Salt Mines - 2005
Although feelings are such an integral part of our lives they can often just be another un-inspected component, but they spring up at unexpected times. The way that our society has evolved is so complex that Feelings, Thoughts and Actions can be tightly coupled in ways that are contradictory and cause stress. We also know that feelings can affect the way that we think, and on top of this when we are right in the middle of a situation, it’s possible for our thought processes to be consumed with what we are feeling and not what we are facing.
These things apply to all feelings, positive or negative.
Negative emotions are very powerful, and a physiological level they generate potent chemicals. Bad feelings generate stress, your cortisol levels rise, it can affect your blood pressure, digestion, outlook, everything.
If you see a hazmat accident, you would avoid it like, well, a hazmat accident. That’s what these feelings are – there’s a lot of bad chemicals sloshing around all over the place, and the last place you want to be is anywhere near it, not least for the reason that you don’t want your precious bodily fluids being turned into biohazard. There are no hard and fast rules about how you can do this, but you can think about it ahead of time. Some people are better at it than others. You might see people that deal with unpleasant situations more gracefully than others. You might take this as a role for how you are going to do it. "Go ahead, Punk! Make my day."
Just as there are people who are trained and equipped to deal with hazmat accidents, there are people who are trained to deal with negative emotions – people like the police, judges, and counselors. These are experts. Something to bear in mind is that some of them are experts ex post facto – i.e. something has to happen before they get involved (like the police or judges).
Knowing that there are people out there that are paid to deal with this stuff can be a huge help – the obvious benefit is that you don’t have to. A secondary benefit is that if you think about this ahead of time and can visualize a situation where these people may be playing a role in your life, it tends to have a moderating effect on your actions. You’d feel pretty silly if you called the police because a dog bit you, and had to explain to them that you were poking it with a sharp stick. It’s also gets you in the frame of mind of seeing yourself do this. Let them sort this shit out, they are paid for it, and in any shit slinging contest, it ain’t what you throw that counts, it’s what sticks.
Emotions play a powerful part in our lives and should not be discounted or suppressed, ever (thereby lies the path to a corrosive end).
Part of our evolution equipped us with powerful systems to deal with dangerous situations. The flight or fight response. This is a function of the parasympathetic nervous system, and involves your adrenal glands dumping powerful chemicals into your bloodstream. When this happens, your body is prepared for incredible feats – running fast, or fighting. Over millennia, our social structure has changed so that there are very few of us that need to do this regularly (Fight or flight), but the same mechanisms still exist and it is still possible to trigger them.
We like to watch action movies, and cop shows on TV, but consider this. When was the last time you had to fight someone? How often have you ever had to fight? How necessary was it? For most people, they have no need during their day to engage in combat. For those that do, soldiers and law enforcement personnel, the stress of these situations can be overwhelming. It’s one thing to watch cop shows each week where a cop shoots a bad guy. When this actually happens (in real life), the policemen involved are automatically given leave and psychological counseling.
Even if your feelings are entirely justified (You have every right to feel hurt, angry, resentful, scared), doing something while you feel this way is not acting in your own best interests. The emotions in your brain are generated by the release of chemicals that are many times more potent than artificial drugs. If you would never think of going to a business meeting, sales negotiation, or confrontation while you were drunk, you should think the same way about doing this when you are angry or upset.
The primary difference is that you don’t suddenly get drunk in these situations, but you can suddenly experience strong emotions. Just as drink impairs judgment, so do strong emotions. If you are angry or upset, this is a very important situation and you need to deal with it IMMEDIATELY. If your thought processes are completely de-railed with emotion, you are not giving yourself the best opportunity to deal with this important situation properly. Who knows’, you may. You might just pick on the appropriate action and execution while you feel this way, but consider the following.
Time leaches emotions out of experiences. I’ll just bet that there are times in your past where strong negative emotions were involved, and now that they have receded, you can inspect them. You may well have been perfectly justified in feeling the way that you did (don’t discount your feelings), but in retrospect, how did this experience turn out for you? If you had a time machine and could re-visit this situation, what would you have done differently? You can use this as a Deus ex Machina in the future. You can use your crystal ball and look ahead, you can make some decisions right now about things that you can do if this starts to happen again.
You know how to deal with this.
If you look at it this way, you might not be able to prevent negative experiences. It is your absolute responsibility to reduce this corrosive component of your life. If you fuel a bad feeling, it can escalate to something worse. Even if it never escalates, but just simmers along, it is generating chemicals that will kill you in a very unpleasant way, and the trip to this demise will be just as unpleasant.
You owe it to yourself to just get that crap out of your life. Someone might be unpleasant or rude to you. They may even do this on purpose, they may track you down across a continent for the express purpose of being mean, or they might just pick on you because you happen to be there. Right up to this point, it is their problem.
They could be an anonymous nobody who can just as easily return to that category with their feathers unruffled, or your ear hanging from their belt loop. They know nothing about you. You have a say in how every human interaction in your life turns out, and you could do worse than trying to make everyone positive
In a specific example like road rage, one simple expedient is to stop. If you are moving in traffic, and you pull over to the side of the road, simple laws of physics take over – the distance from an asshole increases.
