In early January of this year, my parents’ 16-year-old cat, Quinn, passed away. Her final week had been gut-wrenching.
The day after she passed, I called my dad and cried on the phone to him. (I felt guilty about this—I should have been the one comforting him and my mom, not the other way around—but I couldn’t help it.) I can’t stop thinking about Quinn’s final week, I told him, and I can’t stop crying. My dad listened patiently as always. When he finally spoke, he said something that instantly calmed me, and has calmed me since. “Em,” he said, “you can’t do this to yourself. We had sixteen great years with Quinn. So we can think about the 1 week of sadness or the 16 years of happiness, you know? We can choose.”
The 1 week of sadness or the 16 years of happiness. We can choose…
Principles or People
If we bend the rules for one person, we’ll have to bend the rules for everyone. That was the position of Gavin de Becker’s client, a mid-sized city that was in a dispute with a former employee. The city had offered the ex-employee, who was retiring due to a mental disability, $11,000. The ex-employee refused to accept the offer because it didn’t include an extra $400 he felt entitled to. The city refused to pay the $400 because it was not approved beforehand and would therefore violate the rule. An ongoing dispute began, and the city hired Gavin de Becker to mediate. He advised them to pay the $400 (they’d already spent more than that fighting it) because it was an inconsequential sum and obviously a matter of pride. One day, the ex-employee showed up without notice and demanded to speak to the administrator who’d made the decision not to pay him. The two argued; neither side would budge. The ex-employee then laid two .38 caliber bullets on the admin’s desk and walked out. De Becker also learned that the ex-employee had recently shown his therapist a gun while talking about the situation. “Right is right, and right always wins,” he said. Still, the city refused to pay. It was a matter of principle—if they bent the rules for this employee, they’d have to bend them for everyone, they said. But, de Becker pointed out, that’s just not true. They wouldn’t need to make concessions for everyone—they’d just need to make them for the mentally unstable man who’d placed two bullets on the administrator’s desk and showed a gun to his therapist. “I don’t expect the city will be paying out on that policy too often,” de Becker said. By ignoring these red flags, the city was choosing principles over people. They were choosing pride over safety. Wisely, the city finally took de Becker’s advice and chose to pay the $400. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.”
Special or Happy
A highly-respected financier, who’d made her fortune on Wall Street, was beginning to feel as though her work skills were declining. She was in her mid-fifties and younger colleagues were becoming leery of her decisions. She wasn’t as sharp as she once was. Panicked, she reached out to social scientist and author Arthur Brooks. He asked her about her life and learned she was unhappy, had been for years. She “lived to work” and was constantly exhausted from the long hours she put in. Her marriage was in decline. Her relationships with her adult children were strained. And now she was terrified that her career skills were deteriorating. To Brooks, the solution to her unhappiness seemed obvious. He asked her why she hadn’t taken the time to revive her marriage, or repair her relationships with her kids, or cut back on work hours. “I knew that her grueling work effort had made her successful in the first place,” he said, “but when you figure out something has secondary consequences that are making you miserable, you find a way to fix it, right? You might love bread, but if you become gluten intolerant, you stop eating it because it makes you sick.” She thought about his question for a few moments, then looked at him and said flatly, “Maybe I would prefer to be special rather than happy.” Brooks was stunned. For a long while after, he mulled over what she had said. It reminded him of something, but he couldn’t put his finger on what. Then it hit him. Her reasoning—that she preferred being special over being happy—was not unlike the response given by a recovering drug addict when asked why he had continued to get high even though he was fully aware it was making him miserable. “I cared more about being high than being happy,” he had told Brooks. The financier, Brooks realized, was an addict, too. A work addict. Maybe I would prefer being special rather than happy. She was miserable because she was choosing her ego over herself.
Choiceless or Free
Dr. Edith Eva Eger, whom I’ve written about, is a Holocaust survivor turned world-renowned psychologist. We already have the key to happiness in our pocket, she says. The key is knowing that, in every situation, we have a choice. Sent to Auschwitz at the age of sixteen, she writes candidly about the horrors of her imprisonment. “But even then,” she says, “in my prison, in hell, I could choose what I held in my mind. I could choose whether to walk into the electrified barbed wire, to refuse to leave my bed, or I could choose to struggle and live.” This is the same message in psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s classic book Man’s Search for Meaning. Rabbi and author Harold S. Kushner summarizes what he believes is Frankl’s most enduring message:
Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you…Frankl would have argued that we are never left with nothing as long as we retain the freedom to choose how we will respond.
If the Stoics had to boil down their philosophy to just one idea, it would probably be the same as Eger’s and Frankl’s: we don’t control what happens, we only control how we respond to what happens. Our ability to choose our responses, the Stoics said, is what allows us to emulate the divine. No one has the power to take this ability from us. (“No thefts of free will reported!” Epictetus once joked.) And we can access it at any time, if we choose to.
P.S.
My parents have since adopted Piper, who’s now best friends with their dog, Minna.
Books Read This Month
It’s been more than 10 years since I’ve read a Malcolm Gladwell book, and I forgot how much I enjoy his storytelling. One of the things I took from Talking To Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know is how bad we are at reading people and how the flimsiest evidence often skews our judgments. For instance, people who didn’t know Hitler personally knew him better than people who had spoken with him for hours. I also read his excellent book The Bomber Mafia which highlights the complexity of morality, especially in war. I read and loved Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness, and Winston Churchill’s Painting As a Pastime. Finally, I read Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road, a nonfiction medical mystery about the Galvins, an all-American family with 12 children—2 girls and 10 boys. And 6 of the 10 boys were diagnosed with schizophrenia. Though sad, it’s also a beautiful story of love and family.Your Attractive Heading