-image-I Tell You…

October 25, 2007 | Get Inspired!, A Pick Me Up

Nothing drives me crazy like driving does.

No, wait, I should amend that; nothing drives me crazy like inconsiderateness does. It just so happens that nothing reveals people’s inconsiderateness and selfishness like driving does (except of course shopping, which is really a lot like driving - carts and aisle and all that - anyway).

Really. I become a different person when I drive. Not because I’m a bad driver, but merely out of sheer frustration at the rudeness that happens around (and to) me.

I ask you, is it really worth your life and mine for you to get thirty seconds ahead of me? Which is even more frustrating when you are just planning on turning at the next freaking corner anyway!

Oh, oh, and even more than I dislike people who jump stop signs, or pull over to let people out in the right turning lane of a primary (i.e. very busy) intersection, even more than the people who tailgate and scream at you, I truly loathe the people who are breaking the law and then have the nerve to be mad at me because (while following the rules of the road) I got in their way and held them up.

Really. If you are driving in the parking spots, and I’m driving in the road you have to wait for me because, frankly, I’m the only one actually following the rules. So, no, I won’t stop driving straight so you can cut in front of me and not have to wait ten seconds. Not even if you wouldn’t have had to wait if you had taken the road instead of the parking spots.

Can you see what this does to me?

The Kung Fu Master has told me he doesn’t want me swearing at people when I’m driving with him; it’s not polite and swearing is (apparently) never appropriate. That’s how bad I am.

I’m so bad that I’ve caught myself looking for, and getting frustrated by, other people’s choices, even when they don’t affect me. Case in point, last night I stopped at Starbucks while waiting for the Master to get out of Kung Fu class (normally I’d wait at home but we are having plumbing issues and I had time to kill). Lo and behold, there’s a shiny, silver Audi parked at the curb.

I don’t mean stopped while they wait for someone to come out (which is truly annoying, but somewhat understandable); no, I mean parked right in the lane (where are the parking police, I ask you!). I assumed it was someone in getting a drink, but when I left I saw the boys (20 somethings) who’d been on the patio for the last hour start to pile into it.

Nope, not in a hurry getting a drink, they just couldn’t be bothered parking in any of the three parking spots I could readily see within 15 feet of their car. It makes me so frustrated I could scream.

This is a problem; because I’ve noticed myself lately slipping into some of the same driving habits that make me frustrated in the first place. Like, when I’m in a lane that doesn’t end and a guy pulls up next to me in a lane that ends past the intersection, I find myself thinking, “Who does he think he is. He’s not going to get ahead by forcing me to slow down?”

So of course, I go fast enough so that he is the one who has to wait, not me. Which is one of the things I hate when I accidentally get caught in an ending lane; and how do I know he didn’t know that lane would end till he was stuck there anyway?

So, I’ve been thinking about this. Really, I need to find a way to not letting driving get me so frustrated. After all, me getting all upset and worked up isn’t decreasing the instances of inconsiderateness happening on the road, so where’s the value in it? And it’s not like getting frustrated with the world around me is doing me any good.

I’ve been thinking about this for the last few days (as I’ve been driving back and forth on various errands), and yesterday I coincidentally (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) came across this quote in a book I’m reading :

When we are driving, we tend to think of arriving and we sacrifice the journey for the sake of the arrival. But life is to be found in the present moment, not the future… It’s useless to fight. If you sit back and smile to yourself, you will enjoy the present moment and make everyone in the car happy.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

Which I think is a lesson that was meant just for me at this moment.

My own conclusion was that I need to combat not only my own tendency to get frustrated and aggresive (driving is not, after all, an act of war), but the very thing about driving that is getting me upset in the first place: inconsiderateness and selfishness.

This little helpful voice that lives in my head (God, my conscience, whatever you like to call it) - by the way, I’m starting to understand where the stereotypical image of the devil and the angel on your shoulder comes from, but that’s neither here nor there - suggested that maybe I should start doing conscious acts of considerateness while driving.

That is to say, slow down and let the person in - even if it’s my right of way; help someone who’s stuck get past the traffic; let someone cross in front of me.

I should combat the overall feeling on the road of getting everything that’s ours and not letting other people push in on my space, by not just following the rules of the road, but by even going above and beyond with my space and my right of way. Hey, if it doesn’t change the world (or the general atmosphere on the road), it will at least change the mood in my car. Which is definitely a good thing.

