Answer the phone!

Our lives are filled with things that are seemingly urgent. If the phone rang when I was a kid, almost everyone in the house (including myself) all-but-killed-themselves trying to answer it as quickly as possible. Imagine heating a tea kettle on a stove—what do we almost unhesitatingly do when it begins whistling? Naturally, we try to stop it as quickly as we can. How about when the doorbell rings? What about when an alarm sounds? Most likely the same answers apply. What's interesting about these observations is not that we tend to respond to such things, but rather, that we respond to them so urgently and without conscious thought.

Now I am not seriously suggesting that when the phone or doorbell rings, we should not respond appropriately. I am not suggesting that when the timer on the stove goes off you should consider letting your food burn. Nor do I think that those of us who seemingly “can't resist” answering a text or email are suffering from a kind of insanity. What I am suggesting is that, for many of us, our years of responding to such things in an urgent and necessary fashion has conditioned us to react to many things without realizing that we have a choice in the matter.

Regardless of any urgency we may feel, we can choose not to answer the phone or doorbell. We can choose not to get the food out of the oven—and let it burn—just as we can choose to leave the tea kettle screaming on the stove top. Again, I am not suggesting to actually do these things. I am simply making the point that we are not obligated to do them, despite our behavior often suggesting otherwise.

As an exercise in self-control, try to overcome the impulse of acting automatically. Try to subdue it and master it. Things that you may perform automatically, unhesitatingly, urgently—deny them their urgency and importance. Respond to them differently. Deliberately heat a tea kettle on the stove, for instance. When it whistles, take your time getting to it. The sound might drive you nuts, but let it go for a minute or so and then slowly remove it from the burner. See? The world didn't end. You're still very much alive and kicking. You survived the discomfort. No tea kettle? Try the same exercise with something else. Flex those self-control muscles a bit, you never know when you might need them.

Explaining Losses

Winning and losing is implicit in the nature of competition. There must be a scorecard, a results tally. Someone must win, someone must lose. However, should the losing party attempt to explain their loss—something that I continuously find rather puzzling, and which usually comes in the form of excuse making or blaming—their explanation, at bottom, usually amounts to: “If only you hadn't won, I would have!” Indeed... a most astute observation.

I often wonder why people feel the need to explain their losses to those around them. Take a card game, Euchre, for instance. When a person wins a trick, you will often find that one of the losers will say something like: "If you didn't have that King, I would have won it!" Or, if the situation is such that whomever wins the trick wins the game: "If you didn't have that King, we would have won the game!" Now, I can't for the life of me think of a more uninteresting thing to say. Again, "If only you hadn't won, I would have!" Great. What an exceedingly riveting observation. Why don't we sit here for another 20 minutes hashing out all the ways you could have won—"if only things had happened differently"?

Why do people do stuff like that? Is it because they're embarrassed they lost? Is it because they want the winners to know that they (the winning party) just barely eek'd out a victory, and that they (the losing party) are not so very bad after all? No doubt I will encounter the said situation again at some point in the future. And when I do, perhaps I can cross examine a few people and figure out just what is going on in their minds when they say such things.

A Quick Observation

Over time I have observed that my own emotions seem to radically affect my initial perception of problems or situations. For instance, upon being faced with a new problem or unexpected situation, I am often inundated with emotions which seem to artificially inflate my perception of the gravity of the problem or situation. In other words, because my initial response may be emotional (perhaps no one else would know this because I tend to be more introverted when it comes to my emotions), I tend to immediately anticipate that the problem or situation is much more terrible than it actually is, and after some time has passed (which can range from a few hours to a few days) and my emotions have subsided, I realize that the problem or situation is not nearly the threat which I had initially perceived it to be, and that my initial emotional upsets were unwarranted.

None of this should be a huge surprise to those who carefully study their emotions and their volitional responses to them. However, this observation seems to suggest that it would be better to suspend emotional actions and judgments until the initial “rush” of emotion has subsided. With such raw emotions behind us, we are better able to discern appropriate actions and responses, and developing the habit of doing just that would be no doubt greatly beneficial.