Greg Proffit Writing

Category: Awareness

  • Do Not Borrow Problems Not Yours To Solve

    Do Not Borrow Problems Not Yours To Solve

    do not borrow problems
    Photo by Olav Ahrens Røtne on Unsplash

    # 97 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: Do not borrow problems not yours to solve. Life will give you enough to do.

    Do you know what the biggest problem facing most people is? Their biggest problem is that they don’t know what their biggest problem is. Maybe this is you.

    We all know people who make it their life’s work to stick their nose into other people’s business. We’ve all got friends and family and co-workers coming out our ying-yangs telling us how to do this or that, or how to fix something or other we know good and well they have neither experience nor expertise we can rely on.

    Don’t do that. Don’t borrow problems that aren’t yours to solve. You just make yourself a royal pain-in-the-ass. Life will give you enough to do just focusing on your own shit.

    When you receive unsolicited advice from someone telling you what you should do about whatever, and you can see they are drowning in a cesspool of their own unsolved problems, how does that feel? Do you consider them a trusted source? Do you appreciate their concern and rush to incorporate their advice?

    No Poseurs Allowed!

    Hell no! You don’t want to be that guy/girl/non-binary poseur either.

    Leave other people’s problems alone. Leave them alone until they ask you. The invitation to pitch in with help and advice in someone else’s affairs is a sacred trust. Don’t neglect it and don’t abuse it. Be the person who gets asked your opinion, not the kind who never gets asked yet can’t stop giving it.

    One day soon, I will write a story titled, How To Know If You Are A Good Parent. The story will comprise one question and two follow up comments.

    The question: Do your kids ask for your advice?

    The comments: If yes, you are a good parent. If not, you need some improvement.

    Now, like chord positions on a guitar neck, this story can be transposed to play in different keys. We can change it from the key of Parenting to the key of Friendship, say. We can then change the title substituting Friend for Parent and keep the content of the story exactly the same. See how nice that works?

    Is this too simplified? Maybe. But then, I’m a simple guy. Let’s keep things real, shall we?

    Don’t borrow problems not yours to solve. Go to work on your biggest problem. Start by figuring out exactly what that is.

    We good?

  • Try Not To Learn Anything New Today — It’s Harder Than It Looks

    Try Not To Learn Anything New Today — It’s Harder Than It Looks

    Try Not To Learn Anything Today - hoarded books
    How I imagine my mind. (How’d that girl with the vinyl backpack get in here?) Photo by Darwin Vegher on Unsplash

    # 18  on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: ”Try to learn something new every day,” is often included on lists like this. Instead, try not to. By trying not to, you’ll become aware of how much you learn everyday without even trying, you just have to be awake enough to catch it.

    I enjoy “life-tips” lists. Invariably, they advise us to try to learn something new each day. I read those words and hear Yoda in my head, “There is no Try! There is only Do or Do Not!”

    Still, my tip condenses to this: Try not to learn anything new today. I’m a professional non-conformist. I’m not plagiarizing that usual worn-out tip. Instead, we’ll try the opposite.

    I’m sure I must have let some days pass without learning anything new. The likelihood of that seems like a reasonable assumption given a span of some 15K days. But I’d be stunned if I’ve failed to learn something in more than 1% of them. The other 99% of the time, new facts and information falls on me, follows me home, and piles up.

    If you’re awake, you learn without trying. If. You’re. Awake.

    I’m not going all woo-woo metaphysical here. You don’t have to be the Dalai Lama, or Buddha himself. You’ll learn stuff if you remain just reasonably alert and half sober.

    But, I’m contradicting my tip, which is to dis-courage your attempts to learn. Here, I’ll put it in bold letters. 

    You’re supposed to try NOT to learn

    A confession. This is the only rhetorically facetious tip of the entire 99 on my list. How’s that for some purple adjectives? (ProWritingAid and Grammarly are gonna love that). And it is the only one I don’t practice regularly. In fact, I’ve never practiced this one at all. I’ve never made the active effort not to learn something for even one day. 

    And see, I just proved the point of my tip. You just learned several things in that one paragraph without trying. You learned some things about me. And you gained the bonus knowledge that even pro writing software doesn’t have a sarcasm or satire mode. See?

    Comic Relief

    I’m curious about all kinds of things. One of my favorite comics of all times is a scene in a doctor’s office. In the office, we  see a serious looking doctor wearing a lab coat, stethoscope draped around his neck. He is peering intently at a chart and and standing beside his patient, who is seated on the exam table. The patient is a worried looking cat, brow knit with anxiety. Tension is etched on both faces. The doctor speaks, “I’m afraid it’s curiosity.”

    Cute, huh? I’m curious to know. I’ve got a motor to learn. I’ve got more questions than answers  and the more answers I get the more questions they breed.

