So on Friday, Squee and I were chatting. (This is something we do on days ending in -y, lately.) We're both fond of that sort of overthinky, deeply analytical sort of thinking I call noodling.
She's been my co-noodler for a while now. The particular thing we were noodling about that day was about my growing interest in mindful communication. When you're aware of not just what you think, but also how you think it (and share it), some interesting transformative things occur.
In discussing it, we stumbled across a sort of math proof about it, that I call The Squee Variance. It's named after her, because she's the one who thought of it.
(I can just imagine your rising sense of panic here, dear reader. Wait, overthinking and math?! Um, I've got to go organize my sock drawer! Put the socks, down, I promise this won't be awful.)
What Squee noticed was that stupid things are generally worse (lesser) than awesome ones. That's written like this:
stoooopid < AWESOME
Here's a real world example. Being stuck in traffic is not anywhere near as fun as say, talking to someone you love on the phone. (On a related note, I often talk to people I love on the phone while I am driving because DC traffic is as reliable as breathing oxygen. It's not "Will I get stuck in traffic?" so much as "how bad is it going to be today?")
That formula however, that's not the variance. She also noticed that any such inequality can be transversely parsed in a positive way. That is, if something is less than something else, that something else is also greater than the other. That's written this way:
AWESOME > stoooopid
Let's get back to that real world example. Sometimes as I'm on one of these talk-and-drive little misadventures, traffic snarls up even worse. That in turn means I get to talk to the person I love longer. More time to connect with someone is definitely greater than the hassle of being stuck in traffic.
BLAM! Gratitude math. When you do the transform, you are transformed.
So, we're bathing in our mutual noodly goodness over this, when my phone pings, and I get the Word of the Day.
The word was "eudemonic". Eudemonic means:
1. pertaining or conducive to happiness.
2. pertaining to eudemonics or eudemonism.
I immediately share this with her, and we get all twirled up in brain spaghetti over it. It's such a funny, wonderful word, because it sounds like censure, but means just the opposite.
Eudemonic conversation (which we were just having) sounds an awful lot like bitching about an argument, but actually means talk that makes you happy.
Like the one we had.
Mind blown.