You might have to put some effort into this, if you are in a public place and something like this happens, you may need to physically distance yourself from someone – walk away, again the distance from an asshole increases.
You might naturally assume that when the distance from an asshole increases, that you are moving away from an asshole. You could be doing everyone else a favor, because you might be the asshole.
Sad but true.
Like you would not willingly rush into a hazmat accident, and would probably take specific actions to avoid one, the same is true for negative emotions.
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This should show you that your life is not some action movie, where each phase is defined by snap decisions and explosive action. These things may happen, just not all the time. For the long periods in between, everyone benefits from your consideration, but because you are in every single one of these situations, the person that gets the most overall benefit is YOU.
I was driving my mother to the airport for an international flight. I had scheduled to be at the airport between 2 ½ to 3 hours early. As I was driving, I got a message on my cell phone from the airline and I pulled over to check it (yeah, really, I had loads of time and my Mum was up my ass about it). They left a recorded message saying that the first leg of the flight had been cancelled, and that my mother was re-scheduled to fly a day later and on a much more grueling schedule. When I called the reservation desk I found that the international portion of the flight was still OK, but the domestic hop was cancelled. There was an earlier flight, but because the overall flight was international, I’d only have an hour to check in and that it was a policy that I needed 2 hours. I thought this was fine, but the reservations clerk strongly discouraged me from continuing to the airport.
I was fuming. I’d gotten notification about an event too late to do anything about it, and had been presented a fait acomplis. I was already en route to the airport, and when I’d called someone to ask for help they were adamant that I should turn around and go home. It was not that this thing was not possible, it was a policy issue. It became obvious that I was not going to prevail on the phone, and even if I did, they were not the people that could physically get my mother on the plane.
I’d made a decision, I was going to the airport and I was going to get my mother on the plane. I’d also got some pretty strong ideas about what I was going to do. They were completely conventional thoughts and they revolved around some yelling and throwing my weight about and some kicked asses and my Mum on that plane. The fact that it might be my ass that got kicked and Mum would miss the flights because I’d be in custory was not a consideration. I’d seen too many hardass movies. I focused on being calm, since I still had to drive to the airport, and my Mother is always up my ass about how I drive and as I calmed down. I started thinking more calmly about my situation.
There was someone at the airport that could get my mother on the plane. I needed to find that person. When I walked up to that person, the first impression of my problem would be the one that I gave them. Until they met me, they would have no idea what had happened. A graphic description of the injustices perpetrated against my by their employer, what I thought of the airline, and demanding immediate satisfaction was my second plan admittedly, but at best it was a plan b.
I know I feel good about myself when I help someone. The first thing I needed to do was ask for help. Without explaining everything that had happened, and how I felt about it, I needed to tell this person plainly and calmly what I needed.
“I need to re-book me Mum onto a domestic flight that leaves in 1 hour, and I need to make sure that she was still booked on the international flight. I need to do this because her original flight had been cancelled, and I'm worried that I didn’t have enough time, miduck.”
(I'd pre threatened Mum to look pathetic and old)
I did have a lot of justifying statements, threats, accusations and other stuff lurking beneath the surface, but that was my problem, not theirs.
When I approached a supervisor and said pretty much that quoted bit above and they said “It should be no problem, let me check”. He went to a spare terminal, asked for my mothers documents and printed the tickets. The whole thing was resolved in less than 10 minutes, and I still had 30 minutes to say goodbye to my mother.
In this case, I had a 30 minute car ride to gather my thoughts. If I had been presented with this information at the airport, or I had held onto my feelings for 30 minutes, executing my plan b may have worked. Plan a could have caused a lot of bad feeling and ultimately hurt someone I cared about – my mother. It was no good for her if I let my emotion stand between her and her flight.
This is a situation where I thought differently. Not in an abstract way, sitting on a park bench thinking about “How much money would be enough?” I was in an emotionally charged environment, and I was thinking conventional thoughts (conventional to me). These conventional thoughts had entirely predictable outcomes. But, ironically enough conventional thinking was telling me that while I didn’t like what was going on right now, if I did what I felt like doing (or what I’d done in the past in similar situations), I was going to feel even worse about what happened next.
As stated before “Blessed are they that get the knowledge they need as they need it”.
Sometimes it is easy to get carried along with the situation. It can be a little like skiing, or bicycle riding: you get going on a gentle slope, and you are comfortable with everything that is happening. This slope gets steeper and all of a sudden everything you have is focused on dealing with a situation that needs everything that you have. Your level of awareness rises from clues about your surroundings (i.e. I’m going too fast). At this point you can do something about it. At a minimum you can stop. If you decide to continue, you know you have to use all your considerable experience and faculties to keep yourself from running out of control and maybe getting hurt.
You can do this at any point in your life. There are situations that can start to gather momentum all on their own. If you are experienced, you look for these situations because this is where you can move away of the pack and put distance between you and everyone else (sometimes literally, in long loping strides).
Stopping is an excellent and often underused device for bringing a situation like this under control. You have a myriad ways of stopping something, but the simplest is “I need to stop”
If it is a situation where you cannot stop just remember, it takes your participation for this thing to get where it’s going, so you'd best be prepared.
