NO CHOICE

October 15th, 2018

What if you had no choice but to feel good?

Arguments about the nature of free will aside, what if each and every day started with a wonderful surge of energy and motivation to get up and get at the day?

Is such a thing a choice?  We seem to attribute this sort of thing to will power, and how much we can muster to bring about this kind of mindset.

What about starting off the day miserably and continuing to have a miserable day?  Is this a choice?  Or have we created a situation where we have no choice but to feel this way when we wake up and think much the same way throughout the course of the day?

It might not be too much of a stretch to say that any situation we currently find ourselves in, we have no choice about.  We may have had a choice, but now that the antecedents to the present are gone and lost forever to the annals of history, that choice no longer exists, so we might in fact say that we have absolutely no choice about our present.

The trick here is realizing that the present is continually receding, and while we do not have a choice about the present, we do have a choice about the future.

For example, say someone challenged you with this:  if you can have five spectacular days in a row next week, you will get $100,000.  What would you do with such a strange challenge?  Would you just hope for the best and let those days come your way?  Or would we perhaps be inclined to prepare for those five days?  Would we maybe ask ourselves what causes us to have a great day?  Would we identify those things and start lining them up in preparation for those days?

If we wanted to leave as little as possible to chance, how might we manufacture our situation in the time leading up to those five days to leave ourselves with no choice but to feel fantastic?

For many who do not feel fantastic, the reverse challenge is constantly being met.  The situation for feeling miserable in the morning and throughout the day is being perpetuated in a vicious cycle fashion.  Such a statement may feel threatening, and even insulting, but such reactions surrender a sense of calmness in order to entertain such feelings, and a calm thoughtful pause can go a long way to unpack situations.  Mae West is famously quoted for saying that those who are easily insulted should be insulted more often, and such a sentiment begs the question: why exactly would such a person be threatened or insulted?  The core of such answer might have hidden within it a key for unlocking such a dismal situation, and opening up a sense of reality to something more expansive, generous, and enjoyable.

Such a feeling of being threatened or insulted may come from a suspicion of blame.  The no choice argument here is a double-edged realization that from one side puts blame on the person who feels miserable squarely on that person, which ultimately is probably not helpful, unless such a person responds well to the ‘toughen-up’ prescription.  The other side of the no choice argument relieves such a person of the blame.  Past actions cannot be changed so why would someone in the present be required to feel shame over the past since they still have the agency in the moment to create a future that is far better than the past?  A threatened feeling or a feeling of insult may be a form of embarrassment that both of these edges are the case, which many productive people would define as progress.  If you aren’t embarrassed by your past self, then you aren’t growing.  A feeling of insult or being threatened might be a sign of a realization that’s on the brink of happening, or possible evidence that such a realization is possible.

If such a threatened or insulted person asked themselves whether they had a choice about being threatened or insulted, it might open up the space for asking: How do I become a person who is not easily threatened and not easily insulted?  Would such a process require more of a change on the side of one’s self or the rest of the world.  Most focus on the later, but the whole crux of the situation might be indicated by a change that needs to occur on the former: a change that needs to happen within one’s self.

Regardless, any change that we make is sure to have ramifications in our future.  In some sense, our future self is a puppet, a sort of slave to the decision we make now.  We would be wise to think generously, and kindly, and lovingly about our future selves, because when such a future becomes the present, we will look back at our current actions and have absolutely no choice.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: A DATE WITH BELIEF

October 14th, 2018

Young Lucilius was sitting in a diner with a young woman.  They had just ordered their breakfasts and Lucilius was pausing for the briefest of moments in anticipation of the smell and taste of coffee as he took a hot sip.  His date smiled, watching him.

“I’ve never seen anyone enjoy coffee as much as you do.”

“Ambrosia of the underworld,” Lucilius said in response.  “What’s the line about having fun with sinners instead of crying with the saints?”  Lucilius raised his mug of coffee to cheers.  The mugs clinked.

“What were you saying about belief yesterday?”  The girl queried.

