Psychology and Other Stories (17 page)

Write down ten examples of things you've failed to get or goals you've failed to achieve because you wanted them too badly or tried too hard. (Use the back of this page if you need extra space.)

Margo did not believe she had ever wanted too badly or tried too hard; in fact, she did not believe such a thing was possible. All Ethan's and Jim Bird's assertions that nothing could be achieved through direct effort only strengthened her conviction that
anything
could be achieved through direct effort. Because they kept assuring her that she was powerless, she became quite certain that she was omnipotent.

(In the same way, of course, Jim Bird, after reading so many self-help manuals that assured him he was omnipotent—“Using the power of decision gives you the capacity to get past
any
excuse to change
any and every
part of your life
in an instant
!”—became only more certain that he was powerless. This is often what we do when confronted with an idea that conflicts with one of our beliefs: we exaggerate the idea, and exaggerate our own opposing belief; we make the familiar idea white, and the foreign black. This makes the new idea both easier and more enjoyable to combat. As Nietzsche said, even bad music and bad reasons sound fine when one marches off to fight an enemy.)

Margo ignored the instructions. She no longer even bothered trying to find the self-empowerment lesson hidden behind the self-acceptance doctrine; she simply wrote down whatever was on her mind. At the moment she did not want to think about the past, or mistakes she'd made, or her regrets. She wanted to think about the future. Wasn't that what she was here for?

She drew a horizontal line, representing her past, that, at the point of the present, branched into several arrows representing the future. Beside the arrows she drew question marks. Then beside the question marks she wrote down what she saw as all the possibilities.

Travel. (Norway? Korea?)

Acting again. (She had never been happier than when acting. But would this really be a change—or a regression?)

Horseback riding. (She had never even been near a horse. Would she like it? Well, it would be something different.)

Real estate agent. (Her friend Nyla seemed happy.)

Write a novel. (Because none of her plays had been produced in a long time, she believed that theater was a dying art.)

Divorcée.

She stared at this list for a long time.

THURSDAY
.

“Your conscious mind,” said Ethan, “is like a dog on a leash. It sniffs this and that and goes running after it.”

To illustrate his point, he sniffed demurely in several directions. There were titters. Margo and Brad exchanged a wide-eyed look.

“But our unconscious mind, the sum of all our deepest wishes and dreams and … what else? Just shout it out.”

“Hopes!”

“Our real self?”

“Life scripts!”

“Desires?”

“Okay, yes, definitely, but what I'm looking for is—”

“Limitations?”

“Fears!”

“That's it! Yes, the unconscious is the sum of all our hopes and desires definitely but also yes let's face it our
fears
, and our fears, let's recall yesterday's learning, aren't necessarily what?”

“Bad!”

“Uncomfortable?”

“Well yes, our fears aren't necessarily
bad
, though they
can
make us uncomfortable, but that's okay because our comfort zone is what? Everybody!”

“Comfortable!,” Margo and Brad shouted along with everyone else, but with a sarcasm that was detectable (or so they believed) only to each other.

“That's why they call it a ‘comfort zone,' folks,” Ethan deadpanned. “It's
comfortable.
And our fears and our dislikes are signals of
dis
comfort, but
dis
comfort is useful, isn't it. It shows us the limits of our comfortable zone. Like we said on day one: The mind
can't
make a heaven out of hell or a hell out of heaven—sorry, Milton. What you like is what you like, what you hate is what you hate. If you hate broccoli, and who here hates broccoli, show of hands? Yeah well, welcome to the club, ha ha. If you hate broccoli you don't say to yourself: Gee, I sure wish I liked broccoli, then I could eat a lot of it!”

Brad murmured in his Ethan voice, “I sure wish I was gay, then I could have sex with all those beautiful men!”

“Okay,” Ethan was saying, “so the unconscious mind, which is made up of your dreams and your fears both, your unconscious mind is the master holding the leash. That's why we never get far. Unless we let go and let our master lead the way, we're only going to succeed in choking ourselves on that leash.”

He had them write down seven “definers,” or critical moments in their lives, then analyze whether they had acted as the dog or as the master. Had they run off incontinently towards what they
thought
they wanted, or had they pursued their true desires? Had they done what their intellect said they
should
, or that which their heart said they
must
?

This distinction was incoherent to Margo. Why should the two necessarily be at odds? Why couldn't her conscious, rational decisions at least occasionally correspond to her unconscious wishes? In fact, wasn't the process of decision-making, of thinking a matter through from every angle before acting, wasn't this precisely the way the conscious part of the mind figured out
what
the unconscious mind, or the whole self, wanted? She put up her hand.

“Sorry Ethan, and everybody, but forgive me if I'm wrong here, but don't you sometimes do exactly what you want to?”

“Sure. That's what we mean by pursuing your true desire, Mar, acting with your true self.”

“But what I mean is, don't you sometimes
want
to do just what you
should
do? Don't you sometimes want to do what is right? Doesn't your … dog sometimes go the same way as your master?”

