Patience

I think I've found one of those wonderful hints that explains how I got here (here meaning my current state of being). It relates to patience.

I used to be pretty impatient. I was a little fireball in a lot of ways as a kid, feeling free to emotionally explode about any number of meaningless situations. People who can get really angry, and do so frequently (or used to), understand that there's a satisfying element to 'freaking out'. In the short term. And when I was younger, little things were more dramatic and it was the perfect canvas to improve my freaking out.

Somewhere along the line, I started to get a lot of negative response to my abrasive behavior, and I did a U-turn. I flipped inwards and became Switzerland (neutral - or at least, it used to be). Instead of getting angry about things, I either stayed completely opinon-less, or I ignored the situation/allowed myself to be distracted. This is the source of my lack of focus, I'd wager.

Speaking of distraction:

 This is what I came up with when I searched for 'neutral'

Awesome.

Recently I've had a bit of butting heads with someone in my life, and although it added a bit of stress, it was beneficial because it helped illuminate this U-turn that I made Way-Back-When.

What I've extrapolated is that now, not only do I try to avoid angry outbursts, but I work hard to keep a situation completely placid - I'm a peacekeeper of sorts. But what it really does is allow anger to bubble up inside of me and not get released when another of my previous ilk tries to aggress themselves all over the situation (probably not a real word). It also usually doesn't solve the problem.

Worst of all, I seem opinion-less when in fact I have a lot to say.

I wrote a blog entry a little bit ago about my bubbling anger and how I was learning to control it. That was about controlling my anger when its presence was unnecessary in my body. In this instance, it was acceptable to feel anger, and it needed to be released in some fashion or another.

In speaking about my concern with said person the other day, I realized that I was stumbling over my explanation of how I was feeling because I was so infuriated inside. I was trying to be completely fair and rational, but also trying to express the frustration I was feeling. This caused an internal battle, since my anger was too irrational and my approach was too neutral.

Remember the Mr. Men?!
Nostalgia.... 

Ultimately, I got my point across and the situation was resolved. Pat on the back, release of stress, and we're back on the low-stress, happiness road. So how does patience play into this? Though it didn't stand in full confidence this time around, I'm ready for next time. 

Patience can act as an objective filter, allowing anger to emerge in a timely way so as to allow a semi-coherent request to be spoken. Anger, unchecked, can lead to accusation, but allowing it to formulate into a request for the anger-inducing situation to change is preferred. 

A person speaking with this 'checked' anger will speak in a truly powerful voice.

Some of the things I write are shocking to me. I read them and I think, "Really? No kidding. I think most other people learned this when they learned how to first engage in a conversation - when they were 3. People reading this must see it as a flowery way of stating the obvious."

"Twice the amount of a singular digit, combined with twice the amount of an additional singular digit has a sum equal to the amount of four singular digits."

Or...

2+2=4.

See the predicament? Ah, well. Perhaps I am a little late in the game and perhaps I'm working on words coming out of me more than having really intellectual thoughts to write about. Who can say. I'm sure everyone questions what emerges from them on a daily basis, though, and I won't let that deter me.

Persistence and determination - gotta make better acquaintances with those chaps. I've thought we were friends, but it was actually stubbornness in disguise.

Little Miss Stubborn

Asking Questions

I've always been one to ask a lot of questions. When I was young I remember asking question after question, wanting to understand 'what this means', 'how this works', and 'why this is'. My parents were willing to indulge my questions, but it wasn't too long after going to school that I started to develop negative correlations with my many questions.

When I was in school, I had a feeling of isolation from a number of my classmates. There were kids who weren't listening to the teacher, kids who were too intimidated or insecure to ask a question, or kids who weren't motivated enough to ask questions because they didn't realize the benefit questioning could have. Therefore, I felt alone as I stuck my hand high in the air, looking down at those other kids who were slumped down, trying to hide in their chairs.

This latter type of person, the unmotivated questioner, has become an epidemic that I see prevalent in a lot of people (of all ages) today. These people are acting on what they are being told, without questioning it enough to know why they are acting, or whether or not they prefer the action over another one they could freely choose.

It's easy to be pulled along, responding to what you are being told, believing the world is as the people around you are telling it is, and not worrying about other possibilities of existence. This is due to fear of too many options. To avoid overwhelm and failure, we settle.

I did and still do think that it's important to ask questions. I wouldn't have been able to self-motivate and create things for myself if I didn't know why contrasting behaviors wouldn't be beneficial. Trial and error is how we learn, and it involves questioning ourselves before, during and after our active choices. 

