Sounds like Witchcraft

Posted on November 21, 2013 by joegergen

witchcraft1a

That was the response I got when I said “You need to expand your idea of order to see the order behind the disorder.”

I was lightheartedly (I hope) responding to a thread of comments about OCD. The thread was referring to this article: “30 Infuriating Images that will Trigger your OCD.”

For the record, I am not OCD. I am whatever the opposite of that is. The originator of the thread assured me that the OCD thing was not a choice. Even though I joke I certainly do not mean to diminish the burden of being OCD.

Yet when I said “You need to expand your idea of order to see the order behind the disorder” I intended there to be a deeper truth here.

The truth I wanted to share was that order is often a matter of perspective, that the existence of order may depend on the lens through which you are viewing it. So though you may have the OCD lens in front of you, are you willing to learn to look through a different lens, if only for giggles?

You OCDers may already do it and not know it. All the examples from the article above were visual, often violating symmetry or another preconceived normal construct. I get that.

But what if it’s not visual. What if it, say, musical? Think of good, interesting music. Like all good art, what makes good music good is conflict. Art without conflict is usually pretty bland. How does that manifest itself in music? Well, a couple examples are unexpected changes in rhythm, discordance and suspensions. These would be like visual asymmetry. And there is definitely meaning in it. Possibly your OCD is not as all powerful as you think.

Perhaps I need to amend my initial comment to “You need to expand your idea of order to see the meaning in the disorder.”

So it is like witchcraft. There is meaning in witchcraft. It’s just obscured by the aura around it that people are unwilling or unable to look through.

It’s not unlike the theories of complexification, or Chaos Theory as it is more often referred to. Chaos Theory is not really about chaos. It’s about the belief that there is order behind the chaos or order in the apparent randomness.

My favorite example of this is that with the advent of computers scientists where able to iterate formulas thousands or millions of times. Especially formulas that had hitherto been considered random. And the list of results still looked random. Until someone decided to chart these results. And the results created a discernible pattern. And so while I may not be able to predict what the next number might be, I can predict that it will end up somewhere near this pattern.

Not so random after all. We just needed a different lens.

So though you may not be able to rid yourself of the discomfort caused by disorder when viewed through your lens of OCD, perhaps you can you teach yourself to look through different lenses.

Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” was perhaps aptly named.

Aliceroom31

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Someone will be Offended

Posted on November 20, 2013 by joegergen

bombe2

Take offense. Someone will take offense at what I write. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but soon.

And I’ll be honest. I won’t get it. I’ll try but I won’t understand.

What’s important to understand is that I’m a very empathetic person. Too empathetic for my own good, really. I can readily (though not always) identify with a person’s emotional state. Now, I don’t always condone the emotion I’m empathizing with but I can usually comprehend why it is occurring.

But if you’re offended, you’re out of luck. My intention is not to be cold or harsh. I want to empathize with this. But I can’t. I didn’t even know I couldn’t until today.

I was doing a writing exercise for a project I am working on. Some free writing. Take a word and just riff on it. I had a list of emotions I wanted to practice verbalizing. I grabbed the first one: abandonment. I went on for a page. I could have gone longer but I think I had achieved what I wanted.

I grabbed the next word on the list of emotions: offended. Dead air. Radio silence. Whatever you want to call it. I had nothing.

I could think of topics people might find offensive. I could not, however, conjure a feeling of being offended. I could not imagine what that was supposed to feel like. I did not know.

I could be angry. Maybe insulted. But not offended. Why not? Why can’t I muster that feeling?

I got thinking that maybe it’s because being offended is a choice. Then I thought maybe all emotions fall into this category. That was kind of an eye opener. How much do we get to choose how we emotionally react to the world around us? But that’s another subject altogether.

Then I thought choice is often a matter of habit. We make choices because of engrained habits even though we often don’t know we’re doing it. Habits are powerful.

I made a conscious decision years ago not to be offended by other people behaviors. I wasn’t going to allow others’ behaviors make me feel negative. I would not let them have control over me. So when it came to offense I did that. And it became a habit. And as the habit became stronger the knowledge of what the emotion of being offended was just faded away.

