May 2019 – Life’s Training Opportunities
The article in this month’s newsletter extends some thoughts from last year, (link) about the necessity of approaching depression as a training process. Here I am expanding the idea to the underlying idea, namely, that life itself can be looked at as a training, a kind of coach whose injunctions and regimen is embedded in the nature of the challenge itself. Rather than life simply giving inflictions that we have to fight, or submit to, the idea here is that actually life is giving us training opportunities. Whether we see them, or are willing to go through the hard work to get the good results, is something that is essentially up to us. But having a lens such as “life’s training opportunities” can help open us up to the possibility.
Life’s Training Opportunities: More thoughts on life as coach.
In last August’s newsletter (link), I talked about healing from depression as a training in specific skills, but more so, being a condition that is healed in some large degree by holding that attitude of training itself. So, in this newsletter, I want to extend that idea to a more general sense of life, with its demands, disappointments, and dismalness, and how being able to identify the “mandated training” is deeply useful to not becoming stuck or bitter. In Alcoholics Anonymous, they say one needs to “take life on life’s terms,” which is an injunction to surrender one’s desire to dominate life, but if you carry that insight forward, you get that part of those “terms” of life are trainings that it offers, woven into the difficulties. Life is not simply about humbleness and humility; there’s learning to be had if we know how to look for it.
What is “training” though? Training is different than, say, insight, because training is not a single change but rather a sustained process of change in self, resulting from a structured efforting towards a defined goal. It requires discipline, clarity, tolerance of frustration (you will be bad at it initially), and commitment. We train for a marathon, but we don’t train for a picnic.
So, the thought here is that different difficulties will offer different kinds of trainings, that specific challenging situations are, by virtue of how exactly they are challenging (and specifically, challenging to us), pressing for certain changes and learning in us. It’s a bit like the structure of school: math class may have some social challenges, but it’s structured primarily to push us to learn math. P.E. is about challenging our physical edges, not about philosophical clarification.
Think about a couple different challenging situations in your life. Consider what the structure and nature of the challenge is, and then what direction, or in what part of you, the pressure is being exerted. (If there’s no pressure, then it’s not actually a challenge.) Consider what that implies about the solution to the challenge, and then what that solution implicitly—not from domination or oppression—requires from you, what skills, what changes in belief, or what changes in the very structure of your self.
For instance, if I’m struggling at work with time management, in order to understand the training that the situation is offering, I need to understand the problem in relation to my goal, and therefore what the solution to that problem will require from me. If it’s a simple answer—get my assistant to prompt me 5 minutes before each meeting, or some such—then it’s a technical clarification that’s required, but not a training regimen. But if I analyze my problem with time management and realize that it’s not that I don’t understand structuring work efficiently, but rather that I resist feeling controlled by “someone else’s” structure, then the change requires deeper work. In analyzing what that particular challenge is interested, as it were, in training me in, I realize that it’s in the qualities of both acceptance of authority, greater ability to submit my will as needed, and consciously affirming the value of the work I’ve taken on. The training, then, requires a disciplined, repeated work towards better noticing of my own resistance, choosing to restrain the pattern of avoidance, and a disciplined intention to submit to the work at hand, especially when part of me is wanting to rebel.
A second example of how life is implicitly trying to train us could be: I keep going on internet dates, but they always fizzle out after two meetings. Initially I chalk it up to San Francisco being a flighty city, or just internet dating, or in my more depressed moments, just because I’m not worthy of a partner. Those put the “locus of control” outside ourselves (the depressed explanation posits a lack of control, a just-who-I-am reasoning), which means there’s no change, and therefore no training, available.
But as I dig into what actually happens on these dates, I discover that on the second date, I start “over sharing” from an anxiety that the person is not going to like me anyway, so I’d better just let loose with all my stuff and get it over with. Sure enough, I overwhelm my delicate new connection. So, if the goal is to have longer relationships, perhaps a partnership, then the situation requires me to train in the skills of self-awareness (knowing when I’m beginning to over share), to be able to modulate my own anxiety internally, and to be able to stay in contact with the other person rather than get self-conscious (and therefore self- rather than other-involved). That’s no small training, amounting to a kind of rewriting of something core to me, being my self-esteem. Yet, if I take it on in a disciplined way, in a training mindset, then over time, with a fair amount of tolerated bruising, I will attain more mastery of those qualities and skills, and therefore have a shot at realizing my goals.
Rather than some push-button cure, or some exertion of power and dominance over the frustrating reality, training is about work. What we get out of training is earned, is the product of sacrifice, tolerance, discipline, and listening to our teacher (i.e., life itself). But the results, because they are embedded in a process of changing our selves, our core qualities and skills, are tremendously more stable and internalized, and are therefore the base of how we move through the world. Once we have earned something through training, we get to keep it.
