Needle, Meet Haystack

Over the past decade, I’ve undergone several major personal transformations.  My Meyers-Briggs personality test results have literally reversed themselves, as I’ve grown exponentially more extroverted, confident and knowledgeable.  I’ve developed skills that allow me to observe, retain and recall information at a larger volume and with more effectiveness than most people would think possible.  Most recently, I have worked on my physical self, dropping fat and gaining muscle in the way that you would usually only see suffixed by an asterisk and the phrase, “results not typical.”

I’ve honed my mind, body and soul into the optimal form of myself.  Would you like to know the secret?

Shoot, so would I.

People change.  It’s a natural extension of our culture and personalities to develop and adapt to new surroundings, people and experiences.  Most of the time, development happens with a great deal of subtlety, and years can go by before one notices new traits or competencies that have developed stealthily during that time.  When the desire for change is conscious, however, the process becomes stymied.  There’s a greater sense of urgency and immediacy with any undertaking, and a larger deal of frustration and stress comes with any setbacks or failure.

This is why diets don’t work.

When someone starts a diet, they often do so with a particular goal in mind.  It doesn’t matter what the program is, how long it’s supposed to take, or how much it costs; a diet is always constructed with a goal in mind.  ”Lose 15 pounds in just three weeks!” it might say.  ”Slim down two pants sizes in one month!” it might proudly proclaim.  The one thing they neglect to mention, though, is that you will eventually go off the diet.  One can only subsist on grapefruits, large piles of bacon, meat substitutes or vitamin-enriched milkshakes for so long, after all.

When a diet ends, things return to normal.  The goal has been met, and oftentimes, the view of sustaining that accomplishment is overlooked.  It’s why so many people have boomerang body fat percentages, and why there are tens of thousands of diet options on the market today.  Though it might be simpler to cut down on starches and fats while eating healthier foods overall, the gains (or losses) from that practice are not as immediate.  And when people demand change and results, immediacy is key.

This can apply to most personal changes; everything from gaining confidence to learning to ride the unicycle takes time and effort to do well.  And yet, we cling to the quick cures in the hopes that maybe this one will be different.  Maybe this will be the exception to all of the other failed attempts.  If the only thing that works definitely is time, then maybe a shift in perspective is needed.

Most of the time, personal development happens with a great deal of subtlety, and years can go by before one notices new traits or competencies that have developed stealthily during that time.  When looking back, it doesn’t seem like it took that long at all – it’s almost like it happened right away.

Life is made up of a series of small moments.  From the first glance across the table with your eventual spouse to ink marking paper to sign a contract for a new home, even the largest events have auspicious beginnings.  The tiny bits of a day add up to form a larger narrative, but sometimes they can be rewarding on their own.

We experience dozens upon hundreds of unique interactions with different people every day, but gloss over many of them.  Do you remember what you said to the cashier the last time you made a purchase?  Can you recall the details of small talk around the office?  It’s impossible to keep track of them, but they all combine to form our daily lives.  What might be insignificant to some might be the most meaningful to others.

During the first few years of high school, my friends and I would go to the movies on our half-days.  At a showing for the latest Harry Potter flick, a few younger kids sitting behind us were discussing every detail of the movie compared with the book, including events that hadn’t happened yet.  ”That spell’s not going to work,” one said, breaking the rising tension.  ”Clearly, it’s one of Voldemort’s guys,” the other remarked just before the big reveal.  It was too much.

I turned around in my seat.  ”SHUT UP AND LET US WATCH THE MOVIE!” I yelled.  The theater burst into a round of applause, and the rest of the movie was spoiler-free.

When we left the theater, the group delved into our usual chat about the movie, from favorite lines and scenes to criticism over the effects and performances.  And the one review that I’ll always remember came from my friend Andrew.  ”My favorite part was when that guy told those kids to shut up.”

I doubt that the kids who were chattering away remember their experience in the theater, and I doubt that my friends all remember it either.  Heck, I can’t remember which of the harry Potter movies it was.  That small moment of speaking out when everyone else was silent, as small and insignificant as it was, still means something to me.

We can also find solace in our daily routines.  There’s comfort in the familiar motions, from a consistent choice of breakfast cereals to brushing one’s teeth starting from the same spot every morning.  Running on autopilot lets us use our minds for heavier thoughts, although the specifics of our routines can get lost when they become too familiar.

