Super Stars Wanting More?

Why would Super Bowl star quarterback Tom Brady have to cheat? And then lie about it? The media, as you probably know, is referring to the incident as “deflategate.” (I find myself wondering when—please sometime—the media will move on to some other, perhaps more original, words to describe these debacles.)

“I have no knowledge of any wrong doing,” Brady told reporters. But then he refused to reveal his emails and, unfortunately for him, the guys in the locker room who were pumping the footballs—or not--shared theirs. According to sports reporter, Bob Costas, Brady “knowingly broke an established rule.”

I’m not a football fan and even I know who Tom Brady is. Even I know what an amazing quarterback the Patriots have.

Not for the first time, I am staggered by the question of how much is enough?  How much fame, how much money, and how much adulation are enough for any human being?

Look at my favorite newscaster, Brian Williams. What happened to him; what internal shifting occurred to provoke him into enlarging the dramas of his stories? I wish we could say it was some concussion he sustained when he was playing high school football, anything but what appears to be a stunning unconscious need for more.

It’s difficult to sympathize with the rich and famous. It’s so hard for us to imagine the power of addiction to fame and fortune. We don’t live in those realms.

 I have been trying all day to feel into their experience, to find something in myself akin to what conceivably drives that kind of behavior besides the normal attention deficit that accompanies most of us into adulthood.  

I know this: that as I watch the stats which tell me the number of readers of this blog, for example, I am cheered by accelerating numbers and sorry when a blog I write doesn’t “hit”. And, by the way, I never know which will appeal and which will not. There doesn’t seem to be any pattern that I can discern.

So I am asking myself: how many readers are enough for you, Cecily? How much attention do you wish for?  At the same time that I am exceedingly grateful for all of you who do read it, the truth is, I’d love a million people to want to read what I write. I know that isn’t going to happen, but the wish is there. To that miniscule extent I can understand Brady and Williams wanting more: The force of wanting becoming a separate thing from the pleasure of already having.

 Having said that, I still can’t help wondering: so much more and lying for it? And yet, how many of us expand a story we are telling friends in order to wring the maximum drama and attention out of it. We don’t call that lying exactly, do we? We call it exaggerating. I know a couple of people for whom exaggerating in order to gain attention is a chronic condition. I bet you do, too.

This human need for more attention, success, admiration, fame, fortune—whatever floats your boat---belongs to all of us in differing degrees and in different areas of our lives. Mostly we try to be discreet about it. Facebook is a common and socially acceptable attention grabber. Otherwise we hide our need; cover it with some costume, like humility or manipulation. Better to come right out with whatever success/admiration we seek and own it, at least to ourselves. That way it won’t sneak up on us and catch us unprepared for what can be its destructive power.

It’s just so unfathomable, so much larger than ordinary life when hugely successful and talented Tom Brady or Brian Williams are caught wanting more. Their failure of self-control stands out and we get to point the fingers of self-righteousness at them while ignoring our own, albeit less conspicuous, self-seeking.

Instead of serving our outrage, who could these two men be for us? We could regard them with, in Buddhist writer, Pema Chodron’s, words, “friendly curiosity.” We could view their actions as lessons in life: no more, no less.  

Juicing Our Dramas

Let’s not juice our dramas. By that I mean telling and retelling the stories, large and small, in which we are life’s victim. You know the kind I mean: when the cable guy is supposed to come in a four hour time frame and shows up two hours beyond that: when we stand in an endless queue at the DMV and finally achieve the window only to be told that we haven’t brought all of the necessary papers. All that boring, stupid stuff that happens to us all the time when life, as is so often the case, fails to work for us the way we want it to.

Sometimes—at least in hindsight--it’s funny when things don’t work. We rather enjoy it because, for example, our friends have their DMV stories, too, and, together, we can dump all over that hopeless office and bond through our mutual frustration.

Some of our dramas are serious: a loved one receives a cancer diagnosis: a friend breaks a hip. We yearn for a sympathetic ear, perhaps a shoulder to cry on. These situations merit our attention.

 But most of our dramas arise out of the way we choose to perceive and describe every-day events in our lives. Our attitude and descriptive language make a big difference. I have a friend in the UK who, when her housekeeper for the summer fails to properly plump up the pillows in the living room, my friend will say, “It’s a nightmare!”

 No!  A nightmare is when one of our children is diagnosed with leukemia. Our ordinary life dramas are at the most, annoying or irritating and inconvenient. 

We can notice our drama-junkie behavior when we need to tell our victim version story repeatedly to almost any willing audience. That’s when we know we are hooked. That’s when it is time to relax, take some deep breaths and let it go.

Why does this matter? Why should we bother to become aware of this attention-seeking pattern? Because every time we repeat our drama stories we are, to some degree, reliving them and therefore refreshing the original anxiety or anger the experience generated in our bodies.

According to Dr. Joe Dispenza, Breaking Your Habit Of Being Yourself: How To Lose Your Mind and Create A New One, our bodies are unable discriminate between thought alone and the actual experience. Therefore thought—stories about the experience--brings on the same stress as the primary experience itself. And, as we all know, stress is not good for our health.

Do we really want to incorporate this victim story, along with all the others we have juiced over the years?

The next time we have a “poor me” or “a dreadful situation” story to tell, let’s tell it once, maybe a second time, but then? Ahhhh. . . . Could we just skip it?