Letters to Leland

Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, “The Brothers Karamazov”

January 25, 2024

Dear Leland and Everett,

Today I want to encourage you to take ownership of your lives. We prefer to allow others to dictate the terms of our lives; we find it much easier to accept our lives’ shortcomings when we convince ourselves we are powerless to change. We are a lazy species, and surrendering ownership of our lives is the easier path. But life becomes more vibrant and fulfilling when I take full responsibility. And while ownership might be the harder path to start, it becomes the easier path over time (as the rewards of ownership compound relative to the frustrations of imagined powerlessness). 

How does one take ownership? The answer is layered, as we have different levels of the psyche where we thoughtlessly surrender, but maintain the option to take back control when we are willing. 

The first layers of resistance to ownership come from our ego. These typically come in response from accusations leveled by others. One way my ego resists ownership is via pride, wherein I take the attitude “I would never do that!” when blamed for an alleged infraction. I pride myself on being reliable, on having a good memory, on being a good person…and so I naturally resist implications to the contrary. Leland, I notice this form of resistance from you. You, like me, often resist criticism from others on logical grounds; while you (like me) are often factually correct, I encourage you to explore the possibility that you or your accuser experiences emotional resistance, and as a result you are missing opportunities to learn and/or connect with loved ones if only you could hear what they are really trying to convey (which is typically only partially captured in the initial accusation). 

The second way my ego resists is from various places of fear. My codependent side wants desperately to ensure others avoid negative emotions, and almost cannot hold the possibility that I might do something to cause others pain. The part of me that fears getting ‘kicked out of the tribe’ resists taking blame out of fear that the alleged infraction might result in the permanent severing of relationships. And the part of me that fears being ultimately unloveable fears that this accusation might, if true, prove that I am indeed irredeemable. When in a place of fear, I deploy a number of tools, ranging from deflection (“oh it’s fine” or “it’s no big deal”) to making excuses (“it’s not my fault!”) to blaming others (“it’s YOUR fault!”). Everett, I’ve noticed you typically deploy these tactics when you face criticism; I encourage you to take time to explore your fears so that you might find healthier responses when you feel blamed or attacked. 

What I am slowly learning to do is try to separate the infraction I allegedly committed from the emotion underlying the accusation and the meaning I attach to the idea of having committed the infraction. If someone blames me for a wrongdoing, I try to differentiate facts (“you arrived late”) from story (“you are always late because you only care about yourself!”). Facts can be agreed upon, typically shouldn’t elicit a significant emotional response, and when handled appropriately can often lead to reconciliation fairly quickly (“yes, I was late, my meeting at work ran longer than expected. Next time I will either try to avoid scheduling meetings at that time, or let you know when I expect to be home late due to work. Is that fair?”). Story is harder, because it reflects the meaning you or your interlocutor attach to the alleged facts. If your spouse believes you are always late because you don’t care, or if you struggle to accept the possibility you might be late because it might make you unlovable, one (or both) of you are bringing an emotion into the discussion. In my experience these emotions most often boil down to some form of fear. Fear distills to a physiological sensation, and represents something that wants to be learned. When you face the fear, acknowledge it, and then allow yourself to sit with it, you will almost always discover something important. You can do this for yourself, and I encourage you to do so after an argument with a loved one ends poorly. You can also try to practice with trusted loved ones, creating space for each of you to acknowledge the physical sensations you are experiencing, and the ideas that appear to be attached to those physical sensations. 

(Note: sometimes emotional arguments are charged by sadness rather than fear; unlike fear sadness just needs to be felt, and once you have grieved sufficiently you will find yourself ready to let go and move on. Sometimes sadness wants to be shared as part of the healing process, as in “you were late, and I am sad that we missed that opportunity to spend time together”.)

The next level of resistance to ownership comes from the challenging relationships in your life. These can be work, friends, or most commonly your family. The overwhelming temptation when others create frustration in your life is to blame them for your frustration. They did something wrong or bad, there is nothing you can do about it, you’re just going to have to suck it up and deal with it (or so you tell yourself). Or maybe you convince yourself that if only they would change, you would be happy. If you are like me, you ruminate endlessly on the rhetoric that will convince the other party to magically change. 

Here’s the problem: you are the reason you are frustrated, not them. You own and are responsible for your emotions. They can’t ‘make’ you mad, only you can. Don’t get me wrong: I am not advocating for accepting boorish behavior from your loved ones. What I am saying is that you will find enormous value from owning your emotions. You will find that saying “You were late! How dare you?” will typically yield a poor response; however “You were 15 minutes late; I am sad we missed that time together” will almost always lead to a more productive conversation. When I represent facts and my underlying emotions clearly and honestly, I find that I can live with the results of almost any contentious conversation (even if the other party stubbornly refuses to accept culpability and/or apologize). 

You are also responsible for your relationships. You chose your job, you chose your friends, and you chose your spouse. If they are behaving in ways that frustrate you, you need to own your part in that frustration. Even your children are, genetically speaking, half you and half your spouse (whom you chose). The only relationships you can’t really control are those with your parents (hi); more on that in a moment. 

Taking ownership of your relationships does not mean accepting others’ behavior as a permanent state of being, but it does mean taking ownership of the presence of bad behavior in your life. Isolated incidents don’t really cause me substantial frustration; repeated infractions are what cause lingering pain in my relationships. But if someone repeatedly acts in a manner that frustrates me, it means I have accepted the frustration. That is my choice, and it’s one I can control. And by accepting ownership, I empower myself to evaluate why this frustration continues in my life. Perhaps I have not set clear expectations with the other party. Perhaps I have set clear expectations, but not spoken up when those clear expectations were not met. Perhaps I ignored a request from the other party which prevents them from meeting those expectations. Or perhaps the other party just isn’t capable (for whatever reason) of meeting those expectations, in which case I need to reset expectations and perhaps find someone else to satisfy that particular need. On rare occasions I might decide that a relationship has served its purpose and needs to be adjusted or even severed. We evolve, and relationships wax and wane in significance and usefulness over time; sometimes our frustrations come from holding onto relationships that are no longer serving us. Regardless what tool you choose to deploy, the point is that taking ownership of these relationships introduces various tools previously unavailable to you. 

