5.1 In and out of the sweet spot

One of the things that makes being human so hard on us is that…

We’re dilemmic beings.

Deeply so.

Dilemma is part of our nature. And it’s a part we try our best to ignore.

The dictionary says…

A dilemma is when you have to make a choice you don’t want to have to make.

For example, you’ve got two options and both are bad, but you have to pick one.

I’m thinking of a guy I knew in college, who right after he graduated got a draft notice. This was in the era of the Vietnam War. He decided that no matter what, he would not go fight in Vietnam, because he believed that was an immoral war. For him this decision was momentous, but simple. It was not dilemmic.

But his next decision was wrenching. One option was to go to prison for refusing the draft, a choice which scared him because he knew enough about prisons to know how destructive they are to inmates.

Or he could fly to Toronto, relinquish his citizenship, and become a Canadian. Which he did. And he made a great life for himself up north, but he found it very painful to leave his family behind and this country which he loved.

A dilemma can also be when you have two good choices but you can’t have both.

I’m remembering Sandy, a woman I knew who was in love with two men at the same time. She said, “I want to be two people so I can spend my life with each of them. I want this so badly that sometimes I think if I concentrate on my desire hard enough, it might actually happen.”

She finally picked one and committed to him, and was happy with him, but she hated having to make that choice.

That’s what the dictionary has to say about dilemma. But our genome has a whole lot more to say. And it tells us that…

At our very core we’re dilemmic beings.

Before we were homo sapiens, when we were living in chimpanzee–like troops, we were your typical competitive, self–centered kind of species, with individuals contesting against each other, and that’s because DNA, the basis for life, is inherently competitive and self–centered.

But over time, we evolved into a tribal or social–group species. We learned how to cooperate with other people in our group at a very sophisticated level. And that became the key to our success.

Thing is, though, we didn’t leave self-centeredness behind. We kept that but learned how to be cooperative with each other in our tribes. So now we were both, competitive and cooperative, and had to find some way to make those two work together.

Most species are not dilemmic. They don’t have to make the kind of difficult decisions we do. They do their thing in a straightforward way, propelled by instinct.

But for us humans, decision–making can get complex and contradictory. And difficult and painful.

And that’s because we have to deal with this fundamental dilemma…

Me versus we.

We each have to decide how to respond to dilemmic questions every day…

Who do I put first, myself or my group?

How much do I cooperate?

How much do I compete?

How much do I give to my family and my tribe? How much do I take from them?

Sometimes these decisions are easy. There are times when it’s very clear to me that if I give to my group, my group will be stronger and I’ll be personally better off along with the group as a whole.

Yet, while that particular decision on that day might be easy…

Nothing gets rid of the underlying dilemma.

So tomorrow, I might have to deal with a me–versus–we decision that’s not easy at all.

And just because we’ve become a super–cooperative species, does not mean that cooperation of the kind we’ve achieved was easy for our ancestors.

But our hunter–gatherer ancestors came up with a brilliant solution to this problem. Tribal groups put together a set of mores, embodied in the group’s culture which became the way of life for everyone in the group.

So you had a discipline to follow. You had guidelines, you had rules to help you along. You grew up knowing what was okay to do and what was not okay. And you followed that guidance which then minimized the decision–making you had to do, especially the dilemmic decision–making.

Still, that did not take away our underlying dilemmic nature. Our tribal strategies were only a way to manage it.

I think of the me–versus–we problem as being on a continuum…

The Dilemma Continuum.

Family relationships, for example, are on this continuum. At one end is the me–extreme where I focus totally on what I need and not at all on what the family needs. At the other end is the we–extreme, where I put my family’s needs first and ignore my own personal needs.

We can place communities on this Continuum, too.

As an example of the me–first strategy, I’m thinking now about the hippies of the 1960s and 70s who set up communes where people came together by choice instead of kinship. They “tuned in and dropped out.” They rebelled against the restrictive mandates of mainstream society. They did their best…

To maximize personal freedom.

Which meant their culture was me–first.

In 1968, I moved into Haight–Ashbury just as the hippies were moving out and being replaced by the hard–drug scene. I heard the stories about people heading to the country to join idyllic communities. I saw the pictures. Sexy earth mothers with wildflowers in their hair. Gardens burgeoning with hunky vegetables. Workshops where people made beautiful things out of leather, wood, and clay, things you wanted to caress. And at night, everyone took hands in a big circle under the starry sky to dance their way into bliss.

I was jealous. I wanted to live there, too. But no hippie ever mistook me for one of their own. I was too uptight, as the phrase went. And I was too much of a political activist to be content with dropping out. Still, I wished I had it in me to run away and become a free spirit and go with the flow and have that kind of fun.

One young woman in a video interview described it like this…

“Here on the commune, we’re all together as a community. We get to pursue what we each believe is best for ourselves. There are no limiting rules. There’s no higher authority to tell us what to do. We each get to do our own thing.”

It sounded so perfect—until I started hearing stories about communes imploding. Implosions that left people damaged. It made no sense to me at the time. Everyone had such good intentions. Why wasn’t that enough?

But now I look back and the problem is clear. In the communes that fell apart there was a critical piece missing. They were good at individual freedom, but they didn’t master the discipline of cooperative decision–making. They didn’t take care of the group as a group.

