I've avoided several orthopedic surgeries via yoga and weekly therapy. I am my physical therapist's Big Project, and results have been remarkable. She's been working so hard to put Humpty together again that if she spots me wearing the wrong shoes or moving the wrong way, she becomes distressed, exhorting me to do better and stop messing up her project.
At such moments, I consider her directions for a moment, and readily agree. New shoes will be ordered. And I won't angle my knee that way. Done! Will do!
But then she keeps on exhorting me. Exhortively! Greater and greater force and volume are applied until, finally, she collapses from the futility. Setting her jaw, she hisses "Do what you want. It's your body. What do I care."
It's very strange, but, hey, it's a strange country.
One day, in a flash of realization, I understood what was happening.
"Señora Vanessa, is the problem that I'm agreeing too quickly?", I asked.
She frowned and was silent. Señora Vanessa needs time when someone asks a question she's never been asked.
I continue: "Would you be more satisfied if I grunted, struggled, weighed, and only gradually passed a psychic kidney stone in my journey toward grudging acceptance? Must I clench and flail to show that I'm painfully digesting your instruction and committing to an actual behavioral change?"
Señora Vanessa was blushing. She'd never thought of it like this, but couldn't deny the truth.
I explained that I trust her, so when she tells me something, it slots right in. Done! Will do! She peered down at me on her massage table, marveling at my alien ways. It was like Merlin had appeared in her clinic.
My explanation would require laborious processing. It would hardly feel prudent to simply accept it, true as she knew it was.
Which, of course, is her point.
Señora Vanessa imagined that I'd been patronizing her all this time. My lack of flamboyant struggle meant I was being glib. Making light of the value of her substantial expertise.
"Sure, honey. I gotcha. I'll get right on that. Meanwhile, hey, can you work on my left calf a little?"
I've gradually come to realize that other people don't reframe as easily as I can. People think that shifts of perspective happen spontaneously. While we dimly recognize that we can sometimes play some minor part, for the most part, the world seems to compel our interpretation. When our world and our gods choose to induce a shift, we find ourselves in a new mental place. We have reframed.
The truth, though, is that shifts of perspective are always easily and instantly accessible. Freedom is like a smartphone feature we forgot we own.
This, by the way, explains the event that inspired my "Surprisingly Uplifting Examination of Suicide" . Readers have asked what actually happened in that situation. Was it some cosmic revelation, or heavenly consolation? Nah, I just remembered I could reframe. It's always easily accessible for all of us. We own the faculty!
As I wrote in this terse posting , we imagine that we control our thinking, though that's ludicrously obviously untrue (try not to think of a pink elephant). And, conversely, we imagine that the world controls our framing, which is equally crazily untrue. We have it backwards on both sides of our functioning. The truth is that we're saddled with thoughts that simply arrive, but we are infinitely free — this is our free will! — to pay attention to them and interpret them and contextualize them and react to them per our choice of perspective/framing/point of view. It really is a choice, and it's far more powerful to choose the framing than to try to control the thoughts.Perhaps I am a sort of Merlin, though not via special tricks. I just stopped ignoring the big trick we all possess. We work perversely hard to deny, ignore, and inhibit the faculty, occluding it more seamlessly than a solar eclipse! But it's slippery to try to reclaim it. The sticky wicket is that an ability to reframe is prerequisite to grokking reframing! It's the ultimate bootstrapping problem.
Let me step out from the curtains for a sec. Hi, I'm Jim! Writer of this essay! It's not yet the polished gem you're currently reading, but I'm realizing it will inevitably feel a bit foggy and slippery, like some of my other postings here [frowny face]. The problem is in this line you just read:
"The sticky wicket is that an ability to reframe is prerequisite to grokking reframing!"You can't frame reframing without a facility for reframing...which requires a facility for reframing. Even though it's tantalizingly easy, innate, and immediate.
So this is nothing like explaining calculus or music theory. You need to stumble into it yourself, and all I can do is to get you in the mood via metaphors, anecdotes, and contagious enthusiasm.
We reframe countless times per day, but don't realize we're doing it. It feels imposed. This misapprehension makes us forget that we are completely free to reframe. We think we're following when we're actually leading.
