Openings

There’s an old joke—and do not report me to PETA—about a farmer who buys a mule from a neighbor. The mule has a rep for being able to pull a plough all day long. But the farmer discovers it won’t move. So, naturally, he drags the mule’s former owner over and starts ranting.

“I bought this mule because he was supposed to be a puller. ‘Never stops,’ you said. ‘Pulls all day long.’ Well, this SOB won’t move. Not one bit. You sold me a slug. I want my money back and you take back this worthless animal.” And like that.

The former owner nods, picks up a two-by-four and smacks the mule right in the head. The mule immediately starts pulling at a good clip.

“You have to get his attention first,” he says.

Well, sometimes it seems to me that the Universe has to get our attention for us to get moving. This past week has been one of those metaphorical two-by-fours for me. But I didn’t realize it until I got a message from a friend asking about a quote from Rumi, the 13^th-Century Persian poet and Sufi mystic.

To some extent, Rumi is the Magic 8-Ball of life coaching; you can find a Rumi quote to answer any question about why your life sucks. But that doesn’t mean you should disregard them. In this case, the quote was, “You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.” On reading it, I immediately thought of two things, Kintsugi and Leonard Cohen.

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with gold; it’s based on the philosophy of wabi-sabi, embracing the flawed. With Kintsugi, the goal is not invisible repair, which disguises the damage caused by using the object; the goal is to celebrate the beauty of utility and the strength that comes from putting broken pieces back together as one. Kintsugi proclaims, “I have suffered, but I am strong and I am more than that suffering.”

The Leonard Cohen reference is from the refrain of “Anthem”:

“Ring the bells that still can ring
“Forget your perfect offering
“There is a crack in everything
“That’s how the light gets in.”

Bells can crack when flaws created during casting are struck by the clapper. Once cracked, a bell might be restored through welding, but often it needs to be recast—melted down and made anew. Cohen tells us not only to nevermind about the flaws (“forget your perfect offering”), but instead to celebrate them. Because when life hits one of our innate flaws, the ensuing crack is not inherently catastrophe; it can be an opportunity for enlightenment—for literally opening oneself up to the light.

And this is where a Sufi mystic, a Japanese art form and a Canadian poet came together to smack me with a board. Some things have transpired at work that have pissed me off a lot, culminating in last week being a complete adrenaline suck. They came about in a way that threw up trust issues the size of a Christo installation and I spent a lot of the weekend trying to reconcile myself to doing a job that holds no particular interest for me, considering other options and figuring out how to park my Drama Queen somewhere while I navigate a (new) org that has demonstrated itself to be both disorganized and deceitful.

(I’m not going into details. I’ll just say that a VP asked for my candid opinion—“no hard feelings” (a direct quote)—about whether moving my two colleagues and me into his group was a good fit; then he told the VP of my previous org that he has concerns about “people who aren’t whole-hearted” working for him. And that he can fuck all the way off.)

I do not interpret Rumi as advising us to be reckless in how we give our hearts; honestly, doing the same thing over and over (even in loyalty) expecting different results is just nuts. He’s reminding us that the cracks that come from the practice of love are not just the price of use; they are signs of strength and opportunities to grow. Taking a risk does not equal recklessness; never taking a risk, though, is the mark of sterility. It's finding that balance that's the hard part.

I’d been looking at this work tsuris from the perspective of how much pain it causes me. This weekend I realized that’s because I was giving it too much importance in my life. For the past 16 months I loved what I was doing and what I was contributing to; my value was clear to those around me. Last week that changed, but I have not. My heart, so to speak, was broken (yet again), but I choose not to close it. Perhaps I don’t give it to my employer as fully as I had done—at least, not to these particular people. But if I let resentment overtake me, that’s a self-inflicted wound, so no. That's the wrong lesson to take from this. 

This frees me to open myself to other things. I don’t know what other things as of yet. I might need welding; possibly recasting some major components; maybe some painstaking mending with molten gold; or something entirely different. I embrace my flaws and the light they allow into me. My heart is open.

Universe—you got my attention, ‘kay? Lay off the smacking.