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Interview with Jerry Stanecki Author of Life Is A Joke And God Wrote It
Bloomfield, Michigan, June 22, 2001
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 I
met Jerry Stanecki after having read his book, Life Is a Joke and God
Wrote It—a small volume of reminiscences, anecdotes, and homespun
wisdom that I picked up in the local authors section of the Borders
Bookstore in Ann Arbor. Stanecki was a former Detroit
newscaster familiar to long-time residents of the area through his
career as an investigative reporter on the local ABC affiliate, Channel
7, in Detroit. A recovering alcoholic, he presented himself
as a purveyor of no-nonsense spiritual insight.
I caught up with him at the Starbuck’s on the corner of Maple and
Lahser, in Bloomfield, on an early Friday afternoon at the very
beginning of summer. I arrived at the appointed time and
spent a few minutes sizing up customers, seeing if I could tell which
one was Jerry. Finally, I spotted him just entering the
establishment. He greeted me briskly and ordered a chocolate
chip cookie from the counter, while I carried a plush chair into the
far corner of the place to ensure a maximum amount of
privacy. I told him about the kind of writing I wanted to do.
“The most important thing is to be aggressive,” he
responded. “Just let it all hang out. Put your
issues into it. Write what you feel, and see what
happens. If it’s aggressively done, that means there’s
passion in it.’“
“Thanks, I appreciate that,”
I replied. “The word ‘aggressive’ has a positive connotation
for me, especially in connection with spirituality. A lot of
qualities go into spirituality, but one thing it takes is a certain
degree of courage.”
“A great deal of courage,
actually,” Jerry responded. “The scariest thing we look at
in our lives is ourselves. When you look into the mirror and
something has happened—something that may be considered terrible—it
takes courage to say, ‘OK. I’ll hang tight. I’ll
feel this feeling that I’ve buried previously, with faith that I’m
going to come out on the other side feeling much better about
myself.’ That’s really the goal of spirituality—to be at
peace with oneself. I look at things now, when so-called
‘bad’ things happen to me in my life, and I think of them as having no
other reason to happen other than for my good.”
“That’s a great attitude,” I commented, “but it’s surprising how
elusive such an attitude can be, no matter how serious we are about
living the spiritual life.”
“Why,” he asked rhetorically,
“do I choose to believe that when bad things happen, they are happening
for my good? When positive things are happening, I recognize
them as good things. I don’t have to worry about
them. They’re not stealing anything from me. When
negative things happen to me—even something as simple as somebody
cutting me off on the road—if I believe that good things will happen as
a result of what is occurring to me right now, I stop myself from
feeling self-pity. If I feel sorry for myself, the next step
is that I get angry—‘Why me, damn it?’ Then, all of a
sudden, I’m caught in the resentment trap, which leads immediately back
to anger and self-pity. I become the dog chasing its own
tail. All of which steals my happiness.”
“I understand what you’re
saying,” I replied, “and I try to practice it, but still there are so
many times that I find myself feeling angry.
“You know why that is, don’t you? You’re human.”
“If that recognition were just turned on all the time…” I complained.
“Practice makes perfect,” Jerry stated simply.
“Yeah,” I agreed, “but
there’s no telling how long it’s going to take some of us.”
“It’s going to take some people longer than others. For
instance, you see this chocolate chip cookie I’m eating?” he
asked. “I’m eating this because I want to. I want
this because it gives me pleasure. Perception is the most
important thing here. If I perceive that you’re doing
something to harm me, hurt my feelings, or wrong me in some way, my
perception tells me that’s not pleasurable. It also says,
‘Get angry, get impatient, get intolerant.’
“Now, you can say to me, ‘Gee, I really feel bad for you,’ but you
can’t feel my feelings. Nobody can feel another person’s
feelings. If we believe that we’re powerless over the people
and the things in this world, but that we are powerful over ourselves,
then it’s an easy job. All we have to do is make the
choice. Am I going to stay angry, impatient, or intolerant
because of some jerk? Am I going to let him live in my life
rent-free?’ No. I’m going to say, ‘Check it,
Jerry. Look in the mirror and you’re going to see the
problem,’ because I’m the problem. You’re the problem when
it comes to your feelings, and I’m the problem when it comes to mine.
“For instance,” he continued,
“I was at the bank the other day. A woman comes up to me and
says, ‘Hey, does that book of yours say anything about
husbands?’ I said, ‘Yeah. The first sentence
says, ‘Look in the mirror and see the problem. It’s not your
husband.’ The woman looked shocked. She said,
‘What do you mean?’ Then we talked a little about
it. We talked about accepting responsibility for your own
feelings. I’m eating this cookie because it gives me
pleasure. If it didn’t give me pleasure, I could choose not
to eat it. No one forces you to have your feelings.”