So, I don’t know what offended is any more. So I can’t empathize with you when you are feeling offended. I feel bad about that but it can’t be helped.

Now for good or bad I haven’t exhibited that kind of habit forming control over other emotions. So I’m not a flat-liner yet and you can still expect some empathy form me.

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You’re an Idiot!

Posted on November 18, 2013 by joegergen

truthserum1

Or like trying to bring someone around to your way of thinking by calling them an idiot? Usually an argument epic fail.

I suppose truth is best. Talking around the subject often gets you nowhere. Subtlety is often lost on the convoluted and subjective mind, mine included. We want to just say it. And that’s what gets us in trouble.

Truth is after all a rather fungible concept. It’s different for everyone. My truth is not your truth: it’s all mixed up with emotions and history and context. Our truths are like parallel universes: similar but not the same. That’s why dealing with the truth is so intriguing, and so volatile.

Not that you shouldn’t always seek the truth or use the truth to make things better as long as we remember they are not absolute.

We all want to be truth dealers. But I think if you want to be a good truth dealer you need to work on a few key things.

You need to understand there are lots of parts to any given truth, even more parts than you’re aware of. So knowing you don’t and can’t have all the parts of a given truth allows you more plasticity in your thinking.

You must acknowledge and accept that your target doesn’t have the same list of truth parts that you do. Taking inventory of this different truth parts allows you to see commonalities in your distinct truths. Common parts are a much better place to start dialog than the conflicting pieces are.

Don’t confuse facts with truth. Just like the truth you’ll never have all the facts. And we all interpret facts differently. You have to work with the knowledge you have in the moment. You can do nothing else. But knowing a fact could be hiding out there that derails your whole argument may make you more open. As Gandalf would say “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”

And shoving “irrefutable facts” in someone’s face may be helpful in a court of law. Life is not a court of law. Using the tactics of a lawyer to address another outside of a courtroom has always baffled me. Everyone hates technicality mongering lawyers. It’s a really good way to put someone of the defensive. How not to win someone over: make them defensive. Check.

Lastly, taking the biggest piece of truth and bashing someone on the head with it rarely works as the first negotiating step, however clear and obvious it is. Yes, you need to be open and blunt sometimes, but starting with effects instead of causes can be a much better path toward enlightenment. Unless you’re dealing with a sociopath, most people will respond to an increased awareness of the effects of their behavior. Start small and work backwards.

And if you don’t agree with this, you’re an idiot.

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Tears of a Turkey

Posted on November 14, 2013 by joegergen

turkey_toy1

The Turkey and the last straw.

Oh, Thanksgiving, I knew thee well. On the front side is the ever increasing recovery time from the over-hyped and over-worked orgy known as Halloween. On the back side is a fat man in a red suit sticking his belly further and further in your front door.

Well, the fat man has finally pushed his way into the house. There he is. He will not be ignored. The Holiday Shopping Season is in the turkey’s house.

I could fake surprise. It would be a weak ruse to what seems to be the inevitable.

So while I can’t fake surprise, I do not want it to be inevitable. I want to fight back. To just say enough is enough.

I usually try to influence these things by the choices I have power over. The problem is I already made the choice long ago not to support the Holiday Shopping Season. I don’t have another vote. Now I know you have a vote and certainly hope you join me.

But it’s going to take a larger societal shift to turn this into something else. Yes, we are a consumer society. What have we become when even our government advocates consumer spending in the Holiday Shopping Season to save our economy over and over again? We have become shallow. I know, it’s a hard truth for us to swallow.

I was at Home Depot on October 18th and they had holiday decorations out and holiday music playing. Now I don’t go to malls and such but if this is any indication of what happens there, I am just horrified at the state of affairs. Giving benefit of doubt and presume that the real Holiday Shopping Season starts right after Halloween that means that sixteen percent of each year is spent focused on the spending frenzy of the Holiday Shopping Season. Yikes!

Do people even know why they are buying, buying, buying anymore? I don’t think so.

I know this isn’t a news flash.  Hell, Charlie Brown and Linus lamented this back in 1965. They had no idea, did they?

So how do we stop this frenzy? I’m going back to my old standby. Change the world one choice, one interaction at a time.

First: Just say no. Do not join the mobbed-up frenzy. A little commitment and discipline. Just do it.

