The Artisan Soul (5 page)

To find our own voice, we must first wrestle with the voices inside our brains. Some of those voices could hold us captive the rest of our lives. Some of those voices, if we choose to give them power over us, will make us become less and less as we listen to them more and more. Some voices inside will silence our souls and leave us without a language to express who we really are. To find our own voice, we must be willing to let our souls go silent. Finding our own voice may take the greatest courage we've ever mustered.

There is something comforting about being nothing but an echo. Far too often, we are more afraid of silence than we are of emptiness. If we turn off the volume on all the voices we have become accustomed to, will we have nothing to say? Why would we allow negative, destructive voices to have so much power in our lives unless we had embraced the truth of their words? In the end, all the voices that seek to make us small and irrelevant and worthless find power only when we have allowed them to become our voice. What others think of us, what others have said about us matters, has power, only when it becomes what we think of ourselves and what we say to ourselves about who we are.

Years ago I wrote a poem about this struggle in my own soul. It's entitled “Where the Echoes Stop.”

I want to stand where the echoes stop.

Far past where sound has abandoned thought.

Where silence reigns over redundancy.

Where once well said is more than enough.

I want to stand where the echoes stop.

Where words must be born to be heard.

Where speech is a gift and not a curse.

Where there is more of the unique and less of the mundane.

I want to stand where the echoes stop.

Where meaning is rescued from noise. . .

Where conviction replaces thoughtless repetition. . .

Where what everyone is saying surrenders to what needs to be said.

I want to stand where the echoes stop.

Where the shouting of the masses falls silent to the whisper of the one. . .

Where the voice of the majority submits to the voice of reason. . .

Where “they” do not exist, but “we” do.

I want to stand where the echoes stop.

Where substance overthrows the superficial. . .

Where courage conquers compliance and conformity. . .

Where words do not travel farther than the person who speaks them.

I want to stand where the echoes stop.

Where I only say what I believe.

Where I only repeat what changes me.

Where empty words finally rest in peace.

I want to stand where the echoes stop.

“Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10a).

Before we can move forward on this journey of discovering our own voice, we have to choose to stand where the echoes stop. We also have to believe that there is a story we are supposed to be in, a story that is bigger than us and, because of that, a story that makes us bigger.

At least once a week, a bunch of guys and I take over an indoor basketball gym and play two hours of full-court basketball. For two hours, below-average athletes pretend we are the peers of Chris Paul and Dwyane Wade. We rarely have a Kevin Garnett, since most of the guys are no taller than 6'2. Recently, though, I was playing with a friend on my team who was 6'6. In our game, he was nothing less than a giant. Every time I took the ball down, he would set a pick for one of our teammates. The purpose of a pick is to essentially create a wall so that the defender cannot get to you so that you are then either open to shoot or to pass it to the person who set the pick. Each time after setting a pick he was wide open underneath the basket. It was clear to me that easy points were waiting for us, but he never looked up. He would never make eye contact with me. I kept wanting to pass the basketball, and he did everything physically possible to make that impossible.

In the genteel manner I always bring to the game of basketball, I started suggesting that he make eye contact with me. In fact, I began the conversation by calling him out. “I know what you are doing. You are avoiding eye contact. You're avoiding eye contact so I can't pass it to you underneath.”

He rose to his defense. “No, I'm setting a pick.”

I responded, “I know you are setting a pick. I also know you can make eye contact with me when you are setting a pick. You don't want the ball underneath. You don't think you're open. You're 6'6. With your reach, it makes you 7'6. On this court you are always open. I need you to make eye contact. I know that you're a guard and you're used to playing outside, but somewhere in your life someone told you that you were small and you believed you were small, and now you are playing smaller than you are. Here you are big. What do I need to do to convince you that you are not small?”

His response caught me off guard. He said, “That's what happens to you when your younger brother is 6'10. You are small, so you learn how to play outside.”

It became my goal that day to change his narrative, to replace the internal story that told him he was small with a narrative that made him bigger than life.

I knew exactly what was happening inside my friend—not only because I've seen it so many times in others, but because I have seen it in myself. I have spent my entire life rewriting the story of who I am. The great battles I fought had little to do with the world of others and everything to do with the universe inside me. It was all about disarming the voices that made me less and taking responsibility for my internal narrative. A critical part of this process is listening to the voice that calls me to more. When we win this internal conflict, the battle will be won long before we ever walk on the battlefield.

For several years when I was in the fashion industry, I traveled to New York on a regular basis. One time my family traveled with me, and we spent some time with my former business partner. When you travel as much as I do, you leave remnants of your life everywhere. Unfortunately for me, this has often meant canceling credit cards and securing a new driver's license. I don't know how many wallets I have lost around the world.

Since I was traveling with my family, I wanted to be extra diligent in ensuring that this did not happen on this trip. My wife, Kim, is far less likely to lose things, so I decided to put my wallet in her purse when we took the train to Eastchester. It was a perfect plan until our plans changed. Kim decided to spend the night in Eastchester. My son, Aaron, and I had a meeting in Manhattan the next morning at 7:00
a.m.,
so we decided to take the train back into the city. When we arrived at the White Plains station, I realized I had left my wallet with Kim, safely tucked inside her purse. Now, to be clear, I didn't lose it—I just forgot it. This was a huge improvement over my previous pattern. (I just didn't want to continue the story without celebrating my progress.)

You can imagine my frustration when I realized I couldn't pay for the train and that I would be cashless the next day in Manhattan. Aaron stepped in to save the day. “Dad, I have my wallet. I've got this. I'll take care of you tomorrow. Nothing to worry about.”

