Violance in Media

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The words..like yes and courage

Yes” extends boundaries, establishes new playing fields, moves possibility from ideas to actuality. Actress and improve artist Tina Fey points to the opportunity yes affords us when she says, “the first rule of improve is agree—agree with whatever your partner has created.

 The second rule is yes, and—agree and then add something of your own. If I start a scene with ‘I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,’ and you just say, ‘Yeah…’ we’re kind of at a standstill. But if I say, ‘I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,’ and you say, ‘Yes, it can’t be good for the wax figures,’ now we’re getting somewhere.”

In our recurring dialogues, patterns of conversation, the habitual ways that we listen and speak, our first response often defaults around a “no” or a “but.” Toss in a few intricately constructed reasons justifying that response, and we find ourselves limiting the future in front of us.

For anything creative to show up in life—not accidental, not manipulated, not figured out—it shows up in our stand for possibility, in the “yes.” Standing for possibility comes from nothing and creates a generative field; “yes and” extends that field and broadens the game.

Nothing is the foundation for possibility—from nothing we are able to create with a freedom that’s not available when we create from something. In creating possibility, we get to know what’s available to us in being human.

 

Choice. It’s the word that allows yes and the word that makes no possible. It’s the word that puts the free in freedom and takes obligation out of the mix. It’s the word upon which adventure, exhilaration, and authenticity depend.

 

It’s the word that the cocoon whispers to the caterpillar. We tell ourselves, sometimes, that living a transformed life isn’t  that important, that it’s enough just to get by. We get wrapped up in our own concerns, particular points of view, or positions, and the idea of getting ourselves to a place where things can be great seems too big an undertaking.

 

If somebody had a magic powder to come and sprinkle on us and just through that we’d  be transformed, we might say, “No, thanks—I don’t want any!  Let me stay just as I am.” It takes courage to live in a transformed way—to wrestle with our resistances, to give up mediocrity, to live consistent with what we know is possible in being human. It’s always and only a matter of our choosing.

 

Communication, conversation, language are predominately thought of, anchored in our minds, as an expressing, a speaking, a vocalizing. That outward expression goes far beyond talking, far beyond describing or representing reality—it is in fact what allows for “who” and “how” we are in the world.

 

It’s what allows for the futures we create, where we evoke experience in others, where our ideas become clear and possible, where we share ourselves, and where others are expanded by our participation with them. Though speaking is not where things get handled—it’s not powerful enough. The possibility that there’s an edge, the possibility of impact, lies in our listening.

 

 Listening, we often think of as more passive—important, but somehow lesser or secondary. But listening is the clearing in which speaking can occur—without it, there isn’t any speaking. Listening is an action. Listening doesn’t receive speaking, it isn’t a receptacle for speaking—it gives speaking. Listening is the possibility for meaning, for understanding.

 

The possibility for being loved lives in one’s listening; the possibility for learning lives in one’s listening. Listening is what allows others to be—it’s where both the speaker and what is spoken come alive, exist, and flourish.

 

How we describe, label, hold things, think things—it’s within those frameworks that our lives unfold. There are no “facts” that limit possibility, there are only “conversations” that limit and constrain, or those that create and forward, what’s possible.

 

The “glass-half-empty” folks lean toward the idea that something’s wrong, something’s not there, something’s missing-as in problematic. The “half-full” folks are attending to what’s actually in the glass-as in what could be brought to the party-as in “missing as a possibility.”

If we’re going to create a possibility, it’s a matter of choosing, a matter of saying, and that’s the whole deal. It’s about discovering what’s possible in being human beyond the places where, unknowingly or knowingly, we might restrict or limit ourselves.

 

When we create “something missing as a possibility,” we set a point of choice, a point of commitment-things show up as openings for action.

 

For most of us, “I” is positional (“you” are there and “I” am here), a location in time and space, a point of view that accumulates all previous experiences and points of view. Does this “I” presume a substantial entity located inside our bodies, or is it located in our minds, our families, job titles, Facebook profiles, bank accounts—those trappings that help us maintain the meanings and understandings that we have up ’til now considered ourselves to be?