Second: Tell people not to buy you anything. This is hard. People think they’re expressing some emotion for you when they buy you stuff. But nobody needs more stuff. If they really need to buy and give, tell them to give it to charity.

Third: Say no to buying stuff throughout the year. Make it a habit. Make it you. Lead by example.

Holiday Shopping Season. You shall not pass!

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Finding Your Gut..Instinct

Posted on November 12, 2013 by joegergen

big-bellied-man1

Really, you’re just figuring this out now, I thought as I read an article in the Washington Post called “Too Much of Too Little.”

The article focuses on the highly processed and low nutrition diet often consumed by those on food stamps and how this contributes to obesity. I’m glad the topic is getting attention and I hope they make strides in the area.

But my main reaction was still “you’re just getting this now. Really?” I could have told you this years ago.  Many people could have told you this years ago.

Did we really need statistics and studies to tell us this? Wouldn’t your basic gut instinct tell you this? Even if I couldn’t have said obesity was an issue, I could have pointed to malnutrition or diabetes or lowered immune systems or host of other health problems stemming from this behavior.

Are we so afraid to trust our gut instincts in today’s world that we can’t see things for what they are without a multiyear study from the FDA or HHS or Harvard or whoever studies these things? Can we not go with our gut instincts because we’re afraid we’ll be sued for not having all the facts available (and as if that really ever happens anyway as we have a tendency to confuse facts with reality) when we make a choice?

Perhaps we don’t use our gut instincts because their capacity has been diminished. Atrophied for lack of use. Shelved, shunned and shamed by society for not being scientific enough. Undernourished by an education system more interested in teaching you to take tests than to understand.

I don’t know. I know I’d be horrible at my job and life if I didn’t use intuition, a little bit of the old ultra-gut instinct. I told someone once that the day I have to rely on data to understand a situation is the day I fail. Fortunately that hasn’t happened yet. Intuition often is all I have to add to the mix. And I like it that way.

I want you to use your intuition. I want you to trust yourself. Will you be wrong sometimes? Certainly. Will you be wrong any more often than if you relied on facts and figures? I doubt it, and you’ll get there much faster.

As always there are tons of resources on how to follow your intuition out on the Web. Trust me.

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Emotion Comotion

Posted on November 11, 2013 by joegergen

love1

 

How do I love you, let me count the ways.

I ran across a list of emotions the other day. There were approximately 260 words on the list.

I forgot how many different ways I could feel. I always get stuck on the”7” basic emotions used in psychology: anger, fear, disgust, contempt, joy, sadness and surprise. But wow, you can feel a lot of different ways.

I guess we just have too much emotion to be contained by seven words. Joy lacks the needed emphasis to tell you how awesome I am feeling. There’s a lot of nuance to it, isn’t there?

I looked over the list. Here’s a  chunk of the list:

Bliss, blue, boastful, bored, breathless, bubbly, calamitous, calm, camaraderie, cautious, cheerful, cocky, cold, collected.

Not sure how “scientific” the list is but I got to thinking if the list might trend in some way. So I divided them up into positive, negative and neutral in some kind of a Rorschachian method.

I didn’t know what I was looking for. For a while I thought I could see a pattern that the letter “R” was being more associated with negative emotions. That didn’t really prove out but it got me to notice something else.

The thing I did notice is that there seemed to be about 50% more words for negative emotions than for positive. (The neutral were about half the positive). Well, just like in our seven basic emotions from above, we seem more adept or interested or able to name negative emotions. That got me to thinking about communication, then about words, then about poetry.

There is a lot of poetry in the world. I certainly haven’t read that much of it. But I think a lot of it has themes in line with our seven basic emotions (if we exclude the large volumes associated with death). And so much of the poetry I have read I would call positive, even when dealing with sad and horrible things. Which I would say is interesting in that there seem to be (based on my scientific methods above) so many more negative words and thus emotions available to wax poetic about.

Is that perhaps because poetry is like therapy? You don’t go to therapy to be less happy or content. You go to feel better, to get better. Which makes sense to me and I can say that I am glad there is not a lot of hate and anger mongering poetry. Poetry appears to be good for the soul.

So next time you are having a rough day, stop and write a line poetry, just one line. It’s like free therapy.  And Easy.  No one will judge (unless you do).

Here, I’ll start. Here’s a line off the cuff to make me feel better.

“In the time of need I asked for bread when I needed water, for wine when I needed love.”

I feel better already.

Now you try it.  It might remind you of all the wonderful emotions you can feel if you just paused and enjoyed them.

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Joe vs. the Phoenix

Posted on November 8, 2013 by joegergen

flame2a

Out of the ashes. That’s where the phoenix rises from.

I’ve always loved the imagery and idea of the flaming phoenix rising from the ashes. Reborn to take on the world anew.

And yet I never really focused on the ashes part. Just the romantic return from ruin. Perhaps a natural inclination to shy away from dwelling on the struggle, the conflict, the pain associated with the ashes.

Yet I have often envisioned myself rising from the ashes within my own life. When I have made it through a difficult period. I think about the rising, never the burning. And not like I am always rising. Lots of burning has occurred.

So what about this whole burning up into ashes thing? Why am I not giving it its due? It’s an important part of the process. One doesn’t happen without the other.

Obviously there is some destruction occurring with this burn up. That sounds difficult and maybe painful, I suppose. So maybe I’m blocking. Just ignore all that bad stuff. Though it seems unlikely someone would get to the rising part with that behavior.

Or maybe there have been enough of these burning and flaming rebirth cycles that they have just become normal. Maybe even necessary. A need to reinvent myself meant a need to burn the old me down and start over.

So maybe I don’t focus on the burning part because I’m the one who keeps starting the fires. Seems reasonable. I might start to question my own motives otherwise.

I think maybe it’s as Lawrence of Arabia said in the movie after extinguishing a match between his fingers and an officer asking him what the trick is: The trick is not minding that it hurts.

Perhaps that simple yet not so simple thought tells it all. It’s part of the process. Or part of the attitude. If we view the re-invention negatively, it will be negative. If we see it as struggle, it will be hard. But the working for it is what makes it worthwhile. The working for the reward is what makes it so sweet. View the struggle as value unto itself.

I end with one of my favorite Shakespeare lines: Nothing is good or bad but our thinking makes it so. Well, make it so.

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A Little Focus, Please

Posted on November 6, 2013 by joegergen

focus

 

Multitasking should be a swear word. Or at least preceded by a swear word whenever it is used. Effing multitasking.

My favorite thing about multitasking is that it has become a desired strength or skill, especially on the job but also in our personal lives.

Though I think what people really mean when they say multitasking (performing multiple things at the same time) is what I like to call multifracturing: performing multiple tasks in quick succession in a linear fashion, jumping quickly from task to task.

Management actually sets up environments where this multifracturing is the norm. And when the norm doesn’t produce the desired level of multifracturing, they introduce artificial stress into the environment to make sure it happens. Drop that, pick up this, stop this, start that, emergency here, emergency there. Talk about self-inflicted stress.

If you went to your psychologist and described this behavior they would diagnose you with ADHD and prescribe you drugs. How scary is that? Management actually induces ADHD on you and thinks it’s a good thing.

I know people who wear this mutifracturing as a badge of honor, probably because management rewards them for it. But there is no honor on inflicting stress and thus damage upon yourself, however subtle it may be.

Of course the behavior carries over into our personal lives. And technology is here to aid you on not focusing on any one thing too long. You know what I’m talking about. It’s almost as if we have a phobia of focusing. A fear of being alone with our activity or thoughts.

It’s not surprising that there is a new trend on the virtue of mindfulness (I guess we were afraid to call it being focused). Meditation and mind relaxation are great things. I totally recommend them in some fashion. They can help put you in control of your mind, reduce stress, increase productivity and elevate contentedness. There are lot of good resources out there on this.

But is some mediation or mindfulness in these small doses enough when you spend the rest of your day intentionally being non-focused (smart phones obsession) or having management force multifracturing on you? It’s like drinking a protein shake once a week for its health benefits and then eating lunch at McDonalds the rest of the week.

Want to reduce the self-inflicted or management inflicted ADHD? Change the environment, the parameters, the context. Remove as much multifracturing as possible. It’s like changing or creating a new habit. You have to work at it.

