Kelly Flanagan's Blog, page 5

The Reason Companions Feel Abandoned All the Time (and What to Do About It)

I almost completely ignored her.

It was near the beginning of a very busy Wednesday. I had behind-the-scenes promotional work to do for True Companions, and two podcast interviews about the book to record in the afternoon. My wife had a full day at her office and a school board meeting in the evening. She reached out to me around mid-morning and asked if I could use an app on my phone to place a lunch order for her at a local Thai restaurant, which she would pick up herself. I glanced at the text preview on my lock screen and went back to work. Fortunately, I was saved from the kind of inaction I would later regret by a word that popped into my head. I’d explained the word to a client earlier in the week.

The word was “habituation.”

The dictionary defines habituation as “the reduction of psychological or behavioral response occurring when a specific stimulus occurs repeatedly.” For instance, let’s pretend that when I put on my blue jeans these days, they are for some reason quite a bit tighter and less comfortable than before the pandemic. Just pretending of course, a little creative license. Ahem. At any rate, when I put on my blue jeans first thing in the morning they feel constrictive. I’m aware of the fabric squeezing me in unpleasant ways. By the end of the day, I don’t notice them at all. Why? Because my nervous system is programmed to quit processing the data. It decides the discomfort isn’t a threat to me as an organism, so it withdraws cognitive resources from feeling the discomfort and opens up the channel for other inputs, other sensations, other feelings. We habituate to uncomfortable things.

We habituate to pleasurable things, as well.

My last sip of coffee in the morning never tastes as flavorful as the first. My taste buds have habituated. Put your favorite song on repeat all day. It won’t be as enjoyable to listen to by the end of day. In fact, you may discover that you’re tuning it out altogether. You’ve habituated to it. The scent of the first flowers of springtime can be intoxicating after the icy odorlessness of winter, but by the time your potted mums decorate your front porch in the autumn, you’ve moved on to noticing the sweet rot of fallen leaves. It’s inevitable: exposure to something safe always results in habituation.

We habituate to our companions, too.

They’re around more than anyone else. They occur repeatedly in our lives. The things that once tickled us about them become things we don’t even feel any more. The things that once got our attention have been filed away as safe and unimportant, and our nervous system redirects our attention to other concerns.

For instance, when your favorite person in the world asks you to do them the smallest of favors, to order her lunch—just a few minutes and a few taps on a device, just a few calories expended to get her the calories she needs for her day—and you barely even notice the request, let alone consider acting on her behalf. Twenty years ago, I would have fought my way into and out of hostile enemy territory to retrieve her some pad Thai with tofu and vegetables. Now, I’m habituated. Now, I save my attention for the fresh concerns being thrown at me all day. Is it any wonder we can feel abandoned and isolated at times in even our closest relationships. We’re wired to abandon each other, in these small ways.

Fortunately, we are also wired to reverse our habituation.

According to research by Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen, which I present in True Companions, the “priming of our fragility” can radically reorient us. It’s what happens when you let in the awareness that all of life—the whole hard and holy ride, everything you are traveling through and everyone who is traveling with you—is temporary. Impermanent. Transient. Fragile. The dictionary defines “prime” as “to prepare or make ready for a particular purpose or operation.” To prime our fragility, then, is to take something that most of us spend our lives ignoring out of fear and sadness—death, mortality, loss—and to put it to use to resensitize ourselves to our companions. To unhabituate, if you will. Carstensen says the inevitable effect of priming our fragility is to become more present to, more grateful for, and more loving toward our truest companions.

On a Wednesday morning, I let my fragility be primed.

It made my companion more beautiful than mums in the autumn.

And I ordered her some noodles.

 

This blog post is a sample chapter from the exclusive bonus eBook you will receive for pre-ordering True Companions! Click here to pre-order True Companions and sign up for this exclusive eBook, before the offer is gone!

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Let’s Get Clear About True Compromise in True Companionship

Here’s a sample chapter from the exclusive bonus eBook you will receive for pre-ordering True Companions!

 

There’s a lot of talk in True Companions about growing together.

However, let’s be clear: this is not the same as blending together. For instance, every morning I make the same smoothie with the same ingredients: a handful of frozen strawberries, a tablespoon of peanut butter, a banana, and two cups of almond milk. I blend it all together and by the time I drink it, it’s impossible to tell where the strawberries end and the bananas begin.

Last week, several couples told me they were worried about becoming a smoothie.

