On Trust
After Work, Part 11
Toward the end of my Grief series, I talked about “new hellos”1 — those quiet little hands, reaching out from around the corner, timidly waving just enough to pique your curiosity after you’ve said goodbye — to a person, to an old you, to a job or style of working, to a life — and begin to emerge into the early glimmers of next.
But the hellos don’t come immediately; after a goodbye seems to come a period that can have many names: contemplation, withdrawal, rest. Perhaps these manifest as a fog, a solitary meander, or a long, exhausted breath. Such a period seems inevitable; even if you think you’ve jumped from one thing immediately into the next, your ramping-up period on the new thing is still going to be some form of murky transition.
We tend to not love these periods of life. They’re full of unknowns, and unknowns aren’t good for us evolutionarily. Yet they can’t be rushed, as I wrote in Seasons in the Riverlands. Trying to force progress — when the only thing that can move it along is the life experience inherent to the passage of time — will leave you highly frustrated (and no farther along the path), but not forcing it feels like inaction, which we tend to view as the antithesis of what one is supposed to do when something feels off. Yet that’s exactly what we must do, as Whyte’s Winter Apple poetically highlights.
A couple of years ago during a particular struggle, my therapist gave me a very annoying suggestion: “Just stop doing that.” I of course replied with, “OK, but what do I do instead?”
“No, that’s it. Just stop doing that.”
Such a suggestion is highly offensive to an action-biased problem-solving person — it just felt so passive! When you stop doing one thing, you have to do something else instead, right?!
Nope. (Ugh.)
Sometimes, stopping is the best course of action: Stop trying to engineer your way out of a dark meander (and just be with the darkness). Stop repeating that one bad habit (without substituting something else). When you stop something — and resist the urge to quickly replace it — you create an inverted space in your life. And when you do that, as Whyte has said, you ”open up an absence inside you into which the world rushes.”
Let’s make our final visit to The Journey. We’ve spent a lot of time in our cottage in the storm, but take a listen to the end: “and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world.”
Perhaps the very first hello we’ll hear is our own.
Believing in the New Roof
When coping with our old cottage in a storm, daydreaming about what we’d do with a functional living room can keep us going — but actually getting one can cause us to freeze in panic (as I wrote in Part 3 about the terror of the blank page). Even though our old systems didn’t work well, at least we were used to them and understood how deal with them — trusting that they would behave (and falter) in the ways they were prone to: We know our roof patch fails every two months, so we’re not buying the nice couch, and we’ll need to get the buckets out during the next storm and be ready to patch things yet again. We know we have a meltdown every Q4 after Annual Planning and Perf are done, and we’ll get sick over the holidays and need to disappear for a few weeks.
But what now, when circumstances have changed?
Well, it takes lots of gentle range-finding to figure out what works for this version of us: What are our old interests versus new ones? What are the ones that were blocked before and are no longer? Which ones are shoulds that we now realize we aren’t interested in at all? (And it’s worth revisiting 4000 Weeks, as Burkeman discusses our general aversion to actually choosing the big things that we want, because it forces us to confront the fact that we are limited beings and can’t do everything — which means thinking about mortality!)
And when we do choose, there’s the matter of self-trust: Will this new roof even hold? Can I safely host guests on a rainy day? What about in a hurricane? Can I shelter my neighbors? When we’re so used to the old thing doing what it does, developing a new muscle memory for “it doesn’t do that anymore” takes a lot of testing, trying, and believing.
Seamus Heaney’s Scaffolding was written about relationships, but I loved the visual for learning to trust that a house would hold after the construction supports were removed:
I’ve been working a lot on these self-trust ideas in recent years. There are the mundane, such as questioning how much of my crazy motorcycle travels were a durable, innate desire versus an overreaction to a constrained period of life, as well as the vocational — the “live wire of work” that I’ve stayed far, far away from, because the last time I got near it, I was nearly electrocuted. But that was all years ago — what if the growth I’ve experienced since means such worries are outdated? (If I put effort into something bigger or more committed, will my brain hold?!)
These things can be scary to even consider testing out. But that’s exactly what we have to do.
