We rarely celebrate our failures on social media. Resentments can be, and are, floridly expressed, but accepting what we cannot change is mostly a private affair. Our losses, near misses and downright flops might go into memoirs, but not on social media. Or blogs.
(Buckle your seat belts, this one is long and … well, you’ll see.)
Some sorrows resolve into a melancholic acceptance.
I wanted to be a theatrical director in regional theater when I was in college. To that end, I applied and, miracle of miracles, was accept into a Masters in Theater program at Brandies University. Then, the summer after graduation from Brown, I fell in love, and followed him to his dream, leaving mine. In a way, it was too easy, to follow the trodden path of partnering rather than the challenging path of turning my unformed self into a theatrical director. What would my life had been like had I taken the other path? I’ll never know.
Some resolve into fulfilling that dream another way.
Your Money or Your Life seemed to be the product of two people whose names were on the cover. Not at all. We had a strong, devoted team that shepherded it all the way from the first seminar in 1980 on to when my coauthor, Joe Dominguez, died in the first days of 1997.
Part of the joy of that work was being in a creative, committed team, a bit like taking a play from script to stage. That didn’t resolve the loss of the first dream, but it gave me the feeling I had in our small repertory group in college. Sometimes we want a feeling and pin it to a form and can’t let go. We mistake form for essence. Sometimes, though, another way opens. It doesn’t resolve the first loss, but it can lead us to a broader satisfaction.
Sometimes you have a chance for a do-over.
I have no idea where it leads, but acting in a play recently gave my just the feeling I had 60 years ago. It’s made me audacious enough to declare that I want to develop a performance that’s part comedy, part pathos, part replete with lessons. I must have known this was coming, because I started this story-telling blog that I might turn into theater. And next time there are local auditions, I’ll try out for a part in a play.
Sometimes there’s no happy ending
There is one festering sorrow in my life that, again and again, I’ve tried to change - and haven’t. I’ve let it hang over me, incomplete and always beckoning. I’ve tried many times to birth it as a book, but every time I’ve picked up that work, though, I’ve hit a wall, and the failure stings each time. It also confuses me. Why the relentless drive? Why can I neither let it go or get it done? And because I can’t lay it to rest, it seeps sadness into my life. And shame.
Coming of aging is coming to peace with the past
Let me tell you a story about this one little human, me, reaching for that brass ring, and missing each time the merry-go-round goes round. This isn’t the story of the grand project, the big ideas, the longing to give a gift. It’s the story of the person, me.
For decades I’ve been the public face of Your Money or Your Life. Joe and I and the team wrote it to, as we said, “transform the way Americans think about, earn, spend, save and invest money - for the sake of our sanity and the sake of the earth.”
What a heady time!
I did something like two thousand media interviews. Twice on Oprah. It was the most requested book in the US library system the first year after publication. I could smell the sour breath of the hungry ghost that drives consumerism, and pursued it. I could almost taste our desperate, unsettled minds, longing for love and seeking it in things.
We thought if we could keep calling consumerism by its real name, it would lose its grip on our psyches. Or, like the Wicked Witch of the West, we could throw water on it and it would melt. I was on a mission, joyfully relentless, and this gave me a sense of potency.
We took to heart the est training aphorism, “If you keep saying it the way it really is, eventually your word is law in the universe.”
My personal grail story
From this audacity, and while still filled with the certainty that we could slay the dragon, I glimpsed the lair where the dragon hid at night - and went in.
We were teaching freedom, yes, the there was something deeper.
I’d been invited to teach a class at the University of Washington. It was probably on economics. I had given that speech hundreds of times, and it flowed off my tongue with a few asides I thought would connect with the class.
Then, in the Q&A, a man in the second row said, “Why do I have to do anything you say. It’s a free country, I can buy whatever I want.'“
I sputtered a lame answer about values, but I knew he had me.
Americans see freedom as entitlement, and how in the world do we moderate consumption collectively with such entitlement as an escape clause?c “I can do whatever I want whenever I want and you can’t stop me,” is the siren song of the toddler to the teenager.