I was advising them to compromise with each other about their vision for their relationship—career goals, ways of parenting, leisure activities, and so on—and they each expressed the concern that compromise would turn them into an unrecognizable version of themselves. Basically, I was hearing over and over again: I’m a banana and she’s a strawberry, and neither one of us wants to become a smoothie. I told each of these couples the same thing I’ve told countless couples over the years:

Compromise isn’t changing who you are, it’s changing how you fit together.

In true companionship, compromise is about creating spaces for each of you to be fully yourself, with approximately equal frequency over time. That’s the compromise. No longer do you get to do your thing or be in charge of your schedule or set your own course one-hundred percent of the time. Now, you get to do that about half the time, with all the celebration and support of your closest companion, while the other half of the time you return the favor.

This sorting out of mutuality is one of the blessed struggles of true companionship.

For instance, as I mention in True Companions, my wife loves adventure and I love…couches. She loves to socialize, and I love to…contemplate. Blending would be a disaster. You can’t carry a couch onto a kayak. You can’t go to a party and sit in the lotus position. You simply can’t go exploring from the comfort of your own living room. Smoothie compromise is impossible.

Rather, in true companionship, compromise is about making sure there is basically equal room for both strawberries and bananas in your companionship.

True compromise is the agreement that you’ll hang out with friends one night every weekend, and hang out by the fire the other night. It’s the agreement that Saturday mornings are for pajamas and Saturday afternoons are for hiking boots. And it’s making those agreements not begrudgingly but gratefully, because you recognize that true compromise doesn’t make you less of what you are but gives you the opportunity to discover even more of what you are. It turns out, I love hanging out with our friends on a Friday night and I love finding new trails on a Saturday afternoon. Compromise hasn’t diminished me; it’s expanded me.

May you put away the blender, and may you, through true compromise, become true companions.

 

Click here to pre-order True Companions and sign up for this exclusive eBook, before the offer is gone!

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The Surprising Secret to Apology and Forgiveness

Here’s a sample chapter from the exclusive bonus book you will receive for pre-ordering True Companions!

It was the best omelet I’d ever tasted.

My wife made it for me on a Sunday afternoon, a perfect combination of egg, cheese, tomato, and spinach. I know that sounds like a relatively insignificant moment in the grand scheme of things, but here’s the thing: we’d been in a fight for most of the weekend. We hadn’t said much of anything to each other in a day. I’d apologized for my part in it, and I was demanding an apology from her. She’s not a huge fan of men telling her what she has to do. We were in a stand-off.

Then, the omelet.

I grabbed some hot sauce, grumbled some gratitude at her, and sat down to eat my lunch. I raised the first forkful of egg to my mouth and paused mid-air. I looked down at it, and I remembered the conversation I’d had several times with several clients over the last several days. In each case, the client was in conflict with a loved one, and in each case the client was overlooking something important about their loved one. To each client I’d said the following words:

Apologies can be spoken in many languages.

By now, most of us have encountered Gary Chapman’s five love languages in one way or another. He articulated the five ways that love can be given and received, and they include words of affirmation, acts of service, physical affection, quality time, and material gifts. We each prefer one language over another. So, when someone expresses their love in a language we don’t tend to speak, we miss the message. And vice versa.

I’d told my clients that apology is an expression of love, too, and we often overlook it when it’s not expressed in our favorite language. I’m a words guy. I value words of affirmation. I offer my apologies in words. “I’m sorry” matters to me. However, with my forkful of eggs paused in mid-air, my own words came back to me: apologies can be spoken in many languages.

Apologies can be spoken in omelet.

In True Companions, I make many suggestions, and this is one of them: let them surprise you. It’s a simple practice, but it’s not an easy one. We companions get into well-worn ruts of expectations and accusations, beliefs about each other and grievances against each other. Our conversations and our conflict become habitual, even scripted. We know what comes next. Or at least, we think we do. One of the ways we protect ourselves in relationships is to feel certain about what others are going to do and why they’re going to do it. However, that kind of certainty separates.

Curiosity connects.

What if you sat down with your companions today, and you practiced some curiosity about how they put closure to conflict? Ask them about the language in which they like to speak apology. Let them surprise you. Share your language in return. Then, take the conversation to the next level by talking about forgiveness—the act of letting someone know an apology has been received and accepted. Sometimes that might be as simple as saying, “I forgive you.”

