Adam’s Peace

That’s right, I’m getting more and more motivated to shift my pair of dimes… I mean, shift my paradigms.

The first thing to figure out, though, are what my current paradigms are. This isn’t just what I think should happen… but how I am actually acting.

I live in an objective world, with only my emotions crossing over and firmly planted in the subjective. My paradigm says that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction… That quarks and electrons form the basic substance of the world.

The problem with that paradigm is it does not explain human interaction. It is an excellent map of all things chemical, but it does nothing for the behavioral world where money exists.

New Pseudo-Scientific Law:

The first paradigm shift that I want to make is one regarding people’s behaviors. I propose a new hypothesis: Subjective Behavior. People will behave the way that you expect them to.

This subjective theory has many applications. For a long time now, I have expected this site to grow very slowly… after all, who would want to come listen to me ramble on, knowing only half of the story? Because of this, I have about 30 people who are subscribed to the RSS feed. I also expected a very slow growth in the amount of income this site generates… and my Adsense earnings are hovering around $40, growing by an average of one dollar per month. (That’s total earnings… I haven’t received a check yet, despite having this site running for over a year.)

I have changed my expectations about people linking to this site. Before, I thought that many people would write many links about specific posts… after I had written some great posts. Well, people have linked in to the few select posts that I thought were great, but I have changed my paradigm about the whole site, and now the only links that I get are residual links from a list that circulated around the ‘net a couple months back.

I don’t expect great traffic from that list… but I could be wrong. Since that list came out, some great people have visited this site, and have made some great comments. Of course, some of the comments have been thinly veiled spam, but as in the case of Jonathan Wells’ comment that I approved this morning, some of these comments have been real gems. I don’t know how Jonathan found my site, but the list seems to be driving some high quality traffic, and it is introducing me to people who I would like to call friends.

A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Yesterday, I was in a terrible mood. When I woke up, I imagined my wife nagging me to work on some unfinished projects around the house. By the time my wife had awoken, I had run a hundred scenarios through my mind, and I wanted to get something done… yet I simply couldn’t think of what I could do. When my wife woke up, she found me on the computer, debating whether I should start programming or find something else to do, and she said that she wanted help on a couple of projects that day.

Instead of agreeing with her, and getting up to make coffee so that we would both be motivated/caffeinated enough to get work done, I fell into despair that I hadn’t thought of the projects sooner. I agreed to help, and sat at the computer filling time with idle tinkering. About an hour later, my wife asked me about one of those projects, and I took it as nagging, so I responded back that I’ll start it later. Of course, she noticed the annoyance in my voice, so she rightly took it personally. When she responded with annoyance in her own voice, I felt justified in believing that she was nagging, and the day went downhill from there.

It wasn’t until late that evening when I understood that I was wrong in my reactions. By that time, it was too late to salvage the day, but I remembered something my wife had told me before… She wants to be treated as though she were helping me, and as though we want to be together.

That night, before I went to bed, she hinted a couple of things to me, such as to do the dishes. Of course, I was completely oblivious to the hint until this morning, when I noticed the dishes still in the sink. The key is, I behaved to her exactly as she expected me to: To her, I blew off the dishes, leaving them for her to do. I certainly didn’t mean to… and if I had realized that she was getting tired of doing the dishes by herself all of the time, I would have jumped up to help… but I was expected to ignore the dishes, so ignore them I did.

Exploring a Faulty Paradigm

The real question is, what do I currently expect from myself when it comes to housework, and what do I expect from my wife?

To be honest, I expect that I will forget the housework, and that, when I think of it myself, I will procrastinate until someone else does it.

I expect my wife to do the housework most of the time… to be resentful that she isn’t being helped, and for her to nag me when I am obviously not doing my fair share.

What, then, would be a better paradigm? Obviously, my current paradigm isn’t working… It is only adding stress to our relationship, and only reinforcing my anxiety.

Can I expect that I will remember the housework? Well, I’m perfectly capable of remembering it, with a little help. I don’t expect my wife to want to remind me all of the time… but fortunately, I have a handy PDA that I can use to set reminders.

