Whole Persons spend quality time with their spouses, children, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and members of their extended families, and strive to make love, sharing, mutual respect, and openness the cornerstones of these relationships.
Page 1 Module 5- Family
CREATIVE LIVING
‘With grateful Thanks to Clayton Barbeau whose presentation this section is based on.’
We are going to be talking about creative living. Now, the interesting thing about a lot of people is that they don’t appreciate the fact that we are actually involved in a creative task that is more marvellous than any creative task Michael Angelo or Leonardo Da Vinci could have dreamed up, and that is the task of creating ourselves and our lifestyle.
From the moment you and I were kicked into the world, we faced the monumental task of coping with the world. Here were these giants lumbering around, 20 times our size. They didn’t even speak our language and we had to learn to make them obey. We had to persuade them to do things that they don’t even do for themselves, like wake up at 2.00 am and feed us, or other disgusting things like change our diapers! I had a lot of experience with that. Earlier, somebody said, “I understand you had eight children.” I corrected her by saying, “No, the experience has been more of being had by eight children.” Those who are parents will understand that completely.
We pretty well succeeded in that coping task when we couldn’t even speak yet or get the giants to speak our language, and we proceeded to do other things in the development of our life. We learned to put thumb in mouth and later even toe in mouth. As a public speaker I have occasionally put my foot in my mouth, the whole thing. The point is that those coping tasks, which became increasingly complex as life went on, today you take for granted.
And yet, the fact is that some of us feel that somehow we have completed the task of growing up, of becoming who we were meant to be. I get that a lot in my psychotherapy practice in San Francisco. If you’re going to do psychotherapy, that is the place to do it. We have all six sexes there. If you come to the family relationships talk, I’ll tell you which six we have and maybe define a few of the others we’re thinking about and trying to puzzle out.
I had a lady bring in her husband one day. He was a giant of a man, she was a dinky lady. Sometimes dinky ones marry big ones. She sat him down and she read the riot act. They had been married for nine years, had three children, and he never talked to her about anything that mattered. He didn’t share his emotions etc. She went on for about 15 minutes and finally I said, “Shut up!” In my profession, this is known as “therapeutic intervention!” I got her to stop and I turned to him and said, “What do you think of this laundry list of complaints that your wife is presenting as grounds for divorce if you don’t change?” And he said, “I’m just naturally shy.”
Now, the “I’m just naturally repugnant” routine, or “I’m just naturally shy, or “I’m just naturally this awful” is one of the greatest cop-outs we use to stop the creative task in terms of ourselves. So I said to him, “No, you’re not just naturally shy. You do it very well. You’ve had long practice at being naturally shy. Did you study old Gary Cooper movies to learn to be that naturally shy?” And he said, “I’ve always been this way.” And I said, “No, you weren’t always that way. Once upon a time you decided that in order to survive in the world you needed a defence mechanism you called ‘naturally shy.’ You became naturally shy one time. When did you make that decision?” And he gave the classic response, “I dunno.”
“I dunno” is a response you get from people educated in our present system of education. Kids give it to their parents. Spouses give it to each other. We do it to ourselves when we are about to explore the mystery of our being in a world. At some point we kind of go, Oh I dunno. Clients are saying it to me all time when I ask that sort of question about where they learn this behaviour. In our educational system we have a testing method that says all questions have a right or wrong answer and if you get it wrong, you’re dumb, stupid, and you are going to get an “F”. Whereas if you just say, “I dunno,” that doesn’t make you dumb or stupid, it just makes you ignorant. And everybody is ignorant about something. There are people who know more about higher physics that I could ever think of, and I know more about the origins of schizophrenia than they will ever dream of knowing. So we are all ignorant of some things. Only God knows everything.
I have the infallibly correct response. It never fails, whether you are saying, “I don’t know” to yourself, whether a client is saying it, whether a child is saying it, or somebody else is saying it. The infallibly correct response that never fails was the one I gave to the man who claimed he was just naturally shy. When he said, “I dunno,’” I said, “Take a guess.” I have never had anybody guess wrong. Nobody guesses wrong. He said, “Well, I guess it was because both my parents were alcoholics and I was an only child and they used to fight and threaten murder and throw furniture and break dishes and scream and yell and I used to hide under the bed or in the closet.” I said, “Gee, that would make me naturally shy too. I suppose when you went to school you made lots of friends?” He said’ “Oh, I couldn’t make any friends, because I couldn’t bring them home to that. So I didn’t make any friends, no.” I said, “Well that increased your natural shyness. Where are your parents now?” And he said, “My father died a few years back and my mother lives in Connecticut with her sister.”
