Behold the Stars

While reading my favorite high-level, intellectual journal, I came across an article on J.K. Rowling’s depression.

Rowling professes that she experienced a brief bout with depression in 1994, during the time she was struggling to make ends meet for herself and her infant daughter. Her experience with depression made a lasting impact on her and inspired the Dementors that first appear in Prisoner of Azkaban. On depression, Rowling said, “It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad.” Rowling… admits that she contemplated taking her own life back in the early 1990s, after separating from her first husband, Portuguese journalist Jorge Arantes.

“We’re talking suicidal thoughts here, we’re not talking ‘I’m a little bit miserable,’ ” Rowling told [an Edinburgh University student magazine].

I love that the Dementers were inspired by her depression. Works for me.  But here’s what caught my eye:

“The funny thing is, I have never been remotely ashamed of having been depressed. Never,” she says. “I think I’m abnormally shameless on that account because what’s to be ashamed of?”

It’s an odd thing, really. After years of struggling with depression, I look back on that period not with shame, but with pride. I now understand that I went through something unique, something special, and survived. That is quite an accomplishment, and one, I’m learning, only understood by people who’ve experienced it. We’ve been tempered by a fire the intensity of which most people can’t imagine. It’s simply out of their realm of experience.

So what? Are we better than others? No. We’ve just gone through something unusual. I went through an intense breakdown and rebuilding of my dreams, values, self, finances, and relationships — with a dose of death thrown in for flavoring (What an education!). I’d rather have had my life go along swimmingly, but it didn’t. I went through what I went through, just like everybody else.

This year, just like every year, I’ll go through what I go through. I’ll set goals and succeed, and I’ll set goals and fail. I will love and hurt. I will be excited and bored and lonely and social. I’ll be confused and sure. I’ll wish for something better or be happy with what I have. And that’s just fine. As they say, “It’s all good.”

Make a great day.

How many self-help, life-hack websites do you read each day? Each week? Now how many of the great ideas have you actually put into practice? If you read three or four life hack and self-help web sites each day, are you getting better, or are you just consuming the information like potato chips, bite after bite, no longer enjoying the taste, but eating nonetheless?

It’s easy to become so overwhelmed by the amount of good advice out there that you pay attention to none of it. Many of us are caught by the magic promise of the Internet, by its endless pathways of information, each path filled with stimulation and magic and fresh, new ideas. But by compulsively following these paths, we become inured to the impact of each new piece of information so that, rather than absorbing the idea, we let it bounce off us, an in-one-ear-and-out-the-other sort of thing. It’s as if we thought we could learn another language simply by reading a long list the words in that language.

It reminds me of what they taught us in computer classes about the difference between data and information: data is a mountain of facts and figures; information is that data filtered and organized into meaningful chunks. Each post on the life-hack web sites is an attempt to create information from the mass of available data. By reading multiple life-hack sites, we are, in essence, turning that information back into data. What do we get from that?

Hope, I guess. Sites like these represent hope and the possibility of a perfect life. But they also represent a need you have to be more than you are. These sites are useful, but they also can make you feel insecure. Often we assume that there are others out there — the author of the post, perhaps — who are so insanely productive that they approach perfection. Maybe we can absorb all these hacks and become perfect ourselves…

I don’t think so.
Yes, we can improve. Yes, we can be more productive. We do that with focus, by narrowing our concentration and working more intensely with that. Here’s what I want you — and me — to do this week: stop looking at all the tips and ideas that are out there. Pick one or two to implement into your life and give them your all. Do not look at more ideas. Take the time you save reading to work on the things that drove you to those sites in the first place. You’ll probably be more effective (and more relaxed).

Make a great day.
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There is a beautiful practice called loving-kindness. It is a marvelous way to increase your awareness of and compassion for those around you. It will transform how you look at your life, as well.

The essential practice is to wish peace and happiness for yourself. Then you do the same for those you love, those about whom you’re ambivalent, and finally, those whom, for some reason or other, you can’t stand. We do this for individuals, but we can also do this for groups or categories of people (say, political groups).

In the basic practice, you recite a short script for each of the people on your list. One classic script is this:

May you be free from danger.
May you have mental happiness.
May you find physical happiness.
May you have ease of well being

You recite this text for each person, focusing wholly on one person or group while sincerely wishing them well. It will get harder (but better for you) as you move away from yourself and those you love to those you dislike. The scripts may not work for you. They are are too hokey for many people. This is no problem. Simply make up a way to wish everyone well in whatever way works for you.

