I've always loved cats. Almost every house I’ve lived in has had them, except for a few years when my allergies kicked up. And even then, my children insisted on adopting every stray that came by.
Right now we have two cats my daughter brought home from a barn but, after a move or two, couldn’t keep in her apartment.
Then there were the two Siamese I adopted from the woman I met at the unemployment office a few years ago. Maybe the location should have warned me, but she seemed so nice. She had these two “friends” she needed to “place,” and we’d had Siamese.
By the time it was over, one of them had taken a sizable chunk out of my hand, and our town’s animal control officer had to come over with a big cage to get the second one out of our house.
There’s a bigger truth here: life’s always easier in theory.
If you need the answer to a difficult problem, just ask someone who hasn’t got the problem. They’ll have the answer — in theory.
As a person of faith, I love everybody — in theory. It’s just a lot of the people I meet that I don’t like.
That leads to a much bigger topic: living life according to theory or, to put it more plainly, living life according to beliefs. Because isn't that what belief really is: a set of theory's about reality?
In some way, that question is more dangerous than out-of-control-cats. Of course, that's only my theory.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Thursday, September 17, 2009
What makes me mad (or not really)
All the discussion of explosive anger in the last few days — why a congressman yelled at the president, why two normally classy tennis champions blew up at the U.S. Open, why a bunch of people who oppose the current administration are doing it so ferociously — leads me to this wandering rumination.
I get irritated fairly regularly. I work at looking cool — and it works pretty well. I am impatient with lots of things, but it only gets loose occasionally.
However, when I do step over the boundaries, when I give myself permission to treat other people as if they are totally wrong and I am totally right (as in righteous), the explanations I give myself for that level of anger aren’t, I suspect, the real reasons for the explosion. When I go over the top, I pretty quickly notice that it's more deeply fueled than that.
Psychologists say our reasons for unrestrained anger are more often about pain, loss, fear and powerlessness than a momentary irritant. And that seems about right.
When I was younger, many of us believed everyone needed to “get their anger out,” express it, hit things, shout and scream. It was a common opinion at the time. In fact, an entire theory of therapy was built around a concept called primal scream. The stuff I read more recently seems to indicate that expressing anger on a regular basis leads, unsurprisingly, to more anger.
There have been times in my life when I decided I needed to get angry. It’s important to emphasize the “I” here. No one “had it coming.” It was more about breaking out of a habit of emotional carefulness I tend to fall into. (Ever feel like you’ve been holding your breath for a long time. I do that.)
It’s important to point out that, what I’m talking about here are emotional outbursts. That different than being deeply distraught over the destruction that greed and ego bring into our world.
Maybe that’s my point. I think most of the outrage I’m seeing in the news these day is self serving, childish and, to a sad level, strategic. It’s about “me.” It’s about "my way of taking control." It needs to grow up into something much more meaningful. Or calm down.
If you feel the need to rage, make sure you’re raging at the right stuff.
I get irritated fairly regularly. I work at looking cool — and it works pretty well. I am impatient with lots of things, but it only gets loose occasionally.
However, when I do step over the boundaries, when I give myself permission to treat other people as if they are totally wrong and I am totally right (as in righteous), the explanations I give myself for that level of anger aren’t, I suspect, the real reasons for the explosion. When I go over the top, I pretty quickly notice that it's more deeply fueled than that.
Psychologists say our reasons for unrestrained anger are more often about pain, loss, fear and powerlessness than a momentary irritant. And that seems about right.
When I was younger, many of us believed everyone needed to “get their anger out,” express it, hit things, shout and scream. It was a common opinion at the time. In fact, an entire theory of therapy was built around a concept called primal scream. The stuff I read more recently seems to indicate that expressing anger on a regular basis leads, unsurprisingly, to more anger.
There have been times in my life when I decided I needed to get angry. It’s important to emphasize the “I” here. No one “had it coming.” It was more about breaking out of a habit of emotional carefulness I tend to fall into. (Ever feel like you’ve been holding your breath for a long time. I do that.)
It’s important to point out that, what I’m talking about here are emotional outbursts. That different than being deeply distraught over the destruction that greed and ego bring into our world.
Maybe that’s my point. I think most of the outrage I’m seeing in the news these day is self serving, childish and, to a sad level, strategic. It’s about “me.” It’s about "my way of taking control." It needs to grow up into something much more meaningful. Or calm down.
If you feel the need to rage, make sure you’re raging at the right stuff.
Monday, September 14, 2009
It doen't matter how you feel
Whenever work gets as busy as it’s been the last few weeks, I think about the situation I hate most: having the responsibility without the power. Not power as in power-hungry. Power as in having the critical resources to get the job done right.
There are all sorts of things that can make you feel powerless in that way. True, it may be because you don't have the ability. But often it’s just as much about not having enough time, the right resources, the right information, etc. Few of these situations are perfect. (It may come down to having the right amount of fortitude.)
I mention this because it took me a lot of years to realize that some failures, sometimes, weren't comments on my inadequacy. (Many were, but not always.) And that discovery felt pretty good. Still does.
