We only have what we practice || 僕らにあるのは実践して習得したものだけ。

"We only have what we give."
私たちが所有しているのは他者に与えたものだけ。
-- Isabel Allende

I came across the quote above in the autumn of 2009 while working as an ESOL instructor as part of my teaching practicum for my master's degree. I taught academic listening using a series of essays that had been featured on NPR some years prior. The essay by Chilean-American author Isabel Allende resonated with me then and has remained a favorite of mine since. Ms. Allende believes we only truly own that which we give away, either literally or by using it up in service to others. It is only in sharing freely and unencumbered by feelings of possessiveness or lack that we truly possess something outright. Until then, we are just clasping at it; it is not truly our own to enjoy fully.

I believe we only have what we practice. The idea that we gain through practice is not unique to me. Even young children can recite the adage "Practice makes perfect." We learn many things by practicing over and over, proceduralizing them until we are able to do them quite unthinkingly. We brush our teeth without thinking about the maneuvers necessary to do a thorough job and even operate vehicles with relative ease. Have you ever succumbed to a spell of highway hypnosis, wherein it is possible to drive long stretches, maneuvering and responding to changes in the road accurately and then reaching a destination without any idea how this happened? This phenomenon is an example of the proceduralization and automaticity afforded us by practice (and perhaps a lack of mindfulness--but that is another post altogether).

The same basic principle of practice is also true of our way of thinking and even of our personality. It seems to me that, by and large, we consider our personality quite constant. Our pervasive use of attributive adjectives to describe people reflects this quite well: He is a lazy fellow and she is a cruel person. We speak of personality traits, character flaws, and the like as though they were indelible facts about us. This is especially true of adults. After all, one can't teach an old dog new tricks, right? 

If we spend a little time reflecting on the past and our path to the present moment, though, we will see that we amassed these traits by practicing and proceduralizing them. Our personality traits are no more than deeply-ingrained habits we have picked up along the way and then drilled into ourselves; while they may have started off as opinions about us held by others, it is we who took them on. The human is a self-domesticating animal, after all. Our ways of thinking are habits in much the same way.

If I am quick to rage on the road* when other drivers are inconsiderate or take inordinate risks to get where they are going ahead of everyone else, it is likely I have a long-established pattern of reacting in this way. Somebody cuts me off; I swear a little under my breath. Someone pulls out when it was clearly my turn at the intersection, and the gesture I offer them is certainly not the peace sign. Well, maybe half of it. How many times have I done this or engaged in similar actions? I react this way every time something goes wrong on the road, and at some point, road rage becomes a matter of course; there is not even a hair's breadth between the offense and a shower of profanity from me or, at very least, a gritting of the teeth and sense that That really burns my bacon.

And so perhaps I might be characterized here as an angry person or someone with road rage. However, just because this is a rather predictable pattern in me now does not mean it always was or that it always need be. It may seem hard to change; it may not seem worthwhile to attempt to change. Maybe the people who live in my area are really terrible drivers and they have it coming. Perhaps. Nevertheless, my propensity for anger was not always there. Indeed, there may be instances where I am decidedly not an angry person. Being around certain people or in certain locales might have me in a jolly good mood. Perhaps holidaying at a resort, for instance.

You may be thinking to yourself, "Well, that's well and good. I'm not an angry person." That may be so. I may consider anger foolish or childish and yet be convinced that the dawn of Monday morning is unbearably depressing as it means the coming weekend is so far from reach or that the heavy rains** of a given day are deplorable. Perhaps my oft-practiced, habitual way of thinking is not an angry one but a negative one. Negative thinking is a far more insidious and widespread problem than even anger.

A negative orientation might seem automatic, an inevitable consequence of a gloomy personal disposition, family legacy, cultural values, or even messages on television and in the media. Still, feeling bad about rain on Monday or having road rage or anything else I may be prone to is actually the result of a great deal of practice in a certain way of thinking and feeling about the world. These thinking and feeling patterns become habits. They're like grooves in the road, so when the thinking, feeling vehicle that is the mind comes down the road, it is easy to get caught in them and continue barreling down these well-worn circuits of thought.

The path of anger or of sadness or of fear can be quite seductive. We may have started down it at a young age, long before we could have realized its possible implications. Before we know it, we've unwittingly practiced anger to the point where we cannot even distinguish between where the offense ends and our own reaction to it begins. Or perhaps we've memorized every lyric to Rainy Days and Mondays and can sing along the Carpenters without missing a beat.

We only have what we practice.