 

How we “arrive” at this identity is mostly inadvertent. Essentially it is built from a series of decisions we made in response to what we felt or saw (consciously or not) as failures to do or be something. When these “apparent” failures arose, we made decisions about how to compensate for, respond to, and accommodate ourselves to them. The degree to which who we are today is filtered by those early decisions goes unrecognized.

 

Whether it is one or 10 or even 40 years later, we still hold on to that with which we’ve identified—obscuring access to ourselves and leaving us no powerful way to be with whatever is going on. But stepping outside of our identity isn’t so easy—it’s achieved a certain density throughout our lives, and it is all we know of ourselves.

 

The idea that another whole idea of self is available can be disconcerting, invalidating. In setting aside those things that gave us an “identity” we “become aware that this so-called self is as arbitrary as our name. It’s like standing over an abyss, recognizing that ‘I,’ as we know it is not an absolute.”* 

 

It is here, with this recognition, where transformation occurs—where we can invent ourselves as we go along. This revealing of our selves to ourselves occurs in a profound way that can alter the very possibility of what it means to be human.

 

The Harvard Business Review might not be where you’d expect to read about fear’s pervasive presence, but an article there referred to a great passage from a Joseph Heller novel. The novel’s hero and narrator, Bob Slocum, a middling executive at an unnamed company, is driven nearly mad thinking that decisions might be made behind his back that could ruin his career and his life. He’s not alone in these thoughts. Slocum says, “In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid.

 

Each of these five people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps), for a total of twenty, and each of these twenty people is afraid of six people, making a total of one hundred and twenty people who are feared by at least one person.” The company, in other words, is a pyramid of potential panic, ready to topple when someone whispers, “Jig’s up.” *

 

Perhaps even more than sadness, anger, or disappointment, we find it difficult to deal with fear. Fear often keeps us from participating, from doing what we’re capable of—from experiencing and expressing the full range of possibility available in being human. This is not so much a function of the fear being operative, but rather of decisions made unwittingly long ago, and the automatic way we pull in our past experience. Old circumstances have the power, not us.

 

We don’t have to push down, work on top of, accommodate, or adapt to these old fears. We survived the first time, the second, third, and so on…. Completing a past fear includes recognizing that we would survive if the past repeated itself.

There’s a big difference between being realistic about what happened once, and being resigned or stuck that things have to continue to be some way now, or that they just are some way, or they’ll be that way again.

We have the freedom to choose our relationship to whatever it was back then, and that’s the beginning of building power. It takes enormous courage to try out new ways of being in the space where fear used to be.

 

There was a forest at the beginning of fiction too. Its canopy of branches covered the land. Up in its living roof birds flitted through greenness and bright air, but down between the trunks of the many trees there were shadows, there was dark. When you walked this forest your feet made rustling sounds, but the noises you made were not the only noises, oh no. Twigs snapped; breezes brought snatches of what might be voices.

 

Lumpings and crashes in the undergrowth marked the passages of heavy things far off, or suddenly nearby. This was a populated wood. All wild creatures lived here, dangerous or benign according to their natures. And all the other travellers you had heard of were in the wood too: kings and knights, youngest sons and third daughters, simpletons and outlaws; a small girl whose bright hood flickered between the pine trees like a scarlet beacon, and a wolf moving on a different vector to intercept her at the cottage.

 

Each travelled separately, because it was the nature of the forest that you were alone in it. It was the place in which by definition you had no companions, and no resources except your own uncertain self.¹

 

When we’re young, things can get out of control pretty quickly. We experience danger as a distinct possibility that’s “out there somewhere,” and it becomes a notion that stays with us, at some level or another, throughout time. So from a very early age, we’re kind of on alert. The idea that life can be dangerous doesn’t go away just because we become (more rational) adults. And when we carry around the idea that life could be dangerous for many years, even the notion of possibility can seem, well…threatening.
 

