Life is a Verb:
A Conversation
So. I set out this
year to try to give some voice and attention to these questions of spirituality
that kept creeping up on me, and to do so through, in part, some attention to the
texts of my faith—that Bible that’s been troubling me most of my life, and
morning prayer.
Then I stumbled
on Patti Digh’s blog, 37days.com.
In many ways,
Patti’s posts came also to serve as texts of my faith—essays about living with
more intention, reaching toward others with more courage and compassion,
opening up to more love and more joy.
These are the tenets I believe are lodged within the difficult, ancient,
much-translated texts of Christianity, and it’s been a delight and relief to
see them lit up in stories of regular old 21st century life in
America. Recognizing moments where our
paths paralleled or almost crossed also brought a certain resonance—both of us
were raised in the South, Patti now lives just 40 miles from where I used to
visit my grandmother, we both survived the 2002 sniper attacks in the DC area,
both of us have dated individuals now living in another gender, my mom goes to
the hair salon that Patti used to frequent.
Had I engineered this, I would be a stalker.
Patti
also wrote about living a path I hope one day to follow—developing a book out
of her writing. This book, Life is a Verb: 37 Days
to Wake Up, Be Mindful, and Live Intentionally,
was just released this year. It offers
37 of the essays previously published on her blog, plus exercises that invite
readers to share the lessons Patti learned…about choosing wisely, but perhaps
not so quickly judging one’s seatmate in an airplane; about racism and
homelessness and the ways injustice plays out—and can be tempered—in our lives;
about joy, desire, allowing ourselves a little—or a lot—of freedom.
Patti
is now in the midst of one of the most unique and inviting marketing campaigns
I’ve ever seen. Readers were invited to
write for her blog, to set-up readings coast-to-coast, and to feature her book
on blogs of their own. That’s the
invitation I’m taking up today—to share with you a conversation I had with
Patti Digh, about writing and belief and marketing.
Life Is a Verb:
37 Days to Wake Up, Be Mindful, and Live Intentionally
A Conversation
with Patti Digh
That
period of 37 days was not chosen at random—in 2003, your stepfather died 37
days after he was diagnosed with lung cancer.
Some people might conceive of these 37 days as "the 37 days before
you meet your Maker." Your book, it
seems, looks in an entirely different direction—not toward the Maker, not even
very much toward the person counting down.
Instead, the focus is outward, toward the people we will leave behind,
and those we still might have a chance to meet and cherish. I would say you urge us to wring the last bit
of life out of our life, rather than concerning ourselves with what—if
anything—comes next. Can you talk about
the mental/spiritual framework that leads you to this approach? Do you have a sense or a belief in something
after this life—if so, how does that inform your beliefs about living and if
not, what hopes and fears do you hold for those who do believe in something
after/more?
When my father died in 1980, my
mother was (and still is) devastated. Even more so when a well-intentioned
family member told her that despite her wanting a house in Heaven with my Dad,
complete with a white picket fence, she wouldn't know or need to know him in
the same way in Heaven. I was only 20 at the time, but I remember how upset she
was, and I remember my response: "How does he know what Heaven is? And
isn't Heaven what you believe and want it to be? Wouldn't living in someone
else's idea of Heaven kind of negate the whole point of Heaven?"
My message in 37days isn’t about
scoring points for the future, no. Do I believe in Heaven? I believe in some
form of afterlife, yes. I believe that mine (and my daughter, Emma’s) are old
souls. I believe we have been here before, I truly do. But I’m not an advocate
of racking up points for the future—perhaps that explains the lack of attention
I have given my 401(k), too (smile). This book, and the writing on 37days, was
really an effort to grapple with my own recognition (and fear) that at some
point—and I don’t and probably won’t know when—I will wake up on Day 1 of my
last 37 days. At that point, honestly, it will be too late to live the life I
had imagined for myself. And so, the living must start now. Right
now. Not at 2pm after I’ve had that tomato soup for lunch or after that
fascinating strategic planning report is finished, but now.
