_…We love that we have ideals, ideas about a perfect world, etc, but we love even more the fact that we find ways to get things done given what little we have, and how valuable our resources are, and how expensive everything is. It’s sometimes more than we even contemplate possible to stay out an extra hour past what our usual routine calls for. We make lemonade out of lemons on a daily basis.
But being practical is also a curse. First of all, it forces you to throw out ideas, and ideas about a perfect world. We put those under laminate and adore them on holidays, but bring them out during the everyday and you will be scorned and mocked as someone who hasn’t yet learned that life doesn’t work that way, that it isn’t fair, that it will continue to turn with or without thee. That it waits for no man, woman, or child. This is fun.
We have a wobbly totem pole of misconceptions that allow us to continue to make the same mistakes over and over again even though we strive at every node to correct the mistakes. There are forces that keep our forces from forcing themselves properly on the targets we set them on, and they also trick us into forgetting what we were trying to do, if there ever was something there to begin. Have we not as a human race figured these things out yet in a non- cryptic and cheesy fashion?
Strangely, in some ways I think I have figured it out. There is this little module in my brain that I toss things into and out come answers. It’s not a normal module–which I understand to be rather flighty (there one day, gone the next) and inconsistent (your mileage may vary), but it has been fairly consistent at receiving and processing questions that I have in a unique and surprising way. Maybe not everyone thinks of their brain as a workshop with various tools that each have varying degrees of usefulness, fragility, but it doesn’t seem far off from the truth. It sounds a bit cheesy though, so humanity has not yet fashioned me the perfect brain module. Anyway, I have the answers. But the answers are not like what I had expected them to be. For example, the answers don’t necessarily make me any happier… happiness is like the taste of mackerel. You taste it most right when you put it in your mouth, and you panic by chewing the taste and ultimately the happiness is gone and you have only one other piece of mackerel (unless you place another order). But in order to appreciate the last piece, you take a piece of ginger (perhaps a metaphor for calm, or perhaps a metaphor for drunkenness), and then take the piece. What the answers doo-doo is let you know how to order more happiness when you want it. I think. You don’t always want it, really. Sometimes you want to get angry because the damn world is just so infuriating… and the kaleidoscope of emotions metaphor makes an appearance (it always does in these cheesy passages).
Blah blah blah. Here’s a question for you:
Do you have a system for changing yourself when you decide you want to change?
_…Here’s something I’m doing more and more and which I think might be a hidden gold mine for actually changing yourself: solve things by taking things away.
Erik Benson: practicality, new brain module, change yourself by taking something away