Introduction
Hey, Amber, Aidan, I’ve written this for you both, hopefully to help you as you grow into young adults and beyond. These are some of the things that I wished somebody told me at your age. You probably recognise one or two of these as you’ll have heard me say a couple of them over the years. Perhaps, now that you’re older and I’ve expanded on them, you’ll get a better understanding of what I meant. Some of this won’t make sense now at the age you are now. Maybe you’ll come back and read this every now and then. Then, perhaps, some might make sense at 25, others at 45 and perhaps some will never be needed. Needless to say, I’ll always be here to talk about anything, this is just something extra to cover the general things and not the specifics that come up in life.
Kids grow up into adults so fast and suddenly it feels like you have to always know the right way to do everything. It might not feel like it but you don’t have to know everything and to be honest, you never will know the right way to do everything. I’m middle-aged now and I still make mistakes all the time. I make them with friends, I make them at work and I still wonder sometimes how the hell I am gonna deal with this or that situation. I don’t always have all the right answers and you won’t either and that’s ok. You’ll work them out as you go along, just as I did. Hopefully you won’t take as long as me and you’ll get more right that I have but you’ll get there. Our lives are a collection of simple chapters in a book and if I’d known even a little of this, my own chapters would have been simpler and so, in some small way I hope this’ll help you with yours. Your chapters are your own and you’ll live them your way, with your own decisions and mistakes which you’ll learn how to fix by yourself.
Remember when I taught you to ride a bike? I held onto your seat whilst you pedalled to keep you from falling and then when I thought you were ready, I let you go. Think of this as an extension of that and re-read it if you ever need to feel a hand on your seat again.
But there are no full answers to be found here, but perhaps a little of the right questions one should ask. Use it to remind you of one way of being, to help you if you need it. But don’t live by these words alone. Search out other ways to be too and take the best of all of them, those that make the most sense to you.
So anyway, go on now, pedal away and create that book, change someone’s world like you did mine and every now and then come and find me wherever I am because I’ll want to hear all about it.
With all my love, Dad
April 2016
Life is simple
“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.” — Dr Seuss
When you’re born, you really only need four things. Food, sleep, entertainment and love. That’s all you needed and all you cared about. Fortunately, you were lucky to be born in a loving family so you really didn’t want much for anything else. Now as you grow older and you mix with others, your life is becoming yours to control. You’ll find new friends, rediscover old ones and encounter love many times over. During all of that, every now and then you may find that life gets a little complicated. People might say hurtful things, they may reject you or your ideas, compete with you or perhaps simply disagree with you and the things you feel strongly about. Maybe society makes you feel you should act a certain way or must copy somebody famous and you feel you have to be like them too. Or that you just have to acquire something even though you really can’t afford it. At other times, it’s not others but yourself that makes things seem difficult by putting needless pressure on yourself or thinking that things are worse then they really are.
All of these things can make things seem tough, even if only for a little while. How you respond will determine how difficult your life feels. It’s important to realise that the choice of how it feels is entirely yours. You can get angry or sad or dwell on the unjustness of it all for as long as you need to but at some point you have a decision to make. You can get involved and respond accordingly or you can choose to accept and ignore the situation and disregard it as something that happened and not worth any more of your time and move on. Some things are worth fighting for and some aren’t. Try to remember that life is meant to be simple and that others make it difficult but how difficult is up to you.
Whatever you decide, do what you feel you have to but afterwards, make sure that you can still happily eat, sleep, have fun and love. Because, just as it always was, and despite how much humanity tries to pretend otherwise, life is really about keeping things as simple as it was the minute we were born.
Enjoy life
“This life is contagious! Go, go tell your neighbours!” — Emelie Sandé (modified)
Enjoy being yourself. If there’s only one thing to take away from these words, it should be this: Have fun and share it. (Secret tip: the sharing leads to more fun!)
Money isn’t required to have fun, only time and courage. Invest in both because both diminish quickly until there’s no more of the former and we need all we ever had of the latter.
If money isn’t required then that only leaves memories as the currency of life. They are the singular thing that drive all our communications with each other. Without memories we have nothing to say, seek, or fear.