In the cases I heard about, emotional bullying became the norm. There was no workable system of conflict resolution, so if you wanted something and people weren’t giving it to you, you’d throw a tantrum. And people would let you bully them because the point of the commune, after all, was for everyone to have whatever they wanted all the time.

Political collectives, a few of which I had contact with, often had the same problem with emotional bullying. I remember one I was fond of, a group of remarkable women up in the Sierra foothills, who were being run helplessly in circles by the bully in their group. They had no way to stop her because they wouldn’t consider making any non–consensus decisions. So the bully could always veto any proposal designed to set limits on her bad behavior. They kept doing good work in their community for years, they were loved and respected, but their group process took an awful toll on them.

At the other end of the continuum from the hippies are tight–knit, long–lasting religious communities, like the Amish, which are we–first.

The Amish came to Pennsylvania in the early 1700s and from there moved into Ohio, Indiana, and other states. All these years later they’re still maintaining the core of their tradition. Thinking of them, I just remembered the barn raising scene from Witness, the film with Harrison Ford, so I clicked over to YouTube to find it…

You see wagons loaded down with lumber drawn by sturdy, willing horses, arriving at the farm of a newlywed couple. You see the men wearing their blue shirts, straw hats, and tool belts, and the women with their long plain dresses in quiet, solid colors and their demure white caps. So many happy faces.

The work starts. Men drill holes in the beams, join them together with wooden pegs pounded in, then use ropes to pull the frame of the barn piece by piece up into the air and into position.

There’s a break for the midday meal the women have been preparing and now serve on long plank tables flanked by wooden benches. In the afternoon, the men and boys put up the outside walls of the barn with a whirlwind of busy hammering. The women quilt, accompanying their stitching with subdued conversation.

As the sun begins to set in rosy pastels, the long day of labor is completed. There’s a glow of well–being as families drift back out onto the road heading home. The background music swells in an emotional crescendo.

The Amish touch something in us that longs for a peaceful way of life…

They touch our need for a depth of belonging that’s not easy to find in mainstream society.

Yet, despite how compelling movie portrayals of the Amish are…

We don’t see millions of Americans flocking to join up with them.

And why not? Because behind the romanticizing there’s a sober reality. To keep from getting swamped by the aggressive, dominant culture all around them, the Amish follow a serious, even severe discipline. It’s what holds them together; it’s what protects them from outsiders.

Like the hippies, they retreat from society to make a refuge, but whereas the hippies were extreme in supporting individual expression, the Amish are extreme in putting the group first. They suppress individual expression.

In a strict Amish community, the group tells you what clothes to wear, what kind of work you’re allowed to do, and what to believe. The group lays out your way of life and makes your moral decisions for you. There’s no such thing as a free spirit. Everyone is bound by the Ordnung, the rules of behavior.

In some districts the bishops are so scared of people having their own thoughts they forbid individuals from organizing unauthorized Bible study groups. Because if people developed their own personal understanding of the Bible it might be different than the doctrine the bishops approve, and that might cause rifts in the community, which absolutely cannot be allowed.

The coherence of the group is actually more important than the sacred book which the community counts as its spiritual foundation.

Amish communities rebel against the world outside, but…

Within the community, rebellion is not tolerated.

I’ve just described the continuum at both of its ends, but where things get really interesting and really challenging is in the middle, especially right at the center of the middle.

And that center is what I call…

The sweet spot.

It’s where…

You do your best to maximize both me and we at the same time.

What I would love best is to be…

100% me.

And, at the same time…

Belong 100% to a group that I believe in.

I want total personal freedom and total belonging without any conflict between the two.

That’s my ideal. Me not having to compromise on self–expression and my group not having to compromise on what it needs from me.

I understand that in real life, I’m going to have to settle for less than 100%, but in spite of that I want to try to get as close to the sweet spot as I can.

And this means wrestling with the innate opposition between me and we.

It means wrestling with dilemmic decisions.

And…

This takes moral labor.

And…

Moral imagination.

Given this dilemmic nature of ours, a set of rules is very appealing, but rules only work in simple situations. If there’s even a minor degree of dilemmic difficulty, they fail us. And if all we do is follow rules, we stagnate morally.

Caring about someone, taking them into account deeply and personally in their rich complexity, this requires…

Not rules but a heart.

A heart attuned to complexity and nuance and layers.

And by the way, the sweet spot is the place where intimacy comes most alive because to make intimacy work…

I need to care about me and you and our relationship in equal and harmonious measure.

Each time we struggle with a decision about the people in our lives our hearts get a moral workout. And the closer we are, and the closer we want to be, the more of a challenge it is.

There isn’t any way to get rid of our dilemmic nature. It will be with us till the end. So the best we can do is to…

Master the art of living into dilemma.

We can’t master dilemma itself, in the sense of taking control of it or transcending it or vaporizing it. We can only work to get better at wrestling with this core part of ourselves. And this wrestling, oddly enough, feeds self–love, because…

Making hard moral decisions doesn’t harden you, it makes you tender.

When you labor in the service of nurturance, you soften toward yourself, and into yourself.

In practice, “living into dilemma” means…

Living into the sweet spot.