It just so happens that the life
I had imagined for myself was one of great intensity and joy and energy and
deep relationship—things that bring me to a place of great care for others, to
a place of deep compassion and an urge to serve others, to be in service to
others. Will that bode well for my next life? I hope so, but that’s not the
intention behind it. If I end up as a gnat in my next life, I’m just planning
to be the best gnat I know how, to fully engage in and embrace my gnat-ness.
Life is a Verb offers six practices
for intentional living: Say Yes, Be
Generous, Speak Up, Love More, Trust Yourself, and Slow Down. These seem to me to be as full and clear an
ethical standard as the Ten Commandments or the Eight-fold Path. Your structure, however, is framed in
positive terms--what to do, rather than what not to do. It strikes me, for example, that the person
willing to sit arm-to-arm with a stranger is not likely to murder, that the
struggle to love the unlovable is a struggle toward true witness,
that always renting the red convertible or saying Wow on seeing a bus
are ways to inoculate oneself from covetousness. How intentional were you in directing your
readers toward positive action—and did this affirmative support seem to you to
be something missing in the world of ethics/religion?
My business partner,
David Robinson, and I do an enormous amount of thinking about the direction of
intention. If you call me to come to your college campus to do
anti-racism work, that’s a negative intention. You are identifying what you
want to push against. What I want you to identify is what you are moving
toward. That’s a positive direction of intention.
Your articulation of
the meaning of those stories in positive terms is really amazing to me—I was
doing that and not realizing it. Thank you for that clarity. I guess it is a
core impulse of mine to be FOR something and not AGAINST something. “Thou shalt not” is a far less compelling energy in the world for
me that “Thou shall and with great passion.”
A lot of times I work
in organizations where there is an employee manual that is
six inches thick. As we all know, those are rarely explorations of positive
intention, but serve as warnings against. “If you do this, you will be
reprimanded, fired, talked about mercilessly in the hallways.” What that does
is merely help everyone in the organization abdicate their own responsibility
for positive, generative action in relationship. The same is true of religious
edicts.
Why don’t we frame
things in positive terms? Because it is infinitely more
difficult to say what we are for than to say what we fear. Because we largely live our lives as if we are playing to win (a
finite game) rather than playing to learn (an infinite game). Our
measurements (we are more civilized, more democratic, more righteous) are
killing us.
You don't spend much time in Life
Is a Verb considering what not to do—although you share, in various
stories, a clear-eyed accounting and regret for the harm that we can do to one
another, and ourselves. I'm thinking
here of pieces as diverse as "Love Unloveable
People," "Redefine
Because I was writing
these stories for my daughters, I wanted them to see me as a full human—with
big flaws and having made mistakes. I think parents sometimes hold out an
unreachable ideal to their kids. I wanted to say, “I am fully human,” with all
the warts that come with that condition. I’ve made mistakes, I screw up, I
stereotype people, I judge people. My daughters will
screw up too. I want to create conditions in which they will learn from those
errors, not hide them or spin identities or cloaks of shame from them. I want
them to create healthy stories for their lives, ones that fully engage the
shadow side of themselves. We all have a shadow side—let’s play with it, let’s
learn from it, let’s fully engage it and acknowledge and own it rather than
pasteurize it or deny it altogether.
I think sin,
redemption, justice, mercy, and acceptance are abstract concepts. I think
unless each is embodied in an action—walk toward, listen to, empathize with,
recognize yourself in, sit arm to arm beside, bring a warm cup of tea to—they have
no real meaning. What does redemption or forgiveness look like? It doesn’t look
like a pronouncement, it looks like an action, or a
series of actions over time. It looks a lot like a simple movement toward
rather than away from.
