Next Stop, Damascus

Stephen Covey claimed that being proactive – the first of his seven habits of highly effective people – was the foundation of all of them.  I thought being proactive meant doing things;  hadn’t given thought to it meaning doing the right thing at the most effective time. Hearing him talk about it opened my eyes to seeing being proactive as so much more.  

Until listening to The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, i'd never thought about it in the context of taking conscious, aware control over my own life, focusing on what I’m doing at this present moment, instead of letting myself get all sorts of distracted by other things.  That includes knowing what my values are, knowing what I want to accomplish in my life in THIS moment, setting my intentions, determining my goals, and doing all in my power to achieve them, then move on to the next. 

Had never considered before that It’s impossible to know what I want to accomplish without first knowing my basic values.  Seems simple stupid, but had missed it entirely.

Before we can be proactive, we must first be awake & aware.  For me, that was difficult, even painful.  There were things I did not want to see, things I felt safest ignoring.  Slowly, slowly, it sunk in that to  be true to my own self, I had to get past that, had to discover who that self was. 

My eyes were opening to the fact that I had to be more in sync with what was really & truly important to me if I was ever to respond more effectively to events, spot opportunities, & create my own life.

This was totally new to me.  Although it seemed to come naturally to John, it was not what I’d seen mirrored by my family.  

Now that Dr. Covey had brought it up, it struck me that my family aggressively ignored what was right in front of our noses.  Be awake, aware?  Scary!  Way easier to filter out the potentially troublesome, to see only what felt safe & manageable.  At least, that was how it felt to me, the youngest.

Maybe that was one of my saving graces - being the youngest, by many years.  Being so separated by age, it was easier to get a sort of overview on my older brothers' & sister's  various approaches to life.  It makes sense to me that, from the time I could watch body language & grasp differences in vocal tones, it would have been clear which family members had weight & which did not.   

Of all the members in the family, the one with the least weight was Mom.  Maybe that’s one reason she seemed the antithesis of being proactive. 

I can imagine her friends, drop-jawed at the idea of Mom as non-active.  Kay?!  Oh, she did a lot, but it was reactive.   She was a marvel at doing something for someone else, responding to another’s needs.  Where she had on blinders was when it came to doing something that would directly benefit herself.  That, in her eyes, would be the great no-no. 

Not only did Mom not see any reason to change that aspect of her life, she didn’t think it was possible.  “I’ve always been that way,” was her explanation. 

In 1997, all that changed, when our road to DisneyWorld became her road to Damascus. 

Driving down to Florida, she had her choice of a mixture of audiotapes, including her favorite musicians, recordings of Prairie Home Companion, and some of personal dynamics coaches.  On the first leg, from Bryn Athyn to Williamsburg, we’d listened to Marianne Williamson discuss relationships.  The next day, after lunch, I flipped in Tape 1 of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. 

We’d had some interesting discussions as we listened to Marianne talk about relationships, but it never came up at dinner or later as we settled into our room. I certainly wasn’t looking for any special interest in hearing Stephen Covey, in spite of his impact on me. 

As we approached Fayetteville, Dr. Covey introduced the general idea of the 7 Habits.  Talking about paradigm shifts, he used Pasteur’s germ theory to explain how the way people viewed disease completely changed.  In an instant, people who’d ridiculed the possibility that organisms invisible to the eye could cause devastating disease completely changed their minds.  Once they saw the value, their paradigm shifted. 

Dr. Covey talked about this happens with us, when we discover something to be true & valuable.  His goal was to shift our paradigms from ones that were limiting to ones that were effective.    

As we started towards Florence, he began to talk about the first habit – Be Proactive.  

Mom was quiet, but I didn’t think much of it – guess I figured she was dozing off.  Hardly.  As Dr. Covey came to the end of a sentence, Mom touched my arm – “Please, play it again.”  

Startled, I asked her what she wanted.  “Please, would you play that last part again.”  I did.  And she asked again & again for me to replay it.  Mom must have listened to that one sentence at least four times, maybe more.

“Between stimulus & response is the moment when 

you can choose your response.”

Mom asked if we could pull off at the next exit  for a cup of coffee.  She had to talk out loud about what she had heard. 

In all of her life, Mom had never thought about changing the way she’d always responded.  Her ingrained reactions to things were as much a part of her being as the color of her hair or her height.  Until now.  Now, she realized, she could choose to do things differently, to look at them differently, to experience them differently.

Talk about a paradigm shift!

I will never forget that first conversation, her dazed amazement at a possibility she’d never considered.  There is stimulus and there is response AND there is an opportunity for us to consciously choose our response.  This was radical stuff for her!  She’d talked about free will all of her life, but she’d never experienced it in such a living way before. 

With that, Mom started her journey toward healthier self-awareness.  She was born in 1910, raised to think of women & especially wives & absolutely mothers as doing what others – particularly males – asked.  A healthy sense of self was never part of that perspective.  Until that moment.   If someone asks you for something & it is inconvenient or even detrimental for you to comply, it’s okay to say no.  What a wild idea! 

The possibility that she had an inner compass was a radical departure for a woman raised by Victorian parents.  It was the beginning of Mom’s dawning awareness that we need to know what our true values are, not just what we think they should be.  Revolutionary!  She’d never thought of using her imagination to come up with different responses to her longtime ways of dealing with things, particularly with family issues.  Mom had always known she had the freedom to act, but she had not connected that with her freedom to choose, to pick a different response from the one she & others had come to expect. 

Just as he had me years before, Stephen Covey had set Mom on the new road!

A Brahman saw the Buddha resting under a tree in meditation.

The Brahman was impressed with the Buddha's way.

He asked, "Are you a god?"

"No, Brahman, I'm not a god."

"Are you an angel?"

"No," replied the Buddha.

"You must be a spirit, then?"

"I am not a spirit," said the Buddha.

"Then, what are you?"

"I am awake."