Building Back Up (with Agency)
I recall a story from years ago about a weightlifting coach2 who was trying to re-pattern a football player’s form in the barbell squat. He could move a huge amount of weight, but he had hit a plateau (and I think kept getting injured? I don’t remember exactly). The coach’s fix was to start him over from scratch, being very precise on the proper form — but at first, when doing it the correct way, he could barely squat a *broomstick*. He had to start with zero pounds and work all the way back up. This idea of being very strong, yet still having to rebuild in a better, different, deliberate way, really stuck with me.
When we’re exploring, especially among those early hellos and pressure-tests, keep in mind the line from The Journey about the voices “shouting their bad advice” — shouting so loudly that they can blow out our fragile little flames. Those voices aren’t always the external ones; I find them often to be loudest internally, and they’ve rhymed throughout my life — usually sounding like an evolutionary caution of “Why are you risking leaving this reasonably safe and secure space to self-actualize? You’re undermining your hierarchy of needs!”
My voices like to predict that something won’t work, discouraging me from even trying. For example, I’ve often deflected opportunities by saying things like, “Anybody who would want to work with me would need a full-time commitment, but flexibility is still a high priority of mine.” That sounds plausible, sure, but it’s completely made-up, ungrounded conjecture: I haven’t had any serious conversations with anyone, and so nobody has ever expressed such a thing! It’s my evolutionary brain manufacturing convenient “truths” to convince me to remain in safe inaction.
It’s also important to remember that a slight dabble in something will not automatically launch us down some inevitable, all-consuming path to whatever miserable result we’re catastrophizing. Remember what I wrote earlier in this series about how with a blank page comes a gain in agency? We still have it. When you’ve been on a treadmill (whether a corporate one, a trauma one, or an unexamined life habituated one, or whatever) for a long time, it’s easy to get into the rut that decisions are being made for you — that step one does equal launching all the way to step forty-seven. Yes, we should be ethical about our commitments (to ourselves and to others), but if something turns out to not be working, you’re allowed to stop. Does reading that feel like a radical act? (Writing it does. Wow.)
I had a conversation with my old boss (B.F.) last year about trying new things, and he had another perspective on this that perhaps should’ve been obvious, but wasn’t: If you don’t actually understand what is available, of course the unknown will seem scary. (If the only dog you’ve ever met bit you, you wouldn’t know that there are millions of friendly dogs in the world!)
In Part 7’s “right tool for the job,” I was only able to make peace with the fact that I did have the right tool (bike) because I’d tried many others over the years. I understood the field. With a recent apartment search, I was able to weather the many “you’re being too picky” comments because I’d made a monthslong effort to understand the local market, pricing, historical availability of the types of places I was looking for, etc., and concluded that what I wanted did exist, but was rare enough that it would probably be a long wait. (I was right.) Committing to unknown unknowns will inevitably threaten our evolutionary instincts, but probing them plays to our strengths. Try it on for size: how does “Let me go investigate if there are scary things out there” feel inside you, compared to “I’m just guessing what’s probably out there based on the years-old information inside me.” If you’re like me, the former feels reasonable, and the latter feels pretty gross!
And it’s not only about knowing the field, but also knowing your field. Everyone knows about chemistry in relationships; even if you could measure 100 distinct traits and match them up, what’s on paper will never be a substitute for someone’s intangible vibe. The same is true for life activities: “I think I might enjoy that” can easily be replaced by “Wow, I definitely did not enjoy that” merely by actually doing the thing and seeing what happens. You can only truly know how it will feel by doing it. Anne-Laure Le Cunff has a book called Tiny Experiments (that I haven’t read yet, but my friend N.F. says it’s great), and I’ve enjoyed her talks on the subject. In the video below (among many other great nuggets), she explains how she tested out whether she wanted to become a YouTuber, and using subtle signals of procrastination as an indicator of what works for her and what doesn’t. It’s worth a watch:
You’ll recall earlier in the series, I wrote about the importance of living experientially rather than theoretically. Perhaps we should also amend that with living experimentally.