Living into the partnership of me and we. Which is a continual balancing act. Because it’s not like you get to the sweet spot and your relationship dilemma is settled and done with. Dilemma doesn’t work like that.

It’s not possible for us to stay in the sweet spot constantly. Not in that prime place of 100% plus 100% both me and we in perfect, abundant partnership.

So when I talk about living into the sweet spot, I’m also necessarily talking about times when you fall out of the sweet spot. And you find yourself in what I call…

The in-and-out dance.

When I’m headed closer into the sweet spot, I’m really happy and celebrating and appreciating what I love about the partnership of me and we.

But what about when I’m having a bad day, and struggling with my limitations, and moving away from the sweet spot? What do I do then? Do I berate myself? Do I hammer myself with shoulds, like, “You idiot, you should stay in that sweet spot. What’s wrong with you?”

I choose not to do that. Instead I commiserate with myself, “I’m backsliding. And as this is happening I’m noticing how much I wish I were back in the sweet spot. How much it means to me. How much I hate losing my connection with it.”

When I’m busy focusing on my love for the sweet spot, I’m not attacking myself. Instead…

I’m feeling for myself so I will keep fighting for myself.

Fighting, when I’m able, to head back in the direction of the sweet spot.

There have been plenty of days when I’m tired and want to rest and wish that we humans were not dilemmic and could have a much, much easier time of it.

But most days now, having been on this upgrade journey for quite a while, I’m thankful for our dilemmic nature. Or rather…

I’m thankful that we can use it to upgrade love.

It’s in the middle of the continuum that…

Love finds new life.

But we don’t get that benefit for free. I’ve said, asking more of love means asking more of ourselves, and one of the key reasons is that upgrading love is…

A dilemmic project.

Taking on the dilemmic dimension of upgrading love, without any buffer, without any workaround, is a more challenging way to live. And yet, it’s more adventurous and invigorating and rewarding, because it deepens our self–love and makes it richer as it deepens our relationships and makes them richer.

Next let’s look at a series of examples of dilemmic decision–making to see what it’s like, not just in theory, but in practice.

First up is a very simple example of how one decision could be made in three different ways…

Imagine there’s a nonprofit called the Health Independence Project (HIP). It’s dedicated to teaching everyone how to take charge of their own well–being so they don’t have to be so dependent on a profit–centered health care system. HIP has just finished a major, 50–page report to accompany the launch of their newest program. Six staff worked on the report and it’s time to decide how to give credit.

If the director puts the report out under his name alone that would be me–centered.

If it was decided not to include any individual names, but just give credit to the organization as a whole, that would be we–centered.

The sweet–spot resolution would look like this…

We’d like to thank Luisa for the research that led to this report, Gabriella for the writing, Hilaria for the layout and illustrations, Santiago for designing the program itself, and Raul for the accompanying videos.

A special thanks to Dolores, our director, who has championed each of us personally and challenged us to do our best work, and who has helped us discover our synergy as a team, and realize that together we are way more than the sum of our parts.

And finally, thank–you to all the supporters, Board members, and former staff who have contributed to making Health Independence the organization it is.

Now let’s look at some stories of more complex dilemmic decision–making. Easy–step gurus don’t talk about dilemma. They can’t, because if they did it would blow up their brand which is founded on their promise that even big life challenges can be solved with easy steps.

But…

Dilemmic decision-making requires gutsy steps.

Or more accurately, it requires gutsy wrestling.

Let’s start with this story. It’s one where a dilemmic challenge, which at first looked like trouble, landed in the sweet spot and turned into a serious blessing.

Imagine you’re Julia, a single mom, and you live with your 13–year-old daughter, Ashlyn, in a small town an hour away from a mid–sized city. At dinner on Friday night, Ashlyn surprises you…

“Let’s move to the City.”

Your first, but silent reaction is…

No way. I’m a single mom with a demanding job and you want me to pick up and move, and how much will that cost, and how disruptive will it be, and I’m rooted here where I grew up.

But then you catch yourself…

Hold it, I’m being reactive. Let me be proactive. Let me investigate this.

So you ask Ashlyn…

“Why do you want to move? I thought you liked it here.”

“I do like it here, but if you want to go to the High School for the Arts, you have to be a legal resident of the City. And I want to go to that high school.”

You’re still in the mood to quash this, except you see a light in her eyes you’ve never seen before. So you ask her why art matters so much to her, and she tells you…

“At first I struggled with my art class this year. I thought I had no talent. But I’m getting better. In fact, over the last few weeks, Ms. Ducharme has been raving about my drawings. She went to the School for the Arts and she’s been telling me about it. She thinks I could get in.

“And I’m happiest when I’m doing art. I’ve heard people talk about finding themselves, and I think this is what they mean, the way I feel about drawing and painting and design.”

Now you’re remembering kids you knew growing up who found what they loved early on—sports, math, writing, music—and you saw how happy it made them. You never had that, but you want it for your daughter.

But wait, you’ve got a worry. Is this just a passing fancy? So you propose the following to Ashlyn…

“You’ve got a year and a half till 9^th grade when you can start going to this school, but how about if we get serious about this right now? How about if we make sure that art really is your first love before we do something as drastic as moving? What if you sign up right now for one of the Saturday classes they have for kids at the Art Museum in the City?”