And I said, “You live out here with a wife and three children and you are about to jeopardise your family because you are using a defence mechanism you no longer need in order to get by in the world. How would you like to take lessons from Clay Barbeau? Learn to be naturally more gregarious. It might save your marriage.” So he did. Now every year since that event I get two tickets to one of those $150 a plate rubber chicken dinners that people serve. He heads an organisation now that raises money for a wonderful humanitarian cause and he’s the toastmaster. He greets people at the door, gouges money out of all kinds of corporate people and civic leaders and fills rooms like this at a banquet. You would never know that he had ever been naturally shy. In fact, you can’t shut him up now, and he’s too big to want to try. The point I’m making is that some of us cop out in terms of the creative task, which is an ongoing one and which does not end until the day we are laid out in our final burial gown and the undertaker says, “Well this one is perfectly adjusted now, who’s paying the freight on him or her?” That’s when our creative task is finished.
That coping strategy that he learned early in life was no longer fitting him very well. And if we are to stay alive, if we are constantly to remain active in terms of our growth as human beings, keeping the 15 billion cells of our brain young, then we have to remain aware of the fact that we are the major creative element in our life. That it is the way we choose to respond to the trials of bodily life, the challenges we confront, the challenges we give ourselves. It’s the way in which we handle those things that matters, not so much what hits us, good, bad or indifferent. It’s how we choose to respond to it. Now, there are people who don’t know that. I get people in therapy all the time who say, “I can’t do that.” What they mean is they haven’t made an attempt at it and they never learn. I get people who say they want to make themselves victims instead of creators of their lives. They have a notion that somehow these things just happen to them. They say, “I’m so depressed,” or “I’m so frustrated,” or “I’m so rushed.” And my response to that invariably is, “How have you been depressing yourself? How have you been rushing yourself? How have you been overscheduling yourself?” etc, making them assume responsibility.
In my therapeutic work, my clients get to use any terms they want, except “I can’t.” As long as they understand and accept that they are responsible, that they have the ability to respond to life in creative or destructive fashion, they are on their way home free in terms of recreating themselves or their life.
That creative task that we are engaged in takes place in no other time but the present. It takes place now. This would seem obvious, but it’s not so obvious. Once I was talking on loneliness and love and 65% of my audience was over 65 and living alone in the inner city. One gentleman came up to me just before I began to talk and said, “Mr Barbeau, I am so glad you’re going to talk on this topic of loneliness. I spent all weekend in my room alone waiting for somebody to call and nobody did.” I said, “You spent all weekend in your room waiting by the phone?” He said, “Well, I went to the bathroom, and I went to the grocery store once, but basically I was right there by the phone and it never rang.” I said, “And so you were lonely all weekend. Tell me something, does your phone have a set of numbers on it with little buttons or a dial?” “Well, yeah, of course,” he said. I said, “And it works, huh?” “Yeah.” I said, “Well, why on earth didn’t you call out to somebody, ‘Hey, I feel lonely, let’s go snowmobiling,’?” Well he hadn’t thought of that! The same gentleman came up to me at the end of the talk and said, “Gee, I’m so exhilarated after this talk, but I still have to go back to that lonely room.” I said, “Yeah, have you paid your phone bill lately?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Well you know it still works in the other direction. Do you know any ladies you could phone at this hour of night? It will be about 10.00pm when you get home.” “Well, I don’t know, they might be asleep,” he said. I said, “Wake them up. It’s called romance. Wake them up and say, ‘There was this nutty speaker from San Francisco who told me to call you and share my enthusiasm.’ He’s creating his own loneliness and didn’t know it.”
