1.19.2009
THE FACE THAT TORCHED 1,000 BERGS
When it comes to torching a Berg, let's face it, the Rooskies win, hands down. After all, they've been facing the freeze for centuries. They, our Comrades to the east, are a fearless lot, and they do have a penchant for spewing forth a few ruthless rogues and rulers now and again. Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Rasputin....Putin...?Ladies and Gentlemen, I ask you to glance at the man whose countenance graces the cover of Time, Vladimir Putin, or "Vlad" to you and me. I ask you to stare into those cool steely blue pools and tell me what modern mass of ice would fail to melt under his laser-like stare. No one escaped his critical eagle eye. "Vimps, you Westerners are all vimps!" Even the Mad Monk did not escape his criticism. "Rasputin was softie," he was known to say.
Putin is clearly a man who is not to be messed with, someone who would sneer in the face of fear. (in heavy Russian accent, snarling) "Ha, fear, I am not afraid of you. I curse you! I spit on you! I spit on your brother, I spit on your mother, I spit on your ugly stepsister with the crooked limbs, I spit on your goats, (sputtering)...I spit...I spit...I spit on your spit!"
The Putin approach is like a one-two punch, without the "two". Verily I say unto you, Comrade Vlad is my "channel of choice" when I, in my weak and panicked moments, am faced with...the Dreaded "Unidentified Caller".
The minute I hear the ring and see the dreaded syllables appear on my Blackberry, I see myself in Putin's shoes, or rather, snowshoes, long fur coat and fur hat, eyes quinting into steely slits, unflinching in the 40 below windchill factor winter storm, standing in front of the Kremlin, facing off a horde of Mongols and old-guard Communists - every fiber of his Slavic soul severing huge chunks of ice with Siberian severity. This man will not back down. He will not chicken out and hit the "ignore call" key. He will persevere and answer the call, proving once again that the best defense is a good offense.
EXT. KREMLIN - DAY
Putin stands stoically before the Russian people. It's cold. Most of the Russian people standing outside have frozen solid. All except Putin.
A cell phone rings and Putin grabs it from his pocket, answering.
"Alyo? Vat you vant?" he shouts, slicing the head of the caller. He listens, ominously. His silences are portents of the evil to come.
"Hello, Mr. Putin, my name is Mr. Smith, and on behalf of American Excess, we would like to offer you the opportunity to pay your Visa payment over the ph...."
Slowly, he sneers, "Nnnnyet." Shock - as the caller is required to hear the thundering "no" come across the wires. Speechless, he cannot even summon the courage to retort. Sharply, like shards of glass silently slicing serfs in their sleds (hey, it's "...onomatopeia...every time I see ya...").
"I'm sure you wouldn't want to pay any late fees...."
He sputters a sentence that rains down like the bullets on Bloody Sunday, his terse words smiting any glint of guilt the Caller might try to foist upon him.
"Ruthlessly he goes for the jugular. "Nyet, I will not do this thing you ask. Not no vyey, not no how. Not ever....(pause) Nye-ver."
Silence. The Caller doesn't have a chance, not a hair's breadth to query, to quip, to cajole. In a trice, he is made to feel like the nothing he is. Putin blasts him with round of machine gun fire. "How dare you call me. How dare you interrupt 'Densink vit the Czars'....You ...you are not worth spitting on!"
The Caller, now fearing for his life, is reduced to tears, pleading, hysteria. "But you Excellency, sir, I was just wondering why... you were 30 days late on your Visa card..."
"You vill to shut up and lyi-sten to me!"
"Yes...sir...whatever you say, sir."
"You vil forget you speak to me."
"Yes, sir."
"You vil forget I speak to you."
"Yes, sir, I will sir."
"Then I vill forget you."
"Yes, sir, oh, yes, sir."
"Then everybody forget."
"Oh, yes, forget it. I mean, thank you, sir."
"Get it?"
"Oh yes, I got it sir. I was just kidding."
"You are skunk, you try to play with Putin."
"Oh no, sir, not me, I would never..."
Putin starts to laugh, a deep, ferocious, barbaric laugh.
The Caller stammers, trying to laugh along with him.
"You try to take Putin on ride?" (to flunky) "Hey, Boris, Mr. Smith from Amyerican Exsyess try to take Putin for ride?"
Both men are laughing ominously.
"I like you, Mr. Smith. Soon, you vill get lyeetl present from Putin."
"Oh, sir, gee, you don't have to do that."
