Friday, May 30, 2008

Just follow your instincts...

'Just follow your instincts' - What great advice!...NOT!!! How many times have I thought I was supposed to turn right and then ended up on the other side of town taking me 3 hours extra to walk home. Or when I met someone who I was certain was the type to kill animals in his spare time only to discover he was a male Mother Teresa. I am sure this has happened to all of you, but these examples will never come to your mind when you think about your instincts. Incidences where your thoughts have led to the correct conclusion will always pop up and, therefore most people probably believe they are intuitive i.e. special (aside: face it - if everyone is special in their own way, no one is actually special, sorry). Now I am by no means stating that we don't have a form of 'intuition' or little voice that is sometimes able to tell us correctly where to go or how to judge someone. I believe that this it is simply our highly intelligent subconscious that is able to piece together past experiences, peripheral visions, conversations, facial expressions etc. to give us our 'instinct' that comes to us before we can consciously figure out how we actually knew the answer. A common example is ' I just had a feeling he was cheating on me, gosh I was so right, it must have been my womanly intuition'. Sorry to say, dumbo, (not dumbo because you got cheated on, but dumbo because you thought it was your female intuition that caught him) I am certain that your significant other was leaving some very obvious clues, not to mention behavioural changes which led you to conclude that he was a swine. If your womanly instincts were actually that good then you wouldn't have been with him in the first place. To mistakenly rely on this 'intuition' as some magic fairy godmother that will tell you the answer when you have no other way of finding it out would be ridiculous; although, your 'intuition' i.e. subconscious would be the best thing to use if you had no other option! However, when you do have the option, relying on intuition would be highly dangerous in science, for example, and a horrible way to approach meeting new people. I guess what I am trying to say is don't listen to people who tell you to blindly follow your gut. The advice I would give would be not to follow your instincts but to LISTEN to them. Be aware of them, be conscious of their limitations. Then you can choose whether or not it would be wise to go ahead an follow them or if you should search for some more empirical evidence to base your belief.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

SMILE!

If it is not followed by a flash, it is one of the most irritating instructions someone can give you. Usually if you're not smiling, there's a reason: you can be complacent, thinking, grumpy or sad. Either way you are experiencing (or not experiencing) an emotion and people should let you be. Granted, it may not be the best idea to always sport a gloomy expression and smiling to people as you meet them is a great way to give off a friendly vibe; however, once in a while if it just doesn't feel right, it is ok! The argument 'If you smile, you will automatically be in a better mood', is true - nevertheless, ordering someone to smile is the wrong way to go about it. First of all, if you have to ask someone to smile and they haven't smiled already when they made eye contact with you, chances are you are not smiling yourself. If you had been smiling (you hypocrite) a nice natural smile probably would have crept up on your frowning friend's face. If you're already Mr. Cheery, full of warmth and empathy, and no amount of radiance will influence your victim, you can assume that he/she is unhappy to see you or if you're lucky, they may just be having a bad day. Wouldn't offering to help or lending an ear be a better idea than ordering this person to hide their emotions? Finally, the forced smile that you may receive out of politeness will be fake and unattractive thereby disproving the 'You look prettier when you smile' argument that men like to use on unsmiling females. So, if you are one of those people who like to go around telling people to smile, I suggest YOU become more entertaining company - that way you won't have to force a reaction from your audience :)

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

What to do when you meet new people

I am the furthest thing from a social butterfly, a social worm if you may (since caterpillars eventually turn into butterflies). I despise small talk and therefore rarely enjoy getting to know new people. However, this process is important in every day life and can lead the formation of new and lasting friendships and if for no other reason, when forced to go to public outings with friends, you can only pretend to be a mute for so long before your friends will refuse to take you out. Therefore, I have found some fun ways to pass the time in superficial social settings.



Meeting people is always a fun time to reinvent yourself, since people probe you over and over again with the same predictable questions...



'What are you?' -for those of us who do not have our race stamped on our forehead (i.e. not white or black), this questions is the most common and usually is asked even before your name. Some fun answers include 'Human I think' or 'I am not sure, I was adopted'



'What is your name?' - leaves the most flexibility, so be creative - use colours, movie characters, sounds



'What do you do?' - aah, the question to put you in a box, to judge your mental abilities, your social ranking. This is a fun one to experiment with to see how much respect you get after your answer.