Isabel Allende holds that we only have what we give away to others, the possessions we hand over willingly, or the time, money, and other resources we spend in the service of others. As she sees it, we only truly own something when we have willingness and agency enough to entrust it to another, to give it away. In the same way, I believe that we only have that which we practice having, over and over. Put differently, we can only bring into our lives that of which we are aware. We can really see only that which we allow ourselves to take in, that upon which we choose to rest our attention. We can only receive what we will allow ourselves to take in.

For whatever reason, I may have practiced being angry or feeling blue or victimized in my life up to the present. Good news is, I can also choose to practice something new. Sooner or later, I'm bound to become expert at it. This concept may seem simplistic, may seem too far-out, may seem hopeless when we start the new practice. This is only another judgment, another thought about the prospect of changing one's habits through practice. In reality, at one time, it may have seemed hopeless that we would ever be able to operate a car smoothly, to play a guitar or piano, or to do any number of other things. The problem with thinking, the reason we are so apt to assume that changing our thinking through practice is a futile proposition, is that, while it is a complex process, it is also something we do so automatically.

One reason I began this collection of writings, one reason that I've made the decision to inflict yet another blog on the Internet, is that I need to get back into practice capturing my own thoughts, which often seem to speed by faster than the superexpress here in Japan. I want to practice gathering my thoughts and lining them up into some kind of coherent and creative work. What is important to me is not so much the product--the blog itself--as the praxis--the doing.

I see importance in making a practice out of patterns of thinking as well. My practice of having negative thoughts--anger on the road, that blue and pitiful feeling at the sight of more rain or another Monday--may be deep set and feel convincingly like objective reality. It doesn't help when your own negative opinion on something is shared by many others. Monday isn't a fun day for most. Rainy weather does get a lot of people down.

But neither of these is very true. Not really. These are just widely-held ideas.

If I decide that Monday is the best day, if I choose to belt out "Monday, I'm in Love***" while getting up in the morning that inevitably follows Sunday night, it may ring pretty hollow for a while. If I decide that donning the PVC rain boots I bought for $9.00 at the local Workman's and going out into the rain is the spice of life and something I get to enjoy every June for a limited time only, this might sound pretty delusional, pretty strange, and not a little insincere.

But with enough practice in these particular ways of thinking, they can be come true. For me, at least. And why not? What have I to lose?

It's become abundantly clear to me in a very short period of time that making choices like these is not any more ridiculous--any more delusional--than choosing the more widely-held and culturally accepted ones of feeling melancholy or enraged (see above). They're just different practices. Maybe they're a little harder practices to begin, owing to culturally-held beliefs or what others are doing around me or the fact that it's not fun when your shoes get soaked with rainwater and you have to slosh around while you do your grocery shopping. But they are perfectly acceptable choices.

And practice will inevitably make pretty close to perfect.

And since we only have what we practice, a positive outlook--however zany it might seem--will only become automatic with a bit of practice. Or a lot of practice. I'll let you know.

But it seems to me that this is far preferable to the alternative. I'd rather be zany than gloomy. I'd rather be seen as a touch delusional than a curmudgeon.

And so it is. All is well in my world.

DA

--

Notes:

* I don't drive! Not for the time being, that is. I've been without wheels since mid-February of 2014, when I moved from rural Mie Prefecture into the city. This is a hypothetical. =) I was never particularly angry when at the wheel... But Matsusaka drivers really got to me.

**It was the rainy season in Japan when I wrote the first version of this post. Let me tell you: if I had had a dime for every time I heard someone say that the weather was crummy or unbearable, I would have had enough for a fancy coffee every day at work.

***Profuse apologies to the Cure.

From Joy, From Obligation || 喜んでやること、義務感からやること･･･

What happens when we give freely and generously? Parsimoniously and hesitantly? The objective reality may be much the same, but the subjective experience of the act of giving and its effects on our inner life may be quite different.

I was lucky enough to participate on a walking during my winter holiday while in London in the winter of 2013/2014. The tour was a great way to see the city and gain understanding of its long history, complete with all the amusing and sometimes salacious bits they don't teach you in most history courses. And, what's more, it was offered gratis!

At the end, the guide--quite rightly--forwarded a request for tips. In a burst of gratitude and heady generosity, I fished out a £10 note and dropped it into the coffer.

I was immediately of two minds about what I had done. On the one hand, I had given to our guide a small token when considering that this tour was easily the most amusing and interesting part of that leg of our London expedition; I was pleased to do this. On the other hand, as a little voice pointed out to me, the average person would see this as an imprudent amount. After all, the tour was to be free. What I should have done, clearly, was to offer a pound or two. Some change from my pocket. A Tic Tac. A stick of gum a la Home Alone II.