“Yes! I want to do that. And it’s fair to test me to see if I’m really going to stick with art, but I’m sure I will.”

And now you realize there’s something else that worries you about moving, so you make a request…

“You know the City is not as safe as our little town. Would you be willing to take some self–defense classes here, starting right away?”

“Elana goes to a dojo and I’ve seen her in her gear and it looks really cool, so yes, I’ll go.”

“You know, I really believe in self–defense for women and girls, but I’ve never done anything about it myself. How would you feel if I took adult classes at the same place? Would that be embarrassing?”

“Not at all. And maybe we could practice together sometimes at home so we’d get better faster.”

And then one more thing occurs to you…

“I’ll bet the School for the Arts has shows and exhibitions. How about if we start going to those, so you get a chance to meet some of the kids and hear what it’s like going to that school?”

“Wow, yes! I’d really like that. I want to meet as many other art–geeks as I can.”

So now you’re on a roll when Ashlyn surprises you again…

“Mom, we’re talking about what I want, but would this move work for you?”

“Thank you so much for asking me that. And I don’t know. But can I sleep on it and let you know tomorrow night?”

“Of course.”

And you don’t actually sleep on it. You think about it, furiously, all that night and through the next day…

What about me, indeed? I know I can’t move to the City if it’s only about Ashlyn. I would do anything for my daughter, but I know if I sacrifice my happiness for hers, I’ll end up resenting her and that will wreck our relationship. I have to make this work for me, too.

So you take a good hard look at your life and realize you’ve been coasting. You’re in line to be the next ED at the nonprofit where you work. And Robert is aging, but his job is his whole identity, so he might never retire. Are you willing to wait maybe ten years, or longer, to step up?

Then you realize what you really love is leading a team, and you have a team of people you love working with. But Robert is a micro–manager, he doesn’t really let you lead like you wish you could.

A phrase pops into your mind, “A leader who develops leaders.” That’s who you are, that’s who you want to be. You don’t care about your job title. In fact, you’re not interested in fundraising and administrative work. You just want a team that’s really your own.

So you decide that while your daughter is checking out art, you’re going to check out the nonprofit community in the City. The annual Nonprofit Day Conference is coming up in a month. You make a plan. You’re going to skip the workshops and spend the whole time talking to people, as many as you can, especially EDs, asking them about their work and their organizations, and see who you find who’s sympatico and who in a year or even sooner might want to hire a leader who develops leaders.

Now you’re suddenly appreciating Ashlyn like crazy, because of how she’s taking charge of her own life, but also because she’s interrupted your coasting. You’re going to take charge, too.

What we see here is a mom and daughter embarking on an adventure together. They’ve resolved a dilemma that could have put them at odds. Which would have happened if the mom had simply put her foot down and said, “No, we’re not moving, period, end of discussion.”

But let’s remember that these two have only resolved this one episode of me versus we. The basic dilemma is still at the center of their relationship, as it is in all familial relationships. And this underlying dilemma will never be removed. These two will have many more occasions to work through more episodes together.

Happily, though, each episode they wrestle their way through will grow them and give them a better chance at success the next time.

Now let’s switch gears. When you’re up against a dilemmic decision, and even if you give it your best, there’s no guarantee of a happy ending.

Tracey and Hunter have been happily married for five years but now Hunter brings up an issue they haven’t talked about before…

“We’re not getting any younger, Tracey. It’s time to make a plan for the next phase of our marriage, having kids.”

“Whoa, what?!”

“Kids, little tykes that turn a couple into a family.”

“But I’m not ready to have kids.”

Here’s the situation for Tracey. She’s a writer. Over the past three years she’s started to meet with success. She’s getting her short stories placed in magazines. Rejections are rare now. And her debut novel has just been published to raves from just enough reviewers to be able to call it a winner. And to sign a contract for her next book with a decent advance.

So when Hunter presses her, here’s how the conversation goes…

“When do you think you will be ready?”

“Oh god, Hunter, I’m so, so sorry. I’m not ever going to want to have babies. My books are my babies. I’m living exactly the life I want to live.”

“How can a book match a baby?”

“For me it just does. But what about you, how important is it to you to have children?”

“The most important thing ever. I’ve always dreamed of having kids, having a real family of my own.”

“Oh, sweetie, my heart is breaking. I didn’t know that. And suddenly I feel like the floor is falling out from under me. How did we go so long not knowing this about each other? This is so painful.”

“You can say that again. I thought you knew how I felt about kids.”

“But we never talked about it. Oh, what a mistake we’ve made. We fell crazy in love so young and we were so right for each other in so many ways, but we never did our due diligence.”

“Due diligence? What’s that mean? It doesn’t sound very romantic.”

“It’s not. It’s pragmatic. It just means taking a cold, hard look at the long term considerations for our marriage. Like where each of us is at with kids.”

“I just assumed that marriage meant a family.”

“And I assumed marriage just meant marriage. This is shocking. What do we do now?”

“I’m making enough money that you can be a stay–at–home mom and do your writing in your spare time.”

“But I need big blocks of time for my writing.”

“Okay, then we’ll hire a nanny so you can write three days a week.”

“That’s a great idea, and thank you for thinking of that, but if I was going to be a mom I’d need to be a 100% mom, an amazing mom, not a part–time, half–hearted mom.”

