I M Perfect lady

Category: Books

  • Keeper of their Illusions.

    One more part that really stayed with me from Sickened by Julie Gregory.

     

    “I now feel ready to try and talk to a therapist again.  Most times I do not feel like a client, but an educator who pays to teach my therapist about MBP.  I answer her questions?  How did it slip past the doctors?  Why didn’t anybody notice? Didn’t you have neighbors?  Were you really sick?

     

    But still, in our sessions, I cry from the guilt of betraying my mother, for not keeping the shroud on her secrets when I held them locked in such trust.  And I feel terrible about my own secret.  I have been writing, writing about what it feels like to be cut open while your mother’s tight, thin smile mouths, “Doctor’s orders, honey.”  To be emptied and filled by your mother, just like the IV bag she’s arranged for you. And to believe you are genuinely ill because that is what everything in your world mirrors back to you.

     

    My therapist explains that my mother was cannibalistic.  That she wanted to ingest my living flesh, to tear chunks from my body. That the closest she could come to cannibalizing me was to lift me onto the serving platter for the men of the medical community to carve.  The longer I hold guilt for betraying her, the more I will keep climbing on the platter all by myself.

     

    And yet the hand that pushed me down was the hand that helped me up.  The one who beat me was the only one to save me from being beaten. The one who wanted to kill me was the one who would kill her self if I didn’t offer myself under the knife.  I was trained from the womb as an alibi for her innocence.  She would snuff out my life if I went against her, even in thought.  She brushed me this way as casually as you would slide a ling brush down a pair of slacks, to get all the grain running in the same direction.

     

    I still told myself that it was okay, it really wasn’t that bad.  A normal sacrifice for any child to make for her mother.  Words programmed into me as my own. Tangled in her web, if a doctor couldn’t decipher what she did, how could I?

     

    Until I turn thirty.  Then I see her almost as clearly as if I was standing on a windswept sea cliff and she was looking up from the sand below.  There is only one line that connects us, and it is wrapped around my waist; my hunger is tied to the most intimate, emotionally deep contact you can ever get: a mother’s touch.  Anything less that where she took me feels like not enough.

     

    And so it is for the people I bring into my life.  My relationships, like the one I had with my mother, turn immediately intense, sometimes violently invasive.  I start to see that I surround myself with broken people; more broken than me.  Ah, yes, let me count your cracks.  Let’s see, one hundred, two…yes, you’ll do nicely.  A cracked companion makes me look whole, gives me something outside myself to care for.  When I’m with whole, healed people I feel my own cracks: the shatters, the insanities of dislocation in myself.

     

    So I start over.  When I ruin something or when someone vines around me, I move on.  It is just another opportunity, another chance to interact with the outside world and not have it take me completely, utterly to the bone.”  Julie Gregory

     

    As much as her mother needed her sick, my mother needed me innocent.  We are the exact opposites.

     

    She was well and her mother needed her to be unwell.

    I was molested and not okay, and my mother needed me to be okay to hold her marriage, her life, and her world together.

     

    We both found out that what our mother’s needed had nothing to do with us, but rather we were the vehicles used to get her where she wanted to be.

     

    Perhaps we know what our unveiling will do to our mothers, we are wrecking purposefully her illusion, and we are no longer caring enough to sacrifice ourselves for their insanity.

     

    We know we are shattering their dreams to a million pieces… yet their dreams go on; someone takes our place to be the keeper of their illusions. 

     

     

     

  • Sickened

    Here is another few lines from “Sickened” by Julie Gregory.

     

    “I lived my life in a bubble. First it was her bubble. Then it was of my own making.  And now, freshly stripped of the delusion that had protectively swathed me for years, I was embryonic – too raw to interface directly with the world.  People aren’t just influential to me; a thin layer of them fuses onto me like hot cling wrap.  Their words become my words, their voice inflections merge seamlessly into my own, their opinions form a transparency over the faint etchings of my own developing ones.

