The title of this week's blog comes from the title of an article I read this week in The Atlantic. The author, Arthur C. Brooks writes a weekly column on "How to Build a Life". His articles are always worth thinking about. The subtitle of this one, whose three-word title might have been written by a certain nameless US presidential candidate about his numerous misdeeds, actually clarifies more about Brooks' theme for the article: Our fears about what other people think of us are overblown and rarely worth fretting over. Brooks describes where this fear originates--in many of us, it's an ancestral holdover from a time where it was imperative that we knew what people thought of us. It's also a holdover from a time where what people thought of us determined the grades we would achieve in school, the job we would obtain and whom we would marry. Those fears are not in Brooks' article though, they're my own musings. Brooks focuses on the other kind of fear, the fear of what people we don't even know think about us.
This relates to what I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the reason why I won't take my blog "public"--I don't want to know what a nameless stranger thinks about what I write. Sometimes I don't even want to know what people I DO know think about me and/or what I write. I'm talking about acquaintances, not friends. There's a difference, I think we all know what that is?
Anyway, Brooks has three pieces of advice:
1. Remind yourself that no one cares. What he means by that is that actually people think far less about us than we think they do. So while I am at home still obsessing two days later about what that school secretary thought of my asking her for help with my class, she's probably thinking about what to wear tomorrow. Or how did the other members of my church retreat this weekend REALLY feel about me; did they think I talked too much, too little, sounded like an idiot.... When they probably can barely remember what I actually said (because truthfully, I barely remember what they said. The meeting came and went, as meetings usually do.)
Number 2. is a little weird to me: Rebel against your shame. Clark uses the example of giving a 90-minute university lecture with his fly unzipped (hopefully he was wearing underwear, he doesn't say.) He said he was embarrassed when he realized what had happened but then he felt liberated (not that he was going to give all his lectures unzipped) from the shame of how he would feel if something embarrassing happened. It happened, he didn't die, get over it--I think that's what he is saying. I don't know about that one. I can remember an incident when I was a young clerk typist working at Bell Canada in Montreal. It was summer and I was wearing a pretty white dress, which I thought was very much in the mode. But when I got back from my lunch, my male boss came up to me and said that he and his wife were walking behind me on Ste Catherine St and they noticed that I was wearing black underpants which showed through. Oh my gosh. I was mortified. But I didn't die, I wasn't fired. (I just learned never to wear black underpants under a white dress--at least not without a slip.)
3. Stop judging others. Ahhh, yeah, this is something that's been in my mind this year. It's something I struggle with whenever I think of a certain politician and political party. But it's one that I've been working on, slightly more successfully than I've been working on my calorie count and finances. I think I AM less judgmental than in the past. Nobody is perfect and most people--with a few notable exceptions--are honestly doing what they think is right and trying to do no harm. So don't judge them when they, like me, fall short. If I cut people slack and they know it, then maybe they'll do the same, or at least that's what Clark thinks.
But here's where I add a great big caveat to what I've written. Although freeing ourselves from worrying about what other people think of us is probably, on the whole, a healthy first step, that doesn't mean we should then give ourselves permission to walk over other people's feelings or lives with hobnail boots. Even if no one else seems to care, I don't believe we should wholesale stop caring. Because part of what being "alive" means is to have hopes and dreams about ourselves and the world around us and because we live in communities and there is really NO such thing as a completely self-made person, then that means it IS important that someone else cares. I don't think Clark would actually argue with that but I wanted to get that down here.
Something else I did this week was to listen to another of Susan Cain's Sunday Zoom meetings, this time with Scott Barry Kaufman (SBK to his friends) where he and Susan discussed that very topic--what being alive means, what MAKES us feel alive and how do we go beyond Abraham Maslow's (SBK is a huge fan) original hierarchy of needs? There was a very interesting Q and A at the end of the Zoom where SBK said that focusing on our lower grumbles--why am I depressed, why can't I stop overeating, the types of things we take to therapists--sometimes keeps us from reaching for the higher grumbles--how can I make a difference in my family, in my community. And one of the people who logged in was from India where she said that in India the focus is always on community first, self second. Which engendered an interesting to and fro dialogue as to cultural differences and the idea that until we fix ourselves, it's hard to think about fixing others but is that really a Western idea and in the East that isn't okay, it's take care of your community and you will be taken care of....
I can't summarize that juicy hour in just this blog but it's left me with my own feeling on these two things from this week: (1) Any kind of worrying that paralyzes us is NOT good. Worrying should lead to a change. If it can't lead to a change for the good (like wearing beige underwear under a white dress), then we should let it go. And (2) it's my personal belief that taking care of the lower grumbles (grumbles is SBK's term, I like it) in our life should lead us to then open our hearts to taking care of the higher grumbles in our community. That doesn't mean waiting until all our lower grumbles are SOLVED. It means looking after ourselves to the point where we can look after others too. Even if it's not perfectly.
Have a happy week!
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