“Maybe quality time would make up for quantity time.”

“But there’s something more. I’m scared that if I chose to be a mom for your sake, that I’d resent you for taking my writing away from me. And maybe I’d resent my child, too, and that would be the worst thing ever.”

“Yeh, that would not be okay.”

“And what about you? What if you gave up on having a family? Who would you resent?”

“Well, you, of course, for denying me what I want most. And your writing, I guess, which to date I’ve loved. I’d probably resent the hell out of that, too.”

“Understandable.”

“But you used to be a part–time writer, back when you were teaching at the college and coaching.”

“But I was teaching writing and coaching writers, and all that made me better at my own work.”

“Mothering might put you through changes that would make you a better writer.”

“That’s true. That happened for my friend Janae. But I’m not willing to roll the dice, because what if that doesn’t happen for me? And, see, the thing is I’ve already found my formula for success.”

“What does that mean?”

“Look at my reviews. What do they say?”

“That your characters are imaginative and compelling. But what they comment on most is the depth of your characters. One reviewer said the depth was breathtaking. Another one said she fell in love with your characters. Another one said you seem to have affection for each of your characters, even the bad guys.”

“I think those reviewers are accurate. And that depth they talk about is something I can get to only because I can spend long hours five days a week, being a hermit, putting myself under a spell, going deep and staying deep. No interruptions, no pressures, no other big concerns to weigh on me.”

“But you take the weekends off.”

“Yes, that’s my recovery time. That’s what gets me ready to dive in again on Monday morning. If I had a child, I’d never get recovery time.”

“Isn’t there any compromise you’d be willing to make?”

“I don’t want to. My writing is so me I can’t imagine giving it up. And especially since I’ve spent years working hard to get to where I am with it.”

“When you put it that way, I’m really happy for you, but this scares me about us.”

“You’re good with kids. You spend time with your friends who have kids. Could it be enough for you to be an honorary uncle to a bunch of kids?”

“No. I do lots of fun stuff with kids already, but I want the hard stuff, too. Being up in the middle of the night, dealing with them when they’re being a pain in the butt, taking care of them when they’re sick.”

“You want the hard stuff?!”

“Yes, I do, because I want to be a real dad.”

“Oh god. What do we do now?”

“I don’t know.”

“I love you so much, I can’t imagine my life without you.”

“And me, too, you. But I can’t imagine my life without kids of my own.”

So now what choices do these two have?

Tracey could give up her writing, or Hunter could give up having kids. But what would that do to their relationship? Whoever gave up their dream would resent the other one who meanwhile, in stark contrast, would be living the life they love.

Or to keep things equal, they could both give up their dreams. But can you imagine?

Or they could both find new dreams that are compatible. But would it be possible to find new dreams that would match the ones they have now?

Or they could split up and go find new partners. And break their hearts in the process.

Even when Hunter and Tracey make their final decision, they still won’t be done with the dilemma. There will be years of longing for the life not lived, and second guessing, and hurting behind whatever loss they choose to suffer. There will be pain that maybe time will heal, or maybe it won’t.

Next let’s look at a situation where it’s not just a single dilemma, but a tangle of them.

Imagine Wendy comes to you and wants your help in working through her problematic relationship with her sister, and you have this conversation with her…

“I’ve agreed to go to one of those ‘Listening Sessions’ next week. My sister is organizing it. I’m bringing five pro–choice women and my sister is bringing five pro–life women.”

“So you’re on opposite sides.”

“Very much so.”

“Why is she doing this? But wait, Wendy, I didn’t even know you had a sister. You never talk about her.”

“Her name is Diane, and I don’t talk about her because it’s too painful.”

“Why is that?”

“When I was 22 I had an abortion, and when I told her about it, my sister berated me and called me a murderer and slammed the door of my apartment as she left.”

“Wow.”

“I was hurting so bad, and she was so cold. And, see, we were best friends right through high school, so it was really hard to lose her like that.”

“So why do you think she’s organizing this session?”

“I don’t know. I’m hoping she might be opening to a reconciliation. But maybe she and her posse are coming to try to bring me back into the fold.”

“So you’re ambivalent about attending?”

“Oh, yes. First because I’ve been to listening sessions, and so what if we hear each other but say the same old things. I run our pro–choice campaigns and education programs at work, for god’s sake, so I’ve read tons of fundamentalist literature and listened to lots of anti–choice talks on YouTube. I know all their arguments. I don’t want to spend an evening hearing that stuff rehashed.”

“What would make the evening worth it to you?”

“If we could find some common ground. And if I saw my sister opening to me even a little.”

“Which would look like what.”

“I’d want her to know who I am, that I’m a complex person, and the stuff her church—the same fundamentalist Catholic church I grew up in—tells her about people like me is just not true. I believe in women having the right to choose, I want them to be able to have an abortion if they need it, and I needed it, I wasn’t ready for a child, not even close. I’m still not.

“But even though I defend the right to choose, I hate abortions. My sister delivered her attack and then bailed out on me. When I needed her. What she doesn’t know is that I cried for three weeks after my abortion. I saw the amnio. I made the mistake of giving my baby girl a name—Emily.

