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I love learning. Even if the learning is preceded, or a result of some bad experience… even if it is pain…
You learn nothing from pleasant, or good, or happy.
You can only learn from bad, mistakes, wrong steps, screw-ups, or failures.
If you are willing. If you are not willing, then you’ll never learn. And if the glove doesn’t fit… don’t wear it.
I talked to two clients yesterday.
I asked one how he was feeling. I already knew because I had run his numbers, but I was curious how he felt about how he felt.
To my surprise he went into his memory and started to hee and haw. WTF? he looked good, his color, his skin tone, his eyes…
But instead of saying: I feel fantastic, he went to a place, probably his memory for an answer.
I was dumbfounded. He has increased his health almost sevenfold, and the only thing that remained is what I can’t help him with: ligaments in his knee…
This morning, upon researching some tools for my clients to learn thinking… virtually none of you were taught thinking, or if you were: they didn’t tell you that tools are tools, not only applicable in the field you learned to use them… They did the same thing with skills. But I digress…
I found a TED video on Daniel Kahneman’s talk on happiness. What the heck, I’ll watch it.
And to my surprise, the talk answered my quandary why my client didn’t look in his feelings to answer my question, why he looked in his memory.
The talk is great, you should watch it.
And I also understood why everyone looks at me funny when they ask me how I was doing, and I would check in with me… definitely with my feelings…
My great luck, I think, is that my memory works differently from most people’s: I pretty much don’t remember s-h-i-t. It may be part of dyslexia for all I know. But it turns out to be very lucky: I can be happy when I am happy, and not happy when I am not happy…
I can feel well one moment, and bad the next.
I live moment to moment.
I am like the little Italian car I once had: you could feel every pebble it drove over in your butt… lol.
By the way, this is not uniquely human to not be present…
I have watched cats… they search their memory and then they eat their memory food… the food they remember. Same with dogs… never even slow down to taste the food.
They eat the menu not the food… just like you.
You, the thinking, feeling entity is taken out of the equation… in this enterprise your word won’t count… how weird is that?
In certain things, or maybe until a certain age, I, maybe, was just like this… I can’t tell.
But my whole memory of my childhood, was that I wasn’t having a good time.
And there are some documents to prove that it was true, at least some of the time.
The video I have about our class on the last day of high school shows me somber, looking down, not very communicative, not very alive.
But I have seen tons of pictures, taken without my knowledge, where I am laughing my ass off. Not smiling that fake smile everyone smiles for the photo: no, I am clearly having fun.
Now, whether I am clowning, which I am discovering I like to do, or I am just having a good time, i don’t know. My hunch is that I am clowning: making an ass of myself and maybe others.
I didn’t have a chance to do it for decades. I guess I was dignified instead. And bored, or something like that. Maybe miserable.
Lately I have found that I don’t have to be in any particular way… and if I can choose, I’d rather be funny, hilarious, silly, ornery, than dignified.
Of course when I am teaching, or I am trying to get to the bottom of something, I am serious… there may be nothing funny, or the client won’t see the fun: after all they came to me because something wasn’t working for them.
But I’ve noticed that underneath the thin layer of seriousness there is a raucousness, delightful to me. Invigorating.
There is so little fun, so little laughter…
I have found that being curious and finding things funny must be right next to each other on the gene tree, because they come to life at the same time.
And the opposite: being dull, thinking you know everything, and being sullen in need of excitement from outside… they go together too.
One of the things that happen when you get well, is you start seeing the world from a higher plane. Higher than survival. And from there more thing strike you as funny, in yourself and in other people as well.
When you laugh your experience of well being increases too… So the two are synergistic. A lot like love. I love you. You feel it, so you’ll love me more. And it goes endlessly… to create real love.
Your first step is to find out where you are.
And depending on your numbers, I’ll tell you what is your next step…