“Can I answer that Ethan? Well Mar, the way I see it is last year for example I set this goal for myself? That I would make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars?” There were perfunctory murmurs of recognition; Lottie mentioned this figure almost every time she spoke. “Well I didn't achieve it and I've been trying to figure out why. Now it occurs to me that one of my definers was this business deal I got involved in. I won't go into the details,” she said, then went into the details. “Anyway the point is, and Ethan correct me if I'm wrong here, but wasn't that my conscious mind
choosing
to get into that deal because I wanted it too badly? Wasn't that my dog running off ahead of my master? Like, instead of
letting
two hundred and fifty thousand dollars happen, I was
making
it happen?”

“Excellent, Lottie.”

For not the first time that week, Margo felt like she was drowning in some invisible fluid. “But what if the deal had worked out?”

Ethan and Lottie stared at her blankly. She turned to Brad for support. He gave her a steady, compassionate look, as if she were some crazy but lovable aunt who should be placidly tolerated. She hated him at that moment.

Later, at lunch, however, he agreed with her. “It's dumb, all right. Because if your unconscious desires are really unconscious, you can't ever know what they are. You can say anything is your ‘true' self. I came to this thing because I have a problem with commitment. Every time I meet a new girl, I think
she's
the one I want to commit to. But which is the true me: the one that sleeps around, or the one that wants to settle down? Should I be trying harder to be happy with the girl I'm with, or should I be trying to find the person I'll be happy with naturally, easily? Does settling down mean
settling
? Should I force myself to stay with a girl even after I get bored? Is that what love is? But then what if I meet someone new, someone—hypothetically speaking—intelligent, attractive, mature. Someone I can
talk
to. Should I just ignore her, pass her by? What if this is the woman I'm
supposed
to be with? But maybe I'm just fooling myself. Maybe this is just my way of wriggling out of the old relationship. But is it even possible to
make
yourself be happy with someone?”

Margo was disturbed by the intensity with which he asked these questions. This was not just rhetoric. He seemed to expect some answer. She felt as though he were petitioning her for advice, and did not like the implications. The word “mature” had stuck in her mind, and to combat the flattering possibility that he was flirting with her,
she decided to take offense: He thought she was wise, knowing, experienced! He thought she was old!

“Oh, what the hell do I know?” she said. “I've never been happy, not really. Not for any length of time. Anyway, who wants to be happy? Have you
met
a happy person lately?”

“I don't know. Ethan?”

“Exactly.
Happy people are morons.
Morons
are happy. Anyway, forget all that hogwash about your true self. You don't ever know how anything's going to turn out. All you can do is think it over and then do what seems right. Do what you want.”

“But how do you know what you want?”

She looked at him. What
did
she want? How could she know? What test could she perform? Introspection was a myth; her consciousness, like her eye, could never be its own object. Her self—that dim, immeasurable, unlocatable, forever forward-facing, outward-looking self—could never know of what it was made. She could only judge her desires retrospectively: whatever course she finally took, that must ultimately be the one she had most wanted to take. Thus her behavior was an infallible record of her desires. It was, then, in other words, impossible to act contrary to her own wishes. For even to try quite conscientiously to do so was to make acting-contrary-to-her-own-wishes itself her wish! At that thought, she almost heaved a sob for all the pleasures she had denied herself, all the paths she had not taken, throughout her life—because
had
she taken them, they would have, by that very fact, been that which she had most desired. But no, that made no sense. Because, by the same logic, she must have desired the denials more than the acceptances.

What did she really want? If the only way she could assess her own feelings was by reviewing her actions, then no one could know her less than she did, because she, unlike others, had to rely on memory, on photographs and mirrors, to get glimpses of herself. And why
should she feel such loyalty to a stranger? It didn't matter at all. Life was a map without wrong turns. She could do whatever she wanted!

Agh, but what did she
want
? She couldn't use her past as a guide, for even if she could detect there some pattern to follow, she would only be condemning herself to doing as she had always done. This would only prove Jim Bird's tenet, that we cannot change ourselves.

“Whatever you do,” she blurted at last, with a smile she did not have to measure out in advance, “whatever you
do
, that's what you want.”

Brad laughed. “But what to
do
?”

That evening after class she went up to her hotel room and called Bertie.

He didn't answer. She realized with a start that he probably wasn't home from the shop yet. This prosaic explanation seemed disproportionate to the momentousness of her act. She had finally broken down and called him—and he wasn't even home. How was this possible?

Her voice was still on the answering machine. She did not leave a message.

FRIDAY
.

The next night she was sitting at her assigned table in the banquet room, scrunching up her napkin and getting unobtrusively drunk, when John came over and asked her to dance.

She had been in a good mood most of the day. She felt, as she supposed she always felt at the end of a seminar, that her life was going to be different from now on. This feeling was not attributable to anything Ethan or Jim Bird speaking through Ethan had said. Rather, two thoughts from her conversation with Brad the day before kept returning to her. The first was that whatever she did was
what she wanted to do. The second was that she had never been happy.

And if you've never
been
happy
, said her mind gloatingly,
what makes you think you ever
will be
happy
?

Okay. She would never be happy. She was incapable of it. This thought, curiously enough, made her feel quite content.