To be very clear: the other party *also* owns your relationships. You have to let them own their decisions, their behavior, and their emotions. You can and should love generously, but you should not try to control others. You might very well be tempted to *help* others by influencing their decisions, their behavior, or their emotions. Be very careful to evaluate whether this *help* comes from a place of love and generosity or from a place of fear and a desire to control your surroundings. 

I even submit that you own your relationship with your parents. For one thing, you obviously own your behavior when interacting with your parents. But I’d even take it a step further. I’ve recently come across the idea that our spiritual selves choose the lives we are born into, and the challenges we face during that life. There’s obviously no way to prove that idea, but I find it incredibly useful. Just the idea that I’ve cosmically agreed to the challenges life presents me gives me some sense of comfort and empowerment, and some faith that I have the tools to meet life’s challenges. I am optimistic that if faced with a natural disaster or some other seemingly external phenomenon, the idea of taking cosmic ownership will help me face whatever challenge with greater calm and equanimity and less resistance. Ownership may not eliminate the pain of discomfort or loss, but will hopefully give me a fuller toolkit for how to handle life’s unexpected challenges. 

[Aside: this is as good a place as any to say that the two of you will, in adulthood, find that you have traumatic childhood experiences that need to be processed and healed. I say this with some level of confidence based on my own experience. I’m thoroughly convinced I had one of the kindest, safest, most loving childhoods of anyone who ever lived. And yet I carry codependency, abandonment fears, and a fear of being ultimately unloveable. If I carry these types of psychological wounds, everyone does, and so will you. If I could prevent it I would, and I will try. But realistically, you will need to learn how to heal yourselves in adulthood. Meditation will help a great deal. Therapy might be helpful. You might prefer coaching, as I did. You might also benefit from spiritual exploration, which I encourage anyway. Whatever tools you use, be aware, especially in middle age, you will need to look into healing wounds suffered in youth.]

Finally, I advocate taking ownership of what you believe. Now, much of what you believe will be factual. But you will take some things on faith. Some things you will take on faith because humans don’t have the capacity to reason everything from first principles, and necessarily rely on others for important information. You want to be careful about your information sources and their reliability. You also want to be generally aware when you are relying on second-hand information in your decision making processes (which you necessarily will, but you might choose to validate information you are using to make important or otherwise risky decisions). 

Some things you will take on faith because humans are designed to do so. I live in an era that believes itself to be driven by logic, but in fact we create false gods everywhere. We’ve created false gods in our media, science, politics, religious traditions, governments, and socio-economic tribes. As much as anything, we’ve made a false god out of the human reasoning capacity. Ultimately though, people put their ultimate faith in something, and it is important to understand where it is you place your faith. Once you understand your faith, you can always revisit as the need arises. What I find, however, is that those who assume their lives are rooted in reason are often deluded, often badly so, and frequently put their beliefs in ephemeral things like a political movement or the tribe’s latest intellectual fad; such rootlessness invites instability, chaos, and a life of emptiness and frustration. 

The broadest point is to stop judging yourselves and especially stop judging others. Take ownership of your actions, take ownership of your relationships, and take ownership of your life situations. Once you do, you will almost instantly feel empowered to take meaningful action to improve the aspects of your life that frustrate you. And it will set you on a path of growth and discovery. I’ve been practicing taking ownership of my life for more than a decade, and still have more to learn. I’ll share more as I do.

I love you,

Dad

January 23, 2024

Dear Leland and Everett,

Today I want to provide an update on the persona work I’ve been doing. I introduced you to my first several personas when talking about my early visions here. 

Since that vision I’ve discovered three more personas that have made their way into my ‘Tribal Council’:

• Too Much: fears that I am too big, that my personality is too big, and tries to protect me by keeping me from crossing socially acceptable thresholds. I was very large growing up, and had a very large personality. I eventually learned that my large size and large personality could intimidate others. Sometimes others reacted with particular hostility when my presence intimidated them. I often did not realize when I was scaring or making others uncomfortable. Over time, Too Much emerged as my solution, vigilantly monitoring my behavior and reminding me to reign myself in before I made others uncomfortable. 
• It’s Fine: is deeply attuned to others’ needs, knows that I am healthy and agreeable, and assumes that I can sacrifice my wants and needs on behalf of others. 
• 7th Grade football player: was afraid to hurt others, to show aggression, to fight to win. I played football in the 7th grade. I don’t believe my team won any games that year, though we did come close once. On the final play of that game, the coach called a pass play for me (I played tight end). I got open, caught the ball, and ran down the sideline with one player in close pursuit. I stopped running in the hopes that the other player would run past me, allowing me to run into the end zone for the winning score. But by stopping I allowed other players to catch up, and these players collectively tackled me about a yard short of the goal line as the game ended. What’s particularly frustrating is that the player in close pursuit was much smaller than I was; I could easily have run him over and scored. Over time, that play stuck in my psyche as evidence that I was unwilling to run over others, in fear that I might hurt them.

You might notice that with the 7th Grader I used the past tense in describing him. In fact, I’ve repurposed the 7th Grader. First I spent some time accepting that football can be a violent game, that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with being larger than my opponent, and that there is nothing wrong with using that size to my advantage. Further, accepted that because football is a violent game, some people get hurt playing (and they take the risk of getting hurt by playing), and that I can live with the consequences of hurting others so long as I play within the rules. Said differently: in middle age, I finally came to accept that I should have just flattened that other kid and scored. What this allowed me to do was repurpose the 7th Grader and give him opportunities to practice ‘flattening’ others. Now when someone gets in my way, when appropriate I unleash that 7th Grade persona and ask him to run over that roadblock. In practice, that looks like achieving a goal rather than overcomplicating it, asking for forgiveness rather than permission, and allowing others to stop me only when they have the power to do so. I won’t pretend that I live the prior sentence all the time, but I find that repurposing the persona allows me to find a better balance between pursuing what I want and helping others achieve what they want.