(An aside: isn’t this what we face now, a man who would be King who is immune to accountability?)
Flush with confidence born of the success of Your Money or Your Life, I decided I would find a way to bust that notion of freedom as entitlement.
My guiding statement for the book I would write was, “I want Americans to fall in love with limits the way we’ve fallen in love with freedom.” After all, The Limits to Growth had been published 25 years earlier. Sustainable development had entered the lexicon through Our Common Future, and not yet been taken over by corporate interpretations.
I thought I had a shot. Here’s that story. And here, and here if you want to go down that rabbit hole. Spear at the ready to thrust into the heart of the beast, I set off the write this book.
The Freedom Book that had me in its grip
I wanted to develop a compelling language for limits so that when the consequences of our entitlement hit big time (right about now) we could talk about planetary boundaries and limits to growth and everyone would get with the program.
As I write this now, I see I was like Icarus. I was trying to fly to the sun with wax wings. But honestly, I didn’t care. I was willing to die trying.
A sensible person would have enrolled in a PhD program to work this question, but I didn’t think I needed to. After all, look what happened to Your Money or Your Life. Joe never graduated from college. I only had a BA. In Spanish. And time was short, too short for a PhD. The world was on fire already though very few saw this.
The impossible dream
First, I didn’t have a team like we had with Your Money or Your Life. Just me, reading and thinking for long hours in dark woods cabin in the wet Pacific Northwest. I realized I had to study philosophy to find answers, so I dug in to Hegel, to Amartya Sen, to Eric Foner, to Murray Bookchin - wherever the path took me, I went, yet my goal seemed further and further away. I felt a kinship with Ludwig Wittgenstein in his lonely cabin, trying to wring truth out of thin air. I felt nigh on to insane. It seemed insanity might be the cost of pursuing this question to its source.
I was saved, in a strange way, from insanity.
Mysterious morning leg cramps took me to the doctor, who gave me one of those cardboard stool sample cards, which came back positive for blood, which took me to get x-rays, which revealed a cancer in my colon, which stopped me for a year to face that unwelcome guest squatting in my body. (I share one of my poems below)
I’d sold the book to a Harper Collins, though, so I returned to writing after I was given the all clear. There is so much more to the story of the book. An angel of a friend inviting me to live with her so I could finish, and offering to be my sounding board. The publisher sending it out to a book doctor to draw a better book out of my draft. That man loving it but failing to find a way to make it clear. Another book doctor, another failure. Everyone wanting me to write a smaller book, a manual on how to be free in an unfree world as Harry Browne had. I wanted to rewrite the very definition of freedom as understood in America. The how-to version made me want to vomit. Then, great blessing, the publisher gave up, but in doing so, I lost all faith in myself.
Dogged pursuit
In my heart of hearts, though, I never lost faith in the principles and practices I’d pulled out of those years of work. I tried to write it as a little book of parables, and fell into depression. I tried to write it as a novel and was clickety clacketing along when the trail was lost and I was too. I tried writing it as a fable, got further, but again, a depression hit. I wrote it up on a blog just to get some of it out somewhere, but it went nowhere.
Here we are now in the 2020’s, and 6 of the 9 planetary boundaries breached quite predictably, with no capacity to talk seriously about limits as a pathway to freedom from the ravages of climate disruptions. This is my great sorrow. I/we could not stop the train hurtling towards destruction.
Wisdom to know the difference
God, give me the strength to change the things I can, to accept the things I can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference. Wisdom. The signature of Coming of Aging. It’s time to let go. Not of what I learned, but of the rash certainty it would shoot an arrow into the heart of the beast. It’s time to surrender. To stop fighting the war that was lost long ago, the war against folly.
In another post I may try, again, to write about what I saw and wrote into that book I hoped would, once more, change the world.
Now I know I will not pick up writing this same book to try to resolve this grief. I will just tell my story, one of many stories in this world, of dreams that never came true.
Dreams propel our lives. Keep dreaming!
We never know which dreams will be realized and which we must eventually let go, or let find their right form. If you are reading this, you are still in the game of reaching for dreams, or letting them find another way through you. Maybe some have transformed. Maybe you will die trying. Maybe you want to ask your abandoned dreams if they want another chance of living through you.
