The 99 Percent Solution: The Last Self-Help Book
Reverend William Metzger
First Unitarian Church, Philadelphia, PA
January 8, 2006I had this idea for a self-help book. I would call it “The 99 Percent Solution: The Last Self-Help Book.” But I have never got around to writing it. So I have made it into a sermon.
The insight underlying this idea came to me in an instant during a very difficult period in my life. It followed my wife's death from ovarian cancer, and my heart attack and bypass surgery, and I was trying to figure out how to get out of a stagnant job situation. I was editing the magazine I had founded at the Theosophical Society in America —some of you may remember it, The Quest , a quarterly journal of religion, philosophy, science, and the arts. This was a satisfying project, but ten years of this was long enough, and I had reached the point where I wanted to return to parish ministry and felt trapped by my need to keep my health insurance.
“The 99 Percent Solution” changed my whole perspective. I regained my spirit, which enabled me to change the situation. I do not exaggerate. Whenever I felt like wallowing in suffering, “the 99 percent solution” could pull me through. I literally got to the point where I would slap my head and declare, “The 99 Percent Solution!”
The Buddha famously said that “Life is suffering.” With all due respects to the Buddha, I want to assert today that life is NOT suffering, at least not nonstop suffering. Of course, no life is without suffering. Loved ones die. Bad things happen to us, even those of us who are really “good people.” And even when we feel that our life is generally good, the news reminds us that there is a great deal of suffering in the world.
In his book Ethics for the New Millennium , the Dalai Lama notes: “Bad news is a fact of life. Each time we pick up a newspaper, or turn on the television or radio, we are confronted by sad tidings. Not a day goes by but, somewhere in the world, something happens that everyone agrees is unfortunate.”
But while the Buddha said life is suffering, he went on to work out a system to alleviate suffering. The 99 Percent Solution is my small contribution to the cause of alleviating suffering. I assert that 99 percent of life is made up of good experiences. Pleasant, even joyous experiences. Times of creativity and accomplishment. Energizing experiences. Thoughtful times. Times of letting go of thought. Times of reflection and remembrance of things past. Quiet times, peaceful times. Boring times, too, for these do not constitute suffering. The 99 Percent Solution asserts that no more than one percent of a typical life is in fact suffering.
Now I know that this seems almost unimaginable. What a ridiculous notion. I'm sure it seems to many of you that suffering can not be so trivial as to occupy only one percent of one's life. But yes, I want to claim that it is entirely possible to experience a sense of well-being 99 percent of the time. Some of that remaining one percent may be dreadful, but within the whole perspective of a life, it doesn't sound like much, does it?
But paradoxically, that's not even true. The one percent is a lot, for that one percent includes some of the most significant and meaningful experiences in life. While much of our life is composed of non-suffering, it is suffering that shapes our lives. It is suffering that gives depth to our lives.
Did you ever see the Dalai Lama? How does this guy manage to be so cheerful all the time? Driven out of his Tibetan homeland by the invading Chinese, he has certainly witnessed plenty of suffering. But he smiles and laughs all the time. He has even said that there was a good aspect to the Chinese invasion of his homeland. By forcing many Tibetan Buddhist teachers out of their isolation, the Chinese (inadvertently surely) enriched Tibetan Buddhism, and Tibetan Buddhism enriched the world.
So too there are good things about many of the unfortunate events in our lives. Life gains richness from pain and challenge. The point is that this is all a matter of perception. I think it was the philosopher Alan Donagan who wrote that we give “imaginative significance” to the events of our lives; we give meaning to experiences by how we think about them, by the significance we bestow upon them.
As Ram Dass pointed out in his book Still Here , there is a fundamental difference between pain and suffering, a difference that involves our minds and how we react to experiences. It is, he says, the mind more than outer circumstances that controls our suffering. We have limited control over outer circumstances, but we have great control over how we experience our lives.
“Negative” events contain positive aspects, as the Dalai Lama's example shows. So too “positive” events can have negative aspects, such as when being overprotective of a lifestyle we avoid challenges and opportunities that seem too risky. Yet it is often the difficult experiences in life that become the greatest source of satisfaction in the overcoming and that give depth and richness to our experience of life.
Life is lived within a flow of experiences—not singular and isolated events, but a continuous stream.
For example, we often speak of “midlife crisis,” but in fact there is really no such thing. Philosopher Lou Marinoff has observed that what we call midlife crisis is actually nothing more than change, and change is a natural part of the life cycle. It is not a crisis. Besides, as the Chinese character for “crisis” indicates, a crisis contains a danger… and an opportunity.
As Marinoff puts it, “midlife presents an opportunity for personal growth and fine-tuning aspects of your life that you may have neglected to your detriment.” Marinoff has been the leader of the philosophical counseling movement and the author of a book called Plato Not Prozac .
