Portia Nelson

Chapter five.

I walk down another street." By Portia Nelson.

It's, it's exactly what you just said.

Yeah.

In closing, I'd like to share a poem, and I want you to reflect on your own life and see if this matches your life as well.

The poem is entitled I Walk Down the Street, and it's written by Portia Nelson.

It's an autobiography in five chapters, which is a metaphor for breaking addiction and overcoming habitual patterns.

It illustrates stages of self-awareness from being lost and blaming external factors to taking responsibility, making active choices, and ultimately finding a new path in life.

I don't know if you saw my most recent PBS special.

But I opened it up with a little story from Portia Nelson, so I'll just share it here with you if you haven't seen it.

If you have PBS, you probably have, because that's about all they play.

And I'm very proud of that, and we've raised close to a quarter of a billion dollars for public television.

So...

since 1999, that's been amazing.

So this was something that Portia Nelson, who I knew, who passed away a few years back, 10 years back now, she lived up in Seattle, and she had, she was at a seminar and they were asked to write the autobiography of their life in five verses, five chapters.

So, and they gave them only like cards this size.

There's a lovely poem that really exemplifies this, uh, that I always like.

It's by Portia Nelson.

It's called Autobiography in Five Chapters.

Chapter one: I walk down the street.

many more attitudes and ideas within mindfulness that we could just go on about and i can talk about this for hours and just learn more about it but you know we won't have this tonight become like a three-hour podcast um but mitch do you remember and i'm just i'm now going god chloe you bringing this up but and i'm wondering if it even ties in and you know what if it doesn't i'm just going to delete this and you'll be like chloe that didn't work but do you remember a while ago i sent you um of a piece.

It was a poem by Portia Nelson.

It's called The Autobiography in Five Short Chapters.

Do you even remember that? I might be able to trigger your mind and at the moment you're probably like, what are you doing? What are you saying? Are you sure you said that to me? I did, I did.

And I absolutely love it because I think sometimes we have this idea that personal growth and stuff means that I've learned the lesson, I'll never do that again.

And that has definitely not been sort of my experience.

I actually think Portia Nelson needed... a sixth chapter, actually, where she says, I know exactly where the hole is.

I've done years of working on myself.

In all of us who don't really want to look at our mistakes, we would rather just bury our heads in the sand than come to terms with what it is that we have actually done and what the effects are.

There's a well-known poem by Portia Nelson called Autobiography in Five Chapters.

You might be familiar with it.

Chapter one, I walk down the street.

It's similar to the 10th step.

Continue to take personal inventory of your life and when you were wrong, promptly admit it.

The third chapter of Portia Nelson's autobiographical poem says, I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.