Conflict and Connection

     "‘Gregor,’ said a voice – it was his mother’s – ‘it’s a quarter to seven. Hadn’t you a train to catch?’ That gentle voice!"      Franz Kafka in his book Metamorphosis paints a good picture of the struggle of whether to listen to the fear that looks beyond people's words, or the hope that encourages us to take them at face value. It’s hard to know whether to trust words or actions, because there are accidents and misunderstandings, there potentially is so much to win or lose by exploiting or being naïve to the difference. We are born wanting to hope the best of people, but passive-aggression and deception  seem to be the game of life, and even if we don’t want to play, it doesn’t mean we want to be played. Is there something innately different about us that makes us not want to play the game, or do we just notice the inconvenience to us when others play it and fail to notice the convenience of the game we are playing sub-consciously?   ...

     “I didn’t mean to do that.” “That wasn’t my intention.” “I know this looks bad, but it’s not what it looks like.”      What percentage of the things that surround us or percentage of the consequences of our actions were our intention?      Many stories and mythologies have items that are cursed if touched or carried would cause the worst fortune to happen. How is it that it seems likely to be the case sometimes that there is some curse on us that overshadows our intentions an abilities? We realize we don’t want to do some habit, smoking, drinking, gossiping, aggression or passive-aggression, and somehow we can’t do it? Isn’t it odd that we can both want to do something and not want to do it at the same time? And what is more odd, is that we can consciously not want to do something and then do it anyway? If we are not controlled by our own consciousness, then what are be controlled by?      I’m probably not the only o...

Why is it sometimes hard to be happy for the success of others      If you don’t trust yourself, what could you trust? In order to trust someone else you would have to trust your judgment of them… there’s no way around it, you can’t bypass yourself out of life, although sadly that doesn’t mean we can’t try.      Trust or confidence is an estimation of an obstacle overcome, which enables us to estimate obstacles ahead of us and know that we can overcome something at least as hard or maybe harder.      When weightlifting it is unwise to try and lift more than about 10 pounds more than the heaviest thing you have lifted. Our muscles might be able to do it because they can grow quickly, but our tendons which don’t have direct blood flow might not be able to handle it, not to mention limitations in our ability to balance a much higher weight than we are used to might get us into trouble and the weight might fall on us. There is no exact num...

“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...