The idea of repurposing a persona has helped me turn several of them from disempowering to empowering:

• My codependent persona is now tasked with helping me identify more consciously when others are acting out of fear or sadness, so that (instead of scrambling tirelessly to help them avoid a negative emotion) I might help them identify the emotion for what it is: an opportunity to heal.
• The professor is currently assigned with helping me figure out how to understand my spiritual and emotional learnings so that I might bring them into the hyper-logical world I inhabit.
• Sgt Get it Done is on sabbatical, earning a much-deserved rest. I anticipate he will be called upon again, but after years of overuse and fatigue he is recuperating. 
• Snot nose is responsible for helping me identify when others are acting out of fear of getting kicked out of the tribe, so that I might look for opportunities to ease that fear.
• Leper is responsible for helping me identify when others are showing signs of feeling ultimately unloveable, so that I might help them bring that hidden belief into their awareness.

All of my personas originally emerged as ways to help me protect myself from pain, but developed patterns that no longer served me. Over the years, each developed highly attuned skills; rather than try to discharge them (an idea I doubted would work), I thought it would be more useful to assign each a more productive use for their skills. Overall I find repurposing my personas has helped me turn self-defeating habits into more productive habits. 

You might have noticed that It’s Fine and Too Much are yet to find a new purpose. The truth is that I’m still working with these personas. It’s Fine is practicing standing up for what I want, an act I still find deeply uncomfortable; what I am finding useful is not to denigrate or attack what others want, nor to try to convince others’ that my wants are more important than theirs. If I can articulate and advocate for what I want without the rest, I find I am often able to achieve far better compromise than when I just suppress my needs and wants in service of others. 

Too Much is the part of myself still needing the most work; it’s the persona that still feels the most disconnected from the rest of me. My sense here is that as I step into authenticity and wholeness, my biggest remaining fear is that others will find that I am Too loud, Too emotional, Too disorganized, Too messy, Too Much drama, Too Much effort, and just generally Too Much of everything to be worth the trouble. Said differently, I fear that being fully and authentically me will be Too Much trouble, and that others (in particularly the people I love most) will turn away. 

What is odd and hard to describe is the pull I feel toward healing and integration. I feel called to heal, to live life as wholly and authentically me. For better and worse, this means embracing and integrating Too Much. This means being me, even when Too Much fears that I am being Too Much for others to handle. I don’t know what it will mean to integrate Too Much authentically, but I do know that the idea still brings deep discomfort. 

Interestingly, I’m sensing that after going into a metaphorical cave to heal, I am now being called out of the cave and back out into the world. The first steps out of the cave are meant to continue the healing journey, but to heal in relationship. Too Much is hard to heal in isolation: one cannot really be Too Much for oneself. I can only be Too Much around others. 

Said differently, I am feeling the invitation to come out of the cave fully and authentically me. I sense that revealing my authentic self will somehow extend the invitation to others to heal and to live in wholeness. I’m still working toward how I integrate Too Much (or at least the aspects Too Much has been tasked with suppressing), and sense this is where I will be spending time in the coming days and weeks as I come out of the cave and reveal myself into the world anew. Wish me luck.

I love you,

Dad

January 18, 2024

Dear Leland and Everett,

After your summer break I wrote to you about coming into awareness that I am a codependent. Much has evolved since then, and I thought it worth providing a (hopefully) brief follow-up. 

The first breakthrough came a couple months ago, when I learned to separate my action from the outcome my action produced. We codependents tend to blame ourselves when we say something that isn’t well received; we assume that our action of speaking was to blame. To be very clear, we humans say lots of nasty things to each other; things that are meant to hurt and wound. What I have learned to study is my intent: did I speak from a place of fear or hurt, from a desire to wound? If so, then I try to hold myself accountable for those actions. But if I can honestly assess that my words came from a place of love and authenticity, I am coming to accept that I am not responsible for how those words are received. Honestly surveying intent is challenging and takes practice. And I find that difficult conversations require advanced preparation, where I work myself into a state of authenticity and love, so that I can speak honestly and be prepared to accept the outcome of the tough conversation. I’m learning that people intuitively recognize authenticity (and the lack thereof): when I speak authentically my message is generally received in good faith. Turns out it was my fears layered on top that often created conflict, more than the ideas themselves. 

Sadly, this one breakthrough did not solve all my problems. I noticed with some celebration that I was increasingly able to approach my interactions with others without bringing my fears and sadness into the discussion. I was learning to notice when my fears and sadness (which I sometimes just refer to collectively as ‘baggage’) showed up in a conversation, and choose to take those emotions into my next meditation rather that bring them into conversations with loved ones. Somehow I expected that taking ownership of my own negative emotions would create an example whereby everyone around me would do the same, and we would suddenly have healthier conversations. If only humans worked this way. 

Others continued bringing their own negative emotions into conversation with me. I found myself able to maintain presence of mind not to respond; I didn’t take the bait, as it were, and fall into my old codependent arguments (or at least occasionally I didn’t). It’s amazing how often we fall into the same arguments with loved ones over and over again. What I’m coming to realize is that we fall into the same arguments at least partly because we are still carrying the unprocessed hurt from some previous interaction, and that something in the conversation triggers us to relive unhealed experiences over and over again. Sadly I’m already seeing the two of you fall into repetitive disagreement, suggesting that you are already carrying some hurt; we’ll work on helping you let go of your pains, but this is something you will want to watch, especially in your interactions with each other, as you grow up.