What about my expectation about procrastinating? Simply remembering is one thing… I can easily set reminders. Getting up and doing something once I remember is a completely different beast. I have reinforced my paradigm about procrastinating to the point where, even though I know it is as simple as changing my outlook, I still see it as a very difficult prospect.

My strength must come from within. I can not find motivation outside of myself, because it simply does not exist. There are no magical words that someone else can speak that would be guaranteed to change my mind. There is no pill that I can take, or some other ‘easy’ way to change my behavior except to actually change my behavior from within.

Perhaps here is a key. I want to stop procrastinating now. I recognize that, in the past I have wanted to procrastinate… but all that ever exists is right now. When I am conscious and living in the moment, I have never wanted to procrastinate. This means that, when I am reminded, I am living in the moment… so I want to start something, and I want to finish something.

This is the paradigm shift of living now. I can’t control the future, and I can’t change the past. I do live now… so when my circumstances now allow me to eliminate procrastination, my [new] paradigm says that I want to work now, and enjoy this work now, and accomplish great and wondrous thing now.

Changing my paradigms about my wife will be hard as well. Rather than expecting my wife to do all of the housework before I get home, I need to be more realistic. I know that she is just about as motivated to get things done as I am, so my new paradigm says that she will do things only when she is living in the moment. She may or may not get everything done, so it gives me an opportunity to look around and see what I can do. It becomes an opportunity for me to create new habits and to practice living in the moment.

As for her resenting when I don’t help… that is a harder paradigm to change. She doesn’t want to resent me… so she gives me hints. Each hint should be a clue to double-check. Last night, when my wife asked how many times I had done the dishes in the new house, it should have been a hint to double-check, to see if I could do the dishes again. She doesn’t resent my inaction until she believes I have been made aware… so if I am conscious that she hints at things, even after my repeated insistence that I am terrible at getting hints (another paradigm to change. I can get hints, I just need to be aware that they’re possible), then I can prevent her from ever being resentful.

When it comes to nagging… I simply need to be aware of her hints… be conscious of the moment, and realize that she doesn’t nag, she gives straightforward reminders to come back to reality when it is obvious that the hints aren’t taking hold. My wife honestly doesn’t nag… I simply interpret her helpful reminders as nagging, because of my own emotional baggage and ego.

A Fifth of a dollar, shifted

My old paradigm is broken… I have tried to work with it for several years, but it simply hasn’t given me results.

My new paradigm says that all of human interaction is subjective… that is, by changing my own interpretations, I can realistically change what is happening objectively. To put it a slightly different way, this new paradigm says that, whatever I expect from myself and from other people becomes reality. If I expect more people to begin visiting this site regularly, then they indeed will visit more regularly, because I will take action and interact with people based on that expectation. In fact, that is one of my expectations, because I am once again getting comfortable in my own skin, and people enjoy conversations with honest, open people who are willing to explore their faults openly.

How many people actually like what they see in the mirror?

I have to admit, I’m one of those who don’t like to look in the mirror, because I’m afraid of what I might find. Yet, my recent changes, starting about two weeks ago, have forced me to actually look; and not just look, but to be who I see staring back at me.

As I have told others before, it is a humiliatingly empowering experience. I recognize things in me that I would have never had guessed before. I see faults magnified out of proportion, and I recognize that they are only so big because I am afraid of them. I see wonderful qualities hidden away behind an excuse of humility, which were really hidden out of guilt and shame.

In some of my recent emails, I have been using the phrase “my (strangely twisted) logic” because I have trained myself to magnify my shortcoming and hide my better qualities. I am told that many other people do this to, but without enterring their minds and examining their thoughts directly, I can’t confirm this. I can only guess that some of the same problems that I’m facing are the same problems other people face, and I am certain that many people have gone before me and have found ways around the same mental blocks that I’m now facing.