Of course, it didn't change the fact that things still have to get done--whether or not I have everything I need. Or how I feel about that.
I remember a February night when I was in college. It was about 2 am and 10 degree below zero in St. Paul. I was trying get my frozen Volkswagen started by having my Dad, who was visiting from our home in Des Moines, push my VW with his big Chevy. It was actually pretty easy back then to get a VW bug started, if you could just get it rolling a little. Anyway, after accidentally hooking our bumpers for the second time, having to get out the jack again and crawl around under the cars on the ice again, it occurred to me that feeling frozen and exhausted, and desperately wanting the whole thing to be over didn't matter. It wouldn’t get my car started.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter how you feel.
Those are the sorts of things that slide into the back of my head and make me a little crazy when the responsibilities begin to pile up. And my over-responsibility neurosis begins to kick up. But that's another story.
There are all sorts of things that can make you feel powerless in that way. True, it may be because you don't have the ability. But often it’s just as much about not having enough time, the right resources, the right information, etc. Few of these situations are perfect. (It may come down to having the right amount of fortitude.)
I mention this because it took me a lot of years to realize that some failures, sometimes, weren't comments on my inadequacy. (Many were, but not always.) And that discovery felt pretty good. Still does.
Of course, it didn't change the fact that things still have to get done--whether or not I have everything I need. Or how I feel about that.
Which leads to another thing I think about in busy times: sometimes feelings don’t matter.
I remember a February night when I was in college. It was about 2 am and 10 degree below zero in St. Paul. I was trying get my frozen Volkswagen started by having my Dad, who was visiting from our home in Des Moines, push my VW with his big Chevy. It was actually pretty easy back then to get a VW bug started, if you could just get it rolling a little. Anyway, after accidentally hooking our bumpers for the second time, having to get out the jack again and crawl around under the cars on the ice again, it occurred to me that feeling frozen and exhausted, and desperately wanting the whole thing to be over didn't matter. It wouldn’t get my car started.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter how you feel.
Those are the sorts of things that slide into the back of my head and make me a little crazy when the responsibilities begin to pile up. And my over-responsibility neurosis begins to kick up. But that's another story.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Length of view
A graphic phrase describing a valuable commodity: length of view.
On the NPR the other day they were talking about the 40th anniversary of what’s come to be called the Tate/Labianca murders. It came up because one of the women who “did it” is dying of cancer and coming up for parole, much like the recently released Libyan Lockerbie inmate.
If you’re too young to remember the murders, google Charles Manson and Helter Skelter. In the middle of the Summer of Love (’69), a Los Angles sociopath convinced some of his followers that murdering important people in the LA area, in a particularly brutal fashion, would spark of a race war that would change the world.
Looking back, you wonder how it could happen. But I remember that summer, and it wasn’t as hard to imagine in that context.
When you’re in the middle of something, it looks and feels very different. Getting to a sane outcome may depend on finding a way to lengthen the view.
Another example: I got angry at someone in my office last week and stomped off—I was totally inappropriate. But in that moment, I couldn’t find a way to think or feel that was not a bit unhinged.
Now there’s nothing unusual about getting irritated, happens all the time for the best of reasons and worst. But throwing a mini-tantrum is, when you look back on it the next morning, kind of humiliating. I called and apologized.
I only bring it up because it took until the next day for me get far enough away to see that I didn’t like what I’d done.
Length of view: we really could use some right now in the healthcare debate. Heat seems to be beating light.
Perhaps the health and humanity of a time, culture, group, family, personality ... whatever, can be partially measured by how rapidly it/they typically create and apply length of view.
On the NPR the other day they were talking about the 40th anniversary of what’s come to be called the Tate/Labianca murders. It came up because one of the women who “did it” is dying of cancer and coming up for parole, much like the recently released Libyan Lockerbie inmate.
If you’re too young to remember the murders, google Charles Manson and Helter Skelter. In the middle of the Summer of Love (’69), a Los Angles sociopath convinced some of his followers that murdering important people in the LA area, in a particularly brutal fashion, would spark of a race war that would change the world.
Looking back, you wonder how it could happen. But I remember that summer, and it wasn’t as hard to imagine in that context.
When you’re in the middle of something, it looks and feels very different. Getting to a sane outcome may depend on finding a way to lengthen the view.
Another example: I got angry at someone in my office last week and stomped off—I was totally inappropriate. But in that moment, I couldn’t find a way to think or feel that was not a bit unhinged.
Now there’s nothing unusual about getting irritated, happens all the time for the best of reasons and worst. But throwing a mini-tantrum is, when you look back on it the next morning, kind of humiliating. I called and apologized.
I only bring it up because it took until the next day for me get far enough away to see that I didn’t like what I’d done.
Length of view: we really could use some right now in the healthcare debate. Heat seems to be beating light.
Perhaps the health and humanity of a time, culture, group, family, personality ... whatever, can be partially measured by how rapidly it/they typically create and apply length of view.
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