Commitment to Gratitude
As I look out at the world, especially in the incredible times we live in right now with all the turmoil, uprising, pointless deaths, instability and chaos in so many places in the world, and then look outside my door, it’s hard not to be a little shocked by how different my life is here in an affluent, developed country. Even some of the arguably most powerful men in the world do not live as well as many of us do here. Look at Bin Laden, found living in relative squalor until his demise.
When I see these things I am struck big time with the thought that, wow, we really do have it good, those of us living in the USA, Canada, Europe, etc. But how often, and seriously, do we consider how blessed we are?
I don’t know about you, but I am so very, very grateful for my life in a free country. My gratitude, however, goes way beyond the free country thing. I have to tell you, when i take time to be grateful (and i really need to do it more often), that very process and feeling of gratitude boosts my satisfaction, contentment, and happiness levels! It’s almost like magic.
So I’m thinking, this month, let’s start a habit of gratitude, hitting that button 2 or 3 times a day. Appreciating what we have will be good for our spirits, our attitude, our family, our outlook on life, and, by extension the world out there that is working through the chaos and pressure of broad and often, unstoppable, change. It’s the least we can do for them, and ourselves.
35 Years Is Enough
When you ‘retire’ it is not time to sit down and watch the world go by. It is time to go re-read your favorite 10, 20 or 100 books, to re-learn all those things that may have slipped slowly away over the years. It’s time to re-connect with old friends and make new friends. It’s time to start a new business or donate your time to a great cause. It’s time to visit a few 3rd world countries and see how many people you can help. It’s time to improve learn, and re-learn.
If you are thinking, “Hey, I don’t have enough energy to do some let alone all of the aboveâ€, well, then maybe you need to re-fire yourself by setting a goal to generate more energy. I am talking about rebuilding your body and mind through a regiment of physical exercise and a super-charged diet. Eat more and more fruits and veggies. Set a goal to stop sitting around just watching TV. Get up and move about. You’ll see that the movement itself, whether it’s walking, running, hiking, tennis, bowling even just playing pool, will energize and re-fires you all by itself.
Then once you have some of that renewed energy running through you, get back to living, not retiring. You have so many more years yet and so much to do.
Battling Depression: It is not WHO you are
When asked who we are, we often reply with listing our common activities such as our job, hobbies, or position in the family, or we may list our physical characteristics such as hair color, stature, or ethnicity. However, this is not who we are just parts of what we are.
In the same and more detrimental manner, we tend to identify ourselves to ourselves by things we see as deficiencies such as being overweight, not smart enough, being a procrastinator or being pessimistic. The issue with this type of thinking is that it perpetuates the problem that lead us to identify ourselves as our struggles rather than seeing our issues as being separate from who we are.
Eckhart Tolle explains how these lead to perpetual cycles of disorder especially when it comes to psychological pain. He notes in his book, “The Power of Now”, that identifying the pain as you, your actual being, allows the pain to not only live as you but feed on this thought of it being your identity. If you think of yourself as a depressed person, you are giving the depression the authority to take over so that no matter what you try to do you do it as a depressed person, not the true self that exists separate from the mood disorder. In other words, you can’t get rid of your depression if you insist on carrying it with you everywhere you go.
The only way to start to heal is to detach your issues from who you are. You do this inside, in the mind. Closely and carefully observe your thoughts and the attachment that you have to “my depression” or “my pain”. Observe the compulsion to talk or think about it and consciously halt those thoughts. Remind yourself that this pain is but an item on your to-do list–probably on the top of the list in big, red letters–but it is something to be worked on, not be.
When you start to dis-identify with your pain and when you become a good “watcher of your thinking”, the depression, anger, etc. can and will eventually cease. It cannot exist without you tending to it and allowing it to take over who you are. A good or great life really is an “inside job” and you are the inside person for it!
Vigilance as the Key to Battling Depression
In my book “How to Ignite Your Passion for Living”, I touch upon some of the depressive episodes I have been through and some of the ways I have dealt with them. I have a whole list of simple but effective things you can do to combat depression. And although I still believe the items on that list to be important actions, I think Eckhart Tolle, in his book “The Power of Now”, has hit upon the true source and most effective ideas to combat depression as well as other mood disorders.
The first few ideas on his list are some of the most important, at least in my experience. They deal with becoming a watcher of one’s thoughts and redirecting the mind when we start to buy into the idea of “being a depressed person”:
• Vigilance is one of the first concepts he speaks to. Learning to recognize how your mind labels thoughts and sits in judgment so you know what ideas lie at the source of your pain.
• Secondly, Tolle believes that you need to accept whatever the present moment contains as if you had chosen it.
• Thirdly, you need to realize and understand that the pain or depression wants you to unconsciously identify with it, allowing it to survive in your mind. If you are not a careful watcher of your thoughts then you may come to believe that you are a depressed person and then this becomes your identity.
