The Behavior of Change
Thoughts and download from the week.
To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive - Robert Louis Stevenson
Doing what’s easy and rationalizing
Never mind the fact that it’s taking me away from the thing I actually want to do, which is read my book. Never mind the fact that I never feel nearly as good after 30 minutes on my phone as I do after 30 minutes of reading. My ability to rationalize, and my desire to do what’s easy, keeps me from reading, and encourages me to pick up my phone instead.
Reading, my brain tells me, is unproductive. Reading, will not lead to any tangible success or achievement. My phone, by contrast, holds all the tools I need to be productive. I can research an idea. Search for a hike. Write down notes. Edit videos. Get caught up on email. Check in on the market. My phone, my brain tells me, will help me achieve my goals, while reading is just procrastination.
This is an example of the back talk that goes on in my head when that little voice, my intuition, tells me what I need, and my programming tells me what I “should” (that bad word) do instead.
It doesn’t happen with just reading. It happens when that little voice starts yapping “go workout, you’ll feel better,” and my brain says, “nah, let’s eat.” It happens with writing. “Write it down later, you’ll remember.” With watering and cleaning up the garden. With stopping for gas. Or going to the store. “Let’s do ______ (anything else) instead.”
I started reading a new book this week. The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron. She calls this internal dialogue your censor. In the War of Art, Steven Pressfield calls it The Resistance. I call it rationalization and doing what feels easy. I’ve determined that a succesful and happy life lies in the ability to recognize when rationalizing versus acting. It lies in the ability to listen to my intuition, that first voice, and ignore the resistance, that second voice. And that’s what I’ve been working on doing.
But it’s not easy, and it doesn’t always work.
For weeks my intuition had been telling me to go do a float. And for weeks I’d been telling it no, we don’t need it, we’re fine how we are. I’ve notice it’s usually the thing I’m resisting the most that I need the worst, and success relies on identifying resisting what I need. That turned out to be the case with my float, but unfortunately I let it get to critical levels, brain fog that impacted my productivity and mood, before finally making an appointment.
Sure as shit, the float was exactly what was needed, and I came out of it feeling mentally clear and physically rejuvenated. Why had I resisted going for so long and ignore that nagging voice? Why do I continue to lack the confidence to immediately act on what my mind and body’ are telling me to do? Why do we as humans go against the things that we know to be true? It’s such an odd thing to me. We know, and ignore.
We know what’s good for us when it comes to diet, drugs, drinking, exercise, relationships, work, stress, and yet more often than not, we ignore it, and do the opposite. We know how much better we will feel if we do these things, but we don’t. We remember the last time we did this things how good it felt, but we still don’t. We know, then we rationalize, then we ignore, and do what’s easy instead.
A reminder about other peoples expectations
When I’m stressing about situations that involve other people and their expectations of me, I try to relax my nerves by thinking about how I would feel if the roles were reversed.
A recent example included a fellow classmate in a kettlebell class I’m taking. During class everyone was given a partner. We were assigned to watch our partner (this was via zoom) do a Turkish get up, and make mental notes of what they did well, and where there were opportunities for improvement. After class we were tasked with sharing these observations with one another via our group text.
Immediately after class the group chat blew up with everyone sharing their feedback. A ping of anxiety rushed through me. Fuck, I forgot what I wanted to tell him. I remembered thinking that a few moves on his way up could’ve been tighter, and that the way down looked good. But I couldn’t remember in enough detail to actually be helpful, and it started to freak me out. I was new to this group, I didn’t want to be a bad partner and appear as though I hadn’t been paying attention.
I couldn’t remember what I wanted to tell my partner, and it was eating away at me.
After an hour or so of letting it consuming me, I decided to turn the tables. I asked myself, how would I feel if I didn’t get any feedback? Would I feel let down and like my partner didn’t care? Would I be mad, angry, or want my partner to be upset about it? Or, would I assume that, like me, he’s just bad at taking mental notes, or didn’t get a great look at the screen, or some other reason why he had nothing to share, and it wouldn’t bother me? I realized it was the latter, and that I needed to stop worrying.
About a year ago my brother rented a house in upstate New York. He was there with his family, wife and three kids. The house was on a lake, and while everyone around them was out enjoying the water on canoes, kayaks, and paddle boards, the house he rented had nothing. But he saw that his neighbor did. So, one day he went over, knocked on the door with his three kids and asked if he could borrow a kayak and a couple of paddle boards. To his surprise the gentleman that answered the door, an older man, said “Absolutely. We bought these for our grandkids but they never come over. Use them for as long as you want. Make yourself at home.” So they did.