INT. CALL CENTER - ATLANTA
We see the Caller on the phone, sweating bullets. The door to the office bursts open and 3 Russian thugs in greatcoats burst into the room and toss 10 heavy bags on the floor. They are brandishing rifles.
"Present from Putin. Happy Burs-day, Comrade."
The thugs open the bags and toss out hundreds of thousand dollar bills, laughing.
The Caller loses it.
EXT. KREMLIN - MOMENTS LATER
"You happy now, Mr. Smith?"
"Yes, uh...sir...uh...I'm eternally grate..."
Mr. Smith can't finish his sentence.
(interrupting) "No, Mr. Smith....I am great. You are NOBODY!"
Putin slams the phone into the snow, laughing menacingly.
"Ha-ha-ha-HAAA!!!"
I FEEL THE CHILL...
Does the sight of an unknown number on your cell phone (worse yet are the ominous words "Private Number" or "Unknown Caller") set your hair on edge? Better yet, does the mere ring of your cell phone send you into paroxysms of doom? But when did this happen? When did the jolly upbeat "brrring" of the telephone that signalled a potential admirer or a nocturnal soiree turn into the ominous "rat-a-tat" of the "unknown"?
Why, in the age of uber-connection, does even the sight of a friend's phone number cause us to hold our breath and dive under the table? The answer is simple. Having the world at your doorstep means that the world is now ringing your doorbell...poking at you at all hours of the day and night...with all manner of requests, from the benign to the outright dangerous. And if anything can be asked of you, then you are open to the unfortunate situation of being forced to admit that even you, witty, urbane, capable creature that you are, cannot...or worse...will not be able to fulfill what is asked of you.
In our culture, the act of admitting that "I can't" or "I won't" is translated as "I am an incapable, dysfuntional, average village idiot who can't seem to respond to the 250 emails and 65 phone calls and 3 inches of junk mail I receive every day....not to mention the other life and death requests made by live and virtual human beings at work, at school, at home, in the neighborhood, at my AA meetings, at the market, at the gym, at the drugstore, on the freeway who, by some random act of synchronicity, have been placed in my path for the express purpose of making me painfully aware of how utterly lame I am at navigating this rat's nest of exponential obligations that we call modern life." At this point, you're either on the verge of a huge anxiety attack, or already "gone awol" into the deep blue waters of "voluntary non-communication", which, by the way, is the closest thing to a mortal sin that we have in this culture. For some reason, it is thought that to endure these requests, give some half-baked answer and allow yourself to feel bad about how bad the other person is going to feel when you are too overwhelmed to deal with them is somehow better than to simply avoid this type of situation altogether.
The symptoms are unmistakeable, crystal-clear, yet it takes years and a lot of courage to be able to see a gigantic looming iceberg two feet away from your boat and even beging to say "Do you think that might be a teeny tiny little iceberg up there?" If you answered, "Nah, I don't think so either," keep reading.
Anyday, Here, Now. Right now.
It's a sunny afternoon and you've ducked into a coffee bar in another part of town where you are sure not to run into anyone you know...or anything for that matter...to seize a simple cup of joe and a blissful "me moment". No sooner do you sip your soy latte than you are jarred into reality with the jingling, jangling "brrr" of your latest celular device. You freeze in mid-sip. You begin to perspire, the sweat beading on your temples, oozing into your palms..."Uh-oh, it's the ex....it's the aged parent I forgot to call back from 3 days ago...it's the friend I forgot to call back in 1999....it's the really old boyfriend I've been avoiding for 10 years...Oh god, please don't let it be another creditor...and really please don't let it be the same creditor who's already called 45 times today...no...wait...it's the cel phone company telling me my check bounced...it's the bank saying I'm 1000 dollars in the red...it's the Red Hat Society asking me to join...it's the committee I signed up for somewhere to do something I can't remember but was probably today...now....five hours ago....they hate me...I screwed up...the whole event was a shambles...people are mad...lives lost...tragic errors have been committed...ohmygod it's the school but I didn't answer and my kid has been kidnapped by aliens and I'm in a coffee bar, wasting time, avoiding real life, hiding from everyone I know, frozen in fear...absolutely unable to even ANSWER MY PHONE FOR GOD'S SAKE....just answer it, who knows, maybe it's not bad news...but hey, the odds of that are 900 to 1..... "
Just as you almost run out of air, you notice the phone has stopped ringing. Thank god for voicemail. Thank god for the fact that we don't have video cel phones. Thank god for the fact that no one can actually find me...wait, of course they can find me...they can trace my cel phone calls...the debit card I used to pay for this goddamned latte...I am so stupid...why didn't I pay cash...why don't I have any cash...because I don't have any money...obviously, why else would I be paying with a debit card...that's it...it's the coffee bar! They're calling me to say that my debit card didn't work....they're after me...they'll be out here any minute looking for the 40 year old loser who can't afford a 5 dollar cup of coffee! Ohmygod...my mother was right, if I'd only listened to her and joined the CIA...and married a rich yet boring and totally unsexyguy from a good family...and worn more makeup...and the right clothes and FIXED MY HAIR...none of this would've happened!