'Why are you still single?' What a question! Usually this is more of a statement intended as a compliment, or perhaps a ploy to determine your fault that would make you a bad choice for a relationship. Some good answers are ' I just got out of jail', 'It is hard to find someone who will put up with the kids'



Getting to know people takes energy, and I admire people who put in the work to get to know others. But I also think it is equally important to know fewer people, but know them well and be there for them as much as you can. This is sometimes harder to do if you are constantly going around asking people annoying questions!!

Bad or Best?

When disaster, death and despair strike the age old questions begin to surface: 'Why do bad things happen to good people?' (which I think is very presumptuous to assume that you/the person you are referring to is a good person. The question should be, 'Why do bad things happen to ALL people?'). Many answer that questions with 'Life is not fair', 'Everything happens for a reason' and my favourite 'Everything will be ok in the end' (a good way to defer the question since by the end, it will be too late for the person to find you and call you a liar). Anyways, if you dig a little deeper the lines between what is good and bad will begin to blur and perhaps you will realize that neither do exist - as exemplified by the following anecdote (taken from Eckhart Tolle):







There was once an old man who won an expensive car in the lottery. His family and friends were very happy for him and came to celebrate. 'Isn't it great?' they said 'You are so lucky.' The man smiled and said, 'Maybe.' For a few weeks he enjoyed driving the car. Then, one day, a drunken driver crashed into his new car at an intersection and he ended up in the hospital with multiple injuries. His family and friends came to see him and said, 'That was really unfortunate'. Again, the man smiled and said 'Maybe.' While he was still in the hospital one night there was a landslide and his house fell into the sea. Again his friends came the next day and said, 'Weren't you lucky to have been here in the hospital?' Again he said, 'Maybe.'






Maybe is right. But what happens if we even go deeper than that, since that story was based on Western presumptions of what is considered good and bad.



What are these presumptions?



Good: being educated, goal-oriented, organized, wealthy, productive, strong bonds with family, friends, attachment to children, good health



Bad: unemployed, failure, old age, death, purposeless, single, illness



The labels good and bad work for these categories if your goal is to become a materially successful individual with a family. However, why exactly is this our goal? And when you achieve those goals, what next? Do we continue to set higher goals until we eventually DIE... dun dun dun!!? Usually it is only when these 'disasters' occur, that we get woken up to our higher purpose since we begin to question the meaning of life. It is only when things don't go our way that we are made to question and analyze the mental noise, created by our own brain, that had become our reality. We are then forced to stop living in the past or spend all our time imagining our future- especially if the future is now shaky. We realize that the people or things we thought were important are only temporary illusions in our fleeting life. All we are left with (as Tolle would say) is the present - which is in fact all we had in the first place. If this is the case, wouldn't that make these so-called 'bad' things actually the best things to ever happened to us? Maybe.



I promise this will be a good post.

I just lied. But it was for a good cause, to prove my point. When you hear the word 'I promise I will...' it is almost always followed by a lie. Promises are my pet-peeve, which may seem like a strange statement. Yes, I am well aware that many people have good intentions when making promises, however the whole idea of a 'promise' is inherently based on a lie. Life has no guarantees, we can barely predict what will happen tomorrow/who we will meet in the next few hours/ the weather next week. Therefore, how can we promise we will always be there for a friend /pick up the groceries for our mom /won't make fun of your spouse's figure? How about a promise that doesn't require for you to predict future disasters i.e. 'I promise I will always remember you'. Well sorry to say but even that I don't believe. Even if 40 years down the road you still remember this friend-of-gold, there are chances you are en-route to full blown Alzheimer's and the memory of your friend will have vanished like a snowflake. So much for your promise! Perhaps the general population does not take promises so literally, but I am quite insulted when a promise is made to me. Even if it is a promise that my friend John ' will TRY and fix my TV', well maybe in the next minute John will be hit by a car and will no longer have the opportunity to 'TRY and fix my TV', yet another broken promise. Even though it is possible that most promises are fulfilled, why decorate tasks, thoughts or favours with absolute terms such as 'I give you my word', 'I promise' or 'forever'. For people like me, who take everything literally, it is simply offensive.