Bad moods seem to have hallucinogenic properties. They make you misperceive and misinterpret reality.
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Sometimes they are all easier said then done, but we must continue to try our best to push our boundaries, do new things and not hold anger insides us.
Sharing this today. I do 90 minutes of yoga in the morning trying to put these points into practice. How truly joyful our lives could be if we start practicing these skill you describe early in our lives. Great post.
I&8217;ve often thought that we would do better to teach students how to think, instilling in them a love of learning and of reading and a curiosity about life, rather than drilling them about esoteric cts that they can look up if needed.
David &8212; Just want to say that I&8217;ve enjoyed perusing your site for the last couple days&8230; Sadly I&8217;m running out of material, as I&8217;m catching up with your most current pieces! On the bright side, you&8217;ve hooked another reader.
David, this is great! I&8217;ve often thought of things I wish they&8217;d taught us in school&8230;.my big one is that when someone is mean or rude or condescending to you, it&8217;s not about you, it&8217;s about them. Maybe they&8217;re having a bad day, got in a fight with their (whatever), maybe you resemble someone in their life with whom they&8217;ve had a less-than-positive experience. The lesson is not to take things personally&8211;a big issue of mine. (The Four Agreements&8211;wonderful precepts!) Also, the people come off as the &8220;toughest&8221; are often the ones who are most terrified. Thanks for your blog!
Oh Lord! Please don&8217;t let me be misunderstood!&8221;
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We can learn to be smarter about the risks that we take, but most of what te has in store for us could never be predicted. Once it&8217;s happening, it&8217;s happening. If you need to do something about it, you still can. But your action doesn&8217;t have to arise from this place of rejecting reality. Planning, preparing, insuring, deciding &8212; all of it can be done at the same time as you let happen what is indeed happening.
Great post nicely written! Should be required reading for all teachers and parents, and well, everybody :-)
Oh wow, what a revelation this was. I was 22 before it ever occured to me that bad moods are completely normal and do not indicate that my life has gone wrong.
They don&8217;t need to take up too much math or science time, maybe just a single two-hour class for each, covering two a year. Plant a few seeds and leave them alone. They&8217;ll grow, in in the minds of certain kids where the conditions are right, and their progress will be gradual but unstoppable.
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I&8217;m slowly learning that the best response to fear is curiosity. When the thought of doing something makes you uncomfortable, all that means is that its consequences are unmiliar and unpredictable. That might be good. It always means there is some seriously new ground that can be brokenright now.
I learned to control it by noticing the feeling that came from the fear and taking time to be with it rather than reacting to it and trying to get my fix of external validation. &8220;Oh, that&8217;s always how I feel when &8230; I don&8217;t have to do anything about this.&8221;
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This is how we &8220;end up&8221; in careers we don&8217;t like, suffering from compulsive behaviors, or getting into debt. We don&8217;t choose these outcomes consciously, we just follow the little trail of cookies throughout life, and they can lead us to dark places. It&8217;s a , thoughtless mechanism designed only to get us from birth to procreation to death, and it drags us along kicking and screaming over rocks and coals, if we&8217;re not aware ofhow it works.
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After all this time, all its coverage on Oprah and in religious texts, forgiveness is almost uniformly misunderstood. It does not mean you are okay with what has been done. It doesn&8217;t even mean it doesn&8217;t bother you any more. Forgiving is deciding you will no longer attempt to justify hate or anger, because you know they are damaging to you and your life.
I would like to add a few more vital skills we need to teach our children in grade school: empathy, compassion, and civility. We live in an interconnected and st changing world; governments are experiencing major social upheavals. We need to reach a new level of global ethicsa revolution in our way of thinking and relating to one another if we are to continue to exist as a species. It is imperative to adopt a different mindset that reflects our connectedness to each other and with nature.
Work in progress :)
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Write on!
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In the cradle of civilization, almost anyone can heed almost all their fears yet still survive in reasonable comfort. So some people never make a point of this.
Refusing to bear the odd bout of bad feelings is what drives people to the most desperate behaviors: addictions, blame, bad relationships and crime.
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Of all these skills, this is the one I&8217;m worst at. Yet I keep discovering the same encouraging thing whenever I do it &8212; once you walk right into it, the fear part gives way pretty quickly. It&8217;s like a thin shell you thought was a wall. The rewards are always way closer and more accessible than I think.
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Just had to add another, personal note: Relating to 2, I often find myself being very quick to anger when I&8217;m driving. I notice how the feeling of being so angry stresses and distresses me. So I&8217;ve started practising driving as though everyone on the road is my mily, known and equal to me. Instead of a bunch of strangers in our respective cars, I imagine we&8217;re all part of the same group. I find myself much more likely to drive with the other people in mind, sure there&8217;s enough room for all of us on the road and simply moving out of the way of aggressive and impatient drivers. As it&8217;s a practice, there are moments I suck at it (as David might say), but as I keep practising, I&8217;m getting better at driving as though no one around me is a stranger. Thanks for the post, David. Going to put this one on the fridge for my kids, who are in grades 5 and 9.