     

    I look back through stacks of photographs of me after the fire.  In each picture, I hold the facial tics and expressions of whoever I am involved with at the time. My face adopts the characteristics of the other, their fine lines, the exact way the jaw muscles freeze or the flex within their smile. My face morphs to take on their identity.

     

    Then I look at a baby picture of myself at six months old, lying on my belly, a natural smile lightening up my face.  My own natural smile, unbroken, intact.  This is the only picture I have of my own face, not someone else’s.  I wonder am I destined to drag around the past like a discarded placenta?  I wonder how far do I boil back in order to reclaim my self?  I was how many pieces did I lose along the way?  Where do I find them? Can I put them back? How many times do you glue a broken vase before you toss it?

     

    I had been taken to the bone.  My mother had fingered into me like the hollow of a melon and scooped me out.  And now, years later, you could press belly to backbone.

     

    Books are my friends, where it’s okay to be silent….

     

    All my time is spent slipped silently between their pages, finding some truth to go with the mirrors. They are self-help gurus who parent me positively and show me how to believe in myself.  They suggest underlying spiritual philosophies:  That each soul chooses its parents and all its experiences in order to learn the lessons it needs to develop fully.  That if the soul’s human form knew what it was supposed to learn beforehand, the ego would short-circuit the process of discovery.  They tell me that, because of this double blind experiment, where you find yourself in this painful process is exactly where you need to be.

     

    That if you lived in a dark cave you’d need time to adjust to the light when the rock was rolled away.

     

    That Hawaii had to be a volcanic eruption of toxic goo and ash before it became so lush and beautiful.

     

    That if you watched the clothes in a washer, it would look like they’re getting dirtier as they slosh through filthy water.  But it’s only after this agitation cycle that you can pull out fresh, clean clothes.

     

    I bolster myself with platitudes: “We are who we are not despite adversity, but because of it” and “They say the truth hurts, but the only thing truth hurts, are illusions.” I sink the studs into soft dirt, and bank my new foundation.

     

    My books talk to me like the child I am and coax me into developing autonomously.  They metaphorically hang all the colored pictures I make on the fridge when I race home with them.  They never tell me: Lighten up, you think too much.  If anything, they say, Hey, you, with the frontal lobe, turn off the TV, stop the noise, and consider this deeply.  They never dismiss me with Get over it.  Or if I turn to my father: What are you talking about? My brother: I don’t remember anything. Or my mother when I squeak out that I was too young to be taking the gun out of her mouth: “Jesus Julie, where is a mother supposed to turn to for support if not to her own daughter?  You think the sun rises and sets on you, like you don’t have any problems?  I can think of a hundred times you…”

     

    I pile my books around me before I sleep and they are the psychic guardrails that keep me from falling out of bed at night.”   Julie Gregory

     

     

  • Inconvenient Truth

    Just finished reading “Sickened” by Julie Gregory, her story of living with a mother who needed her sick, Munchausen By Proxy.

     

    It is amazing that her mother could convince her she was sick, and to ‘act’ sick, and how her mother’s state depended upon her behavior.  And how she never knew this wasn’t her real self, that this was a self that her mother needed.

     

    She writes, “Truth is whatever your mind believes.  And beliefs are erected by those who raise us.  If someone shapes your mind into a distortion, you have to find something that can give you a straight answer.”

     

    She tried to tell her dad about the abuse, but he didn’t fully grasp the immense totality of it all…she goes on to say.

