I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
I listed to a bit of Tara Brach’s recent podcast episode Stories that Imprison Our Heart, Part 2, and it made me think about stories I’ve told for a long time about my life, stories that jail me, that condemn me, that punish me.
Brach always finds funny anecdotes to illustrate her talks. In this one she tells the story of when an reporter was interviewing a bank president:
The question was, “Sir what’s the secret of your success?”
He says: “Two words.”
“And sir, what are they?”
“Right decisions.”
“But how do you make right decisions?”
“One word.”
“And sir, what’s that?”
“Experience.”
“And how do you get experience?”
“Two words.”
“And wir, what’s that?”
“Wrong decisions.”
I’ve made many, many wrong decisions in my life. I’m not sure there is a way to go through life, which runs in only one direction — forward through time — and not make a lot of decisions that were wrong.
But while I find this little anecdote cute, it doesn’t actually represent how I think of seemingly wrong decisions. No, I take a more Nietzschean view of the situation. I see that a life is made up of good and bad decisions, good and bad outcomes, lessons learned and lessons ignored and lessons forgotten after good and bad decisions and good and bad outcomes.
Brach’s anecdote is too close to saying “everything is either a blessing or a lesson” — either a good thing or something to learn from. This implies that if you make a big mistake just be grateful for it because you know not to make the same mistake in the future.
What it doesn’t say is “this human life can be nonsensical, it can be tragic, it can be happy, it will have sadness. You as a human aren’t here to make the best possible decisions and constantly learn from your mistakes. You are here to live the glory and pain, and to do it, ideally in your own way, as the great character you might be in your story.”
Stories that imprison
Still, I’m going to go back to the idea of stories that imprison. I didn’t listen to Brach’s whole talk so I’m just riffing off the title of the podcast episode.
The phrase “stories that imprison” makes me think of Hester Prynne, who was imprisoned in the beginning of her story told in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.
Far from being imprisoned by her adultery and her lifelong punishment of having to wear a scarlet letter “A” on her bodice, these events provide a foundation for her to become a great person. She becomes an admired and valued member of her community through her needlework and nursing skills. She turned shame into strength not by learning from her mistake, but by fully embracing it as part of her story.
I think of how I’ve held the story of my divorce as a story of shame, a story of wrongdoing, a story of taking a step off of the life path that I should have stayed on.
This story imprisons me.
Stories that free
At the end of The Scarlet Letter, Hester’s daughter Pearl has inherited a great sum of money from Hester’s late husband. Stories were told that Hester and Pearl had gone overseas to England to live, and Pearl had married into English aristocracy. But Hester eventually returned to Boston to live in the small cottage where she had lived out her punishment and her shame:
[There] was a more real life for Hester Prynne here in New England than in that unknown region where Pearl had found a home. Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow; and here was yet to be her penitence. She had returned, therefore, and resumed—of her own free will, for not the sternest magistrate of that iron period would have imposed it—resumed the symbol of which we have related so dark a tale. Never afterwards did it quit her bosom. But, in the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful, and self-devoted years that made up Hester’s life, the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world’s scorn and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too.
This sorrowing over, this awe, this sense of reverence: I think of approaching a human life with such subtle and complex perspective.
Bringing a sense of grief along with awe and reverence — that is the way to look back at a human life with its big and small mistakes, its large and not-so-large sadnesses, its happinesses too in a way that frees rather than imprisons.