Tag Archives: perspective

Sometimes a push is needed

I’m not a fan of the cold. I share this fact openly. I’ve also shared that I do a weekly walk with my buddy Dave called the Coquitlam Crunch. Well here is my text conversation with Dave last night:

I’m going to be totally honest, I was fishing for the opportunity to skip the Crunch. But here’s the thing… it was fine! I dressed warmly, we had ‘clamp-ons’ to put over our shoes to grip the snow, and I’m really glad that we did it. That was crunch number 92 since we started back in January 2021.

It’s good to have friends that don’t let us have the easy out. So often our anticipation and avoidance is actually worse than doing the thing we need to do. And when we don’t want to do it, friends can either help us step up, or they can keep us in the ‘easy zone’. Easy to do and good for us are seldom the same path.

The right friend knows when to push… and that friend is far better than the one letting you off the hook, or worse yet, talking you out of the better path.

Holding on unnecessarily

Sometimes it’s hard to let go.

Someone asks you about your day, and the first thing that goes through your mind is the thing that bothered you most.

“How was your meal?” It was really good, but…

An inconsiderate driver doesn’t let you merge and you are agitated for the next 20 minutes.

It takes practice letting go of negative thoughts. We hold on to unhelpful experiences unnecessarily. We almost cherish them. ‘Look at me. Look at how I’ve had to struggle. See what I have to put up with. Recognize my hardship.’

The real hardship is self-inflicted.

It’s not what happened to you, it’s what you hold onto. It’s also what you let go of.

What was the best part of your day? What was your favourite part of the meal? Boy, I’m glad I’m not that guy that didn’t let me merge, poor guy probably isn’t living his best life… I’m grateful that most people I deal with aren’t like him.

When you are used to holding on to the hard parts of life it takes a bit of mental gymnastics to transform your way of thinking to a more positive outlook. Accept a compliment, don’t downplay it. Find someone to thank. Choose to let go of the frustrating part of the day that you want to bring up and relive, and instead remember a shared laugh, a kindness, a success.

It’s not what happened to you, it’s what you hold onto. It’s also what you let go of.

Shades of grey

Just a simple reminder that we don’t live in a dichotomy. The world isn’t either black or white. Most ideas sit somewhere in between.

Nuances in politics, in culture, and in our communities create opportunities to learn, to explore, and to be empathetic. Not sympathetic, empathetic. I remember interviewing a friend of my aunt’s for an essay about discrimination. He was in a wheelchair and I quoted him in my paper, “The only place sympathy belongs is between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.”

We don’t learn if our ideas aren’t challenged. We don’t learn by talking but by listening. We can disagree. We can even argue and debate. We can research and support our ideas. We can walk away… and maybe we can change our minds. Maybe we can find the grey that allows us to coexist without feeling like we have to change others minds.

Nuances. Empathy. Shades of grey.

It’s going great!

Ever find yourself feeling hesitant to say things are going well… or even worse, ‘Going smoothly’? You don’t want to jinx it, to turn your luck around. So things at work and home are going good, even great, but when someone asks you how thing are going you just say ‘fine’, or respond ‘ok’.

You might share that things are good, but preface it with something challenging. Or worse yet you might add that you are busy:

“How are things going?”

“Busy, but good.”

Like Dean Shareski says, Everybody’s busy. Busy is not a badge of honour. So, why mention it? Why preface your well-being with a statement about being busy or any other statement for that matter:

“How are things going?”

  • “Great, but have you seen the price of eggs?”
  • “Great, except for my favourite hockey team lost again.”
  • “Fantastic, if only I had one more hour of sleep.

It’s not bragging to say things are good, when someone asks. Be good. Be great. Allow things to be wonderful. It’s not going to last forever, so why make it unnecessarily conditional? Enjoy the fact that sometimes things are going well without adding stipulations and parameters.

“How are things going?”

“Great! How are things with you?”

Tiny little boxes

The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the over examined life isn’t worth living either. 

Isn’t it interesting how two people can look at the same experience and see it completely differently? How is it that 2 prisoners of war with similar experiences can come out of the ordeal and one has PTSD while the other emerges strong and resilient?

I think some people let past experiences spill into their everyday life, while others compartmentalize their past into tiny little boxes. Some people tie their identity to things that make them feel like they are not in control, that things happen to them, that they must continue to endure what has already happened. The past is as in front of them as it is behind them.

Other people see past events in a metaphorical rear view window… there when you are looking at it, but the memories in the reflection seem distant. And the mirror is somewhere in your peripheral vision when you aren’t looking, and easy to forget to pay attention to, unless there is a reason to look back.

A loss of someone you love can haunt you, or it can provoke feelings of love and fond memories. A loss of limb can leave one person devastated with respect to what they can no longer do, and another person is left thankful for what they still can do. Both of these are painful things to endure. But the frame around the experiences can be very different. Two people and one experience. One frames the experiences into tiny little boxes, the other lets the past experience spill into new experiences.

Do we get to decide? Or are we wired a certain way? Maybe a bit of both.

Does our upbringing influence our ability to cope? Certainly! Trauma transcends generations, and growing up in a psychologically unhealthy environment will impact one’s ability to cope. Tiny boxes aren’t built in stressful environments, and it’s hard to ignore the rear view mirror when you are constantly reminded that objects there are much closer than they appear.

But there is always an opportunity to wrap things up in tiny little boxes… still there, still available, just not spilled out into the present when the memories don’t enrich the current moment. Because when we spend too much time looking in the rear view mirror, it’s hard to see the road ahead.

