Everything is a pattern. Like the moose that walks in circles, so do we humans have behavioral patterns. For us, the circle is figurative, and with the consciousness and ability to create tools, we might be the only creatures capable of navigating our way out.
We know that we live in a heliocentric universe. The sun is the center of it, and all the planets are going around in gravitational pull towards the sun. Literally, the sun is the center of our universe, not just physically, but because all life depends on it. The green stuff and everything that eats it produce the oxygen we breathe.
Growing up, my family was always moving home. New phone numbers and addresses to remember. New teachers to know and people to meet; routes to navigate in the dark.
In university, I did the same thing. In co-op, I moved every 4 months for 5 years.
The noise of life didn’t begin to settle until I was in my early twenties. There was no time to figure out the patterns in all that randomness for more than twenty years.
Random, even less, as I realize that my life has a twenty-year pattern, and the universe is always unfolding exactly as it should.
Going in Patterns
As a process engineer, my first job entailed staring at graphs all day to identify ways to improve results. Mathematically, to figure out patterns in all that randomness.
It was like a video game, playing with lines ticking away for a specific reason, tangled together, the behavioral patterns of valves, volumes, and value. My job was to identify relationships, quantify connections, and improve things. I thought it was so fun, but also horribly stressful, as everyone knew your name and how well you were doing.
People had been at this work for generations. By the time I came along, performance was a predictable, solid A.
Predictably, I saw that when everyone left at the end of the shift, the performance felt it.
“Yeah, we know,” they said. “They stop caring at the end of their shift, the new shift takes a while to really get into it…” It was a common excuse, and blaming it on people and laziness was generational.
Instead, I pointed to a graph showing the change in pressure when everyone opened all the doors at once, which caused wind through the fragile process.
Protection was installed, and just like that, a few percentage points of improvement were achieved.
Life has its charts and variables already in motion. When you stop accepting disparaging answers and pay less judgmental attention, you might see that things aren’t as acceptable as you think.
You might just surprise yourself with new facts.
New facts about what someone might be able to predict if they had your life connected to instruments measuring what they are doing at any given moment.
Around in Circles
A compass is an invention used to avoid going around in circles. Many devices and practices help you improve behavioral patterns, if that’s your intention. A checklist helps you avoid running back and forth all over the house as you get ready to go somewhere, and from remembering new things you need.
As I watch this over and over again, I can’t help but add up the weeks used up in life as this search happens weekly. There are basic organizational tools that save people much hassle and time, and are simply not visible to the observer’s eye.
A wallet, so you don’t have to search for each card individually.
A key rack, big enough for all the keys, so that there aren’t keys hiding in pockets all the time.
A list of the things you need when you leave the house. You have an app on your phone, I have a sticky note on my desk entitled, “Next Time I Go to Town,” because I don’t want to go more than once a week, and if I rely on my memory, I’ll spend a lot of time remembering, and might forget something anyway. Jot it down and forget about it – it’s practically done at that point.
I write that as I forgot the bacon because it wasn’t on my list. I forgot to write it down.
Using personal systems is better than not having one at all, yet don’t forget to improve that system. If you are going to go around in circles anyway, you might as well take control and decide what that circle is going to look like.
Perhaps the compass is more your style. Either way, if you know where you want to go, pick the option that best suits you.
Off the Mark
This, one of the healthy coping skills, to fake compliance, I remember going back to the age of three or four. I agreed that family should come first while remembering my resolve to choose the random stranger over the sister who couldn’t stand the sight of blood.
Three pivotal experiences I had that year and three resolutions to remember that I was only playing along until the day came when I could live through the consequences of expressing my disagreement.
My healing began when I was taught that the behavioral patterns of the people around me were the best they could do, but their best wasn’t the perfection I was taught to believe.
When you believe in things that aren’t true, you make decisions that aren’t right. Your warped perspective shapes how you see everything that happens.
When someone teaches you what should have happened, you can parent yourself into a more adult way of behaving and pass new, improved behavioral patterns to the next generation.
