Greg Proffit Writing

Category: Mindfulness

Do Not Take Yourself Too Seriously—No One Else Does

Photo by Kristel Hayes on Unsplash

# 67 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: Do not take yourself too seriously. You aren’t the same you as you were at five, or perhaps at twenty-five. You are fluid and dynamic. Today’s “you” may vanish tomorrow, just as a stormy, wind-tossed ocean may tomorrow be as smooth as glass.

Learn to laugh at yourself

The ability to laugh at oneself is a life skill to cultivate. It’s tied to the realization, often hard won, that you are fallible and sometimes weak but still resilient and worthy of love. You are a work in progress. The edits aren’t all in. So don’t take this present draft, this iteration, too seriously.

The capacity for change is one of the enduring and ennobling traits of this life. From birth, we change and morph and develop and grow. Our beliefs vacillate, our energies fluctuate, faced with defects we compensate, and all of this admixture forms a distillate; the current self occupying today.

So, for the semblance of stability, if we’re both lucky and wise, we discover some values around which to pour concrete and anchor down. We drop anchor on a belief, or a lover, or a quest. You can find us moored there for a while.

As sure as the wind changes, our course can change, too. We can hoist the anchor, scrape the barnacles, unfurl the mainsail, and ride the wind. You may not see me here tomorrow. It’s possible tomorrow’s version may be different altogether—other than the wrapper. If I haven’t spoken to you in 5 years, I’ll wager you’re a different person. The physical resemblance might prove vaguely familiar, but internally you will have changed. There is plenteous truth in the trope:

“We are always in the process of becoming. Self-identity is a fusion of our prior decisions and our current thoughts.”
~ Kilroy J. Oldster: Dead Toad Scrolls

Think of the applications in your life. Your age, your health, your knowledge, your experience; all are in flux. What’s your longest running good habit? Which version of you should we take seriously? Which is the real you?

Nothing in life is static

Now, lest I wax too poetic, or else get too serious in a ditty contrived to convince you not to take yourself too seriously, let me encourage you with those words of wisdom that have come to us through the years:

This too shall pass.
~ Anonymous

I hated hearing that during a struggle. Because in the middle of one you’re consumed. It’s serious business. Sometimes you can’t see your way out or to the other side. But friend, there is a way out, and there is another side. And either way, like it or not, the quote is true, and the struggles we face turn us into different versions of ourselves. I find it helpful to remember neither good fortune nor bad lasts forever, as it says so poignantly in the Grateful Dead’s Stella Blue:

“There’s nothing you can hold for very long.”
~ Grateful Dead: Stella Blue

Since our layover on this plane of existence is so brief, let’s not get too bogged down in the mire and minutiae of personal insults and minor snubs. Better to smile, shrug, and move on. Exemplify resilience. On the other hand, when you’re riding high in April, remember not to gloat, May is coming.

So, let’s laugh more than we cry and love more than we hate and like good boy-scouts, let’s leave things better than we found them. Do not take yourself too seriously. After all, no one is going to remember all the great things you do for yourself, nor all the high-minded opinions you espoused. They’ll remember what you did for them and how you made them feel. Take others seriously and you’ll do a lot more good, receive lots more love, and have a lot more fun.

June 30, 2021
Selective Attention–You Cannot Trust Your Eyes For All That Is Real

Photo by Alexandru Zdrobău on Unsplash

# 65 on my, 99 Life Tips–A List is: You cannot trust your eyes for all that is real.

“So I give you my eyes, and all of their lies
Please help them to learn as well as to see”
~ Grateful Dead: Black-Throated Wind

One of the best examples of this truth is this video, known as the Monkey Business Illusion.

How did you do?

Selective Attention is a thing.

We have eyes only on the fronts of our heads. This means in order to see something, we must face it. You can only see in the direction you’re looking. Does this mean that nothing exists in outside your field of vision? Of course not, but it means you must look for and look at something in order to see it.

Add to this the fact that it is not the eyes that see. It is your brain. Neuroscientists know that the brain create and feeds an image of the world into our conscious perception of reality. It generates a moment-by-moment hallucination. How weird is that? The ramification is that we’re always playing catch up to the present, and that what our brains show us via the openings in front of our heads is the best-case prediction of what the next millisecond ought to look like.

And even within your field of vision, as the video linked above shows, about 50% of viewers don’t see something even if it happens in the direction they’re looking. I didn’t the first time I watched the video, which my children could have easily predicted. They’ve known for years the easiest way to hide something from me is to hide it in plain sight. We won’t see what we aren’t paying attention to, or if we are distracted by giving attention to something else. For me, that’s often a book (which means I can’t hear, either).

But I’ve had the belief for as long as I can remember that there is more going on in reality than meets the eyes. Of course, we know that to be true scientifically. The fact that you cannot see in the infrared spectrum doesn’t mean bees cannot. They do in fact. And they see well into the ultraviolet spectrum, well beyond human visual capability. It’s speculated that venomous snakes see infrared as heat signatures as well, so be careful out there.