Indulge in as many things as you can that give communicable memories. Try to be as social as you can be so that, over your lifetime, you’ll have been a part of a thousand communities. At the end, you don’t want a little box of memories stored away in the attic but a memory hangar, full to the brim, with a little space on the floor for you to take yourself to, in your mind, to replay the memories and the emotions as you retell yet another story to the children of the future. Memories are unique like that in that they can be spent again and again across generations without losing any value. If anything they gain value and your memories are just as valuable to you as to those you may tell them to when you’re older, those children of the future. And remember, that the future you is also a child of the future, and like all children, that child too will need to hear your stories.
Your dreams are just memories waiting to be written. One by one they’ll transit from an aspiration to an inspiration, perhaps exactly as you envisaged it or maybe a just a little different. But if you find yourself mourning over memories yet to be written then consider how best to write them and get on with it; dreams don’t write themselves.
So, make memories every day, live whilst you’re young (anything under 150) and when you’re old? Invite some friends around and see if they’d like to play in that hangar of yours.
Friendships
“People will forget the things you do, and people will forget the
things you say. But people will never forget how you made them feel." — Maya Angelou
They say love is everything, the meaning of life but that’s not true, at least in that sense. Friendships are the meaning of life. Friends are the people with which we experience our journeys through life together, to embrace and deflect whatever it throws in our paths. If we’re lucky, our parents or the people that looked after us will be amongst our closest friends but if not, that’s ok. There’s literally billions of people that we can be friends with.
The beauty of friendships is that not only can loved ones be friends but that friends can also become loved ones. Over a lifetime, your friends will introduce you to their friends and those friends will do the same to their friends and so on. Then one day you might meet someone that turns into a truly significant person in your life. What started of as a journey with friends is now a journey with family. If you’re very lucky, that chosen loved one will also be your best friend (if you can, don’t settle for less).
Sometimes it’s hard to make friends though. Especially when starting something new like a new school or a new job. It can feel that to make friends you have to please all of the people all of the time. You don’t.
Friendships, like Lego, are best when you don’t follow the instructions. Lego comes with a guide in how to build something specific e.g a farm. But Lego is the most fun when you experiment with the different pieces to see what looks and feels good, not when you try to build something somebody else told you to. Friendships are exactly like that. Don’t try too hard. Express yourself however you want to and not how you think others expect you to be. Then you’ll find other similarly minded people that like you for who you are and that’s how great friendships start.
However once you have friends, things are so much easier! There’s only really one thing to do. Have fun! Do you want to know the best things about friendships? They’re free! The only thing you need to spend is time so make sure you make time to be with your friends. Do the fun things that you all enjoy together. If you can’t spend time with them physically, call them up every now and then and ask “How are you?” as it’s always nice to hear a voice of a friend.
Yes, some friendships will last forever and some won’t. Laugh at the memories you made together and try not to be too sad about the ones you won’t and be glad of the time you shared together.
Try to be the friend you’d want and you’ll get the friends you’ll need.
Love
What a gift it is to have /
A hand to hold /
To squeeze and caress /
A body against which mine to mould /
To clutch close to my chest /
A story that ought to be told /
To proudly confess /
Oh, What a gift that was
When love is in the air, inhale deeply and know that particular flavour. That love or the memory of it will sustain you. When you find it, try and hold on to it and if it leaves or the flavour changes, let it go. It’ll come back. It’ll be with someone else but it will be back. Don’t be afraid of love or of losing it. Embrace it because direct love, for others and the love others have for you, is the only thing (besides memories) worth accumulating in your lifetime. But don’t strive too hard for it. It’ll happen when it happens but it all begins with friendships. Without friends, there is no family. Most likely you’ll meet your life-long partner through friends and if you don’t, you’ll use all of your social skills you learned with your friends to find one.
Lovers can let you down but good friends will be there to help pick you up. Try and find someone who is also a best friend and will help you when you need it and just as importantly, know when you do.