Letting your mind create this depression identity will make it very difficult to get past the dark feelings and the pain because you will then believe this is who you are. But if you start with these first few ideas of Tolle’s, recognizing how your mind is working and seeing the present moment as something under your control, you can avoid the mindset that makes you think of yourself as a “depressed person”.
These ideas are true for any issues of mood. I choose to talk about them in terms of depression because that has been a recent and difficult battle of mine. However, if you are dealing with anger, guilt, low self-esteem, fear, etc. watching your thoughts and taking control can help you with all types of painful moods and attitudes.
Find Your Forward Movement
For me the most helpful point in Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, is to take time to set structure to our lives, including tough goals that push us to the limit. He says true enjoyment is characterized by forward movement; the act of pushing ourselves beyond what we are programmed to do to achieve something unexpected.
There are likely a number of things you do already that reach or approach this ideal and get you to that state of flow. For me it includes:
• Playing a close game of tennis that stretches my ability
• Pushing myself to the max in stretching , yoga style
• Reading a book that reveals things in a new light
• Closing a tough real estate deal
• Having a conversation that leads to a discovery of gives me new ideas
• Spending time writing in my journal and setting more goals and plans with dates to push myself
• Working out very, very hard
• Climbing or cycling up a big tough mountain
I think we should all become aware of the flow experiences that push us towards the unexpected, giving us the experiences and forward movement that brings true happiness and contentment. Consider taking the time to figure out what those are for you. Then make them a priority and see if you don’t find your life quite a bit more satisfying.
The Difference Between Pleasure and Happiness
If what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says in “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” is true, the key to happiness is being involved in every detail of our lives and taking action with intention. It all comes down to our focus, both in being mindful of what we do as well as keeping our attention on the condition of our life. This is never easy. As mentioned last week, we have built-in desires and tendencies that disrupt our focus and distract us from our intended actions.
Personally I think a huge part of this is that we mistake pleasure for happiness. Things that are pleasurable, that fulfill our immediate desires, do not necessarily bring happiness as they are really two different things.
Consider what you think of as ‘pleasurable’–food, relaxation, physical contact with others, etc.–then think about the things that actually make you happy and feel fulfilled–recognition for your hard work, winning a competition, learning something new, etc. An action can feel pleasurable, enough to continue doing it, but you may not enjoy it in the end (heavy drugs or alcohol use quite often result in this seemingly contradictive state). Yet you can do things that are painful but give you great contentment, like pushing yourself to finish a marathon or living frugally because you put all your money into your new business. What makes you happy, and breeds contentment, are those things that challenge you and add complexity to your life, not the sensations of a momentary pleasure.
If you understand this and can recognize the difference, the battle over “self” that I talked about last week will be much easier. If you let your mind be constantly diverted from your plans and intentions by activities that are fleetingly pleasurable such as excessive eating, television, recreational drug use, drinking too much alcohol, etc. you will not enjoy your life. They just can’t provide you with the lasting contentment that comes from facing difficult challenges and accomplishing long term plans.
Pleasurable, healthy diversions do not have to be a disruption. If you plan for them they can become part of the order and progress that your happiness is built on. That is how you achieve focus and flow, with intentions fulfilled and distractions under control. The key here is recognizing what is a distraction and what will, in the end, provide you with the happiness and contentment you are after.
Increase Contentment–Shut out the ‘Self’
In the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csikszentmihaly says the battle over self is the only battle that you must win for complete contentment, that all other battles will be relatively easy when battle over self is won.
It’s not an easy battle, I can tell you. But it helps if you understand what ‘self’ is and can recognize it.
Self is that part of you that is instinctual, the part that would prefer to rest, eat more, and spend more time in physical pleasures. This part of ourselves is rooted in our long ago past. Way back when every day was focused on just surviving, we had to rest whenever we could because every waking hour was spent hunting and gathering. It was also a time when food wasn’t always readily available so you would eat up when you could. And as lifespans were short, a strong sex drive was a matter of survival for our species. These desires for rest, food, and sex were a necessary part of our lives.
Our society and our way of life have evolved dramatically in a relatively short time but these impulses did not. We still battle the instinctual self every day, trying not to be distracted by it so we can accomplish the things we want and know we should be doing. When we are in ‘flow’, however, all of this inherent self falls away. Our world becomes the challenge we are engaged in and nothing more. We are no longer battling old instincts or even wrestling with modern pressures. There is no self to be concerned with, just the task at hand and that sense of contentment it brings.
It would be great if we instantly fall into this flow state whenever we needed it but it’s just not that easy to overcome the self. However, we can work towards it in many things we do, shutting out that voice that sidetracks us or complains about the work to be done. This is the old, unnecessary ‘self’ talking to you. Learn to recognize it for what it is and shut it out. We can’t do much about it being there, but we don’t have to listen to it either. That is another thing about modern man. We have a choice.
