On Saying “Yes.”
In November 1966, the work of 33-year old avant-garde artist Yoko Ono was among the art being featured at the Indica Gallery in London, in an exhibition titled Unfinished Paintings and Objects. At the time, Ono was in the process of finalizing her divorce from her second husband. She had come to London to focus on her art in an attempt to grieve and heal from heartbreak.
The Indica was owned by a friend of Paul McCartney’s, who invited his friend and fellow Beatle, John Lennon to visit the exhibition. Despite not being a particular lover of art, Lennon agreed, later claiming it’s because he was told there would be a living-art piece featuring an orgy in a bag. (There wasn’t.) While there, Lennon, just 25 years old and at that point well on his way to becoming one of the most famous men in the world, saw the exorbitant price tags on the overly-simplistic, boringly inflammatory, or obfuscatingly conceptual art and mused to his companions “This is a con! What the hell is this?”
As he continued through the gallery, he came across a display set in darkness, on a raised white panel with a flood light set up to illuminate it. The display featured a standard-sized wooden ladder, with a magnifying glass hanging on a chain above it. On the ceiling was a piece of clear glass. Lennon climbed the ladder, grabbed the magnifier and moved it across the piece of clear glass until it found, in tiny letters handwritten in black ink, a single word: Yes.
Later, Lennon said that what he felt while looking at that tiny “Yes.” was relief. “It’s a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn’t say ‘no’ or ‘fuck you’ or something. It says ‘yes.’” Ono described the piece as being about the discovery of hope, even when it’s hard to find. If you complete the task of climbing the ladder, and searching for it, you will find the affirmative. You will find hope. They married in 1969 and were together until Lennon’s death in 1980.
Most good things that happen in life (and that’s allowing for subjective definitions of “good”) do not happen to those who say no to everything. They don’t happen to those who err on the side of caution. They don’t happen to those who barricade themselves in physical, mental, emotional confinement. They happen to people who say yes to the world, who believe there is hope beyond struggle or pain or fear if only one takes the time to look for it. But this isn’t news. Everyone knows that. It’s lauded in art and fiction, platitudes and self-help books. WWE Wrestler Daniel Bryan’s “Yes Movement” gimmick is one of the most popular in recent history. Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan is one of the most successful and ubiquitous advertising campaigns to ever exist. We are all aware of the power of yes.
And yet.
For most people, it’s so much easier to say no. The thrill of canceling plans is one of the most memed about topics in Millennial culture. Fewer people are having sex, entering relationships, getting married. Cultural orthodoxy now dictates that for a growing number of young people, even asking someone out for a drink constitutes sexual harassment. The “no” is baked in. Risk aversion is rampant in personal, political, and career aspects of life, and although we laud saying yes as a virtue, try doing it too much in your every day life and there’s a good chance you’ll be decried as overly intense, a people-pleaser, a loose cannon, naïve…or any combination thereof. Saying no is a hot topic in pop psychology, gender studies, internet culture….most places you look.
So what good is it to say yes? What good is it to move forward through fear, difficulty, trepidation, and a world that laughs at yeasayers just to maybe have a shot at finding that tiny little hand-scrawled word beneath a piece of plexiglass 10 feet above the ground?
For starters, it’s all we have.
Betting on even a small shot, an inkling that something good could work already puts the odds of getting it much higher than for those who make no attempt, or outright reject an opportunity. Anyone who’s ever achieved anything had to first move beyond the fear of being challenged, or risking losing more than they might gain. The stagnation of indecision or refusal carries its own risks, but the devil-you-know principle of human reasoning often causes us to rationalize it into seeming like a better idea.
Second, even in failure, we learn lessons that are often more beneficial than mere avoidance of the thing we failed at would have been. If you practice every day to make the Olympic swimming team, but never make it, you’ve learned diligence, conditioning, motivation. And you’re almost certainly a much better swimmer than you were before you started. If we allow ourselves to fall in love, and it ends in pain or complication, we still got to feel the exquisite vulnerability of surrendering ourselves to the love of another. More practically, we have (hopefully!) learned more about what works or does not work for us and can utilize that information going forward. At the lowest level of reward, we now have a story to tell. We have become more interesting, adventurous, knowledgeable.
Finally, in choosing to say yes we are taking a chance on something wonderful. I’m not advocating saying yes to jumping in front of speeding cars, or getting back with an abusive ex, or using heroin. It’s not about saying yes to something that doesn’t seem like a good idea. It’s about saying yes to something you want, or you might want that only the fear (of the unknown, or the worst case scenario) keeps you from pursuing. The best reason to say yes is because the other side of that word might contain everything the deepest, darkest, most unutterably human corner of our hearts thinks it does. Ironically, to embrace life, progress, and the affirmative is in itself a rejection. In saying yes we reject fear. We let go of our oh-shit bars and put both hands on the wheel to drive toward something incredible.
