Advice Advice Everywhere....

Last night at salon, we talked about giving and receiving advice.

"Do you give or receive advice more often?" was the opening question.

Some said give, some said receive, some said 50/50.  (I went with "receive"--since I've made a concerted effort to give only solicited advice, and no one is banging down my doors soliciting advice.)

It got me thinking.

First, what is advice?

Most of us can remember "advice" being delivered as orders--either in childhood or in a former marriage.  "Pick up your damned shoes!" is not advice.  The tone is wrong, for one thing.

My parents never gave orders, nor did I as a parent.  So when I married a man who did, I was flummoxed. How could one adult assume such authority, or bravado, or whatever it was, to tell another adult what to do, when, and how?  I was young; I got conditioned to following orders and fearing the consequences of not doing the "right" thing.

As a result of spending decades on that road, my own muscles of decision-making got as flabby as my thighs are now.  It took me a long time to exercise that muscle, but when I did, it was wonderful.

If you've lived under the thumb of a bossy parent or bossy parent-figure you married once upon a time, you know what I mean.  Once you've set that muscle free, you rankle at certain kinds of "advice."  You may say--as Elena says when someone is trying to help her do something she can do by herself--"I got it!"

Some of us last night recalled bad advice we were given; those examples were, only in retrospect, hilarious--often advice regarding what "nice girls" do and don't do.  We've all outgrown being girls, nice or otherwise--but we're all of an age when we've worked hard to shed too much nice. We value real more than nice; truth more than conformity.

Mary Oliver begins her wonderful poem, "The Journey," with these lines:

One day you finally knew 
what you had to do, and began, 
though the voices around you 
kept shouting 
their bad advice—

This poem shook everything in me loose when I first heard it: one day you stop listening to bad, cautious, impertinent advice, and you set out on your own road, knowing finally, clearly, what it is you want to do, even if it's already late and even if you're already old. You take whatever journey is yours to take, "saving the only life you can save."

Most of us agreed last night that the best advice comes when a friend listens all the way to the end of whatever story we want to tell. When she says, "This worked for me" or suggests things to consider, we take her "piece of truth" and add it to the ones we already have. This falls under the umbrella of good advice.

There are as many kinds of advice as there are dilemmas.  "Should I go left or right? Should I shop at this nursery when buying a lemon tree?"--these are the kinds of quick-answer questions that don't require long conversations.  But the really hard questions, the sensitive ones, need friendship and listening, above all, especially if the listener knows you well enough to connect the dots to earlier such dilemmas.

Usually, we don't want outright advice; we want to be heard.  How many times do we walk away from a great conversation with a friend-who-listens thinking how wise she is?  After talking to her, we suddenly know what to do.

Jean Houston tells a story about Edgar Bergen, the ventriloquist, and his puppet, Charlie McCarthy.

One day, someone walked into an empty theater to find Edgar alone, asking questions of Charlie! What should I do?  What is the meaning of life?  And Charlie was answering!

The person who walked in on this strange scene may have wondered about Edgar's sanity for a minute.  After eavesdropping for a while, he asked, "Edgar, are you talking to Charlie?"

"Yes," Edgar said. "Charlie is the wisest person I know."