One

My first answer would be to use logic. Figure out what the problem is. Determine a solution. Rationally lay out a plan of action. Implement it.

The problem with this is that I don’t follow plans well – let me rephrase. Plans do not approximate reality well. They don’t take into account:

• The fact that when you make the plan, you don’t know everything you’re going to encounter. You can’t fully understand the situation until you’re in the middle of it.
• Often times you have to deal with other people, and they may not fit neatly into your plan.
• You are more efficient at certain times than others and this seems to be sporadic (at least for me). With a solid plan, you often have to do things even when you’re not being very efficient at them, eg you have a headache or are distracted by a fight with a friend or spouse.

Two

The next possibility is emotion. You know, just feel it out and go with what seems like the right thing to do. This has its share of benefits (more action, less thinking, more efficiency of activity because you’re in the moment dealing with things as they come up), but it can also create problems:

• This isn’t so good with deadlines.
• It’s easy to ignore other people and their problems.
• If the problem is complex or requires several steps, you may miss something critical and then have to deal with in a “putting out the fire” method.

Three

Doesn’t it seem like there should be a 3rd way? Something that provides the best of the other options while minimizing their difficulties? Let’s try this:

1. Identify the problem.
2. Lay out a plan to solve the problem. This may or may not be written down, but think it through as best you can. If you do write it down, realize that this is a rough guide, not a rulebook. You don’t actually have to do anything that you write down. This is very important.
3. Do whatever feels right. This is most likely the first thing on your list (if you made one) since you just did it, but the second thing you do may or may not be.

Now you may be asking, how is this different from any other system of problem solving? Well, it’s not really. I mean, it does create a sort of logical structure around emotional efficiency, which is nice but let’s be honest – that’s what most of us do anyway, isn’t it?

I think what I’m really looking for here is something that is not yet defined. Let’s try this:

Three (part the Deux)

What if you could live your life with an awareness of “what needs to be done” (logic), how you’re feeling (emotion), and how anyone else affected by the problem is feeling? What if you could hold that in your head, balance it, and then automatically determine your actions based on it? Now that’s what I’m talking about.

Sound impossible? Sound easy? Maybe you already do this – or think you do. I think I used to do this, but I know that I don’t now. I wonder if I can again?

I think it’s possible that all we do as humans is develop metaphors that approximate what we experience and prepare us to deal with it the next time. If the metaphors predict behaviour and response accurately enough, then they’re good enough and we don’t worry about it! Let’s be honest, our hard-wired goal is to live – to survive, not to understand. Understanding merely satisfies our intellectual curiosity.

(Oh my gosh! Did I just discover the scientific method and apply it to daily life?)

Listening to Obama’s acceptance speech last night, I couldn’t help but draw parallels between Lincoln (which he talked about), FDR, and him. I suppose to leave out Washington is historically inaccurate, but I don’t know enough to draw those conclusions. This is not to say that I have decided that Obama is a great president and that history is already decided – there are many issues that he must confront and his challenge is much more in the leadership and organization vein than any other. Will he be able to break the US reputation for only being capable of handling one major issue at a time? We shall see, but I digress…

The point I was headed for is based on the generational political cycles discussed in the book Millennial Makeover. In brief, there are four main types of generations in Anglo-Saxon culture (including the US), and these cycle through in order. The current generation – the Millennials, or Gen Y – are an example of a civic generation. Civic generations also fought the revolution, the civil war, and world war II. Thus, when Obama referenced Lincoln in his speech last night, and the commentators referenced FDR in 1932, the association rang particularly true through that perspective.

Yes we can

“Yes we can,” he said. This is the first presidential campaign slogan that I have heard in my life that seems to reach out and inspire people on a massive scale, a scale on par with the stories that we read about in history books growing up. I guess so much of this will be written by history, but Obama’s climb to power is an impressive feat in a short period of time, and one that does ride on hope for change.

So DC erupted last night. As I lay in bed at 2 or 3 in the morning, I was awakened repeatedly by honking, yelling, and probably gun fire (although I wouldn’t swear to it) above the dull, continuous roar of a crowd all along U street. I have seen so many quotes from black Americans that for the first time, they feel like real Americans – that they are no longer second class citizens. Jesse Jackson crying in the crowd in Chicago. I will not even pretend to understand the relief that seems to have come from Obama’s election in this regard, but it certainly seems to be cathartic on a cultural level for race relations in our country. That is not to say that we are all done with that part of our history, but as Obama said in his speech, this is the beginning of a change that will be significant for our country.

