Oratory
Oratory presented at the monthly meetings of the Order of the Heldhigh Torch.
The Anatomy of a Breakthrough
by Steven Butterbaugh, August 14, 2011
I titled this talk, The Anatomy of a Breakthrough.
Anatomy means the parts and the structure of something – where the thing can be an entity or an attribute of an entity such as a process. I would classify a breakthrough as a process and so this talk is going to be about the parts and the structure of such a process.
Breakthrough is an act of breaking through an obstacle. The obstacle I have in mind this morning is a psychological obstacle – when one’s thinking about a particular situation is “locked down”, when it is “how it is” and there is no alternative. All thoughts or information that not only are linked to that situation but one feels are linked to it or thinks may be linked to it are shunted aside or avoided. Normally a person feels threatened if someone says something that gets close to the locked down subject.
One of the characteristics of such a situation is that the person has no choice. I can imagine a person in a marriage, particularly a woam, where she did all the right things according to how she was reared, and she is unhappy. But to break up the marriage is unthinkable. To even place oneself in a situation where one could fall in love with someone outside the marriage is out of the question. So any situation like that would be avoided.
Another characteristic is fear of getting close to the situation and the fear is there to protect oneself from the pain that is under that.
Acknowledging that I was gay some 29 years ago was difficult because I had so much fear around the topic. The fear I had was being socially ostracized – that of becoming a pariah, an outcast – and not being accepted by my family. Several other fears that I remember accompanied this: That I would go insane. That I would become morally dissolute to the point that I would not be acceptable even to myself.
A situation where a breakthrough is needed is a situation where a person does the same thing over and over, hoping for a different result which never happens. And after a length of time, the person accepts the situation and lapses into resignation, a condition of acceptance which if the person can look at it all, contains a lot of sadness because of the hopelessness contained in giving up on the possibility that one can have a life he loves that is worth living.
To open a situation such as I’ve described requires a breakthrough. It begins when that welded ball of protection is pierced and one can start looking at what is being protected. It is complete when the possibility that one can have a life he loves that is worth living, his birthright as a human being, is restored.
First there is a softening up process required which gets one curious about what is beyond the wall of protection. This can happen in any number of ways. In the case of the coming out process, there were TV programs that featured gay people and the condition of being gay and one could see that they looked pretty normal – well, not having broken through, one couldn’t admit that they were normal, but at least they had some characteristics like normal, I mean respectable, people. They wore a suit and had their hair combed.
The recent breakthrough I’ve had is in the area of the way I’ve held being creative and earning a living. I had the starving artist mentality regarding being creative. What that means is that I was always looking for the opportunity to create, the psychological and physical space to create, the support for being a creator and I didn’t want responsibilities and obligations that would get in the way of that and make it impossible for me to be that. However, given the current economic depression, the primary means I’ve used to keep going have dried up. This summer has been particularly bad because no one came by to rent the room I rent out.
I have been lamenting this lack of income and have been stuck in finding a solution to the problem – I mean stuck to the point that I simply didn’t consider other ways of getting myself taken care. For some reason, I couldn’t do that.
I was talking to an old friend, one of the first ones I made when I came to Atlanta. I was telling him of my plight and he said, “I know what you need. You need to find an older woman who lives on the first floor of her paid for two story house. You need to them ask her if she would rent you a room upstairs. I needed a room one time and found such a lady and rented the upstairs for $5 a night. She was glad to have someone around and it was inexpensive and doable within the income I was earning.”
I said, “That’s a good idea.” What happened was that his idea opened something up for me. He softened me up. And that is all it was – an opening. It wasn’t what I wanted but it had a piece of what I wanted – living expenses that I could handle within the income I could count on. I hadn’t thought that was possible.
At this point, I did not know what my values were that were causing the fundamental, underlying problem. It was just that his idea had some freedom in it.
