THE PAIN OF ALLOWING A relationship to lose its original thrill is usually unnecessary, but it is still painful nonetheless, and great songwriters have written about it for ages.
In Jim Webb’s “Scissors Cut,” Art Garfunkel sings:
“If they ever drop the bomb,” you said,
“I’ll find you in the flames.”
And now we act like people
who don’t know each other’s names.
We assume that this loss of feelings is due to something external—the other person. Or we say, “The chemistry is just gone. Nothing I can do about that!” And so we try to chase it down again with a new lover. But it isn’t long before we once again lose the feeling. It isn’t long before you and I, once so in love, act like people who don’t know each other’s names.
Divorce rates go up and up as people confuse minor irritations and boredom with irreconcilable differences. (A man in Tariffville, Connecticut, filed for divorce after his wife left him a note on the refrigerator. Her note read, “I won’t be home when you return from work. Have gone to the bridge club. There’ll be a recipe for your dinner at 7 o’clock on Channel 2.”)
And most of this filing for a change of partners is not necessary.
Ask Elizabeth Taylor.
Confusing and collapsing the thrill of being high up her ladder with the act of marrying someone, Elizabeth Taylor was married eight times in her life.
However, it appeared to me, as I watched her once in an interview with Barbara Walters, that she finally “got” what the woman in the grocery store “got” in my course. The ladder is inside, not outside. And she can send herself up or down regardless of who is in her life at the time.
“If you ever hear about me getting married again,” she told Barbara Walters, “come slap me!”
She went on to describe how happy she now at the time of the interview, and how she had come to peace with how to create that happiness for herself. And it didn’t depend on some man or some new thrilling courtship.
As Colin Wilson describes it, most of us spend our time “upside down” with our negative emotions on top and our imaginative thinking submerged and suffocated. Then some external crisis or adventure (such as falling in love) puts us “right side up” again. We credit the crisis, though, for doing something we did internally. This is the biggest mistake we humans make: confusing the outside with the inside.
Perhaps someone in our family has a problem with an addiction, and we all go through the recovery process together, attending “family week” at the treatment center, talking to each other like never before. We end up feeling “high.” We are high! We are high up the ladder. We think the crisis did it. But it didn’t; we did it.
What we don’t understand is that, with practice and attention, we can learn to put ourselves right side up regardless of the external circumstance. Actually, right side up is where we belong. It’s our natural state. You can see this in children. The happy thrill of being alive. Only our negative beliefs can bring us down the ladder. And as Byron Katie so convincingly explains in Loving What Is, none of those negative beliefs turn out to be true.
The ladder is like a piano in that mastering it takes practice. But once you’ve gotten some skill in ascending it, your life will become happier because you can make and keep relationship commitments with the absolute certainty that you need not fear or respond to your own emotions. You can put the “thrill” back into a marriage or friendship any time you want to make that effort. You can allow that excited, optimistic, new feeling back into your life at any time.
Inner peace and total relaxation is what will float you up the ladder. When you lose your connection to that inherent peace, your energy begins to leak and you will notice yourself sliding down the ladder. Don’t ever feel bad about it, because at least you are now able to notice it, and noticing is 75 percent of the journey to enjoying your own life. Most people slide down their ladders many times a day and then stay down because they don’t even know the ladder is there.
The existence of this internal, psychological, neurological ladder is a secret to most of our society and culture. Most of us still believe that someone or something can make us happy, that it all starts on the outside.
But that false belief is the very mistake that led Jean-Paul Sartre to say, “Hell is other people.” Sartre was confusing the outside with his own inside.
This misunderstanding is just like the mistake of thinking the world was flat. People concluded that the world was flat because it seemed pretty obvious. Our senses looked at the outside world and reacted. Just as it seems pretty obvious that other people can make us happy or sad. But just because it seems obvious doesn’t mean it’s true.
The world is not flat. And thinking that it was flat kept people from venturing out. It kept people at home. Ancient couch potatoes were fearful of falling off the edge of the world if they went out too far.
Thinking that other people make us happy is the same kind of limiting superstition. It keeps us at home, on the couch, fearful of venturing out. Afraid that if we reach out for someone, we might fall off the edge of the world.
You can now see that this fear was a superstition based on a negative set of overwhelming feelings. You don’t have to relate to people in that cautious, restricted way. Your world can become less flat and more round, too. (In fact, you can have a ball.)