Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Musings’ Category

Memories – variation on Cherokee wisdom about two wolves

Posted in Musings, Uncategorized, tagged , , on August 24, 2017| Leave a Comment »

There is a Cherokee legend that explains how each of us is torn by the fight between the two wolves within us:

‘One is evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.’

According to Cherokee wisdom, the wolf that wins is the one we feed. The lesson this imparts is applicable to many different aspects of our lives.

Memories are our past. There are good memories and bad ones. Dementia may delete large swathes of them, and there may one day be an ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ solution that enables people to erase particular memories from their minds. But in the general scheme of things, memories are simply part of each individual’s life, having been instrumental in making each one of us who we are. Some memories give us a warm and happy feeling, but – as in most things – the downside is that even when we are looking at things that remind us of our good memories, some less welcome memories are invariably likely to surface as well.

There are belief systems that involve rewriting the past. I have my doubts that we are all capable of doing that well enough to expunge experiences that have left serious scars. I have the same doubts about telling our brain to disregard what it has just remembered – the judge may tell the jurors to disregard what they have just heard, but that may well imprint it even more indelibly in their minds.

Instead, I believe we have a different choice – we can try to apply the Two Wolves approach. The memories are there and are part of the film that is in the proverbial tin of the Hollywood metaphor. If both rewriting and disregarding are unlikely to be effective, we may as well open our door to all the memories that bubble up in our minds – if we don’t deal with them, they are likely to keep making repeat visits. We can thank them for coming by, much as we might be polite to people selling door-to-door, see whether they have something for us that we’d like to have or keep, and then wave them on. We don’t have to invite them in and give them space, time or energy. After all, the more we dwell on certain memories, feeding them, giving them new life and invigorating them, the more that wolf will win. We can nourish the good memories wolf or we can nourish the memories wolf that causes us pain and distress. It is important to accept that the things we recall all happened and were real. They have already had a major effect on our lives. But that was then. It is not written that we have to allow them to give us ‘Groundhog Day’ experiences that repeat over and over throughout our lives. We can choose to let the past go.

There is definitely no law that says we have to let the same dog (or wolf) bite us twice.

Read Full Post »

Seven keys to happiness

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , , on October 12, 2015| Leave a Comment »

This is neither an original thought nor a magic spell – but I think it might be a good way to go to minimise the kind of suffering we are liable to inflict on ourselves, so I’m writing a reminder to myself.

My seven keys to happiness:

  • Accept others as they are.
  • Accept yourself as you are.
  • Accept what other people give you graciously and don’t require or expect them to give you more than they are able or willing to give.
  • Accept you’re unlikely to change any other person, their behaviour or their priorities.
  • Adjust your exposure to other people individually depending on how much of them and their behaviour you can deal with.
  • Don’t take things personally – you are not the centre of other people’s universes, and their behaviour may not have anything to do with you.
  • Don’t attach too much importance to anything – everything will pass.

Read Full Post »

Contributing less to getting what you don’t want

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , , , , , , on October 25, 2009| Leave a Comment »

There are times when the reactions we get from others make us either upset or angry, or both. I am going to suggest something difficult to accept: that we may have contributed to our own discomfort. This is not an easy idea to accommodate. My theory about our contribution is that I think we actually get something from the outrage we feel – I haven’t ever fully understood the ‘brown stamps’ concept in transactional analysis but maybe my pattern is an illustration of what other people manage to articulate more succinctly with that concept.

You do, say or write something; someone responds in a way that you find unpleasant, upsetting, infuriating, unjust … all the things you associate with feelings you prefer not to experience. You feel outraged and possibly misunderstood. You relate the story to someone else, the metamessage being, ‘Isn’t it unfair? Haven’t I been mistreated here?’ You feel righteous in your indignation. With a bit of luck (from your point of view), the person you relate the story to says, ‘Absolutely!’, ‘It’s awful!’ or similar, so that your righteous indignation feels endorsed and justified. You then go on to repeat the experience … over and over again.

