One of the guys on my Facebook feed always posts up quotes from a pop philosopher. I suppose all of us have that friend, the one that’s not afraid to share posts from someone who inspires him. Maybe we even are that person.
Most of the advice that my acquaintance posts is fairly generic stuff. Things like “Don’t judge a book by its cover” or “Always be kind to one another”. Of course it’s all delivered in this philosopher’s own style and for some reason that really spoke to this friend of mine so he thought he ought to share it with everyone else.
Honestly whenever I see one of these posts I just cruise past the post. I don’t find it to be particularly sage-like or inspirational. But I don’t mind if this person posts this.
Someone did however. Someone on this person’s friend list took him to task for posting these little inspirational memes. My friend gave a very spirited and well thought defense of his posts. He wasn’t shy about his beliefs and his need to share them and as he pointed out if this other person didn’t like those posts then he was always free to unfriend him.
What really struck me though is how my acquaintance stuck to his beliefs and showed that he wasn’t ashamed or afraid to share them.
I feel that in the modern age that we’ve become too apologetic and almost ashamed of the beliefs that we hold. Whether those beliefs are religious or not doesn’t seem to matter. We try to accommodate other people and their beliefs so much that we shy away from promoting what we believe. I don’t advocate for those beliefs that are hurtful or exclude others. I also don’t believe in being obnoxious and insisting on sharing my beliefs with those that don’t want to hear about it. Don’t let me be misunderstood about that.
But I do think that there is a lot of good in the world that can be shared and we simply don’t because we are either too shy to express those beliefs or are in some weird way ashamed of them.
In The Merchant of Venice a character mentions that the quality of mercy blesses not only those that receive it but those that give it. I think it’s the same with sharing your beliefs with others.
Being shy isn’t just an attitude. It can be a lifestyle and even a great hindrance to getting what you want in life.
My parents and family tell me that as a young child that I was fairly forward and active. Not at all shy and I always wanted to be in the thick of things. So what happened?
I’m not sure exactly when it happened but surely somewhere in my pre-teens I started becoming more withdrawn and quiet. I shunned being loud and drawing attention to myself. I even began dressing down. Not in a somber fashion like a goth but more in a plain fashion. I started to fade into the background. See my previous post.
I really didn’t care to stand out in any way. If I did something praiseworthy I would try to play it down and minimize it as if it wasn’t anything special.
In my mid 20’s I began to notice that this wasn’t the best attitude to have in life. People that I knew that were less talented than me but more boisterous began getting ahead in life and I was being left behind. It turned out that self promotion wasn’t a sin.
For a long time I resisted any sort of change. To me, humility was the greatest of virtues and casually discarding that was unthinkable.
Eventually circumstances forced me to be more proactive. My new position at work, in sales, demanded someone who was more proactive and forward and I started to come out of my shell. Sometimes too much. I had to learn just how much I could come out before I got obnoxious.
By my thirties I felt I had emerged sufficiently and I’ve tried maintaining myself at a comfortable level. It is a struggle. I have to admit that at times that I still don’t want to engage with the world. But I also realize that life revolves around the other people in your life and that the only way that it is going to work is if I become more sociable and not less.
I’m 4 years old and I’ve just been put in front of a thousand pound horse and I can’t wait to get on. Five minutes later the horse slips in a gopher hole and rolls over me, nearly crushing me to death. Let me try again.
I’m 22 and alone in the Colorado mountains. I’m standing in front of a raging mountain stream that I have to cross to do an environmental report. 30 seconds later I’m being washed downstream banging against rocks. I crawl out of the water and crawl to the road where some rangers find me and take me to the local hospital for cuts and a sprained ankle. Two days later I’m packed and ready to head back into the woods.
I’m 27 and I’m wandering round a “bad place”. Montrose was a no-go zone for suburban kids back in the 80s. Where pimps and junkies would just as soon cut your throat as look at you. Why go inside the loop when you have everything you need in the ‘burbs? But by the mid 90s I’m hearing things out in the Richmond strip. Stories about some clubs and restaurants inside the loop. Around Montrose and Washington avenue. So I lock my doors, roll up the windows and drive into the city in my Gold colored Saturn and drive round. Still plenty of tattoo parlors but no drug dealers or junkies, no roving gangs. Some of the boarded up brick houses are being renovated. Just then a rock comes flying from out of the dark and dents the passenger side door. I floor it and end up lost for the next hour till I stumble onto loop 610 and find my way home. For the next few years I would slowly begin exploring the inner loop one street at a time.