(A tow truck pulls up to the parking lot)....ohmygodohmygod they're towing my car....oh shit...I haven't paid it in 2 months...3 months...who knows...it's been a long long long long time....but I'm too scared to look....they're driving up to my car...god, how embarrassing...having your pre-owned 1998 vehicle with the ancient dents in the side towed away while you're sipping a latte in a swanky west-side coffee bar....oh my god! I don't know what's worse....looking up to watch them do it...or just standing up and running as fast as I can down the street...but how can I explain it...I'll say it was stolen...by thugs...terrorists...out of towners having a bad day...I'll say I sold it...I'm going green...that's it...that's noble...selfless...so environmentally something....ohmygod I can't do that...how am I going to get to my lunch date across town...how can I tell them I can't have lunch because I can't drive to lunch??? An Angeleno without a car? How embarrassing...how did this happen? How can this un-happen...who can I call? How can I call them if my phone's been cut off?
Thankfully, seconds before self-implosion, I manage to peer out of the corner of my left eye and see that the tow truck is here to jump start a tempermental Jag. Whew..! A huge sigh of relief...five more minutes of reprieve...thank you god...I'll never screw up again...I will answer the phone...I will write that thank-you note for last year's birthday present...which I loved...from a friend who I love...but I haven't managed to thank yet because I'm so uncomfortable with the fact that they felt they had to give me such a nice present because I couldn't afford it myself! How in god's name can I ever bring myself to write that note? Maybe they'll just forget about me, write me off as some rude creature they once knew, maybe I'll just fall off the radar and never have to actually re-admit what a total loser I am....Maybe they'll move out of State, go into the Witness Protection Program...be forbidden to contact any of their old friends...and totally forget I ever existed...yeah...yeah....that's it...that's it..."
Down and down the rabbithole. That's how it starts. Pretty soon there are Bergs bobbing on every horizon, of all shapes and sizes, all brought into being by Other Bergs, calving and cleaving off of each other until the sea of your life is nothing but torturous obligations, bobbing reminders of past failures, current inadequacies, and certain future extinction. You can't even begin to imagine a sea of "happy happy joy joy" tomorrows because everything out there feels like just another trigger to massive overwhelm.
Your life becomes a series of tense seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks and months of sheer survival, hanging on by your frazzled wits and furrowed fingernails. Even you can't imagine how you manage to merely "hang on" in the midst of such mega-stress. And the worst of it is that anything you can think of that might actually get you out of it actually costs so much in terms of money, time and effort that to undertake such activity would have a direct and fatal impact upon your current survival. Not to mention that unspeakable horror...asking for help...which is the nail in the coffin of utter and abject failure. Talk about a Berg and a cold place!
Why, in the age of uber-connection, does even the sight of a friend's phone number cause us to hold our breath and dive under the table? The answer is simple. Having the world at your doorstep means that the world is now ringing your doorbell...poking at you at all hours of the day and night...with all manner of requests, from the benign to the outright dangerous. And if anything can be asked of you, then you are open to the unfortunate situation of being forced to admit that even you, witty, urbane, capable creature that you are, cannot...or worse...will not be able to fulfill what is asked of you.
In our culture, the act of admitting that "I can't" or "I won't" is translated as "I am an incapable, dysfuntional, average village idiot who can't seem to respond to the 250 emails and 65 phone calls and 3 inches of junk mail I receive every day....not to mention the other life and death requests made by live and virtual human beings at work, at school, at home, in the neighborhood, at my AA meetings, at the market, at the gym, at the drugstore, on the freeway who, by some random act of synchronicity, have been placed in my path for the express purpose of making me painfully aware of how utterly lame I am at navigating this rat's nest of exponential obligations that we call modern life." At this point, you're either on the verge of a huge anxiety attack, or already "gone awol" into the deep blue waters of "voluntary non-communication", which, by the way, is the closest thing to a mortal sin that we have in this culture. For some reason, it is thought that to endure these requests, give some half-baked answer and allow yourself to feel bad about how bad the other person is going to feel when you are too overwhelmed to deal with them is somehow better than to simply avoid this type of situation altogether.