There’s a difference between loving somebody and being in love. The difference is slight but significant. Being in love means doing the little things, without them asking you to, that make your loved ones smile. Little gifts of actions that only gives (or doesn’t take) happiness from them. At its simplest, it’s thinking about them everyday. If you’re in love, it comes naturally and almost without thinking the things you’d normally wouldn’t do a certain way, you’d do another because you know it’d please your partner not to do it the way you normally do. It’s the same with things you know might disturb, disrupt or upset them. Without thinking, you’d make sure that whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it in a way that they don’t even notice and they’re free to continue doing whatever it was they were doing, be it sleeping, working or relaxing. And if they do the same for you, then you also know if they’re really in love with you too. Being in love is just as much about the things you don’t do just as much as the things you do do for each other. All the pieces matter.
Don’t be too generous with your love. Sometimes, some people don’t deserve as much as you give them. Love is like light — it needs to be reflected to be experienced. Surround yourself with people that shine back the love you give them and keep away from the duller ones that keep it for themselves and hoard it within. Remember, no matter what they say to you, if you’re not feeling it, then they’re not giving it. Love is something that should be felt, not simply said or heard. Regardless as to why people cannot express it, you have one life. Why waste it gasping for the one thing you need if there isn’t enough of it in the air?
Family
Family, blood-tied or not, is the most you’ll ever have.
Stop reading and call your mother.
You done? How is she? Look after her like she looked after you and remember the love she always has for you.
Always try to remember that you both were born so close to each other that before school you were each other’s first best friend as well as siblings so always look out for each other. Be active in each other’s lives.
Death’s a place where the dreams of tomorrow become the regrets of today. The things we wished we did and planned to do always tomorrow (with others or just for ourselves) can no longer occur and become another thing we regret not having done. Try to minimise that much as you can.
It comes to us all and when it comes to our most loved ones, even if it’s expected, it can still be a total shock to us and we can lose all our strength. Grief can affect us in widely different ways but it’s important not to ignore it.
If grief has a flame, then it mustn’t burn like a candle flame, gradually, dim and flickering, but like a lit matchstick, bright and swiftly. It’s much better to have a few very tough months and move on then to have years of incomplete grief and still not being able to move on with your life. One can lose years of one’s life after another loses theirs and that must never happen. It’s a disservice to those that died and to yourself. The life of the living is just as important as the memory of the dead. Respect both by feeling alive. Start by watching John Travolta dance to “Staying Alive”. Then join in.
Happiness
“If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is your success.” — Henry David Thoreau
Happiness is what it’s all about. Gravitate to what makes you happy, whether it’s other people or otherwise.If you ever find yourself falling further away from it, if it’s still possible, try to find your way back.
Happiness is our northern star and we should use it to navigate our lives. There’s no greater feeling and sometimes it can be achieved by doing less, not more.
But sometimes things don’t work out the way you expected and change needs to happen. It may be easier to just accept things the way they are, as after all, it isn’t that bad, is it? Sometimes that’s true because not being happy isn’t the same as being unhappy. If there is a real feeling of unhappiness though, that change probably is required and we have to be a hero for ourselves and make that tough decision to change things.
If that change can’t be made, then work hard at making the situation better or at least at not making it worse especially if others are hurting because of it. Again, try and be that hero for yourself but also for them.
Remove what makes you unhappy and do more of whatever makes you happy. If things hurt enough to cry then do so (like Shrek said, better out than in!) but for only a little while and then find a way to laugh. Try and make laughter your first response to tough times. Getting mad is hard work and crying is messy. But laughter? What a feeling! What a sound!
Self-awareness
“Of all deceivers fear most yourself!” — Søren Kierkegaard
Take time out of your day to be by yourself. No activity, no phone, no music or radio, no play, no work. Just sit and relax. Don’t be afraid to do the things that you’d mostly do with friends or family by yourself. Have a drink in a pub or a meal in a restaurant just by yourself. Just the act of being by oneself doing something that the body can do on automatic, allows oneself to just be and the rubbish thoughts and ideas to dissolve and the better ones to bubble up. Our brains evolved to process things in a non-blocking manner where information is processed in parallel to what we’re doing at the present moment. Solutions to problems we didn’t even know we were processing often make themselves known to us hours, even days later. That process is delayed by modern living with its information overload. Nowadays, there is no time to be, only to react. Reactions are meant to be actions in response to other events and so if we’re always reacting, then that means there are a stream of events happening that we’re responding to. We built machines that do nothing but react to events and yet all it has done is make us more in need of things to react to. Life, at a human level, is meant to be a life of chosen actions and not spent as a reaction factory forever churning out responses to a thing. So, step back every now and then and just be.
