Interviews | Gentleness Ambassadors
The Gentler Way is the Harder Way
Interview with Cristo Lopez, Ph.D. — Retiree and Writer on Medium
This article is part of an interview series, where I ask fellow sensitive healers, coaches, artists, writers, and spiritual teachers how they embody Gentleness in their businesses and personal lives. I call them Gentleness Ambassadors :)
Cristo Lopez, Ph.D., and I connected through the world of Medium! I have been admiring his articles, especially his poetry, that evokes a lot of Gentleness. This is one of my favorite poems written by him:
I emailed to ask if I could interview him as a Gentleness Ambassador and he graciously agreed.
We chatted for almost an hour on Sep 11, 2020. It was his night time in Mexico and morning for me in Singapore.
Here are the key highlights that I’m delighted to share with you:
Can you share more about what you do, other than writing?
I’ve had an interesting career. I planned to become an academic, so I got a Ph.D. and taught for a while at a University, but I didn’t find it satisfying. Then I took up an opportunity to move into the financial industry, and I was great at bringing the best out of the people in my team. I really enjoyed working with people. It didn’t matter which industry I was in. What mattered was that I could hire tremendously smart and talented people who were ambitious in their own right. As someone in a managerial position, it was my responsibility to help them be the best possible. That meant giving them the resources they needed, encouraging them, and even helping them launch into careers beyond the organization I was working with at that time.
I retired about six years ago, pursued some other interests, and moved here to Mexico. I’m an American, but I moved to Mexico a couple of years ago. I absolutely love it and will probably stay here for the rest of my life. My last house in the United States was huge. I’ve moved to a small cottage out in the countryside, and I couldn’t be happier!
I’m 60 years old now and at this age, I like to spend a lot more time reflecting on what’s important. I want to contribute something meaningful while I’m still here.
So, I’ve been writing on Medium for less than two months. I’m exploring to see whether my stories are helpful and valuable to other people. I’m also creating a mobile app as an organizational tool for fellow Medium writers.
I’ve been working on a fun little project as well. I plan to send my newsletter subscribers 5 minutes of meditation and inspiration every morning. The intention is to give them a chance of spending five minutes getting centered inside of themselves and feel inspired to take on the day, rather than jumping out of bed and right into the stress and anxiety of everyday life.
Every new day is an experiment for me and it’s a lot of fun! I love to cook and my partner likes to eat so that's a good combination. I feel so blessed to live out here in this beautiful but hot Mexican countryside.
How does a typical day in your life look like?
I like to wake up naturally, usually between 6:30–7 a.m., when the sun comes up in the morning.
I make some coffee, sit down, and start the day by reading — a book on my Kindle, or Medium stories, or a novel off the shelf.
After that, I would ask myself, “what would you like to do today?” Every day is a little bit different. I see every single day as a new adventure and as an opportunity to learn and hopefully create something.
My partner is an artist, so I’m surrounded by creation all the time. I love being able to sit down and exercise my brain in creative ways. I’m always sitting or standing at a desk since 7 am and keep working, except when I stop cooking lunch and dinner until 9:30 pm.
This is what I enjoy doing!
Bingz: Beautiful!
What does Gentleness mean to you?
Gentleness is such an important part of being human.
Gentleness is like water.
It is like being a stream of water flowing over the earth. Water is soft and supple, but it has the power to shape its path and smoothen the rough rocks gradually over time. Water also has the power to quench the thirst of all living things.
Gentleness is not just passivity, or just being kind. It’s also having an influence and hopefully a positive influence on the environment and the people around you.
So, for me, Gentleness is like being water — that means you can adapt and conform to whatever container is holding you, but you also affect that container. Gentleness is not just passivity or just being kind. It’s also having an influence and, hopefully, a positive influence on the environment and the people around you.
Gentleness is about being present in the moment
I think Gentleness grounds us into this moment. Anger is about a moment that’s in the past. Gentleness is about this moment. In the United States, people are living in the age of Trump. From my perspective, this is a terrible time because he has unleashed the worst angels of people’s nature. He said it’s all right to be angry, mean, and resentful, call people names, and mistreat people.
That is horrible, and it teaches people to step backward in humanity. I think Gentleness can be contagious, just like how anger can be contagious. We need to balance out the Harshness, anger, bitterness, and brutality of those negative angels by being gentle and kind. And to hope beyond hope that the people we touch with our gentleness and our kindness, in turn, become gentle and kind with other people as well.
This is how I approach each day. I’m certainly not perfect, but I wake up and try to be better today, and I’ll try to remind other people too.
Have you always believed in being gentle and kind?
