Conflict and Connection

“Dead people receive more flowers than the living ones because regret is stronger than gratitude.” ― Anne Frank I think that it is safe to say that our deepest drive in life is not to receive flowers but to love and be loved. If that is the case, then what are we most likely going to provoke regret for? I think we all feel in our hearts that if we want to influence someone for good, that the actions that could produce gratitude are better than the ones that produce regret, but what if that doesn’t work? If a situation could deteriorate quickly do we have time to sow seeds of altruism that could bear the fruit of gratitude if an action couldn’t be altruistic if it has any controlling or manipulating motive attached?                 Love is creating a space for someone big enough for even the parts of them that they don’t understand or like. This means there is no control in love.    If there ...

Bob Ross Insights, Hidden in his Painting “I can't think of anything more rewarding than being able to express yourself to others through painting. Exercising the imagination, experimenting with talents, being creative; these things, to me, are truly the windows to your soul.”                           ― Bob Ross, The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross, Vol. 29 What do we find when we look into the window of his soul? One of the first things that might come to mind when you think about Bob Ross is: “Happy clouds,” and “We don’t make mistakes, we have happy accidents.” How are those two things related? Does it go deeper than debunking the assumptions that there is more than only happy blue skies? This might seem like a stretch, but looking at the mere percentage of clouds appearing in Bob’s paintings shows something interesting. In 91% of his paintings there are at least one tree, but in only 44% there are at least...

Getting, and knowing that we have gotten respect, depends quite a bit on having an idea of what respect is. “Re-spect” simply means, to look twice. This begs a lot of questions, one being, why can we not just look carefully once instead of having to look twice? And, what is it that we should be looking for? There are a lot of implications of the meaning of “respect,” but I would like to start by dissecting a word that often accompanies respect, “deserve.” “De” as a prefix, means removal or separation. “Serve” comes from the root slave. Slavery is an awkward thing to casually mention, but there is no way around it in understanding the origin of “deserve.” “Deserve,” besides, “Mine, my, and I,” is one of the words used with the most passion.   “I deserve better than this!” “You deserve what’s coming to you!” “They deserve to be happy…” There are a few ways in which a separation from being a slave makes sense in the context of what we deserve. A slave resided in a house but did ...

We all have a way of looking at life and assessing what it has value to us. Whether we are aware of it or not, our value system is based on very specific conclusions we’ve drawn from experiences we’ve had, and those conclusions are operating unconsciously in our mind, and determine what value we look for, and what things we avoid. There is the Christmas effect, where when we are young it is easy to get excited for Christmas, and then slowly over time, Christmas brings a bigger to-do list that stresses us out, than things that excite us. We likely started off life with an optimistic value system, and then as we notice how those expectations fail us, we replace them with a more pessimistic assessment or value system. Our original value system was naïvely optimistic, but that doesn’t mean that there can’t be a wise optimistic value system. We could have upgraded our original naively optimistic value system, but we assess any new value system by our old one, and what reason would w...

The hallmark of OCD is an action that promises release from a strain. This can manifest in a broad range of “compulsions” that offer a “release”—ranging from the compulsion to steal, to the compulsion to give, but usually involves something to clean or organize. A mental disorder is only a disorder when it affects your ability to function to a clinically significant level, which applies to very few people, but… since it affects the quality of life for pretty much all of us, it is important to understand the root of it. The question of how well we see, could be answered by a measurement like 20/20. This means that what you see at 20 feet is the same as the average person… in determining what letter is on a paper. Anything more complicated than what is on the eye chart, E, F, P, T,O,Z etc, is definitely not going to be the same as the average person, and not like anyone else in the world. This is because we see mostly just what we know to look for, and what we know to look for is d...

Yes, eight seconds is a long time, and no, I am not recommending giving everyone an eight second hug. The shell we put up, or mask we hide behind is made up of what we think logically think will keep us emotionally safe. Intuition is not fooled by shells or masks, intuition which is non-verbal communication bypasses whatever façade we put up. Intuition sees the world of meaning, not the physical world of logic, because of this intuition can by-pass externals. Though heart-to-heart connection is what we want, because intuition works so fast and so well, even a glimpse into someone’s heart can show a lot. This makes us feel vulnerable, because we can’t hide out hopes and fears from being seen from other people’s intuition. We may not remember the last time we felt an overwhelming feeling of belonging, but likely it was when we were the most vulnerable; like being held as a newly born infant, not aware that we were naked, and nothing we could do about it even if we did know, being...

I was somewhere that I knew I would have to be for a while, and started to get hungry. I finally decided that the over-priced under-nourishing who knows how old it was item was worth the $2.50, only to have the machine take the money, and not drop the item. It is that point when my mind started racing through all the things I could have done with those $2.50. There was no way to logically rationalize why I should be okay with it, and no meaningful rationalization that would satisfy either. Knowing I wasn’t willing to throw down another couple bucks in hope of getting something else, or making them both fall down, and knowing I didn’t want to spend the night in jail or pay a fine for breaking the machine, I just decided to solve my hunger problem was hopeless. The philosopher Kenny Rogers, in his treatise on the nature of life said, “You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, and know when to run. You never count your money, wh...