Good is Good: What Men Say to Themselves (When No One’s Listening)
Thursday, April 07, 2011
Tom Matlack is the former CFO of the Providence Journal and is the founder of The Good Men Project, a non-profit charitable corporation based in Rhode Island and dedicated to helping organizations that provide educational, social, financial, and legal support to men and boys at risk.
If goodness can be determined by behavior when no one is looking, then the truth about oneself can be told only when looking in the mirror, alone. Men are often portrayed as lacking self-awareness, but the men I know have ongoing discussions with themselves about faith, goodness, fear, and what they should really be doing with their lives.
My manologue is a barometer of how I am doing.
I still have to do battle with those self-perceptions that are ugly and painful. On a bad day, the shower is a dangerous place. Something will float back into my brain from an hour, a year, or a decade ago, when I did something stupid. Self-hate fills my mind and the internal monologue has to be silenced by a single, very audible word, expressed out of profound discomfort like some deep, instinctual reflex.
“Fuck!”
What causes a guy to swear at himself? I’ve spent a lifetime trying to figure that out: AA, shrinks, meditation, anti-depressants. Recently, the thing that has worked best is the very same thing that worked when I was a teenager, brutally hard exercise that leaves me spent, filled with endorphins—and unable to loathe myself. Spending time with my kids and holding my wife also helps. But the demons sometimes come back in my dreams. I wake, not sure if my terror is over something real or imagined. It’s usually something twisted beyond recognition by my subconscious.
♦◊♦
In the last few years, I’ve trained with a champion Russian kick-boxer.
He often tells me that 98 percent of the thoughts in my brain are meaningless. They are the voices of doubt, distraction, and insanity. It’s only the 2 percent that really matters.
Most normal people have a hard time distinguishing the 2 percent from the 98 percent. My theory is that addicts have a unique ability to see what is true and what is the dark shadow of insanity. They use addiction to block out the 98 percent and give them a super-human ability to focus their minds on just the thoughts that really matter—this swing, this line of dialogue, this deal term.
The difficulty in sobriety is to find other ways to clear the mind of chaos, letting go of the negative chatter, and focusing just on the few critical elements of success. Meditation helps. Faith is critical. A grounding in the truth of why we are here and what really matters in this world can keep things in perspective. But it still comes down to an ability to focus—one that comes out of becoming right with the soul, not out of addiction.
So I try to resist the instinct to yell at myself. I try to clear my mind of all thoughts.
I try to repeat an instruction from the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki that my rowing coach once told me before a race: “When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.”
I don’t always succeed; but my wife hasn’t come running into the bathroom to ask whether I am hurt for at least a couple of months now. So I must be getting better.
For more of Tom's works, as well as other pieces on related topics, go to The Good Men Project Magazine online, here.
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