We talk in Creating Course Leaders about climbing a mountain with no top.

What I have discovered about my already-always listenings is that they exist in a well with no bottom.  As soon as one already-always listening is distinguished, another one is revealed, one layer beneath, down ever deeper into the person I wound up being.

I’m reminded of the final lines of Wallace Steven’s Sunday Morning:

And, in the isolation of the sky,

At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make

Ambiguous undulations as they sink,

Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Downward to darkness, on extended wings: I experience an expansion of self-awareness as I dwell deeper and deeper in my already-always listening.  I have come to realize that everything I perceive is through these already-always listening multi-layered filters.

I meet another person and before they ever speak I have processed my perception of them though a complex system of signs and codes that calibrate my acceptance of their very being. Speech adds another set of filters. Prior or newly acquired background information about them fills in the gaps.  All this before actual experience.

Years ago I took a two-day interviewing skills seminar and the facilitator claimed that the majority of hiring decisions were made in the first ten seconds of an interview.

One story I tell about myself is that I have escaped the WASP strictures of my privileged white male upbringing, that I have grown into a progressive liberal man free from all the conservative stereotypes that label implies. And while this is true in a political sense, I know, now, that my already-always listening ingrained since birth is grinding away in the background. I know my hierarchies of what I regard as human acceptability.  I have been able to distinguish between openness in my head versus openness in my life.

I realize that while I may say I have few prejudices of race, sex, education, origin, style, or other markers of human potential, my comfort zone of friendship lies in a narrow range of parameters—very particular parameters defined idiosyncratically by the things and characteristics I value most, and aspire to, in my own life.

I once compiled a list of the one hundred books one must have read to be regarded as a civilized human being; and I meant it. I have preferential, already-always listening, hierarchies of colleges and universities, States, musical taste, countries and nationalities, clothes (shoes!), physical size (obese people trigger an automatic negative response: they’ve lost control of their lives), food and dining, the list goes on and on—or deeper and deeper into that bottomless well of already-always listening. All of the boxes are rarely ticked.

While once I might have characterized these traits as discriminating, in a good sense, I realize now how confining these already-always listening filters have narrowed my life experience.

Distinguishing these layers of already-always listening is heavy going, revealing layer under layer. Ultimately it’s liberating, allowing for the possibility that I can be free to be and free to act.

A final story (with due respect for our avoidance of storytelling).

Five years ago I was traveling alone on a month-long trip centered on my son’s wedding in Finland. I was visiting Tallinn, Estonia for a few bitter cold days between Christmas and New Years, having come directly from Finnish Lapland a hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle. There were few tourists in Tallinn, and the nights were long, cold, and dark.  Having spent many enjoyable evenings in old-style, wood-fired saunas in Finland with the brother of my new daughter-in-law, I decided to find something similar in Tallinn.

I located a likely candidate outside the old city walls of the city. I walked through an unfamiliar working class neighborhood to find the place, hesitant to enter given its down-market exterior and sketchy environs. Nevertheless I went in. A group of guys in the undressing area were in the final stages of a drunken post holiday celebration. They paid no attention to me. I showered and entered the dark, exceptionally hot sauna, where about ten men were sitting in silent steamy contemplation.

There’s not much to know about ten naked men sitting in a sauna in a foreign country. Doctors or ditch-diggers? Professors or thieves? Old school communists or progressive reformers? No way of knowing. My already-always listening feared the worst and I was apprehensive.

After a while one guy observed, in perfect English, “you’re not from around here.”  I explained I was from San Francisco, en route from my son’s Finnish wedding. Immediately I had ten new friends: instant chatter about Obama and the American elections; the silliness of Mitt Romney, the emerging dangers of conservative politics. The men wanted to know everything about me and my life—all well-informed, in comprehensible English. With no embarrassment one man offered to beat me with his bound birch leaf branches, and I accepted. I stayed for hours. The evening turned out to be one of the most enjoyable, profoundly human, experiences of my trip.

We are living in times of a global virus pandemic with no known end, a collapsed economy, and under the spiteful administration of, in the words of The Washington Post fact checkers, “the most mendacious President in U.S. history.”

Yet I dwell on the end of my marriage.  When I come to think I could care less about her—the “her” who forbids her name to be mentioned for fear her identity could reach the future ex-cons whom she’s interviewed over the past few years—something happens that makes me realize what a mistake of judgment I made.

On this past Wednesday my son Adam graduated from medical school, receiving an outstanding student award. Without comment I sent his graduation announcement to my ex-wife, thinking she would be interested in seeing this, especially given the past year Adam endured successfully battling lymphoma. She had once liked Adam, had helped him with advancing his medical prospects, for which both he and I were grateful. She didn’t respond.

There was no need for a response, and I question my emotions for being disappointed.  My own dictum has been put the past in the past. She told me about her resolve to end our marriage that she had clarity of vision, and now apparently her vision clearly tells her never to communicate with me, even to say anything about Adam.  The doors to her heart were never open, and now they’re locked.

She never regarded my family, my boys, as being part of any family unit we shared together. Family was—I assume still is—a charged, unhappy concept for her, especially one’s true family. Still, I had hoped there could have been one last moment of shared happy experience, having nothing to do with us. 

But no.

Apparently a joke went around in Wuhan during the current virus pandemic:

Client: My wife and I have been quarantined together for 14 days and we’ve decided to get back together. I don’t want to go ahead with the divorce. Can you refund the fee?

