Lichen Playground
After years in the same house in the suburbs of New York City, my parents were moving to retirement in California. Downsizing, they had the usual yard sale, but there was a particular challenge with Dad’s study. Whenever Mom would suggest letting go of some book, say a 1930s electrical engineering volume, he would say that it might come in handy in their new life on the other coast. Growing frantic at the prospect of hundreds of quarrels, Mom asked me to “help your Father.”
Looking around the many bookshelves in his study, I suggested to him that we pretend we were in a shop. While leaving for lunch, the owner of the shop had generously said we could take up to a quarter of the books, absolutely free, if we could pack them in boxes during the next hour, while he was away eating.
Instead of arguing over each book that somebody didn't want him to take, Dad would grab the books that he most desired. Of course he knew exactly what I was up to, but with a grin he went along. With my help, he snatched the books that he imagined would be most valuable to him in retirement. We packed them away, and then had lunch ourselves. After eating, he went out in the yard to help with the sale and never said another word about his books.
This episode taught me the power of reframing, a concept I later heard was used in the practice of Aaron T. Beck and others in cognitive psychotherapy and in the work of the linguist George Lakoff at UC-Berkeley.
My father’s task was sorting through his books, but as long as he focused on each volume he had been lost in nostalgia, but as soon as he imagined getting one of four books free, he could quickly make the decisions on what to grab, leaving the others books behind. (This worked even though he knew he’d actually paid earlier for all of the books.) The task shifted from being an agony and source of contention to being an amusing game.