Sometimes, it might be as simple as enjoying your omelet with a grateful heart.

Click here to pre-order True Companions and sign up for this exclusive eBook, before the offer is gone!

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An Inside Look at TRUE COMPANIONS (The Pre-Order Bonus!)

If you pre-order True Companions, you can receive an exclusive pre-order bonus: an eBook called An Inside Look at True Companions: An Author’s Reflections from Writing Through Publication.

Here’s the Introduction from the bonus eBook…

Publishing a book is like giving birth.

I know that metaphor is overused by authors, but my female author friends tell me it’s overused because it’s about the only accurate metaphor for the experience. I’m also aware that I’m a man, so I have little right to make the comparison. However, the same female friends have given me permission to do so, given the lack of other appropriate metaphors. Having said that, True Companions will be birthed into the world on February 9, 2021. However, the manuscript was completed on June 26, 2020.

That’s quite a gestation period.

For a while, during that time of gestation, a book grows quietly and incrementally in the womb of the publishing house. Cover images are created. Proofreading is done. Typos corrected. Fonts are chosen. Typesetting is finished. The book is slowly growing and taking shape behind the scenes. Then, something entirely new happens. At some point, well ahead of its birth, the time comes to start telling people about it. You show people the cover. You describe the themes of the book to your audience. A publicist starts sharing it with news outlets. There are countless discussions and interviews that ensue.

And every conversation is like a new ultrasound.

Every time you talk about this baby of yours that is basically already finished, you begin to see new things in it. Features that are becoming more clear. Ideas baked into its DNA that are just now beginning to appear. It’s becoming more real by the day and, in that becoming, you begin to fall in love with it even more. With that love, comes new experiences, new insights, more nuance than you could have ever imagined. You realize it really is a living thing and you’ll be getting to know it forever. You thought you’d said everything you have to say about the topic, but now you discover there is so much more to learn and to share. Yet, the pages are already on the way to the printer. Where will you share all of this new insight?

That’s what book tours are for.

That’s why you pay an author to come speak to your group. At these kinds of events, authors don’t just read excerpts from the book. They share the new things they’ve learned about their baby from all the ultrasound conversations that preceded its birth.

In a way then, the document you hold in your hands right now—or your tablet or hard drive—is like a book tour or a series of speaking events in written form. It’s my journal of the days between completion of the True Companions manuscript and publication of the book. Each entry chronicles a conversation or experience that helped me to see this creation of mine more vividly, and I believe it will help you benefit from True Companions more, as well. Each of the entries are like an ultrasound picture, giving you a new image of the book from a new angle, before the world ever saw it. If any of the images are unclear, try not to blame the baby. The sonographer was new at this.

His hands were still a little shaky.

Click here to find out more about how to pre-order True Companions and sign up for this exclusive eBook, before the offer is gone!

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How to Truly Treasure Your Truest Companions

Before COVID, it was just a crabapple tree.

It sits at the corner of our house, and two windows look out upon it. However, until March 17th, the shades on those windows were almost always drawn. I rarely even noticed the tree. Then, on March 17th, I left my therapy office for a planned staycation, assuming I’d return a week later. The next day the NBA suspended its season, two days later our kids’ in-person schooling was suspended, and by the time I was supposed to go back to work, our whole lives were in suspension.

I didn’t work from my office for five months.

Instead, I conducted distance therapy from home by video, in the quiet corner of our house that looks out upon that crabapple tree. For months, that crabapple tree was the backdrop to every session. At first, it remained bare, branches click-clacking together in the final winds of wintertime. Then, ever so slowly, it erupted into every shade of pink, as its flowers unfolded into the warmth of springtime. Eventually, the petals fell and the new growth of summertime began. It turns out, new crabapple leaves arrive in bright red, before settling into the longer-lasting deep green of the year’s warmest months. Then, recently, I noticed something that broke me open.

On the crabapple tree, I could see red and yellow withering leaves.

At first, the feeling seemed like a bit of an overreaction, but I decided to pay attention to it anyway. I noticed grief and I noticed joy, all at once, the feeling of love and the feeling of love lost, in the same moment. You see, the crabapple tree had become a companion of sorts during an unprecedented time in my life. It had become my marker of time’s passage. The leaves’ birth and growth and death were a reminder to me of my own aging, of the transience of time, of the temporariness of it all. More than anything, those yellow-withering leaves reminded me of this:

It is almost impossible to truly treasure your companions until you cherish your time with them.