No fear

If you’re like me, you’re wondering how all of this babbling relates to the title of the post. I guess I would have to say that Obama’s hope for change has successfully moved the US in many ways from a culture of fear. So much of the racial difficulties derive from fear – historic fear and guilt bred from centuries of abuse and mistrust and violence. 9/11 and the politics of fear that ensued from that. Fear is crippling. It promotes decisions based not on reason, but rather on emotion. It creates a world run by reactive response, instead of proactive leadership. It is my belief that it is fear that has led the US to fall from our leadership position in the world. To be pursuing the elimination of danger instead of the creation of safety. To be so busy protecting our interests that there is no room to promote our ideals. If you’re going to lead you have to be in front. No one likes a backseat driver, but that is where we’ve been – all the while sitting in the driver’s seat!

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” said Roosevelt in his first inaugural address in 1933. He wasn’t talking about confronting enemies in a war. He was talking about the Great Depression. He was talking about confronting ourselves. Now, as then, there are enemies out in the world, but the way to defeating them is not through protectionism, it’s through engagement with the rest of the world and confronting our own issues.

Life is for the Living.

As I lay awake last night listening to the crowds celebrate and thinking about fear, I realized something: I have been operating my personal life out of fear. My work life is great, but I continue to struggle in the arenas of play and love. What do I want? What do I enjoy? Am I happy? What do I need in order to be happy? I couldn’t answer these questions. Why? Fear. Fear of losing a friendship. Fear of ending a relationship. Fear of insulting or hurting people around me – the people I love (family and friends), the people I know (acquaintances), the people I meet on the street, the people I just pass and never even speak with. This was not a debilitating fear, it was a very functional fear. Most people would not even recognize it as fear, but rather as a sort of niceness. And in fact, this fear has given me wonderful diplomatic skills. I can’t complain about that, given my current location and goals in life.

The difficulty is that I have been so concerned with avoiding danger (instead of creating safety), that all I have seen is danger. I have known that in fact I am surrounded by love and support (and yes – safety), but unable to really enjoy it, to take advantage of it, to relax, to revel in life and all that it has to offer.

I can’t say that the curse is fully broken, time will tell if that is true. But I’ve made a big step in this regard. And I’m really excited about it.

Several years ago, I was doing some therapy and my final realization was “Life is for the living.” I continue to understand that more and more as I grow up (I know I’m 37), but I think the important part for me today is to take advantage of every opportunity presented to you and don’t spend time worrying about the ones you miss. There are so many opportunities every day, it’s not possible to explore all of them.

And if you think this isn’t true, then your eyes are also shut like mine sometimes are.

Life IS for the living. So get out there! If you’re reading this, tell me what new thing you’re going to take up that you’ve always wanted to do in the comments below.

Wayne

“We need to stop trying to be, and just spend our time being.”

I just ordered new glasses from an online seller. Infathomably, they were $19 (plus shipping). To keep it interesting, I ordered them with a weaker prescription than I probably should have to work on improving my sight and hopefully do away with my glasses altogether over time. Is this a good idea? Tell me what you think.The reason I’m doing this however is that I’ve had success with improving my vision in the past. I first noticed that things got better in college while I was delivering Chinese food for Ho Lee Chow (do you believe it? Anyway…). Within a month of squinting at house numbers in the dark, I found that I became better able to read them. My contacts at the time didn’t quite match my prescription (early contact technology, I guess) and at night, all lights would blur into a long thin streak – it was a pain. However, after a little delivery-driving-sight-therapy, I discovered that I could make the streak go away and vastly improve my night vision.

So, a couple of years later I’d switched to glasses and was driving home on the backroads of Michigan a little bored. (I don’t recommend anyone do this, of course…) I got to thinking about my vision, and decided to try a little experiment. I took off my glasses (keeping them in my right hand and ready to put back on immediately) and tried to focus on the passing road signs. Within ten minutes, I noticed a significant difference in my vision and was excited about it. However, ten minutes also seemed to wear out my eyes, so I put my glasses back on and headed for home (keep in mind, there was noone else on the road, the road was perfectly straight, and I knew it really well – I was being a little incautious, but not much in terms of becoming some form of automotive statistic).

This was fabulous, so I would take my glasses off at different points during the day for short periods of time to ‘exercise’ my eyes. What did I learn? My vision continued to improve. So much so that a couple days into this (literally), I was driving home from work at night and in the seven minutes that it took (glasses on), I had acquired a splitting headache – to the extent that I literally crawled up the stairs to my apartment and went straight to bed without dinner.