If you really are lucky, however, at some point you will get a challenge rather than an endorsement. I put it that way because I think, in my own case, I have to take some responsibility here and I’d like to try to change my pattern. My feelings have not occurred as a consequence of a situation with no input from me. Whether I like it or not, I have actually gone to the playing field and put myself on it. Maybe I didn’t learn the rules of the game first. Or maybe I made the assumption that I simply could play, could handle the game and be good at it, just because that was what I wanted. Sticking with the analogy, maybe I then found that the way I played the game meant I didn’t score any goals, I got injured, or I got pulled up for fouls and got sent off. In other words, maybe my approach was ineffective or at any rate yielded the opposite of what I intended. What to do?

I think there are various strategies to consider. Some are:

  • Get tougher and roll with the proverbial punches (with apologies for the mixed metaphor!)
  • Commit fewer fouls and therefore get penalised less often
  • Learn to take evading action so that you get tackled less and maybe both avoid injury and get to score.

(This is obviously not an exhaustive list.)

What you do in real life, rather than in the game analogy, depends on what you really want. If the bottom line is that you want to have a story to tell like-minded people, who will empathise with your outrage and agree with your response to it, you will keep doing the same thing and put up with the discomfort of getting there. If not, you have to change something.

I’ve decided that the fun of telling the story is punctured too much by the feelings I have to go through to get to tell it (remember this is cyclical: if you do the same thing, you’re likely to get the same result). I’ve also always found ‘learning to roll with the punches’ to be more desirable than achievable – call it frailty of character if you like, I just know I don’t find it easy. So, I’m going to try to go for sparing myself the feelings in the first place and foregoing the fun of telling the story. Another way of putting it is that I’m going to try to take responsibility for how I feel, and do something about my contribution to that, rather than engineering righteous outrage at how I contend someone else has ‘made’ me feel.

Read Full Post »

Draw a line

Posted in Musings on October 9, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Sometimes people surprise you, and not in a good way. You initiate a friendly conversation, and it turns into an argument. You expect a certain reaction, and the response you get is completely different. You make a call to impart some news you think will please the recipient, and instead, they shout at you before hanging up on you. Healthy self-esteem enables people to weigh up such events sensibly and sometimes to shrug and move on. Those of us who find it more difficult to deal with them need to focus on a few basic principles:

  • Do not take responsibility for anyone’s feelings but your own.
  • The other person’s reaction may or may not have anything to do with you personally, and they are under no obligation to explain it to you or to excuse their behaviour.
  • Some disagreements and differences of view can be fixed; some cannot.

It is useful to learn to draw a line under events instead of reliving them over and over again. If they are really yours to fix, then fix them. If they are not, accept that you cannot make anyone else fix them. Let them go.

Read Full Post »

Giving what you want to give

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , , , , , on September 29, 2009| 2 Comments »

Giving because you want to give is good; finding gratitude, attention, love, empathy, appreciation or someone giving in return is a bonus. The main thing is not to require any of those things in exchange for what you give. If you do, you may well be disappointed and eventually become resentful. This is a sad consequence but often an unavoidable one if we are relying on other people’s behaviour or reactions to match our fantasies and expectations. It is particularly unfortunate if the whole well of giving is poisoned in the process.

M Scott Peck said in ‘The Road Less Travelled’ (1990) that he had

a colleague who often tells people, ‘Look, allowing yourself to be dependent on another person is the worst possible thing you can do to yourself. You would be better off being dependent on heroin. As long as you have a supply of it, heroin will never let you down; if it’s there, it will always make you happy. But if you expect another person to make you happy, you’ll be endlessly disappointed.’

The person wasn’t suggesting taking heroin was a good idea, but merely making the point that being dependent on other people to shape how we feel or to create our happiness is not productive – in fact, it is doomed to failure.

The only things we really have any control over are our own attitudes and behaviours – other people’s are usually beyond our sphere of influence except very temporarily, if then.