That’s why we need the Serenity Prayer. We never know. We should never stop dreaming, it’s the life force in our veins. But we can always discern.
Thank you for bearing witness to this untold story.
And now the promised cancer poem:
Cleaning
For Taylor
Vicki Robin
June 2004
My first house-sitting place on Vashon Island; moved during worst side effects from round one chemo
I couldn’t stop cleaning
Dust and grime and webs and
Everything that shined
Showed the next
Grime and webs and dust and so…
I couldn’t stop cleaning
Because he’d put a teddy bear on his pillow
Now my pillow for a while
As I live in his house by the water
Which is living inside his love, really
Inside a love so big even the sky can’t hold it
Because he said, “Feel free” and left for 12 days
Giving me tides to heal and waves to soothe and water to…
Clean, I couldn’t stop cleaning
Because, weeping, I find I can’t feel free to take without giving
To be in a love so big that it can hold him and me and the sky and more
So big it doesn’t need me to give, but I need to or I will die of shame
Cleaning the shame from my soul
Shame at being so small and needing so much
From him and them and the sky and the sea and…
God, I can’t stop cleaning or I will feel the crashing weight of this wearisome need
Dios mio! I need, I need, I need, I’m so sorry I will never stop needing…
To clean or I will know a debt I can never repay just
By scrubbing the grime from this world with my life just
By polishing the pain and grief and good grief…
I can’t stop cleaning or this cancer will sneer
“I am bigger than you,” as it
Squats in this house refusing to move,
Searing my pretties while spreading its fire.
I can’t.
And so I take something small, a shelf perhaps, and clean it
Soft sponge, warm water, stroking with care
The small things here in this house by sea
Spice jars and spoons and saucepans
And learn, by cleaning, that small is no sin
And weak is no shame
And at least I am here
Cupped, not crushed,
Between Death and God,
Warmed by water and his “feel free” love and
I, too, can be
Cleaned.
Profound and intimate
Beautiful Raw Powerful Honest and True … I love you so much Vicki and am here if you are ever prompted to reach out christina@cocreatingclarity.org I would love that! My lifelong experience in the school of hard knocks leaves me with a deep knowing that the only true freedom lies in Oneness. In the visceral knowing and relentless living of unconditional love for ‘other’ as self. For there is no outside in Oneness … so how can we not care deeply , love unconditionally, bless indiscriminately each and every droplet of consciousness? Whether human or plant or animal or situation or relationship of electron or dollar bill or planet or feeling or book or rock or … you get my drift😆 And by love I mean living as Love BEing in form in present here and now one moment at a time, allowing everything/one to be exactly what it is, joining in two-way flowing union with it, and of course knowing exactly what, if anything, is my action to take. And yes joining with cancer too. What a challenge you’ve been through back in 2004. So many tears. What a betrayal! For I had my own adventure with a rare lymphoma, a massive tumor in my chest cavity wrapping around my respiratory and circulatory vessels choking me. A BEing whom I named Rosie, and befriended and communicated with. (I wrote about her in White Hawks http://www.cocreatingclarity.com/indrasnetFBFeb2021.htm#210216). In and out of hospital for months, each time a full week of 24/7 infusions that brought me as close to death as they dared to. And yet here you are! And here I am! Love always wins … love has won … we’re simply taking our own sweet time REALizing it. Why. Because of exactly the the wonderful thing you encountered with Your money or your Life! We love our Freedom! The upside down thin is we persist in loving to fight for our Freedom! How crazy is that? Free will is everything to us, and yet the natural built in power of free will is possible only in embracing all, inclusive of all, allowing all that same freedom of choice! What a conundrum! Blessing you precious friend, and every one who gathers here 🕸️💎🕸️💎🕸️💎🕸️💎🕸️ I love you each and all so very much!🌺 PS: OMG!😱 Vicki darling💞 You’ve done it again … draw all of this stream of consciousness out of me with your writing! How beautiful! How powerful you/we are! Magical!🌈 🦄🌟