Quarterly Check-In, Part Two. Goals, Again. And the Sphincter of Life.

The other day, when I wanted to write, I tried a computer program called Freedom that blocks access to the Internet. You set the amount of time you want to be free from it, and then a green screen pops up and says, “You Are Free.” I have to say that the moment that green screen popped up, I felt a little space open up in my chest. A little what? A space that relaxed? Like a hole? This reminds me of a sphincter. Sphincter is a word I like. It’s a great word. It’s such an evocative word, almost onomatopoetic.

Anyway, the sphincter in my chest relaxed. Yes, I am equating my heart with an asshole, because that is the sphincter that springs to mind when I see the word. There are other sphincters, but let’s be honest, they are not top of the list. Partly because butts are funny. Funny and gross. And because my sense of humor, another top quality, apparently, is on par with your average kindergartener’s. Also, because I don’t really know anatomy, so I don’t really know where those other sphincters are.

I just like writing that word. Sphincter.

Anyway, freedom from screendom with Freedom. When I sit down to write, or really any old time, I do spend too much time checking and scrolling and not writing. The phone affects me like a reflex. I just check and scroll, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, email. email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. You get it. You probably do it yourself. It’s a horror show. There is no space. No release. I was talking to another grown up person the other day—okay, it was my esthetician, Ruth, who is amazing, and everyone should have an esthetician and get facials. Just the facial massage is worth the time and money—anyway, we were talking about the way social media just squeezes your life. When we were growing up, we had freedom from peers that our children do not have, because they are always on social media. Back then, it was a relief to get away from the intensity and scrutiny of them by them. Sure, we had telephones. We were attached to these cords that were stuck to these things on the wall. and sometimes we didn’t even have those phones in our rooms. Maybe we could stretch the cord to the basement steps, or maybe there was an extension in the attic or whatever. But you could get away. There was a little space. A little relaxation. The sphincter of life released. Nowadays, it’s constant.

So then, later, I took a shower, and there was a fresh bar of soap in the soap dish. This gave me a new sense of release. And then guilt. And insight into my marriage and goal setting. Afterwords, I said to the husband, I hope you don’t get annoyed that you’re always the one who gets the new bar of soap for the shower. But the thing is, if I see a sliver of soap left, I am going to use it. Because I feel obligated to use every last bit of it.

Maybe my epigenetics were affected by my father growing up in the Depression, but whatever the reason, I am going to use up that last sliver of soap. So if the husband wants a fresh bar before the last sud is gone, he is going to have to get it.

And, secretly, I am relieved when he does, because it’s much nicer to soap up with a big bar of soap than a pebble sized one.

This is the way we complement one another. Or irritate the hell out of one another. Depends on the day.

I think I have to credit Gretchen Rubin with being my source for the research that shows that in couples, each partner usually overestimates the amount of work they contribute and underestimates the amount their partner contributes to the working of things.

So with that in mind, I let my guilt sphincter relax when there’s a new bar of soap in the shower, because I imagine the husband both resents me and also feels superior every time he gets a new bar. And then my guilt sphincter tightens right back up again, because that is the nature of a sphincter (and of me and guilt), because I suspect that while he might overestimate what he gives to the relationship, I know I must also do so, and therefore. Well. The point is that sometimes you have to work out stuff like this. By accepting that I am just not capable of giving myself (and thereby also) the husband a new bar of soap until the very last bit of the old one is gone. And there is a reason.

Here’s the thing about soap. It relates to goal-setting. According to Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D, (HGH, Ph.D) author of Succeed: How We can Reach Our Goals, and whose work I have discussed several times, people approach goals with one of two orientations, prevention or promotion. The prevention oriented person is focused on stopping bad things from happening: being taken advantage of; wastefulness; loss of money. The promotion oriented person is focused on potential benefits: improved efficiency; what you have to gain.

Now, the husband, when he steps into the shower, is about taking a nice, hot, sudsy shower. So for him, a fresh bar of soap fulfills his goal. Whereas I am always—always—going to use that bar of soap down to the last sud. There is no way Dove is going to get me to throw away perfectly good soap splinters. Left to my own devices, I am going to, in fact, collect soap splinters in a soap dish, mash them all together into a sort of soap mound and thereby eke out every last sud. And take that, Unilever. Suck it.

“Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage table.”

This is my favorite quotation from Hamlet. It’s about how quickly Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, shacked up with her husband’s brother after her husband’s demise. It’s a wonderful example of irony. I love to quote it, almost as much as I love to quote from “Auntie Mame.” And I use these words to point out that, thank goodness, I have the husband to get me a new bar of soap. Because let me assure you, it’s no fun to shower with a splinter. It’s a wonderful relief whenever I get in the shower and find a fresh bar of soap. That was not my decision, but I can benefit from it. Thank you, Husband. In this way, the sphincter of life releases a little.