I’m 44 and standing in an overgrown wind tunnel about to try indoor skydiving. The instructor warns me to be careful and not smash my face against the side of the tunnel. Nothing happened. I had a good time. Not all my adventures wind up as disasters.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t just automatically walk into dangerous situations just for the hell of it. I’m not blind to the possible dangers. I have hesitated at times before embarking on something new or potentially dangerous.
But overall I never find that hesitation is all that worthwhile. For the most part I find hesitation in any part of my life has done me more harm than good and being bold has for the most part paid off.
I’ve hesitated about opportunities in life, about business decisions, about personal decisions and rarely has it paid off. You totally should hesitate when you find yourself in a totally unknown situation but if you find that you hesitate because of an imagined danger or what you think might or might not happens then I would strongly urge you to put aside that fear and try.
At the very least you’ll come out with a treasure trove of interesting stories.
Those old 1980s anti-drug ads are partly correct. No one grows up hoping to be a junkie.
No one likes losing. Nobody in sales goes to bed thinking “Tomorrow I’m going to give a presentation and it’s going to fail.” No business owners is happy at the prospect that their business might go down the drain. No person wants to hear that they might have a life threatening disease. No one goes into a fight intending to lose.
Most people go through life thinking that things will generally work out. Even pessimists are on the whole somewhat optimistic about the future. If they weren’t they’d be called suicidal not pessimistic.
Generally the optimistic thinking goes “When A happens then I can do B and then C can occur” and I’m not even talking about grandiose plans just day-to-day stuff like “I’ll catch the bus so I can get to work so then I will get a paycheck to pay the bills”
But sometimes our best laid plans go to hell. Sometimes we get a piece of bad news. We keep working away at our problems and keep hoping against hope but despite it all the signs are there that things are going to go badly for us no matter what we do.
This is where a bad situation can be managed to become just a bad result or without proper planning it can turn into a disaster.
So where to start? You get news that something is going bad for you. Could happen months from now or maybe 5 minutes from now. Either way you’ve got no time to waste.
Assess the situation.
How bad is it? Is it something life threatening? Will it alter your lifestyle significantly or is it just a short-term shock to the system?
You need to be coldly clinical in your approach as if it’s happening to someone else. Stick to the known facts and not emotion filled guesses. The facts won’t change but assessing them carefully might help you make better sense of what you’re facing and thinking more about the situation may make it less daunting.
Life threatening situations usually require immediate action. If you’re in an accident or a fight or something bad is about to happen you need to do something. Doing something is always preferable to doing nothing at a time like this. Doing nothing just insures that the worst possible outcome will happen. Whether you prefer to fight your way through this or run away is up to you but doing nothing is not an option.
Something more long-term. Here’s the meat of the subject.
You have time to think about it. Firstly know that your first impression of the situation is always going to be wrong. It’s not going to be nearly as bad as you thought and the consequences aren’t going to be as dire. You will make it out alive on the other end of this, the sun will rise again, and life will go on. On the other hand maybe things aren’t as rosy as you think. Maybe those things you are pinning your hopes on are illusions and you need to dig a little deeper in to find out that there is something fundamentally wrong somewhere and it needs to be addressed now or things will totally collapse.
My point? You don’t really know till you start thinking about things. Look at the root causes of what’s really going on.
So you’ve assessed the situation and know that the bad thing will happen. Now plan on how to lessen the impact on your situation. If it’s a disease (for you or someone you love) begin thinking how you will adapt your life to this. Make the necessary arrangements beforehand. Find the help you need. If you’re going to lose your job, start talking to people you know for job leads, for advice, for moral support. Look through the want ads. Not for an immediate job necessarily but to see what employers are looking for. If you’re in school and you know that you’re going to flunk a course find out what you can do to get back on track? Not for this particular course but for your academic career as a whole.
List out all the negative impacts that this event will have on you and have either total or partial solutions for each of these impacts. Don’t just hope that it won’t be too bad or stand paralyzed by fear and do nothing.
Lastly the short-term shock to the system. Usually this is something personal and highly emotional. A broken heart, the death of someone close, some sort of tragedy. In some ways this is the hardest thing to get over. Even though you can share your burden with others, they will still not be able to fully understand. Even though you want to think about it logically, logic won’t apply here. Just remember that life does go on. This is just a part of your life not the whole narrative, unless you let it become that. Let yourself feel bad for a time and lean on others for support.
