This book got its real shot with a traditional publisher because of my online platform, A Headshrinker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so I must thank the editors at Psychology Today for giving me the opportunity to write a blog for their website. I extend my thanks to my agent, Linda Roghaar, who through serendipity happened to be going through her inbox when my email query letter came through. The folks at Central Recovery Press, especially Dan Mager, had the life experience in both publishing and mental health that made our partnership such a natural fit. It has been an unexpected blessing that my publishing team could understand my work so deeply, even from the inside out.
A friend once said that your bridesmaids change through the seasons of your life. Those who stand up for you at your wedding may be different from those who stand by you through the birth of a baby, or an illness, or an important milestone such as this. So I thank the bridesmaids who stood by me through the making of this book—Usha Daniel, Gayle Marks, and Helen Nedelman. They loved me, supported me, and jumped up and down with delight at all the right places. I wish Carla Schuler had lived long enough to see this day, but I like to think she is somewhere beaming with pride while hosting a heavenly book-launching party for me with yummy canapés.
Saving the best for last, I thank my husband, Scott Miller. I love that he calls this “our” book because, in so many ways, it is. He has been my unofficial agent, editor, manager, and muse, pushing me to stay in the game and keep setbacks in perspective while bragging about me behind my back. He read every page of this manuscript, taking his time, soaking it in, wrestling and questioning and critiquing in his signature way. I smile when I imagine myself opening the book for the first time and finding a little square of paper that says, “Inspected by STM.”
My cup runneth over.
MANY YEARS AGO, I CAME across a greeting card entitled “Ten Things to Make Besides Money.” Here is the list: Make merry. Make do. Make sense. Make amends. Make peace. Make waves. Make room. Make time. Make love. Make believe. I loved the innocent wisdom of that list so much, I held onto the card and pinned it to the bulletin board over my desk at work. All these years later, I would be hard-pressed to come up with a better list of things that make for a meaningful life.
To launch our endeavor, let’s start with one of the most compelling aspirations on the list: make peace. If you’re anything like me, you long for peace. Peace in the world, peace with your enemies, peace in your families, and peace within yourself. Peace is perhaps the most valuable thing in all of life, for, as I shall define it, peace is the basis of so much of what makes for a good and satisfying life, whether it be in high-level matters such as a moral worldview and a sound economy, or in the immediate longings of ordinary, daily life such as a happy love relationship, contentment with one’s work, physical health, self-respect, and even a good night’s sleep. While it is among the most precious qualities of life, peace—for a whole set of reasons—is one of the most difficult things to make and even harder to sustain.
In one way, “making peace” describes the process of working hard to reconcile our competing needs and desires. We all know about this kind of struggle. We read about it in the news; we struggle with it in the personal politics of the workplace; we watch it unfold at the dinner table and at family gatherings. We humans are just so darn competitive. We claw for power and resist compromise. We love to win and we hate to lose. If peace is about giving up something we value or feel we deserve, we want none of it. This is true whether we are speaking of the external world, like the Middle East, Wall Street, or Main Street, or—as I shall try to show in this book—when it comes to the internal world, the world of the heart and mind.
Peacemaking involves shifting from a competitive mode of relating to one of give-and-take. It is a process that involves finding that delicate balance between fighting for our needs and wants and making concessions out of fairness and respect for another. This is the vital process that we must all undertake to live in greater harmony with ourselves and with one another. Many books have been written about this kind of peacemaking, both from the perspective of our global community and for those engaged in the spiritual, psychological journey toward inner peace. We strive to balance competing motivations: love for self versus concern for the other; the comfort of sameness versus the appeal of risk and growth; the allure of success and power versus the satisfactions of camaraderie and peace of mind.
But the phrase making peace has a double meaning. It also speaks to the deeper work involving the relationship between ourselves and reality. This may sound like a funny way of describing it, but I think our relationship with reality is one of the hardest things to face in psychological life. It takes maturity to sort through the realities of complex ordinary life—the highs and lows, triumphs and disappointments, and everything in between—and conclude, “I’ve made peace with it.” In this way, making peace with one’s life has a direct link to something else on the list from that greeting card—we are trying to “make do” with a reality that is less than our ideal. We are lending strength to a state of mind that allows us to move forward and get on with our lives.
This approach is at odds with the stuff of the modern self-help movement in which we are encouraged to view ourselves as unlimited potential. This trend is seductive and powerful, offered in both subtle and overt ways in religion, modern psychology, and the New Age movements. We long to believe that we are limited only by the limitations we impose upon ourselves. We are offended at the mere suggestion that we live within boundaries that we cannot change. It is not the American way.
And yet, there are many lessons to be learned throughout the wisdom literature of the great problems that come when human aspirations are not kept in check with human limitations. One thinks of Icarus flying too close to the sun, Sisyphus trying to cheat death, Adam and Eve wishing to know as much as God, or the Israelites building a tower at Babel to reach the heavens. Envy, greed, and grandiosity get the best of us. The global economic turbulence of the last decade heralds this message. Should we listen, we will be reminded at every turn that we are mere mortals, subject to limitations. And one of the great lessons of life is that denying this truth leads to all sorts of trouble and accepting it shall set us free.
As a psychoanalyst, I see my patients struggling every day with this central task—to embrace and work with the life they have been given. I think that we human beings have a deep, natural resistance to this psychological task and that this resistance is a fundamental obstacle in our efforts to change and grow ourselves. It is extremely difficult to look at one’s life and say, “This is what I have to work with. This is my personality. This is my raw material. This is the life I’ve been given—the intellect, the body, the particular sensitivities, the strengths and weaknesses, the parents, the siblings, the children, the culture, the upbringing. This is my history—what I have been given and what I have done with it. I can wish for a different life, but I cannot have it. I must work with what I have.” As the saying goes, “We must bloom where we are planted.”
This second meaning of making peace is foundational to having success with the first. It means that we honor differences, work within the confines of the reality of our situation, and rely on the resources we have rather than nursing grievances or fantasizing about some ideal conditions that will never be. While this approach to life is enormously practical, it is also quite profound. In fact, these truths are at the heart of many spiritual philosophies—from both the East and the West. In particular, I like the Rule of St. Benedict, the guidebook of monastic life that emphasizes stability as the basis for continual conversion. Benedict emphasizes that it is only through commitment to one’s life as it is that we can grow and develop along the spiritual path. So, too, the Buddhists say that acceptance of the imperfections and impermanence of life is the starting point on the path to self-development and enlightenment—a