One of my former roommates would always start the day out stretching like a cat.  One of my friends has sung the same song in the shower every morning for almost five years, even though he has never learned the right lyrics to the song.  And as for me?  It’s all about the underoos.

Seriously.  I don’t own a single pair of “grown-up” underpants.  They’re all novelties, from bananas and cows to neon yellow skulls and crossbones and images of underpants (meta-underwear, it’s been called).  When I pick out what I’m wearing for the day, I can be secure in the knowledge that no matter how professional I need to be at the office, or how cool I have to pretend to be around friends, my skivvies are always ridiculous.

It’s impossible to be really upset when your undies have smiley faces all over ‘em.

No matter what you think is the most important part of your day, there are thousands of tiny events that occur during your waking hours that shape your life and the world around you.  Every once in a while, it’s nice to sit back and enjoy the little things.

I don’t have a nice picture smile.  When someone tells me to “say cheese” or grin or look like I’m having a good time, a rictus of uncomfortable proportions corrupts the lower part of my face, and if there’s flash, a blink is usually involved as well.  And even though it requires fewer muscles to show off one’s pearly whites, I can always manage a good scowl.  I guess I like a good challenge.

The past week wasn’t about flipping the frown upside down; think of it more as a relaxing of the right facial muscles to ease the transition.

When I started the experiment last week, the plan was to put a bit more a spring in my step, to lighten up my disposition, and remove a bit of the sarcasm and self-effacement that served to gloom up some of my thoughts.  I would be “winning” by returning to a perpetual state of zen awareness and would come away with some great insight on how to better navigate my moods.

That plan didn’t come to pass.

No one noticed that anything was different.  Whether that’s due to my natural temperament being sunnier than I perceive it to be, or a lack of notice on the parts of others, there was no mention made on any significant external change to my personality or interactions.  Although I felt more confident, even those who were aware of the experiment said that they didn’t notice any changes.  On the outside, it seemed, I was the same guy.  But on the inside, it was different.

I became more conscious of the content of my conversations.  My words were chosen more carefully, my thoughts shifted in a way to look at the more positive aspects of things.  It was like having a mental editor determined to add smiley faces to everything.  It worked well enough for a while; I was slower to get grumpy, and I noticed that I was less tired and stressed.

The problems came when I was with other people.  When conversations turned to gossip and complaints, it was hard not to empathize with them.  In doing so, slivers of pessimism crept in, and yet I still felt good.  It was almost like a different type of schadenfreude; though dealing with negatives, I felt positive over the content and my reactions.  Even when speaking against someone or something, voicing my thoughts helped me to feel better.  Confession is good for the soul, after all.

So if I’m now optimistically viewing the guy who cuts me off in traffic or the girl who kicks me when she walks by, does that actually improve my disposition?  Or is it just a mental cover to the same brain full of more morose considerations?  After one week of trying, I’m really not sure.  I can say that I’m “winning” until the cows come home, but that doesn’t make it any more true than if I were to mutter, “losing.”  I can choose to calm myself and not get angry about someone else’s actions, but the repression might make me less happy in the long run.  When it comes to moods, there’s simply too many variables.  And try though we might to control them, their capricious and malleable nature ensures that a solid grasp on any one of them will never last long.

But frowning does seem more difficult now, like it’s more trouble than it’s worth.  Maybe I’m on my way to actually winning, instead of trying to force myself to think that I am.  That could be something to smile about.

Your calendar has been lying to you.

Whether it told you that February 14 was Valentine’s Day, Anna Howard Shaw Day, Arizona Statehood Day or Oregon Statehood Day, none of those are particularly important.  It might have whispered in your ear that you get off from work next Monday because the 21st is President’s day.  And it might even try to convince you that the 27th is tops in February, because it’s the birthday of Adam Baldwin, Chelsea Clinton, Josh Groban, Noah Emmerich, Elizabeth Taylor and Ralph Nader, but it’s lying.  You see, the most important day this month is actually today, February 15, and here’s why:

It’s all about you.

If you’re not a fan of holidays like I am, you might not be aware that in addition to today being Canadian National Flag Day, Susan B. Anthony Day, Serbian National Day, Singaporean Total Defense Day and (Potentially) George Washington’s Birthday, it is host to three disparate and unrelated yet very similar holidays.  February 15 is Parinirvana Day, John Frum Day, and the last day of Lupercalia.  Unless you’re furiously searching through Wikipedia right now, chances are that you might have heard of only one of them.

