Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Things I am grateful for

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When Darin bought his car, 16 or whatever years ago, one of the things the dealer threw in with the package was training at driving school in order to become a better driver. It was a great class, and if I could remember the name of it, I’d include a link. I think we can all use refresher courses on how to be a better driver.

One of the important soundbites I took away from that day was to forget the old mantra, “Look where you’re going.” That’s stupid. That’s how people drive off of cliffs. They see the cliff, they drive off of it. No, the thing they said was “Look where you want to go.” If you want to stay on the road, focus on the road. After you’ve driven for a while, you don’t have to instruct your hands on how to turn the wheel (remember how tiring that part of driving was?) and you’ve got a relationship with your feet on how heavy to ride the pedals. No, your job is to point the car correctly. Your autonomic functioning takes over after that.

Doing those “gratitude journals” and stuff sounded so hokey to me when I first heard of them. Let me rephrase: I absolutely love hokey stuff, but not when it substitutes for, y’know, actual work. So often things like gratitude journals are described as being modern versions of magic spells: do this and this and this, and you get X, Y, and Z in return. Suh-weet deal.

But, when I thought about it, I decided that a gratitude journal wasn’t supposed to take the place of anything else. Focusing on things I was grateful for — whether inside or outside of myself — is always good. I force myself to look at the good things in life, because like so many other people if I don’t work hard at it, I ruminate over the bad things that happen.

You know, the old hokey saying “Energy flows where attention goes.”

Note the similarity there to “Look where you want to go.”

I’ve mentioned in an entry a while back that I like the Happy Tapper’s Gratitude Journal for iPhone app. (There’s an iPad version too.) These apps are good-looking, they’re cute, they’re fun. They make it Not Hard to write down your 5 things every day.

After a while of doing this, your brain gets very good at picking out the good things about the day. You focus not on what makes you upset or angry, but what makes you happy, what gives you energy or peace or joy.

And doing this is especially good during the times you’re angry and you want to knock someone’s block off.

Which happens to be where I am right now. Seriously. I’ve been seriously rethinking my values and what kind of person I want to be, because someone I know seems to have done something bad to me, and I’m wondering how to respond.

While I was thinking about this situation, I saw the following quote (while I’m putting up quotes and epigrams) from Abraham Lincoln: “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

I don’t want to be that person.

I want to be the kind of person who looks forward, who doesn’t let the turkeys get her down, and who doesn’t use her blog to really hurt someone back. Because I know full well that I could. I have a very high Google ranking. I could really do some damage, simply by putting something here, even if no one ever reads it.

It was kind of scary to realize that I was the kind of person who’d ever consider doing that.

I’m not going to focus on bad things. I’m going to go find ten things in my life today that I’m grateful for, that make me happy, that make me feel alive, and reset my brain.

The cool thing is, I can even think of one thing I’m grateful about in regards to this situation (that I’m being deliberately oblique about), and I’m not being snarky at all. You really can retrain your brain.

 

The Bank of Time

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It happens for everyone at a different time and for different reasons, but I believe this does happen to everyone.

One day, you suddenly realize you are running out of time.

Another Saturday has gone by. Another birthday (your own or your kid’s) is coming around. You realize you’ve lived more than half your life, because you double your age and you realize it’s unlikely you’re going to live to see 2x. If you’re a woman, you reach the age where people — people under 30, especially — no longer see you standing there, their eyes go straight past you like you’re a ghost. You start making a list of all the things you’d like to do once in your life and you see in black and white you’re unlikely to get all of them done. If you want to get any of them done, you’d better get cracking.

That’s a great exercise, by the way: make a list of 100 things you want to do at some point in your life. “Oh, that’s easy,” you say. “I can come up with two thousand things I want to do.” I recommend doing this exercise anyhow. The first 20 come pretty easily. Then you have to start thinking about it. One by one, you begin to remember what it was you wanted to do, what secret dreams you had, what things you wanted to experience before you died.

Recently someone I know got sick. First there was one health problem, and that exposed another health problem, which exposed three more… The last time I saw this person, I realized there aren’t going to be that many more times I see them. It’s eye-opening, watching someone go through this process. What’s worse is, they keep talking about the stuff they’re going to do, and that’s all it’s ever been: talk. You can’t put stuff off to the future indefinitely, and one day you are going to run out of road.

You don’t have time.

Right now I have 30 minutes before my next appointment of the day. What can I do in 30 minutes? I ask myself. I’ve gotten into the unfortunate habit of saying, “I must have at least an hour to write!” So I have the mental mindset I can’t get anything done in only 30 minutes.

Except I am working on changing this mindset, because there are things I want to do, big and small, and I need to use what I’ve got to accomplish them. I can get a lot done in 30 minutes, even if it’s just writing today’s post. Or I could read some more of my current book. Or I can work on my list of things I want to do in my life, carve out just a little tiny bit of what I want to do. I no longer have the time to waste.

The universe’s testing service

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If there’s a psychological term for this phenomenon, I’d love to know what it is. Everyone knows what I’m talking about when I mention it, like it’s some great metaphysical truism. I can’t come up with the proper cliche for “When you want to do something, obstacles jump into your way to test your commitment” but I know there is one. It’s not quite When it rains, it pours, because that’s just about getting more of the same (usually bad). There’s a damn cliche for everything — help me out here, people.

This week I decided to get serious about large chunks of time for my writing. I have several projects I want to finish, I have new ones I want to start. I have a list, and I am honestly interested in doing everything on the list. It is not a crazy amount of work, although it demands dedication and performance and a lack of wasting time on the Internet. I am not aimless. I am very focused.

Of course suddenly there are several thousand non-writing things that must be handled. That’s not an exaggeration: yes, they must be done and generally I am the one to do them because I am the one with a day that is easy to arrange. Simon needed to see an eye doctor ASAP. I had to drop off some stuff for the school play (which meant going to the market, then swinging by school, getting everything in there…). More Webelos stuff got scheduled we hadn’t been expecting (or should have been expecting and simply didn’t). The First Lego League Championship had been scheduled for the 14th and got unexpectedly rescheduled, so the kids’ Lego teams had to reschedule meetings. And so on.

I asked on Twitter/Facebook, “This week I’m serious about making time for my writing. The universe responds with a million appts for me to take care. What’s that about?” And one of my cohorts from USC responded, “Confirmation of commitment..are you sure that’s what you want to do.” And that’s an explanation I’ve heard from a couple of people. Like it’s an event that everyone’s experienced and is probably reproducible in a lab: You’ve mentally committed to work on your own stuff…so the universe steps up with a series of tests to make sure that you really mean what you say. Not so much mental resistance as the physical, external, in-your-face kind.

Only…I can’t really envision the Universe saying, “Hmmm…yeah, that chick over there. Too many New Year’s resolutions. I don’t buy her commitment. Throw some obstacles in her way, okay?” And the Universe’s team of elves get cracking on the problem. Actually, now that I’ve phrased it that way I totally envision the Universe and some elves, but I’m not sure it helps me understand what’s going on here to personify it this way.

This has not stopped me from phrasing my response politely as, “I will of course do all of these tasks that absolutely need to be done, and then I will get back to what I was doing before, and you will give me more time, Universe, ‘kay? Thanks.”