“Hm.  I don’t know, what was I saying?” Lucilius asked, and laughed.

“You said that belief is like a symbol, and that it isn’t really the thing that you believe in.”

“I said that?”  Lucilius laughed.

“Yea, you said it was like a veil that we throw on things.”

“Oh yea, well, like, think of a stickbug for a second.  It looks exactly like a stick, and when it stays real still, it acts just like stick.  Why does it do that?”

“It’s camouflage, isn’t it?”

“Camouflage for what?”

“From birds right?”

“And why does it work?”

“Because the birds can’t see the stickbug?”

“They can’t?  Does it turn invisible when the bird looks at the stickbug?”

“Well no, they just don’t realize that they’re looking at a stickbug.”

Lucilius pondered for a moment, his gaze gently sliding off into the distance. 

“See that chair?”

His date turned around and looked at the chair he indicated.

“Yea.”

“What can you tell me about that chair?”

“It’s made of wood.  It has four legs and it has some fabric attached to the seat and back.”

“Are you sure?  Have you sawed into the wooden legs and looked at the grain pattern under the surface?  Have you touched the fabric and ripped it open to see what is stuffed underneath?”

“Well no.”

“Then how can you tell these things?”

“I can see them.”

“Just as the bird sees a stick instead of a bug.  Imagine if you walked up to that chair and once you were close enough it unraveled in some strange way and it tried to snap at you, and it was clear it was actually a creature, what could we say about your ideas about that chair before you realized it was alive?”

“Well they were wrong.”

“You believed it was a chair.  When you were a young little toddler, you investigated a few chairs quite closely, and once you decoded the similarities, then you stopped investigating all chairs and took their visual similarities at face value because the fidelity among chairs as being chairs is high enough that you can release a sense of curiosity or skepticism.”

Lucilius’ date pondered this.

“Here, this is the best example I can think of when it comes to belief being a sort of thing we put onto other things.”

Lucilius pulled out his wallet and opened it and feathered out some green bills.  He selected a single dollar and held it up.

“What is this?”

“A dollar.”

“What does it mean?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, what can I do with it?”

“You can spend it.”

“Yea, it’s fungible, I can spend it on a stick of gum or a lighter or whatever anyone else bleieves is worth a dollar, right?”

“Yea.”

“Here’s the best way I know to get a visceral sense of what a belief is, and what it feels like.”

Lucilius took the dollar bill between his fingers, paused, and looking at the young girl, he smiled.  Then he quickly, and violently ripped the dollar bill in half.  The girl jolted in her seat, gasping a little, her eyes going wide for a moment.

“What?” Lucilius asked.  “It’s just paper, or cotton really.  But the thing is you believe it’s something else.”

STABILITY

October 13th, 2018

A table with four legs is expected to be fairly stable.

Knock off a table leg and the remaining three legs might keep things up.

Knock off another leg and it’s doubtful the table will keep standing.  Anything short of a perfect balancing act will result in collapse.  And even if that is achieved, the table is useless since using it will throw it off balance.

Knock off another leg and all is lost.

Every day, our brains and bodies need things in order to operate.  We need sleep, food, air, relationships and different activities.

Each necessity is like a table leg.  Cut into sleep and it’s like cutting some of that table leg off.  Now the table rocks.

Poor food is akin to replacing a table leg with a rotten  piece of wood.  It’ll hold things up, but is it as reliable?

The reverse is obvious: adequate sleep, good nutrition, healthy relationships… All contribute to our mental and social stability.

But what about going beyond this.  Can we add legs to our four-legged table?  Can we add exercise, can we then add a habit of hiking and open up our options of experiencing the world with others in increasingly healthy ways?  Can we add meditation, reading and a writing habit to make our mental environment even more robust?

A table with a thousand legs is probably overkill, but the image is compelling.  Such a table can take quite a few hits before it loses stability. 

This idea of stability as a function of the number of foundational elements can even apply to our financial security.  We might simply ask: how many sources of income do you have?

Is one a stable number?

