One Thought

Standards I would like to follow in my interactions with others:

1. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Have a sense of humor. Realize that what you are doing may be less important and serious than you think it is.
2. Be open and honest with yourself. Recognize what you feel and what you want. Do not deny that your emotions and desires exist. At the same time, know that it is possible to change thoughts and behaviors.
3. Be open and honest with others. Let other people know how you feel; don’t assume that they will figure it out themselves. Do not hide yourself from others. Do not try to lead separate private and public lives.
4. Be empathetic. Know how you are perceived by others and how your actions affect them. Understand others’ moods and emotions and react appropriately. Recognize others’ insecurities and compensate when necessary.
5. Neither seek out nor withdraw from confrontation. Do not intentionally pick fights. At the same time, do not avoid actions that might provoke hostility. Do not step down from a confrontation unless your opinion has been heard.
6. Be humble. Don’t exaggerate the importance of your opinions or actions. Don’t assume that others are less intelligent or competent than you, regardless of their experience. Don’t brag (much!).
7. Cultivate relationships. Do not wait for people to come to you; seek them out. Do not wait for someone to scratch your back before you will scratch theirs.

I like some cliches.  Here’s a list of the ones I’ve heard that I like:

1. Live now. Plan for the future, but be here now. Don’t defer life or happiness.
2. Pursue your passion(s). Don’t worry about the consequences of doing so.
3. Take the hardest, most-risky, and/or most-feared path. “Realistic” goals are often the ones with the most–and the fiercest–competition.
4. The most important choices you make are: where you live, what you do, and who you do it with. Choose wisely, and don’t compromise.
5. If you aren’t failing some of the time, you aren’t being ambitious enough.
   • In particular: If you aren’t getting rejected some of the time, you aren’t asking enough.
6. Be honest and open with yourself and others to the highest degree possible.
7. Don’t accept a “decent” or a “pretty good” life when an “excellent” life is possible. Do not get stuck at a local maximum.
8. Be aware of the ways you limit yourself and seek to eliminate them.
   • In particular: Confidence and positive thinking beget positive action and success. Do not allow low confidence or negative thinking to limit you.
9. Make a point of facing fears rather than running from them. In many cases we fear most what would benefit us most.
10. Focus greater energy on developing strengths than on patching over weaknesses.
11. Combine your talents in a unique or rare way. Your talents together form a skillset much rarer than any of them individually.
12. Have strong opinions but hold them weakly. Allow your opinions to change quickly and readily when appropriate; do not be needlessly stubborn.

Getting older is mostly good. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown more self-aware. I’m now more aware of my strengths, my weaknesses, and the ways others perceive me. I understand the effects that my actions have on others. I’m better at detecting the feelings and insecurities of others. I see how I’m similar to others and how I’m different, and the differences make my strengths and weaknesses more clear.

As a result of being more self-aware, I have more control over my emotions. I’m able to label my emotions more accurately and to understand what is causing them. I’m better able to regulate my emotions, which means that I can prevent negative emotions from ruling my life.

I’m more conscious of the things that make me happy and unhappy. Partly through trial-and-error, I’ve found that some things–writing, going to the gym, playing music, spending time with people I like–tend to make me happy, and other things–being alone for long periods of time, backing away from challenges, getting no time to myself–tend to make me unhappy. This knowledge helps me to lead a happier and more-satisfying life.

Part of the satisfaction of getting older comes from the feeling that, in some way, I’m moving “closer” to perfect knowledge and a perfect existence. Of course, I’ll never attain these, but I like feeling like I’m making progress toward them. I don’t want to feel like I’m running in circles, realizing the falsehood of one assumption after another, ad infinitum. Though certainly many of my current beliefs are wrong, I’d like to think that I am, in general, closer to ‘the’ (or ‘a’) truth than I was when I was younger.

The problem with this sort of thinking, however, is that it can lead to a sort of comfortable equilibrium that shuts out contrary information. If I believe that I have become more “right” as I have gotten older, then I may also become more closed-minded and stubborn. I may shut myself off to new experiences and restrict myself to activities and ideas that are proven to make me happy, or at least that I know are comfortable.

