Meet my role model for situations of high tension: the hostage negotiator

“What would Jesus do?” say some. “What would Grandma do?” say others. These figures, who often are not with us, serve as inspiration to be somebody better, to “take the high road” at challenging moments.

For me, when such moments involve tension between human beings, I have my own version of this: “what would the hostage negotiator do?”

Privilege is a much less unpleasant topic once we let ourselves be fully aware of it

These days, privilege often gets talked about in the negative: those privileged people, who have no idea of how life is for people unlike them. A justifiable anger, for those who do not enjoy such privileges. Very often, when somebody’s privilege is pointed out, an unwanted, undeserved aggressor-defensor dynamic develops. It is often an unpleasant discussion – and so the mere mention of the word “privilege” is an unpleasant event.

What is often left out of this is the good that can come out of being aware of one’s privilege. When, for example, an able-bodied person gives up their seat on a crowded bus, without fanfare, so that an elderly person may sit down, this creates a positive exchange of giving and receiving. It permits both a benevolent recognition of the way things are and an affirmation of how they should be, without guilt or shame to either party. Ideally, it would always be like this – but even though the reality is often far from the ideal, any individual that truly wants to positively impact the reality around them can do so simply by maintaining an active consciousness around issues of privilege. This is especially true for those that find themselves in positions of privilege.

What will it take to stop the violence?

Why do violent acts happen?

There are a thousand answers to this question. But not all of these answers are easily known. Especially when you are talking not about one single act of violence, but rather the continued stream of violence that keeps taking place, despite vows and initiatives to take steps to end it.

If we want to know why violence happens, and how to stop it from happening as much as possible, we’ve got to remember what violence actually is. We tend to think of violence as being about physical harm and bloodshed. But this is only one facet of violence. It’s far from the only kind.

How “leaving people a way out” calms tensions

We all get to that point with someone sometimes when there’s this big loaded question in the air – one that involves a lot of emotion, and thus potential disappointment. Think “will you marry me?” for example. Sometimes it’s not as extreme as this, but there are many times when these moments happen, especially between people that already share some kind of relationship.

Many times, the person needing to ask the question may not know how to ask it, and the person hearing the question also may not know how to respond. The inbuilt sense of expectation can be quite unpleasant, on both ends.

It helps when we can lower this heavy sense of expectations and obligations. I often find that a good way to do this is to “leave a way out” for the other person.

Compersion: a word we should all become familiar with

We have words in English for when we become upset at someone else’s enjoyment (jealousy) and for when we delight in being better off than someone else (gloating) and even delighting in another’s misery (schadenfreude) … but what do we call it when somebody enjoys themself without you, AND you feel pleasure right along with them, even as the pleasurable experience does not include you? “Vicarious pleasure” doesn’t always cut it, does it?

Enter “compersion.”

“Today you … tomorrow me” (or, “why I often pick up hitchhikers”)

The following is a verbatim republication of something written by a member of Reddit in response to the question “Have you ever picked up a hitch-hiker?” It won Reddit’s “Comment of the Year” award in 2010 – it’s a beautiful story! For context, this was written by somebody from the United States, about an experience that took place in the United States.

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Just about every time I see someone I stop. I kind of got out of the habit in the last couple of years, moved to a big city and all that, my girlfriend wasn’t too stoked on the practice. Then some shit happened to me that changed me and I am back to offering rides habitually. If you would indulge me, it is long story and has almost nothing to do with hitch hiking other than happening on a road.

What is “listening?”

This is so damn important!

If I ruled the world, “listening” would be as much a part of the school curriculum as mathematics or language or history. It would continue to be a required course in higher education also! It’s the bottomless skill, the one you can use everywhere, all the time – the one you can never, ever become “too good at” (no more than a week and a half ago, I badly disregarded a friend; I am still shaken up about it – and reminded of the ways I must continue to work on myself).

Listening is not just “hearing” something. You can hear things all the time without listening. Listening is about learning and understanding meaning. If you are good at listening, you are constantly learning.

Pay as much attention to why things are right as you do to why they are wrong

Many people only turn on their brain when something is wrong. But when things are right, it’s good to reflect on how to keep them that way - especially in case they start to go wrong. If you know more about why things feel right when they do, it will be easier to get back to a “right” state of mind.

Folks who only make an effort when stuff is bad often find it hard to derive any good out of things that ask them to concentrate and make an effort. Then can only enjoy themselves when being passively stimulated, and are unable to actively engage with their good feelings – because their habits dictate that they only truly engage their minds when something needs fixing, instead of when something needs enjoying.