     

    “After that day with Dad, I knew that nobody could give me straight answers but me.  I used mirrors to step back and forth between trips out into the real world, trips back into the swirling black hole of my family, trips to new adventures outside the bubble, seeing how long I could walk away from the mirror before the old thoughts submerged the fresh ones.  Sometimes I’d only get to the kitchen or down a few steps of the porch.  Sometimes, I could make it a half-day before I’d have to rush back to see myself…

     

    With my freshly wired instincts, I inch farther and farther out of my incubator.  I stay longer in the real world and run back with less frenzy when waves begin crashing.  When I do slip under, I whip out a pen and write myself back to the surface, using whatever material I can snatch to capture the barrage; bar napkins, toilet paper, airline barf bags, my bare leg.  I scribble my thoughts; tweak them with words from my new vocabulary.  It talk myself out of paranoia and coax myself from ledges. I fill volumes of journal books with these moments; packed with crowed text, both sides scribbled and stuffed with snippets of paper smeary inked paper towels, feverishly written.

     

    My life now in triplicate: One life in the mirror, one in the world, and one balancing the two as oceans which must wax and wane in tandem until one replaces the other.” Julie Gregory

     

    She is right that your life is lived in triplicate until you can finally live fully in your truth.

     

    How you find yourself in a very awkward stance, knowing your past is incorrect, but not fully knowing what is, and then being the one to resurrect a you that you have never known.  How you have to go against all who stood with you in the secret.

     

    She writes about her younger brother.  “His memory, as mine once did, as opted for the starrier picture.  It was just last year, when Danny was twenty-four, that the only thing he wanted for Christmas was a tape of Mom’s singing, one of the few good things strained from our life with her.

     

    He still needs a mom and dad.  His psyche has draped sharp edges of detail in a thick drop cloth as he keeps his past at bay with workaholism and asthma attacks that coincide with Mom’s random phone calls to him…”

     

    It is like a curtain that shields the truth, a blind area where the parents are concerned, something that stops the truth from penetrating their worlds and upending their apple cart of loving parents, or at least ones that ‘tried their best’.

     

    To me it is facing the inconvenient truth.

     

     

     

     

  • Spontaneous Evolution, by Bruce Lipton

    Here is a part of what he writes.

    Sometimes, the body’s natural harmony breaks down, and we experience dis-ease, which is a reflection of the body’s inability to maintain normal control of its function-providing systems. Because behavior is created through the interaction of proteins with their complementary signals, there are really only two sources of dis-ease: either the proteins are defective or the signals are distorted.

    About 5 percent of the world’s population is born with birth defects, which means they have mutated genes that code for dysfunctional proteins. Structurally deformed or defective proteins can “jam the machine,” disturb normal pathway functions, and impair the character and quality of lives. However, 95 percent of the human population arrives on this planet with a perfectly functional set of gene blueprints.

    Because the majority of us have a perfectly healthy genome and produce functional proteins, illness in this group can likely be attributed to the nature of the signal. There are three primary situations in which signals contribute to dysfunction and dis-ease.

    The first is trauma. If you twist or misalign your spine and physically impede the transmission of the nervous system’s signals, it may result in a distortion of the information being exchanged between the brain and the body’s cells, tissues, and organs.

    The second is toxicity. Toxins and poisons in our system represent inappropriate chemistry that can distort the signal’s information on its path between the nervous system and the targeted cells and tissues. Altered signals, derived from either of these causes, can inhibit or modify normal behaviors and lead to the expression of dis-ease.

    The third and most important influence of signals on the dis-ease process is thought, the action of the mind. Mind-related illnesses do not require that there be anything physically wrong with the body at the outset of the dis-ease. Health is predicated upon the nervous system’s ability to accurately perceive environmental information and selectively engage appropriate, life-sustaining behaviors. If a mind misinterprets environmental signals and generates an inappropriate response, survival is threatened because the body’s behaviors become out of synch with the environment. We may not think that a thought could be enough to undermine an entire system, but, in fact, misperceptions can be lethal.

    Consider the situation of a person with anorexia. While relatives and friends clearly perceive that this skin-and-bones individual is near death, the anorexic looks in a mirror and sees a fat person. Using this distorted view, that resembles an image in a funhouse mirror, the anorexic’s brain attempts to control a misperceived runaway weight gain, by-oops!-inhibiting the system’s metabolic functions.