Therapists after therapists respond, “I’m sorry that happened to you. Here’s what the gold standard would be if that happened today.”
Together, we work to smooth out that new reality into the new baseline. Ripples happen, into work, into relationships, into making new decisions, and they are there to help you learn and grow. If you don’t have someone helping you, maybe you are doing it the hard way, or you aren’t doing it at all.
When it’s you that is off the mark, it’s you that has work to do. Yes, it is work, whether it’s aiming your scope or honing your natural instincts.
Even if your parents were fully informed, supported, and attuned, standards change. Times change. If you don’t change with that wave, you might get swept away by it.
Pushing it Forward
I once met a woman who was complaining about how much she owed for her education, and her potential employers told her she was overeducated. Her solution was to go back to school and advance her degree.
We all have behavioral patterns that not only push the problem into the future, but also amplify the consequences.
I’ve made those decisions myself, only at the time, I explained them differently. She had as well, seeing open opportunities rather than jumping into ambiguity and adjusting expectations.
Sometimes, when we push it into the future, other people make their decisions, and in doing so, we lose the opportunity. Life gets decided for us.
Something about me can’t take that loss. It must radiate to others, because at an early point in my career, a senior engineer pulled me aside for a mentoring conversation. “If you stay, you have to be okay with being assigned where to live and what to do. You have to hand your life over. If that’s not okay with you, then now would be the best time to leave.”
So I left. The very idea of having to live in the deep South of America, or anywhere in Asia or the Americas, or, frankly, any city of a certain size, made me panic. It turned out, the idea of working at the other end of the plant made me panic.
And there I went, off to another city and address, but at least it was of my choosing.
Instead of staying put and learning the lessons you are forced to face when you cannot escape, I kept pushing it forward.
If there’s one thing I can do well, it’s move.
Using Time Wisely
My life is obvious. When you think to yourself, “Oh no, that truck is going to run me over!” only to get laid off by The Tonka Truck, you realize that the literal and figurative got swapped around, yet they were both branded by the same company.
Three times, it’s been a close call, but the close calls with trucks are over. Close, but no cigar. My time with trucks are over.
Luckily, I had about three years to brace for the impact, and I used them as wisely as I could.
Behavioral patterns mean that some things in your life are already set in motion. Are you using your time as wisely as you can, or are you distracted, or are you in denial?
Perhaps you forgot why you are spending your time doing the things you’re doing. This audit of time and priorities has always led me to quit something I’d previously thought necessary and to begin something that actually was.
Once, I was saved when someone pulled the starting cord of my sled for me. Since that’s all I have this year, it’s become a required skill – no more passing the buck. Off to the gym I go.
There was a time when I would have said I didn’t have time to head to the gym. Another time I laughed about a gym’s existence.
Yet, in my retired age, if there’s one experience I’ve lived, it’s the one of “If it’s going to be, it’s up to me.”
I could have waited, and I also have the patience of a dead man, I’m told. I could have asked, and I have good experience with getting my prayers answered.
Or, I can learn a skill and build the muscle to match.
Control Over Consequences
Sure, I could be stoic. There was a time. Life felt like a chore. Have kids? Why wish this on anyone, I used to wonder.
In time, I gained more control over consequences. I started to feel the glee.
I’d rather be joyous. I’d rather be light and fly than a heavy anchor. Like Mona points out in A Man on the Inside, “Why do a job that machinery can do?”
Or a rock, or a robot, or a dog. God gave humans consciousness – the ability to know that a future is coming, the ability to predict that future, and the ability to use tools to change that future into something else. What more could you want?
Time to do it? Yes, exactly. Do that audit and see if you are spending your time in frivolous ways, or on priorities that don’t matter to you, or on expectations that are not met…the list of categories is endless, but you know them when you honestly do the audit and see where your time is going, versus where’d you’d rather it go – toward being in charge of making a better future.
The future is yours if you want it.
