Lessons in Love #6

This is a disruptive comment. It’s disturbing. But that’s not a bad thing. There are times when we need to be disturbed … and this is certainly one of them.

We live in a crazy world. It’s a world with 800 million hungry people where celebrities can spend over $140,000 for a Luis Vuitton hand bag. Let’s see, the price of that bag could feed 280,000 children in a third world country for a day. We live in a crazy world.

In fact, the American psychiatrist Milton Erickson felt that we are all walking around in a trance, almost all of the time. It’s common in self-improvement circles to speak about “waking up,” which usually means taking a step towards a more enlightened, illuminated state.

But how exactly do we wake up? Do we need an urgent alarm clock (sometimes), would a gentle nudge do (sometimes), or will we wake up voluntarily (sometimes)?

The Soviet writer Maxim Gorky wrote, “If it is true that only misfortune can awaken a man’s soul, it is a bitter truth, one that is hard to hear and accept, and it is only natural that many people deny it and say it is better for a man to live on in a trance than to wake up to torture.”
This is the same thinking that causes us to avoid the news. We’d prefer not to know, because 1. It’s dark propaganda, 2. We’d rather focus on the positive. But, 3. We might be staying in a trance.

There’s a disruptively different option that I call “riding the D train.”

If we’re in a trance, which I believe we are and that it’s a trance of disempowerment, then it seems of value to awaken, to de-trance. I’m fond of inventing words so I created D-Tran. I experimented with saying, “I was ready to D-Tran.” Didn’t work for me. For one thing, as I teach my writing and public speaking students, it’s very “on the nose,” ie, literal. So, I came up with a more playful term: the D Train. D, of course, stands for “disruption” or “disturbing.”

Riding the D Train describes waking up and we can hop on any time we want. The D Train will take us in a different direction than where we were heading in our trance of the moment.

Getting lost in our screen is a trance. We can burn hours on social media or in front of the television. Binge watching, anyone?

Riding the D Train means shutting it off, getting up, doing something different.

That’s disruptive. It’s disturbing … our trance.

I identified four progressive trance states: Trance, spell, stupor, and possession. The trance condition is considered normal. It’s unconscious behavior, continuing to do what we habitually do without question. A spell manipulates us to do something we would choose not to do, were we not “under a spell.” Being in a stupor … note my television analogy, and add in alcohol and dope. This is like zombie sleepwalking through life, no longer living, just existing. Possession is the deepest trance state, where we are possessed by the “other,” some force or person.

So, what does love have to do with all this, since these short messages are supposed to be lessons in love?

Love can break the spell.

Love with a capital L, that is - Universal Intelligence - is what will motivate us to hop on the D train and ride it in a different direction.

Some of us are aged enough to remember the comedian Flip Wilson’s Geraldine character saying: “The devil made me do it.” That excused every misbehavior. OK. How about Love made me do it? Which can validate every waking up strategy.

My wife called the other night to say that she was driving home, tired from a long day of work. Immediately, I had the thought: “I should give her a massage.”

Then I forgot!

But I remembered this morning and in an hour I'll be giving her the massage I could have given her last night, had I stayed on the D Train long enough (instead, I was … staring at a screen!).

But, as the saying goes, there are two ideal times to do something important: when you first thought of it, and now.

See you on the D Train. It’s a free ride.