Achtung

        Attention. Some crave it. Some shy away from it. Others can take it or leave it. Some have spent but a few moments reflecting on how they feel about it. Other’s try to fathom it. Have you ever asked yourself about, and then dared to understand, your relationship with attention?
        Dale Carnegie said that everybody wants to feel important. In our desire to feel important, attention usually plays a role. That is, the more attention we get, the more important we feel. The more important we feel, the better we feel about ourselves. The better we feel about ourselves, the happier we are.
        Obviously, there’s a fatal flaw in that construction of reality. If our self worth is defined by an outside source, such as how much attention we get from other people, then our happiness isn’t up to us. We’re at the whim of the world, which we have no control over. This is an extreme example, but it illustrates the point of how painful it is to look outside, rather than inside, of ourselves for self worth and happiness.
        By no means do I consider myself a master at deriving happiness from within. But I am aware that it is the way. I know that my sense of self, my self worth, and my happiness, are all inside jobs. I aspire to loving myself enough so that I feel good about me regardless of what’s happening in my life. I don’t always do it, but I’m aware it’s what I need to do. I would dare say that self love is the great challenge of humankind. Or certainly one of it’s great challenges.
        Entertainers and performers, and I include myself as such, are particularly vulnerable of falling prey to deriving too much of their self worth through the amount of attention they get. That’s what fame is all about. Attention. There’s something inside those of us who love performing in front of others that’s not there in everybody. That desire for lots of attention, preferably from lots of people, at once. A crowd. Big or small, we love an audience. Because we get to be the center of attention. And we love that. It makes us feel good. Makes us feel important. Makes us feel....loved.
        I struggle with this question: Is there something fundamentally wrong with wanting to be the center of attention? I have to accept it, because it’s the truth. To resist that is to resist myself. But if I derive so much pleasure from that attention, and that attention isn’t there, then I’m depending on the outside world for a sense of happiness. And I know that isn’t the way to go. So it can feel like a conundrum.
        I would argue that people who look for self worth primarily through their work are in the same boat as entertainers who need the attention of an audience to feel important. Both are looking almost exclusively outside themselves for something they can’t give from within. A CEO obsessed with power and wealth has more in common with a musician who needs the fix of an audience than it appears.
        My fear is that if this is the way I am, this attention glutton, then I’m never going to be happy because I’m counting on something else besides myself to make me feel good about me. But the truth is, I do love attention. So what do I do? I’ve set it up as a no win situation. If I accept it, I’m screwed because depending on the outside world for happiness is a one way ticket to agony. And if I say “I don’t want to be this way”, I’m fighting myself. I’m denying a piece of me. Either way, I don’t win.
        Being an extremist, I tend to polarize things in order to understand them. But I’m aware that isn’t the best way to gain clarity. So I’ll step back from my all or nothing thinking for a moment and try something else on this morning.
        I have to accept the fact that I love being the center of attention, because that’s the truth. But I realize in this moment that a part of me does not accept that. A part of me feels there’s something wrong with me for being that way. It is in fact my own judgment about myself that leads me down the wrong path. It is that part of myself that does not accept this truth about me that is in conflict with the rest of me that’s perfectly fine with it. This is called a splintered personality. A personality in conflict with itself.
        How well does that describe you?
        What I could do is completely embrace the fact that I love attention, without judgment, but not derive any sense of self worth from it. By embracing it, I’m no longer in conflict with myself over it. I’m no longer so splintered. I’m more whole. By not using it to bolster my sense of self worth, I’m not hanging my happiness on the outside world. This removes both horns of the dilemma.
        There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be the center of attention. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel loved, which is ultimately what attention is all about. For whatever reason, be it from my childhood, or from past lives, or both, it’s there. The world needs people like that. The audience needs the performer as much as the performer needs the audience. What we don’t need is to become stuck in those roles. To derive too much of who we are from that relationship is painful folly. It’s never healthy to always be the performer, or always be the audience.
        The big picture is that I aspire to love myself, regardless of the audience, while accepting that I prefer lots of attention over relative obscurity.
        It never ceases to amaze me how it all always comes down to self acceptance. To self love. In that, I suppose, our complicated lives are really quite simple.

Note: I would love to hear from those of you who shun the spotlight, because I’ve never been like that and I want to know that side better. Use an alias, but let me hear you. And fellow attention grabbers are of course welcome.


©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a stage full of Wrongs) Reserved.