Buddhists and yoga fans will recognize Parinirvana Day as a particularly significant day: it’s the day that the Buddha transcended his physical life and achieved Nirvana.  It’s a day that celebrates life, honors death, and is a time for reflecting on the future.  As Buddhists believe that our existence is in a state of flux (or impermanence) in any particular form (see: reincarnation), one could say that Parinirvana Day could be summarized by the phrase, “This too shall pass.”

John Frum Day, meanwhile, is simply absurd and wonderful.  A holiday celebrated by some of the cargo cults in the South Pacific, its origins mirror the plot to the film The Gods Must Be Crazy.  During the early Twentieth Century (and especially the Second World War), a sudden influx of modernized goods, weapons and culture from the outside world invaded the indigenous populations of many small islands.  The manufactured goods and new technologies that appeared in front of the natives led them to believe that the soldiers there (‘John Frum’  might be an interpretation of the introduction, ‘John From America’) were prophets who would help usher the tribes into a new age of prosperity and happiness.  And while the cargo cults have a bit too much emphasis on material wealth and coveting, a day celebrating the hope and promise of a better life and success is something that can be admired.

Unless you are a devotee of ancient Roman traditions or a huge Shakespeare trivia nerd, it’s unlikely that you celebrate or have heard of the three-day festival of Lupercalia.  Without delving too much into the practices (participants are encouraged to run around naked and make animal sacrifices, among other things), the festival was one of fertility and purification; evil spirits were symbolically cast away in the hopes of improved health and fertility.  The festival was a way of starting with a clean slate to look towards a brighter future, much like we do each New Year’s Day.

So when we combine these three celebrations, we find that February 15 is a day in which we look towards the future with hope to plan for future success while recognizing that any negative issues we currently face are only temporary.  This is a chance to brighten one’s outlook with renewed optimism, to shake off the cobwebs and try again.  It’s a chance to take a few steps down the road to become the person you want to be.  And that’s something worth celebrating.

So, in honor of this sentiment, February 15 shall now be known as the (unimaginatively titled) Improvement Day!  Here’s how you participate:

Do something that makes your life better, right now.

It doesn’t have to be a grand gesture or a major act; it might be something as simple as cleaning out your email inbox or stretching after sitting in front of your computer for too long.  Just do something that affects you in a positive way with an immediate payoff (without detriment or harm to others, of course).  Maybe it’s a little thing you’ve put off doing, like recycling a few empty soda cans at your workstation.  Maybe it’s something you’ve been hesitant about committing to, like clearing your ex’s number out of your phone.  Whatever it is, just do it.  Right now.  Get it done, then come back.

With that simple action, you’ve taken your first step.  So maybe it’s time to consider larger steps, like improving communications with a co-worker, or taking the time to plan out the rest of your day so you know what you have left to do.  You could take small steps towards larger goals: buy a few healthier things when you go grocery shopping, or pay off your latest credit card bill.  As long as it’s something that has a positive impact on your life, get it done.

When we celebrate the new year, it’s often in the form of a hangover and resolutions.  ”I will do [something]” or “I’ll start to do [something]” or “I want to do [something]” – it’s an act of planning out eventually acting on a desire to accomplish a goal.  But there’s no pressure to resolve on Improvement Day, or to make drastic snap decisions without much consideration for how you’ll accomplish them; it’s about just doing things that make things better for you.

Every day, somewhere in the world, there’s a holiday celebration going on.  But why wait for a special day you might not even recognize?  Celebrate yourself.  That’s something that you can do any day of the week.

Your brain is working against you this very instant, crushing your hopes and dreams as quickly as you might think them up, pushing down your fantasies, and destroying an infinite number of possibilities for your future.  It’s building walls that you will never be able to overcome, pushing you down a more limited life path, keeping you from discovering untold adventures and limiting your own beliefs.  Every one of our minds has been designed, over centuries of evolution, to prevent us from being our fullest, best, truest selves.  No one is exempt, and no one is safe.  But for those of us who realize these limitations, there is hope.

There’s nothing that’s really stopping you from making friends with strangers, pursuing a lifelong goal, or improving yourself to be the person you wish you were.  The limiting beliefs that you possess are just that: beliefs. They’re not physical structures that you have to break down, but metaphorical and psychological barriers that need to be cut down to size and overcome.  All you have to do is forget everything you think you know about how to behave.