What surprised me was how unpleasant I found some of those interactions to be. Whether it was with family or friends, I found it deeply uncomfortable when someone was pointing their negativity toward me in barbed language. What confused me: if I was no longer bringing my negativity into the conversation, and I was willing to detach from the behaviors of others, why would should I feel such strong emotions when others directed their negativity toward me? After much introspection, and resisting enormous temptation to try to control others (in this case, resisting the temptation to try to convince them not to direct negativity toward me), I noticed that the energy surges I felt were associated with some message I wanted to convey. (Note: I talked more about this here.)

This discovery shocked me a bit, as it helped me unwind a consistent pattern in my life that led to interpersonal conflict. See, I’ve had these messages (and corresponding energy surges) all my life. Because I’ve been so determined to be rational, I would ignore the energy surge and that the source of the idea seemed external. Instead I would instantly begin to translate the message into something I could comprehend more clearly (something that made sense to me). Typically this meant coming to some sort of conclusion regarding what someone else should do. From there I proceeded to come up with the rhetoric meant to convince that other person why they should do the thing I had now convinced myself they should do. Hopefully you can already intuit why this would go badly. What I will add is that I am learning that people know when others are behaving inauthentically, and are instinctively repulsed. Put another way: I’ve spent my life attempting to persuade others using logic to accept ideas whose source has been anything but rational thought. 

In my finer moments (typically at church, or with my spiritual group), I am learning to recognize the energy surges when they come, honor the associated thought, and resist the temptation to clutter the message. That last part isn’t easy: sometimes the thought doesn’t mean anything to me; other times I can’t imagine that the message will mean anything to the intended audience; invariably I am tempted to layer in extra language and interpretation. So far, when I’ve been willing to resist the temptation, I’ve been surprised by the results. One time I wrote a message down (it was too long for me to remember), and handed to a woman at church: she stared at it, then stared at me and simply said “can I keep this?” as if it contained some deep wisdom and weren’t hastily scrawled on the back of a church worship handout. Another time, I approached a woman who shared that she had been going through difficult times and simply said “may you find the gift”; I honestly expected her to express either confusion or anger, instead her eyes welled up. A third time the recipient looked at me wide-eyed, with almost a “how did you know?” expression. In all three instances I was prepared to accept whatever outcome, and appreciate that I was honoring the thought that wanted to be expressed by sharing it; and yet I can appreciate that God seems to be giving me positive reinforcement by giving me practice with receptive audiences as I build this new capability. 

My not-so-fine moments occur in my more intimate relationships. Precisely because those relationships come with history, they come with those recurring arguments we’ve already discussed. In those instances, I’m finding that I still get knocked off course. The progress that I can celebrate: I can go away and meditate, and through the process of introspection identify the emotions that came up, the pain I still carry from other interactions, along with the new thought that wants to be expressed underneath it all. From there, I’m able to revisit the conversation, honestly expose the emotions I felt, and then express the thought that came to me. These follow-up conversations require patience, while I wait for the right opportunity. But I’ve had some wonderfully healing conversations with your mom and other loved ones over the last few weeks as a result of this process. 

The next step, the one I’m working toward now, is maintaining presence even in my intimate relationships. I’m coming to understand the negative emotions pointed at me by others are an invitation to identify a buried, underlying pain. These emotions are meant to be embraced and leaned into rather than avoided. If I can lean into them, I suspect I can unlock healing opportunities both for myself but also those I care about most (and perhaps eventually others as well). 

If I could offer one suggestion from all of this, it would be not to avoid your negative emotions. Our temptation is to either suppress or attack negative emotions, or to run away and hide from them. We’d rather do almost anything other than feel the fear and sadness stored in our bodies. Similarly, we’d prefer not to be exposed to others’ pain and suffering. But fear and sadness are invitations to heal. If we avoid our negative emotions they get stuck. If we allow them to flow through us, we can heal. If we can support others, I suspect we can support their healing as well. From there, I suspect we’ll find an invitation to find comfort in discomfort, and develop our superpowers by being willing to feel the things our body wants us to know and experience. 

I love you both.

Love,

Dad

January 12, 2024

Leland and Everett,

I started the day thinking I would write on another topic. Events of the day intervened with other plans. This morning I wept while listening to a recitation of the first verse of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword

His truth is marching on

Julia Ward Howe; The Battle Hymn of the Republic

I’m not precisely sure why the verse moved me, and I doubt words can fully capture what I experienced, but that is the topic I want to explore today. 

[I find myself stuck with what to say next. My programming tells me to build up my story from first principles or as close to first principles as I can achieve. But so much has happened over these last few months that I cannot possible capture all of it in preamble to this letter. This overwhelm partly explains my paucity of letters of late: once I fell behind, I didn’t know how to catch up. My sense is that this overwhelm is meant to teach me to cut through the deductive style of writing and speak more clearly, more authentically, and more with my own voice. So allow me to make a first, perhaps feeble and fumbling, attempt at that today (my old coach uses the metaphor of a toddler learning to walk: the first attempts are clumsy, but necessary in order to eventually achieve the natural gait we know in adults or even older children).]

God’s truth marches on. Whether we support or resist, God’s truth proceeds. We only decide whether we move in harmony with that truth or stand in resistance. Standing in resistance cannot stop the destruction of the grapes of wrath, but only affect how we experience the destruction. The fateful lightning of God’s terrible swift sword is loosed with a certain inevitability, even if that inevitability is also somehow surprising or even shocking. I don’t know how we recognize God’s will as both surprising and inevitable, but we do. When we are in harmony (or at least surrender) to God’s will, we recognize the inevitability of the destruction, even if we need to mourn and grieve the loss. Those who resist, however, experience the fateful lightning as terrible pain. 

One idea that resonated deeply with me today: all participants in the Civil War originally hoped for swift resolution. Both the North and South hoped for a quick war, and neither side started the war willing to accept the inevitable truth that slavery needed to end, no matter the cost. Only gradually, reluctantly, did the North come to grips with the truth that slavery needed to end, and that the cost of ending it would be unimaginable sacrifice. Somehow, even today, one can feel the weight of that decision, the reluctant embrace of the inevitable and necessary, the acceptance that comes with grieving, and the resolution that comes with knowing one’s path. 