In True Companions, I write about a body of research that shows young people tend to value the spreading of their wings, the expanding of their influence, and the accumulation of their stuff, while the elderly tend to value being present, enjoying ordinary pleasures, and connecting more deeply with their truest companions. The research shows that this difference actually has little to do with age and everything to do with awareness. In other words, the young tend to ignore the passage of their time and their vitality, whereas the elderly live with their “fragility primed.” They know it’s all about to end, and this knowing makes it possible for them to live and love with the urgency of a true companion.

The crabapple tree reminded me that I am entering the autumn of my time here. Relatively soon, some ancient breeze will tug at my yellow-withering body, and I will be pulled free from the tree of my life. I will float downward, and I will land on the ground of Being, and my chance to love inside of human skin will be over. The whole thing makes me joyful about having been a leaf at all, about having had the chance to love the people I’ve been given to love. It makes me grieve the swift passage of that opportunity. And it focuses me, as I think about how I want to show up for my people for as long as I can.

In this, I am not alone.

Recently, I called my wife’s grandparents. Her grandmother is ninety. We suspect she survived COVID in January, though no one was testing for it at the time. Since then, the decline in her strength and memory has accelerated rapidly. As we talked, she could remember that they’d had their car serviced that morning, but she couldn’t remember why. She could remember that they’d gone out to eat afterward, but she couldn’t remember where. Relatively quickly, she seemed to give up the fight with her aging neurons and passed the phone to Kelly’s grandfather.

He’s ninety-three now and still improbably sharp. He told me what they’d had serviced on the car and where they’d eaten for lunch. We chatted for a while about current events. He told me a joke or two. Then, as the conversation was winding down, he told me something he’d never told me before in my twenty-plus years of knowing him.

He told me he loved me.

He was a little awkward about it, and he appended it by saying, “Of course, that goes without saying.” I told him I loved him, too, and we hung up the phone. I was broken wide open again. If it goes without saying, why did he say it? I think it’s because, as he looks at his withering wife and feels the imminence of her separation from the tree, his fragility is exceedingly primed.

When you are mindful of your time here, it doesn’t just make you feel happy; it makes you feel everything. It makes you feel the buds and the flowers and the new leaves and the green leaves and the withering leaves. And in the feeling of it all, you will feel the urgency to practice right now the thing that, in the end, you will have wished you’d practiced all along:

True companionship.

My book True Companions: A Book for Everyone About the Relationships That See Us Through is available for pre-order.  Find out more by clicking here.

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How to Save Our Culture with One Simple Idea

“Family dinners.”

I’d spent the day at a dads retreat, talking about how to intentionally shape the culture within our families and households. I was still mulling over the day when my 17-year-old son Aidan plopped down on the couch next to me. I decided to get his opinion on the matter, so I asked him, “What is one of the strengths of our family culture?” He didn’t hesitate to offer an answer.

Family dinners.

He said one of our “COVID positives” (our family’s name for the graceful, unexpected blessings we’ve found intertwined with this painful epoch in human history) has been the cancellation of most extracurricular activities, so the whole family has been able to gather at the dinner table almost every evening. He’s right—our family dinners have been a highlight of this tumultuous year.

But why?

Family dinners sound great, in theory. However, I don’t have many fond memories of family dinners in my childhood. I remember tense silences between parents, siblings storming off angrily, and canned green beans that became more inedible the longer you refused to eat them. So, the evening of my conversation with Aidan, I decided to sit back and observe our family’s interactions during the meal. I was startled by what I saw. We spent 80% of the meal talking about, laughing about, and celebrating one thing:

Our differences.

Caitlin refuses to eat anything but leafy greens, Quinn is only interested in the fried food, Dad eats them in order from least desirable to most desirable, Aidan isn’t interested in the food at all (his plate sits empty because he needs his mouth empty for talking), and Mom loves it all. Aidan wants to make comedy when he grows up, Quinn wants to make money, and Caitlin for all intents and purposes just wants to make peace. We are family, so we have a lot in common. And we are rich with diversity.

The celebration of differences is the difference between a joyful sense of completion and a toxic culture of aggression.