Yes, I guess I’ve always been like this. Even as a child, I was always interested in being kind to everybody and protecting the seemingly “weaker” kids from the bullies. Someone had to protect them, and I didn’t mind standing up to say, “You know that’s not right. This is not how we should treat people.”
Throughout my years as a student and in my professional life, I’ve had a whole lot more success with people by being gentle and kind than showing Harshness. Some bosses think they have to be tough, unkind, and demanding to be effective. I think that’s completely wrong. There’s a high cost to that — the people’s humanity.
We need to recognize other people’s humanity and celebrate it in some way. We need to help them uncover the gifts within them and express them as best they can to be much more successful and feel good about themselves. There is nothing else more important than that.
How did you practice being gentle and kind as a leader in the corporate world?
I spent most of my time meeting with people one-on-one or in small groups. My job had two parts:
- to provide a vision of where the organization needed to go
- to listen to the people who accepted that vision and help them fine-tune their duties and responsibilities.
I think this goes back to Gentleness — it is about listening because when we listen, that means we care. We honestly care about what the other person has to say, and we recognize the value in what they say. This is the harder path because it requires constant mindfulness and practice to listen more than we speak. It’s much easier to do the opposite, to tell people what to do.
But if we take this more mindful path, we’re rewarded with great performances from people. They feel much more valued and trusted.
Bingz: As you were describing this, I had a beautiful image of you, allowing these people’s water to flow into you — the container. It feels like the perfect metaphor for listening and adds on to how you connected Gentleness to water.
I think that’s exactly right! So, we’re both the water and the container for other people’s water. Instead of letting their water splash onto us like we’re a piece of wall, we let it into our container.
Bingz: I love this metaphor!
Is there anyone in your life who has inspired you to practice Gentleness this way?
I had a teacher, he’s a Korean Buddhist monk who I was very fortunate to spend less than three months with. He was the kindest and gentlest person I’ve ever met.
But he also taught me that life is not just about being kind and gentle — it’s about learning from life too.
He said, “whenever you are presented with choices in your life, don’t choose the one that seems most appealing to you. Instead, evaluate and choose the most difficult option. Always take the hard road because that’s how we grow.”
I love that and so I think about that all the time. I always ask myself: am I going to take the easy and comfortable way, or am I going to take the path that gives me the highest chance of growing?
I think Gentleness is difficult to do.
I don’t know if it’s innate. As children, we have it in abundance, and somehow, it is schooled out of us in some way. The default state for most adults seems to be harshness or being mean, which is far easier than being gentle. It is much easier to live life in a trance and take the usual path. But there is so much more to be learned by taking, as Robert Frost said, “the path less taken.” So in that sense, it takes a lot of work for us adults to practice Gentleness, but it’s so rewarding.
So Gentleness is the harder path. Is it also a more creative path?
Yes! I’ve never seen it that way, but yes, it’s so true!
The creative process is a slow process for me. I write quickly, but I think slowly. So I might be writing a thousand words at a sitting, but it can take me three days to think about it. A short poem can take me a lot of time and anxiety to revise and edit. That’s just my nature. That’s who I am. There are so many articles on Medium teaching how you can get tons of followers and make tons of money. But I’m not trying to be rich through writing. I want to write meaningful pieces and reach a good-sized audience. I can write every day, but I will only publish when each piece is saying what I want to say.
I like that I have the comfort of being 60 years old and retired, so I don’t have to publish every single day. I can decide my schedule and be happy with whatever that arises from this.
We live in such a fast-paced world. How do you allow yourself all the time you need to process and integrate?
I’ve lived most of my life in big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. It was a very fast-paced life, and it’s no accident that I’m living in this cottage out in the countryside. It doesn’t even have an address!
I don’t encounter other people out here very often, but I see lots of chickens, cows, horses, and insects! If I want to, I can leave my desk and sit out on the porch to watch the grass grow. Sometimes I’ll go out there and sit for an hour and think. I’m so blessed to be able to do that now.
I would be in my office by 7 am in my previous fast-paced life, and I usually didn’t get home till 10 pm. It was as exhausting as much as it was rewarding because I enjoyed working with people. It was also incredibly demanding, and there was a lot at stake at times. So it’s no accident that I’ve wound up in this dusty gravel road in the middle of Mexico.
Do you have any final message you’d like to share?
I want to summarize what I’ve said:
Gentleness is hard, Harshness is easy. As humans, we should choose the harder path because that’s how we grow and evolve.
Thank you so much for sharing your gentle nature and beautiful insights, Cristo Lopez, PhD! It was such an honor meeting you, even if it was through Zoom, and learning from you and your fascinating life experiences.
I’m so grateful.
