Uncle Jerry Has The Floor

This morning the phrase ran through my head, "Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?" As usual, it straightened my head out immediately.

I originally heard the phrase from my Uncle Jerry, rest in peace. He and my aunt had gone to some kind of workshop.
 

A workshop? My relatives? Relatives aren’t supposed to do that. It was a bit like when my Aunt Dottie, rest in peace (yes, most of them are gone, and just when I have so many questions for them), used to say, “Hang loose.”

It almost hurt my ears. “You can’t say ‘hang loose,’" I would think. I mean, she was too old.

How old was she? Probably not much older than some of my friends. But relatives never age. They're suspended in time back in the living room, holding forth on the issues of the day.

Anyway, Uncle Jerry gave me that phrase, and this morning when I looked to see where it came from—I thought it was probably the Center for Attitudinal Healing; I heard a tape of theirs once that was illuminating—I found this article. Whatever your thoughts on healthcare--past, present, or future--his insights are really good medicine.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-e-carroll/do-you-want-to-be-right-o_b_411475.html

©2011, 2013 Laynie Tzena.

Where Do We Go From Here?

One of my friends was recently robbed by somebody he had hired. He said his father would say, after such a breach of trust, "That's it. You can't trust anybody." Our conversation got me thinking about a piece I wrote a few years ago, "Bitachon: Notes on Trust," originally published on the Ashrei website. Ashrei was a local community where people studied the middot in the Jewish tradition of mussar. Middot are spiritual qualities. Many traditions focus on weeding out characteristics we don't like or don't find useful. In mussar, the approach is different. The qualities are seen as fine--in balance. The work is to see how much of a given quality you are using: not enough? Too much? Or just right? I wrote about trust--bitachon, in Hebrew. 

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BITACHON: NOTES ON TRUST

It’s hard to worship an invisible God. Or maybe not hard to worship, but hard to trust. So much of trust is bound up in solidity. Even the phrase, “In God We Trust,” has money behind it. (Not that money is stable, but we tend to think of it that way--at least at its “source.”)

What are we to make of trusting in the unknowable? Only to say it is oceanic, this Ayn Sof, and that it includes us. There’s a corner for our trust. We are all One. Again and again, the Shema provides the solace that eludes me elsewhere. So “made in the image of God” means, in part, that here in each other we find a solid part of God, something tangible. 

But say we trust that other child of God and s/he hurts us. How can we trust then? 

“You could hurt me again.” The walls go up. We retreat into the known, which has a way of feeling tangible. We want certainty, security. Trust requires letting go of that, floating, waiting, releasing. And we want to make it conditional: “I will trust if . . . ” But that’s not trust. And here’s the hard part. We want to measure our success at trusting by results. No can do. Trust is about trust. Not what comes next. So trust brings us back to living in the moment. 

The late Rabbi Alexander Schindler gave a talk once about the importance of being present in our daily lives. I don’t remember if he mentioned specifics, but I know I think of him as I take a moment to smell my almond soap in the shower. When I am in the present, just living, I am trusting.  

You could say that with people you’ve got to think of your history with them. “But memory can tell us only what we were, in company with those we loved; it cannot help us find what each of us, alone, must now become” (“The Blessing of Memory,” Gates of Prayer).  
So when we refuse to trust someone, we freeze that person in the past--and in a moment when they might say they “weren’t themselves.” Who among us would like to be imprisoned there?  

This doesn’t mean we pursue those who have hurt us. But when we encounter them now, we do so in this moment. Think of the martial art of aikido. As I understand it, you use your opponent’s power to overcome him or her. You don’t try to take away that power, you work with what’s there. So trust means living fully in the moment—meaning along with everything and everyone there--and choosing our response. When we trust, we embrace the moment. We relish it.  

Rav Kook wrote that tshuvah (return, repair, making amends) is going on all the time, was going on before the world began. He compared it to a rushing river. He made it clear it’s not that tshuvah is such hard work. It’s natural for us to do it. What is hard work, and unnatural, is to resist it. We make an effort to avoid tshuvah.

Trust is just as natural. Infants trust. It’s in our basic nature to trust. But we move away from that basic nature when we try to control the universe—to play God, in effect. Trust brings us back to our humanity. 

©2011, 2015 Laynie Tzena.

Who Can You Be?

I was walking down the street and a favorite song was going through my head. So I sang a bit of it, and a guy passing by said, “Hey, if you can’t be yourself, who can you be?”

The last time I remember walking with my sister and starting to sing something, she said, “Would you cut that out?”

And there’s the rub.

My brother once told me, “You have to understand that when Mom and Dad look at you, they see you two feet shorter, age twelve.”

A bit annoying. So how come we all do it?

The late Richard Hugo used to say, “Writers want the world to stay the way it is, so we can change it in our imagination.”

Maybe it’s not just writers and family members. We deal with so much change, all the time. When we’re kids, it’s the pecking order in school, crushes that keep us on edge (“He looked at me on the way to the pencil sharpener. What does it mean?”), new schools, new houses, sometimes changes in family structure (new siblings, siblings going off to college or to the service, illness of a parent or sibling, marriage problems). As we get older, it’s college and work and relationships and—it never ends.

No wonder we want to keep things under control. But we can’t. Well, except for ourselves.

When I started creating rebus stories six years ago (word-and-picture stories; remember the game, “Concentration”?) I was really excited to have found a new form, one that could be funny and deep, that presents a lot of challenges (the pieces usually take a couple of months to create) and that has a lot of life.

One of my friends was less than thrilled. She wanted me to write poetry.

Now, I happen to love poetry. My MFA is in poetry. I was doing undergraduate work in poetry when I met my friend. But I started writing songs when I was nine—five years before I wrote my first poem. And a few months before I went back to school to study poetry, I had begun writing short stories. So it’s not as though songs or stories came late to the party.

When I talk with my clients about their work and their goals, one of the things I always ask is, “Where’s the energy?”

The energy for me these days in new writing is in songs and stories—rebus stories, and stories like the one I’m telling you now. Doesn’t mean I don’t still love poetry. But I want to write and record more songs and tell more stories.

We nearly lost our friendship over it. She thought I was abandoning the work I should be doing, and I thought she didn’t get the work I was doing now and was being unsupportive.

Enter Rabbi Akiba.

My father, rest in peace, used to tell the following story:

Two women had a terrible quarrel. They each went to see the rabbi.

The first woman walked into the rabbi’s house and said, “Rabbi, this woman did this, and this, and she did that, too.”

Rabbi Akiba said,”You’re right.”

She went away happy.

The second woman averted her eyes as the other woman walked by on her way out of the rabbi’s house. She said, “Rabbi, I don’t know why you would even allow that woman in your house. I don’t know what she said, but she did this, and this, and besides, she did this other thing, too.”

Rabbi Akiba said, “You’re right.”

And she went away happy.

There was a third woman, the rabbi’s wife, seated in an adjoining room. (Maybe she was in the kitchen. Somebody had to make dinner.)

She said, “Rabbi, I just heard a woman tell you a story. You told her she was right. Then I heard another woman tell a story that contradicted the first one’s in every form and fashion. And you told her she was right. Surely they can’t both be right.”

Rabbi Akiva said, “You know what? You’re right, too.”

And so: I’m sending out my poems for publication, and I’m working on new songs and stories.

And you? What are you itching to do? Where’s the energy, for you?

Who can you be?

©2011 Laynie Tzena.