The whole thing made me think about how COVID has made a family out of nations—and out of humanity—once again. Prior to the pandemic, most of us were busy with our day-to-day lives—our extracurriculars if you will—and it was easy to pretend we weren’t related to each other, let alone living in the same household. COVID changed that. It slowed us down. It showed us that we are deeply interconnected. A microscopic bug has hitchhiked around the globe, from one human host to another. Now we are all keenly aware: your very breath can change my life, perhaps even end it. Now, it feels very much like we are all gathering around the same dinner table, night after night. As a result, our differences are on full display.

I think it’s safe to say we have not been celebrating them.

Last night, I went out of my way to create a dinner table of national politics—I watched the primetime news shows on two very different networks, from beginning to end. Like most people, I lean in one ideological direction (for what it’s worth, fifteen years ago, I leaned pretty heavily in the opposite direction), so of course I agreed with the gist of the content on one network more than another. But I hadn’t tuned in to agree or disagree. I had tuned in to watch the culture. This is what I saw, on both networks:

Not only were differences not celebrated, they were feared.

Of course, some differences are scary and do need to be called out and resisted. White supremacists at one extreme and anarchists at the other, for instance. These folks violate the rule of law and the basic rules of human dignity. In any healthy household, there are consequences for going out of your way to break the dinner dishes. However, the vast majority of our ideological differences fall into a different category of behavior:

Essential diversity.

Conservative ideas and liberal ideas are not whole ideas. They are a yin and yang. They are not meant to compete with each other, they are meant to complete each other. Together, they provide balance, not doom. Nevertheless, the folks on both networks seemed to suggest that if the other side was given any quarter, our way of life as we know it will come to an end. It reminded me of toxic family systems in which each parent is fighting for the allegiance of every child. It is the opposite of a healthy culture. And it makes for lousy dinner table conversation.

So, what do you say, siblings of mine from every walk of life and almost every degree of political ideology? Shall we allow the parents to continue to divide us out of their own broken self-interest? Shall we continue to be unwitting pawns in their power struggle? Or shall we take responsibility for building a national culture that kicks the toxic competition to the curb, celebrates our differences, and enjoys the relatively healthy completion that results?

The dinner table dialogue is ours to determine, if we so choose.

And no, as far as I’m concerned, you don’t have to eat the green beans.

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The Four Kinds of Anger (and How to Handle Them Better)

It looks like anger is tearing our world apart.

It’s not. Anger has no power to tear anything apart. Anger is just an emotion. It’s immaterial. It’s ephemeral. It’s a ghost. It can haunt us, but it can’t destroy us. However, the expression of our anger can be deadly. More specifically, when we get in the bad habit of expressing our anger before examining it, we can tear the entire fabric of civilization in two.

If you start watching your anger—observing it, studying it, learning from it—you will notice three important things. First, not all anger is created equal—there are at least four kinds of anger. Second, each kind of anger comes with its own impulsive reaction. However, with just a little bit of awareness, each one can be cultivated into its own wise response. And third, one kind of anger in particular is resistant to self-examination.

Let’s start with that one…

Defensive Anger becomes a reflexive and destructive habit in our lives. It is inherently aggressive. Sometimes passively so, sometimes obviously so. This is the signature anger of the false self. In other words, Defensive Anger is usually first experienced in adolescence, as kids develop their false and protective personas. It begins as a sincere desire to protect our good, beautiful, and true self from shame and rejection. However, over time, the goodness of our true self gets forgotten, and the Defensive Anger itself begins to feel like the highest good within us. Strength, toughness, and violence in its various forms become glorified above and beyond everything else. If left unchecked, it takes over the whole person. It has taken over much of social media.

Your Defensive Anger will keep you focused on the problems in everyone else. So, to handle it better, we simply have to ask ourselves, where is the Defensive Anger in me? As you redirect your focus inward, you will notice a voice within you, running through a litany of grievances. It blames others for your problems and shames others for their defects. It decides what they deserve. The wise handling of Defensive Anger requires only one thing: that we observe this voice and choose not to follow its commands. Then, we are free to listen for a better voice within us, a voice whispering of our worthiness, and the worthiness of everyone around us, even those people who continue to wield their own Defensive Anger. Especially those people. Doing this may feel like voluntarily climbing up on a cross and dying.

Maybe ending the cycle of violence always feels that way.

Frustrated Anger is very different. It happens when you have a goal—when you want something—and you encounter obstacles on the way to getting it. This is the signature anger of childhood. It’s a kid throwing a tantrum because they can’t have dessert until they eat their green beans. Of course, we never really grow out of our Frustrated Anger. Much of life can feel like a plate of green beans, with the chocolate cake just out of reach.