And another thing: there will be many times in life when things feel, well, good enough. Level. Settled and stable. And that’s fine – sometimes. But sometimes, we need more than that. Sometimes, “good enough” doesn’t cut it, because we know we are passively cheating ourselves out of “better.” Those are the times that we look around and say, “I have everything I could ask for. I’m safe, I’m content, I’m in a stable place. So why do I feel like shit right now?“

It’s important to encourage active, conscious appreciation of what is good in one’s life – heck, we ideally would even appreciate ”what is,” point blank. That’s what many of the great thinkers say. But a great part of this involves engaging more deeply with those good things we enjoy.

When “attention” is a disease you don’t want to catch

The people and things that get the most attention are rarely the people and things most deserving of attention. Why are some people’s voices heard more than others? Why is some news heard more than other news that is equally or more important? And what makes one hero more deserving of attention than another?

When we think about calling attention to something, especially in societies with strong freedom-of-speech cultures, we think in the positive: this is something that needs attention; it will help improve something, solve some problem, clarify something. But attention is also very often associated with negative things – we just don’t often “pay attention” to that side of the deal.

On the dark side of things, attention is often involuntary and uncontrollable. This is a big deal – most people don’t like to lose control of their identities or their lives. Out-of-control attention can cause stuff like that to happen!

When overall reality trumps ‘facts’ and ‘logic’

There are times, when I am discussing a topic with someone, that I run into an interesting paradox; the other person tries to use facts and postulates about what something “officially” is or has been “defined” to make their point. And very often even when I agree with all the statements they make, something is missing.

For example, recently I spoke with someone about my interpretation of what Jesus’ message was originally supposed to be – or at least the part of it that I think makes many schools of Christian thought very attractive and enlightening (I wrote about that here, if’you’d like to check it out). The person I was talking to was saying that the Bible has a lot of weird laws that Christians have to accept by definition if the Bible is the Word of God, and that Jesus in fact was not always so progressive if you look at everything he is chronicled to have said, and so on – so my interpretation of Jesus’ message simply could not be the case.

I agreed with pretty much everything he was saying on a purely factual level. But “facts” weren’t the whole story. My friend was speaking as if Christianity and Christians (and even Jesus Christ) were finite definable entities, and in that conversation, I was not seeing things this way. Reality is often much more complicated than a logical series of if-then postulates.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with having access to logical reasoning and using it. Logic and definition are essential tools for learning and understanding. But we should not make the mistake, either, of thinking that they are the only tools.

Get off the script!

“Hi, how are you?”

“Fine, thank you.”

“Good! How’s work?”

“It’s good, it’s good.”

This gets boring and meaningless after a while, doesn’t it? It’s the dreaded script! AAAAAHHH!!! You know, those times when the conversation becomes so deafeningly predictable, when people might be saying a lot, but they’re really not saying anything at all?

The worst part is that sometimes you feel like an imbecile for wanting to say something more meaningful, like “work is a bit stressful. I sacrifice my lunch break to help complete projects on time, but nobody notices; I think one of my coworkers might be stalking me, and my boss has these horrible fights with their significant other on the phone during work, so things are kind of weird. But the avocado / orange / mayo sandwich at the cafe next door is awesome! I order there every day for lunch.” And you look at the person you’re talking to, and they’re like “oh, ok” as they wear that expression that says “damn, you’re a heavy one” on their face and look for a way to discreetly slip out of spending any more time interacting with you.

Kind of depressing to think about, perhaps? Maybe … but I have a more optimistic view of these things.

On not labeling your relationships

A friend of mine recently told me, “I’m seeing two people. But I never refer to either of them as ‘boyfriend’ … they are always just ‘friend’, both between us and with other people. The minute you give the relationship a label – boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, whatever – you’re screwed.” I had never thought of this, but you know what? It made a whole lot of sense to me.

I’ll have more respect for your point of view if you demonstrate respect for points of view you don’t agree with

I trust some salespeople more than others – and I’m more likely to buy from folks I trust, of course. What inspires my trust in a salesperson? Things like knowing what you’re talking about and being able to address my questions completely and concisely helps, of course. But I’ve found that the number one factor for me to trust somebody I’m meeting for the first time is this: do they demonstrate respect for where I’m coming from, no matter what?

This is applicable to many situations outside of sales, of course. When discussing a disagreement with somebody, I find the same pattern: the more the other person demonstrates respect for me and my point of view – even if they strongly disagree with it – the more likely I am to listen to them and try to find common ground with them.

What do I want for the holidays? Nothing, actually.

A member of my family recently asked me what I wanted for Christmas. It was a beautiful gesture by somebody dear to me who knows me well and knows that I generally appreciate gifts I know about more than surprise gifts. But the question still kind of caught me off guard.