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As an educator, these values/skills are indeed hard to teach to students. However, I think whenever there is an opportunity, especially if students open up and share their problems, those will be great opportunities to tell them these, and off
Sometimes they are all easier said then done, but we must continue to try our best to push our boundaries, do new things and not hold anger insides us.
How often you do things you&8217;re afraid of is a reliable barometer for how quickly you&8217;re becoming a more capable person.
For sure. They wouldn&8217;t even have to be drilled or anything, like other subjects. Just plant the seeds. There are some things certain teachers mentioned once that I never forgot.
Talking to strangers is good &8211; however for me it&8217;s more overall about teaching communication.
I used to really believe that somebody getting the wrong idea about me was some kind of problem that had to be fixed. This is the kind of fear that would prevent me from, say, renting &8220;Heavenly Creatures&8221; because everyone knows it has Kate Winslet&8217;s boobs in it and the Blockbuster girl would think I&8217;m renting it only because I&8217;m a huge perv and not because it&8217;s a good movie. It&8217;s a tiny example, but that&8217;s a genuine wall I built there. One of thousands.
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The truth is your life is a steady stream of mostly unpredictable stuff, and there is ultimately very little control to be had over it, other than what you do in response. The best responses are always conscious and calm.
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Make no apologies or explanations for what you want, and let the unknown ces dislike or distrust you. Study your fear of leaving bad impressions, and practice doing what you want any7 High-leverage life skills they should teach in grade school? high school life skills storeway. I bet you&8217;ll become not just more comfortable, but more likable.
You won&8217;t be able to let it all go at once, but it&8217;s amazing what happens when you give yourself a mission to do it for five minutes. Can you let everything unfold as it will for five minutes? Sure you can, and it&8217;s exhilarating. If something happens that has you itching to react, let it be, and when the five minutes is up, you can get right back to trying to stop the world from turning, if you think it&8217;s worthwhile.
Hi David!
They had an explicit rule about it: Don&8217;t talk to strangers! Stranger is clearly a pejorative word, and they told us to use that word to describe anyone we didn&8217;t know. And don&8217;t let them talk to you!
Spot on. Love this post. There&8217;s a little anecdote brought to mind by 7, noticing craving and aversion as soon as it arises. A Buddhist teacher (whose name I forget) had a great fondness for yogurt. At a retreat he found himself, after a long meditation, seated at the very end of a table of monks who were passing down the table a large bowl of his vourite food. He noticed that he was becoming anxious about there being none left for him by the time the bowl got there. Then he noticed he was mentally criticizing those monks who were taking &8220;too much.&8221; All the benefits of the meditation were being replaced by irritability and anxietyhigh school life skills store. So when the bowl got to him, he looked into the bowl, where enough for him still resided, and said &8220;No. No yogurt for this addict!&8221;
Math does have a certain purity to it. I think it&8217;s incredibly healthy. I like your point about being comfortable in the mystery, even when it comes to something as explicit as math. If people could only be okay with not quite getting it &8212; people get so impatient while learning a concept, but once you know the rules it always always works. Few things always work like that.
As a future teacher this is so great information to base from.. I agree with your list.. Thanks for the post!
I have found your posts/views here on your blog to be consistent in providing real depth of thought to many things each of us often take for granted, so when although I was just going offline and I saw your notice of a new post I heard myself say &8220;Oh Yay!&8221; out loud&8230;it was a no-brainer that reading it was going to keep me from sleep for just a little while longer.
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I&8217;ve been at work all day and I&8217;m thrilled to come home to see such a great response to this post, out in social media land and here in the comment section. I&8217;m on my way out again (to see my beloved Winnipeg Jets after being separated for 15 years) so I&8217;ll address your lovely comments when I&8217;m back. Have a good Monday evening, and thanks for sharing this post!
Whenever I even mention this idea, people panic. &8220;But we can&8217;t just let things happen! What if terrible things happen?!&8221;
Although I sometimes wish it weren&8217;t true, this seems to be law:
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David,
These are interesting. I have been teaching math to teenagers for 20 years, and a few of these have been part of my sub-curriculum! I would say that the skill I focus most is helping young people be comfortable in the mystery. We are a culture of immediate gratification and st routes to solutions .. and thus we are horribly uncomfortable in the &8220;not knowing&8221; that regularly presents itself .. and similarly, not so great at reflection. In the right environment (safe, supportive, not competitive), math can be a wonderful medium in which to develop both of these. If you can sit with the mystery for a bit, find your intuitive voice, remember what you already know, and approach a problem with openness and the belief that you will eventually move through the &8220;not knowing&8221; to a clearer place, you develop a skill that will serve r beyond the math classroom. Additionally, it&8217;s always great to make mistakes .. that&8217;s actually where the best learning takes place!! (all the mous mathematicians working on proofs and theorems spent r more time mistakes than getting it right!) Reflecting and revisiting, trying again, knowing when to ask for help, knowing when to offer it, and working together to understand a process/solution .. these are all skills that will be so, so important for our young people in the coming decades.