There are a number of wise ways to handle Frustrated Anger. On the one hand, what feels like an obstacle in your way may just be a problem in need of a solution. No need to start screaming; start solving. On the other hand, the obstacle might be an opportunity to practice releasing an attachment to something you don’t really need, or it might simply be a lesson in patience. In the end, Frustrated Anger, when handled well, makes the world a better, freer, or more patient place.

Scared Anger happens when we feel like our safety or well-being are being threatened, and our fight-or-flight response involves two options: get afraid and run, or get angry and attack. This is the signature anger of the limbic system: the natural and healthy part of us designed to keep us and our loved ones alive. It is the anger you feel toward your child right after they wander away in a crowd, you search for them in a panic, and you find them again, unharmed. “Don’t ever wander off like that again,” you yell. Fear and anger, two sides of the same threatened coin.

The wisest way to respond to Scared Anger depends upon the severity of the threat. If you are about to be eaten by a tiger on the Serengeti, you’d better run. If you hear footsteps rushing up behind you in a dark parking garage, you’d better reach for your pepper spray. In most situations, though, we don’t even know what we’re feeling threatened by. So, pause. Identify it. Ask yourself, do I need to flee from or fight this? Might there be a third way? Is it possible to approach this threat without anger, perhaps even with tenderness? Many a marriage has been saved by trading the expression of anger for the confession of fear. Most Scared Anger, when handled well, makes the world a more vulnerable and authentic place.

Righteous Anger happens when something bad is done to something good. It’s in us for good reason: it’s the anger from which most justice arises. This is the anger most of us feel about sex trafficking, for instance. It is the signature anger of the true self. It is usually first experienced in childhood, at the intersection of our worthiness and our wounding. When we arrive in the world, we assume correctly that we are worthy of love and belonging. Then, someone sends us the message through words or silence, action or inaction, that we are not worthy of their love and belonging. In this moment, the true self experiences injustice about the way it is being treated. These kinds of moments happen over and over again in our lives.

Righteous Anger is the urge is to protect the good thing, in us and in others. However, when it is Righteous Anger we feel, and when we are careful to protect the purity of that anger, it is never destructive. Its only agenda is the protection of goodness, so it seeks to protect the goodness in one thing while simultaneously remaining aware of the goodness deep down in the person or thing being resisted. True self in you sees true self in everything, and all action becomes compassionate action. Righteous Anger, when handled well, makes the world a more loving place.

Let’s review. If we handle our anger well, we can create a culture of peacefulness and progress and patience, of vulnerability and authenticity and tenderness, of justice and love, wherever we go. We can do so not because we don’t have anger, but because we are having it in the wisest way possible. So, what are you waiting for?

Stop expressing for a while, and start examining.

Stop reacting immediately, and start responding.

Stop destroying thoughtlessly, and start creating.

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If You Don't Have Something Humble to Say, Don't Say Anything At All

We’re in trouble.

I’m not referring to the global pandemic, nor the prospect of new lockdowns in our country as the virus resumes its exponential spread, nor the school year approaching in the midst of it all, nor the cultural upheavals around race, nor the most divisive election in our country’s history which is about to happen in the long shadow of all this turmoil. Sure, this can all make one a little tense, skittish, and twitchy. However, we’re not in trouble because we have a bunch of really important problems to solve. We’re in trouble because of our inability to solve them.

We’re in trouble because the key to solving communal challenges is civil discourse, which has two prerequisites: the awareness that you might have a blind spot or two, and the humility to let someone with whom you disagree show them to you.

Recently, I was in a conversation that was going nowhere, when I asked the person I was speaking with if he might have any blind spots. He told me he did, but he was completely aware of them. It was a strange way to describe a blind spot.

We’re in trouble because humility is an endangered species in the public square.

It’s been years since I’ve engaged in dialogue on Facebook, in part because I don’t venture into social media very much anymore. It’s not good for my soul. It’s not designed to be. It’s designed to trigger my ego and all of its slightly-less-than-humble reactions. The truth is, I avoid social media debates not because I’m some paragon of humility, but because I have difficulty mustering even an ounce of humility in that space.

Recently, though, I caved.

A friend had posted an article from a reputable source, with a startling headline. However, upon closer examination, the headline was startling because the article had been published in 2017 and the information it presented was outdated. I found an updated article from the same source that painted a more accurate picture of the topic, and I shared it. Along with it, I asked this question: “Will this more accurate data change your mind?” Because that’s really the question we should all be asking ourselves before we consider engaging in civil discourse.