“How we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life, wouldn’t you say?” – Captain Kirk
So to paraphrase that, planning for failure is just as important as planning for success.
You’ve just come out of a frustrating meeting or you’re in the middle of a difficult work out session or concentrating on a complicated project and you?
Sigh
No, it doesn’t make everything better and you don’t feel 100% again but somehow you feel a little more refreshed, a little more relaxed and you’re able to continue on. Why is that? It’s nothing more than an exaggerated breath after all.
Maybe it’s just the act of pausing to refresh yourself. A brief nod to the body to acknowledge that it’s tired.
Maybe it’s just a break in the routine that let’s you mentally reset yourself so you can go on.
Or maybe it’s the extra intake of air that comes in to replenish the oxygen supply.
Whatever the reason it seems to be a time proven technique for allowing you to continue working. The physical sigh works great but I think the mental sigh should not be disregarded. At times your mind needs that mental sigh to clear away your thought process and let you go on working.
It doesn’t have to be something involved like meditation or time-consuming like reading a book or an article. Just a brief thought about something banal, something whimsical. Just a tiny pause to untangle the knots that we all tie ourselves up in.
It’s not just alright to do these things, sometimes it’s necessary.
It’s easy to quit and despair. It’s easy to say “well I gave it my best shot but it didn’t work” and just give up on trying to move ahead. It’s quite another thing to see a failure or a difficulty and to shift gears out of one venture and go into another.
This last week the world lost Sir Christopher Lee. While most of the world knew him as a long time actor, very few people knew about his other exploits before becoming an actor or his other ventures and honors that he accumulated over a lifetime. I could do a list of all of these things but I think there are plenty of websites and articles out there that do a fine job of this.
Looking at his life in a totality however it is worth noting that he never had an easy or obvious path to success. This was an individual that faced setbacks and failures quite a few times over the course of his life yet he never allowed this to slow him down or stop his progress.
What’s more he was an individual that actively went out seeking new opportunities and interests on his own. You would think that someone who had difficulties in his life might be content just to “break even” or just be a little better off but in his case he did not wait for these new ventures to present themselves. He either went looking for these new ventures or he created them himself.
Like I said above, it’s easy to despair. Despair is easy to do. It’s comfortable, it can be done at a moment’s notice, and requires little to no investment. Despair can be such a hard temptation to resist sometimes.
But lifting yourself up, having the presence of mind to look around and plot your next move, getting on with your life as it stands after a setback, that’s hard.
I think that’s something that a man like Christopher Lee can teach all of us.
I’ve been horrible about writing this year. I really have. In total I think I have maybe 4 sessions of an hour apiece for the last 5 months. Besides writing this blog I haven’t really done anything on my writing.
I was at a writing panel the other week and they pointed out that the most important thing to do as a writer was to actually sit down and write. I felt as if that were aimed right at me.
I could make all the excuses in the world but the fact remains that I need to put more time and effort into writing. Not just into writing but into editing. I have a couple of pieces that I think have some potential but I need to get them moving and that’s another thing that I need to do.
But how to go about doing that? The quick and easy answer is that you just do. I could make excuses all year-long and never get anything down or I could try to at the very least I would be making the effort.
That’s really at the core of whatever you want to do in life whether it’s your work or it’s a hobby or something else you have to be willing to actually do whatever it is you do.
It doesn’t matter if it turns out terrible. At least you’re trying and that’s more than most people do. And even if you do fail at least you can say that you gave it your best effort.
Travel can be a nightmare sometimes. Whether it’s for relaxation or for business, at best travel is a chore that you have to get through in order to get on with your plans. At worse it can be a nightmare that never seems to end.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. I get the fact that years ago when you had to rely on travel agents and paper tickets and possibly misbooked hotel rooms that things could often go awry but nowadays we have robust and well-developed and refined travel systems out there. You really have almost no excuse not to have a good trip.
Let’s start with booking the trip. If you just watch an hour’s worth of TV or listen to radio or read a magazine you will come across advertising for some sort of online travel agent. I’m not saying you need to book through them but you can at the very least get online and compare prices for days and days and find those cheap tickets to almost anywhere.