But my point about goals is this. The tendency we have towards goals is one or the other of these.You guessed it, Clever Readers, these orientations are basically pessimistic and optimistic. This is good news and bad news, depending on the goal you have. Some goals lend themselves more to a prevention strategy, and some more to a promotion strategy. When you have a creative goal, for example, says HGH, Ph.D, you want to approach it with a promotion a goal—don’t worry about mistakes. However, when you need something to be perfect, say, a bridge you’re constructing, then you need to be prevention-focused. More good news is that we are not always either promotion or prevention focused, and we can adjust our thinking depending on the goal.

So, some goals are prevention goals. Some are promotion goals. Some can be looked at both ways. Like using soap. Or buying a car. Buying a car involves both promotion and prevention. The promotion part is getting a newer, more updated, more fun, prettier vehicle. The prevention part is getting a safer, more reliable, updated vehicle. And yes, the husband and I recently bought a new car. I was able to get over the loss of money in the bank, and the husband was able to achieve a new vehicle without having to test drive twelve different brands, as I intended, to make sure we had considered everything and weren’t being totally taken advantage of. Which I am sure we were, once we decided on a car we both liked. But now, we have it, and I can just enjoy it. Relief. Sphincter release.

Sadly, I am not the thoroughgoing optimist I would like to be. Because, honest and true, optimists have more fun, tend to see what they might gain from a situation, a goal, or a decision, rather than fester and fear what they might lose or miss, and get to enjoy a fresh bar of soap on the regular. On the other hand, they might overspend on a car and waste precious soap. They might possibly be cleaner than pessimists, thanks to all those suds, but I’ll take you to the mat on that one.

Success Scaffolding: Goals & Wishes

Hello, Readers, here’s what’s been happening. I went to the hair salon. I love going there. I love my stylist, Donna, and the whole place.  It's her place, and it’s just nice. Everyone is close there. For example, I walked in and Donna was finishing with a client and she said hello to me and I saw that her eyebrows were covered in dark smudges. Then I saw that the other stylist had dark smudges on her eyebrows, too, and that she was touching up the roots of the manicure-pedicurist. Everyone was dying her hair and eyebrows. Rinsing and dousing in between clients. A perfect ballet of personal care. Now, I have not dyed my eyebrows nor my hair, but I do get highlights. As I said to my friend the other day, I’m just another Jewish woman slowly going blond. Donna takes good care of me.  

Anyway, I told Donna that I finished my manuscript and sent it to Agent. I told her that I hope Agent is still my agent, and that I’m not sanguine about that. Then I started twirling off into the wings about whether Agent is really going to pull through and be Agent for me, or if I will have to find a new agent. And Donna put her hands up. Whoa, whoa, she said. Let’s take a moment to celebrate. 

About completing my manuscript, she meant. Did you open the champagne? To which I said, Not yet, because I don’t know what Agent is going to say about or do with it. So Donna says, But celebrate. You wrote it!

This was true, and also true was that I had done nothing in particular to commemorate it. I finished my manuscript draft. I pushed send. I pushed send on an email with an attachment. The attachment was my manuscript, well, the rest of manuscript. Ninety thousand words. Sent. I texted the husband who was counseling the family of a stroke victim and texted back, Congratulations. I got a little electronic confetti. 

But, but, but…. I said, thinking of all the things left to do and all the possible ways I can be rejected, shot down, and made miserable about this sent manuscript.  And also about admitting to it in public, for example, here on my blog. 

And then Donna said that I need to stop with the negativity.  This is a nice thought, of course, stopping with the negativity. However, the debate is still open whether this is the dog of negativity, or negativity’s litter mate, pragmatic hedging. 

Now, pragmatic hedging is a term I have made up. Therefore, I am on that side of the debate. Pragmatic hedging descends from the superstition, common among the Jews I know, of mitigating all good fortune or even hopes and dreams of good fortune with a muttered, “God willing.” It’s like spitting over your shoulder or whatever. I don’t actually think it’s a Jewish thing. It’s a human thing-- for the neurotic human. It’s making sure that the God you don’t even believe in won’t smite you for daring to have a less than humble aspiration or a modicum of good fortune. It’s a kind of reflexive self-humbling so the Universe doesn’t decide to squish you.

But Donna had the scissors and I was in the chair. Her eyebrows, by the way, were by now rinsed. She said, because she is a big Deepak Chopra fan, Here’s what you’re going to do. You are going to manifest what you want to happen. 

Sounds great, I said, my pragmatic hedging ready to intrude immediately. I shushed it. 

