Thrive, page 23
Her life was filled with giving moments. Wherever she was—in an elevator, a taxi, an airplane, a parking lot, a supermarket, a bank—she would reach out to others. Once, a stranger admired the necklace she was wearing; my mother took it off and gave it to her. When the astonished woman asked, “What can I give you in return?” my mother said, “It’s not a trade, darling, it’s an offering.” Toward the end of her life, she would always arrive at the doctor’s office with a basket of fruit or a box of chocolates for the nurses. She knew that in an office where patients brought their anxiety and pain, the gesture would help change the atmosphere. Her tenacity in breaking through the barriers that people put up around their hearts was both enchanting and comical. If one of the nurses was, as she put it, “on automatic” and didn’t take the time to be friendly or personal, my mother would whisper to me, “This one doesn’t want to budge,” and would start looking for a way to give her extra attention. She might produce a little treat from her purse—a package of nuts, a special kind of chocolate—and give it to the woman, knowing she would get a smile. Giving was a way of being for her.
When she died, my mother left no will and no prized possessions, which is not surprising, considering her habit of giving things away. I remember the time we tried to give her a second watch; within forty-eight hours she had given it to someone else. What she left us with is the treasure house of her spirit. It’s as though certain gifts can be bequeathed only at one’s death—that while she was alive she so embodied the qualities of nurturing, giving, and unconditional loving that it felt as if those dimensions of life were taken care of for all those blessed to be in her orbit. Why learn how to cook when you live with the Iron Chef? After her death it became much clearer to my sister and me that if our life’s journey is to evolve as human beings, there’s no faster way to do it than through giving and service.
We mostly focus on the good giving does for others—the good it does for our community. But just as profound is what it does for us. Because it is really true that while we grow physically by what we get, we grow spiritually by what we give.
Ever since I became a mother, I’ve been moved by the need to make volunteering and service part of children’s lives from very early on. And I’ve seen the impact it had on my own children’s lives. When one of my daughters was dealing with an eating disorder and started volunteering at A Place Called Home, I saw how it began to change the way she saw herself—her own perception of her problems and difficulties. There’s nothing like putting your own problems in perspective. When you become involved in the lives of children for whom drive-by shootings are a regular occurrence, where one out of three fathers is in jail, and where there isn’t enough to eat, it’s much harder to worry about how you look, whether you’re wearing the right clothes, whether you’re pretty enough, and how thin you are. My daughter learned these lessons not by being lectured at (though I tried), but by absorbing them firsthand.
The Fire Gets in the Poker, Too
People are already doing an enormous amount of good every day. So how do we put the spotlight on it? How do we help scale and replicate it until we achieve a critical mass? My dream in the 1990s was to create a new TV channel, a kind of C-SPAN3—back when there was only C-SPAN covering Congress and C-SPAN2 covering the Senate. So I put together a proposal to create C-SPAN3 to cover what nonprofits, NGOs, and volunteers were doing 24/7 so that service could become part of our everyday reality—as much a part of the business of the country as the doings of the House and the Senate and thus deserving of the same coverage. Well, my version of C-SPAN3 didn’t happen, but the Internet did. And at The Huffington Post we now have multiple sections—Impact, Good News, and What Is Working, among them—covering the moving stories of people reaching beyond themselves to help others, sometimes right next to them, sometimes at the other end of the world. Just as important, we have the go-givers themselves tell their stories in text, in pictures, and in video. The magic happens when people respond to the stories by getting involved—by being inspired to move from observers to givers.
The Reverend Henry Delaney spent a lifetime transforming crack houses in Savannah, Georgia. He said something to me that captures what happens with service. “I want to get people involved,” he said. “It’s like putting a poker in a fire; after a while the fire gets in the poker, too.” And that’s how we’re going to get to a critical mass.
To a physicist, a critical mass is the amount of radioactive material that must be present for a nuclear reaction to become self-sustaining. For the service movement, a critical mass is when the service habit hits enough people so that it can begin to spread spontaneously around the country and the world. Think of it as an outbreak of a positive infection, with everyone as a potential carrier.
“There are doors in space you look for,” a friend told me once, “and doors in time you wait for.” We are facing such a door in time right now—an opening for great possibilities. The modern equivalent of the pre-Copernican vision of the world as flat has been our secular view of man as an exclusively material being. This error has dominated how we live our lives and what we consider success. But today this is all changing. We have increasingly come to realize—partly due to the growing price we have been paying and partly due to new scientific findings—that there are other dimensions to living a truly successful life. And these dimensions, the four pillars of the Third Metric, impact everything we do and everything we are, from our health to our happiness. As a result, something as vast and epic as the destiny of humanity depends on something as intimate and personal as the shape of our individual lives—the way each one of us chooses to live, think, act, and give.
