Freshly Laundered & Hanging Out to Dry: Chapter12

Chapter 12
Decision

We cannot get rid of impulses in us, but we can say yes or no to them. _JG Bennett

Five weeks into the curriculum Mr. B is about to introduce us to the Decision Exercise. We are gathered in the bright and airy ballroom, excitement bubbling through the air as it always does whenever Mr. Bennett is announcing something new. If we hadn’t already learned a little restraint, people would be asking questions before he even spoke. Instead we quiet ourselves so as not to delay his talk by making him wait for us to simmer down. As always, he sits with his eyes closed for some minutes, probably getting a feel for what we might be capable of understanding.

He reminds us of the importance of learning how to carry out our intentions.
“The Decision Exercise is a valuable tool that provides step-by-step experience in understanding and strengthening Will.”
He describes it this way.

“The first step, planning, is done at night, the day before carrying out your chosen task. Consider your reason for doing it. Ask yourself what order it brings.
“The second step is done while you are still sitting after Morning Exercise in the ballroom and before you stand up to do the rukus. First visualize and then sense in your body doing the Decision.
“Third, ask yourself, ‘Am I going to do it?’ If the answer is affirmative, move ahead according to plan. If you get a ‘no’, let the task go.
“The last step is done at the end of the day, before planning the next day’s Exercise. Look at how today’s Decision went. Compare it to your intention. See what was the same or how it differed. If you failed to carry it out, then you must remind the body to carry out tasks you have given yourself. Remind it with a difficult physical task such as holding your arms out for ten minutes.”
The tension in the room is a mixture of anxiety over the possibility of not getting it right and excitement about learning another new practice.
“For now, keep your choices simple,” says Mr. B. “Stick to the physical realm. In this way you will be able to recognize easily whether you’ve accomplished it or not. Don’t work on something subtle or complex such as changing an attitude. Instead, learn to sew on a button or write a letter you’ve been putting off, but don’t do tasks you know you would have done anyway. The point is to develop your resolve. Each time you do the Exercise, it should stretch the Will and teach us something about how it differs from willfulness or self-will.”
Mr. B adds something more to help us consider the Decision Exercise in relation to Will.
“We do not make Decisions. We find them or they are revealed to us. There’s a sense of their presenting themselves rather than their being only of our own choosing; a sense of inevitability about their being done, that they come from a deep internal connection rather than our unilateral choice.”
And finally, he explains, ”The Decision Exercise is to be done in your free time—during the half-hour tea breaks in the morning and afternoon, after eating meals, or after the last activities of the day. I expect you to do it every day for the rest of the course.”
Every day. After chuckling about ‘every day’ and my ‘free time,’ the next reaction to hearing this pronouncement is, for once, not that of feeling overwhelmed. The intent to carry out decisions is something I’ve already felt a need for in life and have invested a lot of energy in.
As soon as Mr. Bennett is done speaking, a forest of hands appears. The questions range from useful to being about everything he’s just told us.
“Can we do things that are part of practical work?”
“What if someone else does what we decided to do and the decision is no longer available?
“How will we know the answer to the question of whether it will be done?”
“What if I forget to do it?”
“Can I use it to improve my diet?”
“Can sensing my hands be a Decision?”
Questions and patient answers last for at least fifteen minutes until it becomes clear he won’t be taking any more.
“At this point,” he says, “it is up to you to accrue some experience and let that guide your future questions.”

Though we had been told to look at everything freshly as if it had no connection with the past I could not help but reconsider my long history of working with decisions. My interest arose from childhood disappointments. Our parents found it hard to follow through on their intentions and I could see it was as big a source of frustration for them as it was for my brother and I. Because of these difficulties, I found that I had little practical support. There was no one to talk with who could help me choose or learn how to do the things I wanted to do. Lack of guidance fed my abundant fears. As I struggled to carry out decisions when I was a teen, I received a lot of satisfaction from an assortment of unrelated accomplishments—taking on learning how to crochet, sew, play the recorder, and swim. Each choice had no goal other than doing something that looked interesting or countered a fear.
Now, with the promise of Sherborne showing us practical methods for bringing actions with higher ideals into the world, being able to carry out an intention could mean something more important—helping people who were discriminated against, changing laws, getting food to starving people, how to be kind even if you didn’t necessarily feel that way. Life had already shown me how human efforts often failed when, despite good intentions, personality conflicts could destroy an organization. Every day the news showed examples of how perfectly good projects could be sabotaged by disagreements over how something should be done. Didn’t humans already have the scientific and psychological knowledge to improve life on the planet? Yet we didn’t seem to understand what kinds of things interfered with practical application of the knowledge.
Although I hated school, I worked hard and got good grades, which meant I’d had plenty of practice in accomplishing tasks that other people thought were necessary. However, when I tried to carry out my own projects, it was painfully difficult finding ones that held my interest strongly enough to complete. There seemed to be no will involved.
Now, at Sherborne, we would have the opportunity to choose tasks we each set for ourselves and have the peripheral support of knowing that all of us living together here were trying to do the same thing. We’d share the Decision Exercise while individualizing the actual work. This was one project I could embrace without my usual reticence.
Years before Sherborne, I’d taken a couple of workshops on decision-making and even practiced an exercise of my own. In the one I did, visualization was used to establish how the task would be done. One of the steps that was new to me in Mr. B’s version was the use of sensation to enlist cooperation of the body. It added an extra impetus for completing the chosen endeavor.

