Frenemy***

(This one has been sitting for a while, unfinished, but when I encountered another TED talk from Mr. Ricard today, I decided to just share this.  In the time since I first drafted this, I think I have become better at controlling my reactions to situations, as opposed to trying to control the situation itself.  I know I am better for those efforts.  And I like Mr. Ricard's ultimate message; we are all likely better people than we give ourselves credit for.)

***


“We deal with our mind from morning till evening, and it can be our best friend or our worst enemy.”  A Buddhist thought from Matthieu Ricard

Disregarding the grammatical issues with the quote as presented, and noting that I don’t want to get too deep or alarm anybody, here’s a Daily Chart* I produced earlier this year: 

This was generated on a particularly “bad” day, when a series of ultimately insignificant threads of my work life weaved into one giant (but thankfully, ephemeral) tangle.  It’s a bit daunting that my chart depicts four “dark” categories only, but I’m sure it just reflects my feelings at work at that moment, as I firmly recognize that there’s always lots of good in my life.    Interestingly, my work calendar indicates that I was contemporaneously killing it; field, office, independent and collaborative work; it all got done, and got done well, too.  

I alone reside in my body, with my brain.  I can’t do much about that.  I have some darkness in my life, but even I can feel kind of optimistic when I see that I have some control over the majority of my life, even as depicted above.  The dizziness was temporary and the physical pain is generally manageable and being controlled.  On that particular “bad” day, more than half of my issues in the chart are “mental”, and so are mine alone.  As referred to at the start, I can either be friend or foe to myself.  I can choose to accept (manage? defeat?; or not) the depression and the negative emotions.  Little did I know that this too was actually a Buddhist way of thinking:

“Enlightenment is eliminating mental confusion (and a litany of bad characteristics and emotions)…That’s very simple and straightforward.”   (Pico Iyer; another quoted Buddhist)

OK, here’s a formula to my liking; acknowledgement, acceptance, identification, management, learning; these can can all lead to clarification. And because the quote says eliminating the mental confusion (not eliminating the problem or bad thing itself) is the goal; I know I can work on this. I'm not asking myself to tackle the impossible, but rather simply to not get distracted by other aspects of these issues. I can co-exist with these dark elements, I just can't let them confuse my thinking of what is important.

Unfortunately the quote continues:

“Whether you can do it or not is another matter.”

So, like everything worthwhile, “it” probably won’t be easy.  But at least I feel that I have a map for the path ahead.  That is comforting.  I know that certain things are under my control.  That’s empowering.  I’m not even sure I know what “it” is, but I suspect I have some choice; and some clarity of thought with which to address these choices.  These are powerful tools.  I should be able to do it.  Heck, my chart could just as well be portrayed as this:

I could be OK with this.



***Fonts are apparently the enemy with respect to this entry.  Sorry.

*As part of my Individual Development Plan at work this past year (a good thing), I chose (in part) to pursue some PowerPoint and Presentation Skills. To help cement some of what I’d learned, I started honing my PowerPoint abilities by developing a new slide every work day, either for use or just for practice. Many of these have become a “Chart of the Day!” such as this one. These are usually timely and topical for the workday, but sometimes they are simply light-hearted conveyances of my fishing endeavors, time budgets, etc. Strangely, I’ve completely very few of these since the one first depicted here appeared…