As I thought about how to respond and the words came to mind, I realized a few things:

Some thoughts about individuals who go on deadly shooting sprees

After getting over the fact that the most innocent of lives were lost yesterday in Connecticut just because somebody was angry or wanted revenge on someone else, we’re going to start asking why once again.

There is no one answer. There are multiple answers. Obviously, availability of guns is one of them. Without the guns, certainly fewer people die. But guns are not the only issue here – and focusing just on the issue of guns ignores a lot of other very important things. Gun ownership is similar in Canada to the United States, but Canada’s homicide rates are significantly lower.  The state of Connecticut, where the shooting took place, is actually at the low end of the U.S. average.

More concerning to me is the cultural values and norms we grow up with. This is a central factor in why these things happen, and holds the key to solving the problem.

The insidiousness of dogma – and how it affects our ability to be happy

Anything, even the greatest, most wonderful of things, can be ruined for somebody if they have bad experiences with it. Nothing has an absolute quality of greatness or awfulness. Each individual feels things relative to their own experience.

The best things in the world – the best ideas, the best movements, the best innovations – often become corrupted with dogma and lose their appeal to people.

Dogma shuts off listening. And listening is a uniquely important skill. What is the point of interacting with another human being if you are not going to listen? Listening is in some ways even more important than expression. It’s the cornerstone of all meaningful human interaction.

Certainly, there are other ways to get people to stop listening; using fear, shame, guilt tripping, and other negative emotions are often part of this process, especially in a more immediate context. Dogma, however, is often more subtle, less easy to notice, longer-lasting, more insidious, and so on. When people hold dogmatic attitudes, the conversation doesn’t necessarily stop – often it can keep going on forever, in fact. But in a sense, it’s all in vain; listening is not occurring, and thus the conversation might as well be an exercise in theater.

When somebody takes a dogmatic attitude toward you, you can feel how it doesn’t matter to them what you think or know, or even who you really are. They’re gonna have it their way no matter what. This happens quite often, of course. On an everyday basis, really. That’s why I think it is so important to talk about.

Soundbites don’t make a discussion

The further along we get in media and Tweeting and texting, the more it seems people want to pack as much information into as little time as possible.

This is often an admirable goal; when you can state a point concisely, it often comes across more clearly.

But when we want to talk about deeper issues – things that cannot be explained in five seconds, five minutes, or even five hours – short back-and-forth exchanges are completely inadequate. There’s no substitute for the in-depth process of explaining and learning about the context of those things that can’t be figured out right away.

Why greater investment in finding a romantic match often leads to lesser returns; some thoughts

The world of sex and romance can get really noisy sometimes with all the drama, intended or not, that it often brings. Yes – even with low-drama people. At such times, it can become hard to think.

People who know me know that I can be quite the romance junkie. But I bet those of you who read this blog from time to time could totally tell, right? I mean, look at how I’m always writing about something deep, or about sex, or intimacy, etc.

So I’ve taken some time off from that mode of being. And it’s so much quieter inside my head … now that I’m not devoting so much time and energy to how I feel about her, how she feels about me, what do we want out of this, how much time do/should we devote to developing our connection, where is this going, what needs aren’t getting addressed, how compatible are we, etc….

What the heck does “positive” mean, anyway? Here are 22 ways I’ve come to understand “positivity”

I picked the word “positive” for this blog because I think that, if I am limited to one word, “positive” best represents the message I am trying to convey, and the way I want to live my life.

No one word can be a catch-all for everything meaningful. Far from it. But I like the word “positive” because I find that it covers so many different situations and approaches. Here are my ideas of the many meanings of the word “positive,” as well as a link to an article from this blog for each particular meaning:

Why do people believe anecdotes and stories more than real statistics?

The obvious answer is that anecdotes often touch us more deeply. However, when a statistic touches us deeply, we also tend to identify very much with it. Those statistics that seem far away to us, however, are easily ignorable. And though a statistically-proven fact should have more weight than a well-put-together story, the story usually comes out in front. Why is that?

Another simple answer is that a story is a story, which means that it is meant to get you to listen and become and enthralled by what it has to say, where is a statistic does not do this by itself (unless you are into the statistic from the get-go). But there is more to this: statistics, because of their fixed, factual, conditional nature, can never capture the whole truth.

There is no talking to someone who won’t listen. Talk to those that will listen instead

I am often witness to situations in which a conversation is going on between two people. Or, at least, that is what supposed to be happening. In reality, somebody is not listening. But often, even though somebody is not listening, the conversation continues anyway.

What’s the point, I ask, of continuing a conversation in which the communication is unsuccessful?

What does it mean when you want someone to be jealous of you?