I trained myself to use this strangely twisted logic out of fear. I recognize this now, because those events are behind me, open to the book of the past so that they can be studied in detail. While I was making those decisions, though, I could not see the fear just under the surface. I know that I have only seen the tip of my problems, just like most of an iceburg’s mass sits under the water, and that fear still sits just beneath the surface, hidden behind the mask of living in the present. Yet, recognizing that I have uncontrolled fears has been amazingly empowering. Those fears are certainly humiliating, but naming each one allows me to contain it, and once it is contained, I can work around it and push through it.

Part of my strangely twisted logic is to focus on those fears. I realize, logically, that when I focus on a fear, it gains power over me. For instance, if I am afraid of disappointing my wife, my natural reaction is to avoid her, and to tell her what I believe she wants to hear. This works great in the short term… yet when what I tell her doesn’t quite match up with what is really happening, I disappoint her even more. My reactions to my fear has caused me to bring that fear to a reality, with worse consequences than if I had just told the truth in the first place.

Focusing on these fears actually make the fears stronger, in my case. When I disappoint my wife by lieing to her, I have to face both the internal consequences of disappointing her as well the external consequences of her anger and distrust. This reinforces the fear, sort of a little voice in the back of my head saying “I told you so” and increasing my fear of disappointing her even more. (Alright, so I don’t have a little voice in the back of my head mocking me. If it were a voice, it would be easier to ignore. It is just an overwhelming feeling of dread that I can’t shake by doing anything but avoiding the stressful situations. Of course, this just makes those situations worse, until I can’t avoid that feeling of dread at all.)

Well, this is exactly what prompted my change. I had gotten myself into a cycle of avoiding my wife and avoiding telling her the truth. I told her a lie about sending a fax to a potential landlord, and was caught, as usually happens when I lie. After listening to her for about half an hour, I went and took a walk around the neighborhood (about one mile round trip… quite short all things considered). During that time, I kept asking myself why I lie… I certainly don’t enjoy lieing, and nearly every time I do lie, I get caught. I honestly had no idea. As I was making my way back to the street where we live, my wife sent me a message on the phone asking where I was, so I decided to not take extra trips around the neighborhood, even though I was still feeling all of my emotions, and just make the final turn down the street. She was standing out front, so I invited her to take a walk around the block so that we could talk things out. We made it around the block, with me asking why I lie, her pointing out there really is no reason to lie, and her pointing out a lot of my best features that I don’t take credit for.

As we rounded the corner back to where we live, she pointed out that I was afraid of her. It was a new idea to me, but as I thought about it, it made more and more sense. I love her, so I do what I can to do the best for her… Because I’m uncertain of my abilities, and because I have disappointed her in the past, I’m afraid of disappointing her in the future. We all know how my strangely twisted logic leads me to make my fears worse when I concentrate on them, so we can imagine just how far this fear of disappointing my wife had gone.

My father had overheard the argument earlier, so when he noticed that we had come back, he came outside to talk with me. He told me simply that I will make mistakes, and I’ll either learn from them, or I’ll avoid them. It seems to be a family trait for us to compartmentalize our lives completely, so that when we are doing one task, we perform it to the exclusion of all other tasks. We don’t ignore anything… we simply have no concept of anything else except for what we are working on at the time. He gave me some tips on how to overcome this… (Namely, write things down, and when I’m done with a task, or taking a break from it, take a glance at the list. It’s okay to not do a task right away, but always write a task down right away, or it goes into the great /dev/null bit bucket of the brain… It simply ceases to exist until something else reminds us, and often, that’s too late.)

The real change came when my father told me that he knew I had a lot of different emotions… but all that I had to do was let them go. He didn’t tell me to bottle them up, to hide from them, or to ignore them… simply let them go. He didn’t recomend that I purge them or push them away, or to express them until I couldn’t feel them anymore. He simply said to let them go, and as he said that, the feelings of frustration, of fear, and of helplessness left, to be replaced by peace. They didn’t go far… but they didn’t cling either. The best way to describe it would be like ending a phone call with a good friend… You know that you can call them again, and if they need you, they can call you… but they’re simply not there at the moment, and that is okay.