There are mental blocks that have built themselves over time that prevent us from acting how we want.  They can come from almost any source – friends and family, culture, religion, entertainment, politics, or random happenstance.  While some of these things can be good, like those that keep us from hurting one another physically, most are designed to help reinforce a status quo that we all accept because we’re comfortable with it.  Living a certain way allows each person the freedom to focus on a set number of things with which they might discover new enterprises; all that it costs is the freedom to do much else.  And it boils down to two simple words: conscience and regret.

There will always be a road not taken.  Though not every choice comes down to one of two options, some people spend their lives wondering what they might have done had they made one different choice.  They debate whether or not they would have been better off, by how much, and what they could have achieved.  In decision theory, this difference in payoff between what could have happened and what did happen is called regret.  It’s a defensive barrier that guards against taking risky chances in the future based on past performance, and is used as an unfair weight while judging decisions.  After all, it’s a comparison of the tangible occurrences that one has experienced versus the imagined history of what never was.  By unfairly weighing the odds through regret, many people prevent themselves from ever moving forward or taking advantage of the opportunities that they have.  Instead, they look to the past, frozen in a permanent state of “what if.”

The cliché angel and devil on opposing shoulders are supposed to represent conscience and baser instincts (respectively), and have been used countless times to illustrate moral conundrums.  But it’s not that black and white.  When someone “goes with their gut,” or uses intuition, isn’t that similar to baser instincts?  After all, very little conscious thought or empirical evidence is used in any of those cases, except maybe in hindsight.  When we act on instinct, the results can prove favorable; think back to when you made a good decision in the heat of the moment – everyone has at least one that they can remember.

So if the devil on your shoulder isn’t quite as evil as they seem, what about your conscience angel?

There’s a large number of definitions for what conscience is, but essentially, it’s conforming to what one believes is the right course of conduct.  So if you think that it’s immoral to eat the last cookie in a box, your conscience will tell you not to eat it so someone else can have it; if you believe that nobody should go more than 5 miles over the speed limit, when you’re going 53 in a 45 mph zone, you will feel guilty.  But since conscience is personal, that means that it’s also rather subjective.  We define what our conscience tells us to do, and can manipulate it as we see fit (and if you’ve ever seen Dexter, you know exactly how this can go).  Your conscience isn’t set in stone; it’s a rough guideline of minor things that you should and shouldn’t do.

Both regret and conscience work together to hold us back; it’s easier to keep things in and mitigate the guilt than take a risk to feel worse.  As such, they’re two powerful mental motivators to stay risk-averse and preserve our expected experiences.

This makes sense: from an evolutionary standpoint, it was imperative that those in a tribe work together to maintain a survivable and livable situation for the entire community – and deviation from proven methods could literally kill the members of that tribe.

Financially speaking, it seems logical: the risk of a short- or long-term potential payout might lead to greater rewards, but the equally great risk of losing as much (if not more) capital frightens many people away.

It’s uncomfortable to take chances and innovate.  Trying and failing has been ingrained in our minds as one of the worst things that a person can do.

But isn’t it worse not to try?

If you’re actively attempting to reduce your regret and “what if” quotient, wouldn’t taking the chances you might miss out on actually improve your life?  At the very least, you could use the experiences to make more educated decisions in the future.  And similarly, if you define what your conscience tells you, wouldn’t following it down the safer path only sate your personal code of conduct only for so long as you define proper action as what you do right now?

If you actively understand the fallacies within the mental conditioning that limits your self-concept and perceptions on what you can do, it’s easier to get around them and achieve your goals.  It might not seem like the sane, rational or responsible thing to do, but that’s because you’ll have to fight against your brain.

Besides, who wants to be sane, rational or responsible?  Go with your gut.

This is pretty much the thing I enjoy the least about my day.

It’s 6:00 AM, and I would love to be able to hit the snooze button and just relax and go back to bed and not think about being in the office in three hours, but I know that I really don’t have that luxury.  You see, someone else is counting on me.

So I trudge from one side of the house to the other, grab the cardboard box, take out the morning’s dose, and walk back to my room, plopping down on the floor to sit Indian-style as I check for breathing and open eyes.  Then, I use the index finger and thumb of my left hand to press against a fuzzy muzzle and pry a mouth of sharp teeth open, as the fingers of my right hand dart in as far back as they can, deposit their goods, and retreat.  Then I close the muzzle, and wait.