So, to go back to giving, the best we can do is to give when and what we want to give and to stay in the moment, getting our fix from the giving (i.e. what is in our control), not immediately attaching to it an expectation or hope of an outcome or return, which would not be in our control. Not requiring an outcome or return is probably one of the most valuable contributions to our own happiness that we can make.

Read Full Post »

Listen to what people tell you about themselves

Posted in Musings on September 20, 2009| Leave a Comment »

What people say can give you useful information, as can what they do. But to get that information you need to be paying attention – you need to be present. This means you have to be in ‘observer’ mode, rather than in a world of your own imaginings when you are with them.

When a member of your family, a friend, a partner, a lover or a colleague tells you: ‘I am not good in the mornings’, they are probably genuinely trying to tell you that their behaviour in the mornings is unpredictable and possibly some way short of how they would like to be. It is code for ‘Please don’t get upset if I snap or appear grouchy and thoughtless – it’s not personal, I just take a little time to get into the day and into my more social role around people’. For many years when I worked in an office as one of a team, we had a deal whereby we would ‘issue bad mood alerts’ on this basis – to oil the machinery of which we were parts so that there was a chance there would be less uncomfortable friction. It is worth listening to what people say, and taking it in, if it can help us to avoid pain and upset.

With this in mind, there are other situations where we would also do well to listen to what people say: when they are self-critical, for example. Choose not to believe them at your peril! The information they are imparting to you is invaluable for your well-being in relation to them. So, the next time a person says, ‘I’m a real bitch!’ or ‘I’m an insensitive bastard!’, don’t disbelieve them and don’t ignore what they’ve told you – or at least do allow for the fact that they may be being totally sincere.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have them in your life, but in the same way as it is wise to go into financial investments with your eyes open, it is sound to approach emotional investments with a similar awareness and desire for self-protection.

Let reality in as soon as you can because you’ll invariably always have to let it in eventually.

Read Full Post »

Disappointment

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , , , , on September 10, 2009| Leave a Comment »

We experience disappointment when things don’t turn out as we wanted, imagined or hoped. It is quite hard to get past the feeling, especially when we’ve invested a lot in a particular outcome, and it doesn’t materialise. I suppose ideally the answer is not to invest in a particular outcome – just do what you have to do and stay in the moment of doing it without projecting forward what might follow or result from it. But it’s difficult to do that, and it hurts when it doesn’t work out, particularly at the time we realise that we are just not going to get our desired outcome when we want it. I used to think T S Eliot had encapsulated what life often seemed to be all about, with his:

Man’s life is a cheat and a disappointment;

All things are unreal,

Unreal or disappointing … (‘Murder in the Cathedral’)

But, generally, the feeling passes, usually because life doesn’t stop; it continues and whatever it was that was disappointing becomes one of those things you see in the rear-view mirror – eventually it is gone. Often, we look back on those disappointments and see them differently, either as lucky escapes, or simply as things that were not so bad. This is not just a ‘Pollyanna’ attitude of wanting to find something to be glad about; it is just a perspective that time and distance tend to lend. I look back at some disappointments with sheer gratitude (admittedly some time later!) when I am able to see more of the picture than I could at the time, and I am genuinely able to think ‘thank goodness I didn’t get that job’, ‘how lucky I was that that situation didn’t work out’, ‘how amazing that I should have gone from feeling so wretched to feeling so much better, despite what I thought I’d lost!’

I tend to avoid the explanation that whatever it was ‘was meant to be’ (or otherwise), because for me it doesn’t lead anywhere – it is conjecture, post hoc explanation, a case of finding something that fits after the event and seems to make sense of what happened, insisting on believing that it was part of some divine plan. Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with that – I’m just saying it doesn’t work for me. I would rather look at the reality now, what is, what has happened, rather than fantasise about what might have been. I’m not sure that fantasising about what might have been makes people happy because there is so much regret and wistfulness involved – it focuses on loss, not real loss, because it is the loss of something they never had, but perceived loss. In other words, I think it involves an avoidable feeling of loss. There is enough of the other variety – we don’t need the avoidable kind as well.