“And it’s not over. Every year on my due date, which I think of as her birthday, I imagine what she would be like another year older, what she would look like, what she would like doing, how her personality was developing. And I wonder what it would have been like to be her mom.

“So I’m not done with the abortion. One night of passion without birth control, one mistake, and I’ve paid for it and I’m still paying for it. I guess most of all, I’d like my sister to have some compassion for me.”

“What about her calling you a murderer?”

“See, that really hurts, because, though I refuse to call myself a murderer, I did kill that embryo. That’s something we pro–choice people don’t deal with forthrightly enough, we kind of side step it.”

“Is that common ground with your sister?”

“It could be if she were to understand it the way I do. I can say, yes, I killed a fetus, my fetus. There was a life growing in my and I terminated it. That’s so, so serious. And that’s why I hate abortion. But I also hate forcing women to have children they are not ready for or can’t afford. I hate turning women into breeders, so they never have a life of their own.”

“So a dilemma.”

“You bet. And it drives me crazy. And I don’t know what to do with it because I don’t want to tell my sister she’s right.”

“And yet…”

“She’s not wrong. But there’s got to be more to it. But I’m feeling stuck and you’re someone who thinks odd thoughts…”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“A good thing, a good thing. That’s why I’m coming to you. Help me get out of this trap.”

“Okay, I’m starting to cook up a few thoughts. How about if we go back to the very beginning, back to the source?”

“Let’s go.”

“I want to ramble for a bit, set the scene, so we can go deeper into the dilemma and maybe find a way to deal with it.

“When we’re talking about abortion, we’re talking about the larger issue of reproduction and when we’re talking about reproduction, we’re talking about evolution, because reproduction is the main purpose of evolution.

“Creatures strive to survive in order to reproduce, and that’s the main driver of evolution, to send your genes into the next generation.

“So when we’re talking about abortion, we’re talking about one of the most fundamental issues for biological beings, like us humans. No wonder it stirs up such feelings. How we handle reproduction is a life and death issue for us, as it is for any species.

“Now a bit of history. In the past nature has done our birth control for us. It limited our population. Babies and moms died in child birth. Disease and accidents carried away lots of children. And droughts. And locusts. And competing tribes.

“But we’ve overridden nature. We have better food and safer conditions and modern medicine. So now we need to take responsibility for controlling our population ourselves.

“I used to work with this guy, Dr. Bertolini. He and his wife were good Catholics, and just before I left that job, they had their tenth baby. Their tenth!”

“I can’t imagine.”

“I remember I got out a piece of scratch paper and did the math. If each of their children had ten children, and those children the same, and so on, by the time they got to the tenth generation there would be ten billion Bertolini descendants.”

“That’s ten Chinas!”

“It’s more people than are alive on earth right now. Just from one family’s lineage. And what if lots of families did the same. Earth couldn’t support those numbers.”

“So if nature doesn’t control our reproduction and we don’t control it either, in short order we will have extreme overpopulation, is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes. That’s what’s happened in the last two hundred years. A population explosion. You’ve likely seen that graph of our numbers climbing slowly and suddenly the line veers upward at a steeper and steeper angle. And here we are adding billions of us within the span of less than a hundred years.

“We’re not taking good care of the people we already have, so how do we imagine that we’re going to be able to take care of giant numbers of additional people?”

“I see where you’re going with this. Overpopulation leads to mass death.”

“Famine, mass migration, warfare, failed states. And that means if we don’t practice birth control, the consequence is going to be death one way or another. Either the individual death of fetuses through abortion, or the death of large numbers of people as a result of overpopulation. Maybe even the death of our species.”

“When you say it like that, it makes me feel kind of negative about evolution. No, it makes me really, really angry. Like we’ve been set up for trouble. Evolution has put us in the middle of a dilemma with no easy answers.”

“So what are you thinking now about birth control?”

“It would be easy if everyone had the discipline to practice sex responsibly. But look at us, we’re a sex–crazed species. That discipline is not easy. The #1 thing on the internet is pornography. People get into so much trouble because of sex. Like me when I was 22.

“It’s so easy to jump into bed with someone, your brain flooded with hormones, without a thought about the consequences. The drive to reproduce is so powerful. And on the global level we’re not even close to getting control of our numbers.”

“Now back to Diane. Let me ask you about blame. Where do you want to place it?”

“I’d rather hate evolution than hate my sister. And I want my sister to hate evolution, too—instead of me.”

“So what common ground are you finding?”

“We share a common enemy—evolution. And both of us hate abortion. And I’m a fierce supporter of education on birth control. That could be common ground if my sister chooses to join me there.

“But no matter what, being able to see our common ground in a new light means that even if she still calls me a murderer, I will not demonize her in return. I can trust in myself that I will not do that.”

“Do you think Diane might be dealing with any dilemmic contradictions like you are?”

“Let me think about that. Her church is opposed not just to abortion but to birth control. Their point of view is that if you block the sperm from the egg, that’s next door to murder. You’re preventing a life that would otherwise come into being.

“Yet, I’m sure my sister practices birth control. She’s only got two kids, and about five years ago in an unguarded moment, she said she was done and wasn’t going to have a third.

“So there’s a contradiction for her. She’s a loyal member of the church, yet if she is violating a key tenet, that must cause her turmoil.