This is what we call “giving a dog a non-chewable pill required twice daily an hour before each meal.”  I call it unpleasant, for both me and my dog.  And we’ve been doing this same dance every day for nearly a year.

When we discovered several bumps on her fur, we had them checked out.  And on the day before I put up this post, we found out that they weren’t cancerous.  But all the same, her liver was breaking down slowly, and would kill her in a prolonged and agonizing way.  Luckily, these pills have helped to stave off the problem, and she’s been in good shape ever since.

And considering that she turned 14 recently (98 in dog years), that’s pretty impressive.

So we have our morning tradition.  I wake up grumpy so she can live longer.  Works for me.

———–

There is nothing that will humble you more than doing dirty work.

After several seasons on the air, I’ve found that Mike Rowe, host of Dirty Jobs, has changed his approach and outlook.  No longer does he stand in for the viewer in the wow, that’s gross or who in their right mind would do that voice that he once did.  Now, his tone is of reverence and respect.  Look at these things that keep our world running; did you even know that people did this? he asks now.  Be grateful of people like these, he seems to say.

I’ve had a similar, though more localized, experience.

For more than half my life, I’ve taken care of my dog.  Feeding her, playing with her, giving her medicine, and cleaning up her messes.  It’s been a job of constant servitude, but it’s one that I, like many pet owners, accept gladly.

What I’m getting at here is that it’s pretty much impossible to have an ego when you have to pick up your dog’s yard presents on a weekly basis.

It’s an unpleasant task to be sure, but it could be so much worse.  Like if we had a horse.  Or goats.  Or chickens.  I mean, have you ever been by a chicken coop? It might be the worst smell ever in the history of smells.  Just imagine the worst thing you’ve ever smelled in your life.  Got it?  Chicken scat is worse than that.  But I digress.

Whenever you have to perform work of servitude with no reward, it requires you to acknowledge that you are at the service of someone else, performing the most menial (albeit necessary) tasks possible.  Much like the Groom of the Stool from Ye Olde England, you’re doing dirty work for the betterment of all.

But at the same time, you’re just picking up dog doody.

No matter who you are or what you’ve done in your life, it’s inescapable.  Presidents, astronauts, actors, CEOS – all have had to, at some point, scoop up after their furry friends.  There’s no way for a music mogul to look cool while removing doggie deposits from the park.  This is just a scientific fact.

It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

Years before I was born, my dad decided to quit smoking.  Maybe it was the growing quantities of information regarding the adverse effects of cigarettes.  Maybe it was the rising cost of tobacco products.  Maybe it was having to go out onto the porch to smoke in the New York City winters because my mom wouldn’t let him light up inside of their apartment.

Whatever it was, one day, he just up and quit.  That was it.  Done.  Cold turkey, none of the cravings, the pangs of withdrawal, or the slippery slope back to addiction.  He still has the pack, almost thirty years old, with its original four cigarettes still inside.  It sits in his dresser, this stale pack of cancer sticks, untouched and slowly becoming mummified over the passing years.

I’m not quite so lucky.

For me, it’s always been about reaching a peak experience.  Once I master some skill, get to the top of the mountain, or accomplish a long-standing goal, I’m done.  This is why I stopped playing competitive soccer during high school, why I left my martial arts dojo as a youngster, and why it’s been hard for me to get back into drumming.  Once I feel I can’t go any higher, I start my descent.  The learning and achieving just stops.  The issue isn’t with quitting, but with sustaining. When I hit that peak, I call it “Reaching Everest.”

Throughout the years, I’ve tried to stave off this psychological barrier with a variety of methods.  Procrastination, meditation, visualization exercises, lateral activity expansion, and so on.  Nothing really seemed to stick, at least not until I stumbled upon the Candy Bowl Method.

When I started working at my current office, I was constantly asking more experienced co-workers in my department for help.  They were coming by my desk so often that I could tell it was getting a bit grating for them to break with their own tasks to assist the FNG.  So after two weeks of constant co-worker bothering, I decided to add incentive to their helpfulness, and turn down some negative connotations that might have popped up.  I brought in a candy bowl.