When we give our fears rein, even the smallest moments can be daunting. Fears arise when we look back, and they arise when we look ahead. Fears arise about ourselves, and about our reception from others. Whatever their origins, they prevent us from living fully. Whether a threat is real (a situation where our survival is at stake—our security, our health, keeping our families safe) or imagined (a situation that might await us, something that might happen—or where we might be made to look foolish, for example), it is all about survival.

Those moments of fear and anxiety—with the constriction in our chest, the fluttering of our hearts, the feelings of imminent danger or potential embarrassment—can be overwhelming, because we think some aspect of our survival is at stake.
 

Perhaps even more than sadness, anger, or disappointment, we find it difficult to deal with fear. Fear can keep us from participating, from doing what we’re capable of—from experiencing and expressing the full range of possibility that’s available to us in being human.

The disempowerment, constraints, and stops, however, are not a function of the experience of fear but rather a function of the meaning we’ve added, and the decisions we made, at a particular time in the past. Another way of saying it is that it’s not the fear that is operative, but the automatic way we collapse something that happened with what we say it signifies. It’s that automaticity that keeps us stuck in place, and what has us lose our power. Old circumstances now have the power, not us.

When we stop going for it—when we step back, play it safe, or say we can’t do something—we might avoid the experience of fear for the moment, but at the same time we are reinforcing where we’re stuck. We’re limiting our freedom, and cutting off possibility.

Being alive includes risks, threats, and danger—the possibility of “bad” things happening is always there. In planning our life to avoid those things, we’re essentially avoiding life—obviously not the wisest way to be alive.

The Harvard Business Review might not be where you’d expect to read about fear’s pervasive presence, but the following appeared in a recent issue and I thought it apropos: “I get the willies when I see closed doors.” That is the first line of Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, one of the handful of superb novels about business. Heller’s hero and narrator, Bob Slocum, a middling executive at an unnamed company, is driven nearly mad thinking that decisions might be made behind his back that could ruin his career and his life, or might merely change things that are, while odious to him, at least bearable. Without transparency, Slocum is a quivering wreck. He’s not alone.

 As the second chapter begins, Slocum says, “In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid. Each of these five people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps), for a total of twenty, and each of these twenty people is afraid of six people, making a total of one hundred and twenty people who are feared by at least one person.” The company, in other words, is a pyramid of potential panic, ready to topple when someone whispers, “Jig’s up.” ²

There’s a big difference between being realistic about what happened once, and being resigned or stuck that things have to continue to be some way now or that they just are some way or they’ll be that way again. Instead of wishing we could change our past experience—a futile exercise—we have the freedom to choose our relationship to whatever it was, and that’s the beginning of building power.

That’s the beginning of creating possibility. Possibility invites us into areas of creativity, of side or another, unsettle old realities. Our own identity, say, or the certainty of some fact, the behaviour of others, or even the meaning of words can come to be seen and understood in new ways.

It takes enormous courage to try out new ways of being in the space where fear used to be, and by choosing to do so, we come to be authors of our own experience. Choosing requires courage—and courage leads to the ontological question of being. Courage is rooted in the whole breadth of human existence, and ultimately in the structure of being itself.³

Courage can show us what being is, and being can show us what courage is, uncertainty, of paradox and surprise. It invites us to bring things into existence that haven’t existed, take a step to one

* Thomas A. Stewart, “Seeing Things,” Harvard Business Review, February 2008

1 Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built, pp. 24-25
2 Thomas A. Stewart, “Seeing Things,” Harvard Business Review,
February 2008, p. 10.
3 Paul Tillich, The Courage To Be.