Stoicism might be settling. With time to spare, I wanted to work on something better.
What Could Be better? Total freedom, with wings to soar, but don’t go too close to the sun nor look directly at it, even while knowing better will not mean doing better.
To connect these behavioral patterns in my life, I kept journals, meditated, cut out excess noise, like people who used up my time but weren’t there for me, decided to pay attention to how things felt in my body, and learned how to turn into the voice in my head that was mine.
Well-Made Plans
When I was dependent, I had to change my mind to survive, or write it down, play along, and try not to forget. Choosing the latter, much to my parents’ chagrin, I was a handful, but in an odd way, not in a rule-breaking way. I was a stubborn child; I had strong behavioral patterns.
You make mistakes. We all do. Sometimes, we all make the same mistakes in the same conditions. We all want to look up and see the strange moment when the sun gets blotted out from the sky. So, with healthy coping skills, we lock kids inside and pull the curtains to save their eyesight.
To mastermind a plan is not to orchestrate a symphony; it is to know that life happens and that risks are embedded in its fabric. The best plan allows each player to make their own moves based on their behavioral patterns. More like a game than a piece of music. More like a scoreboard than a checklist.
The best way, then, to orchestrate your own life with its goals and feelings, is to lead from within – to do what feels right.
Get quiet with yourself, and then imagine one future. Then imagine the other. Like the eye doctor says to me, “Which one is better, A or B?” Which one is more complete, more realistic? Which one would the braver, bolder, authentic version of you do?
Because you can get old, or you can grow old. It’s all about the quality of the planning, and the planning of the quality. Are you close enough now to what you thought you wanted to realize what you’ve always wanted?
We all start on hope and faith, but at some point, you need a little proof.
Game-Changing Endings
The snowstorm rolled in thick and fast, using up gas and options faster than expected. When my mind wanted to take a break from riding, I let it drift to the best hotel room I’d ever experienced and the best hot tub and shower I’d ever known. King-sized marshmallow bed. Two people, lots of jets. Glass, tile, plush robes, and towels.
After a sketchy day, there was one room left. Did we want it? Given the price was the same as what we’d spent the previous night on a dingy double, I focused on the fact that we were warm and safe.
The door was beside the kitchen’s dumpster, so at least a car wouldn’t be backing into our sleds.
Behind the door was the marshmallow bed, the jet tub, and the shower. I hopped into the tub while my boyfriend offered to gas up my sled and get me a beer, because that’s what boyfriends do.
As he transitions from boyfriend to finance, I hope it only gets better. I hope behavioral patterns don’t become, “Get your own!” but I have heard that screamed at a lot around here. This transition could mark the end of that, because all transitions mark the end of one and the beginning of another.
Take control of this equality to create the bridge you need, if needed.
When you start to see links between the things you say, the things you think, and the things you get, you start to be more deliberate in putting that reality to your advantage.
If you want a different ending, you have to tell a different story. All the endings are pretty obvious. Even the plots are rarely different. It’s merely the characters who change, and the context that makes everyone and every journey unique.
Predicting the Future
Managers saw my resume with many addresses and cities, and assumed it was like that because I liked it. As was the past, such must be the future. In interviews, you are asked about the past because it’s the best predictor of your future. What you’ve done before, you will likely do again.
In truth, I was working toward a more rural way of life while capitalizing on my one true skill.
What I do really well is act like someone not there, make sense of the action, and see ways it could have gone faster, better, smoother, etc. I answer the question, “What would a lazy, frugal, perfectionist do?”
I understand that the things I claim and the stories I share are hard to believe, yet I suggest you collect your own proof – in your own life. To help you decide and experiment, I leave little breadcrumbs tied to the practices and healthy coping skills I suggest.
Healthy coping skills include refraining from the temptation to get sucked into drama; tuning in to the critical people in our lives and the behavioral patterns they exhibit. Understanding behavioral patterns means we can better duck, bob, and weave our way through the crises and curveballs called life.
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