The important difference between one income vs several incomes is clear in this exemplar question:  Would you rather receive $100 from one person every week, or would you rather receive $5 from 20 different people every week?  Both circumstances result in the exact same amount of money, but one situation is far superior to the other.  In the first situation, if one source of income disappears, then there is absolutely no money coming in.  Whereas with the second situation, if one source of income disappears, then there’s still $95 coming in.  This simple difference is perhaps at the heart of why losing one’s job is one of the most stressful events that can occur in one’s life.  The difference between losing a job, and losing a customer, or supporter cannot be overstated.  The second is small enough to look at as a learning opportunity.  It does not subsume our whole being in doubt worry and feelings of inadequacy, which is far more likely to happen after losing one’s job.  Additional sources of income may also benefit a main source of income, merely for the fact that there’s implicit faith that if the primary job is lost, then all is not lost – literally.  Such reassurance may enable one to take things a little less seriously, and often this has good benefits to any endeavor we undertake.

Much the same thinking can be applied to social relationships.  Someone who experiences a devastating breakup, but has a dozen very close friends is going to transition into the next phase of life far easier than someone who has no other friends.  The first person simply has far more avenues for communication, for love, generosity, and kindness – all the things a person needs during such difficult times.

Returning to the concept of nutrition, we might take a moment to be grateful for the human stomach and the enormous variety of foods we can intake.  Imagine for a moment if we were like the koala, who only eat eucalyptus leaves.  What if some new invasive species of beetle found it’s way into the environment and decimated the eucalyptus trees, where does that leave the koala?  And yet, this is what most people’s financial situation looks like: one job, one income, which could easily be wiped out by one new disagreeable, invasive boss.

What about mistakes and setbacks?  How many potential reactions do we have ready on the hip for such situations?  Do we only have one angry reaction that is used ad nauseum?  Or have we sought out, discovered, trained and embodied many different perspectives on the nature of failure? 

How many hits can we take before we lose stability?  Does a single disappointment derail our thoughts, our emotions, our mind?

What can we do on a daily basis to add to the foundation of our thoughts?

Can we achieve a greater overall stability by adding to the stability of all areas of our life?

SHORT GAME LONG GAME

October 12th, 2018

In the game of emotions and thinking, how we react to the short game is our long term strategy.

If we become enraged or depressed because of some mistake or failure, then chances are very good that we will experience much rage or depression throughout the course of the long game.  Mistakes and failures cannot be mitigated.  They are an unavoidable and a necessary part of the feedback we get from reality. 

Our short game for such feedback compounds and eventually comprises our long game.

If we can replace rage and depression with calmness and curiosity, not only will the long game be more enjoyable, but without the stunting distractions of negative emotions, we can move along more efficiently, therefore faster and eventually cover far more ground.

Practicing calmness and curiosity as the chief short game strategy eventually creates a new default that can self-perpetuate into the long term and inevitably dictate the outcome of our long game strategy. 

Just as a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, long game might be a general direction, but short game is the mechanics of each and every step, and how we react to them.

The gift of difference between emotions and thinking is inherent in the fact that emotion is primarily a function of short game.  Emotions do not last.  They have little endurance and short half-lives.  And while some emotions seem to perpetuate for a long time due to habitual thinking, they are riddled with cracks and gaps where we have an opportunity to introduce new thinking that can alter the habitual thinking responsible for emotions that appear perpetual and unending.

We seek some kind of emotional experience that will forever alter who we are and how we feel, but chances are good this is a fool’s errand.  We are concentrated on some external force to change us.  What has a greater chance of working is seeking new concepts and thoughts that can in turn have an increasingly larger sway on the way we feel.  The radical potential of a new thought is not limited to whatever dynamics such a new thought might have inside the brain with our emotional centers.  A new thought can initiate new behaviors that then have a round-about effect on our emotional make up.  Like going through a secret back door.

An easy example is exercise.  For the overwhelming majority of people, spiking the heart rate for a little while has a huge impact on the way we feel.  The idea that exercise could have this effect leads to the behavior of exercise which in turn impacts the emotions.