I felt myself vacillate between experiencing satisfaction at having offered what was in my pocket to someone who shared his knowledge with people in a fun and engaging way and self-reproach for immoderacy.

Now, you might ask: Wouldn't a £5 note have sufficed? Perhaps. Heck, most certainly. But my action here was not a judgment; it was a choice. And this means it was rooted in my values, not in rationalization.

This distinction is something Dr. Steven Hayes talks about in his book Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life. He contends that our values are best conceptualized as arbitrary choices we make that are meaningful to us personally. These guidelines become codified to some extent, not as a rationalized list of rules but as our personal point of reference for later choices.

If we accept this operating definition of values, then, to me, a value is not the same as the painstaking process of weighing pros and cons of a situation to come out ahead or of making a judgment in the usual sense of the word. Neither still is it being a slave to a strict list of immutable rules of ethics or decorum that seem to have existed since time immemorial or that move of their own accord, outside of us. Often when we hear the term "value" or "values," the latter comes to mind. My definition of values, influenced by Dr. Hayes and other teachers, requires that a value be a choice we make and then codify because it brings us satisfaction to do so.

We examine our choices--our values--as steps on a path toward a life leading to our sense of fulfillment, our greatest good. And this is as arbitrary as choosing vanilla over chocolate, the pancakes over the French toast. So long as our choice leads us on the path toward our greatest good, our purest light, it's the right one.

So--what does this have to do with From Joy, From Obligation?

Well, everything, really.

When I was acting from my values and passing on my prosperity to someone who had given us his time, expertise, and creative goodwill, I was coming from a place of joy, of spiritual abundance. I may not have as much in my pocket as some, but at that moment, I had more joy in my heart than many. When I allowed myself to turn my ear to the little voice of judgment that whispered, "Oh, jeez, Donny, what is it you think you're doing? Is that really a good idea? What are you going to do at lunchtime?" I temporarily lost my connection to the flow of good experience and abundance the Universe (capital U) had waiting for me.

As it turns out, I found a little corner shop selling a sandwich and drink combo I could buy with my last few coins, and I was fine. I didn't want anything more extravagant than just this.

And I got to give! And, as I wrote yesterday, I love the quote from Isabel Allende that we only have that which we give. I got to exercise my agency, my choice to provide what I had to someone.

This was based in my value--my belief--that people who offer a creative service of value and do so happily should be richly rewarded. Our tour guide gave us the best account of London's history I heard the whole time I was there. And he did so in a way that we could relate to, that delighted the people in our group, and that was easy to grasp for people who knew little about British history or for whom English was a second language.

My act of giving was an exercise of true agency when it was joyful and rooted in my values, an arbitrary choice rather than one based on logic or outside ideas. What may have been superfluous for others was precisely right for me.

How different an experience when we do something out of obligation. Because we have to. Suddenly, handing over even a £5 note or giving a little of our time is agonizing. We don't have that much to give. The cupboard is bare; we are busy. There isn't even enough for us, and yet here this person is, requiring from us some portion of what we ourselves lack. The nerve! The unfairness of it all! The misery...

We only truly have what we give as Isabel Allende reminds us. I would go so far believe we don't really own it anyway. None of it. Not really. And yet all of it is ours. We get to use it when we need it. We get to have it when we allow it to flow through us.

The moment we become convinced we lack, the din of poverty thinking drowns out our joy and inundates us with a miserable and miserly feeling. This, it goes without saying, feels icky.

I made the choice that day to feel happy, joyful, of my choice to pass on what I could. I found a good choice for lunch (brown bread!!!!) and I lived to tell the tale. Handing over my last £10 was not a problem after all. The Universe (capital U, or Life, or God, if you like) had me covered. I just had to be joyful and willing and let it flow through me instead of being avaricious.

Looking back on it now, this was for me an important lesson in operating from joy (love) rather than from obligation (fear). I didn't see the significance of it at the time but now it is quite clear. Passing on my own wealth resulting in my being released that much more from the notion of possessing something that could be lost. Looking at it all as borrowed anyway makes sense to me when considering my values. Amassing wealth or stuff or time--or whatever it might be that seems limited--and keeping it locked away negates its value.

Unless you can swim in it like Scrooge McDuck. In that case, I'll bring my swim trunks and we'll go for a dip.

And so it is. All is well in the world.