Earlier this year, I had made a decision the making of which has caused the current situation to come to a head. When I was short of money, I could have borrowed it from a friend. But, I decided I would not do it. I decided instead to cash in a gold coin and husband that money to fill the gap. What I willfully decided to do was cause myself concern for the purpose of breaking through the way I have put together this whole thing of being a creator and living a creator’s lifestyle. I knew that this would get stressful and maybe even painful and that I may not make it through to the other side. At some point I might scream uncle and go get a job and pay my bills and not work through a new way to look at it. Given that I’ve been working for an integrated life for years and explicitly advocating living that way for about two years now, I wanted to prove that it was possible to do it and have it work.
As the months wore on and the cache grew slimmer, I cashed in the next to last coin on August 5 to cover the August rent. I cannot tell you how stressful that was. I thought I was Sanford of Sanford and Son and I was going to have the big one. It was sufficiently intense that meditation didn’t make a dent in it. Finally I went downstairs to the treadmill and walked as fast as I could for a mile. That elevated the requirements of my body to the point where my breathing and heartbeat settled down to provide for my body’s requirements. At last I was able to relax. I’ve used exercise as a stress reducer ever since because I’m convinced it works.
On August 7, three days after I’d submitted an Intention to Vacate my apartment and because of that, changed the ad I had on the Georgia State website for off-campus housing to say that the room was only available through the end of September, a guy called about renting the room. He saw my statement about September and he called anyway.
The person who contacted me was from China and he was here for Graduate Study in Interior Design at Georgia State. He had an undergraduate degree in architecture, he said. He’d seen my ad where I mention who I am and what I do and he was calling because he thought this place would be perfect for him and he wanted to inquire more about what I’d said about my place only being available through the end of September.
I was straight with him about it. I told him that I’d put that in the ad because I was in the question as to whether I would keep my apartment. I have the right to revoke my intention to vacate with the permission of the management so I was considering this whole thing an open question. The fact that he fit so well with my interests and that he’d taken the time to inquire after my saying the room was not for rent after September totally charmed me. In a way, it called me back from the abyss.
I was inspired to find a way to do this.
I decided to go over once again the nut I have to crack each month to see where I stand with that. (Believe it or not, this was the first time that I’ve really gotten serious about knowing exactly how much money I had to earn. Given my shaky means of earning income, I hadn’t been willing to face that head on. Now I was ravenous to face it. With his rent and my social security, I still needed to produce $600 per month to eat and drive around some besides pay all the basic bills. And then I had the breakthrough.
I realized I was, for the first time, taking the action to have my work provide for me. I had never held being a creator in a way where I would let myself do that. Why? Seems crazy. When I was married, I didn’t have a problem with this sort of thing. I earned money, saved, invested, the all of it. But since I was single and pursuing a different life and wasn’t responsible to provide for someone else, I’d always looked for the opportunity to create and would do almost anything to have that opportunity. If I had to suffer for it, fine. No problem.
But this situation inspired me and in pursuing it I experienced for the first time the possibility of providing for myself in a way that I could take care of myself.
The first thing I did was call my client in Sarasota to see if they had any work. I told her I had turned in an “Intention to Vacate” my apartment and was casting about for income. She hated to see me give up this place knowing how much I liked it. She knew what I was talking about because she and her husband had visited me here one time. She said that one piece of land they’d been working on fell through and right now they had nothing. I thanked her and hung up. But at least I’d let her know that changes were afoot.
The next thing I did, I wrote a letter to my client, this same lady, in Sarasota. The rates I’d been charging them had been set in the mid-90s. I’d never raised them and they were, as I’d noticed in the past year or so, too low. I went to the internet and found a cost of living calculator. I found a multiplier that I applied to my rates that raised them to something appropriate for the present day. I then penned a good letter on newly designed stationery signaling changes afoot and sent it. I told her that this was something I realized I needed to do and that I wanted to do it now so that she could take this into account when planning a new project. I haven’t heard from her, but this really is a no-brainer which I’m sure she won’t like, but will agree with.
