DELIGHT IN DIFFICULTIES

March 19th, 2019

New difficulties are bound to spring up.  Progress might even be defined as the rate at which we can gobble up these difficulties that lie on the path to our goals.

Many of us react to these new difficulties in similar ways.  We roll our eyes, we groan, we ignore them, we get frustrated, angry and even bitter.  We essentially invoke that ancient image of the toddler stamping their feet and having a tantrum.

On the other hand, some people have discovered and developed a kind of super power response to such needling details.  Some people take delight in such difficulties.  Such a response might seem mildly psychotic to a person who has no accessible benchmark for such a perspective. 

A possible remedy is to think of games.  Those played by the youngest children are very easy: like putting a star shaped object into a star-shaped hole.  For a young child we can imagine this is good for pattern recognition, but for an adult, this task would be inane and boring.  The game is too easy.  But present the same adult with a more difficult game?  Intrigue and enjoyment are more likely to arise and perhaps provoke a sense of curiosity.

This tension between difficulty and curiosity is an invaluable waypoint in the process of becoming a more effective person and less triggered.

We can think back on our own recent history and ask: do small difficulties make me angry and frustrated?  Or am I more likely to be curious about such things?

In such questions lie an important caveat: if such difficulties are too simple, and merely represent a procedural repetition in our job or life, than we are perhaps playing a game that is too simple for the mind we find ourselves equipped with.  If such is the case, then it’s time to Level-Up and go find a more challenging game, one in which the inevitable difficulties can be used as fodder for curiosity.

On the other hand, there are aspects of living that are impervious to such game-switching.  There are things that we as humans have to do on a regular basis that cannot be swapped out for more interesting tasks.  And here in lies the mirror complement of the above caveat:  we can further ask if there’s any way we can tinker with our perspective to change our relationship to frustration during the times we have to deal with such simplistic difficulties. 

We can take something as simple as doing the dishes, or folding laundry.  While some people can actually pay their way out of such tasks, the vast majority have to engage in this kind of activity from time to time.  Just as a more difficult game requires stretches of perspective and recombined ideas, our more mundane tasks still offer a similar opportunity.  Here a practice like Mindfulness can be invaluable, and while a full discussion of the topic will be left for another time, we can still phrase the useful difficulty in a simple way, we can wonder:  how well-tuned is my ability to focus on the task at hand?

Am I always lost thinking about the past or thinking about the future?  Or can I leave the past and the future where they are and walk the Tightrope of the moment in the present and simply enjoy being alive, regardless of what I am doing?

This is an important difficulty that besets all people, and yet little training or exercise is undertaken to address such difficulty.  While it generally requires some study and a healthy amount of practice, it is well within reach to develop the on-command ability to take delight in the moment, no matter which moment.  Such an ability is another superpower, especially in today’s hyper-saturated distracting environment that appears hell-bent on convincing the common person that their life is pathetic when compared to others.  Not only does such a mindful ability clear such useless obstacles, but it opens up the space to teach ourselves that first mentioned superpower: the ability to take delight in difficulties as opposed to simply getting angry.  By observing, noting, and taking careful heed of our default reactions to different issues as they arise in life, we can slowly but steadily edit those defaults and eventually rebuild a perspective so that when irritating trifles arise, we either respond with delight and curiosity or we take the opportunity to simply enjoy being alive. 

This episode references Episode 333: Frustration Focus, Episode 42: Level-Up, and Episode 88: Tightrope

DETRIMENT BENEFIT

March 18th, 2019

The word detriment, from Latin, via Old French, means ‘wear away’.  We might think of the erosion of a coastline, or – perhaps – we might think of the erosion of a waistline for someone who has diligently undertaken a course of exercise and nutrition.  Detriment refers definitively to damage, but damage also breaks into ‘loss’ and ‘hurt’.  Certainly in the specific frame of health, we can say that it’s not exactly comfortable to lose weight.  It hurts to work-out if we are unaccustomed to such and it certainly hurts to hold ourselves back from temptation, both of which result in a beneficial loss.

We can also envision the sculptor chiseling away at a block of marble, surrounded by a pile of detritus.  The work of art is not complete until everything has been removed to reveal what the artist has in mind.  And here we can differentiate between hurt and harm.  Though the two words seem inherently bound in that hurt always leads to harm, we can suss out a categorical shift.  If the sculptor keeps chiseling away too hard and cracks the sculpture in half, then of course harm has occurred.  And yet, with a thoughtful approach to health, we can endure much hurt while exercising while keeping ourselves safe from actual harm.