However. The next experience I began having in school as I got older, into high school, was a lack of encouragement by my teachers. Some teachers just wanted to get through their curriculum, other teachers probably felt that holding onto one topic for too long was appealing to the lowest common denominator when they needed to keep an average pace to appeal to the general population of students. Either way, many times I was sitting in class, with my hand raised for five minutes, the muscles slowly losing strength, only to have my teacher admit that they weren't going to call on me because I was asking too many questions.

"A symptom of not listening is asking too many questions". This is something that I wrote down the other day and it struck me. I've been having concerns about my focus and deeply listening - can there be too many questions?

I did stop asking so many questions as a result of being ignored (or so it felt) in class. And then, I realized that to many kids, it was cool to pass notes and not pay attention to the teachers. I was pulled into that world, where I began to perfect my skills of half-listening and multi-tasking.

So was it the teacher's fault? I don't suppose so - with a class full of students you can only answer so many from each of them. Was it my fault for not really listening and just trying to think of a question for everything I heard? I wouldn't imagine so - I was learning how to question and understand everything around me, all the time. What really happened, which was no one's fault, was that I went from one extreme, and once learning it was not ideal, went to the other extreme.

I keep coming back to balance. It's all one huge balancing act, and being too aggressive or too passive in the approach yields similarly unsuccessful results. And there isn't a spreadsheet with numerical limits to my questions to keep me aware of when I'm asking too many - "Oh! No, you asked 6 questions in the past 3 minutes. Sorry, you have to wait two minutes before you have another question in your queue."

Ha - spreadsheets and clearly outlined rules - of course I would ask for that.

I've been attempting to allow my questions to come through one at a time. It's sort of like eating: if I ask a question and sit with the response for a little bit, sometimes when I go to ask my next question I'll realize I'm 'full' sooner than I expected and I don't really need to ask the next question.

I need patience so I can review what I know and have just learned and make sure it stays in my mind, before I go and try to stuff more things in there. Previously, my technique involved replacing the thing I had learned before with the new thing I just learned. Didn't make for creating broader contexts from which more knowledge could be inferred.

Speaking slowly and asking questions slowly - I definitely sound like I'm from the west coast now :-)

The Immediate Mind

As a runner, it would only be natural to share a metaphorical anecdote (can you use 'metaphor' as an adjective? Can those words be paired together as one noun? Probably not, but anyway...) about running - in relation to my thought process.

While running today, I decided that I was going to try not to think of anything - use a simple meditation to allow my eyes to see the woods that I was running through, my nose to smell the air, my lungs to take in breath regularly, and generally be present with a quiet mind.

I think I lasted a few minutes. Then, maybe 10 minutes later I realized that I'd started thinking, planning, calculating, and I missed the transition somehow. So I reign the beast in, tugging harshly on the leash of my giddy thought-tangent-puppies, and work on calming my mind once again. Suddenly I'm back, but this time I feel the switch. I am deeper in my body, my body feels more real, and I'm present.

The interesting thing: suddenly my lungs and body set off "I'm-not-going-to-last-as-long-as-I-just-thought-I-would!" and "Woah!-sudden-intensity-added-to-this-process" alarms.

Where this lead me is to an understanding of productivity. When I am present and focused in the moment, I am working hard and getting results. At this point my process also involves the increased work of constantly having to reign my mind in and remind myself, "you can be enjoying this more fully!". Regardless, when I accomplish something in this mindset, it is from a deeper place - a place of strength, power, and creativity. It is harder, and it should be.

What I accomplish when I'm scattered/busy/work-driven and in what I am going to call my "Immediate Mind" is excessive and seemingly productive, but shallow. I can think about meaningless scheduling, details, numbers, and sketch out ideas I don't follow through on, running for two miles without realizing it, but I'm not getting the same workout as I do when I begin thinking about something more powerful. Then my body is more fully engaged; I might run less of a distance, but the quality of my run has vastly improved.

Quality, not quantity - I can sum this entry up into those three words.

The word "quality" is quite amusing to me. In 6th grade I had a teacher who always was licking his lips. He must have had some sort of Dry Lip Syndrome or something, because every other word he was sticking out his big ol' tongue and circling it around the front of his face. And I'm not just talking about a dainty lip moisten. This was a face lapping.

And his favorite word to say to us - Quality.

It might have been his favorite word because he could do the face slobbering while saying the word at the same time: his tongue would emerge while saying the 'L'.

So anyway. I guess the tongue was distracting me from the validity of his respect for quality.

If it takes longer to gain knowledge and skill, so be it.  I'm going to find my creativity through re-learning patience.

I want to more consistently drink from a much deeper well.

Breathe Deeply