I had completely forgotten
about his reference to the chocolate chip cookie until he unexpectedly
came back to it. Jerry was saying that eating the cookie was
a choice, just as our emotional responses to all of life’s situations
were choices. Everything we did or felt was the result of a
choice. There was something amazing about the simplicity of
this. Our responsibility didn’t extend to things other than
ourselves, but for our response to life, it was total. In
other words, we couldn’t control what happened to us, but we could
control how we felt and acted in any given situation.
“So, the power of choice
means working in the most positive way with whatever confronts you at
this moment?” I asked him.
“Precisely,” he
replied. “All you have is this moment. This is
it. If you’ve got breast cancer, that’s what’s happening to
you today. That’s what you’re dealing with. If
you hide it, if you don’t want to tell your husband about it, if you’re
worried or scared about it, what you’re doing is avoiding what IT
is. That, in turn, will create a hundred-fold more elements
of fear in your life. Fear is the most destructive force, in
terms of stealing your happiness.”
“I was hiking the other day,”
I said, “and I got into an area where there were a lot of mosquitoes,
and they were biting me. And I was thinking…”
“Those little bastards…” Jerry interjected.
“Yeah,” I
agreed. “But I was also thinking, ‘What would happen if they
didn’t itch?’“
“Well, you wouldn’t know you were being bitten. You’d ignore it.”
“So, what would happen to our
resistance? People would allow mosquitoes to bite them, and
we’d have them swarming around all over the place.”
“Well, now hold on a
minute. We’re bitten by a lot of bugs that don’t
itch. I’ll tell you what’s interesting in what you’ve said,
however. You mentioned resistance. Resistance is
a big problem. We are not put in this universe to resist
it. Resistance is trying to control a situation because of
fear. If you could go through life without trying to control
another person, place, or thing; if you could just go naturally with
the flow of the universe, it would make you available to all these
wonderful things the universe presents to you on a moment-to-moment
basis.
When I expressed wonderment
at his philosophical attitude toward life, he responded vociferously,
“Am I peaceful all the time? Hell no. I get
irritated. I get angry.”
“You do?”
“Sure, he replied, “but then
I say to myself, ‘OK, Jerry. You get pissed off over this
stuff. How long do you let it bother you?’ The
answer is, ‘As long as I choose to.’ The most important
aspect of spirituality, for me, is the ability to choose how long I
want to be angry, stay upset, or allow another person to live in my
life rent-free—whether it’s the guy who cuts me off on the freeway or
the President of the United States.”
“A couple of stories in your
book were just like experiences that I’ve had in my life,” I
said. “You told this one story about a guy who has
everything go wrong for him, and then says: That’s it,
God? You call that a hit? Can’t you do any better
than that? I had an experience just like that years ago when
I was living in Egypt. Everything had gone wrong for me
there. It wasn’t an easy place to be, in the first
place. I had various health problems at the
time. I had an operation, nearly lost a finger, got dumped
by my girlfriend, and managed to get on the wrong side of just about
everyone I knew there.”
“And were you grateful for that?” Jerry asked with an inquisitor’s intensity.
I
laughed. “No. At the time, I wasn’t particularly
grateful. I was saying, ‘Why me?’”
“When you almost lost your
finger, you could have said, ‘Gee. That was only my
finger. That could have been my whole life!’ Life
is how we look at it, at that moment.”
“I agree, but I was a long
way from being able to have that kind of outlook. At any
rate, one day I was walking down the street, and came to a covered
market that had a sewage gutter up above near the roof. I
was just in the process of saying ‘Why me?’ when I got this load of raw
sewage dumped right on my head.”
“Perfect. And I hope you looked up and said, ‘No shit!’“
“I said something that was
the equivalent of ‘Can’t you do any better than that,
God?’ Except I said it in Arabic, and there was a little
extra degree of irony in that.”
“That’s
great. When something becomes so utterly painful, one must
remember that God gives us the gift of pain to bring about
change. We like our own little niche and our own ways of
doing things. Change is scary. If you stop to
think about it, however, you change because of fear, and after that,
you’re no longer afraid. Fear is what enables us to
survive. You don’t run out in traffic with a car coming at
you. If you see a guy in a trench coat on a dark night, and
there’s something in his hand, you don’t go up to him and say, ‘Hey,
got a light?’“
“So, if you’re afraid, but you’re doing something about it, you’re OK?” I asked.
“You’re OK as long as you’re
not running away from that fear. That’s also ‘doing’
something. Instead of running away from it, run towards
it. Embrace it. Stop the
resistance. You’ll be amazed what happens.”
