Eleanor Wiley - There Are No Mistakes: Becoming Comfortable With Life As It Is, Not As It Should Be

For many years I tried to make my life conform to a lot of shoulds. Not until I got into recovery through Alcoholics Anonymous did I realize just how many shoulds I had been trying to follow. Along my own travels, first through the Twelve Steps and now through my teaching around the world, I have come across many people who walk through the world in comfort. Their lives aren't easy; they have just accepted them with a certain grace and ease. As I thought about what they had in common, I identified eleven attributes.

ELEANOR WILEY

This astoundingly candid and simple book is illustrated with personal stories from the author and people she has encountered along the path. It's graced with exercises and meditations meant to help the reader cultivate these attributes:

• Know where you came from.
• Know your story.
• Accept yourself.
• Own your pain, hurt, and vulnerability.
• Laugh at yourself.
• Find community.
• Take care of yourself.
• Give yourself permission to change your mind.
• Be willing to fall apart and put yourself back together again.
• Create a tool box.
• Go with the flow.

First published in 2006 by Conari Press,

an imprint of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

York Beach, ME

With offices at:

500 Third Street, Suite 230

San Francisco, CA 94107

www.redwheelweiser.com

Copyright 2006 Eleanor Wiley. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.

Reviewers may quote brief passages.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wiley, Eleanor.

There are no mistakes : becoming comfortable with life as it is, not as it should be / Eleanor Wiley with Caroline Pincus.

p. cm.

ISBN 1-57324-262-4 (alk. paper)

1. Conduct of life. I. Pincus, Caroline. II. Title.

BF637.C5W494 2006

158.1--dc22

2005029998

Typeset in Hoefler Text, by Jonathan Sainsbury.

13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06

8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992 (R1997).

www.redwheelweiser.com

www.redwheelweiser.com/newsletter

To my three children,
Stewart, Beth Ann, and Jennifer.
They have been my most beloved teachers.

My gratitude to all the people who have supported me as I worked on this book is more than I can express in words. I am so grateful to Jan Johnson for publishing these words and for introducing me to Caroline Pincus. Gratitude to Caroline, who crafted the jumbled words I gave her into the wonderful stories you will read in the pages that follow. I also gained a friend in the process.

I also thank all the other people at Red Wheel Weiser/Conari Press who contributed to the publication of this book, including Pam Suwinski, the eagle-eyed copyeditor.

I am not going to name all of the wonderful people who trusted me with their stories, because then they wouldn't be anonymous, as I promised them they would be. They know who they are, and to them I send my gratitude. A deep bow of gratitude, too, to my walking buddies who listened to me, my family, my spiritual communities who prayed with me, and all the people I have encountered along the way who are part of this book. And last but not least you, because you bought the book! Thank you, one and all.

If you were to meet me you would think, Now there's a woman who is comfortable with life as it is. I keep my hair short, wear comfortable clothes and shoes, and always adorn myself with some of my art. I smile a lotand am easily moved to tearsand I am constantly displaying enthusiasm for the simple things around me. In other words, people can tell that I'm enjoying myself.

Suffice to say, this wasn't always the case. For much of my life I worked very hard to make it look as if I had it all together. If I made a mistake I covered it up; if I didn't know the answer I made one up. Until I was in recovery I struggled continually with the question, Am I doing the right thing? The truth is, no matter where I was or what I was doing, I never really felt at home, and I was never convinced that I really belongedanywhere.

That didn't change until I was fifty-four. That was the year I recognized I was an alcoholic and discovered the twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). I'll never forget walking into an AA meeting for the first time and hearing people say, I am a grateful alcoholic. I was sure they were out of their minds. I was even more sure that I would never, ever say such a thing. Well, I was wrong. I am a grateful alcoholicgrateful, especially, to have been pushed into telling myself the truth about my life, to have been pushed to discover that there are no mistakes in life, only choices, and that beautiful things can come from what we think of as our mistakes. The stories I had the opportunity to finally hear through AA forced me to explore and become comfortable with life as it is and to stop making up stories of how I wished it would be. AA didn't force; it gave me an opportunity I was willing to take.

For example, long after my marriage was over I hung on to it, telling myself the story that if I just did one more thing, my husband would come back. I blamed myself for not being good enough to keep him happy, not knowing the right thing to do. It took time and lots of therapy for me to understand that we are each responsible for our own happiness, that what I did was right.

Another story I told myself when my daughter Beth Ann died was that if I just got on with my life, things would be fine. I told myself that strong people can handle these things. Of course that didn't work. The death of a child rocks your whole world, and I needed time to grieve. And with my drinking, I spent years telling myself stories to make believe things were okay. I could always find an excuse for my drinking behavior, for needing to unwind, to relax. That is, until I admitted I was an alcoholic and got into recovery.

At age seventy, I continue uncovering what is right for me; I continue to work at being comfortable with life as it is and to stop struggling with how I wish it would be. And one of the great tools I have discovered along the way has been beads. Yes, you read it right. Beads. It might be something else entirely for you, but the catalyst for me was beads, which came into my life about four years after I stopped drinking and was on my way to recovery. Let me explain.

About twelve years ago a friend asked me to help her make some necklaces. I told her I didn't know how. Betty's response was a revelation. It doesn't make any difference, she said. I'll show you. What was so remarkable about this for me was that earlier in my life I would never have been able to say, I don't know how. Allowing myself to do so was a huge step, and it opened up an amazing world for me. The more comfortable I became with not knowing, and acknowledging out loud that I didn't know, the more other people were willing to share their wisdom, to open new doors for me, and to invite me into new places. I also discoveredand continue to discoverhow very much I do know, simply from being alive and paying attention.

Through surrendering to the process of beadingof choosing the beads and materials and putting them together on a strandI am offered a way of looking at life without judgment. There is no right or wrong way to string beads, no right or wrong choices. And that's the way it is with life. There are no right or wrong choices; there are only differentand sometimes arduous!paths to wholeness. That's the lesson in the beads for me. Once we peel off the layers of supposed to be we have been hiding behind, once we realize that