If the answer to the question, “What would it take to change my mind?” is, “Nothing,” then you probably aren’t engaging in civil discourse.

You’re probably not even engaging in sincere debate. You’re simply advertising your brand. You’re telling everyone who you are and who you are determined to remain. And that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s a time and place for it. But the time and place is probably while you’re having a cup of coffee with a like-minded friend.

We’ve got important problems to solve, and we need to keep our public spaces free for actual civil discourse.

Humility needs some room to repopulate the public square. I know, humility sounds so sanctimonious. Most of the least humble people you know are the ones who are always hinting at how humble they are. So, let’s quit thinking of humility as a character trait that defines us, and let’s start thinking of it as a moment that happens to us. It’s that moment when you realize you were completely wrong about something of which you’d been completely certain.

Humility is the awareness that if you could have been so wrong about one thing, you might be just as wrong about many things.

I had a moment like that happen to me in 2008. I describe it in more detail in my forthcoming book, but suffice it to say, in the space of a morning, I saw my entire life from a new angle. I became aware of the ways I was clinging to a set of rules and beliefs and judgments that had served a very specific purpose for me: they’d given me a structure for living the early years of my life. A blueprint, if you will. I needed that blueprint. It made the hard and confusing parts of life tolerable for a while. Over time, however, that tightly-held worldview was making me intolerable. Josh Ritter sings, “How many times is the truth that you take to be true, just truth falling apart at the same speed as you?”

Humility isn’t a virtue; it’s the natural byproduct of a moment in which your truth fell apart, and so did you, and you both became a little more graceful because of it.

To be honest, though, sometimes I try to put that morning back in the box. I conveniently forget it happened, or I pretend it will never happen again. I start telling myself that I’ve arrived and I’m complete and my evolution is over. Surely, this thing I now believe is the right one. The final one. Social media has a tendency to trigger this self-delusion in me. It makes me unfit for civil discourse.

As this unprecedented year—with all of its unprecedented challenges—grinds on, may we do our part to make true civil discourse possible.

May we remember the moments in our life in which our super-sized certainty gave way, at least briefly, to the awareness that we were more than a little wrong. May we call upon that moment of humility so that it can guide as many conversations as possible. I plan to try. And when I can’t muster it, instead of advertising my brand under the guise of earnest debate, I’m going to do something else.

I’m just going to go get a cup of coffee.

The post If You Don't Have Something Humble to Say, Don't Say Anything At All appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

If You Don’t Have Something Humble to Say, Don’t Say Anything At All

We’re in trouble.

I’m not referring to the global pandemic, nor the prospect of new lockdowns in our country as the virus resumes its exponential spread, nor the school year approaching in the midst of it all, nor the cultural upheavals around race, nor the most divisive election in our country’s history which is about to happen in the long shadow of all this turmoil. Sure, this can all make one a little tense, skittish, and twitchy. However, we’re not in trouble because we have a bunch of really important problems to solve. We’re in trouble because of our inability to solve them.

We’re in trouble because the key to solving communal challenges is civil discourse, which has two prerequisites: the awareness that you might have a blind spot or two, and the humility to let someone with whom you disagree show them to you.

Recently, I was in a conversation that was going nowhere, when I asked the person I was speaking with if he might have any blind spots. He told me he did, but he was completely aware of them. It was a strange way to describe a blind spot.

We’re in trouble because humility is an endangered species in the public square.

It’s been years since I’ve engaged in dialogue on Facebook, in part because I don’t venture into social media very much anymore. It’s not good for my soul. It’s not designed to be. It’s designed to trigger my ego and all of its slightly-less-than-humble reactions. The truth is, I avoid social media debates not because I’m some paragon of humility, but because I have difficulty mustering even an ounce of humility in that space.

Recently, though, I caved.

A friend had posted an article from a reputable source, with a startling headline. However, upon closer examination, the headline was startling because the article had been published in 2017 and the information it presented was outdated. I found an updated article from the same source that painted a more accurate picture of the topic, and I shared it. Along with it, I asked this question: “Will this more accurate data change your mind?” Because that’s really the question we should all be asking ourselves before we consider engaging in civil discourse.

If the answer to the question, “What would it take to change my mind?” is, “Nothing,” then you probably aren’t engaging in civil discourse.