Getting into the ‘Flow’
I recently sat down and re-read, for maybe the 6th or 7th time, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s fantastic book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. He has some very intriguing ideas and I wanted to share some them with you over the next few weeks.
First of all, the basic idea of the book and the theory he discusses is that we are happiest when we are in, what he calls, a state of ‘flow’. This is that moment when you become completely engrossed in what you are doing and everything else around you kind of disappears. Some people call it being in the zone or getting in a groove. But whatever it’s called, it is usually spoken of with fervor, excitement or longing and I think we’d all like to spend a lot more time there.
You can only be in flow, though if the task on hand is of particular interest to you and you have some level of skill to work with. Plus it needs to be challenging–nothing frustratingly hard, but challenging enough to motivate you to keep working at it. A natural interest combined with a testing of our skills gives us an intense sense of fulfillment, so much so that things like time, food, comfort, and even ego are lost. We get to a point where we do the task for the sake of the task and reach a state of productive harmony.
I’m thinking, though, you don’t have to get into the zone or a groove to make these ideas bring more happiness into your life on a regular basis. Whether it’s tasks you are accomplishing at your job, with your business, while working on a hobby or even fixing up the house you can develop your skills so that you do what you do well. Then challenge yourself and your skills. That same sense of fulfillment and happiness can be a part of your every day then, not just those super cool moments when you’re in the flow. But, of course, making it a goal to have more of those trance like flow moments would certainly make for a happier you as well.
Life Should Not Be a String of Sundays
It’s so easy to get overly relaxed when you are in Hawaii as I have been these last few weeks. These relaxing days do allow me to reach some major mental breakthroughs and really think through the ideas that come to me. This trip out, I was really struck by how lost I can feel, even during these relaxing days and it got me thinking about how common this feeling can be for people in mid and later life. You’ve worked so hard for years, looking forward to retirement, and then once you get there, you start having these days where you simply have no direction. And you start to realize, the carefree retirement life isn’t quite what you expected.
I see this all the time in people around me and many times inside myself. When one retires or semi-retires it becomes like one long string of Sundays. For most people in America, Sunday is the lazy day, the day when you don’t have any particular plans, a day to unwind and not answer to the clock. But when you do this every day, it actually can get depressing.
As it turns out, Sunday morning has been found to be the most depressing time of the week. Seems very odd that this can be true but the reason is pretty simple. It’s because we don’t usually have any particular goals, plans or structure for that time of the week, unlike the work week and the often busy, errand and play day on Saturday. Likewise, when a person retires, the constant structure of their life is gone and without those goals and deadlines, they begin to feel lost.
Retirement is not a bad thing. I can certainly attest to its advantages. But even in retirement, there should be goals and plans. It’s just that this time, you don’t have an employer to please, or a family to provide for so you can determine just what you want to do without those concerns. The key is having the structure, the challenges, and the hopes that made you get up every day before retirement. You don’t stop having dreams when you get older, so there is no reason to stop making plans.
Embracing What We Cannot Change
There were so many awe-inspiring, extraordinarily beautiful, and even startling sights during our recent trip to the Asia. But one of the oddest things—or at least one that really struck me—was the incongruous vision of Buddhist monks walking around the temple areas, looking down as they went, at something we are all very familiar with yet would not expect to see at a Buddhist temple–cell phones! Yes, these monks, ages anywhere from, (would you believe) 8 or 9 years old to 80 or 90 years old—were walking and texting or talking on that very, modern invention.
It didn’t seem to fit at all and it took a while to get somewhat used to seeing the simple Buddhist ways combined with modern technology. Didn’t Buddhist traditionally renounce conventional living? But it occurred to me after a while, that they also attach great importance to community and isn’t keeping in touch part of that? And then there’s the Buddhist philosophy of “if you can’t change something then accept it”. And I’ve been thinking about that particular outlook on and off ever since then.
It’s really a very important idea, one that we should all make a part of our lives. Whether it’s a simple thing like not getting upset at standing in line or being in a huge traffic jam or the heart-breaking circumstance of dealing with the illness or death of a loved one, we need to focus on accepting what we cannot change. Fighting it by getting angry, depressed, or taking any other destructive or non-constructive path will not make it better and often leads to more unhappiness.
I know it’s easy to say, accept it and let it go or embrace it, and much harder to act on that idea. But if there is any time of the year that would make it easier to try and live by this philosophy, it must be now, during the holiday season when forgive and forget, be of good cheer, and learning to see that it’s “A Wonderful Life†is being preached and practiced all around us. So, let’s all think about that and put it into action in our lives and I promise that we will all feel so much better.
A Happy Holiday to you and yours.