Detriment need not be destruction, but merely a way to clean up what has grown through natural processes.

This tension and turn-taking between growth and detriment can be seen in all sorts of situations.  As in the biological example of growing, eating and the pairing back the fat, the trend is also apparent in seemingly unrelated areas, such as: searching for an answer.

We google a question and a list of possible sources that may hold our answer pop up.  We open up a few links in different tabs, and after much time researching, we might find our browser has grown slow because we’ve opened up dozens and dozens of pages in our adventure down some interesting rabbit hole.  After stepping back, we look through all the opened pages and exit all those that didn’t prove helpful – cutting the fat, in the browser-sense.

Through this toggle of expansion and detriment we discover and create the future, whether this be a business or merely an idea, but our rhetoric and behavior suffers from a categorical barrier that keeps concepts like detriment in a negative category and growth in a positive category. 

We must remember that tumors grow and that bad ideas can whither away.

Just as hurt does not always lead to real harm, we must keep in mind that the borders between our categories truly have a semi-permeable nature.  And in fact, some of these categorical borders may benefit from their own degradation, while other borders perhaps need some growth.  Such a process is occurring all the time within language as connotations expand and take over denotations.  While such a process is inevitably a cultural one, the individual also experiences the same process on a personal level.  The difference is that the individual can Pause and take a mindful, thoughtful perspective on this process and in so doing discover new helpful ways of thinking that can in turn lead to beneficial behaviors. 

We can mindfully entertain more helpful ideas and do away with concepts that are no longer serving us well, regardless of what the culture at large tries to dictate, and this may be the most fundamental invocation of that popular advice to ‘go your own way’.

Such general advice may even be a subtle example of these mechanisms of growth and detriment on a large scale.  We grow together, but we often benefit immensely when someone splits off from the herd to go investigate something on their own.

This episode references Episode 23: Pause, Episode 133: The Right Track and Episode 269: Blazing Tracks

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: HYDRATION

March 17th, 2019

Lucilius was sitting in the baggage claim area of an airport, waiting during a long layover.  He took a sip from an old pannikin – a metal mug - he’d used for several hundred years.   The mug was dented and scratched, misshapen but loved, and still – only faintly – showed the image of Hercules, crudely etched, swinging a sword at a many-headed monster.

He realized it had been decades since he’d last looked at the faded piece of art.  Hercules had yet to figure out the trick to defeating the monster and it was still getting stronger and stronger, growing more heads every time Hercules cut one off.  Lucilius held the mug out and took in all the dimples and dents.  Hercules’ sword was bent because of one dent, and the monster wrapped round the rest of the mug.

At that moment he heard a short shriek and a moan.  He looked up and saw a woman kneeling over a suitcase unzipped and open.  She was holding white and blue shards of a tea cup that had shattered in her luggage.  She began to cry as she peeled back paper and clothing to find more broken pieces of china, the whole mess of it clinking and crunching as she moved things around, searching for even a single unbroken piece.  The woman sat back and started to have a full-on tantrum, anger and grief flashing across her face.

An airport janitor walked some distance past her and the crying woman yelled,

“Why can’t you be careful with people’s stuff?”

The janitor briefly looked around to see who she might be addressing and then continued on their way.

Lucilius sipped more coffee, watching the scene and became aware once more of his mug.  He held it out at length, next to the sight of the bereaved woman. 

The mug certainly wasn’t new and far from pristine, but, Lucilius realized, it had somehow become better than when it had first been given to him.

The woman mopped up her face and then dragged the splayed suitcase over to a trashcan next to the bench where Lucilius sat.  She struggled to lift the suitcase and get an edge to the lip of the trash, tilting it until the whole crushed mess clattered out and dumped into the bin.  The woman coughed at the dust cloud that plumed up from the crash as she flipped the whole suitcase on top of the trash bin and then walked away.

Lucilius cracked an old book and began to read while his next flight was still sometime off and it wasn’t long before the same janitor had circled back and noticed the suitcase atop the trash bin. 

The janitor removed the suitcase and groaned, looking down at the heavy mess.  The janitor tried to lift the plastic trash bag from the bin but with the weight, it only ripped where he gripped it.  In defeated frustration, the janitor took a step back to reassess the situation, and as he did, he bumped Lucilius’ mug balanced on the edge of the bench.  The now empty mug fell and bounced on the tile, clattering to a stop.   The janitor spun around in the same instant.

“I’m so so sorry.” He said as he picked up the mug and handed it back to Lucilius.

