You don't have to be zen

I hated Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart.

It’s been years since I read it, but I still remember my visceral dislike. In contrast to the person who lent it to me and its many devoted fans, I didn’t find Chodron’s approach comforting. I found it intensely irritating.

I was thinking about this reaction recently, as I reflected on the way I have leveraged the power of narrative in my own life, as well as the way I use it in coaching. As I wrote in my post about the quest-cam, I believe the stories we tell about our internal resistance play a key role in enabling us to get unstuck.

In this post, I want to say more about the importance of narrative and why it seems to go missing in a lot of discussions of mindful presence and the ever-changing nature of experience.

But before I do that, I want to be clear about some things. In the brief discussion that follows, I am not intending or claiming to address what Pema Chodron teaches in When Things Fall Apart or elsewhere. Nor am I purporting to respond to the actual philosophy of Buddhism here, Zen or otherwise.

Instead, I’m using the term ‘zen’ in much the same pop-culture spirit that gave us Patrick Swayze’s character ‘Bodhi’ in Point Break.

My focus is on a general, popular perspective that circulates in some versions of personal development and mindfulness as a kind of default goal, which to me is evoked by the broad meaning of the phrase ‘things fall apart’.

This view goes something like this:

The stories we tell ourselves link events together, give them meaning, and suggest they will unfold in a certain way. But because things always fall apart, these stories are always falsified. They are essentially an illusion, and when we cleave to them we create more suffering for ourselves.

That means the most enlightened, evolved and aware thing you can do is try over and over to step outside the stories you are telling yourself. You will fail, but the moments you succeed will be the moments of greater presence and truth.

I have two issues with this view.

First, the idea that things will always unravel is itself a narrative. It is a story about how the world is. It is a story about what in our consciousness is more or less useful. It is story about what is and is not true. As deployed by some people, it is even a story that tells us something about all the other stories. (This may seem like a petty point but it is one that, as an English prof, I find it hard to get over.)

Second, I actually think it’s undeniably true that cleaving to narrative creates suffering. Things often will not turn out the way the story seemed to promise, and that is painful in ways I’ll discuss more in just a moment.

What I’m not willing to accept is that the self-evident next step is to try to step outside of narrative, to treat it like some sort of mirage. I think that only looks like the obvious solution if you think the costs of narrative are real while the benefits are a sham. And that I don’t accept at all.

Here is the thing about leveraging the power of narrative in your life. You will 100% be smacked in the face by things falling apart, by reality not conforming to the story you told yourself. You will be disappointed and let down. You will feel betrayed by experience itself.

But you will also do things you would have never done had you not had the story in the first place. Your belief in the story will shape experience. It will make itself true in the world, even if not in all the ways you wanted. And this is a crucial thing to know if you are trying to do something significant with your talents.

In some article somewhere, I saw a director say about her first feature, I was sent to this planet to make this film. I still get chills every time I think about it. That is a fucking story. How many ways could the reality of experience prove her wrong or falsify this story along the way? An infinite number. How many times did things fall apart along the way to releasing the film? Based on her description of the making of the movie, a hell of a lot.

Believe something hard enough that you watch reality torque to meet your expectations, and it’s a rude-as-fuck awakening when reality then suddenly decides that now has other plans. The fact that the story has proven itself powerful is part of why the smackdown hurts so much.

But how many obstacles did she get over with this story that she might have let stop her without it?

I’m not saying to throw out mindfulness or try to convince yourself that everything will work out for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

I’m saying that narrative creates suffering, and it creates power. Sometimes creates suffering because it creates power, because its ability to shape the world gives us an expectation of inevitable triumph that will inevitably be disproven.

But I’m also saying that the inevitable dissolution doesn’t make our stories empty either. They are not just some kind of self-deceit to be avoided as much as possible. Events falsify our stories, but stories also hold events and people together against the odds, sometimes for long enough to change our future forever. Sometimes even enough to change the world.

And I’m advocating for a perspective that is able to let all of those things be true at once.