“And then there’s this contradiction. Birth control is the best way to prevent abortions. And here’s her church insisting that abortion is murder, but refusing to take the most effective action they could take against that kind of murder.

“She can stay in the church if she practices birth control. She can get away with that. But she can’t preach what she practices. She couldn’t do what I do and organize programs and go out and teach birth control. If she did she’d get kicked out. I wonder if she feels that as a contradiction?

“Okay, new plan! I’m going to call Diane and ask her to meet with me this weekend, just the two of us.”

“What will you say to her?”

“I miss you so much, can we talk? Can we look for some healing between us? Can we look for common ground? I think we’ve got it. And there are some personal things about me I want to tell you that I haven’t told you before. And then there are some questions I’m aching to ask you. Will you meet with me this weekend?

“And in our conversation I want to be clear that I don’t want to be wrestling with her, but that I’m seeing how the two of us are each wrestling with dilemmas that go very deep, and that we could share with each other.

“And I’m feeling so strongly how both Diane and I are in over our heads with this birth control thing. How our whole species is. And I want us to stop fighting each other and start taking care of each other.”

“Anything else you need?”

“No. I feel opened up and settled down. And thank you.”

Finally, now, I’m going give you three stories to illustrate just one point, a point which I believe is the most important element of dilemmic decision-making. See if you can guess what it is before I reveal it at the end.

First story…

Imagine, you’re married and the father of two young children and you’re offered a promotion at work. It’s a great job. Half the guys in the office would give their right arm for it. And you know what’s expected of you. A corporate executive is supposed to climb the ladder of success. So you decide to take the job.

Except you’ll have to travel for two weeks every month, and on the days when you’re in town you’ll be working long hours. So you won’t get home till after dinner most nights, or maybe not until after the kids have gone to bed. Family time is important to you, and you want to be there for your kids in a way your father never was for you, so you decide not to take the job.

Except the salary is half again what you’re getting now, which means you could put your family in a new house in a safer neighborhood in a better school district. You want your kids to have teachers who could bring out their full potential.

Except you remember what matters most to you in this life is to be a loving husband and a great dad, and you don’t know how to do that if you’re gone all the time.

So you’re caught in a dilemma. Do you make a better life for your family…or do you make a better life for your family?

You talk with your wife for hours each night for a week, and on Saturday you have a family meeting with the kids, and finally you decide to refuse the promotion because when all is said and done, time with your family has to come first. You want to provide for them, but it’s just not okay to be an absentee provider.

You know there will be days when you’ll regret your decision. You know exactly who will be chosen to take the promotion in your place, and he’ll be happy to needle you about how dumb you are. He’ll regale you with stories of traveling to interesting places to meet with interesting people. There will be days when you’ll wish it was you taking those trips.

Dilemmic decisions are so easy to criticize after the fact because there are such strong arguments on both sides, and that means critics can easily make you wrong no matter which option you pick, and you can make yourself wrong, too.

Except you know you’ve bearded this particular dilemma in its den. Of course you’ll have regrets, but you feel a glow of pride, too, as you decide to leverage this dilemma. You’re going to use this one very hard decision to trigger a stream of easy decisions.

You’re going to take classes to finish your MBA—just one night a week and every other Saturday—so you can get a better job and earn more money but still be around home a lot.

And you’re going to spend serious time with your kids on their homework, helping them learn how to become excellent students so they can power through their schoolwork and have time to develop other talents—one loves drawing, the other loves piano—which you’ll support them in and you’ll enjoy doing that.

And now you notice you have a newfound sense of appreciation for yourself, and for this you are thankful.

Second story…

Say you’re a woman who married her high school sweetheart right after you both got out of college. Your husband had a lot of sexual experiences during the four years you spent mostly apart, but you never did. He’s the only man you’ve ever been with.

Just before you head off to a conference you have to attend for work, the two of you have a big argument that doesn’t get settled. So there you are 2,000 miles from home, and you’re mad, and without even thinking about it you have sex with three different men during the five days of the conference. And you’re glad you did because now you’ve got experience. You’ve learned something about variety.

And it was disappointing. Each time, after the guys finished, you kicked them out. You didn’t let them stay the night. You didn’t talk to them the next day. By the end of the week you realized that you need intimacy with sex. You want to be with someone who really knows you and cares about you. You now understand that anonymous sex, which some people find hot, doesn’t work for you. That’s just not who you are.

You’re glad for these three encounters, because that voice that nags you about missing something and being naïve, has finally shut up. So you head home happy. You feel more committed to your husband than ever before. And you want to celebrate with him.

Except how can you? Telling him would hurt him way too much. And it wasn’t just one man you cheated with, but three! He’ll be so hurt. And you can’t risk your husband leaving you. He’s not only your husband but your best friend and irreplaceable. You can’t imagine your life without him. So you decide you’ll keep this secret.

Except how can you? You’ve never been one to keep secrets. You’ve always told your husband everything. You hate the thought of having to spend the rest of your life keeping this dangerous secret, having to stay vigilant every waking moment so you don’t blurt it out, and not being able to talk to your girlfriends about the breakthrough you experienced because you’re scared gossip might get back to your husband.

And you realize that from now on you won’t have the freedom to just be yourself, to be carefree. And you think, “Well, that’s my punishment, I’ll just have to suffer it.”