By sensing, I realize there is not just disorder of books on a bookshelf I’m planning to organize, but there is also litter on the shelf. The visualizing step alone didn’t make me aware of bottle caps and string I’d left there without thought.
Another time, I am to re-pot a friend’s prayer plant I’d been caring for. Its variegated green leaves had gotten so bushy it needed a bigger home. She’s given me a dusty purple ceramic planter to use. Once I sense in my body the act of extracting the plant from its old container and adding earth into a bigger one, I feel almost driven to completing the task. Every time I have a moment of quiet throughout the morning, the plant comes to mind. There is no rest until the job is done. It’s as if my body has been activated by the sensation.

A second aspect of Mr. B’s assignment that lent a different energy to the process was the step where we ask ourselves if we were going to do it.

I’m still sitting in the ballroom after morning meditation and before the rukus when I ask myself if I’m going to sweep out the broom closet, the one patch of floor that often is overlooked. Instead of receiving a ‘yes’ or a ‘no,’ I receive what I interpret as a ‘yes, if….’ An image comes into my mind’s eye showing me that the broom is not going to be in the closet as it usually is. I will need extra time to search for it. When time to do the Decision arrives, the broom is not in the closet and instead of being annoyed I am already prepared to first look for it elsewhere.
Another example of ‘yes, if’ happens when I get to the step where I ask whether I will do an intended task. The idea comes to me that there will be an unforeseen demand made on me during morning tea when I’m planning to carry it out. As I’m still sitting in the ballroom, I change my plan. I decide to do the task at a different time of day and consider having made the suggested adjustment a ‘yes.’ Later on, during breakfast the person in charge of laundry makes an announcement to our group. We are to bring our blankets, which are not washed on a weekly basis like the sheets, down to the laundry room during morning tea.
The feeling of these spontaneous alterations is that help is coming from outside. Each one seems connected to Mr. B’s explanation about Will and the quality of how Decisions present themselves or are revealed to us.

A third aspect that was different about Mr. B’s Decision Exercise was the step of evaluating at the end of the day how the task had gone. Only then were we ready to plan the next day’s Decision. If we had not done the Decision of the current day and it could still be fulfilled, we were to do it immediately. If it could not be done because some critical component was no longer available such as daylight or lunchtime, we were to give the body a reminder.
Throughout the year, students referred to the reminder as punishment, and Mr. B persisted in correcting us. We just found it very difficult to see reminding the body as a positive reinforcement. Holding our arms out wasn’t the only possible reminder but we couldn’t let go of that image. A friend told me she disliked the idea so much that she refused to recognize the ‘reminder’ as part of the exercise. Maybe I never did either, still thinking of it as a not quite necessary addition. What bothered me about the example of holding out one’s arms was that it had that grim intensity that so often permeated the methods of the school.

I have failed to do my Decision Exercise today. I cannot remember even thinking about a Decision last night or asking about it this morning. I choose that my reminder will be to carry out two undertakings tomorrow. One is to buy stamps and mail an audiotape letter to Robin, the priest who’d told me about Sherborne; and the other is to clean the dorm fireplace and bring in wood for it.
After Morning Exercise and before we stand for the rukus, I ask about the mailing. I get a ‘yes’ along with a clear image of handing someone else the money and having them mail the tape for me. But I think, that would be cheating, wouldn’t it? I take ‘yes’ to just mean ‘yes’ and ignore the image.
After breakfast, I go up to the dorm where several of us are changing into work clothes. My roommate Amber announces that she is going to the Post Office, an activity not condoned when we’re supposed to be going to practical work. She asks if anyone needs anything. I can’t resist. I hand her the money and she mails the audiotape for me. Hadn’t the Universe been trying to tell me that’s how it would happen?
Later in the morning as I walk through the courtyard from the garden, without thinking, I begin picking up stray pieces of wood that Oliver, the postmaster’s terrier, has been pulling out of the woodpile during his relentless crusade for rats. The wood reminds me about the second task that had, in fact, slipped my mind. I gather up additional wood from the place I intended. When bringing it into the room, I remember that cleaning ashes from the fireplace is also part of the project. It feels like I’m receiving helpful reminders.

After weeks of practicing the Decision Exercise, many of us feel like it provides a tone of order to the whole day, the way an orchestra tunes to A before practicing or performing.

We cannot escape remembering
the important things that have happened,
and we cannot escape the awareness of the important things
that have not happened. _Ralph Salisbury, Cherokee

go to the previous chapter

continue…