For those of you who are brave, there is a more advanced technique, a more difficult practice called taking and giving. In taking and giving, we go through same process, but this time our wish is to give that person all our joy and happiness and take on all their pain and sorrow.

This is not an easy practice. To unconditionally wish someone you hate peace and happiness will be very difficult at first. Something inside you will rebel against the process, so you will have to do it many times before it sinks in. Stay with it for a few weeks, and you’ll be glad you did.

I tried this practice during my Dark Period. Each day I would take an early morning five-mile walk around Town Lake in downtown Austin. As I walked I would practice loving-kindness for those in my life — especially for those whom I resented or by whom I felt betrayed. As time went on, I began to “give” all my happiness to each person I passed along the way and to “take” on all their pain and sorrow. I did it for about eight weeks. Two surprising things happened to me. First, I felt much better and less resentful of many in my life. I began to let things go and to lighten up. Second, I found that I was less frightened of people.

This second response was made clear to me one day as I approached an empty bus stop. At the stop was a young man with the demeanor of a criminal, perhaps a gang member. As I passed by I felt slightly threatened, even though the young man had done nothing more than stand and dress a certain way. I began to think about his life and all the things that could possibly create suffering for him right now. I thought about all the things that would make a person feel so strongly the need to rebel. I also began to take on all his pain and give him my happiness. By the time I had walked by him, I no longer felt frightened. All my unease, it turned out, was all created in my head. It was quite an experience.

If you’re going through tough times, especially with other people, or if you find yourself tense or angry because of the actions of one group or another, I urge you to give this a try. It can help you see things from a completely different, less self-centered perspective. It will lighten your load.

Make a great day.

Photo: jam343
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Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.~Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

A couple shares a table at a coffee shop. One drinks black coffee; the other latte. They share one scone, each periodically tearing off a piece to eat. As we draw closer, we start to hear their conversation:

“That’s a great idea! Why don’t you go pick up an application? You can be enrolled for next semester.

“I’d love to, but…I don’t know. It’s been 12 years since high school…”
“So?”
“It’s been a long time. I don’t remember anything. And those will all be smarter than I am.”
“Oh, come on. They’re not any smarter than you. Besides, look at all the things you’ve done since high school. You raised three kids and are doing great in your job. Geez, you’re an office manager.”
“But that’s different.”
“How?”
“You know, school is so different. You have to know so much. And the kids today are smarter than I am.”
“That’s nonsense.”
“And then there’s tuition. It costs so much to go to school. And when would I do the homework?
“I guess you don’t really want to go back to school.”
“Oh, but I do. I want it more than anything!”

How many times have you been involved in a conversation like this one? Your friends encourage you to go after what you told them many times was a dream, and your response is to tell them every reason why it won’t work. It goes back and forth until you finally convince them that you can never achieve your dream. And that’s it: you won the argument. But what kind of victory is that?

One of the worst things we can do is to work to convince others how hopeless our dreams are. Defending our fears by disputing every point made by our friends strengthens those fears much more than merely thinking of them does. Every time we explain why it can’t be done, we create more and more doubt. It then becomes harder and harder for us to take action.

If you find yourself defending your doubts, there are two courses of action you can follow:

Ask yourself if this is really your dream or just a pipe dream, a distraction from the present. Wen we fight against our dreams, it is because there are other factors that we judge to be more important than our dream, even though we may not yet understand what they are. In the dialog above, the person who wants to go to school may not really want to go to school, but thinks that he should go to school. In that case, the motivation for “the dream” isn’t really there because it isn’t really a dream. I want to be a better tennis player, but clearly not enough to go out and practice. Whatever I do instead of practice is clearly more important to me than becoming a better tennis player. I have to understand that for me being a better tennis player would be nice, but isn’t a dream.

If you’re sure that you really want a particular dream, you must train yourself to talk only of its achievement. Deny yourself the right to discuss why it won’t work. Have your friends ask you only questions related to your dream’s accomplishment. What steps need to be taken? What is one thing that you can do this week toward your goal? Those questions are powerful tools to keep you ont the right track.

It’s amazing how the words we utter can help us or hurt us. So speak only words that empower you. You might just amaze yourself.

Make a great day.

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We’ve talked about paying attention to what is working in our lives. We write gratitude journals and success lists to train ourselves to shift our focus off what doesn’t work for us toward what does. Here’s a simple idea from Marci Shimoff’s Happy for No Reason for quickly shifting our thoughts to the positive.