Here’s how you do it, she said. You think about what you want. You imagine that publisher calling about the book. You picture it. Then, you imagine how you will feel when it happens, really feel it. Then you feel it. Give yourself over to it. 

Okay, I said. As I mentioned, she had the scissors. I had the pragmatic hedging in a down-stay. 

Now, I have written much about visualization in this blog, and some about abundance theory, also known as the Law of Attraction. This is the stuff of Deepak Chopra. He’s one of a long line of peddlers of this theory that if you want to achieve something, you think positively about it and attract it to you. That’s the theory. 

Also known as hooey, flim-flam, and bunk. Sorry, you Law of Attraction believers. BUT. Visualization can be an excellent tool. Visualizing a positive outcome can be helpful. It can prime you to work harder, because you’re primed to be a bit more optimistic than, uh, pragmatic. And there is a more complex form of visualization that is also helpful. It is called mental contrasting. Mental contrasting is visualizing one’s goal and also visualizing the obstacles one is likely to encounter when striving for said goal and how to overcome them. Mental contrasting helps in setting appropriate goals, because once you envision your ultimate goal, you then lay out a series of smaller goals you need to accomplish on the way there. 

This is a lot of work. Trust me, I have been doing it for a long time with this book. First a first draft, shitty a la Anne Lamott. Then another draft. And another. Then the proposal and the agent and the editor and publisher and the--- I have overcome multiple obstacles. The book, she is done. I mean, she needs polishing and revising, but her essential organs are intact. At this point, things are out of my hands. I have sent the book out. So manifesting—what harm can it do? 

Donna is not a nut. I would not let a nut take scissors to my head. What she also said was that I had to let go of how this wish manifests and just focus on the wish. I took that to mean I have to drop the reins of worry for awhile, while I wait to see what Agent says or—my big fear being that Agent doesn’t respond at all—doesn’t say. Then, I can act further. Find a different agent or whatever. Meanwhile, I can think happy thoughts about the day the publisher calls and says, I love this book! Let’s get it out on the shelves. 

Pragmatic hedging, by the way, is a relative of mental contrasting. Mental contrasting is all about being pessimistic—or realistic—in goal-setting. It’s about figuring out the contingencies that might make reaching a goal difficult and then getting around those. This is turning a goal into a series of small goals or steps. All in the head, mind you. It’s a form of proactive positive thinking. It’s positive, because you visualize your goal. And it’s negative because you visualize obstacles; that turns out to be positive, though, because you visualize obliterating those obstacles. Fortunately, Unfortunately. Anyone remember that children’s book? Fortunately, I got the last seat on the airplane. Unfortunately, the plane exploded. Fortunately, I did not die. Unfortunately, I was thrown from the plane. Fortunately, the plane had parachutes. Unfortunately, the parachute did not open. Fortunately, there was a haystack. Unfortunately, the haystack had a pitchfork in it. Fortunately, I missed the pitchfork. Unfortunately, I missed the haystack. 

And so on. Here is someone reading it aloud, in case you missed it in your elementary school education: 

Tangential to this hair styling situation, was the dharma talk I listened to while walking the dog the other day. The actual dog, on a teaching about putting the burden down. Buddha said to put down all the things we carry with us, including—according to Gil Fronsdal, the teacher—the search for Nirvana. The spiritual search can be a burden, too. Anything we struggle with represents an attachment. The idea is to somehow exist with those things WITHOUT struggle. 

Putting down the burden. That is the appeal of manifesting. That was the appeal the other day. To just let go of all the pragmatic hedging. To let go of all the caveats to the wishes and to just imagine having a simple form of wish granted, to imagine how that would feel. 

How to Podium - A Person Wants to Be Helpful

This week finds me more focused than last. Right at this moment I have something in my contact lens making my eye uncomfortable and I am irritated by it and am imaging removing it and replacing it with a new one. A new lens, not a new eye, I hasten to say. This will make me feel better, and see better, which is good because I have to pick up the 9th grader from her rehearsal in an hour. Being able to see when driving is good.

See how much of what I'm thinking about at this moment involves the future? Apparently, this is status normalus for humans. This is what I've learned from a recent article in the failing New York Times Sunday Review.*  I have a beef with the title of this article by Martin Seligman, big name in Positive Psychology, and science journalist John Tierney, "We Aren’t Built to Live in the Moment". While the article is fascinating, and is, I suppose, a way of bringing a new field of psychology to the attention of the general public, the title is, frankly, misleading. I wouldn't go so far as to call it click bait, but it is annoying. However, I will get to that. I suppose it was meant to catch the attention, since living in the moment via mindfulness is all the rage these days.

But the meat of this piece is that Seligman believes, “What best distinguishes our species” is our ability to “contemplate the future.” Rather than obsess over the past, people more often think about what might happen, a.k.a., the future. According to Seligman, anxiety and depression spring from having “a bleak view of the future.” Not from past traumas nor how they feel about what is happening at present.

