The faint cues that dictate my outlook
And how the world has lost its care for quality
I’m feeling a little stressed today, I must admit.
It’s weird how these feelings ebb and flow. How one piece of information, or one experience, or one interaction can alter the trajectory of your mood just like that.
And it’s not so easy a thing to articulate . . . As in, what it is about these things that make them uplifting or downputting.
I certainly could articulate a few of the factors, but the reasons that make these factors impactful in the way they are are often mysterious, buried underneath layers of subconscious drives, packed down by years and years of experiences that shaped my neurosystem.
I, for example, am a people pleaser, and so my wellness is very much impacted by things I hear about loved ones . . . If I learn, from something my brother tells me or from my mother’s voice or facial expressions, that my mother is stressed out or sad, then it becomes more difficult for me to enjoy life, regardless of whatever adventure lies before me. And then, if I later get on a call and somehow find that my mother is doing well and that she is in good spirits, then my mood is uplifted because I know my people are much better.
The reason for me becoming this people pleaser has become more clear to me over the years . . . It’s got to do with a few things, like how I’m the older brother and some other things I’d rather not talk about.
But the point is that the quality of my waking reality is very much determined by these faint cues that I’m not so upwardly aware of but that I am deep down always looking out for. And it’s not so easy a thing to change—to let go of—because it is just how I was programmed to be.
It’s not necessarily bad, either; it’s really just how I came to be in order for my psyche to survive the environment in which I grew up.
And I think any sort of conscious effort—sort of like how I’m writing about it, and then becoming aware, and then making an effort to let go of these things, and practicing this over and over again—actually inspires some true, deep change.
But at heart, I will always be this way, and so I must learn how to contend with the fact that there are these strange forces that dictate my outlook and that there are some things I can do to improve it and some things over which I have no control.
This world has lost its care for quality. And the very simple reason for this is that people have lost their focus. Nobody, well, really hardly anyone, delves into things anymore.
It’s all a race to get to the next thing, and in those times when life is a little slow—when humans of times past would thrust themselves into more quiet, concentrated, invigorating endeavors—we instead thrust ourselves into distractions.
We live in such convenient times; people prefer convenience over everything now. They don’t want to live. They just want everything to be easy. And all this really does, besides providing some temporary relief, is make life more boring.
We’ve so quickly forgotten that life—indeed, the good parts of life—are not about the things that come so easily but about those things that aren’t so easily procured.
What good is something if you can walk down the street and grab it off a shelf?
And that’s not to say there couldn’t ever be something good within close range, but that generally, the good things in the world are spread out and not so plentiful, for it is not the thing, necessarily, in and of itself, that is so good, but the fact that it cannot be had so often.
Because if it were able to be had so often, then it would lose its goodness, not within, but in how it is perceived, because it would become normal, and those things which are normal, or seen every day, come to be taken for granted, because we come to think they’ll always be there, and we abuse them so much that we no longer take pleasure from them.
People today don’t understand that goodness lies in the ability to withstrain . . . Not just in the freedom to say yes, but in the power to say no.
Everything is indeed so superficial these days. But what this means is often not completely understood . . . Not so coincidentally, because most people are superficial.
And the only way to break through superficiality is via focus. Because you must concentrate an effort—an energy—in order to dig deep. You must work to penetrate the surface of an idea and get to its core.