Be wary of seeing things only through your digital lens, that cyclops, screening out all other perspectives and things on the periphery, distorting your own opinions and recollections. Any device is just a portal to various subsets of life, not life itself. Try to ensure that your ideas and memories are unbounded by the shape of any device.
Remember who you used to be, who you are and who you’re trying to be. You’re privileged to have what you have, even if it isn’t very much. It’s still a tremendous amount compared to a very many people. No matter how little you have, somebody else has less.
Try not to feel entitled to everything and be as independent as you can.
Be humble. Know when you’re wrong and don’t mind admitting it. Apologise when you need to. You’ll gain more admiration admitting your failings and feelings than being right all the time. Try to be honest but polite. However, don’t take crap from anyone. Love yourself first and make sure nobody disrespects you (including yourself). The right thing is never wrong and the wrong thing is never right. That’s especially true from family, friends or lovers; is the wrong thing a little more right, more forgivable, just because they’re not strangers?
Don’t define yourself by your sex, ethnic background or anything else that isn’t unique. All these things can be used to pigeonhole you. You are male/female or straight/gay or everything in between in varying degrees. You are of one or more ethnicity. You like art or math or football. You’re religious or not. These and more besides are all social groups that you belong to but they do not define you. The experiences you have whilst belonging to that social group contribute to who you are but still, you cannot be described in just those terms alone. You are much richer than that so don’t let anyone define you using anything else than that which is you; your personality. If you’re a glass of wine, then your sex, sexuality, race, IQ, religion, appearance, and interests are simply the ingredients. Nobody should care about those things, the wine itself is what’s important. Be proud of makes you, you, but don’t let others judge you by anything other than by how great the wine is. Those social groups are also social constructs that didn’t exist for you at birth. You became aware of them as you got older because society made you aware of them. But if they didn’t matter to you when you were born, if you have no genes that evolved that would make you judge others who are different, then why should you judge others or let others judge you in that way?
All the advice to laugh, brush or floss your teeth, eat well, get lots of exercise, sex, and learning isn’t just for your own good to feel great right now but also for your future self. All that you do today will either save or destroy you tomorrow. All these things are great for your mental and bodily health. Besides, you’ll still want to get laid in your 50’s and beyond and you’ll need both a healthy mind and body to do that.
Dating
“If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ‘em!” — John Waters
Try your best to meet kind and interesting people and not just attractive ones. Don’t be blinkered by “beauty” alone. Don’t forget that some people are only pretty on the outside and that true beauty lies just behind the eyes.
Try not to look for or demand perfection either in yourself on in others. Is there anything more beautiful than a smiling face devoid of makeup or sculpture? Smiles dress the face, not makeup or fancy sculptured hair and it’s the subconscious ones that let love lasts. So, smile as often as you can, and make others do so too. Embrace the crookedness, the scars and the wrinkles, for those are the signs of life!
Never feel that you’re not good enough to ask someone out for a drink because they’re more attractive, smarter or funnier than you. If you don’t think you are good enough for them then why should they? So do them a favour, offer them the opportunity to say “Yes.” as you have no idea what they think is good enough and they have no idea yet how great you are. It’s the least you could do for them, right? Don’t put your words in their mouths and let them decide for themselves.
When it comes to sex, do what you like and like what you do, but do it safely — always use condoms! Don’t do something you don’t really want to, even for love. And never be selfish and use another’s love as a way of getting what only you want.
Try to remember that sex alone isn’t love just like receiving a high five from someone doesn’t mean that you’re now BFF.
Most people forget that the most beautiful art in the world is the body of your lover. So, understand and appreciate that art in your arms and make love like it’ll be the last time you’ll ever see each other. Because, why the hell not?