I'm trying to come to terms with the fact that religion matters to
me—that despite all the hurtful things the Roman Catholic church
has to say about me and my girlfriend, I can't quite walk away from it. Twelve years of Catholic education
(some would say indoctrination) have made a difference—a difference I am
trying to better understand and more honestly claim. The trouble comes in wrestling with these
ideas of identity in a world where religion is the root/reason/excuse for
unfathomable violence, and where a claim of religious identity is likely to be
interpreted as either a claim to moral superiority or an assertion of
in-group/out-groupness. I wonder how your experience in working with
diversity informs your approach toward matters religious and/or spiritual—and
whether you have any advice or guidance for those of us trying to figure out
where we stand without building barriers against those who stand elsewhere.
I believe that in our
shared humanity we have confused our role as religious or spiritual conduits
with the role many have now taken on as religious or spiritual proclaim-ors. If there is such a word. There is a certain amount of hubris
associated with proclamations of any kind, isn’t there? How dangerous it is to
proclaim that my version of the truth is any more or less valid than yours.
There is a story in
Life is a Verb that gets to the heart of my beliefs about this – one involving
my acupuncturist who, through a series of very smart questions, led me to
believe that it is my attachment to being right that is causing me to suffer,
not whether I am, in fact, right.
I also believe that
we deny our human nature—particularly in organized religion—to an extent that
dooms us to failure. As David Berreby has written in
his brilliant book, Us and Them, we see the world in
terms of “us” and “them” and we aren’t going to stop doing that. Yet in many
parts of the world, we pretend we don’t see the world in that way. We are
living a lie. I believe we can see “us” and “them” and still not act in a way
that negates the “them.” I believe we can better build bridges not by focusing
on me and the not-me, but by focusing on the space between, the relationship
between.
If all story has at
its epicenter either "like me" or "not like me," phenomenal
things happen if we choose the "like me" path, not to minimize the
differences between us or make them like me, but to seek and
explore how we are alike as much as or more than how we are
different. Such a shift changes even our physicality--how we are with
others radically changes as a result.
I consider myself
deeply spiritual, but I haven’t found organized religion to fill the need I
have for connection to a greater being because I get too frustrated by the
dogma and politics of it—I fear that churches have become businesses, not avenues
for enlightenment and nourishment. They protect their market by dissing the other products, other beliefs. I have no place
in my life for that. I don’t need that to tap into a greater shared humanity,
to look to the Buddhist family I lived with in Sri Lanka in 1976 and know that
we are related in significant ways though we speak different words for god, to
know that my lesbian neighbors are as married as I am, to know that my
transgender friend in Portland is as deeply, deeply human as I am. I don’t need
a bureaucrat (in the church or government) to tell me otherwise. So I find that
I can keep what serves me from religion and let go of the rest. That works for
me. Would it work for everyone? No, probably not. And—my point—that’s okay.
What is the primary
intention of religion in your life? Every action should serve that
intention—and every action that does not (which likely would include damnation
of others with a different religious belief system) should be let go of. We are
either believers in or believers against. And we must choose which.
Throughout the Christian gospels, various promises of relief are
made—the light burden/easy yoke, comfort, rest, etc. The steps you suggest in Life Is A Verb are not always easy to do
(love unlovable people, ask yourself each lunchtime if you're becoming someone
you respect), and yet they seem to push toward greater joy. Do you think increased joy or lightness is a
valid measure of whether or not we're on the right track?
It sure can’t hurt!
Another measure might be the increased joy you have brought others.
Mary Oliver has a poem about
the donkey that Jesus rides into
These are such great
questions. Do we need to feel brave to be brave?
Perhaps. And perhaps not.
When readers of
37days started sending in their answers to the question, “What would you be
doing today if you only had 37days to live?”, I began to
see what emerged from a wide variety of people all over the world, and they
were centered on love. So I believe we are left with love. Love for ourselves
and for others, which translates into actions—hopefully I am, like the donkey,
just living my life, not really knowing the impact I have on others, but loving
the walk. And loving—truly loving—the people I am meeting along that road. And
that is enough.