As I write this post, the most popular post on my blog these days, by far, is the one about why human beings get jealous. I noticed that a good number of the search terms hitting that post say things like “how to make someone jealous,” which is interesting, because that post is all about how to reduce jealous feelings. So I figured I’d also address why people often wish to inspire jealousy in others.

Jealousy is about control – or wanting control when you aren’t feeling in control. It’s a flailing emotion that looks for some way to achieve stability in those moments when you get socked in the gut, often when you realize you have a need that you weren’t aware of before. It’s a particularly sharp way of being reminded that “HEY … THIS MATTERS!”

And that’s the key thing to understand about why some folks want to inspire jealousy in others: if you are an object of somebody’s jealousy, that means you matter.

A murderer is not just a murderer

A murderer is a person, too. Like you and me. A person who probably shares a lot in common with you and me, in fact.

Some folks were reading this will no doubt ask me why I think that this matters at all. To which I say: have you ever intimately known somebody who has intentionally killed another person before? If the answer is yes – whether or not you still keep in touch with such a person – you can’t tell me that this doesn’t matter.

Feminism is NOT enough by itself to liberate men from the problems they confront; a treatise on male empowerment

One of the biggest sticking points between feminists and those who oppose them is this creeping thinking that “women are the oppressed gender, and men are not.” That it is only women who need the safe spaces, the redress of injustice, the activism, the specialized attention to problems only they face, the throwing off of traditional restrictions, and so on. Men are sometimes thought to need none of that; as the gender that is not oppressed, men are just fine as they are. They deserve no special attention.

I couldn’t disagree more. While it’s true that there are a million things that women have to deal with that men don’t (and that feminism is still very necessary), men also have their own struggles peculiar to their manhood, and things they go through and are expected to do as men that women are free from. That should not be denied.

And whether or not you want to play Oppression Olympics and talk about which gender faces more barriers, one thing is for sure: in the area of gender justice, women have been making great strides forward, talking to each other about the obstacles they face, calling out and defining their issues as women, and pushing back against sexist norms - while men’s issues are still most often shrouded in silence.

This silence around men’s issues is not the fault of feminists or feminism. Sure, there are bad feminists. There are bad doctors too. Does that make the practice of being a doctor a bad one? Feminism is overall a very progressive phenomenon – one that takes women’s issues, yanks them out of the dark, and calls them out so that they can be known about and dealt with.

The constructive answer to this problem is to replicate for men what feminism has been doing for women, rather than pushing back against feminism.

Who do you think you aren’t?

Before I was able to love myself, I use to think about all the people that I wasn’t like. I would think about heroes, the people that we hold in high esteem as models for the best that humanity can be – and about how I wasn’t meant to be like them. From historical figures like Harriet Tubman or Gandhi to everyday local heroes in our comminuties who are known for their acts of courage, overflowing generosity, and sense of commitment to bettering the world around them – I knew I wasn’t one of them. My destiny in life was just to be the best ordinary person I could be. I thought “some people are heroes … and some aren’t.”

Then, when I first found love for myself – which was quite an amazing period in my life – I noticed something: I was already my own hero. I no longer separated myself from these “heroes” in my head. Rather than seeing what separated me from them, I began to see just how much I had in common with them. I began to think of them not just as heroes, but as allies; people that I was spiritually side-by-side with, in a sense. People that I could learn from who could also learn from me – and I realized, in pretty much every case, these people would also welcome me seeing myself as equally valuable to the betterment of the world as they.

Ask for help even when you don’t totally need it

We tend to ask for help when (a) what we need help with is not a big deal, and (b) when we desperately need help with something, often at times when we should have asked long ago. The fact that we often don’t ask for help when we find ourselves in the middle of these two extremes robs us of a lot of good opportunities to help and be helped. It creates unfortunate negative associations with help, including feelings of superiority versus inferiority, and also a thinking that a request for meaningful help is usually associated with neediness and desperation.

This shouldn’t be the case. When help is genuine – given from a place of wanting to see somebody free of troubles – it’s most often a rewarding experience for everyone involved, helper and helped. And I’d like to talk about that for a bit: the importance of helping and being helped, by itself, regardless of the nature of the help given or received.

One atheist’s understanding of the message of Jesus Christ

I’m one of the most religion-friendly atheists you’ll ever know. Because I don’t believe in disparaging people’s beliefs for being different than my own. On the contrary, those around us who believe different things than we do, they hold these beliefs for some very good and interesting reasons, and this makes me curious.

This is why I am grateful, atheist that I am, to be able to relate to the message of Jesus Christ.