You’re probably not even engaging in sincere debate. You’re simply advertising your brand. You’re telling everyone who you are and who you are determined to remain. And that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s a time and place for it. But the time and place is probably while you’re having a cup of coffee with a like-minded friend.

We’ve got important problems to solve, and we need to keep our public spaces free for actual civil discourse.

Humility needs some room to repopulate the public square. I know, humility sounds so sanctimonious. Most of the least humble people you know are the ones who are always hinting at how humble they are. So, let’s quit thinking of humility as a character trait that defines us, and let’s start thinking of it as a moment that happens to us. It’s that moment when you realize you were completely wrong about something of which you’d been completely certain.

Humility is the awareness that if you could have been so wrong about one thing, you might be just as wrong about many things.

I had a moment like that happen to me in 2008. I describe it in more detail in my forthcoming book, but suffice it to say, in the space of a morning, I saw my entire life from a new angle. I became aware of the ways I was clinging to a set of rules and beliefs and judgments that had served a very specific purpose for me: they’d given me a structure for living the early years of my life. A blueprint, if you will. I needed that blueprint. It made the hard and confusing parts of life tolerable for a while. Over time, however, that tightly-held worldview was making me intolerable. Josh Ritter sings, “How many times is the truth that you take to be true, just truth falling apart at the same speed as you?”

Humility isn’t a virtue; it’s the natural byproduct of a moment in which your truth fell apart, and so did you, and you’re both a little more graceful because of it.

To be honest, though, sometimes I try to put that morning back in the box. I conveniently forget it happened, or I pretend it will never happen again. I start telling myself that I’ve arrived and I’m complete and my evolution is over. Surely, this thing I now believe is the right one. The final one. Social media has a tendency to trigger this self-delusion in me. It makes me unfit for civil discourse.

As this unprecedented year—with all of its unprecedented challenges—grinds on, may we do our part to make true civil discourse possible.

May we remember the moments in our life in which our super-sized certainty gave way, at least briefly, to the awareness that we were more than a little wrong. May we call upon that moment of humility so that it can guide as many conversations as possible. I plan to try. And when I can’t muster it, instead of advertising my brand under the guise of earnest debate, I’m going to do something else.

I’m just going to go get a cup of coffee.

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The Most Resilient Thought I've Ever Had

“Are you okay?”

I’ve just flown over the handlebars of my bike to avoid being hit by a car, landing on asphalt at 15 mph, my shoulder taking the brunt of the impact. I’ve dragged myself and my bike to the curb. This kind man has materialized out of nowhere to help. I tell him I think my shoulder is broken, but I won’t know for sure until the shock wears off. Five minutes later I know for sure.

I’ve broken my collarbone.

As the pain sets in, a completely unexpected and entirely salvific thought enters my head: What are you going to learn from this? Immediately, I know the question isn’t about what just happened. It’s not about the importance of bike helmets or the consequences of riding a little too recklessly. It’s about all of the pain and loss and limitation in the weeks to come.

By the time my wife arrived at the scene to take me to the emergency room, the question had morphed into an even more specific one: What is it that only this could teach you?

It taught me that I can endure lonely emergency rooms and painful x-rays on my own, because in the age of COVID-19, my wife could not accompany me for that part of the journey.

Later that evening, when I was forced to let her help me with my shower, I learned that I am really bad at letting other people take care of me. I learned that I resist it because it is vulnerable. I learned how to stop resisting it.

I learned that my kids want me to be strong and aren’t quite sure how to relate to me when I’m weak. I learned just how strong they can become when they need to be.

I learned that my friends like to be with me even when I’m broken.

I learned that my lack of time to simply be present and to relax is entirely a figment of my imagination. In reality, there has not been a lack of time to take care of myself but a lack of will. Once the decision was made for me, I learned there is all sorts of spaciousness in my life. I learned to settle into it once again.

I learned that at about 8 o’clock on a June evening in our neighborhood, when everything on the ground is in darkness and shadows, there is sunlight still touching the treetops. I learned that if I look at that long enough, it’s a reminder that I don’t always have to feel the light on me, as long as I can trust that it is somewhere up above.

I learned how to take the lid off of the peanut butter with one hand.

I would never choose to go through this again, but I would also never want to give back the very good lessons I’ve learned. So, I guess I will gratefully keep them both. And when the next thing in my life breaks, I hope once again the first thought to enter my head will be,

What am I going to learn from this?

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