For the week they were there they used his water crafts.
After he returned home he wanted to do something nice for the neighbor, but he didn’t know what. He decided to send them a hand written thank you note, along with a picture of his kids on the lake using their watercrafts. We were talking one night and he asked me, “do you think that’s enough?”
I thought for a minute and then I said, “Well, put yourself in his shoes. How would you feel if you got a card and a couple of cute pictures? Would that be enough for you?”
“I never thought about it that way,” he said, “It would.” I could even sense a smile come through the phone as he reversed roles and thought about himself in this guys shoes.
As humans we have a tendency to overthink how other people are going to react. We tend to think that everything is a bigger deal than it really is, and that we’re not doing enough. I know I do.
The next time you feel this way, swap places with the person you’re worried about and ask, “how would I feel?” The answer should be enough to allow yourself to move on.
That’s not to say you won’t encounter people who do not feel the way you do, or people who do make a bigger deal and expect more. But, use yourself as the yard stick to judge the situation by. You’re a reasonable person, as most people are, so your response is the best judge you have.
Side note, as of this writing, I haven’t received feedback from my partner either, and I haven’t thought twice about it.
Healing in an unstable environment
The argument I’d make is that you can’t heal in an unstable environment. I’d argue that you can only heal when you’re in an environment that offers unconditional love, support, and security. If your stability is under constant threat, then its hard to make room to heal.
I’ve now been in a stable environment for three years, and during that time I’ve begun to heal.
That environment for me is the one my girlfriend and I have created. There have been challenges, scares, and mis-understandings, but it’s always been stable because of our love for each other. The love we have, the support we show each other, creates a stable environment, regardless of what’s going on around us.
It’s something I’ve really been able to notice since we moved and begun to settle down. Prior to meeting Jen I had felt like I was all over the place. I moved to Los Angeles by myself in 2019, and despite living there for 3 years, I never really felt settled. I was alone, and I knew Los Angeles was not where I wanted to put down roots. And I wasn’t even sure I wanted to put down roots anywhere. Even though it caused me some feelings of anxiety, I always thought I would just live a semi-nomadic life, moving around every few years.
But now we’ve started to create a home, and I’ve noticed that no longer feeling like a nomad has put me at ease and it’s allowed me to heal physically and emotionally.
Being in one place, it’s been very clear to me how much I’m benefiting from it. My mood is generally better and my emotions are more balanced. My perception of things, and my role is much clearer. My ability to change has been one of the most apparent things to me. I always believed in the ability to change who you are through manipulation of the mind, but to see it play out in real time is something I’d never experienced in my life. I’ve been able to decide to change, and make it happen.
I’ve also seen profound changes in my writing, which I attribute to having a clearer mind. And I’ve also noticed an improved overall sense of control in my energy and effort, and specifically in my ability to pull back on the reins before I go over a cliff.
But the most profound thing, perhaps because it is so tangible, has been the daily chipping away at my chronic injury that has nagged me since 2020. I always held out hope that I’d one day be able to begin to heal, which is the reason I never stopped trying, but in the back of my mind I had begun to accept that this was just how I was going to have to live. Chronically injured, in pain, and never returning to my full form.
But in the last three months I’ve seen and felt dramatic improvements that I attribute to feeling stable. This new environment we’ve created has allowed me to be consistent, and know that I can be consistent into the future. The fear that I need to fix it today, because I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, is gone. And so I’ve been able to take my time and focus on small improvements.
Jen and I have always believed that my injury was part energetic and part physical. Energetically I’m getting to express myself and “release” what’s been building up inside of me through consistent writing, and things like the wake up workout challenge. Physically, I’m learning new modalities through reading and taking classed I’d been waiting to take until the time was right.
That’s all to say, which is probably not what you would have expected to hear, that my personal experience has taught me that we cannot expect people living in unstable environments to be healthy, heal, and prosper. The expectation for people who are struggling to keep a roof over their head, put food on the table, working multiple jobs, and in poor health, to recover, be better, and improve, is unrealistic. The environment in this country for millions of people is unstable at best, dire at worst, and until we improve upon those conditions for these people, we can’t expect anything to change.