    As a writer, I’ve heard of an affliction called writer’s block in which the writer is stuck and has nothing to write about. It’s hard to imagine. That must be the same feeling as having nothing to live about. I have way more ideas than time. Way more time than talent. 

    Most likely, I’ll just keep on learning and letting ideas and information pile up in my mind where all the rooms look like an episode of Hoarders. See, my advice is not for everybody. It just won’t work for me. 

    But your mileage may vary. So, you go ahead and try not to learn anything new today. Feel free to return and comment below with all the ways your efforts failed. Other readers may learn something. Oh, shoot!

  • Ends In Themselves Hide Everywhere In Plain Sight

    Ends in Themselves Hide Everywhere In Plain Sight
    The End Is Achieved photo by Author.

    When you stretch out your feet to the incoming tide, lazily reclined in a beach chair, and the sun is a hand’s width above the water on the horizon, and the wavelets are chasing each other up the sand, and the egrets and sandpipers skitter nervously away as if they’ll melt if the water touches them, your mind isn’t occupied with what’s next..

    You soak in the moment as you soak in the sun. This…this is the reason you’re here. It’s what you came for. It’s the end sought. 

    For most of us, ends as idyllic as that described above are rarities. They are valuable in proportion to their scarcity. Beach folk may no longer hear the murmur-Roar of the waves tumbling in. They may take these marvels of sight and sound for granted, because they’re no longer novel. And familiarity breeds contempt.

    But what can we do, regardless of where we pass our lives, to extract the sublime from the familiar, eliminate the contempt, and cease taking anything for granted?

    In that light, find small “mini-ends” throughout your day. Identify the ends in themselves. Look for them every time you drink a cup of coffee or tea. Savor every conversation with a loved one. Similarly, let each meal exemplify the opportunity to reflect on more than transience. Sure, you’ve had many meals. You anticipate others. But, stop to appreciate that by some miracle you’re having this one, right now. It’s the only time you’ll partake of this meal. That’s a worthy end in itself.

    That mindset and it’s objective is what we cultivate by the practice of awareness, or “mindfulness”. To do so is to fill the mind with what is right in front of it. Extract the precious by appreciation of the obvious. Discover what is too often disguised by plain sight, and realize that if you’re still conscious of being conscious, things could always be a whole lot worse.

    Find these moments hidden in plain sight

    Acquaint yourself with moments from which you want nothing else. Recognize and log in your awareness each time you recognize a moment to which you would add nothing to make it better, or sweeter, or richer. The more these inner promptings bring you into the present, the better you will  come to know your true self. 

    You’ll see that the good life isn’t about waiting for the big, rare thing to come along. Rather, it’s seeing and appreciating the good already present in the so-called mundane grind of life. And when you can maximize happiness from the everyday, you’re living a rare life indeed

  • Other People Affect What You See, Hear, and Say

    “I was blind all the time I was learning to see” ~ Grateful Dead, Help On The Way

    I’m listening to the Audible version of The Overstory during my daily walks. Yesterday, I heard the Bullhorn of Truth in the dialogue of two characters on page 430:

    ”What keeps us from seeing the obvious?”

    Douglas puts his hand to the brass bull’s horn. ”And? What does?”

    ”Mostly other people.”

    [Before proceeding with my remarks. Here is a fun tidbit. I just pulled a bookmark randomly from a pack I received from Amazon a couple days ago. Each has a quote from a famous person. The one I selected (without peeking) to mark the passage I quoted above, says:

    ”Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice.” ~ Steve Jobs]

    These aren’t exactly the same ideas, but are next of kin. Other people influence what we pay attention to, and therefore what we see and hear. Their opinions hold the power to silence and shelve our own opinions.

    I could spend a month searching the psychological literature to find supports for those sentences above. I’m not going to do that. They are self-evident to me. I’m sold. I just wanted to package it up for your consideration. 

    To look below the surface, you have to know there’s more to see

    None of us can see everything. We have to be selective. And we are constructed in a way that we cannot simultaneously see what is in front of, and behind, us. Unlike an owl, which can spin its head around, or a fly, with eyes that allow 360° vision, we can look in only one direction at a time. And often, we don’t really know what we’re looking at. To truly see a thing requires some idea of how much there is to look for, does it not? Who decides where we look? Who tells us how long to look, or much to look for? Who tells us what to pay attention to? Where do these impulses come from, if not other people? 

    (For God’s sake do not get me started about the algorithms Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms use to restrict what you see and hear about in order to capture your attention for sale to advertisers. The truth asserted above is the basis of their business models, by virtue of which, they are the richest companies in the history of the world.)

    Who have you permitted to determine what you get to see? And who decides what you get to say about it? There is more going on friend, than the carefully curated world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you to the truth. (with my tip of the cap to Morpheus’ quote in The Matrix.)