Except that means you won’t be giving your husband the best of yourself. You’ll be holding yourself in check. You’ll be carrying unspoken guilt which will drip a slow poison into the relationship. And your husband might begin to sense something’s wrong but he won’t know what it is, which will leave him helpless to do anything about it.

Suddenly you realize keeping this secret is like cheating on him again. And you can’t do that to him. And now you’ve hit your moral core. You don’t understand how something you did can feel so right and so wrong at the same time, but you know you’ll have to tell, even though it will be the scariest thing you’ve ever done.

Except you don’t want to hit him hard with the cold truth. You’re not going to blurt your confession then stand there like a helpless victim waiting for his anger. You want to take responsibility for what you did. You want to think through how you can best be his friend in the midst of his righteous pain.

So you go meet with a therapist you’ve heard good things about. You test her out because you want someone you and your husband can turn to immediately if need be, someone who can help the two of you find your way through the coming crisis. You want to know ahead of time that this is someone who’s got real skills with difficult issues, not one of those pitiful therapists who loves the drama of distress and instigates more trouble than they cure.

She suggests you write a long letter to him, telling him everything that’s in your heart so if he’s too freaked to listen, or you become too emotional to be coherent, you can give him the letter and he can read it when he’s calmer, and read it more than once. And she’s got another dozen ideas about how to break hard news. So now you’re as ready as you’ll ever be.

You pick Friday night to tell him so you’ll have the weekend to start going through whatever comes. You’ll tell him what you did, and that it got that old longing for experience out of your system, which you wish you had taken care of back in your college days.

And you can’t imagine never again having his arms around you holding you, but you can’t imagine having his arms around you while you’re hiding a malignant secret.

And you’re so scared that he might be too mad to stay with you, and you wouldn’t blame him if he left you, but you want him now more than ever and you’re so thankful for the relationship the two of you have created together.

And you’re not trying to talk him into forgiving you. You’re actually not asking him to forgive you because you understand there’s a way in which what you did is unforgivable.

And what’s most important is that he gets to figure out what he needs, and that he gets to make his own real decision.

And you can’t imagine life without him, but you intend to stand by him as he goes through all the feelings he needs to go through and as he decides what he wants to do about you.

And now a warm, buoyant rush of love fills your heart…and it’s for yourself.

Third story…

Say you’re a new minister nine months into your first call, still getting your feet on the ground with the basics, when two women come to meet with you one evening. They’ve just moved to town and are looking for a church to join. They’re sincere Christians and they seem very sweet, so you’re delighted, until they add: “We’re married and have two little boys.”

Instantly, you’re thinking about the three most conservative families in the congregation. Each has been here for generations—parents, grandparents, and great grandparents. And if you accept this lesbian couple, those families might leave, and you feel so strongly about people having a church home that you can’t bear to think about driving them out with a decision you made. How could you live with yourself if they left and left mad? So you’re going to have to tell this couple no.

Except this couple deserves a church home, too. And what if no other church in town accepts them? That would be intolerable. How could you be part of that outcome? So you’re going to have to tell them yes.

Except you really don’t like conflict. So you’ll tell them no.

Except this couple moved into the house right across the street from the front door of the church, and you’d have to look at that house every Sunday morning as you greet congregants after the service, and you’d be seeing those two women and their two little boys around town and that big ugly NO would be there between you.

Except a minister’s job is to bring people together not rend a congregation in two.

So you decide you’ll put the question before the congregation for a vote and let them argue it out on their own and not take a position yourself.

Except you didn’t become a minister to be a passive facilitator. You’re passionate about your faith. You remember how in seminary you discovered that you don’t believe in worshiping the historical personage of Jesus. You believe in listening to and following the Christ presence in your heart. And that presence calls you to be inclusive as Christ was inclusive. He welcomed in outcasts, and lesbians are certainly treated as outcasts often enough.

You think about your childhood minister who was the one who inspired you to go into the ministry. You remember his way of gently bringing people together, over and over again, and moving them forward.

So you decide to fly back home for a day to talk with him about how to best help your congregation through this crisis.

And it’s not like you’ve got lots of knowledge about lesbian and gay issues, so you decide to get help with that, too.

And you realize your heart has made a decision, and so you say yes to this couple. It’s the only way you can honor your relationship with the Christ who is alive in you.

The next morning when you wake up, you notice you have no regrets about saying that yes, but it takes your breath away to realize just how deeply committed you really are to inclusivity and how much trouble that might cause you.

Maybe you’ll get fired from this church. Or maybe not. Either way you’ve set yourself on a challenging path and you can’t imagine turning back. You understand that on into the future, for the rest of your life, time and again, you’re going to be doing the hard, hard work of holding very different people in your heart at the same time.

But now you’re sure this is what you’re called to, and you feel on solid ground with yourself like never before.

And now, here’s what I wanted to illustrate with these stories.

Whenever we make a dilemmic decision, the outcome matters, it matters a lot, but even trying our best, we’ll have mixed results and failures along the way. So I’ve come to believe there’s something that actually matters as much as the outcome, and often more, and that’s…

How much we care.

And…

How much we wrestle with the decision.

Specifically…

How much moral labor we put into it.

Which means…

How much heart.