October 20, 2007 | Mentor Meditations

I’m reading a book called Women In Overdrive (Isaacs), I thought this excerpt from it was very synchronistic with my current thoughts:

In my twenties I worked in a high-stress publishing job in Manhattan. I logged long hours, went to the gym after work, and then met friends for cocktails and late-night dinners. I didn’t realize how far out of balance my life had become until I started having panic attacks…

By age twenty-four I had experienced an exhaustion and burnout that women everywhere feel at various points in their lives… After some serious soul-searching, I realized I wanted to veer off the path I found myself on. I looked to my superiors - editors who still worked long hours and lived unbalanced lives thirty years after starting their careers. I didn’t want my life to become a series of promotions that felt meaningless and empty; I yearned for a richness and vibrancy that I couldn’t foresee myself experiencing in my current state.
– Nora Isaacs, emphasis mine

It’s amusing that last weekend I watched The Devil Wears Prada which is about doing the exact same thing as Isaacs is saying in this quote: looking at the people above you and realizing your actions today are leading you in the same direction. Synchronicity and all that. Maybe it’s synchronistic for you too?

-image-Who is That Woman?

October 19, 2007 | A Pick Me Up

I have a terrible memory for names. I can remember faces, even how people talk and how they move, but for the life of me I can’t seem to remember names.

For example, once when I was about 12 I was in the mall with my friend and this very good-looking older man (i.e. 18) started talking to me. I knew that I knew him. Not only that, I knew that it was expected that I would know him, that to hint at forgetting his name would be a very big insult.

So, here I am having this long conversation, while my friend is drooling, and the whole time I’m racking my brain trying to figure out who the heck he is. Suddenly, something he says near the end of our conversation does it and I remember, he’s my cousin.

“Rafe!”

My brain is so excited by this discovery that I actually declare it out loud… and then realize that he didn’t know I didn’t know who he was and now I have to explain this declaration.

Ok, you may think it’s not such a big deal to forget your cousin’s name, but if you only knew. You see, I’d actually lived with this cousin for a year or so; yep, he’d been like my brother, and I forgot who he was. I tell you, it’s a problem.

I say all this to say, last night I was in Starbucks and while I was in line I noticed a women at the bar waiting for her drink. Her face seemed vaguely familiar. It was when she said something really loudly that I realized I knew her. I could remember that voice - the way she spoke. The way she stood and held her head, all those little things, were sending off signals in my brain that I should know this woman.

I didn’t recognize her friend, no help there. So I just kept staring at her trying to figure out who she was. The more I watched her the more I recognized her (and yet the best I can remember is that I met her in some professional capacity). It was really her mannerisms that stood out to me; that unspoken “aura” that we put off was so familiar I could almost taste it.

You know what I mean? I’m not talking about auras as in a spiritual phenomenon (although, maybe I am and just don’t know it), I mean something closer to a kind of projection of personality.

You know how they say that confident people are more attractive to people because of their confidence? Well, this woman radiated lack of confidence; even from across the room I could feel that she wasn’t comfortable with who she was. I did notice that with her friends she was a little more confident, or maybe comfortable, than I remembered her, but still, her unconscious habits were screaming at me: I have no faith in myself. I don’t know who I am. In fact, they were so pronounced that this is what kept nagging at my mind that I knew her.

Even more than her face, her persona (maybe that’s the word I’m looking for) was full of memory triggers for me. (Interesting what your mind records about people isn’t it?)

Which makes me wonder, what is my “aura” screaming at other people? Most of us aren’t even aware that we put out this kind of subconscious signal. But, if you think about a time when you met a person and you instantly disliked them, if someone asked you what you didn’t like about them it would be hard to pinpoint it, so you just say, “I don’t know. There’s just something about them.” You’ll know the phenomenon that I’m talking about.

The interesting thing is, we aren’t really projecting what’s true about us (it’s not some kind of Personality Core radar) it only portrays what we believe to be true about ourselves.

In reality, it’s not so much an aura as really a culmination of signals. The way we speak (for example, less confident people tend to talk in questions - raising their voice at the end of a statement), the way we carry ourselves - body language - and our little ticks and habits. All these things come out of, and combine with, what we think of ourselves and serve to project our presence into the world around us.

It just occured to me that really great actors are great because they understand how to imitate this kind of projection, how to create a new presona for themselves.

Which is good news really, because it means that we can choose how we want to portray ourselves in the world. Which brings me back to my earlier question: How am I portraying myself to the people around me? Better yet, how do I want people to read me?

Yep, these are the kinds of things I find myself thinking about at any given moment. And no, I still haven’t figured out who she is!

-image-Jumping Track

October 18, 2007 | Get Inspired!

One of the major things I was pondering while I was away was: How do I want my life to be?

I know, I suppose this can sound like an odd question to be asking, many of you are probably thinking, “It’s not like you can choose what’s going to happen in life!”, or some such thoughts. I can’t choose what happens to me from the outside, but I can choose how I’m going to live the life I have.

I realized that the choices I make open doors for certain experience and events and close other doors. So, as long as I was choosing to behave like work was the most urgent thing in the world and it had the right to consume me then I was opening the doors in my life that lead to exhaustion, material success (possibly, but at least that mentality), and, well frankly, the kind of life that most people live. My experience was of course going to reflect my choices.

Which made me think, what experiences do I want to be inviting? What kind of life do I want to live? And here’s a really odd question: How do I want life to feel?

