Just Maintain

by | Aug 12, 2017 | Blog

I wonder if complicating things makes us feel grown-up.

Things are often simple whether we like it or not.

Most of us don’t need an expensive gym to get in shape. Just pick up heavy things and put them back down. Elevate your heart rate and leave it there for a while.

Most of us don’t need a cutting-edge fad diet to help us feel better. Just eat things that people would have recognized a long time ago and avoid sugar.

Most of us don’t need to change our entire life and start over from the ground up. We just need to do the dishes and vacuum and stop being rude to other people because we don’t feel well.

There are exceptions to these things, of course, but in general, things can be pretty simple. I make my living in an industry that seems to complicate almost everything needlessly, but the simple answers are still almost always the best.

The simplest thing that any of us can do is to just maintain the good things we are doing and add more of them.

I have these things in my life. If I just eat well, exercise, and not drink, everything is pretty easy. It really is that simple. At this point, I am cruising along, and I just need to maintain. This is true for many people.

But what if you aren’t cruising? What if your bike is in the ditch with a broken chain and your face is all scuffed up?

Start changing what you can. The smallest thing can make a difference.

Then, just maintain that change and add another small one.

Simple things are super helpful.

Make your bed.

Eat a healthy breakfast.

Smoke one less cigarette.

Sweep the floor.

Say one nice thing to one person.

Go on a short walk.

Read one book.

Sit outside for 30 minutes.

Drink more water.

Start with these, then add to them.

Find what’s working and do more of it.

Just maintain.

Selfish People

by | Aug 10, 2017 | Blog

In talking about other people, we would be crazy not to acknowledge that some of them are selfish.

Most people.

All of us to some extent.

Selfish people are super easy to trust. They will always do what is best for themselves. If they have some degree of self-awareness, they may employ some sort of mental gymnastics to convince themselves it’s good for everyone, but they will do what is best for themselves in the end.

We like to think that selfishness is the one thing that we don’t have to understand in others, the one thing that is just wrong and unacceptable.

Everything makes sense

I want to think this too sometimes. For some reason, it makes us feel better about ourselves to see negative things in others, but I keep finding that selfishness makes sense too if you know a person long enough or well enough.

In general, someone raised the selfish person with the belief that they are the most important thing in their own life. Someone told them they were special and unique and that what they were doing matters (everyone is special and unique and matters, but they took it too far). They were most likely told this through actions rather than words because that is how we really learn.

Or, someone told them, through actions and words, that if they try to deal with people fairly, they will abuse it and leave you in the lurch. If you don’t get yours first, you won’t get it at all. Things are limited, so take all you can. Other people can fend for themselves.

Digging up the past is painful

Often, when they realize that these are not strategies that work well if you want to be a truly healthy human being, they have to confront some challenging things about themselves and their families and their past if they want to change. This is very hard. Instead of fixing the present they are suddenly tearing the past up by its roots, and it’s bringing a lot of dirt with it. It leaves a big hole. People shying away from this process also makes sense.

We have to have boundaries with selfish people, or they will drain away everything we have, but we don’t have to be angry at them to do it. Being angry will, in fact, only guarantee that the boundaries don’t work for very long. They will fade when the anger fades.

Have boundaries, but understand it’s not personal.

People make sense.

There’s no reason to blame something for making sense.

Ideas and People

by | Aug 9, 2017 | Blog

Continuing from yesterday.

We cannot engage the world without ideas about it, but these ideas often cause us a degree of suffering because they distort pure experience with notions of what we want and don’t want and place expectations on things.

This is particularly true with other people.

Yesterday we used a red light as an example, a simple timed mechanism that doesn’t play favorites or make choices. It has a time to turn, and it does.

People, on the other hand, should know how to act. Or, at least, our mind tells us they should. There are things we do and don’t do as people, and everyone should adhere to these things. It’s simple.

Except that it’s not.

We continually make exceptions to these rules for ourselves and the people we love and like. When we break these rules, it makes sense. We had to do it. Grace and relativism for me, justice and absolutes for everyone else.

Shoulds

This idea that people should act a certain way is useful and convenient and lets society function in a relatively smooth manner. The problem slides in when we let these simple agreements and expectations become ironclad laws in our mind, and we start dealing with other people’s behavior with judgment and criticism and shoulds. We can get so caught up on how someone else is acting that we lose sight of why that even matters, and get invested in things beyond our control.

When it comes down to it, it does not matter what we think about how others are acting or how they should act. They are completely beyond our control. Even if we influence them, this is because they allow it, it is never actually ours.

The stoplight and the other person are not all that different; we just have social expectations for one of them. We can choose to be in relationship to them or not. Granted, not being in relationship can be costly (not driving is nearly impossible where I live) but it is still a choice. It might be very costly to remove some people from our lives, but we do have that choice. This is important because it helps us remember that we are remaining with them through our actions.

This isn’t about blame, but it is about recognizing that we have power in our own lives.

Are other people the problem, or is it our ideas about the other people?

Is their behavior the problem, or is it our ideas about how they should behave?

How often do your ideas about people cause you trouble with them?

No Ideas

by | Aug 8, 2017 | Blog

“How do you deal with the world without ideas?”

I get this question, in one form or another, pretty often. It’s valid.

I don’t know that there is a way to deal with the world without our ideas about it. They are the medium we interact with reality through. There are holy people around the world and throughout history who have claimed to be beyond these ideas, and maybe they are, but my non-holy mind cannot understand how one has actually dropped all concepts.

The key, in my opinion, is to at least recognize that we are dealing with ideas and expectations rather than real things. Our job is to understand that we are interacting through a medium rather than direct experience. We are watching the news (often with commentary) about something rather than witnessing the event itself.

The Mind as Medium

This is important because the medium of the mind always inserts opinions and expectations and requirements and desires as it processes whatever the event is. A light turns red, cars begin to slow down. Our mind processes this through the lens of how badly we have to use the bathroom or how this will make us even later than we already are. The latter can trigger thoughts of how we are always running late or how our new client might judge us because we weren’t on time.

Now, a person with no ideas at all shouldn’t be in a car in the first place, and they wouldn’t know what to do at the red light, so that’s a silly concept. But, we can at least deconstruct the anger or frustration or resentment we feel at the red light. We can recognize it’s not personal and has nothing to do with us. It’s just a thing that happened, a timed mechanism did its job. Move on.

This gets more complicated when we are dealing with other people, as everything seems to do.

We’ll look at that tomorrow.

Every Breath

by | Aug 7, 2017 | Blog

Death is supposed to be for older people.

It is not supposed to come until the end of a long life after someone has done and seen all the things. The death of a young person is always tragic, both in the unfairness of it and in the abrupt ending of what might have been.

I awoke this morning to the news of a young man’s life ending far too early and through no doing of his own. It was one of those kick-in-the-gut deaths that stop you short and immediately settle into your chest.

We take so many things for granted. Our next breath and seeing someone again are central among them. There will come a time when we do not get a next breath. There are already people we have seen for the last time without knowing it.

This all ends someday, and not necessarily in some distant future as we like to think. The end is right next to us at every moment. It sits in our heart and in every breath. Living with this in mind is important.

Take some time today and be thankful for your life.

Move around, play with a child, hug people.

Help someone with something.

Tell someone you love them.

Be kind to yourself.

Breathe.

None of us get to do this forever.