I was so proud of him in that moment. His words demonstrated a sense of responsibility he must have learned from his mother. We realized that we had missed the train and that the last train heading back to the city would be over an hour away. We saw a taxi sitting outside. It was dingy, smoke-filled, and cash-only. Aaron and I scraped together all the cash he had and found more than enough money to hire the taxi driver to take us into the city. I needed to go to SoHo, and Aaron was staying in an apartment closer to the U.N., so we decided to have him drop us off at Grand Central Station. From there he could walk to his destination and I could grab the subway to mine.

We decided to be generous with our driver, giving him a gracious tip of every dollar we had. We figured we could rush out of the cab, find an ATM, and get me some cash to make it through the day. Almost like a ballet, we saw an ATM, watched the taxi drive away, and realized that Aaron had left his wallet in the taxi. We were now standing in the middle of Manhattan in the middle of the night without a penny to our names and with zero wallets between us—no credit cards, no ATM cards, no identification, no hope. I might have allowed myself to get frustrated, except that Aaron so quickly became angry at himself. I remember him saying out loud, “I had one task, one job—to take care of you for one night—and I just blew it.”

I could feel his frustration and disappointment in himself. I didn't really have a lot of room to talk, since I had left my wallet over an hour away, and I was reminded that my son really is a lot more like me than his mother. It was a beautiful bonding moment through shared weaknesses. We did, of course, still have our cell phones. So I called Kim and explained our dilemma. Without dignifying her response, I will say that she was not helpful. After twenty-nine years of marriage and who knows how many wallets, I have sort of used up all the empathy I'm going to get in this lifetime.

So we began to walk toward SoHo. I suggested he go to his apartment, which was nearby, and allow me to walk, but in his highly protective mode he refused to let me walk the streets of New York on my own in the middle of the night. As we began the two-hour journey, it occurred to me that this was a wonderful teaching moment, but I don't think Aaron would have received it like that.

I said, “Hey, buddy, here's a great opportunity for us to use our problem-solving skills. If we had been dropped off in a foreign city without any resources and/or access to money, how would we solve this problem? What would we do?” We began making phone calls across the country. We called Visa and woke up Alisah Duran, my assistant, in the middle of the night. We had several moments when we thought we had found a solution, followed by moments clarifying that we had not.

Our process was hindered, however, by Aaron's frustration with himself. I could feel his anger and disappointment in himself, along with self-loathing. This is when I began to explain to him the importance of releasing negative emotions and accessing our higher consciousness.

For years I have spent immense energy studying the experience of knowing. I am fascinated by how humans can know things that go beyond facts and information. Other animals know through their senses and perhaps even their instincts. Humans have an uncanny ability to know things they seemingly shouldn't know. We call it intuition or insight, or we attribute it to some kind of mystical capacity. What is clear is that there are individuals who have so developed intelligence beyond mere intellect that their capacity to know appears nearly supernatural.

I began to explain to him that some neuroscientists describe the human brain as divided into three parts, and within that construct we have what is described as a reptilian brain. The idea here is that we humans have an aspect of our mental processes that moves us into our most reptilian expression. This part of our brain involves the aspect of our humanity that deals with aggression, dominance, and self-protection.

This idea was first popularized by neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean. He originally formulated his model in the 1960s and expanded on it in his 1990 book
The Triune Brain in Evolution
. This reptilian complex is incredibly valuable when we're being attacked by a lion, but not that helpful when we are trying to solve complex problems. I told Aaron he needed to let go of his frustration and anger. He needed to clear his mind and move out of his reptilian brain into his intuitive mind.

“Buddy, what I need from you is your highest level of thinking. So I need you to release the part of you that wants to protect and open up the part of you that wants to explore.”

He looked at me with curiosity and uncertainty and said, “Okay, Dad. Reptilian brain? I need you to be clear—is this something real or are you making it up?”

I am absolutely certain that my son would tell you that I am the most truthful person he knows, but that question does not come without context. When he was a little boy, I once told him I was an alien from another planet and showed him the alien registration card that I received when I immigrated to the United States of America. I thought he was going to have a heart attack back then. As much as I enjoy a great joke, it clearly left a permanent scar.

I laughed and assured him that I was not making this up. This was an actual theory. He could check Wikipedia and it would be there. Even if this new understanding of how the human mind works did not exist, the truth of it still resonates with the Scriptures. There may be no better description of this dynamic tension than that found in the book of Psalms. When describing the effect of setting free the captives of Israel, Psalm 126:1–2 says, “We were like those who dreamed. Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy.” When captives are freed, there is a substantive change in their mindsets. They are like men who dream, and because they are like men who dream, their mouths are filled with laughter and their tongues with songs of joy.

There is a direct relationship between those who live most free and those who dream most. Captivity not only steals our freedom but cripples our imagination. Slavery crushes the divine narrative within us and seeks to replace it with another narrative to convince us that we are less than those who hold us captive. When the captives were released, they were not only freed from their oppressors but they were free to dream again.

One of the unexpected discoveries during my ten years of working with the urban poor was how poverty changes a person. Not always but far too often, physical poverty drives us to a poverty of the soul. I knew when I walked into a world of impoverishment that I would meet people who lacked food and shelter and education. I knew that I would spend my days with individuals and families who had been deprived of their basic human needs. I knew that centuries of oppression and injustice had robbed them of much of their dignity, opportunity, and freedom. What I didn't know was that the weight of poverty had stolen from most of them their capacity to imagine a life better than the one they had always known.