Since I know she would like me to retain my studio and keep my architectural work, most of it for her, going, I’m planning to present her with an opportunity to retain this possibility by paying me a specific amount each month. I haven’t worked that out in my mind although the figure I’m thinking of is $300.
All of this has come about because I am standing in a different place in to how my creative life takes care of me – not just in the opportunity to create but by providing the income I need to live comfortably. My plan is that I will get this all handled and when I sell paintings or perform architectural services, that will be money that will build something.
And as all breakthroughs do, suddenly I’m present to having a life I love and worth living.
Yesterday I met the Chinese guy for the first time. His name is Yue Zhou. He’s from Beijing. He came to see the place with a friend who is just now graduating from the program that Yue is entering. Both of them were wowed by the place and so excited. I told him that when we get the details of references and such cleared and sign a contract, I am going to sign a lease with the owner of the apartment, securing this place for another year.
So, although I don’t have every piece of my nut in place, I am sure I will soon have it because I now am clear as to what I am creating. That intention will cause the result.
Now to complete the anatomy of a breakthrough, at some point during the softening up process as the stress of change is ratcheting higher and higher, a new realization will occur that gives you a new way of being with an old situation. This new way of being means that you now have a new purpose – one that encompasses the old one, but accomplishes it in a new way that the old way was unable to accomplish.
A breakthrough doesn’t require you to give up all that you had in the old paradigm – the old way you held and related to matters. It places it in a new context – an expanded context. In this way, it is different than choosing between two alternatives that are present to you before the breakthrough. In the old paradigm, e.g., I could have chosen to get a job which would have taken me away from my commitment to create a workable, integrated, independent life as a creator that provided for my material needs.
Now the truth is, once I got clear about the issue that really governs the solution here, I can go get a job and it will not threaten my creative life. That is because I know why I’m getting the job. I am taking care of myself and that is important.
Another thing about a breakthrough, once you have the new psychological/spiritual space of the new possibility, you have to take action for the purpose of having that space permanently in your life. If, after a while you do not take action, then you will lose that possibility.
Another thing about a breakthrough is that you can only breakthrough to the degree you are prepared to breakthrough. If you have a philosophy that is integrated and holds that integration is possible, then you will have ideas and inspirations which are aligned with that. If you do not, you won’t. So, I do not want to underestimate the power of a integrated, true philosophy. It is vitally, crucially important and your growth is possible or not because of it.
So the steps and structure once again are these.
• Experiencing the cost: A situation doesn’t work anymore. You see that you are being in a situation doesn’t work. Feeling sad when hear of a person who has a situation in life you always wanted and think you will never get.
• Softening up: Hearing ideas as to how your situation could be different. Questioning and beginning to dismantle ways you’ve related to something in the past
• Experiences you like that pull you forward: These can be parallel to the core of the problem and the stuckness. You could hear a symphony that called your heart into possibility of an expanded life. You could see a painting that expressed the deep love you have for a person and hadn’t realized it was that deep.
• Intensifying the cost: The pain of being strung on the horns of the dilemma.
• Breaking through: A new possibility of being with life occurs to you and you get a spiritual sense of that experience – for example: the feeling of pride of having accomplished that which you will have in the future when you do accomplish it. Or, the exhilaration that you will experience as you are skating your championship skate.
• Solidifying the breakthrough: If possible you identify in conceptual terms who you were before and who you are now. You take some action that achieves results in the world aligned with your new way of being.
Closing Quote: From a poem written years ago by Marilyn Stohler, my good friend, in the process of sorting out her commitments:
“Love and passion cannot be kept –
in perfect squares with legal frames.”
And that is why we need breakthroughs, the means of mastering living – where one’s values, i.e., one’s passion, and reason are an integrated whole.
P.S. : 9-23-2011: My client called last Wednesday to arrange flying me to Sarasota to look over a potential building to remodel for a new store. The increase in rates apparently did not make a difference regarding my value for them.