The symptoms are unmistakeable, crystal-clear, yet it takes years and a lot of courage to be able to see a gigantic looming iceberg two feet away from your boat and even beging to say "Do you think that might be a teeny tiny little iceberg up there?" If you answered, "Nah, I don't think so either," keep reading.
Anyday, Here, Now. Right now.
It's a sunny afternoon and you've ducked into a coffee bar in another part of town where you are sure not to run into anyone you know...or anything for that matter...to seize a simple cup of joe and a blissful "me moment". No sooner do you sip your soy latte than you are jarred into reality with the jingling, jangling "brrr" of your latest celular device. You freeze in mid-sip. You begin to perspire, the sweat beading on your temples, oozing into your palms..."Uh-oh, it's the ex....it's the aged parent I forgot to call back from 3 days ago...it's the friend I forgot to call back in 1999....it's the really old boyfriend I've been avoiding for 10 years...Oh god, please don't let it be another creditor...and really please don't let it be the same creditor who's already called 45 times today...no...wait...it's the cel phone company telling me my check bounced...it's the bank saying I'm 1000 dollars in the red...it's the Red Hat Society asking me to join...it's the committee I signed up for somewhere to do something I can't remember but was probably today...now....five hours ago....they hate me...I screwed up...the whole event was a shambles...people are mad...lives lost...tragic errors have been committed...ohmygod it's the school but I didn't answer and my kid has been kidnapped by aliens and I'm in a coffee bar, wasting time, avoiding real life, hiding from everyone I know, frozen in fear...absolutely unable to even ANSWER MY PHONE FOR GOD'S SAKE....just answer it, who knows, maybe it's not bad news...but hey, the odds of that are 900 to 1..... "
Just as you almost run out of air, you notice the phone has stopped ringing. Thank god for voicemail. Thank god for the fact that we don't have video cel phones. Thank god for the fact that no one can actually find me...wait, of course they can find me...they can trace my cel phone calls...the debit card I used to pay for this goddamned latte...I am so stupid...why didn't I pay cash...why don't I have any cash...because I don't have any money...obviously, why else would I be paying with a debit card...that's it...it's the coffee bar! They're calling me to say that my debit card didn't work....they're after me...they'll be out here any minute looking for the 40 year old loser who can't afford a 5 dollar cup of coffee! Ohmygod...my mother was right, if I'd only listened to her and joined the CIA...and married a rich yet boring and totally unsexyguy from a good family...and worn more makeup...and the right clothes and FIXED MY HAIR...none of this would've happened!
(A tow truck pulls up to the parking lot)....ohmygodohmygod they're towing my car....oh shit...I haven't paid it in 2 months...3 months...who knows...it's been a long long long long time....but I'm too scared to look....they're driving up to my car...god, how embarrassing...having your pre-owned 1998 vehicle with the ancient dents in the side towed away while you're sipping a latte in a swanky west-side coffee bar....oh my god! I don't know what's worse....looking up to watch them do it...or just standing up and running as fast as I can down the street...but how can I explain it...I'll say it was stolen...by thugs...terrorists...out of towners having a bad day...I'll say I sold it...I'm going green...that's it...that's noble...selfless...so environmentally something....ohmygod I can't do that...how am I going to get to my lunch date across town...how can I tell them I can't have lunch because I can't drive to lunch??? An Angeleno without a car? How embarrassing...how did this happen? How can this un-happen...who can I call? How can I call them if my phone's been cut off?
Thankfully, seconds before self-implosion, I manage to peer out of the corner of my left eye and see that the tow truck is here to jump start a tempermental Jag. Whew..! A huge sigh of relief...five more minutes of reprieve...thank you god...I'll never screw up again...I will answer the phone...I will write that thank-you note for last year's birthday present...which I loved...from a friend who I love...but I haven't managed to thank yet because I'm so uncomfortable with the fact that they felt they had to give me such a nice present because I couldn't afford it myself! How in god's name can I ever bring myself to write that note? Maybe they'll just forget about me, write me off as some rude creature they once knew, maybe I'll just fall off the radar and never have to actually re-admit what a total loser I am....Maybe they'll move out of State, go into the Witness Protection Program...be forbidden to contact any of their old friends...and totally forget I ever existed...yeah...yeah....that's it...that's it..."