possibilities are there when you bypass walls which you place up

Nothing is so reckless as waiting for certainty—that’s a game we are sure to lose. Anyone who runs a business, chooses a mate, or just drives down the street knows there’s a risk. When the possibility of power, effectiveness, and freedom arises, we often find ourselves asking “what if the ball actually goes over the fence…. What if it doesn’t?” The question of whether something will happen or not is irrelevant to the phenomenon of possibility. There is no certainty as an inevitability, or predictability of the outcome—we are the ones saying something is possible. Real power occurs when we know we have something to say about the way things are—that we have access to the state of affairs beyond just reporting.
Creating possibility is risky business. Creation is a great risk, a kind of ultimate risk—the willingness to take a stand with no evidence. It’s hard to provide evidence, or make any real argument for a place where life can show up as a creation, but it is in, although within that that domain that the full world available to us in being human can be explored and lived. We cheat ourselves when we try to reduce the risk. What’s critical, what makes a difference, is to be left with a choice. And to be left with a choice means to be left fully at risk. Stimulating those risks is inseparable from living.

In virtually every human society, ‘he hit me first’ or ‘he started it’ provides an acceptable rationale for what comes next. It’s thought that a punch thrown second is legally and morally different than a punch thrown first. The problem with the principle of even-numb redness is that people count differently. People think of their own actions as the consequences of what came before, they think of other people’s actions as the causes of what came later, and that their reasons and pains are more palpable, more obvious and real, than that of others.

These are positions and ideas we all “wind up” playing out. When we “are” right, embedded in that truth is an equal truth that someone else is wrong—it’s not a matter of accuracy, it’s a matter of being. We can’t be happy, vital, and loving while we’re being right, making someone wrong, or justifying our positions—one displaces the other. The “rightness” of our positions also precludes us from being open to seeing other points of view.

We have a choice about what’s at play. When we elect to transform ways we wound up being, we move to a place of freedom, a place of possibility. Our points of view and positions can then move from fixed to malleable, from closed to open—where each person has an honoured place in the dialogue.

The stuff of wars, soap operas, divorce courts, Hamlet, and more all borrow on that equation, as do we. While we might wish we’d left that even-numberedness to our childhood and adolescence, it’s not to be. The dynamic of dealing with issues that are unwanted, yet persist continues to play out in board rooms, neighborhoods, marriages, and between nations—we justify, we blame, we complain.

Issues that are unwanted, yet persist can be a powerful impetus for change, as evidenced by the progress of human rights, for example. But there’s another world of things that are unwanted, yet persist—things that we complain about over and over, like some aspect of our relationships or jobs that is not working, and yet we find ourselves keeping around.

If we put what’s “unwanted, yet persists” together with “fixed ways of being,” we get what we call a “racket.” It’s a “mash up” of sorts (a web buzzword). In a mash up, one web application is combined with another, making both applications more productive and robust—you get something greater than the sum of the parts. If you mash up what’s unwanted, yet persists (which is most likely occurring as a complaint) and a fixed way of being, you also get something greater than the sum of its parts, but in this case, the yield heads in the wrong direction—the combination is unproductive or more accurately, counterproductive.

A complaint is some kind of opinion or judgment of the way things “should” or “shouldn’t be.” The evaluative component isn’t a commentary on facts that are true or false, accurate or not, but again how we think things should be. By fixed way of being we mean acting in a predictable and repetitive manner (like always frustrated, always upset, always angry, always nice, always annoyed, always suspicious, always confused, etc.). Whatever our fixed way of being is, it’s not something we have a choice over. It’s just there—it shows up automatically when the complaint shows up. It’s also worth noting that a recurring complaint doesn’t cause the way of being, nor does the way of being cause the recurring complaint—they simply come together in one package. The whole point here, though, is that it’s a fixed way of being, not a possible way of being.

The term “racket” comes from the days of big-city gangsters and street-level criminals who conducted questionable activities—loan-sharking, bribery, larceny—usually set up to get some kind of payoff, camouflaged by an acceptable cover above suspicion. In a “racketeering” operation, the efforts at concealing what’s going on behind the scenes can become quite elaborate so as to protect and ensure the success of the operation. We borrow the term racket as it’s applicable to our contemporary lives and because it carries with it many of the same properties—deception, smoke screens, payoffs, etc.

