Are you trying to teach life or be a student of it? A student does not sit in class agreeing or disagreeing with the teacher. Learning requires asking only why. You need to stop all judgement because being oriented by likes and dislikes can only lead to failure and frustration.
When I decided to become an engineer, it was with my head. It would bring me secure employment and solid financial prospects. But also, the idea of it impressed everyone I told.
The first time I remember saying I wanted to be something when I grew up, I said I wanted to be an assassin. It paid vast amounts of money for very little time, which seemed like a brilliant way to have a wonderful life outside of work.
As you might imagine, my answer shocked people. I changed my answer. After that, I tried on “cookbook writer,” to which my mother replied, “You can’t even cook!” Then it was “ambassador,” to which I heard laughter and some mention of my people skills.
It took many years to settle on an answer that elicited the correct response. I felt relieved to finally stumble upon it, with only months left before the university application deadline.
Taking Twelve Steps
However, I learned a way to reflect on this situation in therapy. Listening to Russel Brand’s Recovery, I realized that the twelve-step program follows a similar process. In treatment, I paid someone to take me personally through all the questions and be my sounding board for my perspective. In Brand’s book, he discusses how other people and the Blue Book serve the same purpose and goal.
Whatever works.
When you make decisions to go after security and money, you find out that security pushed to its maximum is a prison. Your prison can be your pension, union, location, home, and more. The point is to recognize the bars you put around yourself, because nothing you can buy with all that money will make it go away or feel better.
Secondly, professionals are expected to dedicate themselves. Quickly, as you work longer hours to ensure that the next promotion goes to you, or at least not the next pink slip, you no longer have time for anything but work.
You are miserable because there is no room for happiness. You left it out of your life’s equation.
It’s clear your life needs changing, but you can’t do it randomly because you risk doing it the same way and ending up in a situation that’s different yet fundamentally the same. Trying and trying again never works.
You have to stop first. You can wait until you hit rock bottom, whatever that looks like for you, or you can pick now, today, this moment.
The Pivotal Lockdown
It’s the most crucial lesson of my career. I learned it in a Six Sigma Black Belt class, and it resonated immediately.
At the front of the class was a quincunx board. It contained a funnel with pegs and a round plastic disk that could be dropped into it from the top at any location you desired. The point was to get it to land in the center.
It does not land in the center the first time, having bounced off pegs on the way down. Fifty of these go down, spreading around the target like a little bell at the bottom.
What do you want to do with the second round?
Students spit out answers and directives, and there are three everyday things we do. We react to the last result, to a combination of the previous results or the earlier results and the later starting positions.
The point is that we take the immediate feedback and adjust.
At the end of the lesson, no one had any further suggestions for improving on the first: aim as best you can, hope for the best, and don’t touch anything.
Lock the knobs down, I wrote in the margins of my notes.
On my project, I did precisely that, not allowing anyone to change any settings. I changed passwords, installed locks, and barricaded access.
It worked like a dream. It was like the machines all breathed a sigh of relief from being messed with.
Finally, I could watch and learn what was happening, so I could make the one minor tweak that set the thing humming.
One Small Tweak
There’s a joke about a consultant charging $10,000 for installing one bolt. He’s asked for an itemized bill and writes, “Bolt, $1. Knowing where to put it, $9,999.” Or that’s the gist of it. I’m here to tell you that it’s no joke, if I never had the guts to submit that kind of a bill or claim that value.
My partner, who is learning to let go of control, is having a difficult time with the size of his stomach. It’s been going on for a few years now, and it’s only on the upswing, despite a lot of hard work on the subject.
At first, the beer brand was to blame, so he switched to a different kind.
Since then, the work’s been all mine.
After that, breakfast was to blame. The type and kind of bacon have been swapped, from the number of pieces to the origin of the meat, from regular to low sodium to homemade thinly sliced pork loin fried to a crisp to nitrite-free low-sodium so-called natural bacon that is now the star of the show. That was a journey.
Finally, this morning, I said, “I don’t think it’s your diet at all. I think it’s stress and frustration, the heat of the summer, the attitudes and demands of the tourists, the training of new employees, and everything else. I think it’s easy to blame your diet. However, enough of this random guesswork.”
I asked him which breakfast component had the most calories and salt. He guessed bacon.
“It was the bread.”
First, you stop making random changes and guessing what to do next because something just happened. You stop doing and start learning.
Learning How Things Work
For my partner, he has to learn everything I learned when I wanted to lose weight. I can’t do it for him, and it’s not my responsibility to decide what to put in his body. It’s his body. I can’t hear it speak, rumble or roar.
There are lessons to be learned about why it’s good to feel hungry and not do anything about it. Treat it as a sign of success, not a sign you are about to die and not a green light to stuff your face.
Your body knows exactly what it needs. You aren’t really hungry if you don’t want to eat raw broccoli. Pick any season of Alone for a crash course in real hunger and watch the whole series to the end.
You need to learn about everything you stuff in your face, from what kind of energy it provides to how. When you are highly anxious and knocking on the door to losing your temper, you reach for cold carrots and a bottle of mineral water instead of the jar of sea salt-coated nuts.
You realize you want to feel better, so you move relentlessly, completely, and totally in that direction. That means learning what you don’t know about whatever comes up along the way.
You feel your way; you don’t think your way.
Perhaps you never felt hungry. If you don’t listen to your body, it will find a way to get your attention. You don’t want that. I don’t want that for anyone.
I also remember that I tried to cure cancer, and that got a lot of impressed faces, too, but I found the years and potential costs of education far too daunting. Still, here’s your cure.