The opinions of others
“All those fake celebrities and all those vicious queens,
All the stupid papers and the stupid magazines,
Sweet dreams are made of anything that gets you in the scene" — Eurythmics
“I’m not in this world,
To live up to your expectations,
Neither are you here to live up to mine.” — Peter Tosh
Everybody loves to have opinions. Sometimes you’ll find out that they will have opinions about you. Mostly, other people’s opinions about you really aren’t worth caring about. Sometimes though they feel like more criticism than anything else and it’s natural that we start to care about those and feel hurt by them. The way to think about criticisms, in fact all opinions, is to treat all of them as observations. And like any observations, some are better made than others. So it might be what they think but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true. It’s just something that people thought at a point in time from their particular viewpoint. Now, that doesn’t mean you should disregard it. Sometimes it’s a good observation and you can use it for your own benefit, perhaps to improve yourself or correct an error of judgement. Only you can decide if it’s something you should consider.
Of course, some observations are not made with honest tongues and some people just like to cause trouble. Don’t bother with these people. They’re arseholes. Don’t feed the arseholes as all you’ll get is more crap. If you find yourself with players trying to get you into a game you cannot win, remember you cannot lose if you do not play.
Most importantly though, be yourself and don’t worry too much about what others think, it’s your opinion that counts.
Troubled times
”The brain hates a vacuum. If it isn’t filled with hope, it’ll fill itself with fear" — Naomi Klein (modified)
Yes, bad stuff happens but it’s how we clean up afterwards that matters. Consider your options and ask for help if required. Then try to fix it straight away - keep calm and apply the balm. Mostly, though, the things that happen aren’t really that big a deal and a shrug of your shoulders is the only thing that’s needed.
But sometimes, we can get really anxious about things. Love, work, cup final. When that happens we lose confidence. Another way to think about confidence is that confidence is a lack of anxiety. If, for any reason, you don’t feel confident about something, it’s because you’re worrying about all the things that can go or have gone wrong. Instead work out all the related things that you are confident about and build up from that. Try and start from a position of little or no anxiety upwards, from a position of strength, towards your goal as that way you’ll be able to work on the things that need to be worked on. Don’t spend energy knocking down things that you’re anxious about but spend it reminding yourself of the things that you should be confident about and then step up and off each one onto the next.
The person we should most be afraid of is ourselves as it is us that restrains us the most. Just with simple thoughts, we can convince ourselves that the things we fear the most will happen even though with a little clear-minded consideration it is obvious that those outcomes are by no means certain and that for every reason it may happen there are just as many reasons for it not to. Almost always it is conversations with others than belays those fears and instils calm again within our minds. The lack of knowing for certain increases the fear and only knowing can give peace of mind.
Nowadays, it’s not like when you were very young and life was spent in the now. Play or conversation with others was made at the same time together and with full attention. Now, life is asynchronous and play or conversation can happen in twisted strands with only intermittent attention paid on each. So if there are times when you’re in need of a connection the most and when you stop to look around and see no-one nearby, when it seems that the only replies you receive are the increasing echoes of your mind, those are the times when you need to be the strongest. For it is then that we believe that which we want the most isn’t there and may never will be. At those times, we need to remember that our signals may be very obvious to ourselves but at the same time can be just as oblivious to others. More importantly though, we must remember that those connections are there, they haven’t gone away but that sometimes they can be unevenly distributed in time as well as space. That the feedback we seek may not be immediate and may be delayed because others haven’t heard you yet or have but not properly because you’re a strand in their life too just like they are a strand in yours. And sometimes, especially when we live and communicate like we do nowadays, asynchronously, intermingled with so many other things, it’s hard to see what people are saying. At these times, if they happen, don’t despair but seek out somebody directly, face to face, so that they can see and hear what you are actually saying with their full attention and do not give up until somebody listens.
But no matter what happens, it could always be worse. If tears are half your voice, then laughter is your only choice, so think of the positives and if you really can’t find any (are you sure?), make one up and fight on that lie. It’ll get you where you need to be, stronger than ever. Then, when you don’t need it anymore, discard it.
There are some things we must always remember and other things that we must always remember to try and forget. Always remember the people that love you. The things that have hurt us or are afraid of are what we must try to forget and forgive. Learn how to forgive others and also yourself. If you don’t know how, ask your friends how they do it. There are far too many enjoyable things to do than to spend time thinking about events that already happened and cannot be changed.
Remember that the past and the future is just the present wearing different clothes (but what clothes!) Look to the past for knowledge and to the future for hope and consider how much the present needs to change for you to get the future you want.
