The basic premise is that everyone on this planet stands on their own unique hilltop from which they peer out and view the world. Each one of us has, quite literally, a point of view that no one else shares.
Brian Durkin, et al: `I Just Love My Job´
The world, as we have created it, is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.
Albert Einstein
Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change.
Wayne Dyer
This week included a few instructive encounters where `hilltops´ were very apparent. How and why do we see things the way we do, each person uniquely? How does our hilltop impinge upon our behaviour and shape the results of our endeavours?
The first story was recounted by a friend. He had just left, by mutual agreement, a company after five good years and was having difficulty in getting some final paperwork from his former employees for his next position. He contacted the Head of HR, reminding him of the issue and kindly requesting a quick turnaround. His request went unheeded, however, and his repeated attempts to reach his former colleague by phone had borne no fruit.
Over three or four days, my friend began to think about the hilltop of the man in question. He remembered that, as Director of HR, he demonstrated that he valued `employees adhering to and respecting the mores of hierarchy´. By means of extrapolation my friend drew a conclusion and decided to send a note to the CEO, copying the Head of HR, outlining his predicament and asking if he would kindly intervene to move things along.
Within five minutes he had received a reply to his original email from the Head of HR! With a smile he reflected on the power of hilltops in human behaviour. In this case, we see the hilltop of pre-eminence of hierarchy, and adherence thereto.
The second encounter was with a person who insists on seeing the glass half empty rather than half full. This lady is constantly battling a sense of doom and depression, talks incessantly about having to do this and having to do that, while passive-aggressively lamenting her lack of freedom. The hilltop at play here is that of the victim in a world apparently characterised by scarcity. This has been going on for years, with no visible improvement in the quality of her life.
The ingredients of each person’s hilltop are made up of a combination of generic, cultural, tribal and personal factors. Even within one family, different siblings may develop varied hilltops while, on the other hand, most Europeans who have never lived in Africa, as I have, would have difficulty in grasping that billions of inhabitants around the world today live on less than €300 per family, per year.
This last example shows that hilltops can be expanded or even radically changed by experiences beyond the realm of the known, the comfort zone. On the other hand, they can also become narrow and even warped on the back of life-negating attitudes and unhealthy lifestyles.
When the alcoholic begins drinking, for example, the alcohol is in no way a problem, but rather a solution. Indeed it generally proves to be a very good solution, removing feelings of restlessness, irritability and discontentedness – with immediate effect! Of course, this is true of all addictive dynamics, whether related to substances or behavioural patterns or both.
Over time however, the unsolved problems begin to pile up and are then exacerbated by the extra problems generated by acting out the addiction itself; the dishonesty and self-hatred of the Jekyll & Hyde existence.
By the time, after drinking alcoholically for over two decades, I hit bottom and began to realise the need for radical change, I was suffering from a perception disorder of the highest degree. Believing myself to be the only good guy left, I was convinced that everybody else was at fault. Life would have been great, if only the others (family, bosses, priests, politicians, etc.) had learned to behave differently and treated me with respect. The human race was doomed to destruction; there was only one person who knew the way out.
This perception disorder, fed by years of accumulated fear, resentment, anger, cynicism, and the like, is akin to blindness. And when a blind person in Manhattan wishes to walk from say, Battery Park to Times Square, it is a good idea to hire the services of a guide dog, to ensure safety of passage through the busy city streets. In the same manner, it is a good idea for the newcomer in any recovery fellowship to engage the services of a sponsor, one who has more experience on this journey and who `has what we want´. In early recovery, this person can guide us, helping us avoid the many pitfalls as we fitfully learn to walk the talk of the Twelve Steps of recovery.
Of course it is a great leap forward for any addict to actually ask for help, especially as we have to put aside the illusions of `knowing it all´ and `nobody being good enough to sponsor ME!´. To ask a group for help is one thing. To go up to another individual and ask `would you be my sponsor?´, aside from the humility issue, often fills us with trepidation due to the risk of re-experiencing the pain of the old wound of rejection. One of the many innovations of the first groups or alcoholics who, in the 1930’s, helped each other to get and stay sober, was that helping each other is an integral part of the process of growth and healing.
My first sponsor tasked me with writing a daily list of ten things for which I was grateful. It had to be hand-written, he explained; otherwise I would simply cut and paste. This was not an easy task, forcing me, as it did, to look out consciously for anything that could be classified as `gratitude-worthy´. There was no gratitude in me at that time. Whatever had been there in my early years had, over years of active addiction, been eroded and supplanted by a sense of entitlement. Caught up in entitlement, I was not a lovely sight; forever angry and resentful at the Universe for not acceding to my endless list of demands.
Through following the kind advice of my sponsor at that time, I discovered that entitlement and gratitude cannot co-exist in one hilltop. By cultivating the one, the other is automatically dissipated. This empirical learning is, in my view, the most valuable kind. I get to experience the results in real life. By virtue of the dynamic of `success breeding success´, the growth become self-perpetuating with continued cultivation. Thus, we can modify our hilltops, to make them more conducive to a new, life-affirming approach to life.
My best days are those spent in the consciousness that nobody sees the world quite like I do, when my behaviour is shaped by me in the context of what I have discovered about my own hilltop, and when I renew my willingness to discard, from mine, what is not working from me in order to make room for something better.
The ultimate fruits of this introspection include my taking responsibility for how I perceive and respond to what happens in the world and the discovery that when I change the way I look at things, the things I look at really begin to change. I am the creator of the `reality´ of my own life.