    The brain, like any governing entity, seeks harmony. Neural harmony is expressed as a measure of congruency between the mind’s perceptions and the life we experience.

    An interesting insight into how the mind creates harmony between its perceptions and the real world is frequently illustrated in stage hypnosis shows. A volunteer from the audience is invited onstage, hypnotized, and asked to pick up a glass of water, which the volunteer is told weighs one thousand pounds. With that misinformation, the volunteer struggles unsuccessfully with straining muscles, bulging veins, and perspiration. How can that be? Obviously the glass doesn’t weigh one thousand pounds even though the mind of the subject firmly believes that it does.

    To manifest the perceived reality of a thousand pound glass of water, something that cannot be lifted, the hypnotized subject’s mind fires a signal to the muscles used to lift the glass at the same time it fires contradictory signals to the muscles used to set the glass down! This results in an isometric exercise wherein two groups of muscles work to oppose each other, which results in no net movement-but a lot of strain and sweat.

    Cells, tissues, and organs do not question information sent by the nervous system. Rather, they respond with equal fervor to accurate life-affirming perceptions and to self-destructive misperceptions. Consequently, the nature of our perceptions greatly influences the fate of our lives.

    While most of us are aware of the healing influences of the placebo effect, few are aware of its evil twin, the nocebo effect. Just as surely as positive thoughts can heal, negative ones-including the belief we are susceptible to an illness or have been exposed to a toxic condition-can actually manifest the undesired realities of those thoughts.

    Japanese children allergic to a poison ivy-like plant took part in an experiment where a leaf of the poisonous plant was rubbed onto one forearm. As a control, a nonpoisonous leaf resembling the toxic plant was rubbed on the other forearm. As expected almost all of the children broke out in a rash on the arm rubbed with the toxic leaf and had no response to the imposter leaf.

    What the children did not know was that the leaves were purposefully mislabeled. The negative thought of being touched by the poisonous plant led to the rash produced by the nontoxic leaf! In the majority of cases, no rash resulted from contact with the toxic leaf that was thought to be the harmless control. The conclusion is simple: positive perceptions enhance health, and negative perceptions precipitate dis-ease. This mind-bending example of the power of belief was one of the founding experiments that led to the science of psychoneuroimmunology.

    Considering that a minimum of one third of all medical healings are attributed to the placebo effect, what percentage of illness and disease might be the result of negative thought in the nocebo effect? Perhaps more than we think, especially since psychologists estimate that 70 percent of our thoughts are negative and redundant.

    Perceptions have a tremendous influence in shaping the character and experiences of our lives. They’re the reason why those faith-filled folks can swig poison, joyously play with deadly snakes and lift a car to free a loved one. Perceptions shape the placebo and nocebo effects. They are more influential than positive thinking because they are more than mere thoughts in your mind. Perceptions are beliefs that permeate every cell. Simply, the expression of the body is a complement to the mind’s perceptions, or, in simpler terms, believing is seeing!

  • Your Diet Today

    As I did yoga today I was reminded of where all the unexpressed emotions lay, the container that holds them when I lived a short distance from my body, is my body.

     

    What has always been true and will always remain true, is even if you mind doesn’t allow you to stay in reality, we haven’t found a way to take our bodies out of it.

     

    Our heads only live in denial; it is like the phrase, ‘get your head out of the clouds’.

     

    I am reading “The Joy Diet” by Martha Beck.

     

    Her book contains instructions for a different kind of “diet,” one designed not for the body but for the soul.

     

    “When the word diet first entered the English Language, back in 1656 when I was a little girl, it didn’t refer to food intake.  It meant “a way of living or thinking.”  A few decades later, diet also came to mean “a day’s journey.”

     

    Her first technique is to do 15 minutes of day of nothing. 

     

    The second one is to be truthful.  Imagine this is the chapter I read last night.