Then live in the present and make it so.
New situations
Act the fool, to learn the rules
Don’t be afraid to ask stupid questions and remember that “I don’t know” is a perfectly fine temporary answer.
Don’t overdo it though or people will think you’re an idiot. If somebody asks you for an opinion, provide one. It’s a privilege to be asked and an honest answer is required.
Mix it up
“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” — Ellen Parr
The boring moments in life are when everything seems the same and nothing ever changes. Life is lived in those other transitional moments when things start to slow down or speed up, when you try something different or meet new people. So, mix it up! Every couple of years, pick a part that’s new and learn to do something you’ve never done before. Be uncomfortable for a while and try something different. Be the artist, engineer, baker, gardener, knitter, writer, singer, biker, programmer or musician. It doesn’t matter if you can do it well or not. It’s the doing that matters. If you work mostly with your hands, try something with your mind and if you work with your mind, try something with your hands. Do something with both!
Dance!
There’s two worlds on this planet, the natural world and the human world. Travel often between the two. It’s far too easy to think that the human world is all we have. We’re so much richer than that so don’t forget to travel to places where you can see the stars or touch the mountain snow. Go to places where you can smell the jungle or taste the ocean air. If you can, work in other countries for a time and live like the people there do (go north, east, south then west). Immerse yourself in other cultures and try not to surround yourself with people who are only just like you as that’s a very, very boring way to live. You might as well be sitting alone on a rocking chair in a cavernous hall of mirrors, nodding to the rhythms of your own voice and image. If you did that, you’ll never experience new ideas or discover older forgotten ones. Be diverse with what you see, hear, speak and do. Don’t just do what you know you will like but be open to other things too. But don’t do things just for the sake for it, choose wisely. They say that fortune favours the brave. If that’s true, then misfortune favours the fool, so be courageous but never reckless.
Parenthood
Most call me Loz, but two call me Dad.
They made me who I am,
by that word they said: Daddy
Fatherhood is laughing when you want to cry and crying when you want to laugh
Trying to understand that when everything is said
Wielding the stick of fairness and the carrot of love
Is all that it takes to be a Dad
Despite what all children say, for parents, it is entirely about the journey and not the arrival at your destination.
Being a parent is wonderful and the only thing I’m proud of doing.
A good parent does what they can. An even better one tries to do what they cannot. Make lots of memories and when you think you’re making enough, make some more. Spend time not money. Children need your time more than your money and that’s what they’ll remember most, the memories made when you spent your time with them and not your money on them.
However, until you have children of your own, the same applies to pets.
Society
“There’s only one rule that I know of, babies:
Goddamn it, you’ve got to be kind.” — Kurt Vonnegut
Try not to judge others. If you have to, try to be a little generous. Try to judge the person in front of you and not the person standing just behind them. You don’t know where people are coming from nor where they’re going. For instance, if you live next to an argumentative couple or a stressed out single mother that’s always screaming at her kids or a war veteran or refugee struggling to come to terms with their experiences, don’t complain about them or judge them too harshly. Stay friendly. That doesn’t mean you should necessarily get involved but just be a friendly face, in case one day they need one. A person may spend some part of their lives on the front-lines of life and they can be saying “Catch me, I’m falling” in so many different ways and one day, they might need to ask someone for a little help. So, try to be someone that they might choose to ask, rather than the one they will never ask; to be part of a solution instead of part of the problem.
Look around and try to figure out how things happened or who did it. Who fixed the traffic light? How come my street is so clean? That lady who had crutches last week but doesn’t seem to need them anymore, who helped her? Who is the lollipop lady?
Remember how much society does for you so try not to take more than you give. It’s just as important to remember how you could be. Age and bad luck can take things away so try to be aware of the difficulties of others as theirs can so easily soon be ours. To make things easier or harder, either directly or indirectly, for them may also do the same to ourselves or our loved ones, later on in life.
Opinions are like targeted adverts on websites. They’re a product of what you’ve seen and heard, so check your sources (and your browsing history!) before you pass judgement on others. If people are liars to you or acting like arseholes, do what you can to remove their presence from yours. Otherwise, consider why they have opinions that are different from yours — what experiences led them there? If they’re speaking from a position of little or no real experience of the topic in hand then don’t hold much sway in what they have to say. If they do, then consider that they know at least a little of what they’re talking about and listen to what they have to say and only then make up your own mind, changing it if need be.
