And, I have a certain uneasiness, maybe sometimes a terror, of completion. This is probably because I confuse completion with ending, death, nevermore, impossible to alter or evolve, ultimate separation.
So I feel I am overwhelmed with incompletions. Paradoxically, this is hardly true as my life is full of completions. I get things done and done well. Yet, I seem to avoid looking at and recognizing the completions and closures that abound in my life.
I am going to use this post as a way to explore my feelings. From my experience as a counselor I am aware many people have similar issues. If you are one of those lucky individuals with a clear sense of process – of beginning, middle and end – I would ask you to post your words of wisdom to share with the rest of us.
What is a way I can reframe “completion” so that I feel safe and alive?
I just looked up the definition and the etymological root of completion. I could write a book on each of the definitions.
From the Latin root I get the picture of “fulfill.”
The dictionary offers several definitions:
- Collected together – ordered.
- Run its course – finished, done.
- Entire, full, to the greatest extent.
- Successfully throw to a receiver – boy, this is important for me as I am a message maker and need to get the message to my audience. If I have difficulty completing I will never fulfill my life’s purpose.
- Make whole or perfect – I am so stuck with not feeling whole or loveable/perfect that I project it on to my life and my work.
Hope never lets me complete!
There is an insight forming in my soul as I write. It is about hope. Hope keeps me from being aware of all my "completions." Hope keeps me focused on the future. Completion is a focus on what has been done in the past.
My painful childhood developed in me such a strong sense of hope and an strong identity with hope. Hope was my survival. To survive I needed to endure and hope. I hoped for rescue. I did not plan an escape. Rescue is wishful and passive. Escape is intentional and active. I did not have a plan! I did not have benchmarks of accomplishment. I had hope.
Like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, I thought sleep (even with all the nightmares) was the way to pass the time until the rescuing kiss touched my lips. Hope kept telling me all I had to do was go to sleep and dream. I did not need to have a plan of action with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
My identification with hope as the path to fulfillment was so powerful that all that I was actually doing to shape my life (when I wasn’t just hoping) seemed like a vague disembodied dream. I couldn’t experience process or completion. I only felt real and my life only felt real when I was hoping.
Hope can be addictive. From a neurochemical perspective, hope triggers the release of dopamine, the pleasure reward neurotransmitter that is the root of addiction. We call addictive, dopamine-producing drugs, dope. My dope has been hope.
How can I give up hope? Hope has been such a good friend. I could whisper to hope all my dreams. Hope just listens and smiles. Yes, the smiles gave me comfort, but what I really needed was courage and a plan. Hope doesn’t change things and doesn’t complete things. Hope does not get things done. Hope just produces more hope or fades and sends me crashing into despair. Hope is my dope.
Now I need to face hope withdrawal. I need to be conscious of process and completion. I need to no longer look at completion as death mere evidence that “my dreams have come true, my wishes have been fulfilled.” Damn! Dreams and wishes just call forth hope. Now I must set intentions for results, take action and live without hope. I can have a life of completions or I can have a life of hope. This should not be a hard choice, but hope feels so good and so familiar, can I really live without it. Yes!!!
My life going forward is shaped by completion consciousness. Each day is filled with getting things done and building more and more awareness of what was completed, what benchmarks were met, what I did. Noting how I move toward completion is an accounting system. I manage my will/intention/completion accounts each day.
Now I understand why taking a course on Conscious Bookkeeping included homework on completion. (I took this teleseminar in February) I wanted to give up hoping I would have enough money and learn how to keep a complete accounting of my financial life so I would know how much money I had. The warmth, sensitivity, and practical wisdom of Bari Tessler-Linden, who designed Conscious Bookkeeping, and the rest of the group on the teleseminar, created an opportunity for me to begin look at my financial challenges from a new perspective – my relationship to completion. Working with completion in this post has led me to the key obstacle to my sense of my daily accomplishments, my addiction to hope.
I am giving up hope and becoming accountable for past, present and future. Learning the art and science of accounting is clearly changing my approach, not just to money, but to counting up and counting on my completions in life.
All the books I have read and all the coaching I have received on being productive and living the life I want, ever included guidance on giving up hope. No wonder I never got results.
I just found this quote from the writer, Rita Mae Brown:
Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts.
And never hope more than you work.
If you are addicted to hope, please write a comment about your addiction and the possibility of giving up hope.I am so excited by being hopeless, I am going to give complimentary 40 minute consultations to the first five people who email me.
5 comments:
I look forward to rereading your blog, this entry. It is very rich in distinctions. Rich on both sides because I think I am good at beginning, middle and end but real weak on being accountable for the past, present and future especially the future and pretty weak on hope.