Meditation is another example.  Studies seem unified on the statistic that positive results from daily meditation do not being to bloom until the 3^rd or 4^th month of meditation, so such a practice has to be initiated from a purely intellectual standpoint.

Such an enterprise shows just how many ties there are between short game and long game.  The individual who begins to meditate with the long term aim of achieving greater abilities for calmness in moments of stress is playing a long game with the aim of playing a better short game, which in turn comprises an even longer long game.

Short game might become long game, but it requires a long game perspective to know how we should edit our short game.

WEATHER REPORT

October 11th, 2018

Being a weather reporter is humorously referred to as either the easiest job, or the hardest job, both for the same reason:  it’s so difficult to predict the weather accurately.  Of course with advances in technology, the job is becoming more accurate.

How many of us treat the quality of our own days in much the same way that we view the weather? 

How strange and potentially wonderful would it be to turn on the news and see that the weather reporter has turned into a weather dictator: an authority who dictates what the weather will be.  How powerful would such a person become?  This weather dictator could easily become like a god who we try to placate in order to ensure that we get the sort of weather that we want.   Couples would spend thousands to ensure sunny weddings, farmers would dedicate huge portions of their crop to guarantee rain.

Unlike current weather reporters who are bound by an external weather that is only partly predictable, each of us has the ability to turn into a weather dictator for the ups and downs, the lows and highs of our own life. 

While the pessimistic and jaded might think it ineffective and probably ridiculous, it’s a curiously powerful exercise to wake up in the morning declare that the day will be a magnificent one.

The jaded pessimists somehow always overlook the self-fulfilling properties of any given outlook, particularly their own.

Jaded pessimism only has the smallest chances of being cracked by unusually good external events.  And even such events are subject to being labelled as a whim of fate.  Such jaded pessimists might feel empowered by the reliability of such perspectives, claiming that no expectations and no hopes guarantees no disappointment, but always fail to see that such a claim is still a perspective that is focused on external events: it is not a perspective that genuinely springs from an internal place for the sake of the person.  Making a declaration that the internal weather of one’s self is going to be spectacular, no matter what external events occur has potential reliability far exceeding any degree of jaded pessimism, if only for the fact that it is internally generated.  Sticking to such a sunny disposition might be far more difficult, but we must ask why it is so difficult and if attempting such a declarative disposition will always be so difficult.  Habitual thinking is a difficult, counter-intuitive thing to change. 

In fact, few things are more counter-intuitive than changing one’s thinking since intuition is a description of feeling and much of the way we feel is a function of the way we think.  By this description, thinking and feeling seem like two gears perfectly lined up with one another, each spinning the other at exactly the same rate.  Or how the heat of the sun is what creates clouds that block it out. 

And yet there are still sunny days.

Luckily thinking and feeling, while intimately tied, are not one-for-one mechanisms, and concepts that we encounter in thinking that don’t appear to spark any immediate emotional ramification can end up having deceptively large emotional ramifications.  The mismatch between thinking and feeling in this case has to do with the half-life of emotions versus the endurance of a concept.  Emotions do not last long.  Anger, for example is perhaps the most spectacular emotion, and yet anyone who pauses to think about it would be forced to admit that it’s actually quite hard to stay very angry for any stretch of time.  The emotion needs to be continuously fed with mental reminders of the injustice committed or the misfortune rendered.

One of the contributing factors to emotions that seem perpetual, like the lackluster emotions of pessimism or even depression, is that much of thinking is habitual.  Like a broken record, many concepts in the brain are on perpetual repeat, which renews any emotion resulting from such a conceptual perspective.  At the beginning of each day, the record player is turned back on, and we hear much the same weather report we’ve been hearing for potentially many years.  But a change in thinking can change the tune,

and unlike the news, our own personal weather report can create the mental weather we experience.

Instead of passively experiencing the day, we might want to wonder what would happen if we start things off by asking:  what kind of weather would you like today?