Some people suspect this, and are ripe to flip into full recognition. So I'm working like a summagun to coax them from a variety of crafty angles. Or at least offer some visceral sense of things so that the next time perspective shifts, they'll have some perspective on their perspective.
But I can't neatly hammer this home, because it's visceral. It's about your subjectivity; your placement of attention; your interpretation. All these things are immediately accessible, but not super "thinky." All I can do is stoke your curiosity.
Ok, let's get back to it!
As I laid pondering this on Señora Vanessa's massage table, the recognition began to extended itself (effortless daisy-chaining of insights is one of the benefits of lithe reframeability). I realized that I've experienced a subtler version of this impasse all my life. No one ever stops arguing when I concede an argument. They just keep going.
I always thought it was because they loved hearing themselves speak — i.e. they were really arguing internally, trying to persuade themselves. And while that's surely a factor, it's mostly because my agreement seems way too light and easy to be true. Where's the struggle? Why am I not clutching my forehead, yanking my hair, and bulging my eyes as I move an enormous mental boulder to foster a weighty change of perspective? There ought to be low moaning as I squeeze fresh fodder through my cognitive sphincter. So my blithe ease signals that I'm using empty words to put an end to the argument.
I am patronizing. I am glib.
Señora Vanessa's version was more extreme because Portugal is a country where people are defiantly, fervidly, proudly frame-struck. They haven't just forgotten how to reframe; they staunchly oppose it.
A great many people here remain in eternal mourning whenever anyone important drops dead. Why do Southern European grandmas dress in permanent black? Because by a certain point, someone has surely died. And they will not let go of loss, nor would they ever want to let go of it. Or let go of much of anything. They defiantly, fervidly stand their ground. Character means never budging one's perspective.
What makes the Eastern outlook (dare I say "framing") seem so ineffable to Westerners? It prizes the release of psychic binding, while Westerners (especially Europeans, and especially especially Portuguese) would never consider any such thing.I've been here long enough to watch the process unfold in real time. My sparkly 60 year old neighbor lost his 85 year old mother two years ago, and the sparkle has not returned. It will never return. And his friends, in turn, mourn for him, and the loss of his sparkle in their lives diminishes them, as well. A chain reaction of volitional self-immolation stems from a staunch unwillingness to let go of anything tagged "Existential".
And countless things earn that tag because high stakes create life's deepest richness — though the irony is lost that this very richness is what's lost upon self-extinguishment.
When the unthinkable occurs, violating our most emphatic red lines, self-extinguishment is the unavoidable result. There's actually a logic to it: "I can't survive X" would seem to compel us to dissolve upon X. At least if we're utterly frame-stuck.
See this series about how we're all survivors of multiple encounters with the UnthinkableAs I stroll Portuguese streets, I notice zombies. "We have feelings," they reason. "Deep, deep feelings. We prioritize our deep feelings, and mourning's not truly mournful unless it crushes our spirit with maximum drama forever. The ultimate expression of Feeling is a state of permanently resigned Numbness. The end game is to transform into a veritable fountain of numbness and non-sparkle. Such is life!"
And of course it's not just from mourning. One can become frame-stuck (aka "frozen perspective") in any context. In fact, that's what we like about this place!
Why has Portugal held onto its traditional culture so much longer than other European nations (e.g. dining culture here is an astonishingly direct connection to the medieval period)? An academic would attribute it to "cultural tenacity", which is true in a flattened, cartoonish view. But how is this stoked, moment by moment, in the minds of actual people? How, in their momentary activities, do they preserve old ways?
Frame-stuckedness! Frozen perspective! The cognitive sphincter of shifting perspective seals tight!
I'm not saying other places are particularly lithe about reframing (humans seem to range from "pretty damned stuck" to "quite impossibly stuck") nor am I saying that lithe reframability is always a greater good. It's much better for me, because I cope quite poorly with the aggregate results of whimsically self-imposed psychic burden. But I grew up in a thin pseudo-culture of slice pizza, shopping malls, and video games, so for me there's none of the nutrition a Portuguese derives from tenaciously clinging to Culture.
Just as there's a fine line between agreement and patronization, "liberation" is perilously close to "groundlessness".
Of course, the difference is all in the framing.
There is a moral component to frame-stuckedness. In many contexts, it's another term for "heroism".