“Don’t worry,” Lucilius said “it’s made for that.”

CLEVER LOVE

March 16th, 2019

There’s that limply inspiring phrase “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.”  Which certainly seems to always be about other people.  We might wonder, are the tough people who are already going being told such a thing?  Or does the presence of this statement feel more like a belittling assessment? 

This is perhaps reminiscent of the obvious problem with traditional schooling.  A grade, such as an A- or a C+ gives no indication of a trend.  It is more a statement of position as opposed to motion.  It’s akin to saying: this student’s command of the subject is good, or mediocre.  It gives no evidence of where someone started, what sort of progress, either good or bad was made, and certainly offers no indication of how a person might grow, which is – to the great misfortune of millions – exactly how institutions of higher education treat such summarizing symbols.

To segway back to our initial phrase: “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” perhaps merely indicates that the listener is not seen as tough in the eyes of the speaker.  Though the intention is perhaps a good one, if the listener comes to believe the speaker, than the prescription is entirely iatrogenic, meaning: it makes a weak person out of someone who was simply not appearing tough.

So many of our efforts land in the same vein:  By merely describing the situation, we entrench that situation, as opposed to changing it for the better – which is most likely our intention and objective.  Yet we shoot ourselves in the foot by failing to take a step back and take in the whole situation.

The straight-shooter might simply conclude that one has to face the music, man-up, and stop ignoring reality.

This may work in some cases, but it puts an awful lot of navigational burden on the listener.  And isn’t this the person in need of help?

The prescription Deal with it! starts to look like laziness on the part of the person saying it.  If such a person is in a position to say such a thing, wouldn’t they be equipped to give more thoughtful advice?  Perhaps such advice wouldn’t fit so quaintly into a one liner that can propagate through culture like all quotes do.  But this is a big part of what makes us human: taking the time with one another, not just to explain things, but to honor that interaction by stepping back from it and asking: what would actually be effective in helping this person grow?  Surely we can do better than just barking at a person that they should grow?  If that’s all a person can muster, than perhaps there’s more than one person in need of help, love and growth?

We might wonder how we can repackage that cultural adage.  Instead of “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.”  We might say something like: You don’t have to be tough to get going, but the further along you get, the tougher you’ll become.

Perhaps some of our cultural wisdom needs some nuanced updating:

When the going gets tough, the weak get stronger.

This episode references Episode 185: Iatrogenic Gaslighting: Are You Ok?

BIPEDAL PERSPECTIVE

March 15th, 2019

Episode 100 of Tinkered Thinking examines how the word ‘yet’ can put a powerful spin on certain statements.

A negative statement like “I can’t do math” instantly ceases to be a pessimistic conclusion and suddenly embodies the underdog process of a person who is learning when the word ‘yet’ is added to the end.

I can’t do math….yet.

Without the key final word, the statement is planted squarely in the mental composition of pessimism.  The perspective shifts with the addition of yet.  For all those of able body, we are perhaps familiar with the case of moving in one direction, stopping to think, and then taking a step in a new direction.  If we look down at our feet during this moment, one is facing in the old direction.  The other has pivoted away, and its on this new direction that we put our efforts.  We physically invoke the notion of two different perspectives in such a case.  The old one, heading in the wrong direction, and the new direction that may pay off.

Pessimistic statements may be broadcasted as realistic, but their true potential effect on our own psychology arises when we combine such statements with other perspectives.

For instance, it’s common to shrug one’s shoulders with a pair of enlightened eyebrows held high while saying:

That’s just the way things are.

This is pessimism trying to masquerade as tough-love realism.  And it becomes apparent when we add just a tiny spin to the statement to tweak the perspective.

One can instead say:

That’s just the way things are, currently.

Here too we find a conclusion flipped into an active statement, one that opens up the future and frees it from being anything like the past – if only we use the present in novel ways.  Failing to use the present like this merely repeats the past and turns life into a kind of monotony.  There is of course a degree of fear that crops up while trying new things, but this is often a good sign.  It’s a signal that we are venturing into unknown territory.

So often our ability and opportunity to take a few different perspectives on a situation, even our own situation, is wasted.  Our feet march in the same direction and yesterday manifests again as tomorrow.

Simply Pausing to consider options and possibilities opens up the future, for the mere fact that it creates a choice.  We can continue on the track we’ve been on, or we can entertain the new directions of such an imaginative cross-roads, and perhaps, venture out into the unknown.

This episode references Episode 100: Yet, a Way out of the Box,  Episode 72: Persevere Vs. Pivot and Episode 23: Pause.