Looking Back on Your Life...

While you're in them, seasons of life seem extraordinary.  Fiery, fragile, and erratic. But once you have some distance from them, the moments seem to get smaller, until they are almost out of focus.

When you look back over your life, you can see more of it now than ever before. And yet it seems somehow diminished. Unassuming. Almost charming.

So you begin scanning your life, looking for something interesting or beautiful. You see an ordinary house, with an ordinary yard, on an ordinary street. It looks smaller than you remember. You once had wild dreams and obstacles and risks looming all around you, but now they look smaller too.

You remember giants and goddesses and villains you encountered, but all you see now is ordinary people assembled in their tiny classrooms and workspaces, each of us moving around in little steps, like tokens on a game board. No matter how many times you rolled the dice, it was always these little moves, here and there.

We do a little work, take a little rest, make a little friend, throw a little party, feel a little boredom, and have a little rebellion. There are so many of these token moments, that were supposed to represent some other thing. You keep adding them all up, as if there was something you forgot to count, some bundle of glory that fell off the back of a truck.

You may love the life you have, for everything it is. You know it isn't groundbreaking, but you wouldn't change a thing. Maybe when you first started building the life you wanted, you left plenty of room for what might happen, and somehow lost track of what was happening.

Or maybe you were never 'in it' to begin with. Maybe you knew even then that this wasn't the world you expected. A world so low and common you tried to keep your distance, floating somewhere above it, where nobody else could look down on this life you built.

Nobody else but you.

TJ

Ironic Reversal...What in the world...

When we are trying to avoid doing, saying or thinking about something, we often find that this is impossible.

This is because of the 'Catch 22' situation that in order to avoid thinking about something, we need to know what we are trying to avoid and hence we have to think about it. The situation then gets worse as our failure to succeed causes us to work harder at the task.

The thought can also act as a block against other thoughts. When searching for a word for a particular situation, the more available words that pop into our minds first become more available and consequently keep coming back when we try to think of other words.

As we get worn out by this fruitless task, our ability to control the situation weakens, we get stuck in the cycle and thinking can easily turn into saying and doing. Repetition also tends to strengthen our belief in what we are thinking, as in Mere Exposure Theory.

This spiral can easily fall into obsessive-compulsive behaviors and many psychological disorders include an inability to stop thinking about something uncomfortable.

Hypnotists use this in phrases like 'You may notice how, as your eyes close, your hand gets heavier and you sink into a deep trance.'

When you are trying to solve a crossword puzzle or quiz question, even though your first idea is not right, it gets in the way of you finding the correct answer.

Telling children not to drop a plate makes them think about dropping it, and that often takes them a step closer to the act!

If you want someone to think about something, talk about it (or even tell them not to do/say/think about it). To accentuate the effect, get them cognitively overloaded and stressed beforehand.

The way out of the trap is not to try. It's like going to sleep: the more you try, the more you can't. The trick is to not be bothered about it, reducing the stress.

TJ

What's Your Story???

Your life is a story. The days flip past, too quickly to absorb, a mess of seemingly random events. So you look back and highlight certain moments as important, as turning points in the main plot. You trace each thread back to its origin, finding omens and ironies scattered along the way, until it all feels inevitable, and your life makes sense. You know how this story is going to end, but you’re still eager to skip ahead, dying to know what happens next.

But there are times when you look up and realize that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore. You thought you were following the arc of the story, but you keep finding yourself immersed in passages you don’t understand. Either everything seems important or nothing does. It’s a tangled mess of moments that don’t even seem to belong in the same genre, that keeping changing depending on what you choose to highlight.

What kind of story is this? Just another coming-of-age tale, the same one your parents told, with the names switched around? Is your everyday life part of the origin story of something truly epic? Are you unwittingly getting by on other people’s charity, mistaking your own luck for your own success? Are you a character in a romance, a tragedy, a travelogue, or just another cautionary tale?

As you thumb through the years, you may never know where this all is going. The only thing you know is that there’s more to the story. That soon enough you’ll flip back to this day looking for clues of what was to come, rereading all the chapters you skimmed through to get to the good parts—only to learn that all along you were supposed to choose your own adventure.

TJ

Want to be More Attractive???

 

A person who is off-the-charts attractive will have these qualities:

 
Are warm and friendly towards others

Are open and real

Know their own strengths and weaknesses - and neither boasts nor puts themselves down

Look for the good in every situation, and is generally positive and optimistic
 
Absolutely will not gossip or pass on others’ secrets

Never takes pleasure when things go wrong for others

Is secure and has a healthy self–esteem; is not self-centered and narcissistic
 
 Is not highly critical or argumentative

Is not possessive and jealous in relationships

Make time for the people they care about

These are just the basic qualities. There could be many more, but without the basics everything is only skin deep...