Another lady came up to me during the break and said, “Mr Barbeau, I’ve been crying for 12 years, ever since my husband died at Christmas time 12 years ago. I’m sick and cry all the time. I’ve been to doctor after doctor and they tell me nothing is wrong with me, but I know that something is wrong with me because I cry in the supermarket over broccoli. He died 12 years ago. He was a doctor, talking to a patient on the phone at 11o’clock one morning and just keeled over and died. And nobody helps me with this.” Now I don’t normally do instant therapy, but on this occasion I didn’t know anybody in Minneapolis, and so I said, “I’ll tell you what. You go see that lady over there and ask her if she has a room with two chairs we can borrow. And, if you’ve got 15 minutes after this talk is over, we will heal you.”
We came into the room and I said to her, “Tell me, why is it important that your husband died at Christmas time?” And she said, “Because at Christmas time we made up any arguments we had, and we had had an argument two days before he died and we hadn’t made it up yet. We were in the middle of the silent treatment. I didn’t say goodbye to him for two mornings when he went to work. I didn’t speak to him during supper. I didn’t call him at the office and he didn’t call me. And that third morning he was talking to a patient and he keeled over and died.” I said, “Right in the middle of the silent treatment?” She said, “Yes!” I said, “That’s not playing fair. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be done. But I thought it was something like that, so I’ll tell you what I want you to do. Sit down here. Do you remember what he looked like?” “Well, of course I remember what he looked like.” I said, “Fine. Put him on that chair over there and imagine him sitting there. Tell him all the things you would have told him had you known he was going to die that morning at 11.00 am.” And she barrelled out this wonderful statement of love, of affection, of apology, of grief over the fact that he had died estranged in this fashion. She made up to him, and when she seemed to be winding down on that I said, “Now move over there and be him and give the response he would have given to that.” She knew very well how he would have responded because they had been doing this for years. And so she gave his response. Then when she finished that, I had her move back and give her response to that, then move back and give his response to that, then back to her response, etc. This is known as going crazy, which is sometimes the sanest thing you can do when it means working a healing on the past. She was constantly bringing into “now” some past unfinished business that she should have attended to long before. And when we carry over negative unfinished business of the past, we can constantly “louse up” the now.
The past is very important. We have to have a sense of the past or we wouldn’t know who we are. We wouldn’t have a sense of our identity. We need a sense of our past especially in terms of what we’ve learned from our failures and the challenges met there. And we also need a sense of the future, but there are some people who are living in the future and “occluding the now.” We’ll talk more about that in a minute.
The last time I talked in Columbus, Ohio, I was brought to an inner-city school of 1,800 kids. They marched them into a gymnasium for me to talk to them and they were going to make sure that those kids didn’t disgrace the school in front of the august speaker. They separated the troublemakers from one another, got them all settled down, and then stood facing them to be sure that none of them created uproar. I was still trying to figure out what I was going to say. As I came into the room somebody said, “I’m looking forward to hearing you speak.” And I said, “Me too.” They looked at me sort of wide-eyed and I said, “Oh yeah, I know we’ve got a text and I will complete everything that is in the text, but if I put everything down in writing, I would bore myself. And if I bore myself, I will bore you, and that’s a cardinal sin.” Anyway, I thought about it and finally I got up and said, “I’ll bet you freshmen here at the school have learned that, or have been told that, you are here to prepare for life.” And some heads nodded. I said, “Some of you are sophomores and juniors and you’ve heard for two or three years that you’re here preparing for life.” And more heads nodded. I said, “And you seniors are probably by now sick and tired of hearing that you’re here preparing for life.” And they went, “Yeah, man! Right on! Wow!” I said, “Well, I’m delighted to be here to tell you that the notion that you are here preparing for life is pure unadulterated BULLSHIT!” And the teachers, priests and nuns spun around and said, “What have we unleashed!?” And the kids went, “Yazzah! Somebody is going to tell the truth.” And I said, “Would you reach out your right hand and take the left wrist of the person sitting next to you. Feel for the pulse. Is anybody here sitting next to a corpse?” Nobody in that hall of 1,800 kids was sitting next to a corpse. They were all alive at that present moment.