Down and down the rabbithole. That's how it starts. Pretty soon there are Bergs bobbing on every horizon, of all shapes and sizes, all brought into being by Other Bergs, calving and cleaving off of each other until the sea of your life is nothing but torturous obligations, bobbing reminders of past failures, current inadequacies, and certain future extinction. You can't even begin to imagine a sea of "happy happy joy joy" tomorrows because everything out there feels like just another trigger to massive overwhelm.
Your life becomes a series of tense seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks and months of sheer survival, hanging on by your frazzled wits and furrowed fingernails. Even you can't imagine how you manage to merely "hang on" in the midst of such mega-stress. And the worst of it is that anything you can think of that might actually get you out of it actually costs so much in terms of money, time and effort that to undertake such activity would have a direct and fatal impact upon your current survival. Not to mention that unspeakable horror...asking for help...which is the nail in the coffin of utter and abject failure. Talk about a Berg and a cold place!
1.18.2009
ICEBERG with an "I"
There's a reason that our chilly friend starts with the letter "I". It's the same "I" as in "Independent", or "pIoneer", or "I Did it My Way", or "Never mind, I'll do it my(I)-self!"
Are any bells ringing for you yet? It shouldn't take long to realize that our entire American culture is founded on the letter "I". Ever since we got our independence from the crown, the American dream has been founded on the premise that "I" can re-create myself...by myself...without any help...without any family...without any legacy to hold me up. Heck, I won't even ask my friends...I'll just jump on my horse and ride out into the sunset, blaze my own trail, be the captain of my ship, seek my own destiny apart from any other culture, group, or clan. Goddamn it, that's why we all came here, wasn't it? To sever ourselves from our old-fashioned, stinking dependence on the way things are...our dependence on others.
We have created a mega-empire of self-help, all the while oblivious to the fact that the word "help" means something that is given by one man to another. Yet we are so bent on believing we can craft our own salvation that we read hundreds of books a year on how to improve ourselves, by ourselves...how to be independent, self-sufficient, self-directed, self-supporting, self-possessing, self-sustaining, even selfish as we twist its meaning to signify taking care of "myself". Self-actualization, self-activation, self-realization. The "me" generation to the nth degree. We're even told that we have to "be" the person we want to have a relationship with, that we should be able to exist in a blissful world of "I'm living my life" and still fool ourselves into the fact that we don't need to bond with anyone other than ourselves. Please, please tell me how we can be both the relator and the relationshipee?
"Others" has become a dirty word. Actually, a very successful television series created an entire group of "others" whose sole function is to intimidate, terrorize and torture another group of chronically, pathologically independent folk like us. God forbid we even suggest that we might need other people. God forbid we admit that they might need us...that would make them dependent...or co-dependent...or some ugly word that means we'd actually have to take care of them, or they'd have to take care of us and the whole thing would devolve into an ugly, uncivilized mess. No thank you. We Yanks would rather die defending the laconic loner or the maverick criminal that band together to pursue our common good.
So what are we so afraid of? What horrors lie within another person that everything in our culture points us away from that. Yet we Americans are a hypocritical lot. We tout "family values", yet indoctrinate our children that the worst thing they can do is get together with someone from the opposite sex and produce someone else. Oh no, we say, wait, wait until you're older, much older, and you've made money, finished seeing the world, sowed your wild oats, done everything you've ever dreamed of doing and pretended to be a teenager for at least two or three decades and then....and THEN...we say gingerly....you just might be allowed to hook up with another functional adult (read "really old adult" because by the time anyone can even start to funtion in this culture they ARE really old) and produce 1.5 children...sanely...in a suburb...with a 401 K...and a steady job...and then you must....must be a superparent, superior wage earner, sensitive, sexy and supportive spouse, not to mention a selfless caregiver for the really aged parents who spawned you.
Should you manage to make it this far into the game, it's unlikely you have a really great community of friends since you've been playing/working/doing it all by yourself for so long, that the human connections just kind of ....were forgotten along the way. Somewhere beside the really good times, when once or twice you had some passion for something outside of your own acheivement, and rode the wave of dreaming long enough to experience a couple of seconds of real ecstasy on this planet.