Now I know “The 99 Percent Solution” is a formula, and all formulas risk being stupid and flip. Such as “Don't sweat the small stuff. And it's all small stuff.” Of course that's not true; life is definitely not “all small stuff.” As I have been suggesting, while one percent sounds like not much, that one percent may be some of the Biggest Stuff you face in your life. (Actually, the guy who wrote that bit about “small stuff” later came out with a book in which he wrote about how to deal with the “big stuff.” Which, I guess, goes to show there is no such thing as a last self-help book, no self-help book to end all self-help books. Too bad.
So you have to take the 99 percent formula for what it is; it is a metaphor, perhaps, and not what we like to call “literal fact.” Life's experiences don't lend themselves to such precise measurement, and the good and bad experiences of life don't occupy measurable percentages of our time on earth.
Remember the term “imaginative significance.” We place value on experiences on the basis of their imaginative significance to us. The few moments when we say to another person, “I take you to be my partner, to have and to hold, to love and to cherish…” take on imaginative significance far beyond the actual time in which they are spoken. The words “I love you” can fill up our hearts and enrich our lives far out of proportion to the time taken by our lover to say the words.
So time is a relative matter indeed, and by holding onto such moments and investing them with imaginative significance, we transform our experience of life. These moments flow through our lives, becoming our very pulse, and remain with us over time.
We also invest imaginative significance in negative experiences. So, for example, an embarrassing or humiliating experience can be carried with us and change our experience of life well beyond the moments of humiliation. We take on the humiliation as if it represented who we are, giving it imaginative significance.
Perspective, my friends! We see that transcendent moments of life can stay with us, just as negative moments can. Can we not learn to feed those transcendent moments, to carry them with us over time, while letting go of the negative moments?
SO HERE'S THE FORMULA
When something “bad” happens to us—something irritating, annoying, frustrating, or enraging—first acknowledge this reality. I am annoyed, angry, whatever. Then find a way to express the feelings, without destroying relationships, then modify the circumstances causing the grief. Make your creative contributions, in other words, to the job or the personal situation. And it doesn't always require a “proactive” step. Surprisingly often, time alone changes the situation. By easing up, by leaving “breathing room” instead of being proactive, we sometimes enable things to work themselves out. Quite literally, by not worrying the situation, it eases.
Other times, however, sharing feelings and ideas will lead to helpful change. As relationships develop, we grow in our ability to recognize when we can influence another person—or not—and can come to know that in some situations resisting another person's authority to make a decision will not only be fruitless but may inspire other problems in the future.
When we have acknowledged our feelings, and expressed them as we are able, then we need to let go and focus on other matters. And when we let go, we come to realize that by far the greatest part of our life is good.
How we feel and how we respond to others is determined by all kinds of things in our lives, many having nothing to do with others. We can grow in our recognition of that fact by simply observing how we behave with others. As we come to know our own behavior, we learn that this true of others as well. We can become increasingly aware; we can often see that when someone snaps at us or criticizes us, it has less to do with us than with what is going on in the other person.
When we invoke the 99 Percent Solution, we strive to make all parts of our life meaningful—work, hobbies, family activities, friendships, entertainment, travel, whatever. We want to “be here now,” to be fully present in all parts of our life.
Self-help theories, including this one, can seem superficial; surely life is more complicated than this. Well, yes, it is, but much of the complication we introduce ourselves, and, let's admit it, the complication is to a considerable degree what makes life interesting. Creativity arises out of conflict; opportunities present themselves through danger.
So we don't want to eliminate conflict, for it is essential to the human story. We just want to find ways to deal with conflict better. When we free ourselves from irritation and anger we free ourselves to be creative.
One of the strange things about life is that we often do better with the Big Stuff than with the Small Stuff. When we face a really big problem—a health problem, the death of a loved one, a job loss—we tend to marshal resources to deal with the situation. Disasters, such as floods and hurricanes, bring out courage, strength, character. At such times, we don't have the luxury of being petty jerks, to put it plainly.
In the big things, we draw on support of others without shame, because the big things bring respect and acknowledgement of others while little assaults on the spirit often do not.
Because the little things can accumulate and acquire very large imaginative significance, they can be more destructive to the spirit than the big things.
Finally, I offer a little thought experiment. Think about a week—seven days, 24 hours a day, 60 minutes in an hour—a total of 10,080 minutes. One percent of 10,080 minutes is 100 minutes. Thus, in a typical week you can have 100 “bad” minutes in a 99 percent life. Without anticipating how many minutes you end up with, create your personal list of bad things in your life; jot them down and assign how many minutes you think each is worth. Don't you really believe that 100 minutes of suffering a week is quite enough, thank you? I thought so.
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