The point of my tip is that our eyes are not the final determinants as to what is real. Without a long harangue about metaphysics and the nature of consciousness and reality in general, suffice it to say that, while you can trust your eyes for the tasks they’re well suited for, you cannot trust your eyes for all that is real.

June 28, 2021
Life Is A Preferences Menu Writ Large

Outlook Preferences Menu (Screen Shot by Author)

# 61 on my, 99 Life Tips – A List is: Know this about people: Everyone chooses what they prefer at all times from the menu of choices available to them.

Most software has a preferences menu like the one pictured in the image above. This is where you can select your own favorites from the features and options available–your preferences. The software remembers your choices as you use it. Depending on the software, the selectable options are often binary, meaning they are Yes or No, Red or Blue, On or Off. Life is a preferences menu writ large. All of us, always and without exception, choose what we prefer from the menu of options available to us at the time the choice is made.

What are you doing right now? Reading this? Why, when you could be doing something else? Isn’t it because you prefer to be reading this than the something else you could be doing?

If you ask yourself the question, ”why am I doing this?” a thousand times in a day, the answer will always be that you prefer whatever it is you’re doing to some other choice you could have made.

We can think about this in the negative if you like. Behaviorists and economists speak of opportunity cost. This is the idea that if you take one path, it closes the opportunity of taking an alternate path. If you work at one job, you cannot work at another at the same time. The lost potential opportunities are the real costs of the actual choice you make. And the choice you make is because you prefer that one to the opportunities you’re willing to lose.

There is a difference between preference and desire

But, as you think about this remember the difference between preferring something and desiring it. I desire to be in Hawaii right now. But that’s not on my menu of options, or even if it is the expense to fulfill that desire would be too great. So, I’m stuck with my preference to remain at home, in front of my computer, writing this. Among my current menu of available options, this is what I prefer.

Does this mean everyone does what they want to do all the time?

No. People do what they prefer, not necessarily what they want. Preference and desire are not the same thing. Sometimes the choice is between two evils. Neither is wanted, nor desired. Yet a choice must be made. People choose what they prefer, even if it’s not what they want. They will choose one unwanted thing rather than another they want even less.

Knowing this about people, and about yourself, clears up a lot of confusion about why people do what they do. They do what they do because they prefer it. It cannot be otherwise.

So, the next time you’re faced with a choice, which will be probably be within the next five minutes, think about this. Think about your menu of options. Becoming an astronaut might not be selectable, becoming nicer might be.

June 18, 2021
Don’t Be a Head Hanger–Lift Up Your Eyes

If you ever get a chance to lift up your eyes to the Grand Tetons I hope you’re as blown away as I was (Unsplash image by Toan Chu)

# 13 on my, 99 Life Tips – A List is: In keeping with the above, lift your eyes throughout the day to change your focal point, especially when outdoors. Americans, especially, are ”head hangers” habitually looking a yard or two in front of our feet. We even do this indoors, looking at the flooring. Look up. You’ll thank me.

My uncle taught me this. He pointed it out to me when I was working for him and learning carpentry. Doing a job for a client that wanted us to install 7-pc crown molding in a 20 foot foyer, he remarked that they were wasting their money. When I asked why he said, ”Americans are head hangers.”

He had been raised in Great Britain, and had traveled extensively overseas, including a stint in Vietnam. I figured he knew was he was talking about though it didn’t keep us from taking the job.

I began observing people. My observations confirmed my uncle’s assertion. It was especially obvious, when I watched people enter a new space. And this was apparent whether people walked into a residence, or into a commercial or religious building. Americans gaze downwards more than upwards.

Maybe it’s our colonial, puritanical beginnings. There are no real castles or cathedrals marking our national architectural aesthetic.

Maybe it’s purely evolutionary. Man has never faced too many predators from above. Who knows?

Now, that’s fine if you’re hiking, making sure not to twist an ankle, but it could cause you to miss out on a lot of unexpected Beauty that is above eye level. And that would be a shame because unexpected Beauty is one of the greatest sources of Gratitude and the resultant increase in happiness and overall mental health. So, do yourself a favor and make the effort to look up.

Now, if you prefer your life tips with a moral. Consider Psalm 121:1-2

”I lift my eyes up, to the mountains, where does my help come from? (some translations are affirmative, and render the last clause, ”from whence comes my help.”)
My help comes from You. Maker of Heaven. Creator of the Earth.”
Psalm 121:1-2

Notice: The Psalmist does not look down in helpless despair. Neither does he look around for help, knowing assistance from peers on his plane won’t suffice. For help, he looks up. He looks to the Mountains, to the Heavens, and to their and his Maker.

June 17, 2021
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.)

April 10, 2021