Cloudy Mirror

As you can see, it’s been a while since I last posted. I’ve missed blogging too, because I really do love to write and the subject matter of this Cloudy Mirror Blog is always on my mind. The excuse that I’ve been making for myself is that I just haven’t had time to do it. Then one day, while doing some tedious and not-really-necessary-task, I realized that I’ve been spending a lot of my time doing things that I really don’t enjoy. Why is that? Do I really have my priorities straight?

It’s a tad bit distressing to be asking myself this now, because I seem to remember not too long ago, that I sat down and made a list of priorities for myself where I decided what was important to me and what wasn’t. Where did I go wrong? How did I stray so far from my “Big Plan” to do things that I enjoy and to make efforts to do things just for me? What happened to make me forget the direction in which I was headed?

Well, the answer is that life happened. I got caught up in the standard day-to-day activities of my life and I began to forget about myself again. It’s so easy to do. I just always seem to have a million things going on, and for some reason, I seem to prioritize the things that I want to do for myself (paying attention to my health, reading, writing, exploring new hobbies etc.) after everything else, so I don’t really ever get to them.

First of all, because of constantly advancing technology, not only can we get more things done in a short period of time these days, but we feel that we have to jam-pack our schedules or we’re just wasting time. Our employers expect more and more productivity out of us because technology to make our jobs “easier” is being developed all the time. And simply because we are able to instantly contact people via e-mail or instant messengers, we feel guilty if we can’t find time to type a quick note and hit send. Think about it: 20 years ago, how long would it have taken us to make a transfer at the bank, buy a new winter coat, and buy groceries for dinner? Those tasks could easily have taken up half a day. Now we can do it all in minutes online. And because we can do so much so fast now, we feel that we must.

Also I have this problem, as many people do, where if certain people in my life ask or need me to do something for them, I have a very hard time telling them no… even if I don’t really want to do it. Thankfully, this group of people, for me, is relatively small but the things I end up doing for them still seem to take up a lot of time. Of course, it’s my job as a mother to do these things for my child, who is too young to do most things on her own, so I’m not complaining about that. It’s the other people to whom I give my time. Why are their wants and needs more important than mine? How can I begin to learn to say no? Continue Reading »

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Many of us are uncomfortable with uncertainty. We don’t like not knowing what’s going to happen next in our lives and so we spend a lot of time and energy trying to control everything that happens in our day-to-day activities. Those of us who act like this are commonly referred to as “control freaks”. It’s not the healthiest way to behave, but I think that we do it, at least in part, because we’re not comfortable with trying to figure things out “on-the-fly” and risking failure. It can be pretty exhausting, and is this kind of behavior really helping us anyway?

The thing that we need to realize is that we’re basically paralyzing ourselves by being so scared of the unknown. Our fear causes us to limit our experiences to only those few that we feel that we can control. We’re missing out on all kinds of things that could teach us about so much about ourselves, like how we act under pressure and how our minds work in less structured situations. Maybe we’re really good at it! Or maybe we’re really bad at it, but we can learn to get better. We’ll never know if we never try.

Without uncertainty, life is just the repetition of outworn memories. There’s no evolution in that, and when there is no evolution, there is stagnation, entropy and decay. – Deepak Chopra (The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success)

Sure, there’s always the risk of screwing something up or of flat-out failure, but most failures aren’t going to kill us. In fact, we may be able to learn more about ourselves from our failures than any carefully planned-out activity. Oops! That didn’t work, so we’ll do it differently next time! I mean, how much is it really going to matter if we don’t plan our two-week vacation down to the minute? Yes, it’s possible that we may miss out on some “must-see” attractions that we wanted to squeeze in, but maybe it would be more fun to just wing it, for once. Just think of the adventures we could have by keeping an open mind and just going with the flow. We could experience some amazing things that very few, if any, other people get to do. Of course it’s possible that we’ll get lost in our wanderings, but maybe we’ll find something amazing that we didn’t know about at our unexpected destination. Most likely, we’ll be able to come out of these unplanned experiences just fine, as long as we remember to use common sense.