I probably should be clear: this does not make me a Christian in atheist clothing, or anything like that. I do not believe in “God,” and I do not believe in Jesus as God, anymore than I believe in Gandhi as God or Madonna as God. But the fact that I don’t worship Jesus as “God” doesn’t mean that what Jesus spoke of isn’t a good, powerful message to relate to, among others. And given that the story of Jesus Christ is one of the most widely known stories throughout the world, a reference point from which so many people base their value system, it’s often quite valuable to be able to say to these Christians “yes. I understand.” From there, we can communicate on a deeper, more appreciative, less patronizing level to each other.

I also find this topic important specifically because it is important to those people who do have a religious faith. These folks are out there, and I am going to be interacting with them. And when interacting with religious folks, ignoring their belief or worse, mocking and shaming it, is bigoted. When an atheist’s (or anybody else’s) beliefs are mocked and shamed, or made invisible through ignorance of them, this is bigoted too. Well, it works both ways.

Now, I’m not excusing those religious fanatic leaders who mobilize people and resources in order to deprive or cause harm to others. Those folks can go chew on some scrap-metal – they really do cause pain and distress, to many people that are supposed to share their beliefs as well as those that don’t. I often think that the biggest problems in many belief movements (non-religious as well as religious) are the leaders; the folks who are ”just believers” are often quite different from these leaders, even when they may not “look like it” at first. When you can communicate compassionately across these walls on a humanity-to-humanity level, you break down myths and learn about the real person, and the experience can often be rewarding on both sides.

So … about Jesus Christ. Let’s begin.

The nitty-gritty of using condoms: a conversation we don’t have nearly often enough

“If you’re going to have sex, use a condom!” We hear it all the time: safer sex necessarily involves condom use, among other things. And it sounds simple and sensible enough, right? Just cover the penis when penetration occurs, and then take it off and throw it away afterwards. So simple – or at least it looks that way in public service ads and school sex-ed classes.

(PLEASE NOTE: there is some explicit discussion of the workings and mechanics of sex further on in this article. Just in case you aren’t up for reading that kind of thing right now. Otherwise, please proceed).

The difference between envy and jealousy

Envy is a natural feeling of wanting what somebody else has. Jealousy, however, is qualitatively different.

Whereas envy simply says, “I want what you have,” jealousy says, “I can’t stand that you have something I don’t,” usually followed up with “thus you should not have it!”

Getting the most out of the loves of our lives

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” –Rumi

There is something about the way much of modern society views love outside of family ties that I find deeply disturbing.

It is often thought that the only people that you should use the word love with are people in your family, or people that possibly will become your family through you being married / settled down with them. Even when you don’t settle down and get married to somebody, the concept of using the word love only for people that will most likely be in your life forever tends to predominate. Not everybody thinks this way, but it is the dominant hidden traditional social value, especially in more modernized, atomized societies.

The primordial soup of new feelings

When a person’s life situation suddenly changes radically, things can often become unstable. Moving to a new town, breaking up with a long-term partner, forming a new deep romantic relationship, moving out of a family member’s house, death of a loved one, loss of something important to you, or even finally achieving something important to you that you’ve sought for a long time … all of these things bring with them the destruction of old routines, and new feelings come and take their place.

And much of the time, these new feelings are weird and scary. Or they can be, like, totally radically awesome, too! If that’s the case, well, enjoy it! My only word of caution is to remember that such feelings are indeed temporary. Transitory. They won’t be sticking around. They’ll quickly get replaced by other feelings, and often switch back and forth and jolt you around a good deal.

We’ll often get into situations that we look back on with amazement: How did I get into that?? Sometimes we regret it, but sometimes we don’t. But for many people, especially those in search of some kind of balance or purpose in life, it can still be unsettling, to say the least, to look back on actions taken in the past and wonder “so, that was really me doing that, eh?”

Hindsight is always 20/20, the saying goes. You can always see clearly looking backward. So the key question here is how to best navigate this “primordial soup” of new feelings that comes with a big change – when that big change is actually happening.

The “monogamy vs. polyamory” debate – how can you know which relationship style is right for you?

When monogamy and polyamory get talked about seriously, lots of assumptions can often pop up. People of one view can get into a mode of thinking that looks down on people that think differently about things.

The “awesomeness” of lack of pretense

When I was young, some people used to tell me about how awesome I was for some reason. Much of the time, they would laugh and chuckle at the same time as they told me I was awesome. I had no idea what the heck they were driving at, and very often it seemed like they were making fun of me. I could not feel this awesomeness they were speaking of, if it wasn’t just some really stupid joke. But later on in life, when I would run into these people again, they would maintain that I was just that: awesome.

I was a rather gruff person as a boy. I didn’t care for great displays of emotion unless they seemed absolutely necessary. And truly – I didn’t see what was so awesome about me, or why I should love and be loved, and why any of this was a big deal; why did people want to love me, anyway? A gruff, insensitive, hard-mannered fellow who cared more about basic respect than about whether or not people found him to be “awesome.” Just respect me and my boundaries, I’ll respect yours, and that’s all that’s necessary, I thought.

