Cream Cheese, making wrong, and love.

I am in the kitchen, boiling the kettle to make a hot water bottle for that special person in my life, Rebecca. And I notice that the Cream Cheese is LEFT OUT ON THE COUNTER. UNWRAPPED. It is just sitting there. Not in the fridge. Not wrapped. I know that moments before she was making a cream cheese bagel, so SHE left it out. And I am reminded of all the complaints she has voiced about me leaving stuff out, or not rinsing the milk bottles, or putting plates in the sink. And here I have evidence that she does it, too! Fantastic! How can I use this to prove that I am right...

I will not call her up to have her take care of it. That is just not a tactic I condone, as it backfired on me when my parents did it to me. So I wrap up the Cream Cheese, and put it away, mulling over what I should do. I decide to let it go, and finish filling the water bottle.

A little while later, I am in bed waiting for Rebecca to join me. Her hot water bottle is cozying up the bottom of the bed. And I start thinking back to the Cream Cheese. I have the thought I could start a note pad and record the incident, as I know that if I don't, I'll forget, and in the heat of our next 'disagreement', I can bring it up as proof she is as guilty as I and she should get of my case. I also think of what other options I have. I can also bring it up right now, and point out her failing. But cozy though the bed might be, I know that I would get a cold shoulder should I go there. Or I could just forget about it. All three options seemed unsatisfactory. I looked some more and saw that in all cases, I was still making Rebecca wrong. It was just a matter of when. If I wrote it down, I would be storing it up and making her wrong in the future. If I tell her now, I would be making her wrong right now. And if I just forget about it, I am still left with having made her wrong in the past.

I had a real dilemma. Because making another wrong is the cause of distance between us, a loss of affinity and love. Yet how could I turn this episode around and generate love between us?

It would take a shift of my point of view. The fact is - the Cream Cheese was left out. I also know that I can count on Rebecca to clean up after herself, to reliably and consistently not leave the Cream Cheese out. I also know she is a very squishy human, and can make mistakes, like I do. I also remembered that while I was fixing the kettle, Rebecca was fussing over a spot that had been growing on my back, and she is very concerned over it, and that I should urgently get more medical attention on it, that it could be infected. I assure her it is not, and relate the various medical opinions I had already got to appease her, and I agree to get more attention on it as soon as the hospital can see me.

So I saw that in the space of her concern over me, which is ultimately an expression of love, she merely walked past the Cream Cheese in a haze of love and concern. For me.

Now I have the power to really put this in the past - there is no making wrong in that view of what happened.

By then, Rebecca had discovered the hot water bottle, and was cuddled real close. I shared with her my victory over the past, and my victory over making her wrong. After that, the hot water bottle was redundant...

Please (don't) drink and drive

There I am, driving along, minding my own business, thinking who knows what, and this sign zips past.

=========
DONT
DRINK
AND
DRIVE
=========
|
|

Suddenly drinking is on my mind, more specifically, drinking and driving. And I go to, 'I can do a little drinking and driving, I can be responsible.'

So what were you left with?

Consider that part of it is that it is an order, which may cause a modicum of resistance.

And part of it is 'drink and drive', exactly the result the message is trying to curtail.

The ultimate irony is that these signs are actually along the highway. Subliminally causing drivers to drink more.

As I am a fixer by personality, how can this be addressed? What I see is that the intent is to reduce drunk driving, and that the message has to be stated in a way that is a positive reinforcement. So how about:

"Driving sober saves lives"

or

========
DRIVE
SOBER,
SAVE
LIVES
========
|
|


This is not an order - it is a statement of observable fact. So both problems outlined in the beginning are addressed.

Your past, in your future

Things that come up after midnight...

Where does the future come from? Where does the present go?

It is pretty mainstream now to hear that only the now counts, that only this moment matters, that we can only experience the present. Which is fine, but I would like more insight into what, exactly, do I do, or do differently, knowing that *now* is all I have?

I've certainly done things in the now that I lived to regret. And I've regretted things I didn't do in the now - missed opportunities and the like. One could say I am learning to decide which of the many choices that I have in the moment I should pick to realize in that moment. I could use any number of criteria in making the choice, and it is obvious that those criteria are learned patterns from my past.

Given that those patterns are generated in the past, and used to choose what actions are taken now, then it follows that what will show up in the future is your past.

Now for some, that may be comforting.

And for others, a nightmare.

For me, it is discomforting to think that my future is going to look like my past. There are things from my past I have no desire to repeat. And many of the things I dream of have not occurred in my past, so how, then, can I generate these in my future?

The answer is to not make decisions based on my learned patterns acquired in the past.

What, then, is left to base those decisions on?

The only thing left is to base those decisions on the future.

A pretty tall order, it seems. And a little abstract. It certainly will take some training and development to practice this.