 
TJ 

Want To Get Ahead In Life?

Don’t get too wrapped up in your feelings.
Feelings change throughout the day and they are unreliable. Don’t let them rule your life, or interfere with your goals.

Don’t worry so much because worrying, more than likely, will make things worse.
Focusing on your worries will drain your energy, and the source of your worry, what we’re dreading, doesn’t happen anyway.

Stop the caustic internal commentary.
Stop telling yourself that things are going to fall apart, or that you will probably fail, or that no one does, or will like you. Keep trying, moving forward, and keep living your life.

Stop being self-critical.
You must be your own cheerleader and your biggest fan. Keep a journal of your successes, and the times your perseverance, attitude, and inner strength helped you overcome something. Be encouraging and kind, and always lean into what makes you successful.

Stop feeling guilty.
Feeling guilty changes nothing. You are going to make mistakes. Accept you aren’t perfect and then get up and try again.

Stop worrying about what others think of you.
At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what they think. Choose your own goals for your life and remember you’re not accountable to them.

Don’t worry about set-backs or changes to your plans.
Plans always need adjusting and things always go wrong, but that doesn’t mean “it’s over” or you’ll never reach your goals. Expect to make some changes. Just be adaptable.

TJ

Honesty. What does it look like?

What does honesty look like?

Being open about yourself, your feelings, and what you have done. When you are asked a question, tell the truth, even it is embarrassing. Do not make excuses for your weaknesses, just be truthful.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to a healthy version of honesty is exposing yourself too much and too early in any relationship. The optimum way to build an honesty bridge is to open-up one step at a time and try to do it at the same rate as the other person in the relationship. 

Use personal, truthful, stories to gently encourage the other person to also expose themselves, or just to stimulate normal conversation.

Openness can also include disagreement. When others express views with which you disagree you can gently state your disagreement with the view, and be careful not to reject the person.

When you expose a personal vulnerability to another person, you are offering them a way to criticize or attack you. This shows them that you are trusting them not to attack. By being trusting, you encourage them to be trustworthy and trusting in return.

It is important to be careful when exposing vulnerabilities because you can embarrass others and make them feel they should be open in return when they are not ready to do so. This is why you should start small and move forward incrementally as they open up to you.

Openness implies you have the confidence that you will not be attacked and can be a unspoken indicator of power. In effect you are saying 'I am so powerful I can admit weaknesses or express views because I can repel all criticism or attack.'

Open disagreement is also helpful in creating a bond because it also encourages trust by saying 'I know you understand me well enough not to take this the wrong way.' Of course this level of openness requires a lot of care in accepting the person even if you reject their argument.

TJ

Thinking About The Past

Your life is written in permanent ink. There's no going back to erase the past, tweak your mistakes, or fill in missed opportunities. When the moment's over, your fate is sealed. 

Are you sure?

Maybe, if you look a little closer, you will notice that the ink never really dries on any of our experiences. These experiences change their meaning the longer you look at them.

There are more ways of thinking about the past than just nostalgia or regret. There is also a kind of questioning that enhances an experience after the fact. To really contemplate the past is to allow fresh context to be introduced over the years to fill out the picture. 

This helps us to keep the memory alive, so it does not become just a caricature of itself. It helps us because we can look honestly at a painful experience, and call it by its name.

Time is the most powerful force in the universe. It can turn a giant into someone completely human, just trying to make their way through life. Or time can tell you how you really felt about someone, even if you couldn't feel it or say it at the time. It can put your childhood dreams in context with adult problems or turn a universal consensus into an embarrassing fad. It can expose cracks in a relationship that once seemed perfect.

Or time can keep a friendship going through thoughts alone, even if you'll never see them again. Time can cause a complete 180 degree turn and make your greatest shame into the source of your greatest power, or time can turn a moment of pride into something nice, but done for the wrong reasons.

Time can also make what felt like the end of the world look like a natural part of life.

For just about everyone, the past is still mostly a blank page, so we may be doomed to repeat it. However, the past is still worth considering if it brings you closer to the truth.

Maybe it's not so bad to dwell in the past, and walk around in the memories, to lessen the simplification of time, and put some effort into reconstructing it.

Maybe we should think of memory itself as an art form, in which the real work begins as soon as the paint hits the canvas. And remember that a work of art is never finished, only abandoned.

TJ