I hope I never end up in that state. People whose minds have hardened to new experiences–who are unable or unwilling to change their viewpoints and opinions–are truly old. Since their view of the world is fixed, they can’t experience new things, and they can’t grow as individuals. The rest of their lives will be a repetition of what they’ve already experienced.

I do like stability, though. Stability comes from learning something about myself and about the world. Stability allows me to focus and to move more effectively toward my goals. And, of course, stability is comfortable. How do I reconcile my desire for stability with my desires for new experiences and personal growth? By the way I frame my opinions and viewpoints. However sure I am of them, I can never regard them as absolutely correct or fixed. There is always a chance that new information will invalidate or change my opinions and viewpoints. This doesn’t mean that I can’t hold them strongly and view them as likely to be correct, however.  I can–and this way I can have confidence in my views while still allowing them to change.

Similarly, I should make sure to force myself to seek out new experiences, particularly those that make me uncomfortable. While uncomfortable experiences tend to be the enemy of stability, they are often the only way to grow as a person. A new experience can destabilize viewpoints that have hardened in my mind, forcing me to reevaluate my assumptions. While too many new, uncomfortable experiences can be quite unpleasant, too few means slow, or no, personal growth. Stability can very easily lead to stagnation.

The most difficult challenges are those that I feel deeply in my gut. They make me nervous; they give me butterflies; they make my mind race; they bring my insecurities to life. They make me want to run away.

I can’t let them do that.

Doing something completely new is stressful. That’s unavoidable. Our minds adapt to doing things a certain ways and perceiving the world in certain lights. Extreme novelty challenges them, forcing them to adapt. This challenge can be painful; a mind at rest wants to stay at rest, and it can take extreme measures to ensure that it does. Stress is the mind’s reaction to novelty, the mind’s pulling back into itself.

However the stress of new challenges need not be bad. Stress can be good–it can be invigorating; it can be energizing. There are good and bad aspects to stress; the difficulty is in eliminating the bad and retaining to good. Stress at its ugliest forces us back into the darkness of comfort and away from the light of new experience. Stress at its most beautiful energizes us, gives us creativity, gives us passion, gives us excitement, makes us feel alive, gives our lives purpose and meaning.

A life without stress is a life unlived. We remember the stressful times in our lives the most, the times that we pushed ourselves the hardest and accomplished the most. It’s in these times that we are living the fullest, and it’s these times that make us the happiest. The downtime between stressful experiences serves to calm us.  Downtime is just as necessary as stess, but it’s an antidote to stress, not an alternative. We must have both stress and downtime, and we must recognize when our lives have become full of downtime–when we are running on auto-pilot–and do something to stop that. We must learn to appreciate stress for what it gives us.

The experience of stress need not be negative. What makes a stressful experience unpleasant? Mostly the thoughts and emotions that run through our minds. We think negative thoughts, which produce negative emotions, which cause us to think worse thoughts, which produce worse emotions, and so on. Our minds enter a hellish cycle.

However, it’s possible to stop this cycle before it starts. The solution is not to avoid thinking about what we find stressful–it’s important to reflect on our thoughts, and it’s probably impossible to shut off our minds completely anyway. We can’t control our emotions directly, but we can control our thoughts and our actions, and both of these can influence our emotions. Thus, we must avoid thinking negative thoughts. We can transmute negative thoughts into positive ones, or we can simply shut off negative thoughts. Sometimes I do the latter simply by thinking “No!” when I feel a negative thought coming. Surprisingly, this actually works quite well.

I find that my mind will spontaneously produce both negative and positive thoughts when I am feeling stressed. The positive thoughts are great–they make me feel better and give me confidence. The negative thoughts, however, can destroy any confidence I’ve gained (and then some) if I let them enter my mind. Because emotions cannot be controlled directly, it’s necessary to alter my thoughts or actions when I feel negative emotions coming. If I begin to experience a negative emotion, I must think a positive thought or take a positive action–simply smiling, for instance, can do the trick. Positive thoughts and actions are usually quite effective at replacing negative emotions with positive ones.

Stress is unavoidable, but it need not be unpleasant. If I find a stressful experience unpleasant, that only means that I haven’t yet mastered the art of neutralizing its negatives.