Our opinions can often be correct and fair but at other times they can be completely wrong. We all have a blanket of bias that we throw onto anything we don’t understand to help us form opinions. We do this because we don’t like to be confused and the blanket of bias shapes things into something that matches the decor that we’ve chosen to decorate our lives with, into something that we recognise and can reason about. If we can fit it into this decor, our internal ideology, then we recognise it as something that is somewhat familiar, then we’re comforted and can file it away like so. That biased shape is a product of our experiences and our interpretation of them and as such, that blanket cannot shape things into something we haven’t got experience of. If our experiences are only of cats, then everything tends towards looking like a cat. When we see a dog for the very first time, we think it’s a cat. Until we look closer and understand the differences, it’ll always be a cat.
So, when you see something you don’t understand, try to see things without the blanket; be curious first and ask questions, learn from those involved and only then will you able to form a opinion worthy of communicating to others.
Don’t listen to just one viewpoint but search and look for others. Understand that perhaps one point of view is correct but also perhaps that none are too. Remember also, that some views can be over-represented or that some viewpoints may be unrepresented either because no-one is asking or listening to the right people. So, pay attention. Our perception is often another’s deception, so look out for it, so that you can make your own decisions with eyes wide open. If someone says look right, look both right and left but also think to check that there isn’t anything else coming from right in front of you.
Reading
“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.” — Voltaire
Never stop reading. Read broadly and deeply. Never bend the corner of a page to use as a bookmark. Think about the history of the words on that page and what it took for that image of the page to be seen by your eyes. Books are made of paper, from trees that took millions of years to evolve. Humans too, also evolved into beings that could not only take a tree’s product and turn it into something that can be turned into a page in a book but also into a being that could generate words and ideas that could be written down on that very same page. Then think of all the people and their lives that have had to be lived before the author gets to be born. Then think of all the experiences that the author had to have had and the people that they had to have had them with, in order to express themselves in that specific way on that specific page. If you think of all these things that make up all the elements of that book you’re reading, why would you ever bend a corner of a page simply because you can’t remember what page number you’re on?
Work
“I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.” — Jerome K. Jerome
Unless you’re really lucky, you’ll need to work. In fact, even if you find yourself not needing to work, you should anyway. Try and do something you enjoy. Money is important but not if it is something you hate doing and upsets you. If you find you are working in an industry or on something you no longer like and can’t change it, balance it with other things you love to do. Always aim to make the thing you dislike (and for most people, it’s work), the smallest thing in your life. Never take work too seriously. It’s just a job. Be nice to your colleagues and don’t forget those that maintain and protect your workplace (and the people that get you there). They’re your colleagues too and through their work and yours, you enable each other.
Ambition
“Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
Have a go(al). It’s important to have some goals in life. Reach is one of the most fundamental things that we do. It’s the first thing you did before you learnt to crawl or walk or run. Don’t worry about failing to reach whatever goal you choose to aim for, whether it’s to travel the world, to create something or simply just to help as many people as you can or maybe even something really simple like reading a book or completing a jigsaw puzzle.
What’s important is that you have things you want to do, see or feel and that you push yourself to try to get yourself wherever you need to be so that you can do those things. In the best cases, you’ll achieve your goals and in the worst, you’ll have gotten that bit closer then when you first started out. Or maybe you’ll discover a better goal or even that it was a rubbish goal in the first place. Each attempt is more knowledge on how to succeed next time. It doesn’t matter if you don’t achieve them; it’s the trying that counts. Don’t moan about things that might be holding you back, instead focus on how to work around them. Do not cower from these challenges, but run towards them, with speed, so that the momentum takes you to the top and over to the other side.
Celebrate your wins and forget your losses. Be proud of your achievements and try not to dwell too much if things don’t work out. Understand what went wrong so it doesn’t happen again. Consider those wins, no matter how small, as a mountain conquered and any losses, regardless of size, as just a small dip in the road.
Then go have a pint with your friends.