I’ve always admired those people who are able to dive head-first into unknown situations and who are able to take a “let’s figure it out as we go along” attitude. But, getting to that point from a “control freak” status takes some doing. It is often suggested to us scaredy-cats that we just do something where it is quite possible that we might fail, but that the failure would be relatively inconsequential. Like, maybe we’ve been wanting to try a new restaurant in an unfamiliar part of a big city. We may have avoided even attempting to get there in the past because we’re scared of getting miserably lost and wasting time. Well, we should pick a day when we have no other commitments so that the time issue is no longer a factor. Then we fill up the gas tank and take a map, a GPS navigation system or another person who can help us find our way there. If we get lost, we use the tools we have to figure it out or we stop and ask for help. Yes, it will be pretty stressful for those of us who are not used to not knowing exactly where we are and exactly where we’re going, but it won’t kill us.

I know that we control freaks have a tendency to start worrying about the “what-ifs” in these kinds of situations before they even begin, but that’s exactly what the problem is. We worry about things that haven’t even happened yet and may not even happen. We just need to learn to relax a bit and see how things turn out. If we have the intellect and skills to plan our lives in excruciating detail, we certainly have the skills to make good decisions, even on the fly. We just need to learn to trust ourselves and our abilities. Most likely, everything will end up being just fine. Just start by taking baby steps and we’ll be jumping off of airplanes in no time! Ok, maybe not.

If we limit ourselves because of fear, we can potentially miss out on getting to know who we really are and what we’re capable of doing. If we don’t ever encounter any new experiences, we limit our intellectual, emotional, spiritual growth as human beings and life can get pretty dull that way. Maybe by allowing ourselves to take more risks and trying new things with less fear, we can break out of our mundane lives and develop into better people than we are now.

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Being rejected is no fun. The feelings of inadequacy, shame, and disappointment that are brought about by rejection are difficult to bear and often send us running away with our tails between our legs. It’s hard to bounce back from being told that we’re “not good enough” and sometimes that there’s no way we’ll ever be good enough. No one wants to be rejected, so it’s only natural that we do our best to not let it happen to us.

The problem is that opportunities for rejection are everywhere: trying out for sports teams, applying for jobs, applying for college, and these days kids can be rejected from exclusive nursery schools before they reach their toddler years. Romantic rejection or social rejection (being outcast by peers) can sometimes be even more emotionally devastating. It’s no wonder we’re scared.

These days, I wonder if our fear of rejection is even more extreme than in the past because of its prominence in reality television. With shows like American Idol, it’s actually become fun to watch people be told that they aren’t good enough. Viewers often watch the earliest rounds of the competition to see just how Simon Cowell, the judge generally regarded to be the most cruel, will put contestants down. Shows like Survivor and The Bachelor actually have formalized ceremonies where rejection takes place. Producers try to build suspense and emotion with each rejection with dramatic music and creative camera work to show the conflict, anxiety, and fear in the contestants’ eyes. Often the rejecters are asked to talk about why a certain person is being eliminated which often adds an additional sting to an already emotional and hurtful situation. It isn’t uncommon to see reality contestants cry, yell obscenities or become enraged after being eliminated from competition and viewers are entertained when they see these reactions. In a way, reality television has magnified our fear of rejection and has actually glorified the act of rejecting people. Continue Reading »

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Until relatively recently, I spent most of my effort in life working hard to accomplish the prosperity and happiness promised by the “American Dream“. Amazingly, I was one of the ones who actually managed to find a decent level of prosperity. The thing is, though, that even when I had reached that point, the happiness still eluded me.

For a long time, I didn’t understand why I wasn’t happy because my life had turned out exactly as I had planned, exactly as it was supposed to turn out. I had done everything according to the timeline that I had developed for myself and ended up with exactly what I thought I needed to be happy: the family, the house, the respectable career, the cars, the material objects and enough of an income to live as comfortably as I wanted. It was the perfect picture. I had everything and yet I still felt that I was missing so much. What had I done wrong?

Recently, I came to the realization that, at least for me, it was my goals that were faulty and not what I did to reach them. I thought about why it was that I thought that this “perfect picture” would bring me happiness and I now see that it was because that’s what we’re all taught to believe. We watch people on TV and in the movies, and more often than not, it’s the ones with the money and material objects that are the happiest. We see the gorgeous people with the big houses, fancy cars and great lives and we think that if we only had those things, we’d be happy too. If we could get the perfect good-looking partner along with the genius kids, the dog and the house with picket fence, what more could we want? These are the ideas and pictures we’re surrounded by every day and it’s no wonder that many of us end up falling for it hook, line and sinker. Continue Reading »

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