Marci refers to this as leaning into the thought that makes you feel better. It works like this: whenever you find yourself burdened with negative thoughts, find an equally true thought about the situation that makes you feel better — and lean into it.

In her example, suppose you’re working on a project that is very close to deadline. Your stress level rises and you begin to tell yourself, “I’ll never finish this in time.” What happens next? More stress, more negative self talk. Instead, search for some thoughts that are equally true about this situation that would make you feel better, like “I’ve done this before and always finish in time,” or “If I truly get stuck, I can always ask for help.”

What you’re looking for is evidence to counteract the negative chatter going on in your brain, not simply positive affirmations, like repeating “I can get this done in time,” 100 times. We don’t want to fight our negative thoughts with happy talk, we want to overcome them with reasonable argument. Choose to focus on that alternative, positive, argument. Then stick with those thoughts. Lean into them.

This is a trick that you can use on the fly. You biggest difficulty will be to recognize when it’s time to use it and to remember to us when the time comes. Put it on a note card to carry with you. When you feel yourself veering off course, pull out the card and follow the instructions. Simple!

Make a great day.

Photo: Clearly Ambiguous

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Thank you for taking the time to visit Behold the Stars.

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Have you ever noticed how easy other people’s problems are to deal with? They complain and whine (or so it seems), and we jump in with our intuitive genius and give them a personal prescription for their lives. “You know what you should do…” If we don’t give it to them personally, we share it with somebody who knows them and who would appreciate the brilliance of our ideas.

When it comes to our own lives…well, things aren’t so easy. Our brilliance seems gone, our well dry.

Chuck Westbrook at I Hate Your Job.com has just the answer for our dilemma. It’s all contained in a little post called The 11 Step, 3 Word Guide to Getting Out of a Rut:

1. Find a friend with similar problems.
2. Give advice.
3. Apply to self

That’s all there is to it! How simple! That one deserves a smack on the forhead and a resounding, “Duh!”

Thanks Chuck.

Make a great day.

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Perfect as the wing of a bird may be, it will never able the bird to fly if unsupported by air.
-Ivan Pavlov

Our dreams are fragile things. We carry them hidden in our secret places and share them reluctantly with a world that often doesn’t respect them. We scare people with our dreams. Our asking for more challenges the choices others have made, and the resulting conflict often strengthens our insecurity and self-doubt.

But a dream acknowledged! Ah, that’s magic. We are now part of a team with a shared vision, and that gives us strength to push aside our doubts and to overcome the obstacles to accomplishment. The writer Stephen King describes just this phenomenon in his acceptance speech for the 2003 National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. This excerpt is long, but worth it:

This is a very atypical audience, one passionately dedicated to books and to the word. Most of the world, however, sees writing as a fairly useless occupation. I’ve even heard it called mental masturbation, once or twice by people in my family. I never heard that from my wife. She’d read my stuff and felt certain I’d some day support us by writing full time, instead of standing in front of a blackboard and spouting on about Jack London and Ogden Nash. She never made a big deal of this. It was just a fact of our lives. We lived in a trailer and she made a writing space for me in the tiny laundry room with a desk and her Olivetti portable between the washer and dryer. She still tells people I married her for that typewriter but that’s only partly true. I married her because I loved her and because we got on as well out of bed as in it. The typewriter was a factor, though.

When I gave up on Carrie, it was Tabby who rescued the first few pages of single spaced manuscript from the wastebasket, told me it was good, said I ought to go on. When I told her I didn’t know how to go on, she helped me out with the girls’ locker room stuff. There were no inspiring speeches. Tabby does sarcasm, Tabby doesn’t do inspiration, never has. It was just “this is pretty good, you ought to keep it going.” That was all I needed and she knew it.

There were some hard, dark years before Carrie. We had two kids and no money. We rotated the bills, paying on different ones each month. I kept our car, an old Buick, going with duct tape and bailing wire. It was a time when my wife might have been expected to say, “Why don’t you quit spending three hours a night in the laundry room, Steve, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer we can’t afford? Why don’t you get an actual job?”

Okay, this is the real stuff. If she’d asked, I almost certainly would have done it. And then am I standing up here tonight, making a speech, accepting the award, wearing a radar dish around my neck? Maybe. More likely not. In fact, the subject of moonlighting did come up once. The head of the English department where I taught told me that the debate club was going to need a new faculty advisor and he put me up for the job if I wanted. It would pay $300 per school year which doesn’t sound like much but my yearly take in 1973 was only $6,600 and $300 equaled ten weeks worth of groceries.