So, that was my first real step towards these recent changes. There are many quotes about fear being the only thing we truly have to fear, and of how the truth is empowering, so I am taking a fresh look at my life. I still have frustration, fear, and helplessness available to call upon if I need them, but I also have many other emotions to call upon whenever I want. The key is, I have to be honest about what I want.

So, I’m going to write a few lists to post here, saying what I want, what I am afraid of, what my best qualities are, and whatever comes to mind. First, I’ll start with a list of what I want… and I’ll warn you now, some of these might surprise you, since they surprise me.

P.S.  If you saw this title posted as “Something to rename,” I appologize.  I forgot to rename it.  Chalk it up to just not paying attention. 

Alright… There has been enough hiding behind an idealized vision of myself.

Simply put: I’m human. I do not have all of the answers, but I have a lot of opinions.

I have a life purpose to bring peace to everybody, which is also one of the many projects that I have. Most projects need foundations if they are to succeed, and simply having a purpose, without direction, is not enough for me.

My purpose remains to bring peace to everybody. But, it needs to be real peace, both political and individual, founded on truth, with opinions and ideal situations clearly labeled.

The first hard truth that I need to share is that I have trouble identifying my own problems. I am too emotionally involved in my own life to make an objective assessment of what I’m doing wrong. I am a very prideful person who excells at escaping into alternate versions of reality in order to deal with stress.

The second hard truth is that I have many fears… Fears that when looked at objectively are irrational.

Well, it isn’t the fears themselves that are irrational. It is my reactions to them that make them irrational. For instance, I fear failure. Because of that fear, I don’t take any chances. Objectively, of course, that means that I will never succeed, since I never even tried… but at least I didn’t fail, right? I fear being judged by other people… and so, I create false masks to hide behind, so that nobody sees who I really am. Of course, when people see me wearing two different masks, they begin to judge me even more… so by avoiding judgment, I guarantee judgment.

I have several other examples, but if I point out all of my faults in one big post, I may never stop typing, and I won’t have any material for future posts.

I do have one final vice to warn everybody about: I am addicted to lying. I am making a promise now to stop lying on this blog. If I lie, I’ll come clean. If I don’t come clean, my wife will tell everyone for me.

For the record, here are the lies and half-truths so far:

• I quit smoking. Actually, I made it two weeks, then picked it up again. I’ll have a future post about smoking.
• I am nearly finished with TimeAgent. Actually, I lost it all when upgrading my computer last week. I did have a nearly finished version that I was about to release into Beta testing… but now, I’m back to starting it from scratch. I expect to re-begin development after I have moved, towards the middle of December.
• I got a medical discharge from the U.S. Army because of a hip injury. Well, I didn’t exactly say that, but I most certainly implied it. I did get a medical discharge. I did have a hip injury while in the Army that is still bothering me today. The two are unrelated, however. I was discharged for a personality disorder… My fears of being judged definitely did not help me while in the Army, and together with a habit of lying, I couldn’t keep myself out of trouble.  I served honorably and did some great things, but I didn’t have the personality of a soldier, so I took a medical discharge and moved on.
• I like to clean.  Well, actually, I do like to clean…  when I actually do clean.  I am a slob.  My desk is covered in things that should have been put away weeks ago, and my litter box for my cats does not get emptied as often as it should.  I hate starting to clean, but once I have set my mind to it, I enjoy it, and I find that the moment I finish cleaning and I look at what I have done, it more than makes up for it.  Now, if I could only make that a habit, I would be set…  and my wife would be a lot happier as well.

There might be some other things that I have said that aren’t entirely true…  but that is all that I can think of right now.  Like I said, though, I am making a promise to come clean about any dishonesty, and if I do lie again in the future, I will come clean quickly.

I won’t be giving advice anymore.  I will be relating stories of what is happening in my own life, of the trials that I am facing and overcoming, as well as the trials that I am facing and am failing in.  If this is no longer your idea of a good day’s reading, then I will be sorry to see you go, but I am glad that you are opening up more time in your day to read things that will help you more than I can, or perhaps pursue other tasks that don’t involve reading blog posts.  If you decide to stay, I ask that you remind me of blunt truths when you see that I have overlooked something.

I am but an egg.