by David Wann
Now there’s news that Darwin would readily toast! Not only are we coming up from our primordial brain into our underutilized cortex (where aggression, jealousy, and survivalist hoarding may be less of an issue) but we’re also becoming adept at using both sides of the cortex. The stage is set: maybe just in time, we’re changing our collective mind! To balance the precise, quantitative, and sequential mind-set orchestrated for a millennium by the left brain, here comes a troupe of story-telling, aesthetic, empathetic caregivers, visionaries, and creators. Though still ridiculed by policy makers and engineers, and sorely neglected by test-crazy school administrators, it appears the right brain is rising. YES!
As hard evidence of a surge in empathy in our society, Pink documents changes in the medical profession, long an enclave of analytical, data-heavy thinking. For example, “Students at Columbia University Medical School and elsewhere are being trained in ‘narrative medicine,’ because research has revealed that despite the power of computer diagnostics, an important part of a diagnosis is contained in a patient’s story.” Medical students at the Yale School of Medicine are studying famous paintings to hone their abilities to notice details, and at UCLA Medical School, students are admitted to the hospital overnight with fictitious illnesses, to learn bedside manner from a different perspective. Pink reports that the number of jobs in the “caring professions”—counseling, nursing, and hands-on health assistance, is soaring, along with the jobs’ salaries. The narrative story—a right-brained stronghold—is once again becoming a vital tool in the physician’s “black bag.” Empathy, not just data, is becoming standard practice.15
This Way Out
In the opening scene of the TV documentary Escape from Affluenza, the Jones family stands on their front porch, waving a white flag and begging the audience not to try to keep up with them anymore. “We’re just going to try to live simply and be happy,” says Mom, hopefully. Imagine the benefits of arranging a truce with the Joneses, and all others who are victims of affluenza (that’s most of us) that we aren’t going to try for absolute perfection in our lawns; for the perfect mix of possessions, or victory in a battle for the highest salary! If the lifestyle we’ve been leading is making a mess of the environment, using up many of the world’s resources and leaving us feeling queasy as a culture, why not just move on to something else?
By redefining our individual and cultural priorities, we can create a more satisfying sustainable American Dream. When our priorities shift, we’ll all benefit from a greater focus on taking care of things. By meeting our needs directly, less monetary effort (and side effects) will be necessary. With more time, better health, and the substitution of information and art for resources, the American culture will quickly mature. If our insistence on being wealthy is really about being wealthier, we’ll get over it when the economy slows down to the speed of the EU economy, for example. Instead of striving to be the wealthiest individual in the firm, maybe we can each strive to be the kindest. Our personal health, families, communities, and environment will all be richer when we change just a few basic assumptions.
It appears that the three-hundred-plus million citizens of the United States have some things to learn from the tiny kingdom of Bhutan, with a population of less than a million. Located high in the mountains and valleys between India and China, this Buddhist culture has adopted an idea well worth looking at: In 1972, its king implemented Gross National Happiness (GNH) as the country’s benchmark for success, instead of the same old Gross Domestic Product. Each year, the prime minister issues a progress report on the four pillars of GNH: promotion of equitable and sustainable socioeconomic development, preservation and promotion of cultural values, conservation of the natural environment, and establishment of good governance. Since the GNH was established, public schools began rotating teachers between rural and urban regions to improve the quality of education; both Western and traditional forms of medicine have been widely provided; and at least 60 percent of Bhutan’s land has been preserved as forest. Would the United States ever replace GDP with GNH? Not likely in this millennium, but aspects of GNH would greatly enhance our acquired quantity of life mentality, to the great benefit of everyone.16
A few years ago, the prime minister of a considerably more populous nation than Bhutan, the Netherlands, acknowledged that his country’s GDP was not growing, but that he wasn’t concerned, because quality of life was growing, in the form of bike paths, industries that take responsibility for their wastes, and policies that ensure a fair distribution of wealth. For example, in that country, there are many part-time jobs available—with benefits—enabling the free market to work as it’s supposed to: if a person values time off more than the extra money, he or she is free to choose that value, without penalty, making work available to others who want more income.
Why should we all have to work full-time, leaving our children stranded? Why does healthcare have to be so tightly linked with employment? Why does money have to be the only form of wealth we pay attention to? Why do we assume that monetary success is the best measure of a person? Doesn’t it make more sense to base our respect on what she knows, how trustworthy she is, how funny, or how healthy and full of energy, rather than just how much money she makes or how many people she supervises? Our basic need to have the respect of our peers is not really met with a “trophy” home if we don’t have the time to know our neighbors. (Besides, their houses are just as big as ours, damn!) A more direct way to win the respect of the neighbors might be to help them through an emergency, coach the local basketball team, or organize a community block party.
Personal Assets
3
Personal Growth
Creating a Rich Life Story
My only regret in life is that I’m not someone else.
