#dailyThink Dare to Not Compare

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine this morning about therapy. 

They LOVE it. Every time they go, it's like a mental spring cleaning. Doors and windows thrown WIDE OPEN.  All sorts of thinky exploration and investigation.  

Their partner on the other hand, doesn't feel the same way. They see a different therapist, for different issues.   They loathe it. Each week, going to the session is an effort fraught with misery. 

My friend feels some guilt over this. I told them, "It's not bad that you enjoy something which your partner dreads.  Your positive experience does not negate or diminish the difficulty which they experience."

I finished by adding, "Comparison is nobody's friend."

That got me thinking. What do we gain when we resolve NOT to compare ourselves to others? 

What is the inherent experience of comparing ourselves only to ourselves like?

For me, it means I can embrace gradual change. It's never too late to get a new skill, get in better shape, write a new book, make some sweeping life changes.  

My life is a race, but only with myself.  It's not the finish line that matters.  

One day my race will be run. I'll do what countless multitudes have done before me, and will do after me: 

I'll die.  

But that doesn't matter. It's not the end of the story that matters to me. It's all the chapters before it.  

#dailyThink An allowable silence

Sometimes, people annoy me. 

This is perfectly normal.  I'm no saint. I have my pain points like anyone else.

One of these is passive aggressive whining, and envy.  I see a LOT of this sort of thing from other kinky folks.  

They want a partner, or a munch nearby, or the world to somehow be different, or to have some material thing without which their life is incomplete. 

There's this silent, unspoken, implication which follows these sorts of complaints, "Could someone out there get/do/change this for me?"

Ugh.  Yuck. 

This sort of thinking makes my skin crawl, for a number of reasons.  These include:

• It objectifies everyone involved.  

• They're inherently expectation based.

• They're disempowering of the person saying and thinking them. 

These statements have something else in common, too.  

They are NOT MY PROBLEM.   

Mostly. 

Why mostly? Because I'm responsible for my own feelings. The very same annoyance I feel when I see this sort of thinking is as much MY OWN problem as the thinking is the problem of the person doing the thinking!  

It's as if when I get annoyed, I'm saying, "I'd be so much happier if person x wasn't such a self-centered, helpless idiot." 

Wow.  What a bunch of arrogant, self-centered thinking on my part.  Who am I to dictate the perfect state of the world and the people in it?  

I'm nobody.   The universe is perfect just as it is, and moreover is in a state of constant change.  If I can stop my own crybaby whining, I can witness some of those changes, enjoy them, work with them. 

That's when I know what I have to do.  

For/about the person who has annoyed me and not asked for my help, I must do Nothing.  (Which is vastly different than not doing anything.) 

For myself, I must allow that this situation which annoys me is.  Then, with all the self-love I can muster, I have to shut the hell up, and move on.   

The Tao Te Ching advises this very strategy.  

2

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.

Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn't possess,
acts but doesn't expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.

It's not my place to dictate to anyone else how the universe or any part of it should be, beyond the changes I myself can make in it.  That's the very essence of one of the three jewels of the Tao, humility.  

The Chinese phrase for it is "bugan wei tianxia xian", literally, "dare to not be first in the world."

Knowing that, what I will often do is mute the person in question, for a day, sometimes a week. Because I don't need to tortute myself, right? 

Then, as now, I get on with the shutting up.  

Daily Think: My favorite zen story, as told by my favorite philosopher

I love Alan Watts.

He was a genius.  In the video below he tells, in his pithy, funny, inimitable style, my all time favorite zen story, The Farmer and His Horse.

Watch it.  I bet you'll be glad you did.  I was.

#dailyThink: difficult isn't the same as complex

Language is a slippery thing.

I've noticed that the works of eastern philosophers, or even my own attempts to adapt their strategies in my life have a way of ticking people the fuck off. 

At times, even as I was struggling to understand and practice these concepts, they ticked me off!  

Just a few minutes ago I had a glorious, ecstatic, annoying, nauseating epiphany as to why this might be.  

I think that the subtle nuances of the English language often conflate the ideas of simplicity and difficulty. That is, that implying something has few steps, also implies that those steps are easy, quick, trivial, or not challenging. 

That's just not always the case. 

Here's my relevant example: 

Late last week I faced some challenges at work and had a conversation with a coworker that left a bad taste in my mouth.  I left the office feeling like I didn't have the skills I need, and that I wasn't bringing my A Game in how I was going about getting them.  

The whole weekend every time I thought about it, it made my heart heavy, and my stomach sink. I spent a good deal of time obsessed with career choices I had made 5 and 10 years ago, and regretting them. Then to add to that lovely salad of regret and misery, I topped it off with a dressing of fears about losing my job, not being able to hold my own next to younger, cheaper folks, and doubt that I would or even could ever get over this technical backlog.  

I ate that fucking salad all weekend. Right up until I got into work today. 

Fun, right?  Not really. 

So here's the thing about that whole salad-making-and-eating experience.

It was COMPLEX.  It involved past regrets, dozens of memories, all sorts of imagined fears, and time to mix them together and force feed them to myself. 

Yet at the same time it was EASY.  All I had to do was trip on myself, fall down a rabbit hole of unhealthy thinking, and let the process just march along unchecked.  It wasn't difficult. 

Today when I got into the office, I tried something different. I sat down and spent time analyzing some code I need to understand.  Some of it clicked for me right away, but the rest involved me painstakingly looking stuff up, writing things down, and working out how the pieces click together.

I feel so much better now.  The process of teaching myself this code was SIMPLE, yet also VERY HARD.  It went like this, kind of: 

- read the code

- write it down as simple pseudocode when I understood it

- when I come to something I don't understand, stop, look it up in the documentation, ask a coworker, or try to reason it out for myself.  

- STAY CALM

- Keep going

When I look back at this process, it's not rocket science.   It's simple.  The thing is something being simple doesn't mean doing it doesn't come without opportunity cost, dedication, a paradigm shift, and most importantly EFFORT OVER TIME.

That's an atypical way of looking at challenging things, and your relationship to them. I can see why it really pisses people off.  

Daily Think: minimizing suffering

A big thing for me is my fairly constant drive to do as little harm as I can to other people. 

I recognise that pain and joy are both transient, and constant. They're a part of being alive.  

At some point, I'm bound to make someone else angry, frustrated, frightened, disappointed, or some other negative feeling. That's just human. 

Heck, I'm bound to do all those things to MYSELF, sometimes.  

So, I'm mindful. I'm careful and focused. Sometimes.

Some of the ways I consciously, directly try to minimize suffering include: 

- being soft spoken, and not raising my voice.  

- trying to listen to what others are saying, fully listen, without preparing a response ahead of time, adversarially. (Hard!) 

- responding to others when they reach out to me in need for solace and comfort.  

Do you try to minimize suffering too? Please leave me a comment about it, I'm curious to hear some of the conscious ways you do that.