In point of fact, statistically speaking, two of them would be dead by suicide, two would be dead from drunken driving accidents, two would be dead from natural causes, all by June of that year, and there would probably be one or two drug overdoses. Therefore, their life wasn’t in the future. They weren’t preparing for anything, and the quality of our future life is always dictated by the quality of the present moment. If you’re talking to me in the here and now, and I’m busy just standing there marking time because I know I’ve got to get to an appointment in 15 minutes, I’m not there for you and you’re not there for me. We just missed an opportunity to be alive. If you’re talking to me and I’m appearing to be listening but I’m really thinking of what I’m going to say next, I’ve already moved into the future and I’m not in the here and now. You’re not present for me and we’ve lost any contact, any intimacy.
Vey often we can give the impression of being in the now, which is the creative moment, and not really be there. I have many clients who “should” themselves. Now “should” and “should nots” are the basis of ethics, religion, and civilization. If I say I’m going to be here today at a certain time, I should be here. We have a commitment. If I say I’m going to do something, we make a contract about that and I should keep my word. If I get angry at you, I should not put a bullet in your head. I attended a Jesuit university and they said that would be lacking in charity! In the Political Science Department they said the state could punish me for it because it would remove a taxpayer from the roles! Interesting.
Ethics and good conduct are based upon an understanding of “should” and “should nots.” We carry it to such an extreme that we are constantly “shoulding” ourselves. No matter what we are doing, we tell ourselves we should be doing it more, we should be doing something else, we should do this, we should do that.
The guy who is mowing the lawn says, “I should clean the garage.” If he’s cleaning the garage he says, “I should mow the lawn.” There are people right now saying, “George should be hearing this.” Other people saying, “I should be taking notes. I should buy a copy of the tape.” In other words, no matter what we’re doing, we’re never doing what we should be doing because we are constantly “shoulding” ourselves.
Now, I don’t tell my clients when I learn this trait about them. I don’t say, “You shouldn’t should on yourself.” I don’t tell them, “Put a sign in your office ‘Thou should’st not should on yourself today.’” I don’t tell them that because they just add another one. They’d say, “Oh, there I go shoulding myself. Clay told me not to do that. I shouldn’t should myself.” Another double bind. No, I simply ask them to be aware of what it is that they’re doing, and if it’s a should that is legitimate, then do it. Otherwise drop it. If you’re talking to me and I’m thinking I should be doing something else, you’re not there for me. I’m going to miss you and you’re going to miss meeting me too. The basic ingredient of being alive is paying attention to what’s going on in the present moment.
In the 17th century, Brother Lawrence, a lay brother in a Benedictine monastery, wrote an essay called, “The Presence of God.” In there he coined the phrase about the “sacrament of the present moment.” He said he could be as aware of God’s presence while washing pots and pans with voices around him and lots of rattling, as he could be in the chapel. And he also made the point that what one was doing there was focusing upon the task at hand.
I have a lot of books on Zen Buddhism. When I was in my early twenties, I visited a Zen Master. He said, “Zen is doing what it is you are doing.” How few of us, in terms of living, are doing what it is we are doing, and we wonder why our lives don’t feel more fulfilled. Basically, because we never allow ourselves to be fully alive in the moment. We keep postponing it.
We’ll be alive next week, or next month, or next year, or we keep allowing the past to intrude upon it instead on doing what it is we are doing. It’s what a saint meant when she said she could pick up a pin for the greater glory of God. She meant, if she focused her attention on that task, it could have immense meaningfulness. It’s the same thing Marcel means when he talks about being present for one another. If I’m doing what it is I’m doing, listening to you in the here and now, paying attention to what it is you’re going through, then that attentiveness in itself brings my full energies of the moment to you or to this task at hand.
Time is what our life is made up of. This moment in my life. It’s not 10 minutes from now. I can’t guarantee you’ll still be alive 10 minutes from now. It’s not 10 minutes ago. This is the moment of living. The point is, if you say, “I don’t have time”, your youngster adds two words to that, “for you”. Where you place your time, you place your life. And it’s obvious that we place our life where we place our love. So if I want dialogue with my youngster and to really give my full attention, I have to allow him/her that choice. Can we handle this in 5 minutes, or do you want to wait an hour and have a full hour. It’s not a matter of not having time, it’s a matter of where I’m going to schedule this time to give full attention to this matter.