So what do you do when you find yourself in this position, with a spouse you're actually afraid to reach out to, to rely on, since you ought to be able to do it all on your own, right? You're afraid to ask your parents, because both you and they made a career out of forging your independence. Of course, they forgot to realize that they would be dependent on you someday, and that all their indoctrination would backfire when it came to asking their uber-self-focused offspring to do things for them. Conversely, more often than not these days, said offspring are unable to take care of their elders, as they themselves are standing on shaky economic and emotional ground. All that "do it yourself" mentality failed to give them the lateral connections necessary for urban survival. Face it, how else do you think people rise through the ranks? It's not just their hard work, but the people they touch along the way, and the people who want to share their success with the next generation.
Scenario: a Saturday night in the Venice Canals. Some of the priciest real estate in L.A., where state of the art designer homes sit on placid canals, lapping up luxury, taste and the perks of urban living. So why then when you stroll through this quaint suburb, do you see so many people sitting alone in their perfectly decked out waterside roosts? Alone, facing the glow of their laptop, on some of the most beautiful balmy evenings of the year, nursing a beer, staring into a screen hoping they can meet their three dimensional soulmate via a two dimensional computer. Lame, isn't it? Why don't they all just turn off their computers and step out into the world and actually interract with people? Because that would be admitting that they couldn't get a date on a Saturday night, that they couldn't meet someone "on their own".
So they remain, huddled in their post-modern darkness, trolling the ranks of the real losers, the internet daters, the people who were too afraid to go out in the first place. God knows why they'd rather email a stranger for days than actually meet someone at a party, or at a friend's house, when you can tell in an instant whether or not you're even attracted to this person. Wait, sorry, I forgot. How the hell are they supposed to meet people at a party if they don't have any friends who are giving the party? Friends? Who needs them? You can count the faces on your facebook instead. Look, I've got lots of friends, and I'm even friends with their friends, but remember, I made those friends....by myself...without any help from anyone. You got that? No one. I don't need anyone to help me make friends. I don't need anyone to help me get a date. I'm not needy. In fact, I really don't need anything. I'm fine, just the way I am, on my own.
So you're asking, what does this have to do with Icebergs? What's with the "I" in "Iceberg" anyway? Well, the reason these little frigid creatures creep up on us is that in each of those "freezing" situations, we fail to realize that what got us into them in the first place is this cockamamie suggestion that we have to do it all on our own. Gary Cooper, it's all your fault. If only somewhere along the trail we might've learned that by sharing our worries with others, by letting them know who we were, what we wanted, what we were afraid of, what was in our way, that we might not have created those Icebergs.
Our fear of telling the truth of our need is directly proportional to the amount of Bergs floating on your horizon. Try it. Label all of your Bergs, and then look back to see how they arose by NOT reaching out to someone. The beauty is that it works under all circumstances. If we told a friend that we had a dream, and the obstacles that were in the way, that friend might well have some answers, and at the very least, could act as a mentor, keeping us honest, so to speak, and minimizing a lot of those panicked and awkward situations.
Even reaching out to someone once the Berg has calved is better than waiting for the Berg to crush you. Nipping it in the bud is a better plan, but it's so often impossible to do when just once person is facing it. Your own fears and concerns can and will paralyze you, but they are powerless over someone else. By allowing that other person to "conquer" your Berg, they show you that it can be overcome, and they can gradually help you recover your power too. By sharing and bartering our problems, we do each other a great service. We lighten all of our burdens, and free up a lot more mental and emotional energy for really important tasks, like saving lives, pursuing our passion, and just taking time to look around and appreciate the world for what it is. We learn so much and so well from others. Is it not an act of stinginess, of lack, of hostility, to deny ourselves and others those valuable lessons, and that joy?
Somewhere in our great scriptures it says, "Lay your burden down." I would like to add to that today. "Let your Bergs down", be open and place your needs out where solutions will find them. Pride is a dangerous thing, and when it comes to problems, we so often let pride get in the way of growth and wellbeing. Who knows, by sharing your needs with others, those needs just might be filled.
You think your monologue is different from the one at the top? You might be saying to yourself, "Oh, I'm not that desperate, I'm not that crazy. I pay my bills on time, I'm not worried about my future. That's not me." Oh, sure, the content might be different, but the structure is exactly the same. The panic, the racing thoughts, the growing fear that others will figure out that you are just another loser. It doesn't matter what the scale is, that type of thinking extends through every economic bracket.