Sweeping Life Changes
I have learned that the inability to deal with specific thoughts does cause cancer. When we hear of someone and their cancer diagnosis, my partner and I play a game of “What was the thought they couldn’t tolerate?” and we usually arrive at the same sentence at the same time.
Taking immediate action is jumping up and letting fear win. But letting fear dictate how you will act is the stuff of squirrels who get hit by cars despite running at maximum speed.
Instead of running at maximum speed, you need to slow down and check your facts. They aren’t all right. There’s one in there that is warped and about to multiply at warp speed. Which one is it?
You need someone else to help you do this, or significantly improve your speed and quality. Take it from someone who will go to great lengths to avoid others.
You need people who are isolated from the potential outcomes. They aren’t invested and therefore have no motive but the truth as they see it.
That you change as required, whatever is needed to change. Yes, it can be daunting to consider, but enacting it becomes automatic. What you might balk at now becomes, “But of course,” when it becomes time.
I realized I was on the wrong path many decades ago. It took that long to find the path I should have walked if I had made room for happiness instead of trying to appease others.
As a therapist pointed out, everything could have gone differently. If I’d said “Assassin” to her, she would have asked, “Why?” with an open demeanour.
Reactions change everything. Always, try not to react but to learn.
Being Teachable
I would have told her my lazy idea in response to the inquisition. She might have tried to help me see that a career can be enjoyable instead of drudgery.
She might have coaxed out of me something along the lines of justice-seeking behaviour, and I might have wound up a judge, lawyer, or even coroner. I did have a fascination with poking at dead things.
When we ask, “Why?” life opens up.
Instead, we judge immediately, whether positively or negatively. It gets written on our faces, in our tones, and marked by our words. Life closes down to what you already know, expect, and might not like.
A student cannot learn with an inner dialogue going on. To what will the ears pay attention? To the inner voice or that of the teacher? You already know the answer, yet perhaps you do not realize that the teacher has communicated to you all this lifetime.
What does it take to stop the narration in your head? Call it meditation, and that’s what you do.
When I am picking weeds, and my mind wants more stimulating entertainment, it tries to find a scab to pick. An old hurt, a story that still carries emotion with it that I don’t like. Things I did wrong for which I did not correctly apologize. Things I did that made me question the labels I chose for myself.
In these moments, I already know what’s down that mental rabbit hole, and now is not the time for it, so I count. You can count breaths, in and out, that’s one. I count the weeds I pick; the moment passes. I go back to my serenity, doing the thing I know I need to be doing at the time I need to be doing it.
Being Present
At the right moment. Now.
It’s all there is. When you want to go down that rabbit hole, you do. I have a pen, a template ready to fill out, and challenging questions to answer. It’s the morning when I am fresh, energetic, and at my peak. Not the afternoon, when I am tired, potentially dehydrated and pursued by flies immune to my deet.
Should the past beckon your attention, you need to give it, but give it when you are ready and then do so wholeheartedly so that it will finally leave you alone to the peace of today. The same goes for the future. If you haven’t planned it and know you need to, schedule it and get it done, or it will continue its pesky nature.
I never felt so peaceful as after I finally got a will. Knowing I wouldn’t be here to have any hope of what might happen and knowing I’d care enough almost to want to become a ghost to watch how it plays out, I knew I needed one. Now my soul can rest in peace.
To be in the moment as much as possible, you must take care of the past and the future. Do the work that needs to be done – it’s your mental health at stake, and it doesn’t stop there.
It’s nice to think you can force yourself to “stay in the moment” and chide yourself when you don’t, but that’s not the lesson.
Being Curious
I remember my mom trying to scold our cat when he used the carpet as his litter box, and what’s even funnier is that she did it more than twice.
Try something, but don’t keep trying something that has already proven not to work. Notice yourself doing it and attempt to learn what you are achieving by doing what you are doing and claiming a sense of power? Control? Esteem?
Learn to spot and stop the ego as curiously as possible. The ego could have you seeking fame only to achieve it and discover that a small-town quiet life is what satisfies your soul, and that’s no longer possible due to the permanent loss of privacy. Be careful what you wish for by not letting the ego lead.
Investigate the causes of situations, don’t pass out judgments, not even on yourself. Take the information and do the homework while resisting the desire to clarify how you feel about its unfolding to the universe.
I don’t think it cares.
Instead of shaking your fist, save your energy. Yep, that’s what happened. Keep calm and carry on. Focus on “next time.”
If you don’t like how that unfolded, you should be doubly curious about which events triggered the avalanche of crap. It’s funny, but when you have the time to unwind the totality of that, you will discover that the root goes so deep as to pick that one out, takes care of a myriad of problems you had no idea were related.
If you fix that one thing, the excess weight will fall off, the wrinkles will melt, and the hair will come back with vigour and volume like never before.
I resolved to put my heart into it the next time I picked a career.
Free From Judgment
The opposite of judgment is openness and acceptance. Like the age-old lesson in comedic improv, the answer is always, “Yes, and…”
Please tell the universe how you’d like things to unfold, and then take them as they do. Try not to be shocked when the weather begins to comply, despite what the weatherman predicted – don’t you know they are never right? When people you missed show up unexpectedly in weird places with uncanny timing, you know who to thank.
The universe? No, you!
The universe is the vehicle, not the driver. Or at least, this is what I’ve learned to be true in my world as I cast my thoughts out on their way to becoming my reality.
Don’t you want to pay attention to that voice in your head now? For those with control issues, this is where to aim.
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