One trick I have created to put this into practice is to imagine there are actually three of me - my past self, me, and my future self. If I treat these as three distinct people, I get access to making decisions based on the future. I simply project what would make my future self thankful for the choice I make right now. And I reward my past self for the choices he made to get me the great life I have right now, and I am deeply grateful towards him.

And right now, I am going to practice this - my future self will thank me for getting some much needed rest, right now. Even if I think this post is not entirely perfect, yet.

Another F.I.N.E. entry

No, really, this is fine.

I promise.

Seriously, going fine. No problem.

Ah, well, there is that. It is not actually going as I hoped it would. Or as I tried to have it go. Or even close to being right. In fact, come to think of it, I am really Frustrated, Incomplete, Nerve-wrecked and Exhausted that after all I wrestled with this, it is exactly, and only, what it is now.

So you see, it is FINE. And I wish it were great. Or perfect. Or fantastic. Or stellar.

And I truly appreciate you inquiring, and getting, that I was talking in a code I have created to hide that a lot of the time, things are not as they seem, and worse, that I suspect that you are actually not genuinely interested in what is going on for me, over here.

So I invite you, next time you hear me say FINE, to listen and see if perhaps I was using my code, and actually might be looking for a Friend In Need of Empathy.

Whoa! A blog. With an entry! I wonder if I should write it...?

So here I sit, a blank edit window in front of me, wondering what on earth is going to occur to me to put in here. And lo, stuff just starts pouring out. Wait, that is not stuff, that is just descriptive narrative of what is going on right now.

Oh, now wait a moment, is not that what a blog is supposed to be about - a dump of what is on my mind at the moment, pressing matters that I should offload so that it doesn't way on my mind any longer? And matters that perhaps might be worth preserving for future review or expansion.

I don't know - if my current, working philosophy is correct, nothing that ever happens to us, or occurs to us, is ever lost, and it is only our limited ability to access that has us think we have forgotten. In fact, forgetting may even be a survival mechanism to prevent us from getting totally stuck and paralyzed with an overload of dealing with the totality of our experiences.

On the other hand not having accurate recall is the cause of much suffering, as we repeat behaviour that we already know is non-ideal, at best, or destructive, at worst. Such behaviour cycles are basically patterns we create from events that occur to us, and when we create them, we are not conscious of doing so.

How can one distinguish events that occur and that are remembered between useful ones that will serve a purpose in the future, and constraining ones that will block your purpose in the future? Is there even a need to carry anything forward into our future from the past?

There are basic survival lessons that seem to dictate that there is a great deal of worth in knowing how to eat, speak, create shelter and look after your wellbeing. And I wouldn't argue that these memories and patterns of behaviour should be eliminated or repressed. But how can one selectively retain those useful patterns for future use, and shred those less than useful ones. By these I mean the ones like the one where I raised my hand in kindergarten because I knew the answer, only to suffer the laughter as I delivered a clunker, and I decided that I should never again raise my hand to supply an answer. A pattern just got created that I treat just like the key survival ones, yet it turns out that this particular one is actually NOT furthering my purpose in life.

(I suppose I should declare here that my purpose is not to hide out in a closed space, and not interacting with the world. If one's purpose was that, then this is actually a critical pattern to that purpose. But I digress, well, actually, not, but the whole matter of purpose is definitely going to have to wait for another time.)

The question is, how come I treat and store this useless pattern as if it was a real, critical survival one. I mean, I answer a question wrong, and my friends laughed at me. I am still going to be fed and sheltered and clothed and I will survive. I am not actually threatened. But universally, this experience does occur as a key survival one and will be treated as seriously as run away from a barking snarling dog that is on your heals.

I do think that the key is the threat aspect. We keep patterns that help us survive threats. So to me, there was an element of a threat in that situation in kindergarten - I perceived that the children laughing at me as a threat. And in a sense it was - not a threat against my physical self, but a threat against my self image, my ego, so to speak. I perceived my stature among my peers to have been injured by this action, so I treat it with the same weight as a real survival pattern. And, for that matter, had the situation occurred were I answered the question correctly and got a gold star from the teacher and my standing among my peers was boosted, I might have developed a tendency to make sure that I had better know the answer to all questions, and become a bookworm, or know-it-all.

It may well be that we have more patterns pertaining to our ego than to actual survival.

The question arises - is the survival of my ego essential to the survival of my self? Consider that ego survival is not essential.

Anyway, that seems to be another whole can of worms, that involves peeling apart how ego and purpose interact, and I want to leave that for another time. But in essence, a purpose that feeds ego will never be fulfilling. A purpose that is ego-less will be fulfilling. Therefore, a worthy purpose is one without ego, and thus patterns that support ego-survival are actually patterns that hinder fulfilling that purpose.

It boils down to the matter of threat survival. Patterns that actually serve your physical survival should be kept. Patterns that do not discarded. Recognizing which is which requires some training and development.