A study of about five hundred adult Chicagoans yielded a lot of information cited in this piece. Using some kind of device, mayhap a phone, the study “pinged” these people multiple times a day and asked them to “record their thoughts and moods.” Turned out that thoughts of the future were three times more common than thoughts of the past. Also, participants reported being happier and less stressed when they were making plans. While they did report concerns about what could go wrong, they were twice as likely to be thinking about what they hoped would happen.

So prospection is our thang. We should rename our species homo prospectus, says Seligman. Although we don't want to think too far in the future, apparently, because only one measly percent of thoughts of those Windy City residents were about death, and most of those were not about their own deaths, they were about other people dying....

Anyway, prospective psychology has ramifications for studying treatments for depression, memory, and emotions. Since anxiety and depression are linked to the tendency to “over-predict failure and rejection,” and become “paralyzed by exaggerated self-doubt,” new therapies are trying to train patients to envision positive outcomes and to look at future risks realistically.

Two other intriguing developments Seligman and Tierney mention are that in brain imaging, the areas of the brain that light up while subjects are remembering are the same areas that light up when they are imagining something. The takeaway is that memory is fluid, and one of the explanations is that memory helps us consider future scenarios. The second interesting conclusion is that emotions exist to help us do this more rapidly and successfully.

So, Readers, the question is, what does this have to do with me? And of course with you - of course. After all, the cornerstone of my blog is the assumption that if it has to do with me, it may well be something to which you can also relate, and therefore this blog is actually helpful in some way. Because a person wants to be helpful in some way, usually. A person likes that.

Although I hope you don’t relate as readily as I to the bits about over-predicting failure and rejection and exaggerated self-doubt.

To be helpful, let me point out that one major takeaway— a  word I’ve now used twice in this piece of writing, when one use of takeaway is perhaps too many — is positive thinking helps in planning and achieving goals. We already knew that, didn't we? But, and here Seligman and Tierney underscore good old Heidi Grant Halvorson, PhD, if you’re pessimistic, just envisioning getting something you want is not enough. I've touched on this topic before. What you need to do is be realistic about the negatives. Pessimists find this reassuring, since they’re not just being blindly Pollyanna-ish about the future. That, according to a pessimist, is akin to daring the Universe to just shit on you.

Pardon the crassness. My children dislike my crassness. And I apologize for it.

But my point is that a pessimist is just not going to be able to convince herself that she’s going to succeed at the thing she wants to succeed at by simply envisioning it. You know, just imagining herself “podiuming” at the next Olympics, as the snow boarders like to say, is not going to be sufficient for a pessimist. A pessimist is going to have to imagine the practical impediments, also known as obstacles, to her achievement. This will accomplish two things, one magical, and one not. First, it will convince her that she’s not taking the Universe for granted by imagining an easy triumph, thus inviting the Universe’s wrath. This is magical thinking and thus seems irrational, but makes perfect sense to some people, such as me. Second, and more important, this strategy leads to an understanding of the steps she needs to take towards this ultimate goal. The term for this is mental contrasting. It’s the opposite of magical thinking, but it does produce results.

Now, back to the title of this piece. I’m sure Seligman and Tierney didn’t pick it, so I’m not going to blame them. However, it is misleading. It seems to indicate that mindfulness is unhelpful, because focusing on the present is not what we are wired to do. Let me point out that the study that helped determine the conclusions described in this article involved something called “pinging”. I hope it wasn't painful, but I can't say. Okay, I can. I know exactly what pinging is, but I'm being quirky and humorous. Anyway, persons were pinged throughout their days, and then, when pinged, these persons noted what they were thinking and feeling at those moments when they were pinged. Those persons, therefore, were practicing mindfulness. They were taking a moment to notice what was happening in the present. Simple as that. That’s mindfulness. As Jon Kabat Zinn says, mindfulness is awareness, and awareness is a form of intelligence different than thought. It was their mindfulness that allowed these subjects to inform the researchers what was going on in their brains. And it would be mindfulness that would allow those anxious and depressed personages to break their bad thought patterns about the future. They have to recognize the negative thought and replace it with a positive one. That’s called, in Buddhism, setting an intention. Intentions are future-looking. They are seeds of possibility. And setting intentions is one of the elements of meditation.  We want to create a better future for ourselves, even the pessimists among us who are scared they can’t. So, living in the moment is actually one of the better things we can do for ourselves.

So, let’s set an intention. I’m gonna, Readers. My intention is to be generous and truthful. I’d love to know yours.

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* https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/opinion/sunday/why-the-future-is-always-on-your-mind.html?partner=rss&emc=rss