The next day, I decided that this was due to the improvement in my vision and began focusing on making my eyesight perfect for the glasses that I was wearing. From that day forward, my prescription has not changed and my eyesight has been perfect. Every once in a while, it will start to blur a little, and I’ll have to focus to bring it back to perfection, but that’s worked great for eight or ten years (I know it was the 90s, but I don’t remember when).

So, when I was practicing hypnotherapy, I did some personal work around my lack of vision and the emotional causes that created it and maintain it that way today. This was very effective and interesting, but didn’t really change how well I can see (incidentally, if it seems a little presumptuous or just downright silly that vision can be improved by resolving some sort of underlying emotional causes for it, I’m with you in spirit. How about we view it from the perspective that whether or not those emotional issues created the visual inacuity that I experience, the therapy still results in the resolution of issues that were affecting my life an a number of ways).

It seemed to me however, that a direct leap from impaired vision to perfect vision was just too much for my brain and/or eyes to handle. That is, I couldn’t function without my glasses even though I fully believed that I could improve my vision over time sufficiently to stop wearing them.

… time passed …

And now I’ve finally done something about it. I ordered these glasses with a weaker prescription. For $19, how can you beat it! I stand to lose very little – I can always just go back to my old glasses and move on with my life, knowing that I’ve failed. But if I succeed, I’m well on the road to no glasses whatsoever, and how exciting would that be?

Anyway, thanks for reading – let me know if you’ve done anything similar or if you just think I’m completely nutso!

I know what you’re going to say:

“What about {insert something that gets completed – like making dinner}?”

And I have to respond:

You’re right. I’ve exaggerated the effects of everything changes. Sorry. Let me re-define.

All meaningful pursuits are ever-changing. Like this business plan I’m working on for my nonprofit – it won’t ever really be done! I will always learn more and the environment that I’m working in will change, and the expectations of the people I’m providing a solution for, etc…

How about relationships or creating a better life for yourself? What was it John Lennon said?

“Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.”

Yeah. It all keeps changing, so I’m giving up on the completion and going to move it into a format that is ever-evolving and easy to change. You know, a wiki or Google Doc or something – then the whole history is captured so that I can go back and retrieve what I thought I wouldn’t need but now realize that I do.

Anyway, ’nuff babbling – ciao.

You see, I’m working on something – the beginning of this nonprofit that I’m setting up. And the potential ramifications of it are, well, staggering.

Or maybe I just think that ’cause it’s my baby.

Ya’ know when you visit those places that famous people lived and worked, and you try to put yourself in their shoes — the house that Van Gogh painted in, or the streets where the framers of the Constitution walked, or the bar where the scientists that worked on the Manhattan Project drank at? Ya’ know that feeling? That desire to connect with the past, to connect with greatness? The way people pour over every letter that Einstein or Mark Twain wrote looking for clues about what they really believed and how they developed their unique view of the world?

At small points in my life, I’ve had that feeling but on the other side – you know the side like someday people will be pouring over everything saved on my hard drive looking for clues about who I REALLY was. Arrogance? Maybe. I’ve always kind of assumed that everyone has these sort of feelings. This sense that their uniqueness is going to significantly change the world one day. That their mark on society will be felt for generations to come…

Maybe.

And maybe my vision actually IS unique. I guess only time will tell.

Either way, I would like to encourage anyone reading this (and those that aren’t) to pursue and express your unique vision. To determine what it is that drives you and make it real. To create the world as you would like it to be by living the way that you think it should be. This is where real change originates.

Let me know what you’re doing in the comments.

Now I’m not a big fan of the Buddhist framing of concepts. I find karma to make a little of sense, but to be a somewhat circuitous route to arrive at concepts that could be arrived at many other ways. This is not to say that I find it invalid in any way and I suppose there is something to be said for having multiple ways to look at the same problem. This is just such an example.

If I may summarize in my own words and perspective:

The purpose of a relationship is to work together to serve the greater good or community or some similar thing. Consequently, you should be with someone who shares your goals and ideologies (what this means will vary depending upon who you are).

Happiness comes from serving others. If you devote your life to serving other people, you will be happy. In a relationship, this means that you focus completely on meeting every want or need that the other person has.

You create your own reality. While the Buddhist perspective takes this quite literally, the points that they make using it remain valid even if you back it off a bit to say that you control your perspective of reality. This becomes important in terms of creating a relationship that you are fully satisfied with.

Don’t talk to your partner. Okay, maybe they wouldn’t quite say that, but in effect they are. The point is that you can create the type of relationship that you want by working on who you are — by changing your expectations and desires and by working to fully satisfy your partner at the same time. And you can’t TELL your partner that they have to do the same thing! They have to come to it of their own volition – otherwise, they won’t be doing it for themselves, and their commitment will not be sufficient to handle all the suckiness that is involved in self-introspection.