Guaranteed there's something you're running from as well, be it affection, joy, pleasure, service to others. Given the amount of conflict on the planet, I can tell you we're not doing something right, and my guess is that we are all a little lacking in the human outreach department.
Try it, next time you sense a Berg on the horizon, call a friend. If you don't have one, make one. A passing stranger will do. Let someone help you see that you've been making a mountain out of a molehill. It's OK. None of us have all the answers. Enough of the Emperor's new clothes. It costs so much energy, and we need it for so many other great things.
Next time you're out at that coffee bar, talk to a stranger. You might be surprised what you can do for them. Even if you can't bring yourself to share your burdens yet, ask to share one of theirs. Don't let someone else live in the deep freeze!
Verily, I say unto you, "Lay your Icebergs down."
Are any bells ringing for you yet? It shouldn't take long to realize that our entire American culture is founded on the letter "I". Ever since we got our independence from the crown, the American dream has been founded on the premise that "I" can re-create myself...by myself...without any help...without any family...without any legacy to hold me up. Heck, I won't even ask my friends...I'll just jump on my horse and ride out into the sunset, blaze my own trail, be the captain of my ship, seek my own destiny apart from any other culture, group, or clan. Goddamn it, that's why we all came here, wasn't it? To sever ourselves from our old-fashioned, stinking dependence on the way things are...our dependence on others.
We have created a mega-empire of self-help, all the while oblivious to the fact that the word "help" means something that is given by one man to another. Yet we are so bent on believing we can craft our own salvation that we read hundreds of books a year on how to improve ourselves, by ourselves...how to be independent, self-sufficient, self-directed, self-supporting, self-possessing, self-sustaining, even selfish as we twist its meaning to signify taking care of "myself". Self-actualization, self-activation, self-realization. The "me" generation to the nth degree. We're even told that we have to "be" the person we want to have a relationship with, that we should be able to exist in a blissful world of "I'm living my life" and still fool ourselves into the fact that we don't need to bond with anyone other than ourselves. Please, please tell me how we can be both the relator and the relationshipee?
"Others" has become a dirty word. Actually, a very successful television series created an entire group of "others" whose sole function is to intimidate, terrorize and torture another group of chronically, pathologically independent folk like us. God forbid we even suggest that we might need other people. God forbid we admit that they might need us...that would make them dependent...or co-dependent...or some ugly word that means we'd actually have to take care of them, or they'd have to take care of us and the whole thing would devolve into an ugly, uncivilized mess. No thank you. We Yanks would rather die defending the laconic loner or the maverick criminal that band together to pursue our common good.
So what are we so afraid of? What horrors lie within another person that everything in our culture points us away from that. Yet we Americans are a hypocritical lot. We tout "family values", yet indoctrinate our children that the worst thing they can do is get together with someone from the opposite sex and produce someone else. Oh no, we say, wait, wait until you're older, much older, and you've made money, finished seeing the world, sowed your wild oats, done everything you've ever dreamed of doing and pretended to be a teenager for at least two or three decades and then....and THEN...we say gingerly....you just might be allowed to hook up with another functional adult (read "really old adult" because by the time anyone can even start to funtion in this culture they ARE really old) and produce 1.5 children...sanely...in a suburb...with a 401 K...and a steady job...and then you must....must be a superparent, superior wage earner, sensitive, sexy and supportive spouse, not to mention a selfless caregiver for the really aged parents who spawned you.
Should you manage to make it this far into the game, it's unlikely you have a really great community of friends since you've been playing/working/doing it all by yourself for so long, that the human connections just kind of ....were forgotten along the way. Somewhere beside the really good times, when once or twice you had some passion for something outside of your own acheivement, and rode the wave of dreaming long enough to experience a couple of seconds of real ecstasy on this planet.
So what do you do when you find yourself in this position, with a spouse you're actually afraid to reach out to, to rely on, since you ought to be able to do it all on your own, right? You're afraid to ask your parents, because both you and they made a career out of forging your independence. Of course, they forgot to realize that they would be dependent on you someday, and that all their indoctrination would backfire when it came to asking their uber-self-focused offspring to do things for them. Conversely, more often than not these days, said offspring are unable to take care of their elders, as they themselves are standing on shaky economic and emotional ground. All that "do it yourself" mentality failed to give them the lateral connections necessary for urban survival. Face it, how else do you think people rise through the ranks? It's not just their hard work, but the people they touch along the way, and the people who want to share their success with the next generation.