Then, many years later, when I finally matured enough to see so many things I had never seen before, something happened: I saw this same awesomeness in my father.

The wonderful, liberating power … of dispassionateness

Oh yeah, let’s get excited! We’re going to get … dispassionate. Cool. Calm. Composed. Collected. And it’s going to be AWESOME.

I’m not joking. I’m telling you – sometimes there’s nothing that feels more awesome and life-giving than when somebody is just … at ease. Passion and excitement certainly have their place. It would be a boring life without such feelings! But these feelings can also be thorny little things. Sometimes, showing a strong feeling is undesirable – especially when a situation is delicate somehow. There are many times when showing too much that you care is an unwelcome thing, and ends up actually feeling uncaring, ironically.

Intimacy takes time

In today’s modern hurly-burly, one thing that I am always seeing people forget [or never learn] is that as much as one may want to get deep real quick, the truth is, that … it takes time.

We’ve all had moments that have hit us in the heart – times when something touched us in an instant, and that instant remained frozen forever in our memory. These intimate moments are indeed very important. They are callings to something higher.

But we cannot live in a state of genuine intimacy on these moments alone. Yet that is what I am seeing in modern society, when I look around; a situation in which people desperately search for a connection to things more intimate mainly through experiencing some shocking / touching / moving / jarring event. And this does have great value – but this “watershed event” is only one step on the road to lasting intimacy. It is important to experience such moments in the way it is important that a pizza have a crust. You won’t make good pizza if you focus on nothing but the crust.

Living in the truth

We should always come forward and tell the truth, right? The truth will set you free, it is said. And I have definitely published here my fair share of analyses about the truth, and about the benefits of finding and telling the truth.

One of the things that I’ve noticed is this: a lot of people who tell lies tend to live a good part of their lives in a state of untruth. Many people mix it up; they are truthful in one kind of situation, and lie a good deal in a different kind of situation. Often, bad things happen when such situations cross each other; someone who has been told the truth speaks to someone that has been lied to, and the lie dominates until both people know the truth. And even after the truth is found out, questions remain as to why the lie needed to exist in the first place. I don’t know too many people who feel pleased when they are lied to.

In my own life, as much as possible, I go a step further than simply telling the truth. I want to live in a state of truth – a place where being authentic and honest and open comes as easy as breathing. Doesn’t this sound like a good idea? Why does it seem like such a tall order?

The enduring value of partnership

Pretty much everything we do in life, generally, will at some point involve interaction with somebody else, or many other people. These interactions can be transitory, or they can be longer lasting, and while long-lasting interaction tends to make the biggest impact on us, there are many times during which shorter-term interaction also becomes really important. And whatever interaction you do have, it will always go better if you have an understanding with the other person.

There are some people, we all know them, that do well in interaction with just about anybody. You know where they stand, and you have a pretty comfortable idea of where you stand with them. It doesn’t seem to matter who they are talking to or what situation they’re in – even situations that aren’t so good, with people that are rude, aggressive, or inconsiderate – they almost always seem to find a way to manage the interaction well.

Such people have good partnership skills. As in “good teammates in interaction.” Knowing how to be a good copilot, together with you, on this leg of your journey together.

It’s good to lose it every once in a while

Over the past year, I felt this weird unease about the way my life was going: it seemed, just a little too much, like I was doing good. Like I was on top, like I was untouchable (or at least “less-touchable”). Like the only bad things that were happening to me were small-time, manageable bad things. Life was just… good! And yet something inside me told me that it was not healthy to always feel this way – but no part of me knew exactly how to remedy this situation. Besides… when things are good, why look for reasons to complain? Just enjoy life when it’s good to you!

Well, I recently got reset, in a major way. I invested a lot of my time and energy into a relationship that just wasn’t ready to receive it. And I didn’t even realize how far I was diving in…  and it hit me like a huge thump in the stomach.

For a few days, I was not myself. I could not sleep well, I wasn’t able to eat much, and I became irritable and often angry – angry because I couldn’t cry. I was hurt. Still am feeling some of that hurt. Hurt because of all the confusion – this was not some straightforward betrayal or anything that had some clear response. It was a situation that both grabbed at me and pushed me away all at once. It was a cloud of uncertainty that left nothing for me to grab hold of. And I was so unprepared for this kind of hurt that it overwhelmed me too much to even be able to cry. For a couple of days the tears refused to come, even when I wanted them to.

Now I am emerging from this period of heartbreak, and slowly but steadily healing. I finally was able to break through and cry for a while with the help and guidance of friends. And that turned things around. And I’ve learned a good, positive lesson from this experience.