You can take advantage of government security programs that let you minimize your time at security checkpoints in airports. You can do a lot of the annoying paperwork that you had to do at the kiosks online and just drop your bags off and walk calmly to your plane with plenty of time.
Once you get to where you’re going you can arrange ground transport by taxi or über or airport shuttle. You can tell people where to pick you up and if you’ll be late.
With hotels you can look at the actual properties where you’ll be staying and see how well you like it. You can find online reviews or ask other people if they’ve stayed there before.
The most exciting thing about our new online life is that we can look at a location and see if there are attractions, restaurants, and other things that we can do besides what we expected. We are no longer bound to be stuck in a hotel or an attraction. We can now explore all the possibilities that a location can offer.
Weather of course is so obvious that it’s almost not worth mentioning but any little advantage can help.
So look at where you currently live and think about all the possibilities around you. If you were a stranger what things would you like to know about your location? Make up a list and then apply that to wherever it is you want to go and find out that information.
I was thinking about a study I read several years back. It was about how children that would instinctively put off instant gratification and momentary gains and instead pursued long-term rewards would statistically go on to have more fulfilling and successful lives.
What brought this on? Well, I suddenly realized how far into 2015 we’d gotten and how the first quarter went past in a blur and the second quarter was close to done and I hadn’t reviewed the progress of my yearly goals yet.
Why hadn’t I done this? I suppose I could give various excuses from being too lazy to dealing with illness in March to this and that but I also have to be honest and admit I have been partly dreading this. I haven’t been doing as well as I’d hoped to be at this point.
So I was walking in downtown Houston the other day and thinking about this. It was after dark and downtown was mostly deserted and it was cool and quiet. Near perfect conditions to think.
Were these goals making me happy or were they becoming obsessions that would not yield long-term satisfaction? Was I eschewing short-term gratification to pursue these goals or just denying myself living my life for no good reason?
I mean I created these goals in order to have a better life and to do something meaningful. I think I did a pretty good job of it as well but the thing is that for some of my goals I think that I am pouring good resources into lost causes and basically wasting them where I could instead be using them for other projects.
So I have to evaluate these goals and see if these are worth continuing on and if I just hang on a little longer that things will get better or if I’m just hanging on due to some sense of pride that won’t let me quit on these goals.
I think that’s what I meant by the title “find what really makes you happy”. Sit down, look at these goals, and see if they will truly make you happy.
Just as we also have carefully thought out plans, we also have pipe dreams.
We all have those wild and crazy ideas that would be nice to achieve but we “know” just won’t ever work. These are ideals that we may dream about at bed time or just after lunch one day. You can think and even see them but the rational part of your mind knows that they’re impossible so it discounts them as just impractical fantasies and generally forgets about them.
On the flip side we have those carefully worked out plans that we think and re-think all the time and we “test out” and know will work because we’ve put in the time to manage expectations and to make sure they can be implemented before anything happens. We work and live through these every day.
Obviously, it’s bad to get hung up on a pipe dream and obsess over it to the point that you can’t function. Unfortunately I see this type of behavior too much among some of my peers. Obsessing about some material item, over some sort of achievement, over some love that got away from them. Many people chase these unattainable goals to the point that they disregard some or all other important aspects of their lives.
On the other hand it’s equally as bad to just live out a carefully scripted and planned life. If you only live a planned out existence you may find that opportunities that suddenly appear and offer themselves to you will be ignored or denied because they don’t fit in with your current plans. You may find that you deny yourself an advantage or may find that your original plan may actual be detrimental to you just because it didn’t fit in.
I think most people can tell what a plan looks like. A pipe dream is more difficult. We can often fool ourselves into thinking an outlandish pipe dream is really a reasonable plan. If we sit down however and look at it carefully and analyze it bit by bit we can often see the faults in the “reasonable plan” and see it for what it really is.
But like I said above, living only a planned life can be equally bad for you. So how can we live a balanced life where we keep our hopes and dreams alive but allow our plans to carry us ahead? We have to strike a balance. Live the daily life within our plans but always keep those pipe dreams at hand. Don’t totally deny them or discount them.
Even if you do chase after your pipe dream and ultimately fail, the journey, the process of trying to achieve that pipe dream may yield unexpected benefits, may open up new vistas and worlds that you didn’t previously know about.
Pipe dreams are sometimes the only things that can keep us moving forward when things are tough. Learn to control them, learn to tame them. But never let them die.
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