CS Lewis posits a last judgment, but says each will be measured
against our own propensities--that the person who resists an urge toward
cruelty might be more virtuous than someone who is naturally inclined toward
generosity. He suggests we all, at the
moment, will see this measure of ourselves and others--and that "there
will be surprises." What do you
think of this vision--and do you see as related in any way to your own nudges
to readers to look more deeply into others, to see the complexity, the miracle
in the airplane seat beside us?
I give money when I
have little. Am I more virtuous or more stupid than the man who has much and
gives? I’m not sure it matters, really, if the intention is focused on the
person who needs the money, but I have long pondered how much sacrifice
matters.
My gut says it does matter, but that’s based
on metrics that are largely irrelevant. We measure ourselves in very
interesting ways, don’t we?
At the heart of your
question—and mine about sacrifice—is the question (again) of intention. If my
intention is to be applauded for making a sacrifice, that is a self-directed action,
and if my intention is to help someone, that is an Other-directed action. Is
one better than the other? I think both are necessary—we do need to put our own
mask on first, as those flight attendants tell us repeatedly, but also be in
service to.
I believe we show ourselves who we are
not in times of comfort, but in times of stress. We can also show
ourselves—daily—who we want to become. But that is an intentional act, a re-storying.
And now, having taken on God, I'd like to invite you to address Mammon. The marketing of Life Is a Verb is something I have never seen before. You invite your readers to practice writing
to the question that informs the book, you send us out on treasure hunts to
find copies in our local bookstore, you invite us to
write reviews on Amazon.com, you invite us to invite you to our town. As someone who hopes one day to have a book
out there in the marketplace, I've found all of this to be delightful—the tone
is light and celebratory and fun, and I've had a
chance to "practice" marketing, on behalf of someone else. What is it like for you and for other folks
involved in the distribution of Life is a
Verb—publishers and readers? How did
you come up with all of this? Is it as
fun as it appears on your blog? And is
there consciously more to it than selling books and having fun—do you intend,
for instance, to use these events to democratize book selling in the same way
that some say the Internet democratizes information?
I really LOVE this description of
what I have been doing—none of it was consciously planned, but the result of
simply following my impulse.
What I have loved is the
unfolding of a glorious intention—not to sell books (though, to be sure, the
kids need shoes and I’m staring college tuition in the face), but with a
primary, sort of primal impulse, to build a community of people who are
reading, engaging, exploring, rejoicing together. To approximate in the world
outside my head what has been going on inside of it for the past three years—a
“conversation” about meaning, a look at the spaces in between people, a
grabbing hold of life in a new way.
I adore the photographs of Life
is a Verb at a very long table of hearty German people with their mugs of beer,
or stuck in the vines of a grapes at a vineyard in New Zealand, or with Hong
Kong in the background. It thrills me to see a gorgeous GORGEOUS
short video of LIAV crossing a bridge in Sweden on the back of a bike. Is that
a democratization of the book buying process? If it is, let’s do us some more
of that.
Let’s engage with books
differently, not as Ivory Tower pronouncements but as invitations. Not as
edicts from experts but as musings from a middle-aged mother of two who can’t
find a roll of scotch tape in her house. This is
invitational reading—and living. To the people who have emailed about giving
away their copies to people they met who “needed” them, to the young woman who
took it on her honeymoon and read it to her new husband one essay a day, to the
businessman who wept on a plane reading it, to the grandfather who bought
copies for all of his 12 grandchildren, to the woman who is using it to teach
her Sunday School class, and many, so many more—I cannot, CANNOT begin to thank
you for seeing yourselves in those pages.
I have dived into getting this
book into the world because I believe—no, I actually know, given the feedback
that I’m getting—that people need this book, that it is really changing lives,
even as hard as it is for me to believe that I’ve been the catalyst for that. My role now? Not as esteemed author, but as conduit for a
reader’s own personal journey. My job now? Not to hold
information as power, but to disperse it the very best way I know how. I am
simply beyond thrilled at the excitement and energy of people finding LIAV
around the world, and I am moved beyond words by the messages and photos of
support and immense love. Moved beyond words.
|
|
© 2008 Melissa Capers