When the weather gets ugly, keep your hands firmly on the steering wheel

As driving advice, this is pretty common sense, right? You always want your hands on the steering wheel, but most of all when conditions are tough. That’s when both hands will be firmly guiding every movement, right?

The thing is, when it comes to traveling the sometimes bumpy road of relationships with other people, many of us often let go of the steering wheel or swerve all over the place when the weather turns ugly, rather than doubling our focus and getting better control of things. It’s a bad habit of letting panic and primal thought jump in the driver’s seat – something that would be completely unacceptable when literally driving a car.

Folks with a positive mindset know that positivity is not all about simply being cheerful and always looking at the bright side of things. Sometimes, you are going to hit snags; you are going to have to slog through the muck and mire of unpleasant situations that will test you and those you have relationships with. This, in fact, is where the real value of a positive mindset makes itself so deeply felt: when the shit hits the fan.

You’re not feeling everything that you really feel

Have you ever noticed, when you look back on a past event, that you feel much differently now looking back on it than you did when you were going through it? When all is said and done, what counts most is often not how you were feeling while the event was happening; it’s the flavor of the film that plays back in your head about the event – how the event gets filed in your mind.

There is no way to reliably tell, when you are going through something, how you will feel about it later! For example, a lot of us, as children, had to go through things that felt weird and horrible at the time, but gave us valuable experience later on, such that we become grateful later for what these events taught us. Or, there’s the happy couple that goes on a wonderful vacation together, and then one of them seriously hurts the other somehow – and all the joy of that vacation becomes at best bittersweet, and at worst, something that one might even desire to forget as much as possible.

What all this points to is that our mind not only remembers what we’ve been through; it also flavors these memories based on what came afterward. Now, while it is true that you can never be quite sure of your immediate reaction to a situation (how it hits you), you do potentially have some power over what flavors a situation has when you look back on it.

Why I hate “will you marry me?” and other such loaded on-the-spot proposals

Loaded questions are okay to ask as long as they don’t demand an answer right away. When it comes to big decisions in your life, like getting married, such questions should not be approached with an “answer me now” attitude.

It’s perfectly fine to bring up a loaded question that needs to be talked about – in fact, I highly recommend it. If there is something on your mind that is burning at you, and you cannot continue to ignore it, then it must come out. But it’s quite another thing to demand that such things that you cannot answer inside yourself be answered immediately by the person to whom you address the question.

You can’t hurry love – and there ain’t no substitute

And you can’t hurry anything else that you really want. You can try, but sometimes, it just has to take its time coming.

Have you ever felt, at some time in your life, like you want to fast-forward through a process which on some level you already know how it will turn out? I have a friend who, in her mid-30s, realized that she was doing a lot of stupid things [that she knew were stupid] because “she never got to act stupid in her teens and early 20s.” And yet, for a while there – she needed to continue doing such things – until the coin finally dropped. Or then there is the guy I know who lost a great girlfriend, because he was not ready to accept all of her goodness. He knew she was just what he’d always said he was looking for, and yet… he couldn’t accept her when she became real.

A lot of people [myself included] are tempted to get upset and disappointed at the missed potentialof these situations. How is it that people waste so much time and throw so much opportunity away, because what – because they’re not ready? Even when they know that their wish is coming true?

It’s ok to not be ready

This is one of those things that you can’t force. When you aren’t ready, you just aren’t ready. And nothing that you do or say is going to change that.

It’s one of those things for which there is nothing to do but give up trying to be who you want to be or think you can be; you truly have no choice but to let yourself be who you are ready to be now.

You can try to fight it, and say it ain’t so, and sometimes you will find yourself doing that even though you know that fighting the feeling ultimately will not change the reality. Sometimes, it is especially painful to not be ready for something that we have been ready for in the past, or when we have committed ourselves to being ready for it in the present. But the truth will always assert itself in the end. So give yourself permission to feel it.

The real prize we’re all in search of

Why make money, form friendships, fall in love, suffer people and things you don’t like, and all that jazz? What are we really looking for?

The answer to that question is not easy, and it does vary from person to person – but if there were one thing, just one thing that I could say pretty much all of us are looking for in our lives, one thing that could roughly cover it all, it would be this.

“Do I worry too much?”

The fact that one asks themself this question already reveals part of the answer, doesn’t it?

Honestly, this is one of my little problems. I think about things  a lot. I reflect, contemplate, hypothesize, extrapolate, rewind, and fast-forward all kinds of different things in my mind. I overanalyze.