     

    “The practice of telling ourselves the truth is so simple and so freeing that you’d think we’d all do it constantly. The fact is, however, that most of the people tell themselves the truth only in selected areas, and many of us lie to ourselves and others about practically everything we experience.  Why? Because living behind a pane of glass, numbing and empty though it is, also feels safe.

     

    …in 1992 and the years that followed, I realized that the simple, small truths of my real thoughts and experiences were the keys that unlocked the dungeon doors for my true self.  Trying to stop telling them would have been like trying to give up oxygen.

     

    This was an almost inexpressibly painful period of my life, but as it drew on, I began to feel intensely, vividly alive.  Prior to that time, I ‘d had no idea so much joy was even possible.  I’ve watched in pain and pride and dozens of my clients have taken the same kind of plunge, determining to tell themselves the truth, no matter what, then opening up secret after secret, breaking through lie by lie, until they find their hearts.  I only recommend that they go for one Moment of Truth a day, but the effect is the same whether you go for broke, as I did, or proceed gradually, as I suggest.  As far as I can tell, this process is always hard, always painful, always so, so worth it.

     

    If you did nothing but pursue the truth about yourself for the rest of your life, you would never run out of fresh discoveries. Every day brings you new experiences, changing you, bringing new aspects of your true self into expression.  There are many layers of thoughts and perceptions in your mind, so many interactive connections that have been developing from infancy on, that the largest part of you will always be an undiscovered country.  As you tell fewer fibs and keep fewer secrets in your inner world, you’ll find energy you once spent on denial turns outward in a kind of creative bloom.  Fascinating ideas, compassionate actions, unheard-of adventures will bubble up from the inexhaustible well of your unique personality during your Moment of Truth.”  Martha Beck

     

    This is the perfect book at the perfect time to help me articulate the ways of living outside of the bubble or as she says, behind the pane of glass.

     

    I love that diet is a day’s journey!

     

    What will you do on your diet today?

     

     

     

     

  • Ladies empowering Ladies!

    In her book, “The Woman’s Book of Creativity” C Diane Ealy writes.

     

    “The expression of woman’s creativity is crucial to our development as self-defined individuals who understand that real power is having power over ourselves.  This knowledge negates the old notion of power as something held over someone else. Creative women are strong women who empower others through their creativity.”

     

    I love this. 

     

    Not only do I feel stronger doing yoga daily, but I am also feeling stronger in self, and if that is from being more creative, I am way excited.

     

    Imagine that I am becoming more powerful as I play with fabric, designs and being creative with my Ladies. 

     

    This has to be why it was so important to me when I was so lost that I felt such a draw to be creative.  It was the one thing I held on to tightly, subconsciously I knew this was where I grew stronger.

     

    I love that my creative ladies empower other ladies…what a great energy flow!

     

    Ladies empowering Ladies!

    I love it.

  • What Fills Me Up.

    Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor wrote about energy takers in her book, “My Stroke of Insight”.

     

    And if you watch how your body responds to different situations, you can find this out yourself.

     

    I know that when I am in the presence of people who talk about life negatively, I leave totally drained.

     

    Some talk in a victim mode where life is out to get you, and there is nothing you can do to change it.  They are not looking for an answer, but rather seem to delight in sharing more and more of how victimized they are and who the next big threat will be and how to guard against it. 

     

    Living on the defensive side of life!

     

    They are fighting with life and feeling they are being assaulted by life at every turn. 

     

    From this mode there is very little in life that brings them happiness, mostly life brings them bad news.

     

    Their radar is positioned to spot the next attack.

     

    Very interesting to watch the way the conversations flowed and how my energy level disappeared.

     

    It doesn’t matter which topic is brought up, they see it from a victim’s point of view and their victim energy gets refilled.

     

    I didn’t realize that victim energy could be draining on one side and refilling on the other.

     

    What fuels the victim mode is feeling more like a victim.

     

    My energy system needs the opposite; I need to be with life giving energies, where change is seen as an opportunity to change.  Where you flow with life, greeting it as it is, and bending in nonresistance, where you look for answers and solutions.