Every Monday (or whenever it’s running low, really) I filled up the small plastic bowl on my desk with various confections.  Now, it wasn’t as much of a pain for my co-workers to come by.  The new problem, however, was that I had a giant bowl of candy less than a foot away from my hands, taunting me every minute of the day.

In the beginning, I would try to keep consumption down to one piece per day.  Sometimes, I was able to keep this bargain.  Other times, I wasn’t.  But as the days, weeks and months went on, I found myself growing less attached to that bowl of candy, and its contents ceased to appeal to me altogether.  But that’s not to say that I don’t like candy.

It seems that consistent exposure to the bowl changed my perception of what candy is.  Before, I viewed it as a reward, a guilty pleasure that was fine in moderation, but something that had a correlation to stress and achievements, eliciting positive feelings.  But over time, the candy came to be just another item, but this time without any positive or negative associations.  It’s easier to resist because it doesn’t have the kind of meaning where I feel any need or urge to have it.  So in that way, it’s like my dad’s cigarettes: they’ve lost their emotional and personal connection, and the power that they possess.

I tried applying this tactic to a hobby I’ve intermittently enjoyed over the past few years: DJing and producing music.  I thought that I had reached Everest almost two years ago, when I played several sets at the Winter Music Conference in Miami for a fairly large audience, including industry names and minor celebrities.  But by spending more time with the music itself, apart from any goals, competition, aspirations or plans, I’ve come to enjoy it again, and am able to work on it without any sort of peak experience looming off in the distance.

So if you’ve had trouble stopping or starting something, you might just need to change your perspective and re-acquaint yourself with it from a different angle.  Or maybe you just need some candy.

“I want you to pay close attention, because this isn’t about fun, joy, happiness, or even pleasure.” he said.  ”This all boils down to survival.”  And with the guillotine chop of a knife, that’s how my lessons began.

I was probably about 5 or 6 years old when I started actually cooking things, moving past sandwiches and reheatable meals to combining different ingredients to form new flavors and textures.  Dad had taught Mom, who, up until they were married, had never put together a meal by herself in her life.  So they both taught me.

On it went, from the basics of boiling water and using different utensils to figuring out flavor profiles and new methods.  Over many years and many cuts, scrapes, burns, scars and further temporary mutilations, a form of personal cuisine emerged, until things got to the stage when I could proudly tell a date, “I can cook almost anything.”  And I did.

What started out as a necessary task for nights when both of my parents were at work became something I would look forward to, then a hobby, then passion, then right back to survival when I went to college and attempted to eat a meal in the dining hall.  But through it all, I wanted something that presented a greater challenge; more direct work with ingredients requiring precision, focus and skill.  Which is why I started baking.

If cooking meals is a free-flowing, improvised jazz tune, baking is the rigid structure of a classical reproduction.  Portions and proportions must remain precise, from weights and measures to technique, timing, preparation and presentation.  The margin of error is almost nil; one wrong move can erase hours’ worth of work and effort.  Cooking is unrestrained freedom and experimentation; baking is more like dealing with hazardous chemicals.

The main difference between the two is that there’s no wrong way to cook something.  There are many opportunities to correct past mistakes, to go back and fill in problem areas, to cover over imperfections and deal with little surprise issues.  With cooking, you can use the “kitchen sink” method – throw a bunch of ingredients together to see what happens.  It’s pretty much how chili was invented.

Baking, meanwhile, requires that you follow the rules, coloring within the lines so that everything turns out correctly.  Sure, you can make a few little tweaks here and there, but if you miss one step or grab one wrong ingredient, it’s all over.  By the time your concoction goes into the oven, you’re set.  All you can do is hope for the best and plan on how to frost it once it comes out of the oven.

Regardless of whether or not someone actually cooks or bakes, their behavior is likely to follow one of these two trends.  Some prefer loose expressionism, while others work better while adhering to a more rigid set of instructions.  It’s the set-up for every mismatched duo in entertainment history; the Odd Couple dichotomy.  While both practices seem to be the same, fundamentally speaking, the execution can be quite different.  The tools and the equipment might be the same, but it doesn’t mean that they’ll get the same result.

There’s nothing wrong with either approach, and many people might engage in both activities.  But for those who stick to one side or the other, the discrepancies in communication and understanding can lead to a wide gulf of miscommunication.  So regardless of which side of the spectrum you fall on, pay attention.  Because it’s not about fun, joy, happiness, or even pleasure.  This all boils down to social survival.