As a quick aside: I am not convinced war is ever inevitable. I am not convinced war is ever necessary or good. Yet I sense once the American Civil War commenced and led Americans into previously unimaginable destruction and loss, the North came to a reluctant understanding of their calling and path out. 

I find myself pondering, regularly, how far into the darkness we must descend today before our path, our calling, is revealed to us. It’s not clear to me what we are being called to do; then again, it was not clear to most Americans in 1860 that they were being called to end slavery. The call to end slavery seems obvious in retrospect; indeed, future generations will look back and wonder why it took us so long to understand and accept the task assigned to our generation. Only after the descent into the darkness and chaos of war did Americans recognize the call. How far into the darkness must we descend today before we recognize and accept God’s call? 

My sense is that the Civil War was not inevitable, but that the ending of slavery in America was. God’s will, God’s truth, wouldn’t allow for the continuation of slavery in the United States. Americans in both the North and South resisted the inevitability of God’s will, and that resistance is what led to the unimaginable destruction of the Civil War. In “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, and in other correspondence, I sense reluctant acceptance on the part of the North to become the tools of God, accepting the task laid out for them. My dualistic mind struggles to embrace what my soul more intuitively understands: war is never necessary nor inherently God’s will, and yet the Northerners embraced God’s will in the ending of slavery, and willingly paid the cost required to achieve God’s will. My logical brain cannot reconcile both of those ideas, and yet I believe both of them to be true. 

How does McClellan fit in all of this? My hope is that this letter will help me discover the connection, if one exists. Remember, we write to clarify what we think. 

Lincoln put McClellan in charge of the main Union forces months into the war. McClellan thoroughly enjoyed the status that his position entailed, and seemed adept at maximizing his status and the trappings. For all his faults, McClellan could build and prepare an army. But McClellan could not bring himself to accept that his task was to deliver success on the battlefield, preferably quickly, by pressing the advantages he, his army, and his Northern side possessed. 

McClellan found all manner of excuses not to use his army. His army wasn’t ready. He needed more men and more provisions. McClellan serially overestimated the size and strength of his opponent. McClellan hoped to amass overwhelming strength in order to deliver a swift, decisive, relatively painless victory. McClellan refused to see the truth that painless victory was impossible, and so refused to engage in paths that could deliver relatively more swift victory through rapid engagement, learning, and adjustment. McClellan refused to engage, or engaged with maximal reluctance and delay, and his reluctance and delay denied him (and the North) immeasurable opportunities to learn, to grow, and accelerate the winning the war. McClellan extended the war needlessly, causing unnecessary death and destruction on both sides. 

In short, McClellan was consumed by his ego. McClellan’s ego led him to overestimate his importance, overestimate his enemies, and experience a paralyzing inability to act due to a crippling fear of failure (and the loss of status failure would entail).

I see McClellan all around me today. Our leaders, our elites, our society at large appear to enjoy the trappings that come with leadership and status. But our elites cannot bring themselves to engage the challenges we face, out of fear and ego. In the process, our leaders waste precious time, preventing us from learning and growing and discovering the paths available to us.

Of course McClellan, or at least the McClellan of my telling, is really me. I am the one comfortable with the trappings of my position. I am the one who is unwilling to see the task ahead of me. I am the one paralyzed and unwilling to act, overestimating the barriers in front of me, and in the process of refusing to act I deny myself the opportunities to learn and grow. McClellan is ego, my ego. And I loath McClellan, and see McClellan in the world around me, precisely because I do not want to see McClellan, or ego, in me. 

Hardest of all is accepting that I can no more cut McClellan out of American history than can I cut the ego out of me. My ego is mine, it is part of me. I might resist, I might loath, I might avoid, but my ego exists as an apparently permanent part of me. 

The question I find myself asking is not “how do I live without my ego?” but rather “can I learn to accept, embrace, and even love my ego?”. Typing the prior sentence was difficult in a way that suggests I have found the right struggle, at least for today. 

How much must I, must we, must you delay in accepting, embracing, and loving our whole selves? How much longer do we insist on overestimating the barriers preventing us from taking action (engaging the Southern army) while simultaneously underestimating the true significance of the task ahead of us (ending slavery). I do not yet recognize the modern parallels to engaging the Southern army and ending slavery, e.g. what is the task God puts before me and us? Like McClellan, I am too dominated by ego and resistance. I, we, you have the opportunity to learn from McClellan, to see when and how our egos dominate us, and to learn to integrate our egos into our complete selves, accept God’s will, and accept our paths with God. The sooner we let go of our resistance, the more darkness and destruction we can avoid. But make no mistake: God’s truth marches on.

I love you,

Dad

January 8, 2024

Dear Leland and Everett,

After a fulfilling couple of weeks of traveling to visit relatives and celebrate holidays, we return to our normal routines today. I will say that I am glad to get back, which I think is a good thing: I find vacations serve as a good litmus test for the quality of my normal life. If I deeply regret coming home from vacation, I probably need to make some substantial life changes. While I very much enjoyed our holidays, I am also eager to get back to ‘work’, which I take as a positive sign regarding the life I’ve engineered. 

So now we enter 2024, a year I anticipate will be challenging for most Americans. This is an election year, and as of now the most likely outcome is that former President Donald Trump will be nominated to run against current President Joe Biden. Given the change and turmoil in the world today, I would anticipate any election year to be consequential. The presence of Donald Trump on this particular ballot makes this election likely to be particularly fraught; I do not exaggerate when I say I think it entirely possible we experience a constitutional crisis regardless who wins. 

Everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) involving Trump seems to trigger both loyal Democrats and loyal Republicans. I have found it generally impossible to have a rational or logical conversation with loyalists from either party in regard to anything related to the former president. Otherwise very rational and reasonable people routinely turn stark raving mad when the topic turns to Trump; I’ve never encountered a topic so triggering and divisive. As a result, I’ve shifted my perspective on the matter: I try to avoid wading into the specifics of any particular debate and focus instead on why Trump looms so large in our collective psyche. 

My overarching belief is that Trump is a symptom, a symbol we’ve imbued with all our frustrations, fears, and sadness. Trump allows Democrats to believe (or pretend to believe) that if Trump would just go away we could all feel safe again. Similarly, Trump allows Republicans to believe (or pretend to believe) that electing and empowering Trump will allow us to feel safe again. 

The truth is far more unpleasant. Our institutions appear to be rotting, stuck in the post-WWII era and as of yet incapable of making the jump to the internet era. The world is moving beyond American hegemony (for better and worse) as those who seek a multipolar world look to destabilize places like the Ukraine (invaded by Russia, partly baited by the threat of NATO expansion), Palestine (under Israeli assault after raiding Israel with the support of Iran), and the Suez Canal (currently only being navigated by Chinese ships due to piracy) in order to advance their interests at America’s (and America’s allies’) expense. Technology and particularly Artificial Intelligence are bringing change at a breathtaking pace. Social media in particular and technology more broadly appear to be making us miserable by hacking our programing to keep us angry and scared in order to keep us attached to our devices. Nobody knows how to solve any of these problems, and so it is easier to blame and demonize our political enemies than to honestly face the uncertainty in front of us. 

And so we’ve manifested Trump. Trump means different things to different individuals or tribes. Most broadly though, arguing about Trump allows us to avoid the hard truths we wish not to face. The truth is that Trump does not possess the power that either his supporters nor his detractors wish to believe. But we empower Trump with our attention. If we stopped paying attention to Trump, he would go away. But we are not prepared to withdraw our attention, and so Trump will be a fixture in our lives in 2024.

What I hope we learn is that Trump serves as an invitation. Those triggered by Trump (or his enemies) are in possession of a gift: the opportunity and invitation to explore what about Trump is triggering. My personal journey convinces me that we get triggered because of an experience we are not willing to relive, or a fear we are not willing to face, or a sadness we are not willing to feel. Said differently: Trump’s presence in our lives in 2024 is going to cause many Americans to experience some trauma; those who accept the experience as an invitation to heal and grow will find they are able to find peace with Trump or his enemies. And then they will possess a superpower. 

When we move beyond our rational mind and embrace our emotions and spirit, we allow ourselves to feel the things we’ve avoided. When we cut ourselves off from our emotions we limit our potential to what our puny brains can process. When we open ourselves up to the universe of awareness and consciousness around us, we find that we are able to access seemingly limitless potential. In my experience, the way to that knowledge is through the body, through internal exploration. But before we can access the infinite, we must first let go of our baggage: the fear and sadness our bodies have carried for so long thanks to our neglect and avoidance. Surrendering in this manner is not particularly easy nor fun, and from what I’ve read typically people only make the jump when they are jarred (perhaps via the overwhelming grief of losing a loved one, just to offer one example). Perhaps said differently: people typically only learn surrender when they are sufficiently traumatized. And so now we will learn whether Trump’s reelection campaign will bring us into enough awareness of our trauma to make the jump. 

I am not optimistic, at least within this election cycle. My suspicion is that we are not done learning the lessons Trump can teach us; as such I anticipate a fraught election cycle and a legitimacy crisis whether he wins or loses. What I find particularly interesting is that the lessons we need to learn are available to us now, if only we were willing and knew how to look. Different people will choose surrender and jump to a new state of awareness at different times. What I am curious to watch is how much damage we create before we collectively (or at least a critical mass of us) make the jump. Lots of what we cling to must die in order to make space for what wants to be birthed. Destruction born out of love will clear out rot. Destruction born out of fear, however, will take the good with the bad. We have lots of room to descend into madness, chaos, war, anarchy, oppression, or other forms of negativity and violence. Collectively we’re headed firmly down the path of fear. We get to decide, individually and collectively, whether we continue down the path of fear (which will lead to unimaginable destruction and what we typically label as ‘evil’) or whether we surrender into wholeness and love. Somehow I sense that I have a role to play in helping us make the jump. The specifics of my role are only beginning to reveal themselves to me, but they are beginning. 

And so I continue to do my work, with perhaps increased urgency as we enter 2024, in the expectation that my work will expand beyond it’s current inward focus (healing just me) and moving out into the world (helping others discover the need and capacity to heal themselves). I hope that we are able to heal before too much unnecessary destruction occurs, but part of surrender is learning to identify and let go of attachment. I am grieving, and will continue to grieve, the loss of dying norms and entities that have brought me joy and a sense of security. But I need to let go of my attachment to them in order to see clearly, act knowingly, and make space for what wants to be birthed. 

There exists some possibility that we collectively avoid chaos, and that this letter will serve just to document how much uncertainty we faced entering 2024. More likely, you will grow up in and inherit a world far more chaotic than I ever knew; in that case I hope this letter helps you understand how to navigate the chaos for yourselves. 

I love you,

Dad

December 14, 2023

Dear Leland and Everett,

Your mom and I lost a friend to cancer this week. That set me thinking about the grieving process, and wanting to share a few thoughts with the two of you. Revisit this when you need it; only then will it genuinely be useful.

First off, grief is felt in the body. When you suffer a loss, honor your body. Pay attention to your body. During meditation, actively search for the pain in your body. Send your attention and awareness to the area of the body feeling the most discomfort. Ask the discomfort what it wants you to know. I find that my body communicates with me regularly in this fashion. 

You may feel a desire to distract or busy yourself. Beware this temptation: sadness can get stuck, blocking your ability to feel love and joy forever after. Process the sadness you feel now, while it is acute, lest the sadness fester like an open wound, spreading and infecting more than just the area it touches directly. Expose the sadness and allow light and love to heal. 