When I experience disappointment I think the most useful thing to do is to try to feel the feeling – there is no point in pretending to myself that I’m not disappointed if that is how I feel – and then to try to let it go on the basis that I don’t know what happened is not for the best – I am literally, at that particular point, not able to judge. Maybe Eliot was right all the time: he went on to say,

All things become less real, man passes

From unreality to unreality.

My experience has tended to be that, generally, when we look back on our disappointments, we reckon that what happened was somehow for the best – we just couldn’t see it from where we were sitting at the time, so we couldn’t see that the disappointment was just another bit of unreality (and it would pass).

Read Full Post »

Volunteers only – no conscripts

Posted in Musings on September 4, 2009| Leave a Comment »

It’s interesting how we manage to cope with different degrees of reciprocity in some of our relationships but not in others. This troubles me because it must signify the kind of non-acceptance of reality that I strive to overcome in my life.

There are friends I meet up with two or three times a year, and that works fine. I accept the relevant degree of maintenance those friendships require and don’t feel either neglected or resentful at the looseness of the bond.

Then there are other friends whom I don’t see a lot of, and don’t hear much from, who have me positively welling with upset and resentment. I am acutely aware that any contact we have is due to my making the effort, failing which it would literally wither on the vine. The bottom line is that I mind. The good news is that I mind that I mind…

It occurs to me that my response to these situations must simply be based on a desire for things to be different from how they are, even though I know it is not a winnable fight, and it takes energy that could be better expended on other things. A more desirable principle would be to choose not to continue to make room for anyone in my life who does not want to be there: volunteers only – no conscripts.

It hurts to let go of people, especially if you have experiences in common and it is not your choice to let them go. But it is dysfunctional to hang on to them if it is crystal-clear from their behaviour that you are not as important to them as they are to you, especially as every time you focus on these relationships you are likely to feel disappointment and rejection.

So, I am going to try to let go of them. Maybe, instead of feeling disappointed and rejected, I can view these retired friendships as completed cycles, storylines that have run their course having achieved what they were born to achieve for both participants. I think that way more happiness lies than to sit unhappily wishing that whatever it is weren’t so.

Read Full Post »

Best parental advice ever

Posted in Musings on September 1, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Parents give their children advice about life, the universe and everything to try to give them ammunition to hold their own. The best advice I ever had from my father was on the subject of having opinions that were different from other people’s. He said there would be many times in life when I would have a different view from other people – he told me that I should never automatically assume I was wrong. I never took this as licence automatically to assume that I was right, mind you, but it was helpful to have the core idea embedded in my brain that being in a minority didn’t mean my view was not worth having.

Read Full Post »

How others see you

Posted in Musings on August 31, 2009| Leave a Comment »

We are often told we shouldn’t be concerned about what others think of us. I think that – like most things – there are two ways of looking at this. If we live our lives on the basis of ‘what will people say?!’, to the detriment of doing what we want to do to be happy, to fulfil our dreams and to be ourselves, I think it is a bad thing – or at least a sad one. However, if other people have a positive image of us, then why would we not think it was a good thing to take some of that on board? The problem is that, in my experience, we generally tend to believe the negative and not the positive. If a person speaks badly of us and we find out, we are generally hurt because the child inside says that if somebody said that about me then it must be true. If we hear a person talk about us as a really wonderful person, we tend to think they must be deranged, or they don’t really know us, or they must want something from us.

Ideally, we try to be and behave like a person we would like to be part of our lives. If we are strong and have healthy self-esteem, we can roll with the punches, knowing that if someone does speak about us, whatever they say they are expressing their opinion, full stop. They may or may not be right in what they point out. If we look inside ourselves, we’ll probably know quite well whether what they said was accurate. There is a problem with taking others’ negative opinions and comments and internalising them, reinforcing them to ourselves and making ourselves feel steadily worse. If we are going to take notice of what other people think of us, it would be good if we made room for the positive opinions and comments we get as well, which we are so much more likely to dismiss.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »