Don't Take Anything Personally

I know, you have heard that so many times. And worse, we have probably all said it to someone else. It’s too easy to offer that advice to another woman when it’s her “personal” and not ours.

But there is something to this. And I’m feeling inspired to give it another try.

A few weeks ago I met with a woman and we were talking about The Course in Miracles—which was my entry point into recovery and changing my life. The woman reached into her bag and held up a book and said, “I’m re-reading this old book too.” And it was a copy of “The Four Agreements” by Toltec healer and physician, Don Miguel Ruiz.

You have seen this book. Maybe you read it when it came out in 1997. It was passed around recovery rooms then. It is wisdom. The fur agreements are:

Be Impeccable with Your Word.

Don’t Take Anything Personally.

Don’t Make Assumptions.

Always Do Your Best.

Great advice right? But what I have come to see is that I even took that great advice and used it against myself. Be impeccable with your word because an internal message of, “Oh, you liar, you can’t do this, why did you say that…” and on and on. And “Always do your best” became, in my head, “Do more, do better, an impossible rant of perfectionism.

Are you surprised to hear that’s not what Ruiz was talking about?

I was making even those good ideas into personal failings. Old habit.

What has really synched this for me—today—is simultaneously reading a newer book called, “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying”.  by Bronnie Ware. Death is a great wisdom teacher too. I date myself, but Carlos Castaneda tried to teach us that ages ago. He said, “Keep Death on your left shoulder all day.” If you do that you pretty much fall into the four agreements that Ruiz talks about.

Here are the top five regrets:

One: I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself.

Two: I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

Three: I wish I had the courage to express my feelings.

Four: I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

Five: I wish I had let myself be happier.

All of those regrets are about courage and self-agency. Note: it doesn’t say, “I wish I was happier” rather, “I wish I had let myself…”

So I’m going to try something. Want to join me? I’m putting a note in my planner and one on my mirror:    Don’t Take Anything Personally.

I’ll keep you posted on what comes (up) next.

Maybe We Should Regret the Past

One of the Promises from the book, “Alcoholics Anonymous” says, “We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.” Yet we hear people with good recovery sometimes admit that they still have regrets. Is that flawed recovery or is that good mental health?

We talk both in and outside of recovery rooms about not having regrets and suggest that it’s a good thing.  What I think we mean by that is that we don’t want to be stuck in or shamed by our past. But if we have been around a while we all have some “stuff”—things we did and people we hurt.  They may be things from before our recovery began, though for many of is they are also things that happened over the years of our long recovery. We are not saints.

We often think of our regrets as mistakes but they are not quite that.  Living without regrets isn’t possible. And maybe it isn’t even desirable.

A new book, “Missing Out—In Praise of the Unlived Life” by psychoanalyst Adam Phillips presents this very provocative idea: We need regrets to shape our best lives. Phillips suggests that the regrets that we hold represent the options we didn’t choose and they are the mechanism that let us see the life we did choose.

This makes sense when I read the daily news. Life changes in a split second. We understood this after the World Trade Towers were attacked and again with the Indonesian tsunami. On a smaller scale we feel it any time we read about a terrible accident or a fire.

A couple of years ago my life had to change. Someone asked me, “But what about your career?” and I answered, being flip but surprising myself with the truth, “I don’t have a career, I have a life.”

That insight had been incubating over time. When my brother Larry was just weeks from death and we finally, awkwardly got around to talking about that reality, I took a deep breath and asked, “Are you afraid to die?” There was a long silence. Then he said quietly, “Di, all I ever did was work.”

I love my work too. But the day that I see the water receding too fast at the beach or hear the terrible screech of tires, or notice the cough that won’t quit I want to be more or less OK with my choices and with my regrets.

 If we live a conscious and examined life we should die with at least a few regrets. The goal isn’t to have no regrets; it’s to be fully aware of them and what they represent.