Others may attempt to distract you, or encourage you to truncate your grieving process. Ignore these people: they are merely attempting to avoid confronting their own negative emotions. 

Grant yourself the grace to grieve in whatever manner feels friendly to you. Grieve loudly or quietly. Grieve publicly or privately. Sometimes movement helps facilitate the grieving process, other times stillness proves the more effective tool. Consider utilizing any or all of your five senses; smells and songs I’ve found particularly acute at triggering memories. 

One cannot rush the grieving process. The body needs the time it needs to heal and recover. You can delay the process by avoiding the emotions you wish not to feel. But you cannot accelerate the process faster than what your body and soul are prepared to allow. 

Find the people who are prepared to let you grieve properly, and lean into those relationships. 

Grieve messily. Proper grieving is messy.

Grief is destructive; it may consume and destroy other aspects of your life. Perhaps these are areas of your life seeking rebirth or renewal.

You may experience a depth of sadness you didn’t know possible. Just know that on the other side of that sadness may be a depth of love, joy, and connection you also didn’t know were possible. 

I’ve come to believe that emotional pain almost always carries a gift. Unfortunately, early in the grieving process it’s impossible to discern what that gift might be. Grant yourself space to feel the shock and pain, and do not rush to make meaning of it all. Meaning may only come days, weeks, or even years later. So be it. 

Grief tears a hole in the soul, and grants you an opportunity to fill that hole with love. 

Few will understand what you are going through. As a result, most of the advice you receive will be terrible. Take what advice you find useful (including mine), and unapologetically bin the rest. 

As your father, I wish I could protect you from extreme sadness. Except that I’m learning to accept that sadness is a gift: we only grieve the things we’ve loved. Grieving helps us observe and appreciate not just the thing we lost, but also the love and beauty still present in our lives. Death invites rebirth. Grieving is painful but inevitable: you will eventually lose something you love, such is the circle of life. In that pain is the opportunity for discovery, for distillation, for renewal and rebirth. But first, you must honor the grief, the pain, the emotions you feel. If you don’t know where to start, I suggest get still and listen to your body. 

I love you,

Dad

November 30, 2023

Dear Leland and Everett,

A few weeks ago in worship service the Gospel reading was Mark 12:28-34. In this passage, Jesus says that the most important of the Jewish laws are to love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength. Our minister proceeded to point out that Christians don’t talk about this commandment much. He even pointed out that he struggled to find hymns that focused on loving God as opposed to receiving God’s love.

I sat gobsmacked processing the truth of the minister’s observations. Especially in secular culture, but even in the church, we focus a lot on the second most important law according to Jesus: love your neighbor as yourself. But I barely recall ever discussing how to love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength. The incredible irony is that I am intimately aware that we are told to love God. Indeed, Christians call this the Great Commandment. We hear this passage over and over again. And yet, amazingly, I don’t ever recall discussion of what this might mean in terms of actions or habits or practices.

In the worship service, the minister asked us to pray and, in the prayer, to practice loving God. I noticed how foreign and surreal this felt. Faced with the apparent gap between the importance of loving God (at least according to Jesus) and my personal experience, I resolved to begin a practice. Since that sermon I’ve started each day’s meditation with at least a brief moment of loving God intentionally.

Partly I tell this story to highlight how wisdom often eludes us, even when sitting directly in front of us. I’ve known my whole life that Jesus instructs us to love God, and yet I’ve never until the last few weeks done anything intentional to follow that instruction. I sincerely doubt I am the only one; my strong suspicion, just based on the conversations I hear amongst Christians, is that most Christians almost certainly do not actively love God in any meaningful way. We talk a lot about receiving God’s love and doing God’s will, but rarely talk about loving God or how to do so. I say this not in judgement; indeed I’m not criticizing myself nor anyone else. Again, I’m just pointing out how an instruction has been sitting in front of Christians for 2,000 years, and yet we seem to have almost completely forgotten it, at least in terms of actually doing what we’re instructed to do.

Mostly though, I write to share a few observations from my newfound practice. In my first few prayers, I imagined sending a beam of loving energy to God. I felt truly disoriented, wondering why God needed me to send God love, especially when I happen to believe that God IS love. If God is love, why would God need me to love him? The answer came to me almost immediately: God doesn’t need me to love him. So then I wondered what the point was. Since I believe God is love, this implies I was sending God’s love to God, a concept I found rather bewildering.

After some time, I started to feel love flowing through me in a manner I hadn’t experienced before, at least not in my adult life. At that point I started to suspect that the act of loving God wasn’t meant to help God (again, God doesn’t need me to love him) so much as it was meant to help me. Just through the practice of loving, I was able to access more love. I felt more love, and I felt love’s healing energy flowing through me.

As I’ve continued to practice loving God, I’ve come to believe that loving God, loving ourselves, and loving others are all ultimately the same thing. We can’t love God fully without loving ourselves or others. We can love ourselves fully without loving God or others. And we can’t love others fully without loving ourselves and God. Attempting to love one or two but not all three inevitably devolves. For example (and speaking on behalf of my own affliction), codependents attempt to love others, in my case without attempting to love myself or God. Eventually that love starts to come from a place of fear, and the love itself becomes less love and more an attempt to control as an output of fear.

In theory, one could practice loving fully by focusing exclusively on loving God, ourselves, or others. Because again, when we love fully, there really is no difference between loving God, ourselves, and others. We become an expression of love, receiving and sending love, and being filled with love in the process. In truth, my sense is that we need to practice loving God, ourselves, and others intentionally. Only through the intentional practice, pursued from multiple angles, do we find that those angles converge. And only then do we understand the depth of love available to us. We learn that sending and receiving love are one and the same action, for only in the act of sending love to we truly receive it, and only via the process of receiving love do we access enough to send. I find that some days I am drawn to practice sending love, other days to practice receiving. Each day I discover that these actions are ultimately connected, and sense that I am merely strengthening my understanding of how they are connected. Ultimately I am realizing that love wants to flow; love is not meant to be held. Given space to flow, love grows. Like water, love looks for openings through which to flow. Our purpose, then, is to create, nurture, and widen that opening in ourselves, that we might become conduits of love in the world.