Somewhere in between

I really like this video of Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about how our brain wants to put things in dichotomous bins rather than recognizing that ideas sit on a spectrum.

It reminds me of my post, Ideas on a spectrum, that I wrote back in 2019. In this post i shared a quote…

As I said in My one ‘ism’:

“We want to live, thrive, and love in a pluralistic society. We just need to recognize that in such a society we must be tolerant and accepting of opposing views, unaccepting of hateful and hurtful acts, and smart enough to understand the difference.”

As deGrasse Tyson says, “The world is not gonna change to fit your inability to recognize how it’s actually manifesting.” That seems to be what people think should happen… the world ‘should’ change to fit ‘my beliefs’. What we really need is more tolerance and acceptance. ‘Somewhere in between’ opposing extreme views is where that tolerance can be found. It’s not hard to find, it’s already manifesting… The problem is that the people who most need to see it are blind to it.

Priorities Versus Motivation

“Get your priorities straight.”

That’s a term you’ve probably heard at some point in your life. But more than likely it means, ‘your priorities don’t match mine.’ The thing is, it’s hard for people to all have the same priorities at the same time. Sure sports team members all want to win a game, but a player in a defensive position moving too far forward trying to score could jeopardize giving up a goal.

Even when the goal is the same people in different roles need to have different priorities. It’s easy to project your priorities on other people, much harder to recognize other’s priorities when they don’t match yours. Even when the motivations are the same priorities can be different. At this point, what’s more important, the priorities or the motivation? I think more often than not people look at what they think others prioritize and lose track of what the motivation is for their actions, and that creates unnecessary conflict.

Cavity

I went to the dentist after work yesterday and got a couple small fillings. Two weird things about me and the dentist. First, I often fall asleep on the chair. With my mouth numb, I don’t feel anything, so I relax and I nod off. I work up on the chair twice snort/snoring yesterday because my breathing was a bit off with my mouth wide open.

Secondly, the numbing injection stays with me a long time. My appointment was at 5pm and my cheek and chin were still numb at 9:30. As annoying as this is, aren’t we lucky to have dentists. Imagine what it was like to have a painful bad tooth a couple hundred years ago and your only options were to pull the tooth out or suffer.

My fillings were not needed because I was in pain, but rather my dentist was preventing my teeth from getting to that point. I didn’t have to wait for the hole to reach my root and cause me agony before trying to fix it. Many people equate going to the dentist with pain. For me a trip to the dentist often involves a nap and the comfort in knowing that I would probably have experienced a lot more future pain had I not gone for my cleanings/regular checkups and taken care of my teach before they caused too much grief. Think about that the next time you are in the dentist’s chair.

‘A’ Game

I had a conversation with a colleague in another district yesterday. I was thanking him for suggesting a great book I’m listening to. We talked about the unique nature of our jobs and he said something that hit a chord with me. He said that while he likes his job as an online school principal, and how unique the challenges are, he’s tired of feeling like there are too many things that come at him at once to give his ‘A’ game all the time. He mentioned that it feels like the best he can do is a ‘C’ or a ‘C+’.

He said, “But that’s not how I like to operate. When I was a teacher I had a lot of control about what my day looked like. Sure, I couldn’t bring my ‘A’ game to every single thing I did, but most of my day was determined by me, and I could regularly bring my ‘A’ game. I can’t do that in this job even though I want to.”

I totally get it. It’s like this job is a juggling act and every time you think you can put on a good show, someone adds one more ball to the balls you are juggling. You looked and felt confident juggling 4 balls, and suddenly you are fumbling with a 5th. Just as you feel good about the 5th ball, a 6th is thrown in. You spend more time picking up the balls than you do juggling. A juggler isn’t showing you their ‘A’ game when they are picking balls up off the floor.

My colleague and I both agreed that we like our jobs, and we want to stay where we are, but lamented about our ability to have control over our days… to decide at the start of the day how many balls we were going to juggle that day. I think that’s something every principal feels and understands. We like our jobs, we just wish we could bring our ‘A’ game to it a little more often.

Strong Opinions, Weakly Held

Stanford University professor Paul Saffo is a futurist and future forecaster who coined the phrase, “Strong opinions, weakly held.”

I love this idea. One of the biggest problems today is that too many people have strong opinions that are strongly held. Well, maybe the biggest problem is that too many people have incorrect, unsubstantiated, or uninformed strong opinions that are strongly held. And these poorly formulated strong opinions are exactly the kind of thing that gets magnified on social media… they incite interaction that is more likely to become viral by attracting both opposing views, and the attention of equally like minded, strongly held opinions. Strong opinions, weakly held don’t pull as much social media attention, mainly because these aren’t opinions that people need to shout about online.

The power of strong opinions, weakly held is that ‘strong opinions’ allow you to ‘see’ and be passionate about your perspective, while being ‘loosely held’ allows you to take newly found information and adjust or change your strong opinions.

Case in point: Flat Earthers are the perfect example of strong opinions strongly held. Any evidence given to them doesn’t matter, it’s immediately cast as false or contrived by people conspiring against them. And so no matter the proof given to them, their strong opinion of a flat earth stay unchanged.

Imagine if doctors and scientists held such strong opinions? We’d probably still be blood letting with leaches to treat a fever, and not washing our hands before dealing with open wounds, surgery, and childbirth. Progress comes from being able to let go of conventions and norms that keep us stuck in our current frame of thinking.

Nothing wrong with strong opinions, they are just better off loosely held.