—Woody Allen
Fear less, hope more, eat less, chew more, whine less, breathe more, talk less, say more, hate less, love more, and good things will be yours.
—Swedish proverb
There is nothing noble about being superior to some other man. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.
—Hindu proverb
No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.
—Eleanor Roosevelt
One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.
—Helen Keller
Whether deliberately or by default, we each create a personal identity and life story. If we’re lucky, we figure out what we’re good at, what we believe in, and what we want to accomplish, joyfully, while we’re here. However, in this world of media and mirage, there are significant obstacles to “knowing thyself,” as the Greek sages counseled, because there are so many stories out there! (It’s like a room filled with hundreds of telephones—which one is ringing?) From the moment we understand even a few words, we begin to absorb TV stories complete with laugh tracks, parental parables, religious scriptures, mythological epics, and cultural directives—and we try to figure out which story is most like the life we want to create.
Judging from the many gentle, passionate characters I’ve had the pleasure of knowing, sometimes our aspirations and instincts do guide us in the right direction! These remarkable people create an ethic to guide them; a vehicle of self-identity to carry them securely through life. They meet many of their needs just by knowing who they are. If the script is strong enough, material possessions and monetary wealth often become lower priorities than do other forms of wealth. This is not to say that people with creative, original scripts prefer to be poor, just that money isn’t their primary goal—it comes as a by-product of other passionate pursuits.
A friend of mine, writer and artist Patricia Lynn Reilly, is definitely a self-scripted individual! She has also become a coach and mentor for other life-minded people who also want to create authentic, rich life stories. Patricia’s earliest years were spent as a “lost and tossed” child with alcoholic and drug-addicted parents. Her father would be home for a few days, the
n take off again. “I made up stories, as any four- or five-year-old would, to make sense of his comings and goings,” she says. “He comes when I’m good. He leaves when I’m bad … One day he left for good.”
Within a few years, Patricia’s mother also disappeared. “I was taken to an orphanage in a station wagon driven by strangers,” she recalls vividly in the book Words Made Flesh. An ordinary girl might have let the fire inside go out, but Patricia dug deep and found her core values. During her five years at the Sisters of St. Joseph orphanage, she also found mentors among Catholic nuns who had taken vows of poverty. “Their basic needs were met to support the work which gave great purpose and meaning to their lives,” she says. “Their love, focus, and dedication had a strong influence on me; I learned that a purposeful life can be creative and abundant.”
I ask if she felt a lack of “stuff” in her life at the orphanage, and she shakes her head emphatically. “Material possessions were not even a blip on the screen for me,” she says, “and they still aren’t.” Clearly, she celebrates her immunity to stuff and the stress that usually goes with it. “I’ve noticed that some of my friends who grew up in more comfortable surroundings didn’t have to reach inward as I did,” she tells me, “and they are less likely to question the script they are living and create their own story. But I had to move away from the violence and danger I’d seen. I had to rely on myself.” Because she felt drawn to dancing, she sought out a nun who was a dancer to teach her the basics. After weeks of looking in the window of a dance studio near the orphanage, she was invited to take more dance lessons, free; and by hanging around a horse stable and looking cute she also got free horse-riding lessons. “I knew what I wanted, and I went out and got it,” she says.
She recently went back to the orphanage for a reunion, and saw the well-preserved videotape of a play in which she starred. “My classmates at the orphanage said they remembered me as “focused, creative, and thriving,” she says, with pride. “A few of the nuns commented on how ‘resilient’ I was.” That inner resilience served her well when she began to question the religious script she’d been taught. “In my graduate studies at Princeton Theological Seminary, I began to see that I was studying scriptures that were written solely by men, and that portrayed women as subservient. I was preparing myself for a profession that still didn’t accept women as equals. I decided to write a book on that subject. I titled it A God Who Looks Like Me, and I traced the problem back to its roots—all the way back to the story’s passages about Eve being created from Adam’s rib.” Adapting her personal script-in-progress, she became a Child of Life rather than a Child of God because she feels a greater sense of abundance and immediacy in the way “life calls out to life.”
Measuring Real Wealth
Patricia went “under the story” of another dominant script when she turned her back on the “fear-based, accumulative story about the American Dream that’s told on television.” In her twenties, when she was living with her partner and his children, she observed, “The creative impulses of the kids were neutralized by television and it was a very sorrowful thing for me. I insisted, ‘The TV has to go!’ Then I set up an art center in the apartment and watched the kids come back to life.” Like so many clear-headed people I know who have permanently turned off the tube, she continued to create a script free of commercials.