It’s also a matter of what we put up front in regard to our lives. Recently, I had a 17 year old boy brought in by his mother from school where he had just finished telling a teacher he was going to kill himself. The school was already traumatised by a previous student suicide, and here was a kid a month later talking the same way. So the teacher called the mother and the mother brought him to see me.
His reasons were: firstly his parents were fighting all the time. His mother had discovered the affair his father was having and they were probably going to get divorced. This was depressing him. Secondly, he didn’t have a girlfriend and that was depressing him. Thirdly, he had three different sets of friends who all liked different music to him and all made fun of the music he liked. And fourthly, his grades were going downhill. Among a whole lot of other things, I said to him, “Do you know what a leader is?” He had to wrestle with that for a while, and finally decided that a leader is one who doesn’t follow other people. In politics, it’s the leader who finds out where the crowd is going and runs out in front of it. But this particular definition I like: a leader is a person who doesn’t follow others, but is out there in front of them leading the way. And I said to him, “You just happen to be a leader in musical appreciation. You’re in the avant-garde of musical life, so don’t let their ridicule get to you. In 10 years they will catch up to you. I know all about that. I’ve been premature in most things in my life and it’s a lonely place out there sometimes.” Then I said, “By the way, of course your grades are suffering because you’re depressed. And of course you don’t have a girlfriend because who’s going to go out with a depressed nerd?” Well, he hadn’t looked at it that way before. And then I said, “Who is responsible for the marriage of your parents?” And we decided that he wasn’t responsible. He was only responsible for loving both of them and continuing to love them no matter how they worked out their problems.
Three weeks later he came to see me for his last session and said, “Nothing has changed in my life except that I’m getting a bit better grades this week. My parents are still arguing, I still don’t have a girlfriend, and my friends still don’t like my music. However, what has changed entirely is my attitude towards what’s going on.” And he was really cheerful and happy and he wasn’t going to bump himself off anymore, which is always the wrong thing to do because it’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
It all comes down to viewing reality in a more positive way than we’ve done before, and beginning to see that we’re responsible for our choices in how we view things.
The reality of our daily lives is that there are all kinds of colours, all kinds of sounds, all kinds of people, and all kinds of challenges inside us and outside of us. Much depends on how we choose to sort out that information and what we choose to accept responsibility for. And how we choose to handle a given incident or matter at hand will depend greatly on how we choose to view it. Do I view this as a challenge or a setback? Do I view this as a failure or a learning experience? I used to say I had never learned anything in my life from any of my successes. I only learned from my failures. I used to say that regularly. You know, 18,000 people giving you a standing ovation for five minutes, that’s better than a sharp stick in the eye, but you don’t learn too much from it!
One evening I made the mistake of saying that at my dinner table when all eight kids were there, and my wife at the other end. I made that remark and my wife said, “Wrong.” I said, “Wrong? What do mean wrong?” She said, “That’s wrong. You just said you never learned anything except from your mistakes and that’s wrong.” I said, “Well, what’s wrong about it?” She said, “Hell, listen, you succeeded in marrying me and you have learned a helluva lot!” So I don’t say that I only learn from my mistakes anymore because she is quite correct. Because in the marriage and in the family, we are all bringing one another up all the time.
So the art of staying young, if you will, the art of creative living, becomes a matter of looking at not just our failures, but also the present challenge and beginning to apply new challenges to ourselves, and especially challenges in the area of loving, of paying attention to the people around us. That is not at war with professional competency, it’s the foundation of it.
Simone Weil, a great Frenchwoman, once said, “There are miserable people in this world who have no greater need than for five minutes of your full attention.” And by attention she meant, opened to the person in front of you, paying full and keen attention to what he or she is going through. When you do that, you have laid down your life for that few minutes so that they can live more abundantly in your presence. The return on that is enormous in terms of their love. Basically, it is an act of love when you do that. You make yourself a more loving, and thereby lovable, person in the world. It’s rather crucial to appreciate that.
Being with one another in that loving fashion also means that we make more friends. And one of the things that makes people grow old is the lack of friends. You see, friends, real friends, are always a challenge to us. They open new doors to appreciation, share new enthusiasms with us. So making new friends, meeting new challenges, stimulating ourselves in various new ways intellectually and artistically, providing ourselves with new challenges physically or otherwise, is one of the ways you keep those brain cells alive in the present.