Zen of The Sequoia

        Of all the places I’ve been to, The Giant Forest may be my favorite. I say “may” because declaring a favorite place is not something I like doing. Any more than I like declaring a favorite color or a favorite word or a favorite person. In our culture, ranking everything from “best” to “worst” borders on a societal obsession. And nothing is usually “the best” or “my favorite” in every context for anybody. For example, I love the color electric metallic fuchsia. A set of drums in that color would be outstanding, but I wouldn’t want to paint my car like that. Well, actually, maybe I would. But you get the point.
        The Giant Forest is located in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park in eastern California. I’ve been there twice, both in the summer. My goal is to visit the park at least once during each season within the next five years. I would love to wake up there one January morning during a snow storm. Cross country skiing, or simply snowshoeing, amongst the gigantic Sequoias and other massive conifers during a snow storm is my idea of bliss.
        Being in The Giant Forest is like being inside a lucid dream. It’s at once surreal and unreal. You’re humbled by these enormous giants, but at the same time you feel special, because you’re connected to a special place. You float while staying grounded. You’re peaceful and at the same time jacked with excitement. For me to say it’s zen, I suppose I’d have to find the mundane in the sacred and the sacred in the mundane, but I’d have a hard time finding anything mundane about the place. I’ll leave that to those of you who understand zen a little better than I do.
        How this place achieves all this is because of the Sequoias. The Sequoias are trees, and in that, very familiar to us. But the Sequoias are unlike any other tree you’ll ever see. They’re so much more massive than any other tree that we have a hard time accepting that these things are really...trees.
        These are living specimens. They grow. Just like we do. Just like every other living thing on the planet. But they grow so big that they defy our conception of what being alive means. They shatter the mind’s limited ability to grasp reality. Like music, the Giant Sequoias reach our hearts and souls directly. Not so much bypassing the mind as blowing it. While our mind struggles with their enormity, flabbergasted and in complete awe, our hearts are filled. Our souls connect. These are astonishingly beautiful living organisms. And like all true beauty, it touches something deep within our hearts. And like all living things, they have the potential to connect us to what’s alive in us. Just like playing with a puppy does.
        The experience of being surrounded by the Giant Sequoias is as spiritually and emotionally glorious as it is mentally stimulating. From a purely scientific, intellectual perspective, these trees are marvels of nature. Even the Ebenezer Scrooges of the world would have a hard time saying “Bah! Humbug!” to them. But it’s way more than just an expansion of the mind. It’s an expansion of the heart. Of the soul. It’s an expansion of our connection to the earth, of our connection to ourselves, and of our connection to our god, if we believe in such. What comes over me is a sense of belonging. I belong to this forest. To this earth. To humankind. To myself. To my life. If that isn’t a spiritual experience, nothing is.
        Being there for four days was not just a vacation from the outside world, but a vacation from my inside world as well. The usual chatter of my mind was much quieter. The silence of the trees was what I heard. It was deafening. And the deafening silence filled every crevice of my being until I was so full I could burst. Just being there was like being in joy itself.
        I’m going back. Soon. Any takers?.....

©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a Giant Forest full of Wrongs) Reserved.

Four Home Hanger

        In my closet, there resides a particular item. There’s something special about it. It stands out from all the other ones just like it. I still use it, and it performs it’s job admirably, despite the fact that it’s over twenty years old and has been “repaired”, more than once. This is more than just a piece of my history or a link to my past. Anybody who saw it would probably say “Just throw it away. You’ve got plenty of them.” But I don’t want to. I hope I have this thing until the day I die. Maybe I could even pass it on as an heirloom.
        It’s not a piece of clothing. It’s not a book or a hat.
        It’s a clothes hanger.
        When I moved into my first condo in Boston in 1987, it was the first time I had lived alone. In college, I shared a dorm room with a roommate, then a house with six other guys. Now it was just me. Living alone in the city.
        When I first moved in, I didn’t have that many clothes hangers. So when this one broke, I took a page out of my dad’s book and just duct taped it. Worked just fine. A pink plastic hanger with red duct tape holding it together. Dad was proud.
        When I moved across the hall, nine years later, the hanger came with me. The move broke it, so I just re-taped it. Dad was even prouder.
        Moving into a house on the cape, then an apartment on the cape, then back to my house, the hanger withstood the rigors of the road. The only move it didn’t make was when I went to California for the summer in 2006.
        The other day, I was going through my closet, and I took a shirt off of a hanger to try it on. And there it was. The pink plastic hanger with red duct tape holding it together. Still working.
        There are probably other hangers that I’ve had since my first move over twenty years ago, but I wouldn’t know. Because there’s nothing distinctive about them, nothing special. They blend in with all the other hangers. Ones that have been there for two decades look like the ones I bought last week at Home Goods. But the pink plastic one with the red duct tape holding it together, that one’s unique. That one, despite it’s obvious flaws, despite that it’s been hurt more than once and was pulled back together, has a special place in my closet. Silly as it sounds, it means something to me.
        Aren’t we all a little like the pink plastic hanger with the red duct tape holding it together?
        If we look back on our lives, honestly and openly, we will see that we are shaped as much by that which hurt us as by that which created joy and happiness and love. Instead of denying our pain, we can choose to embrace it. Not get stuck in it, but throw our arms and hearts and minds around it so that we can heal it. So that we can grow past it. So that we can wrap duct tape around it and keep going. In doing that we also understand that our pain makes us all unique. And our pain makes us all the same.
        For most of my life, I wouldn’t let love hurt me, because I thought that’s what love was. Love meant pain. To let love too far in meant being vulnerable to the inevitable. It looked like a set up. And I wasn’t going to fall for it again.
        But despite that, despite my trying to outsmart my feelings, they showed up anyway. In my past relationships, love showed up, albeit not at it’s full intensity. I loved, and was loved, but I felt a need to exert a certain control over it that stopped me from letting it all hang out.
        My last two relationships have been the most painful of my adult life, although in vastly different ways. But they have opened me up, because I let myself feel more than I had in previous ones. Eventually, I became open to letting them hurt me instead of staying in denial, or defense, or rationalization, or justification, or blame, or bullshit.
        In my last two relationships, I recognized that I’m the pink plastic hanger with the red duct tape holding it together. And in doing that, I set myself apart from the man I used to be. Not that he was bad. But he was limited. He wasn’t loving to his full potential. He was protective. He was too stingy with his emotions.
        How many of us don’t realize the full potential of our ability to love because we stay protected? How many of us don’t allow ourselves to fully feel? How many of us don’t let all of ourselves shine through because we’re afraid?
        They are one in the same.


©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a clothes closet full of hangers and Wrongs) Reserved.