#45: The Sage Plays It Out

There is a particular hour on my morning walk when the ocean has not yet decided what color it will be. The sky is doing its own negotiating. I have learned to use that hour for something I did not have a name for until this week. I call it playing it out.

Here is what I mean. A situation arrives — a client who has gone quiet, a family decision with three reasonable answers, an email that could be read two ways. My mind, being a mind, immediately builds a construct: a little story about what is happening, why, and what I ought to do about it. By the second mile, that construct has a full cast, a plot, and an ending. By the third mile, it has a sequel.

For most of my life I treated that construct as a set of instructions. The story said she is upset, so I apologized. The story said this will fall apart, so I braced. The story said they expect you to fix it, so I fixed it, often before anyone had asked.

This week, somewhere between the second mile and the third, a line surfaced that I have been turning over ever since:

That is the premise of this Sunday. Not that the Sage refuses to think. The Sage thinks more than most people — she runs the scene all the way to its end, including the endings she does not like. What she declines to do is mistake the rehearsal for the performance.

The theater in the mind

George Kelly, the psychologist who gave us the language of personal constructs, argued that every one of us walks through the world as a kind of scientist, building hypotheses about people and events and then testing them against what actually happens (Kelly, 1955). The constructs are not the problem. They are the equipment. We cannot see without them.

The trouble begins when we forget they are hypotheses. A construct held loosely is a lens; a construct held tightly becomes a verdict. Kelly’s whole therapeutic hope rested on the idea that people can learn to try on alternative constructions of the same event — to play it out another way — before deciding which one deserves their behavior.

Jung had his own version of this theater, and he called it active imagination. He encouraged people to let an inner image or figure speak, to follow it as far as it wanted to go, and to stay in dialogue with it rather than either suppressing it or obeying it (Jung, 1997). The discipline is in the middle word: dialogue. You let the construct have its say. You do not hand it the keys.

What strikes me, holding Kelly and Jung side by side, is that both men were describing a form of courage. It takes very little courage to act on the first story your mind produces. It takes a great deal of courage to sit with that story, let it finish, and then say: Thank you. I see you. I am not going to do that.

The freedom Frankl kept

Viktor Frankl learned this in a place where almost every construct a person could build was true. In the camps, the story this will not end well was not a distortion to be disputed; it was, for most, simply accurate. And yet Frankl insisted, from inside that reality, that one freedom could not be taken from a human being: the freedom to choose one’s attitude toward a given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way (Frankl, 1946/2006).

Read carefully, that is the Sage’s premise in its most severe form. Frankl did not pretend the constructs were false. He played them out fully — he had no choice. What he refused was to let the construct dictate who he would be inside it. The circumstance was fixed. The response was his.

He later built a clinical method on the same insight, and it is the most Sage-like technique I know. He called it paradoxical intention: a patient terrified of blushing is instructed to try, deliberately, to blush as much as possible; a patient afraid of lying awake is told to try to stay awake all night (Frankl, 1946/2006). The feared construct is not suppressed. It is invited onto the stage, handed a microphone, and asked to perform — and in the performing, it loses its authority. Frankl observed that humor and a certain self-detachment did the work; the fear, once played out on purpose, had nowhere left to hide.

That is what I have been doing on the road without knowing it had a name. Play it out. All the way. On purpose. The construct, given its full turn, tends to bow and leave.

Why the Sage waits

Caroline Myss, whose work on archetypes I have been living with since last Sunday’s post, describes the Sage as the archetype of accumulated wisdom — the one who has seen enough cycles to know that the first interpretation is rarely the final one (Myss, 2001). The Sage is not slow. She is unhurried, which is a different thing entirely. Speed belongs to reaction. Unhurriedness belongs to someone who has already run the scenario three ways and is simply waiting for the world to tell her which one is real.

Daniel Goleman describes the neurological version of this gap: the brief interval between a stimulus and the emotional response it triggers, in which the thinking brain can either confirm or override what the feeling brain has already decided (Goleman, 1995). Most of our regret lives in the moments when that interval collapsed. Most of our wisdom lives in the moments when we managed to widen it.

And Albert Ellis, never one for mysticism, would say the same thing in plainer clothes: it is not the event that disturbs us but the belief we have constructed about it, and the belief can be examined before it is obeyed (Ellis & Harper, 1997). Playing a construct out, in Ellis’s language, is simply disputing it before it has the chance to dispute you.

So the Sage’s restraint is not passivity. It is Frankl’s freedom, exercised in ordinary weather: the construct may be true, may even be fixed, and the response is still mine.

What I am practicing this week

I will be honest about how new this is for me. My instinct, built over decades of consulting, teaching, and grandmothering, is to do something the moment a construct forms. Stillness has always felt like a lapse rather than a choice.

So the practice, this week, is small and specific:

1. Let the story finish. When a construct forms, I follow it all the way to its ending — including the worst ending — without interrupting.

2. Play it out on purpose. Frankl’s move. If the story frightens me, I lean in and let it be as dramatic as it wants. It rarely survives being taken seriously.

3. Name it as a construct. Out loud, if I am alone on the road: That is one way this could go.

4. Ask what the world has actually shown me. Not what the story predicts. What has, in fact, happened.

5. Wait one more mile. If the construct still wants action after that, I act. Most of the time, it does not.

Three times this week, the thing I was sure I needed to do turned out to be unnecessary by the following morning. The quiet client had simply been traveling. The three-answer family decision resolved itself when one of the three answers quietly withdrew. The two-way email was, in the end, only one way, and it was the kinder one.

I had played all of those out. I had not acted on a single one. Nothing fell apart. In fact, things had room to arrange themselves without me in the way.

An invitation

So here is my question for you this Sunday, the forty-fifth of the year, with seven still ahead of us.

What construct are you currently treating as a verdict? What story has your mind written — about a person, a situation, a version of the year that is coming to its end — that you have been quietly obeying without ever checking it against the evidence?

Play it out. All the way. Hand it the microphone, as Frankl would. And then, before you act, wait one more mile.

The Sage is not the one who knows the ending. The Sage is the one who can hold three endings at once, choose her attitude toward all of them, and still sleep.

Mahalo for walking with me.

References

Ellis, A., & Harper, R. A. (1997). A guide to rational living (3rd ed.). Wilshire Book Company.

Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s search for meaning. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946)

Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. Bantam Books.

Jung, C. G. (1997). Jung on active imagination (J. Chodorow, Ed.). Princeton University Press.

Kelly, G. A. (1955). The psychology of personal constructs (Vols. 1–2). W. W. Norton.

Myss, C. (2001). Sacred contracts: Awakening your divine potential. Harmony Books.