When I tapped into my answers to those questions I realized I absolutely had to change the way I was doing things. Not because it was wearing me out and making me a miserable person to be around. Not because I wasn’t taking time for myself and therefore not enjoying my life on a day to day basis. Not even because I had started living my life for that far off someday goal without even noticing it. But simply because those choices could never bring me to the results I really wanted to accomplish. They simply couldn’t; the way I want my life to feel and the way I had been living life are on completely different tracks (and possible in completely different nations).

I’m not really sure what things I need to do to get me to my end goal, but I do know I need to stop doing the things I had been doing for the last few months. This week, while I’ve been making an effort to be conscious about the choices I’m making and trying to figure out which are the right choices and where balance lies I’ve been making observations - observations about the world around me and about my own pre-programmed beliefs.

One of the conclusions that I’m coming to is that if I want something different then I absolutely, no doubt about it, must do something differently.

We all know the classic definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting different results. I love this quote; I think it’s fabulous; I use it all the time - on a personal level. If you are unhappy at/doing/being A then you must stop doing A to change that result; instead try B, C, or even D. I.e. If you don’t like your job then the answer is the simple (and yet very difficult) get a new job!

But what I’ve realized this week is that this applies on a larger - even cultural - scale too. I’m not all that endeared to the 9-5, keeping up with the Jones’ lifestyle. I don’t like Monday - Friday weeks and I really don’t like the way life feels in that environment. Of course, most of the world lives in that kind of culure (place/mentality) so it hasn’t even occurred to most of us that there’s an option here.

But, I’m an avid reader of people’s lives. I love other people’s experiences, and one of the things I’ve learnt from reading them is that there are other options. Life doesn’t have to feel the way I previously thought it did. It doesn’t have to be about paying the bills and keeping busy and having nothing of value to show for it in the end. I know this because other people don’t live their lives this way and they are happy.

And these people, these people who’ve done something new, who are unique in the way they choose their lives and love their lives, these people all have one thing in common: They didn’t do what everyone else did.

Because (and this is the really profound realization I’ve been having), if we want to get different results then we need to take different actions!

Shocking I know.

The people the rest of us are jealous of; the ones who travel the world (and write about it), or make millions of dollars, the ones who live off of their art, the ones we still talk about a century later, they are the ones who decided they weren’t going to listen to the people around them and were going to go their own way.

We look at them and seem to think that they have something special, something that sets them apart from us - they don’t. We think that it works for them, but it couldn’t possible work for us because (insert your reasons here - money I’m sure will be the primary one).

The thing that my heart keeps telling me over and over as I face each decision of my day is that they are just like you and me, they are no different, except in one thing: They were brave enough to take the action. They didn’t just think about not conforming, they took the risk and refused to do what other people were telling them they were “supposed” to do.

I’m still not sure how to get from A to B, but I am sure that it’s going to involve changing the way I make decisions about my life and the way I think about reality or the world at large (a more powerful - and difficult - step then you may first imagine). It means I’m going to have to jump my former track and get onto a new one and, like I said before, if I want different results I’m going to have to take different actions.

-image-The Inexplicable Hiatus

October 15, 2007 | Just Me

What’s the date? I can’t believe it; it’s been a whole week since I last posted! Ack! When did that happen?

I’m not really clear on what happened to last week. It was Thanksgiving here in Canada, and of course, there was my slight meltdown.

To be honest, it wasn’t really a meltdown, that’s just what I’ve been calling it. It was more waking up to the potential meltdown about to happen.

I’ve been a little carried away with work lately (which is putting it mildly). From your end I’m sure it looks like nothing is happening at more than a snail’s pace, but on my end there’s a wild frenzy of activity. I kept telling myself things would calm down once everything launched; I’d have time to think once everything went live, etc… But of course, that wouldn’t happen, it would just be a different kind of busy then.

Part of me knew I was lying to myself and killing myself (which is very ironic considering the whole bent of my business is about taking care of yourself), but that message hadn’t gotten to my head yet. Until Friday.

Friday something odd happened and my head and my heart both heard what the rest of me had been screaming about for weeks: I needed to take a break and get myself out of this hole I’d been digging. So, I went away for a few days. I was away Sunday to Tuesday (Monday was a holiday so the boys stayed home and watched TV the whole time I was gone).

So really, last week only lasted from Wednesday to Friday, and what with appointments and The Kung Fu Master’s volunteering and trying to keep things balanced… nothing much ended up getting done. Which explains why it’s been more than a week since I’ve come in here to post.

I spent my days away doing nothing and thinking (in that order); I’m still doing a lot of processing of all the thinking, but I never got around to posting because I wasn’t sure what I was going to post about. I’m still trying to find my something to say again (I know it’s in there I just have to find it). I’m sure I’ll have tracked down something to say by tomorrow, at the very lastest.

In the meantime may I suggest you find a little time to do nothing? Sometimes nothing is a very valuable thing to do.