Scenario: a Saturday night in the Venice Canals. Some of the priciest real estate in L.A., where state of the art designer homes sit on placid canals, lapping up luxury, taste and the perks of urban living. So why then when you stroll through this quaint suburb, do you see so many people sitting alone in their perfectly decked out waterside roosts? Alone, facing the glow of their laptop, on some of the most beautiful balmy evenings of the year, nursing a beer, staring into a screen hoping they can meet their three dimensional soulmate via a two dimensional computer. Lame, isn't it? Why don't they all just turn off their computers and step out into the world and actually interract with people? Because that would be admitting that they couldn't get a date on a Saturday night, that they couldn't meet someone "on their own".
So they remain, huddled in their post-modern darkness, trolling the ranks of the real losers, the internet daters, the people who were too afraid to go out in the first place. God knows why they'd rather email a stranger for days than actually meet someone at a party, or at a friend's house, when you can tell in an instant whether or not you're even attracted to this person. Wait, sorry, I forgot. How the hell are they supposed to meet people at a party if they don't have any friends who are giving the party? Friends? Who needs them? You can count the faces on your facebook instead. Look, I've got lots of friends, and I'm even friends with their friends, but remember, I made those friends....by myself...without any help from anyone. You got that? No one. I don't need anyone to help me make friends. I don't need anyone to help me get a date. I'm not needy. In fact, I really don't need anything. I'm fine, just the way I am, on my own.
So you're asking, what does this have to do with Icebergs? What's with the "I" in "Iceberg" anyway? Well, the reason these little frigid creatures creep up on us is that in each of those "freezing" situations, we fail to realize that what got us into them in the first place is this cockamamie suggestion that we have to do it all on our own. Gary Cooper, it's all your fault. If only somewhere along the trail we might've learned that by sharing our worries with others, by letting them know who we were, what we wanted, what we were afraid of, what was in our way, that we might not have created those Icebergs.
Our fear of telling the truth of our need is directly proportional to the amount of Bergs floating on your horizon. Try it. Label all of your Bergs, and then look back to see how they arose by NOT reaching out to someone. The beauty is that it works under all circumstances. If we told a friend that we had a dream, and the obstacles that were in the way, that friend might well have some answers, and at the very least, could act as a mentor, keeping us honest, so to speak, and minimizing a lot of those panicked and awkward situations.
Even reaching out to someone once the Berg has calved is better than waiting for the Berg to crush you. Nipping it in the bud is a better plan, but it's so often impossible to do when just once person is facing it. Your own fears and concerns can and will paralyze you, but they are powerless over someone else. By allowing that other person to "conquer" your Berg, they show you that it can be overcome, and they can gradually help you recover your power too. By sharing and bartering our problems, we do each other a great service. We lighten all of our burdens, and free up a lot more mental and emotional energy for really important tasks, like saving lives, pursuing our passion, and just taking time to look around and appreciate the world for what it is. We learn so much and so well from others. Is it not an act of stinginess, of lack, of hostility, to deny ourselves and others those valuable lessons, and that joy?
Somewhere in our great scriptures it says, "Lay your burden down." I would like to add to that today. "Let your Bergs down", be open and place your needs out where solutions will find them. Pride is a dangerous thing, and when it comes to problems, we so often let pride get in the way of growth and wellbeing. Who knows, by sharing your needs with others, those needs just might be filled.
You think your monologue is different from the one at the top? You might be saying to yourself, "Oh, I'm not that desperate, I'm not that crazy. I pay my bills on time, I'm not worried about my future. That's not me." Oh, sure, the content might be different, but the structure is exactly the same. The panic, the racing thoughts, the growing fear that others will figure out that you are just another loser. It doesn't matter what the scale is, that type of thinking extends through every economic bracket.
Guaranteed there's something you're running from as well, be it affection, joy, pleasure, service to others. Given the amount of conflict on the planet, I can tell you we're not doing something right, and my guess is that we are all a little lacking in the human outreach department.
Try it, next time you sense a Berg on the horizon, call a friend. If you don't have one, make one. A passing stranger will do. Let someone help you see that you've been making a mountain out of a molehill. It's OK. None of us have all the answers. Enough of the Emperor's new clothes. It costs so much energy, and we need it for so many other great things.
Next time you're out at that coffee bar, talk to a stranger. You might be surprised what you can do for them. Even if you can't bring yourself to share your burdens yet, ask to share one of theirs. Don't let someone else live in the deep freeze!
Verily, I say unto you, "Lay your Icebergs down."
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