Creating Conditions for Success
Whatever you want to call them — range-finding, probing at boundaries, or periods of experimentation, these eras can send our nervous systems into a tizzy, looking for comfort, safety, or familiar ruts to drive into. Besides practicing self-compassion (reminding ourselves that this stuff is supposed to be hard), there’s one big thing we can do to help ourselves succeed: stop brute forcing, and work on our systems instead.
Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma), James Clear (Atomic Habits), and just the other day, Angela Duckworth (NYT) all argue that using willpower to overcome adversity is going to be fraught with difficulty. They (and many others) talk about how the best way to avoid eating junk food is not at home when the cookie is sitting on the counter tempting you, but at the grocery store when you can avoid buying it in the first place. Shane Parrish refers to this as putting yourself in “hard mode.” (Click through; I enjoyed his explanation!)
I’ve been thinking about this lately— rather than problem-solving in the moment, or trying to force myself to do something that I know will be good for me while short-term emotional/anxiety states are signaling otherwise, what could I do in advance to make it more natural for me to automatically succeed? In other words, crafting situations where my default behaviors will deliver the right outcome obviates the need to “try so hard.”
When big things don’t go well, I tend to spend a good deal of time analyzing my “failures” as a way of learning how to do better next time, but most of that ends up as berating myself for “failing in the moment” rather than for “failing to plan better.” This is really not productive; when you’re in the desert without water and dying of thirst, you’re going to drink from the elephant mud puddle out of desperation anyway — despite the high likelihood of a net-worse outcome (illness causing worse dehydration). Why then, when I get out of the desert, do I insist on learning how to avoid drinking from mud holes rather than learning to not go into the desert without water in the first place?!
Getting this wrong repeatedly can put you in a bad loop: “Failing” to learn the unlearnable lesson makes you think something must be wrong with your learning ability, which leads you not even consider there’s a better lesson you could learn, thus not learning said lesson either, thus repeating the same dysfunctional behavior ad infinitum.
Working on advance planning, avoiding the idea of willpower as much as possible, and structuring your experiments (and life!) to come from places of advantage is going to be a hell of a lot more efficacious than figuring out how to overcome acute emotional distress signals in hard moments. Don’t beat yourself up for eating the cookie that was sitting on your counter. Stop walking down the snack aisle when you’re hungry! Atomic Habits is a great read for specific tactics.
We’re now a dozen parts in to this series, and while it’s been reassuring to see some of my early lessons (from almost four years ago now!) come back full circle, I’m beginning to worry that some of it will feel repetitive for you, the reader, as I've reused certain quotes/poems/lessons more than once. Some of this is intentional; I didn’t want to assume that everyone has read my Grief series, where there’s been some overlap. Some is less intentional, as I haven’t always kept a tight hold on every similar thread…
It’s also a little disappointing that I seem to need to re-learn some of these lessons over and over again myself. You’d think that as powerful as they’ve been — and as expositively as I’m able to write about them — that they’d be more memorable or ingrained. Although, I suppose this is why culture and religion involve repetitive storytelling: Read The Night Before Christmas each year. Listen to Dharma talks or Alan Watts retell parables we’ve already heard. Take in religious allegories and classic texts as kids, and reconnect with them anew as adults.
I attended a David Whyte morning event (in a church, no less) a few weeks ago, where he recited a number of his greatest hits and told stories around them, interspersed with some beautiful Irish music. I’d heard all of the pieces and the stories before, yet that day, they fell on my fresh ears, and I got something new from them. It’s funny how we’re primed to receive information in this way — in community, in safety, with song, with ornate language — and how it’s (in the grand scheme of history) quite recent that much of Western society has stopped doing so. John O’Donohue mentions in the On Being episode (that I put in last week’s Appendix) that it’s such a shame how the many life benefits people took from religious practice — often unrelated to the specific doctrines of monotheism — are being slowly lost, as so many have moved away from organized religion. I do think we’ve lost something, too.
So, I guess I’ll do my part and try to stop fretting about being repetitive!
Next week, Revisiting My Departure.
Coelho and Whyte both have remarks on this
I think this was either Mark Rippetoe or Dane Miller, though a quick Google search indicates that this might also just be a standard technique that many coaches use.