Sometimes persistent complaints originate with us, other times they come at us from someone else. It’s harder to see that we’re in “racket mode” with complaints that come at us, because it looks like somebody else is the persistent complainer, and we’re just an innocent bystander.

But under closer scrutiny, it turns out we too have complaints—complaints about their complaints. Our matching complaint might show up like, “don’t they understand, don’t they know how it is for me, why are they nagging, don’t they see everything I’m doing for them?” When we complain, we feel quite justified that our response is appropriate to the situation.

We explain the rationale behind our complaints to interested (and uninterested) parties, and point out how pleased we are with ourselves for taking the necessary steps to sort things out—we have a certain fondness for our attempts, for “trying.” We might get our friends, family, or co-workers to agree that we’re dealing with our complaints the best we can.

If they point out that perhaps we’re the one perpetuating the problem, we could feel misunderstood, put out, even busted. Seen from a distance, there can be something almost endearing about how we go about all this—as if it’s part of our authentic and sincere spirit—but actually, our rationale for doing what we do is another thing entirely. This is the camouflage or cover-up part. The deceptive nature of a racket and the allure of the payoff keep us from realizing the full impact rackets have in our lives.

The payoffs for keeping rackets around usually show up in several ways: being right and making others wrong (not the factual kind of right, but thinking that we are right and the other person is wrong), being dominating or avoiding domination, justifying ourselves and invalidating others (attributing cause to some thing or person other than ourselves), engaging in the win/lose dynamic (not “winning” like a celebration with trophies, applause, or congratulations to the opponent, but winning such that someone else is the loser or is lessened in some way).

 These payoffs are like facets of a diamond—although one facet might be more dominant than another (and we might deny or not be aware that some aspect of a payoff is active in our case), they’re really all at play.

The pull of these payoffs is often compelling enough to get us to give up love, vitality, self-expression, health, and happiness. That’s a ridiculously strong force. Those costs are the standard fare of a racket.  It’s pretty obvious that we can’t be happy, vital, and loving while we’re making someone wrong, dominating someone, being right, or justifying ourselves—one displaces the other. This is where choice comes into the picture.

Rackets, although one thing, have two forms of existence (somewhat like ice and steam are two forms of H2O). One form of a racket shows up as “I am X, Y, or Z.” The second shows up as “ahhh, I have a racket that is X, Y, or Z.” When we are the racket, it shapes and determines our way of being. But when we have a racket, it has very little power over our way of being. We have a choice about what’s at play—about giving up our rackets, our positions, our unproductive ways of being. When we elect to transform our default ways of being—being right, coming out on top (the even-numb redness, so to speak)—we move to a place of freedom, a place of possibility.

The question then becomes: How do I express my life? What would be, for me, the most extraordinary, created, invented life?  It becomes a matter of art, of design. How extraordinary are the everyday aspects of our lives; how rich our lives are, how full of opportunity, when we act on the possibility of living life fully.


Hundreds of flavours of ice cream, countless selections of movie channels, an infinite choice of mates, our daily round of work and play, our incessant getting and spending—the world of “more, better, different” is the air we breathe and its pull is ubiquitous.
It looks a lot like this: we search around and move around and do things and act and keep expanding and going for more or better and sometimes we get kind of stuck. But then we break out and we find a new place in life and we are off again expanding and growing and we keep on doing things and often get more from or better at doing that. And that’s what life’s like. Growing and expanding and learning and getting more, experimenting, trying things out differently. We might avoid the question “is this it” or “is this all there is” for a while, especially when we don’t have enough of what we’re after—like money, status, or comfort. But after we’ve got “enough,” the odds are we’ll visit those questions yet again.

More, better, different is the language of change—it’s comparative, defined and understood in light of the past. It’s about becoming. The language of possibility doesn’t necessitate changing anything. Possibility originates in the future, not the past. It’s about being, not becoming. Creating possibility is a stand, a declaration of who we are and what we’re out to create. It’s not taking what is and changing it—it’s taking what isn’t, and having it be. It’s about creating an extraordinary life as a place from which to come rather than a place to get—it’s about living life as a creative act.