Indeed: ‘Tis the gift to be simple, ‘tis the gift to be free. We love this song in my family. Complexity and vexation would be more realistic lyrics for us these days. But we love simplicity and freedom as ideas. There is a story we like to tell about when I was an infant, and I was having trouble sleeping through the night. Most babies will start to sleep through the night by about six months, but I was going on a year old and still my parents’ nerves were being frayed by my waking up and crying nightly. My mom went to multiple sleep experts, and finally sat down with one who said that part of the process would involve just letting me cry, and asked her “How long do you think you can lay in bed and listen to your baby cry?” My mother was a bit taken aback by this question. The whole idea of “lay in bed and listen to your baby cry” was confounding to her. You’re not supposed to do that! That makes you a BAD parent! I know this because decades later when she tells the story, I can see on her face that she has intellectually processed this information but still feels on a very fundamental level uncomfortable with leaving her infant in the crib to just…cry.
Eventually she was able to take this advice to heart and began waiting longer and longer amounts of time before getting up and comforting me in my crib, until soon I was able to sleep through the night. Shortly after that, my parents began leaving a copy of the New Yorker in my crib and I would just read that by my nightlight if I woke up, so that worked, too.
There’s a phrase for doing something to avoid guilt, even when it is not helpful for your overall goal; it’s called “over functioning.” Even though it was the right thing for me and for the needs of our family all those years ago, it was really hard for my parents to listen to me crying and not get up to hold me. They felt guilty. They responded by over functioning. It often turns out to be the case that when we are part of a system of relationships, whether that is a family, a congregation, even perhaps a country, that responding to events within that system in a way that makes us guiltily feel like we are not doing enough…is actually the right thing to do.
So we can see that trying not to over function, it’s complex, right? But I can speak to you from the perspective of one who consistently over functions, who has a hard time not doing what the guilt tells me to do. When I first learned about the damage that over functioning could do, I pledged to work on it and picked a couple specific areas that I was going to focus on not over functioning in. I paid very close attention, and I worked hard and diligently to NOT over function. I strategized, anticipated, planned, fretted, and engaged in some hard conversations in order to not over function. And when I checked in about this process with a colleague months into the experiment, they said: “It sounds like you are over functioning at under functioning!” So take all of my advice with a grain of salt.
I want to advocate for folks not to over function, both from a caring point of view, and also from an efficacy point of view. Simplifying and narrowing one’s focus can often be more effective than grand and elaborate strategizing. Reading the book The Dark Forest brought that idea into focus for me recently, that one small action can hypothetically be more impactful than an elaborate scheme. The Dark Forest is the second book in a trilogy by Chinese author Cixin Liu, a trilogy that starts with the book The Three Body Problem. If you have not read it, I recommend it if you’re into hard sci-fi, and if you have read it, I appreciate your pity as I attempt to give a short and comprehensible description here! In the book, humanity is facing war with an alien civilization from another stellar system, and has severe technological disadvantages. One of the effects of its technological disadvantage is that humans cannot have any interpersonal communication that is hidden from the aliens. The United Nations confronts this situation by starting the Wallfacer Project, where four men with plans known only to themselves, will be granted the full resources of the UN. The first three Wallfacers embark on expensive, large-scale research and building projects, including higher-capacity nuclear weapons, and exploiting the existence of water on other planets and moons in the solar system. But the fourth Wallfacer, an astronomer named Luo Ji, simply asks for a beautiful house to live out his days in peace. The UN eventually compels him to take some action, and so he tells them to transmit the coordinates of a random star out into the cosmos. As the military situation becomes desperate for the humans, the star in question gets blown up by third-party aliens, and both sides realize that Luo Ji has demonstrated the power to destroy the solar system, if he so chooses. The aliens stop their attack, and the assurance of mutual destruction leads to many decades of safety and technological progress for the humans.
Now, I don’t necessarily endorse mutually assured destruction as the basis for alien diplomacy, but this story did give me a new appreciation for the importance of non-anxious leadership that is unswayed by external pressures and turmoil. Literally everyone in the world thought that Luo Ji should have been doing more work as a Wallfacer, but he instead lived a happy, uncomplicated life, and thereby freed up enough of his mental energy to devise a simple plan for achieving an important goal. Too often, in our own lives, we measure ourselves by our activity level, instead of by our impact. Henry David Thoreau captured that in Walden when he wrote “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand;” And Thoreau notably lived that simple message in a cabin on Walden Pond, a lifestyle that made it feasible for him to get arrested as an early practitioner of civil disobedience. For many of our goals, we are better off simplifying our approaches, even when doing less makes us feel guilty for not doing more.
We can see the negative effects of over functioning again and again though. It is so tempting and alluring. One of my favorite TV characters of all time is Lisa Simpson, the plucky middle child from the Simpsons. She’s a model student and citizen, always doing what needs to be done and helping out, while her older brother acts out and her mother frets about her father’s semi-functional alcoholism. She’s so responsible, that in one episode her parents leave her in charge of her siblings, despite not being the oldest. But her brother Bart bristles at her having this authority and, typically, acts out. He makes a prank call to 911, and then he hits his head and gets a lump, and then he locks himself in his room and bangs his head on the wall “to make the lump bigger.”
I don’t think anything on TV growing up burned itself more clearly into my consciousness than the image of a distraught Lisa, trying to care for her brother despite his shenanigans. I empathized soooo deeply with the responsible family member, student, citizen that she was, being undermined in her efforts to do the right thing. But it is precisely that single-minded drive to do the right thing, to be the responsible one no matter what, that can cause us the most trouble. This over functioning can turn us into enablers, in some instances, or it can cause us to cut others off from the opportunity to grow and thrive in their own responsible roles.
And so, when I say that if you feel guilty you’re probably doing something right, what I mean is that not over functioning is hard. Many of us are socialized to over function, and resisting that makes us feel guilty. The antidote to this is both simple and incredibly difficult: don’t over function. Like they sing in the movie Frozen: Let it go, let it go, that perfect girl is gone! Sometimes we know that it’s good to step back from leadership roles for our own sake and for the sake of letting other leaders flourish. We heard a good example of why that is important in the story this morning. But that can feel so abstract, and the need for a group email to get sent out so imminent! In those moments, know that no matter how guilty it makes you feel to not step up and over function, you are doing something healthy for Northwest. If it makes you feel guilty, you’re probably doing it right. Sometimes we are giving too much of ourselves to keep something afloat, but we have to face the prospect of a program we care about DISAPPEARING if we do not over function. There is literally an existential amount of angst and guilt associated with letting this thing not happen. But if you are giving too much of yourself to that commitment, you need to back off, and if doing so makes you feel guilty, you’re probably doing it right. I took a sabbatical from volunteering a couple years ago, and it made me a better minister and a better family member. If that’s something you need to do, then I affirm you doing it. Please do not over function, please take care of yourselves and each other. This is too important for us to do otherwise.
Tis the gift to be simple, ‘tis the gift to be free, if you need to do less, you’ve got permission from me.
Peace, salaam, shalom, and may it be so.
Delivered at Northwest Unitarian Universalist Congregation
May 27, 2018
© Rev. Jonathan Rogers