But don’t take my word for it. Practice, perhaps via meditation, loving God, loving yourselves, and loving others. Explore what the practice means to you. If the practice does not resonate, perhaps pause the practice and come back to it later. Our spiritual journeys are meant to be unique (though they echo in similarity with others’). My sense is that this practice will resonate for you when the time is right.

I love you,

Dad

November 16, 2023

Dear Leland and Everett,

I recently heard a podcast where Malcolm Gladwell recruited a Hollywood screenwriter to rewrite the ending to Disney’s The Little Mermaid. While listening, something clicked. Or perhaps more accurately, a few things clicked, solving a few unanswered puzzles in my head.

First and foremost, in the rewrite Ariel recovers her voice by hugging Ursula (the antagonist and evil witch). This hit me on a couple of levels. First of all, I noticed that, unlike too many Hollywood endings today, they did not have Ariel recover her voice via more traditionally masculine heroic actions. Ariel did not attack, fight, or conquer Ursula. As Hollywood these days introduces us to more heroines (females cast in the lead and/or heroic role), they too often do so by having the heroines act like men. We increasingly see female leads cast as superheroes, literally fighting the bad guys. The top grossing movie of this year, Barbie, humorously explores traditionally masculine and feminine roles in society, and as far as I can tell resolves it’s plot complications by…having the women act like men. I genuinely root for promoting more females as protagonists, but find the idea of women finding themselves and their strengths by acting like men to be something of an inevitable dead end, and have wondered why we as a society don’t seem to have any better ideas.

This rewrite questioned the need for a masculine solution to our problems altogether. Ariel didn’t fight for the return of her voice. She hugged for it. She melted her enemy’s defenses with love. In the process, she found her voice, and we discovered that her voice, while unique, kicked off an intuitive recognition in others, as others intuitively knew the song Ariel proceeded to sing. We instinctively recognize when someone acts in congruence with their true selves, and witnessing someone in congruence invites us to move into congruence ourselves. What a beautiful message.

Earlier in the exploration, the screenwriter highlighted the deep truth which makes The Little Mermaid so long-lasting and compelling a story (while the Disney version originates in 1989, the story itself is nearly 200 years old): Ariel loses her voice. The screenwriter points out that girls often lose their voice as they grow up in our society. Something about this observation clicked for me: since writing my letter about masculinity, I’ve sensed some unfinished business with the topic. Why is it that women are increasingly acting like men? Why is it that Hollywood’s (and more broadly, society’s) solution to elevating the status of women is to encourage them to act like men? The screenwriter offered a pretty compelling hypothesis: women collectively feel like they have lost their voice, and are employing their best guess at how to find it.

The rewrite, again, deliciously challenges the need for masculine energy, at least in certain situations. Ariel solving her own problem (having lost her voice) through hugging, and unmistakeable expression of love, not only challenges the feminine heroic ideal, but challenges our heroic ideals altogether. Why do we so often assume we must resort to conflict or violence to solve our problems? Why can’t we teach people to spread love as our primary tool toward resolving conflict? This need not be an exclusively feminine ideal, but it could certainly be a heroic ideal introduced and championed by female leaders.

Insightfully, the rewrite proceeded to challenge some masculine archetypes. The role of the prince was recast as superfluous, which seems appropriate to me. The role of king (in this case, Triton) was exposed for being not just strong and powerful, but also too often hurtful in its severity and harshness. In this retelling, Triton’s harsh punishments were what actually spurred Ursula to become a witch in the first place; in so doing the audience are encouraged to rethink the role we give punishment as an effective tool in governance, as well as the need for the powerful militaristic archetype as leader.

My favorite aspect of the rewrite was the exploration of Ursula’s origins as an evil witch. Ursula’s origin story correctly points out that ‘hurt people hurt people’. We are so tempted to assign people into camps of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and thus universally weave such morality tales into our storytelling, that we forget (or perhaps fail to understand completely) the line between good and evil isn’t drawn between people or societies, but within the hearts of each of us. Each one of us holds an incredible, perhaps even unimaginable, capacity for good and evil; the struggle between good and evil plays out within each of us. And while we are tempted to fight evil by creating evil villains (in our stories or even in real life), what we really do is create distractions that allow us to avoid confronting the darkness within each of us. Or perhaps more accurately, we allow ourselves to believe that we are fighting off the darkness, or keeping the darkness at bay with our struggle, when in fact we give darkness deeper roots in our own hearts.

The better solution, as the rewrite so beautifully suggests, is to combat darkness with love. This allows us to see the darkness (or evil) for what it really is: fear and sadness that have been allowed to fester into anger, hate, and a density of emotion that leaves no space for love and healing. And the ultimate cure is a return to love.

Of course, when hate is actively spreading, the victims of hate must be allowed to protect themselves. Self protection can be hard to discern from unnecessary violence, a complexity I won’t attempt to tackle today. But once the spreaders of hate are stopped, and their victims protected, we should explore how we enable love to return and heal the wounds that have festered into the spread of hate.

Ultimately, what the rewrite finally enabled me to see (along with lots of other signs the universe has been sending me) is the degree to which modern society embraces the threat of violence and punishment in our fruitless efforts to stem the spread of hate. In the process we abandon any hope of spreading love where wounds exist. We need to shift. The implications will be radical; the alternatives are worse.

I love you both, and wish you luck combatting fear, sadness, anger, and hate with love. It’s not easy.

Love,

Dad

P.S. I discovered after writing that Disney itself has remade The Little Mermaid. The original Disney version, in 1989, was the inspiration behind the podcast and this letter (although I will admit I never saw it). I guess now I will need to watch the new version to see how they did by comparison.