I wanted to post something before it became a thing I wanted to do, hoped I would do or have the perfect response. Great conversation Lynn. Thanks Kim
Hi Lynn - In my first contact with you, I'm responding to a topic dear to my heart. I too discovered years ago that I was addicted to hope. I noticed a pattern: I would crash in despair, and then, to rescue myself from that bleakness, would reconnect to my vision of what I could do and be, which would lift me up again. Later, after noticing that I never acted on those visions, I realized that I was only using them to medicate myself with hope. And that I was addicted to the energy of potential and possibility that I could only access in fantasy, but not make real. Potential was my middle name. I was deluding myself, at each time, of course, that I would take action - that's the fantasy. But all I needed was for the helium balloon to lift my mood and then I would let it go, without noticing, let the string slip away. Just back to business as usual. No actual plan ever occurred to me. Or if it did I forgot it promptly.
It was sobering to wake up to this pattern. I love the energy of potential. And I've found that now that I've learned, through much effort, how to plan and act - by not caving in to those fears that kept me frozen - the energy of potential is still there. Only now it's linked to a feeling of freedom and joy. Because it's not just a fantasy anymore.
I still tend to prefer beginnings to completions, because potential - that helium energy - abides in beginnings. And that's the nature of creativity, isn't it?
There's more, I know - completion has the onus of adulthood and responsibility, which my parents were not a good advertisement for, so I decided to pass. Completion means entering the fray of the world instead of safely watching.
As it happens, I'm writing a chapter (for an anthology book called Overcomings,Inc.) My chapter title is "Growing Up After Fifty: It's Never Too Late to Bloom" and it's partly about this. BTW, the chapter is almost complete - deadlines have always been my savior!
One last thing. A.H. Almaas, in "Diamond Heart, Book Two," has a chapter called "The Teaching of No Hope." He says that hope is not an essential quality, but an orientation to the future that rejects the present, and therefore cuts us off from reality, from who and where we are, and causes suffering.
I am now seeing that hope and potential are not the same. Hope is a thought, a fantasy of a future outcome. But potential, I think, IS an essential quality of the soul. It is the soul feeling its own light and its movement toward expression, its tendency for unfolding. There is "helium" in the soul - among other aspects. That is different. Hope (the personality's longing) can use that sense of potential to reassure itself and then go back to sleep. But the potential itself is real and can be liberated.
That's my thought on it for now. Thank you so much for starting this thread.
yours,
Tomar
When I started college in the 60's but then did not finish I continued to have college dreams until I went back and finished in the 80's. When I was a 911 dispatcher I discovered during a massage that different "calls" would come into my head when the massage therapist pressed on different parts of my back.
I discovered that once something is begun it has to be finished or it will continue to live underneath the surface until it can somehow get "released".
Now, I am extremely choosy concerning anything I begin or make a commitment to because at the same time I say "yes" to the new endeavor I know it will have to end somehow. As a current choir member I know that the last note of the concert is often the most important!
Preparing for a concert is good practice for hope to completion. We usually have a 3 month, once a week rehearsal schedule before performance. The new music is exciting and challenging. Mid-way through it can be tiring, sometimes disappointing (nothing sounds very good at that point)and hard to tell if the work will be worth it. But the concert comes along and we get to experience full completion. It is like seeing a completed painting which you weren't sure how it would turn out while you were doing it and now you get to know. And perhaps the best part is that there is always one stunning moment where we hit a perfect harmony together and all of the work has been worth it.
Without completion you are just punctured through with tiny, tattered longings (even if you don't know it). But it requires simplifying your life so that you truly have enough time for the things that are important enough to finish.
So, that is what I think!
Take care, Kathi
Lynn,
I must say this hit home on so many levels. Thank you.
I learned this lesson so long ago, and just as I was in the middle of "completion" To an emotionally abusive relationship... Here comes your wonderful blog.
Completion is scary only when one wonders "what is on the other side"... Hope is my Dope. LOVE that... still snickering.
The other side is always so much better than Hope.
As usual, you bring such joy to my soul.
Salli
Hi everyone and thank you, Lynn, for this thoughtful piece. I wanted to pick up on where one of the anonymous posters left off - the idea (revealed by a massage therapist) that we carry imprints from our life's experience in our bodies. I am an energy healer and I have found that our beliefs do get imprinted in our bodies (and minds) via the emotions connected to them. And, most importantly, it is possible through means that work with our energy channels and our subconscious - to clear old traumas, let go of old agreements and shift our beliefs on a very deep level to new ones that serve us better. If anyone reading this is interested in a free means to do those things, let me know and I'll direct you to the relevant website. With great love, Ellen
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