Finding my inner "Ruth-lessness"

Decisions have never been easy for me. This could be for many reasons, including, perhaps, some childhood traumas of feeling I had to make impossible decisions between people I loved (since these are a bit intense I will perhaps save them for the book version of this tale). There are also more positive causes of my indecisiveness: I have a nimble brain and can see things from many perspectives (very helpful as a meeting facilitator, not so helpful in the role of “decider”); and have a lot of privilege and access to many, many possibilities (from the 20 brands of yogurt at the grocery store, to the hundreds of meditation/personal transformation/spiritual/creative retreats and workshops that look attractive and that I have time & money to do).

Once as I was entering adulthood, my father, who is brilliant in so many ways, told me something like, “I think you will have some struggles in life because you will have trouble saying no to things.” While I don’t remember his exact words, I do remember feeling a bit angry and defensive and worried this could be true, and I have always remembered a plaque that my friend Sherin had in her dorm room our freshman year at the University of Chicago that said something like, “The problem with resisting temptation is that you may never get another chance.” A search for this quote just now turned up a version (on this fascinating list of quotes about self-control and temptation, worth a whole other blog post!!): "The trouble with resisting temptation is it may never come your way again. ~Korman’s Law". (Who the heck is Korman? I don't know).

I have used many strategies to try to cope with my difficulty making decisions, from lists of pros & cons, to coin-flipping, to simple (muscle-testing) and complex (tarot) ways of accessing intuition or subconscious knowing. It is therefore noteworthy that during my cancer treatment, though I had a few huge decisions to make (mastectomy or not; reconstruction or not; clinical trial or not), in general, life felt much simpler than usual. I had one clear priority; to get well. It was easy to say “no” to the many interesting invitations to events, travel and training opportunities, and requests for my time and energy on worthy projects.

Since getting done with cancer treatment (at least for now!!), life has felt in some ways more challenging. Many of the projects and commitments and passions that I put on hold during the treatment came crashing back in at once, like previously-parted waters of the sea. Unlike a drowning army, I have welcomed this torrent, and have been saying “yes” to many things. I’ve been feeling greedy – like I want to do everything. There is a wonderful saying “YES” to life in this (and, as my friend & fellow cancer survivor Efrat pointed out to me a couple of days ago, it fits with this season, the incredible burgeoning of spring). However, I’ve started feeling guilty and anxious about some commitments I’ve said yes to but not been able to follow through on yet. I have been having trouble finding my “no.”

Now that I sit and think about it in more depth by writing this, I realize that it is partly a problem inherent in this “discernment” period I’ve set for myself. In December at the generative somatics workshop, I declared “I am a commitment to discovering and fully inhabiting this new, naked heart.” And I set myself an 8-month timeline to make a series of decisions about what my focus would be during this next period of life. I have deliberately been holding open many possibilities, exploring them without deciding. This is hard!! And some possibilities go away if you don’t act on them (e.g. the registration deadline for one workshop passes as you wait to find out about whether I’ve been accepted into another one).

Still, even in a period of discernment, in order to have what generative somatics calls “centered accountability,” and what Robert Gass calls “impeccability,” one must sometimes say “no” to things. This can include renegotiation of past commitments. If I want to have time to reflect and be centered enough to make the big choices, I have to say no on some of the littler ones!!

Over the years, and especially in my coaching training, I have learned a number of great techniques to get beyond just coping with indecisiveness; ways to help myself and others make and stick to difficult choices. A lot of them have to do with finding the bigger “yes” that is the reason we are saying “no” to things (see William Ury’s Power of a Positive No). This relates to clarifying an organization’s vision and mission statements, and to the parable of the three stonecutters (instead of just focusing on chiseling stone or building a wall, what’s the cathedral we are building?). I also learned a lesson years ago when deciding whether to stay in a relationship: For some big decisions, the list of “pros” should be MUCH longer than the list of “cons.” And, there is a wonderful alignment coaching strategy I learned from Robert Gass, where you treat all the competing voices and feelings inside like a group of people making a consensus decision – it’s important to hear all the voices to have the best decision that most of yourself can get behind.

Sometimes, saying “no” even to something relatively small feels like it requires a sort of ruthlessness. This word always reminds me of a book I read as a child, about a group of girls who wanted to be pirates. One of them changed her name to Nancy because pirates had to be "Ruth-less." My parents did almost name me Naomi -- I believe the story goes that they sent out some birth announcements with this name on it -- in which case Ruth would have been my biblically-beloved mother-in-law, but I guess a Rebecca can be Ruthless. For the etymologically curious, I just looked up ruthless here, and it’s probably unrelated to the biblical Ruth, but has to do with rue, regret. So is my goal to say "no" without regret? Or at least, be able to move past the regret enough to say the bigger "Yes"?

I finally found my inner “Ruth-lessness” last night. I had been in a muddle about what to do this Thursday afternoon and evening, when I had 3 competing events I really wanted to go to, 2 of them in Milwaukee and one in Madison. I’d let go of the Madison one by finding someone else who was planning to attend who could sort of represent CORE there and tell us about it afterwards. But I hadn’t taken action on saying “yes” or “no” to either of the other two. Then, the news came that Frank’s mother had died, and the funeral is this Wednesday in Stevens Point. Frank is one of Don’s two closest and longest-time friends, who has been there for us in many ways, including driving with us last fall to Don’s dad’s memorial service, making it possible for us to go and take both Sam and Sarah, only 10 days after my double mastectomy. So there was no question that going to his mom’s funeral was a big “yes.” Given all the other things on my plate this next few weeks, this requires some rescheduling and renegotiation, and also made clear to me that I should plan to stay home Thursday night!! I immediately sent “sorry, can’t make it” messages to the two Milwaukee people, and felt relieved, not only to have said “no” to them, but also to have remembered how to find and use my “no” muscle. I keep wondering, though, why it seems to require life-and-death situations (or life-threatening diseases) to bring this kind of ruthless clarity??