The English department head told me he’d need my decision by the end of the week. When I told Tabby about the opening, she asked if I’d still have time to write. I told her not as much. Her response to that was unequivocal, “Well then, you can’t take it.”
[...]
My point is that Tabby always knew what I was supposed to be doing and she believed that I would succeed at it. There is a time in the lives of most writers when they are vulnerable, when the vivid dreams and ambitions of childhood seem to pale in the harsh sunlight of what we call the real world. In short, there’s a time when things can go either way.

That vulnerable time for me came during 1971 to 1973. If my wife had suggested to me even with love and kindness and gentleness rather than her more common wit and good natured sarcasm that the time had come to put my dreams away and support my family, I would have done that with no complaint. I believe that on some level of thought I was expecting to have that conversation. If she had suggested that you can’t buy a loaf of bread or a tube of toothpaste with rejection slips, I would have gone out and found a part time job.

Tabby has told me since that it never crossed her mind to have such a conversation. You had a second job, she said, in the laundry room with my typewriter. I hope you know, Tabby, that they are clapping for you and not for me. Stand up so they can see you, please. Thank you. Thank you. I did not let her see this speech, and I will hear about this later.

Having another’s moral support is the secret wish of every artist, writer, entrepreneur, and dreamer. You know what? It applies to all of us, whether your dream is to write the Great American Novel or to sew a beautiful quilt for your grandchildren. We want our dreams, the most timid and frightened part of us, to be loved.

With this in mind, we now have two goals:

1. Find someone who respects and supports your goal. If you can’t find it in your immediate world, go find someone who will. There are plenty of art societies, writers’ groups, and conversation groups out there (both live and on the Internet), all filled with folks who’ll think your dream is the coolest thing they’ve ever heard. Find the one that best supports your dream.
2. Be that someone for someone else. Start with your family, and ask yourself, “Am I truly supportive of this person’s dreams, or am I setting expectations for them based on my dreams and world view?” It’s a tough question, and one to which you probably won’t like the answer. Ask it anyway. If your answer is negative, ask yourself how you can change.

It’s simple: Get support for your dreams, and give support to somebody else’s.

Make a great day.

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Of course you do. Human beings are thinking machines. It is estimated that the average person has about 60,000 thoughts each day. They bubble up spontaneously, one after another, without end. To see them in action, try to sit quietly for five minutes without thinking of anything. You can’t do it. Thoughts keep intruding on your quiet time.

What is interesting is that it is estimated that about 95% of those are the same thoughts we had yesterday and the day before. That means that most of the time our brains are chugging along thinking about things that have nothing to do with what we’re doing at any given moment. In other words, thoughts regarding our daily activities are merely intrusions into this ocean of self chatter.

It gets worse. It is also estimated that roughly 80% of thoughts in that ocean are negative. Let’s do the math: 60,000 thoughts X 80%=48,000 negative thoughts a day. Admitting that this is a rough estimate of a rough average, we’re still talking about a lot of negative thoughts for most of us. We are not only swimming in a sea of thoughts, but a sea of negative ones. Specialists call these “automatic negative thoughts,” or ANTs.

Now for the bad part: we’re junkies for the bad stuff. Our brains are “Velcro for negativity and Teflon for positivity,” says brain researcher Dr. Rich Hanson. According to Dr. John Cacioppo at the University of Chicago, our brains respond more intensely to negative or disturbing thoughts than to positive, comforting ones. In a study, he measured different levels of brain activity in subjects viewing images inspiring positive feelings, images involving negative or disturbing images, or images inspiring neutral feelings. Activity was much higher when subjects viewed the negative or disturbing images than when viewing positive or neutral images.

So we are hardwired to focus on the negative, right? Not so, says Dr. Richard Davidson of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. New ways of thinking produce new neural pathways and shrink older, unused pathways. This explains why it gets easier to focus on the positive aspects of our lives the more we practice. We’re training our emotional pathways the way an athlete trains his body. That is good news.

Start your training today. Do 25 repetitions with your gratitude journal followed by 15 repetitions with your success journal. Add intermittent episodes of smelling the roses throughout the day, and pretty soon you’ll be a lean, mean happy machine.

Make a great day.

* This post is based on a summary of information taken from Happy for No Reason: 7 Steps to Being Happy from the Inside Out, by Marci Shimoff and Carol Kline.

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