Transforming our narcissistic habits and awakening our giving nature—which is what both the world and we ourselves need—is the work of a lifetime. But once again, it starts with small daily steps. And once again our daily life is the ultimate training. If you told yourself that the goal is to write the great American novel, you might never begin. But you would be far more likely to begin if you told yourself to write one hundred words a day. It’s the same with transforming ourselves:
1. Make small gestures of kindness and giving a habit, and pay attention to how this affects your mind, your emotions, and your body.
2. During your day make a personal connection with people you might normally tend to pass by and take for granted: the checkout clerk, the cleaning crew at your office or your hotel, the barista in the coffee shop. See how this helps you feel more alive and reconnected to the moment.
3. Use a skill or talent you have—cooking, accounting, decorating—to help someone who could benefit from it. It’ll jumpstart your transition from a go-getter to a go-giver, and reconnect you to the world and to the natural abundance in your own life.
Epilogue
WE HAVE, if we’re lucky, about thirty thousand days to play the game of life. How we play it will be determined by what we value. Or, as David Foster Wallace put it, “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritualtype thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”
We now know through the latest scientific findings that if we worship money, we’ll never feel truly abundant. If we worship power, recognition, and fame, we’ll never feel we have enough. And if we live our lives madly rushing around, trying to find and save time, we’ll always find ourselves living in a time famine, frazzled and stressed.
“Onward, upward, and inward” is how I ended my commencement speech at Smith. And in many ways, this book is bearing witness, both through my own experience and through the latest science, to the truth that we cannot thrive and lead the lives we want (as opposed to the lives we’ve settled for) without learning to go inward.
My goal is for this book to chart another way forward—a way available to all of us right now, wherever we find ourselves. A way based on the timeless truth that life is shaped from the inside out—a truth that has been celebrated by spiritual teachers, poets, and philosophers throughout the ages, and has now been validated by modern science.
I wanted to share my own personal journey, how I learned the hard way to step back from being so caught up in my busy life that life’s mystery would pass me by. But it was also important to me to make it clear that this was not just one woman’s journey. There’s a collective longing to stop living in the shallows, to stop hurting our health and our relationships by striving so relentlessly after success as the world defines it—and instead tap into the riches, joy, and amazing possibilities that our lives embody. It doesn’t matter what your entry point is or what form your wake-up call takes. It could be burnout, sickness, addiction, the loss of a loved one, the ending of a relationship, a line of poetry that stirs something ineffable in you (I’ve sprinkled plenty of those throughout the book), or a scientific study about the power and benefits of slowing down, or sleep, or meditating, or mindfulness that speaks to you (I’ve scattered more than plenty of those throughout the book too). Whatever your entry point is—embrace it. You will find you have the wind at your back because that’s what our times are calling for. And I hope I’ve shown that there are many tools in our inner tool box to help us get back on track when we veer off. And we undoubtedly will. Again and again.
But remember that while the world provides plenty of insistent, flashing, high-volume signals directing us to make more money and climb higher up the ladder, there are almost no worldly signals reminding us to stay connected to the essence of who we are, to take care of ourselves along the way, to reach out to others, to pause to wonder, and to connect to that place from which everything is possible. To quote my Greek compatriot Archimedes again: “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.”
So find your place to stand—your place of wisdom and peace and strength. And from that place, remake the world in your own image, according to your own definition of success, so that all of us—women and men—can thrive and live our lives with more grace, more joy, more compassion, more gratitude, and yes, more love. Onward, upward, and inward!
Appendices
Appendix A
The “No Distraction” Dozen: 12 Tools, Apps, and Resources to Help You Stay Focused
Steve Jobs said, “focusing is about saying no.” Here are some of my favorite tools that can help you maintain focus, filter out distractions … and say no, assembled by our HuffPost Third Metric features editor, Carolyn Gregoire:
Anti-Social
Social-media anxiety disorder may not yet be recognized by the medical community, but as many of us know, it can feel very real. And it truly does have addictive qualities: In 2012, Harvard researchers found that sharing information about ourselves activates the same part of the brain associated with the pleasure we experience from eating food, receiving money, and having sex.
If you have a hard time peeling yourself away from Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest during the workday (or during your leisure time, for that matter), try Anti-Social, a social network–blocking software that allows you to avoid distracting sites. You can choose the times you don’t want to be distracted and the sites you want to restrict.
Available for $15 from Anti-Social.cc.
Nanny
Like Anti-Social, the Chrome extension Nanny blocks distracting sites from your browser so that you can keep your mind on the task at hand. In addition to blocking specific URLs for set periods of time (such as restricting YouTube from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.), you can also set a limit for your browsing time on certain sites so that, for example, you only give yourself 30 or 60 minutes total to spend on Facebook per day.