Now Jerry really had
me. My whole present life flashed in front of
me. I knew what my fears were, or thought I
knew. I wasn’t sure, however, if I was running towards them
or away from them. I was thinking about how pressured I felt
to conform to other people’s ideas of what I should be doing with my
life. I felt afraid to go against my own instincts, but what
if my instincts were wrong, and the advice I was receiving was
right? Was I more afraid of going with my instincts, or
against them? It was confusing. “How can I tell
if I’m running toward my fear or away from it?” I asked
him.
“Why don’t people do what they want to do?” he questioned me pointedly.
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“Because they’re afraid
to. One of the great things about alcoholics is they jump
into the pit of fire and then say ‘Now what do I do?’ For
instance, when I was rebuilding my house, I reached a point where I
didn’t have anything the carpenters lined up, I didn’t have the
plumbers lined up, and part of me was saying, ‘You can’t start anything
until you’ve got everything in order. That was the old
picture, the picture that said, ‘Everything’s got to be
perfect.’ Well, I got off of that and said, ‘What will be,
will be. I told the crew to go ahead and demolish the
house. They took down everything. All that was
left were studs—no rooms, just studs. I knew I had nowhere
to go but up. That’s when I started worrying only about what
was happening, right here and now.”
I was thinking that I was
almost at that point in my life where I was just waiting for that last
wall to be demolished.
“This is important stuff,”
Jerry brought me back to attention. “We are all born with
this wonderfully healthy ego, the one that says ‘Good job,
Jerry. You really feel good about yourself,’ or ‘Thank you,
God. It’s great to be alive.’ The moment we come
into the world that wonderfully healthy ego starts to become
diseased. Those folks who give us their love and
guidance—our mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, teachers, and
friends—also give us their character defects, the stuff they haven’t
fixed. That’s the root of our disease. How many
times have you heard, ‘I don’t want to be like my father or my
mother? It’s important to create new pictures in your
life—new, healthy pictures.
“Part of this problem is
perfection. I refer to these as old, unhealthy
pictures. Now, to get new pictures, generally what you need
is some kind of jolt, a slap in the face. In my case, it was
the gift of alcoholism. That was a terrific
gift. Because that gave me the opportunity to say, ‘There
are ways in this world other than black and white. I can
look at things in a bunch of different ways.’ And what I did
then was to start to form some new pictures.”
I felt that Jerry had
absolutely nailed my problem. I had to change in order to
come into harmony with what I wanted in life. I had to
identify what I wanted, without mistaking it for what other people
wanted for me. What was my greatest fear—finding out what I
really wanted, or settling for satisfying other people’s
expectations? If Jerry’s suggested course of action was to
do what one wanted to do, and at the same time what one was afraid of
doing, the implication was that I was most afraid of what I wanted to
do. The notion that I was afraid of conforming to people’s
expectations was a red herring, a trap that would only lead me in the
wrong direction. Some people would view this idea of doing
what you want to do as an escapist attitude,” I said, playing the
devil’s advocate.
“Really!” he replied.
“They’d say that people have
to discipline themselves by doing what they don’t want to
do.”
“Oh, absolutely, they do, but
that’s no reason to choose a profession or direction in
life. Ask them if they chose their profession because it was
what they wanted to do. If they say, ‘Yes,’ you can say,
‘Then why are you down on me for doing what I want to
do?’ Why would you allow people to have that kind of
influence over you?”
“Good question.”
“Answer it.” I was
getting a real therapy session from this man. I fumbled
around for a reply, feeling backed against the ropes. It was
undeniable that I had allowed people—members of my family—to exercise
an entirely unacceptable amount of influence over me throughout my
life. To trace back the root of the fear, to identify the
precise nature of the ego disease that I had inherited from them, was
not something I could do in an instant.
“All I can say at this
point,” I replied, “is that I think for most of my life I’ve had a very
mistaken idea about myself. I thought I was an independent
type of person, when in fact I wasn’t. I was trying to live
up to other people’s expectations all along, but I didn’t know that’s
what I was doing.”
“Well, just remember that
expectations, nine times out of ten, will lead to
disappointment. Don’t feel bad about disappointing those
people, and their expectations of you. The secret is to be
true to who you are. Maybe you’re a people-pleaser, or you
may be afraid of being abandoned. That’s a very common thing
with a lot of people, especially among our generation. The
question is, ‘Why are you doing it?’ and the answer is,
‘Don’t.’ Do what you want to do.”
To buy Jerry Stanecki's book or schedule speeches, please call 888-732-8500 or go to www.jerrystanecki.com. |
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Date Submitted:
3/14/04 |
Copyright Information:
Copyright © The Spiritual Traveler, 2001 |
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