The third party solution is fascinating. Basically (using the karmic perspective), if you are experiencing unhappiness from something your partner is doing that’s because you have caused that same type of unhappiness on others in the past. So what you have to do is satisfy the karma by bringing happiness of the same type to other people. It doesn’t have to happen within your relationship. Example: if you want your partner to be more affectionate, you should be more friendly to people at work. Talk to that guy that no one likes. Buy someone a coffee next time you pick one up, etc… In this way, you will reverse your karma and your partner will change.

Seems a little fantastical, right? Well consider this: if you spend your time doing nice things for people, you will become someone who does nice things (simple enough?). A person that does nice things draws less enmity and more niceness (aka affection) from others. In addition, this person begins to attract other people who do nice things thus moving towards a different social circle and a completely different perspective of how the world operates.

In this way, you can “create” you perfect partner by being a perfect partner and continuing to work on improving yourself. Basically, you use your partner as a mirror to see what it is that you need to work on.

Is this the one? Finally, and this is the part I haven’t fully worked out. How do you know when you meet the right person? Well, first of all, there is no right person. This seems to make sense – I mean, maybe you luck out and meet someone who is at the same place in life as you and wants all the same things on the same time scale. But come one, what are the chances that the two of you will continue to want the same things for the next 50 or 100 years? It must happen, but the odds are significantly against it. Even in this idyllic situation however, all of the above advice still functions.

The difficult part of what they say is that if you start working on you and “creating you perfect partner” (you know, in your mind), that if the one you’re with now isn’t right, that will resolve itself and you will be open and ready to meet the one that will fit into your vision. The example they used for this had to with a woman whose boyfriend was having trouble committing. They recommended that if she fully commit, not just in the relationship but in other areas of her life as well, that he would either commit to her or move on, leaving her free to meet someone who is ready to commit.

You you you. I guess that’s really the point. If you don’t know who you are or what you want, how can you be open to it. Especially in big cities today, you meet so many people every day. How you find someone to spend your life with if you’re looking for that person to make you happy? You need to bring your own happiness to the table and take the opportunities provided by a relationship to even better understand what you need to be happy. All the while, doing your best to give them everything they need so they have the opportunity to do the same.

Ah, relationships – how confusing! How simple! How natural! How complex! How terrible! How wonderful! And yet so important to life.

If you listen to the audio, let me know what you think in the comments below,
Wayne

No. Seriously. What is that about? We all talk about it and want it and chase after it, but what is it? What is it really? Bear with me, I’ve been working on this…

I read an article recently – ok, an excerpt from a book – by a professor of literature that talked about how her life has been harmed by her excessive reading during the all-critical, socialization stage of her life. Instead of learning about relationships and how to make friends, she learned about love from Wuthering Heights, which has left her seeking love that is more important than life and outlives death – to what end? Not a happy one, in her estimation.

So here’s what I think. First of all, there are several types of love and by having only one word, we confuse ourselves. Where do you draw the lines between the love a mother has for her child, a brother and sister share, love between friends, the love that grows from having great respect for someone, that deep and abiding love that never fades, romantic love, and even universal love for all humanity? We all experience these, or some subset of them but use the same word – how confusing! So first, let’s be specific about what we’re talking about – this will help everyone out.

Naturally, the real complexity is in relationships – serious, long-term, committed relationships. I keep trying to rationalize and logically understand what romantic love is all about and I’ve decided (logically) that that is exactly where I’ve gone awry – you can’t. At the end of the day, love simply is. That’s it. Love – romantic, fall down breathless love – just is. It’s now – and it’s not tomorrow (or at least not until you get there). “I’ll love you forever” is only in this moment. Although that moment contains forever within it (funny, isn’t it? The great ironies of life – where the opposites meet? Wonderful).

So my current theory is that romantic love is only in the moment. But this isn’t bad, because that’s all that we have to work with anyway? When tomorrow comes, it will be now. You can’t plan on love, you can’t rationalize it, you can’t keep it, you can’t hold it. All you can do is enjoy it, and be with it, and live every minute as it comes to you. If you have love in your heart right now, enjoy it for the gift that it is, and if you have lost it or it has left you, enjoy it for what it was but let it go and clear your life and soul so that you may be available for next time that it comes. And in the meanwhile, enjoy the path. Without the bad, how would we know the good? Life is lived on a spectrum. We need difficult times in order to recognize the great times.

In the end, the journey is the reward and there are no right or wrong answers.

Let me know if you agree or not in the comments below.