Is that smile on your face real?

Read the most wonderful book page interview. Here’s the headline:

"Wipe that smile off your face!"

The title of the book is: Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, by Barbara Ehrenreich. I can’t help but wonder if it’s a play on the phrase blind-sided. Must be. Silly to think anything else.

This is so cool. It mirrors my idea of how “the relentless promotion of positive thinking” has undermined spirituality. Undermined is a great word. In this context, it means to subvert or weaken.

Why subverted or weakened? Because it’s not honest.

Ehrenreich traces this trend to the 1980’s business world when it was used as a way of “calming people down during layoffs.” Then it became the ideology. “You could not raise criticisms or doubts because there were policies to fire negative people, those who brought other people down with their skeptical thoughts.” She speaks of Lehman Brothers and of “feel good” mega-churches too.

Why subverted or weakened? Because when it becomes an ideology, it becomes one of those ways you’re “supposed to” feel, and if you feel otherwise, you might not dare say it. It’s subversive and weakening because it’s deceptive. It hides things that need to come to light.

Asked, “What’s the worst thing about all this forced optimism?” she responds, “It silences people and quells dissent.” Gosh, I love this woman. She talks as well of being told to have a good attitude through disease. She says, “I should write a book called, “I Snarled My Way Through Breast Cancer.” Another great word. “Snarled.”

I don’t mean to get so gleeful when I see this kind of thing, I really don’t. I have a friend who has the most graceful attitude toward a life-threatening illness that I’ve ever seen. It’s not fake. If you can come by that honestly, more power to you. If you feel like snarling your way through though, I’m still with you. I figure it’s your right. I figure it’s our right to not be silenced.

I saw the tail-end of a Deepak Chopra interview on Oprah one time, years ago, and all I remember from it was him saying that positive thinking was about the worst thing you could do to yourself. I only have two of his multitude of books but I wouldn’t have expected him to say that from the content I recall. I read an editorial once by a European who said he felt oppressed by the drive to happiness. I thought, “He’s a European – he can say that.” In America, we must cling to our inalienable right to happiness.

It is insidious, although I’ve never thought of it in regard to the business world before. Businesses being positive thinking icons? Really? Yet my daughter wonders if she might have lost a job once because of responding honestly to a company questionnaire asking for employee opinions of their way of doing business.

I still receive emails almost daily that are full of positive thinking. “This and this and this bad thing is happening…but hey…I’m fine…it’s all a blessing in disguise.” I fall that way myself on occasion (rare, but occasionally). You get to know, as you mature, that the “bad things” often turn out all right or bring about a change that needs to happen. It’s the way many of us are feeling about the world situation: Okay, it’s lousy, but things have to change, and if this is the way the change is going to come, then it’s not all bad.

“It’s not all bad,” and seeing the bigger picture, is different than putting a happy face on during the worst of times. That’s more like denial.

In America, we must cling to our inalienable right to happiness. In too many spiritual circles, we must cling to our highest thoughts, our positive intentions, our attitudes of being blessed. We must not subscribe, for even five minutes, to feeling sorry for ourselves, or feeling wronged, or considering ourselves to be swamped by challenges.

I told a therapist once that I was feeling sorry for myself and she said, “That’s okay.” Man. I could have kissed her. “Far better,” she said, “to feel sorry for yourself than to feel responsible.” Isn’t that interesting?

The thing is, if we don’t complain or say what we feel, we never get to hear someone say it’s okay. We never get to hear that feeling sorry for ourselves is a step up from self-blame, criticism, guilt. If we never admit how we feel, we can keep beating ourselves up in private and spending a great deal of our time concealing the black eyes and bruises we give ourselves. Just get out the whip and apply a few more lashes. That’ll keep us in line. Stiffen the upper lip.

Okay. I’m a champion at complaint; not so good at claiming blessings. I admit it. My faith, my trust, says there’s a reason for everything. I accept that, even when the reason doesn’t have much to do with me having a gay old time. I usually feel like the hard times show me something I haven’t been seeing. Sometimes they call me to new actions; sometimes to greater surrender. Right now, I feel like I'm "in it" with everyone else. But I believe that a person can rail about these things. You can even argue with God. You can question. You can engage in dissent.

This can become a complicated spiritual issue if you think about it too hard. But if you don’t think about it, it’s pretty simple. You feel what you feel.

It’s a hell of an issue in business too, and in politics, in economics, in environmental issues. Who can afford to complain? Who can afford not to?

Quotes from Zinta Lundborg interview of Barbara Ehrenreich, courtesy of Bloomberg, in St. Paul Pioneer Press, 6E, 11/15/09.

Doing the Days

Practicing Acceptance?

Had to follow up on my last post and give a new weather report. The snow came today. October 10. Doesn’t beat the earliest snow I remember (September 30, year somewhere near 1962), but it beats most first-of-the-year snow falls by about a week. Besides that, it stayed all day, even though it was only a dusting. Donny went out and picked the rest of the apples off our trees and when he came in said he’d remember that – how cold it was as the snow fell on him each time he pulled one.

I knew I had to write about the snow but then I realized I had something else I needed to add, a sort of additional addendum to my last musings on complaints.

I’ve got a few e-mail buddies and one of them is a woman who wrote me after seeing an article I’d written that had one sentence in it on solitude. She wrote saying she wanted to hear more and we’ve been friends ever since. It’s been nearly a year now.

Recently Chris wrote that she was starting the Forty Days of The Dialogues and wondered if I’d “do the days” along with her. I said I would. I’m pretty sure it was the 9th day when there was this one paragraph about acceptance that really spoke to me in a new way. I knew all about it (ha ha!) for having written the thing, and more by way of it being among my favorite ideas – one that says acceptance isn’t about accepting the way “things” are, but about accepting how you are – how you feel in the present moment.

It was after that when I got this startling idea that complaints might just be about accepting the way you feel. Try that one on for size, I told myself. Oh, I know that when you feel wonderful you’re not going to call it a complaint. I, at least, don’t have too much trouble accepting my wonderful feelings. I’ve got that down pretty good.

But I don’t always feel wonderful. I’ve got things that bug me. And they’re not all like the early fall of snow that you might complain about while secretly enjoying. Some of my complaints are about how I feel when I’m not secretly enjoying something and just grousing for the sake of grousing. These complaints usually get admitted amongst friends. “Man, when that happened, I really felt…lousy” or troubled or worried or frustrated.

If you’ve ever done what you call complaining and then felt like you shouldn’t have complained, try my idea out for yourself. What if you’re practicing acceptance?