Well, that and food.

Most days, nothing exciting really happens.  I’ll wake up after hitting the snooze button a few times, groggily check the Internet for the latest news, make breakfast and get ready for work.  Then I’ll go to work, work at work, eat lunch (at work), work some more, then come home to relax (or work), have dinner, relax (or work) some more, and go to bed.  That’s it.

Wash, rinse, repeat.  Same ol’, same ol’.  A consistent, unchanging routine.

Some people would look at that and feel bad for me – where’s the adventure?  The excitement?  The challenges?  Where are the stories hiding, the foundation for what makes someone interesting?  Normal and dull is lame and sucky, they would say.  But why is it really that bad?

There are people who would do some pretty despicable things for my routine.  A dull, boring day for me might be fascinating for others.  Just because I perceive that nothing happened doesn’t mean that nothing did happen.  It’s one of the greatest fallacies of our time: boring = bad.

But when you think about it, boring is what sustains us.  It’s what makes the uneventful, interesting and memorable days so special.  It’s the thing that gets us paid and takes care of our families.  Boring routine is what ensures our cooperation and contribution to the world around us, even if it seems monotonous.

Not all of us have the ability to drop everything and take jet-pack lessons, or to go climb Mount Kilimanjaro as we please.  But that’s what vicarious living is for!  We do it with everything from books to movies to TV and magazines, and definitely with the Internet.  When you think about it, that’s really the whole point of reviews: vicariously experiencing something to determine if we would take it upon ourselves to do it.  If our lives were full of adventure and craziness, how would we be able to appreciate those things?

Most days, nothing exciting really happens with me.  But that makes the days when there is something interesting going on that much better.  And that’s the way it should be.

“So, what was the best thing about your life today?” he asked, looking over my order.

I had no response, and must have had a dumbfounded expression on my face.

“Out of everything that happened to you today,” he continued, obviously used to this sort of response, “What was the best thing?”

The old man’s eyes hadn’t lifted off of the small piece of paper where I’d scribbled down my sandwich order.  And as I looked around helplessly, time seemed to slow to a crawl. What was the high point today?  Was there a high point?  It was all pretty average.  National Sandwich Day was yesterday, that was kind of cool.  But I had a salad.  ARGH!  What the hell did I even do today?

Realizing that I should have some sort of an answer for the guy, especially since he made it clear he wasn’t asking rhetorically, I stumbled through a response.  “I, um…got here early enough…so you were still here so I could get sandwiches?” I offered, uncomfortably.

“We’re here from open to close.” He countered, a bit perturbed.

The sandwich man then set to his task, hidden behind a high shelf of refrigerated side dishes and quick to-go boxes with wraps, pasta salads and pickles.  He worked silently, methodically, chopping and slicing, spreading and folding.  His aged hands moved in the patterns that he’d taught them over a lifetime of experience, deftly working in unison, but also as separate parts, grabbing new ingredients with one while the other arranged the components that he had already gathered.

As he worked, I felt somewhat ashamed, like I had failed a hidden test from the philosopher behind the sandwich counter.  He seemed so content, so at peace with what he was doing, while I could scarcely remember the last time that I even seemed that relaxed at my job.  The sort of tranquility and comfort he seemed to possess was something I’d let go of when I left the university and entered the working world.  In that moment, I wanted to be that Zen.  A creeping sense of unhappiness began to grow at the back of my mind – I still didn’t have a good answer for him.

By this time, the order was complete, and bread-bookended glory lay within the butcher paper wrapping he had constructed.  As I reached for the sandwiches, he cleared his throat.

“You know, you can call ahead, and we’ll have everything ready for you when you come by.” He said.  “The number is right here – it’ll be all set within ten minutes of whenever you want to pick your order up.”  The sandwich man smiled, then vanished to clean up his workspace.

As I left the land of philosophies and cold cuts, his question kept playing over and over in my head, starting at a low rumble and working its way up to a calamitous shout.  WHAT WAS THE BEST THING ABOUT YOUR LIFE TODAY? The voice boomed.  Though I tried to distract myself with other thoughts, it always seemed to rise above them.  I could ignore it no longer.  And though I didn’t have an answer, I did have a compromise.

I would never again have a day where I couldn’t answer that question.

So, what was the best thing about your life today?