     

    What is greatly interesting to me, it is not the individual bodies I resent, but their modalities of living life.

     

    My view of life is so completely different now. I no longer feel a victim to life, but instead a partner with my life.

     

    As I walk hand in hand with my life, I feel so grateful to be free of the life draining energies that engulfed me in my past and I now know what brings me energy or what steals it away.

     

    Living life from the inside out, I feel the differences between energy coming in and my energies leaving, how I feel with someone or how I feel when I leave.

     

    I love that I know this about me.

    I love knowing what is draining me and what fills me up.

     

    As a good body keeper it is my job to watch for energy drains and for what fills me up.

     

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  • Being Me!

    I heard something today that I know I have never considered, that when you feel whatever it is you are feeling, that is you.  The You is comprised of feelings and so often we try and run from them, but then we are actually running from our self!

    Geneen Roth and Oprah were discussing her book, "Woman, Food, and God" and about feeling discomfort of any kind and how we usually  eat when we feel uncomfortable. 

    I see this like we are getting to know our bodies to be able to read what they are telling us, and if you look around your surroundings, you can usually find out what is the cause of those feelings.

    In my case, the fear was justified from my father, fear didn't arise for no reason, my body was trying to tell me something, and I ignored the sensations within my body.

    In her book, Geneen is trying to reconnect us back with our bodies and in doing so she will reconnect you with your truth.

    It is an amazing journey to look at what you are doing instead of feeling that which you don't want to feel.

    I simply love that what I feel is me.  And I love that I can now voice what I feel and act upon those feelings.  I no longer have to pretend that I don't feel what I feel, in fact I won't pretend to pretend to pretend any more!

    I am now learning when to stop eating or when to eat.  I am getting to learn the signals of fullness from my belly.

    What an exciting thing to learn about you by looking at your body.  She is the one too that says "Your beliefs are how your body looks."  Deepak Chopra says that the mind is manifested in your body.

    The more conscious I am, the more aware of my body, the less influence the crazy mind has on what it does.

    Just as I learned how to navigate out of dysfunctional relationships, I am hopeful that I can learn what kinds of foods my body really wants.  I will have to listen and pay attention to what it feels.

    Learning every day about this magnificent living organism, the human body.  Which goes back to the saying "We are Spiritual Beings having a Human experience."

    I am becoming more aware of both and learning what they both need, to have the best human experience of being me!

    Thanks Geneen and Oprah.

  • “This Little Light of Mine…”

    Debbie Ford in “The Shadow Affect” is talking about embracing your Light Shadow.

     

    She had gone to see Marianne Williamson speak…

     

    "… as I sat in the audience I was stunned.  I watched as Marianne boldly called people to a higher version of themselves and the world.  I heard her unabashedly implore us to step out of the smallness of your own ego-centered lives and into the grandness of serving as part of a divine mission.  Although I was listening intently to the words she spoke, I was more overcome by her presence.  I left there completely in love with Marianne Williamson.

     

    I returned to my apartment, intent to discover the parts of myself that I so clearly saw in her.  I loved that she had the courage to speak the truth, even if it meant shocking people in order to wake them up.  Also I admired the way she was able to clearly articulate a difficult message, speaking with such eloquence that her words penetrated into people's minds and hearts.  I was enamored with the depth of concern she seemed to feel for humanity and the sense that she was dedicated to something larger than just her individual life.  I also envied her beauty, her sense of style and her willingness to look like a hot, sexy woman and not one of the many stereotypical frumpy spiritual teachers. She took to the stage looking gorgeous and sophisticated, yet her holiness came through loud and clear.

     

    As a dedicated student of projection, I looked beyond her behaviors and tried to discover the underlying characteristics that gave rise to those behaviors.  I asked myself, “What kind of person is able to just be herself on stage?”  Clearly, an authentic person.  “What kind of person would care so deeply for the rest of the world?”  A selfless person.  “What is the quality that allows Marianne to speak up, to tell the truth even when it is shocking or scary?”  I heard very clearly – a bold person.