Also, I think it’s crucial to understand in the context of family life, that keeping one another alive in that same fashion is keeping ourselves alive. I’m going to read you two things. One of them is from an 85 year old woman who lives in Kentucky.
“If I had my life to live over, I’d make more mistakes next time. I would relax. I would limber up. I would be sillier. I know of very few things that I would take seriously. I Would worry less about what others thought of me and would accept myself as I am. I would climb more mountains, swim more rivers, and watch more sunsets. I would eat more ice-cream and fewer beans. I would watch less TV and have more picnics. I would have only actual troubles, very few imaginary ones. I would feel sad, not depressed. I would be concerned, not anxious. I would be annoyed, not angry. I would regret my mistakes, but not feel guilty about them. I would tell more people that I like them. I would touch my friends. I would forgive others for being human and I would hold no grudges. I would play with more children and listen to more old people. I would go after what I wanted without believing I needed it, and I wouldn’t place such great value on money. You see, I’m one of those people who lived cautiously and sensibly and sanely, hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I’ve had my moments, but if I had it do over again, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d have nothing else, just moments one after another, instead of living years ahead of each day. I’ve been one of those people who never goes anywhere without a thermometer or hot water bottle, a gargle, a raincoat, and a parachute. And if I had it to do over again I’d go more places, do more things and travel lighter than I have. I would plant more seeds and make the world more beautiful, and I would express my feelings of love without fear. If I had my life to over again I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I’d play hooky more. I wouldn’t make such good grades, except by accident. I would ride more merry-go-rounds and I’d pick more daisies and I’d smile because I’d be living free.”
I think that’s a beautiful statement. It’s too bad people have to wait until they’re 85 to learn what’s important.
Recently I had a couple of guests, delightful and lovely people from New Orleans, who came to San Francisco. One of the first things I did when they arrived at my house was to say, “I feel like going for a merry-go-round ride.” And we went over to the carousel in Golden Gate Park so that we could all ride the merry-go-round and wave at all the little kids. That loosened them up for their stay.
People need to have more fun. More people really do need to bring that creative element that we call fun. They need to understand that work, when it’s truly the work we love, is fun. I used to make a definition, a distinction between a job and work. A job is what you run right out of and quit when you win $15 million in the lottery. A work is what you do when you win $15 million in the lottery and say, “Wonderful. This will let me be about my work without having to worry about money.”
Give $15 million to Mother Theresa and she wouldn’t quit her work because it’s not a job. Work is what we do as the overflow of our being. It’s what we do because we love doing it. The basic work of all of us is building up the community of love. That’s really the essential work. Sometimes as a writer in my earlier years I had to take jobs in order to support my work, which was writing, and the family. And the family was the first part of the work. I’m now one of the privileged people whose work actually pays the bills.
I want to read you one last item by Fra Giovanni, written in 1513 and still applicable today. I’ve often told my clients, “Hey, I don’t bring anything to you, I just show you what you already have. I don’t give you any power, I just show you the power you already have. I don’t give you options other than the ones you already have.”
One woman recently said to me as she was concluding therapy, “The wonderful thing I’ve loved about therapy is I’ve been learning all the things I already knew but didn’t know I knew.” I thought that was a marvellous comment.
Fra Giovani wrote, “There is nothing I can give you which you have not. But there is much, very much that while I cannot give it, you can take. No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today. Take heaven. No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present moment. Take peace. The gloom of the world is but a shadow beyond it yet within reach is joy. There is a radiance in glory in the darkness could we but see and to see we have only to look. I beseech you to look. Life is so generous a giver, but by judging its gifts by their covering we cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering and you will find beneath it a living splendour woven of love by wisdom with power. Welcome it, grasp it, and you touch the angel’s hand that brings it to you. Everything we call a trial, a sorrow or a duty, believe that angel’s hand is there. The gift is there and the wonder of an overshadowing presence. Our joys too, be not content with them as mere joys for they too conceal diviner gifts, and so at this time I greet you, not quite as the world sends it’s greeting, but with profound esteem and with the prayer that for you now and forever the day breaks and the shadows flee away.”