She’s also arranged a simple life to have more creative freedom, challenging the idea that a successful person must own a house and spend twelve hours a week at the mall. “The lifestyle I’ve designed is not dependent on whether a company’s stock is high or low; not dependent on whether the company is hiring or laying off workers.” Patricia finds creative ways to make her freelance career work financially. As one of America’s forty-seven million citizens without health insurance, she nevertheless sees the very best specialists—the ones the doctors themselves go to—and persuades them to let her make installment payments for their medical care.
“I measure the wealth in my life by the creativity that flows through me; by the depth of connection I have with interesting people; by the time I spend laughing, exploring, and learning,” she summarizes. Where would the world be without people like Patricia, who have the courage of their convictions and who are able to question the weaknesses of prevailing scripts?
We don’t have to wonder if Abraham Lincoln challenged the existing paradigm, giving slaves their freedom and doggedly sticking with a life script that he wrote long before he penned the Gettysburg Address. Honest Abe was persistent! He failed in business in 1831 and again in 1833, and also lost a race for state legislator. He then suffered a nervous breakdown after his loved one died, yet remained rock-certain he could be a contributor in American politics. He ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Congress in 1843, 1848, and 1855; remained unsuccessful as a vice presidential candidate in 1856 and a senatorial candidate in 1858; and then ran, in 1860, for president.
Unless Lincoln had won his place in history, people like environmentalist Lester Brown, who I interviewed for chapter 17, might not have created their own scripts. Says Brown, “As a young boy I read the biographies of Lincoln, Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Daniel Boone, and I realized that these men were addressing the great issues of their time. So I asked myself, ‘What are the great issues of our time?’ And the environment was one of them.” Without Lester Brown’s dedication and focus, people like me may not have edited our own script. Some people have even told me my work has affected their life, and no doubt theirs will affect others, too …
How This Skunk Got His Stripes
I’ve always been a writer. In second grade, when I was recovering at home from a long hospital stay, I dictated a little story to my mother about how skunks got their stripes (a whipped cream accident, of course). She took the story to my classmates and I’ve been writing ever since.
A formative moment came in my college years on a walk through the Indiana countryside a few miles out of town. My love life wasn’t going anywhere, my grades were lousy, and I was up before sunrise to do some back-roads soul searching. With a faithful little campus dog by my side, I passed a lush, green pasture where dozens of dairy cattle grazed, just as the sun was coming up. With the Indiana sky’s pink, gold, and purple-gray hues as a backdrop, I saw in a storybook-flash-of-insight that life was like an interwoven quilt! The cows ate the grass and made milk, fertilizing more grass with their wastes. The skies contributed rain; farmers were nourished by the milk and had the good health to properly take care of the cattle. I realized that billions of similar relationships were woven productively together, all over the planet. “I see it!” I shouted to my furry friend Pooh, who of course had always seen it.
It wasn’t that I knew much about ecology back then—that would come later. Really, my epiphany was more profound than science—I didn’t just know about the interconnections of life; but in that instant of insight, I was right in the middle of them. I suddenly realized that life on Earth had a strategy and a purpose, and that our throwaway style of living was naively oblivious to it. In the years after college, my emerging draft script focused more and more on the evolution of a strong environmental ethic, and it became clear to me that I should combine my two passions. My work at EPA years later did that, but there was something missing. The job paid good money, I had great health and retirement benefits, and I was doing work that the world considered respectable. I knew that if I just kept my head down and went with the bureaucratic flow, my basic needs would be met. But something in me craved sunlight, freedom, and fresh air. I wanted more than a standard career.
In my last days at EPA, I would sometimes sneak out an hour early, shutting my computer off and making a casual-looking (but inwardly desperate) beeline for the fire-escape stairs in the center of the building, as if I was just heading off for still another meeting. I’d leave my daypack in my cubicle as cover, and dance down four flights of stairs into the wide world outside, where the afternoon sun was still shining. I needed to find a different path—
one that I chose myself. The bottom line is, I didn’t retire from that job, I just got tired. (And if it hadn’t been that job, it would have been another.) I remember feeling at first like I was playing hooky from the real world, and that I would get punished for it (bankruptcy? terminal illness?). I’d ride my bike to the grocery store by way of the park, or plant a row of lettuce in the garden, and feel as if everyone else was following the script but I’d forgotten my lines.
Then I began to trust my instincts, relying less on what the world wanted and more on what I needed. I learned that being less conscious of what other people think could save me lots of money, because it required less than the average person spends on new cars, electronic gadgets, and clothes. Gradually, what I was moving away from became less important than what I was moving toward. I was far less dazed and confused than before, and since confusion often results in consumption, I rarely showed my face at the mall. I liked the work I was doing and I didn’t feel a huge need to get away for more than a good vacation a year—I was already “away,” after all. At an extended family reunion in the beautiful Napa wine country, my mother and I debated the meaning of success and whether I still had a shot at it. I wrote this note afterward, but am only now “sending” it in excerpted form. I think of it as “Successfully What?”