Lawyer: 14 days…hmmm….Let’s not rush it: I think we’re still in business.

Having lived under the same roof with my wife for seven months under the dark clouds of impending divorce, the joke is only semi-funny. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be funny, only droll in a sick sort of way. Divorce isn’t funny, ever. And neither my wife nor I saw any humor in the circumstance; it was sad and painful. The lawyer was definitely still in business.

For the past two days, continuing again tomorrow, I’ve been engaged in a refresher Landmark forum for graduates of the in-person Forum. This three-day marathon is online via Zoom, not an ideal platform for such personal work. On the whole it seems to be working well enough.

We’ve been revisiting all of the basic principles, grown “crusty” in our own practice as the forum leader puts it. Rackets, life sentences, always already listening, the way we wound up being, winning formulas, the genesis of identity. The goal—indeed, the title—of this online forum is Free to Be, Free to Act. Only transformation can achieve this. Not knowing anything, or insights, or figuring anything out. Being on the court with the reality of our lives is a lot different than being in the stands. Recognizing that the “I am” we say we are is a created identity, drawn up from our past, described in language.

Much of the material remains fresh in my mind having been core to the UCLA course last summer, and continuing with the bi-weekly reading of the 1978 Forum lead by Werner Erhard, Speaking Being. At UCLA, Werner Erhard led a third of the sessions, driving home the points in his intimate, sometimes confrontational, always compassionate style. It was an immense privilege.

I’ve been revisiting the work I did then, relevant in my life today.  I cry, still, when I read the letter I wrote to my wife about the racket I was running. That she said nothing in response, nothing at all, never acknowledging what I wrote in any way, remains a wound that can’t be healed. Perhaps she thought that any acknowledgement, even a Fuck You, would be providing some kind of satisfaction that she was so very unwilling to provide. She once told me she refused to be compassionate because she knew that’s what I wanted.

I wrote then:

Dear……,

Currently I am engaged in the Being a Leader leadership course. During the course I came to realize that I have been running, what in this course is called, a “racket” with you. I have come to see this is not a productive way of being and it has actually cost our relationship something I am no longer willing for you or me to continue paying.

While it is probably obvious to you, what has not been working for me, or you, is that my default way of being is being the “good” man in our relationship. By this I mean I have defined myself as the flexible partner, the one always trying to please and willing to compromise, as though these behaviors were admirable.

What I now realize is that the issue identified above has persisted because there has been a payoff for me in running this racket.

The payoff that I now see is that this racket has allowed me to be right, to occupy a moral high ground that when not appreciated by you allows me to be the wronged party. My racket has been based on the paradigm that there is always a right and a wrong in any situation.

What I have also come to realize is that running this racket on our relationship has cost me your trust, your love, and our marriage. 

I leave you with my word that in any new future we may create this racket will be no more.

Love always,

This racket of being the Good Man is my self-imposed life sentence, the way I wound up being. Somewhere deep in childhood I developed the idea that if I were not the good boy, I would be the bad boy. There were no boys in life, only good boys and bad boys. Bad boys lived in bad houses with bad families and did bad things.

I remember once, I must have been in fourth grade, I went home after school with the class bad boy, Eddie Messner. Funny how I remember his name to this day. He lived literally on the other side of the tracks, in a run-down house, with a run-down family. Cars on blocks outside. He was incredibly exciting. I don’t remember what we did, but at some point in the late afternoon his mother shouted out the back door that I had to go home. How I would get home had never occurred to me. There was no one at the Messner household to drive me home (that wouldn’t have occurred to them) so I set off walking in an unfamiliar neighborhood, not sure of where to go. Meanwhile my mother, having learned from one of my other friends where I had gone, had set out in her car looking for me, eventually finding me half way home, in tears. I wasn’t punished—I was never punished for anything—but firmly made to believe that something dreadfully bad had occurred, that I had skirted horrible consequences by the skin of my teeth, that befriending a bad boy like Eddie Messner would only lead to ruin. Good boys didn’t have bad boy friends.

Years later, long after I was sent to a private school where no bad boys went, I came to realize that Eddie Messner wasn’t bad, he was poor. And that to my family associating with a boy who lived in the squalor of poverty was behavior beyond the pale of their self-defined, and fragile, dignity.

To succeed in life, I would need to be a good boy, a refined boy, a reasonable boy. I couldn’t worry my mother by going off with the likes of poor Eddie Messner. At the same time my genteel mother covertly communicated that I couldn’t follow in my father’s footsteps, either. Poverty wasn’t the issue, very much the opposite. He was a handsome, successful businessman, a sportsman, hunter, fisherman, champion shot. He had played minor league baseball. He played golf. Turned out he was philander, adulterer, too. He divorced my mother to marry his best friend’s secretary. Oh no, don’t be like him.

The way I wound up being is to be the good boy, always. Good boys inevitably wind up being victims to their own scheme of life. Good boys try to please, not to provide pleasure but to avoid displeasure. Always waiting for the next shoe to drop, good boys try to anticipate where those shoes are treading, and head them off in another direction.

What I have learned from the women who have been in my life is to be fearful: fearful of their censure, fearful that they will leave. Twice I have been with women who were always already leaving, incapable of commitment. I wanted so desperately to please them, have them love me, have them recognize all the good boy attributes as something to admire, not grow to hate.

Being the good boy among other liabilities didn’t work.

It’s time to move on. No more good boy. No bad boy, either; maybe be just a boy. A man.

Free to be. Free to act.