And I’m realizing – doing this takes away from the moment. From being in the present and living what is to live. I’m realizing this because I’ve been spending time with other people who don’t do these kinds of things. People who know how to forget about the things they can’t change in the future for the time being, and live in the present.

Why men are the sexual hunters and women are considered “keepers of sex” – and what can be done to address this imbalance

Pretty much anywhere you go, men are conceived as the “horndog gender.” Men are viewed as the ones who will always want sex more, who are always quicker to sexualize a relationship, to make things about sex. And this does create a bit of a problem, especially in heterosexual contexts. For men, what should be a simple interaction involving something women generally also want (sex) turns into a complex game of wooing and seduction – in fact, for this precise reason, “seduction communities” that pretty much cater exclusively to heterosexual men’s desires to be more confident and convincing around women, have sprung up everywhere. Men have to learn to walk an often-thin line around sex – or else risk being “friend-zoned,” marginalized, or even shunned.

Then there’s the other side of this: women very often face a reality in which sex is an annoyingly central marker of their existence. Everything a woman does is potentially sexualized, and thus, even when a woman does desire sex (often to the same degree or even more than men do), she has to take steps to make sure all the other things she desires are not completely left behind. So habits develop, on her end, of avoiding and/or withholding sex [yes, even when she desires it], because that’s often the only escape from this often suffocating paradigm of “woman-as-potential-sexual-object.” Thus the complex twists and turns and barriers to sexual interaction that understandably frustrate many heterosexual men – and can also frustrate a good number of women, too!

A short 3-minute film on Youtube called “why men and women can’t be friends” has been getting a lot of attention, because it focuses on this issue that never really does go away. You see guy after guy talk about how they can’t be “just friends” with a woman without having sexual feelings toward her, while every woman interviewed appears innocently unaware of any pressing “urge” to get sexual with her guy friends. Take a look…

Forgive, but don’t forget (for different reasons than you might think)

Can you really forgive without forgetting? There are some who say that you must forget in order to properly forgive. Put that which you have forgiven out of your mind, and go forth with a pure heart. If you don’t forget, it is often thought, you haven’t truly forgiven – you’re forgiving “for the moment,” but when the time comes, you’ll conveniently tear away that healing forgiveness and use what was supposed to be forgiven as a weapon of conflict once again.

I disagree with this perspective. In fact, I think one of the most important parts of forgiveness is remembering – remembering everything, including the initial events that got forgiven, the process of arriving at forgiveness, and the way forward that was decided upon afterwards. I believe that the only way to ensure that forgiveness is complete is by not forgetting.

The real reasons why people get jealous – and why jealousy is so powerful

Jealousy is one of those demons that just seems to take everything over when it is felt – even when you know on the inside that your jealousy doesn’t make sense somehow, it often still rips through and takes you hostage. Many people even go so far as to call jealousy an innate emotion, as though, no matter what, we will always feel some jealousy sometimes, and there’s nothing we can do to help that.

Some people even think jealousy is a healthy thing, because it means that you care. You know that you are in love, it is said, when you feel tremendous pangs of jealousy about that special love that you share being shared with somebody else. Without jealousy and other associated negative involuntary emotions, the relationship might as well end, it is said, because then you have no more passionate divine spark. If you don’t ever get jealous, it must mean that you can turn your emotions on and off at a whim, and thus no more organic drive exists to feel.

I want to correct some assumptions here – because it is obvious, if you look around you enough, that there are people who do not ever really feel jealousy. I am one of them. Such people do not have shallower emotions; rather, they have an inbuilt understanding that channels negative emotions away from feelings of jealousy. This holds a lot of hope for those other folks who tend to become prisoner to jealousy’s grip: it’s not an inevitable process.

How to apologize… without meaning it?

So I’m looking through the search terms through which people come upon this blog, and one of the ones that seems to come up rather often is some variation on “how to say you’re sorry without meaning it.” Unfortunately for these folks, the article on my blog that such a search is most likely to hit upon is about how to truly mean it when you say you’re sorry. Maybe these folks are looking for the article in which I talk about how saying you’re sorry doesn’t mean you have to feel weak. But that article is also not about faking an apology, either. So I’m going to give my thoughts here on that subject.

Those supernatural, divine moments in life are not exceptions – they’re CALLINGS

In the hurly-burly of the everyday, it can be hard to find meaning for many people. Especially if your life has a routine, or if your life is optimized so that you may give your best energy to those around you who need it (children and elderly or disabled relatives, for example), the skyscape of such a life can look like one long panorama of gray clouds.

And then, there are those divine moments that take place sometimes. When something extraordinary happens. Or when you make an extraordinary connection with something completely ordinary. No matter what it is, for a brief moment, the gray monotony of routine life opens up and a ray of sunlight bursts through.

What do these moments mean?