Available for free download from the Chrome Web Store.
Controlled Multi-Tab Browsing
Having thirty tabs open in a single window of Google’s web browser Chrome can be incredibly distracting—not to mention stress-inducing—and it could keep you jumping from one page to another without really focusing on any one task. Limit your tabs and keep your focus using Controlled Multi-Tab Browsing, a Chrome plug-in. Set a maximum number of tabs (say, four or six), and the plug-in will prevent you from opening any more than that set number until you’re done. If you’re a cyber-loafer or an incorrigible multitasker, this tool can help you improve your productivity and focus on what you need to complete.
Available for free download from the Chrome Web Store.
Siesta Text and BRB
The downside of unplugging and recharging is that you run the risk of being seen as ignoring friends and family. In our culture of constant connectivity, a three-hours-later response can be taken as a slight.
“The social norm is that you should respond within a couple of hours, if not immediately,” David E. Meyer, University of Michigan psychology professor, told The New York Times in 2009. “If you don’t, it is assumed you are out to lunch mentally, out of it socially, or don’t like the person who sent the email.”
Now, there’s an app for that. If you want to unplug from your email and texts without worrying that your friends and family will think you’re ignoring them, set an away message on your mobile device using Siesta Text for Android, or BRB for iPhone. Siesta features customizable away messages for both texts and calls (“I’m driving—text you back later,” or “On vacation, will respond when I return next Monday.”) Store up to twenty messages and select specific recipients from your contacts to receive the away message.
Siesta Text is available for Android for $0.99 from Google Play, and BRB for iPhone is available for free download from the App Store.
Self Control
The application Self Control can keep your computer offline for preset blocks of time and can also temporarily stop incoming email. And even rebooting your computer won’t bring the online distractions back. Or, if there are certain sites that are particularly tempting, you can single them out for blacklisting.
Available for free for Mac from selfcontrolapp.com.
RescueTime
RescueTime presents you with a readout tracking your online activity at the end of each day. With greater awareness of how your time is being spent, you can set goals (to spend only an hour checking email, for instance) and create alarms to go off when you’ve spent too much time on a particular site or activity—the online equivalent of staging an intervention.
Available for free, or $9 a month for the pro version, for Mac at rescuetime.com. Also available for free on Android from Google Play.
Freedom
You don’t have to head off to a remote corner of the world to escape WiFi. If you’re a writer, Freedom might just be your new best friend. Freedom completely blocks the Internet from your computer for a set period of time so that checking social sites or getting sucked into Reddit or HuffPost simply isn’t an option. If the Internet is a big time drain for you, Freedom is a great way to eliminate the temptation.
Available for $10 for Mac, Windows, and Android from macfreedom.com.
Time Out
Taking breaks is a scientifically backed way to help you focus and be more present, but so often we spend hours upon hours in front of a computer screen, pausing only to peruse Facebook or Twitter. If you have trouble remembering to take real breaks, try the Mac app Time Out, a tool that encourages you to stop what you’re doing and get up at regular intervals. Time Out reminds you to take a 10-minute break every 50 minutes, and a 10-second “micro-break”—a brief pause to take a deep breath, look away from your screen, and recenter yourself—every 10 minutes. Make your break even more effective by queuing up your most relaxing songs on iTunes to alert you to your upcoming break.
Available for free for Mac from the App Store.
Concentrate
Concentrate packs several different productivity tools into one. The Mac software allows you to designate various activities (studying, writing, et cetera) and then set your computer so that it will only allow certain actions during those times. For example, while in “writing” mode, you can set the software to block social networking sites while allowing you to access relevant documents and websites, set a timer for how long you’ll be writing, and add a sound alert to remind you to come back to the task at hand if your mind has wandered.
Available for $29 for Mac from getconcentrating.com.
Digital Detox App
This app could revolutionize your vacations—or even your weekends. Using Digital Detox, you can force your phone to shut down for a set period of time ranging from 30 minutes to one month (and no, the decision is not reversible).
But the app comes with a disclaimer: Only those who are truly serious about unplugging need apply.
Available for free for Android from Google Play.
Isolator
If you have trouble tuning out desktop clutter and distractions, try Isolator, a menu-bar app for Macs that hides desktop clutter and helps you tune out everything but the Word doc in front of you. This app is another great tool for anyone who needs to eliminate digital distractions while focusing on a project. It covers your desktop with a dark overlay so that your full attention is on the present task, with an easy shortcut key to allow you to turn the focus feature on and off.
Available for free for Mac at macupdate.com.
Higby