     

    I looked at my list of qualities, which read, “Bold, Authentic, and Selfless.”  None of them were characteristics that I owned or acknowledged within myself.  Those who know me now may find this hard to believe, but back then I was not somebody who told it like it is.  Afraid of losing approval of those I loved, I skirted around issues and lacked the self-confidence to even stand in front of a room without shaking. I was more concerned with looking good that I was with saying something that would change people’s lives.  I was more concerned with saying it nicely than being straight or authentic.  Yet I know that if I saw strengths in Marianne, the potential for them must exist also within me.

     

    I began practicing being more authentic with people and challenging myself to speak up even when I wanted to be silent….”  Debbie Ford

     

    How fun to see our potentials in others, to see what we are lacking within ourselves, to admire truth and authenticity and being comfortable in our own lives and selves.

     

    Watch for your Light Shadow, for the part of you that has yet to shine!

     

    “This Little Light of mine, I going to let it shine….”

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  • Future Us!

    Here is a great concept that I had never considered in a book called, “Stumbling on Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert.

     

    “We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. Rather than indulging in whatever strikes our momentary fancy, we take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves, squirreling away portions of our paychecks each month so they can enjoy their retirements on a putting green, jogging and flossing with some regularity so they can avoid coronaries and gum grafts, enduring dirty diapers and mind-numbing repetitions of The Cat In The Hat so that someday they will have fat-cheeked grandchildren to bounce on their laps. Even plunking down a dollar at the convenience store is an act of charity intended to ensure that the person we are about to become will enjoy the Twinkie we are paying for now. In fact, just about any time we want something – a promotion, a marriage, an automobile, a cheeseburger, we are expecting that if we get it, then the person who has our fingerprints a second, a minute, or a decade from now will enjoy the world they inherit from us, honoring our sacrifices as they reap the harvest of our shrewd investment decisions and dietary forbearance.

     

    Yeah, Yeah.  Don’t hold your breath.  Like the fruits of our loins, our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could have been so stupid enough to think they’d like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn’t work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan.  Even that person who takes a bite of the Twinkie we purchased a few minutes earlier may make a sour face and accuse us of having bought the wrong snack.  No one likes to be criticized, of course, but if the things we successfully strive for do not make our future selves happy, or if the things we unsuccessfully avoid do, then it seems reasonable (if somewhat ungracious) for them to cast a disparaging glance backward and wonder what the hell were we thinking.  They may recognize our good intentions and begrudgingly acknowledge that we did the best we could, but they will inevitably whine to their therapists about how our best just wasn’t good enough for them.

     

    How can this happen?  Shouldn’t we know that tastes, preferences, needs and desires of the people we will be next year – or at least later this afternoon?  Shouldn’t we understand our future selves well enough to shape their lives – to find careers and lovers whom they will cherish, to buy slip covers for the sofa that they will treasure for years to come?  So why do they end up with attics and lives that are full of stuff that we considered indispensable and that they consider painful, embarrassing or useless?  Why do they criticize our choice of romantic partners, second-guess our strategies for professional advancement, and pay good money to remove tattoos that we paid good money to get?  Why do they experience regret and relief when they think about us, rather than pride and appreciation?  We might understand all of this if we had neglected them, ignored them, mistreated them in some fundamental way – but damn it, we gave them the best years of our lives!  How can they be disappointed when we accomplished our coveted goals, and why are they so damned giddy when they end up in precisely the spot we worked so hard to steer them clear of?  Is something wrong with them? 

    Or is something wrong with us?”  Daniel Gilbert

     

    I love this concept that we are making choices today so that the US of our future will be happy, when we can’t possible know that the US in the future will be like, want, need or anything!  And we work harder to please the US we don’t know than we do on please the US of today!

     

    I say do today what you love.

    Do it each day for the rest of your life and give up on the future US.