There are lots of good resources on changing habits.

One good one is The Power of Habit. http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Habit-What-Business/dp/1400069289/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1383757915&sr=8-1&keywords=power+of+habit

Just combine two cups of habit change with a few dashes of mindfulness and you are on your way.

 

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A Microwave Life

Posted on November 4, 2013 by joegergen

coffeemug2

The microwave is dead. Or it’s “Mostly Dead” as Miracle Max might say.

My cold coffee used to take a minute to make nice and toasty. Now it takes three minutes to make it lukewarm. At this point I suspect blowing on it with my hot, steamy breath might heat it up faster.

Not that two extra minutes is some large inconvenience in the grand scheme of things unless of course the ticking bomb is going to go off in 45 seconds and your trying to MacGyver it with some melted bubblegum that is taking too long to heat, in which case you have now just MacGrubered it.

It’s kind of about expectations. I’ve come to expect the coffee to be hot after one minute. But it’s really about the way I react when expectations aren’t met. Am I negative about it? Probably. Not like I’m melting down but more like experiencing annoyance. I suppose that for more serious lapses in expectations a meltdown might occur. How do you react?

Maybe that letdown is unavoidable. I mean we’re not stupid. We know the expectation has not been met. We set it. And I don’t mean like situations where you have set really high, unrealistic expectations. But just expectations based on past performance.

The microwave has heated the coffee in a minute a thousand times and I can reasonable expect it will do so again. In fact this understanding of expectations alerts us to when something is wrong. It’s a good and useful thing. Such as setting expectations for children and workers and society. I suspect we need some of that.

How often though do we place expectations unnecessarily? On things and people? Why have we become so demanding of actions outside of ourselves? Is it that ever present need to control? I can set expectation to control your behavior. So I think so.

It’s everywhere. Look at how often we place expectations on things we don’t remotely understand well enough to do so. Or that it’s none of our business to do so? And it’s even more worrisome because we place these expectations universally with no understanding of context.

And yet we are repeatedly and constantly annoyed with unmet expectations. With each failure comes annoyance or worse. And with each of those you introduce unnecessary negativity into your life, over and over again. And you don’t even know it.

Is it time to remove the clutter of too many expectations from your life?

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Talking About Meh Generation

Posted on October 28, 2013 by joegergen

Meh

 

Nothing impresses us anymore. We’re all Meh this and Meh that.

In my efforts to understand Meh, I reached for the Google. I found two main definitions I could relate to (now it being the Google and all I am sure there are many more conflicting definitions, but this is what we got).

Meh:

  • exclamation: expressing a lack of interest or enthusiasm
  • adjective: uninspiring; unexceptional

One definition places it as an attitude coming from the user about something. The other places the quality of Mehness in the object. To me they are really different meanings that seem similar.

I think it’s a cheap shot to place Mehness madness at the foot of the object. It’s not the generator of the response. As Hamlet likes to say, nothing is good or bad but our thinking makes it so. So it’s us.

And that worries me: expressing a lack of enthusiasm. That can’t be good. I feel I’m surrounded by Meh: a world of Mehers.

We have such a pervasive attitude of Mehness that in order to get our attention makers of almost everything resort to more and more obnoxiousness. Subtlety be damned. If I can’t override your Mehness in the first couple minutes, I’ve lost you. Our propensity for Mehness just bowls everything thing over. We’re on Meh autopilot. Everything is Meh, no reason to stop here. It’s all Meh.

Mehness is like a weed and it’s overgrown the roses on the side of the road we are supposed to stop and smell.

But everything isn’t Meh. The world is filled with intricacies and elaborate delicacies that deserve a little time and are certainly not Meh. True wonders are out there if savored.

We have only ourselves to blame for extreme everything. Things can’t survive if we don’t give our passion to them.

My God, have the balls to care for something. Let people know. Give obnoxious extremism a run for its money.

Are we afraid to show passion for something? I thought the Nerd Revolution (you know, the revolution where it was OK to be really into obscure nerdy things without being mocked) might have given Meh a run for its money.

Fight the Meh Borg. Show passion for something today. It’s worth it. Trust me.

 

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