Goal setting, planning, entrepreneurship, money management, the list could go on forever and yet they are the things that would make the biggest difference in most peoples lives.
If you want to read a great article on some of the more positive educational ideas being discussed these days check out the NYT magazine article:
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In particular the points about letting people dislike you, being afraid and doing things anyway, being forgiving and talking to strangers resonate with me the most.
You hit it on the head with your last line. I have done things that I can&8217;t love myself for, but obviously that can&8217;t disqualify me from self-love. I have to forgive myself for causing harm to others when I&8217;ve been angry or thoughtless. If I can do that for myself I can do that for anyone.
A year ago my husband and best friend and I got divorced (amicably) with promises made to always be in each other&8217;s lives. We still considered one another mily, and still loved each other as friends, you see. Eight weeks later he met someone else aaaaand&8230;as I&8217;m sure you&8217;ve already guessed I was cut out of his life completely. So I&8217;ve been trying to actively forgive him while accepting I may have yucky feelings about it from time to time. What you said about forgiveness was spot on, and articulating it the way you did certainly helped me just that much more. So thank you:). I loved your list so much I&8217;m going to share it with my students on Monday. I&8217;m glad I stumbled upon you your blog, and will pass it on!
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Good moods are much easier to deal with and don&8217;t require any remedial action. But it&8217;s worth remembering that they inevitably give way to not-good moods. So if you suddenly don&8217;t feel so hot, don&8217;t take that as a signal that things are going wrong. It&8217;s just a change in the wind. Moods move like weather: there are patterns, bad conditions are inevitable, and any given cell is always on its way out.
Great post David.
I love that Victor Frankl quote above &8211; it describes so perfectly my experience, personal growth, and feelings of freedom.
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Yes I have heard that quote, and that&8217;s really what the last one (and most important one) is about. Most people, most of the time, are just pushed around by arising incentives, and very little of how they end up has to do with who they are. Because they don&8217;t mind the gap.
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Interesting you chose 7 lessons, which is such a significant number on many levels. I also related to your lessons on a personal level. I do believe they&8217;re truly important, and although I agree that it would be awesomely wonderful if they were all taught to each and every one of us from the &8220;get-go&8221;, and think that as a result the world would truly be the better for it&8230;I&8217;m grateful that at least it&8217;s never too late to learn! Thanks for providing more inspiration to keep learning!
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It would be wonderful to combine your list and my list and use it to develop educational a curriculum for our children! What would our society be like if we all developed a healthy sense of self along with a sense of connectedness with others?
I&8217;ve describedbad moodsas &8220;a nasty drug that hijacks your thoughts and robs you of your intuition and perspective.&8221; You simply don&8217;t have access to your higher capacities while you&8217;re in a bad mood &8212; empathy, wisdom, objectivity and patience. They take a vacation, and they&8217;ll definitely be back. So in the mean time don&8217;t do anything that depends on those culties: don&8217;t make any decisions about your life, don&8217;t make any statements about who you are (to yourself or anyone else), don&8217;t criticize others, and don&8217;t insist that you must feel good right now.
There is so much to gain from noticing the feelings of attraction and aversion the moment they arise, thinking about what you&8217;re really looking to cling to (or escape from) in that moment, and sure your action is conscious. No matter how we rationalize our motives, if you observe them you&8217;ll invariably find they almost always consist of a pull towards some kind of promised gratification, or a push away from some kind of promised discomfort.
There is so much I wish I had learned in school.
Great article!
Yes by all means share these with the wee ones. Maybe leave out my foul language though :)
&8220;I&8217;m just a soul whose intentions are good.
We&8217;d all like to think that we&8217;re driven primarily by wisdom and rational thinking, but the truth is the majority of our actions come from very short term attractions and aversions that happen mostly under the radar in the moment. These are the greatest forces driving your life, and if you&8217;re not aware of where they&8217;re leading you, nobody else is either. Trust them at your peril.
There. A few more seeds in the ground.
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So much misery is created by not accepting (a) that there will always be those who will misunderstand and/or dislike you, and (b) when this occurs it does not mean that you are the victim of an intolerable injustice/catastrophe.
I would say your seeds are well sown :-) .
I so enjoyed your list of the seven life skills they should teach in grade school! Like you, I feel that I suck at them! I especially like 2, as I have never believed that we should be afraid of strangerswhy, a stranger is usually a friend I havent met yet! (My husband teases me about chit-chatting with new friends in the check-out line.)
~Victor Frankl
The amount of pain suffered in vain by people trying to be liked by everyone is unimaginable. It drives people crazy. It makes people kill themselves.
School taught me strangers were at worst bad people, and at best irrelevant people. It took me a while to recognize that they were indeed people at all &8212; that they have mily members and friends to whom they are not strangers. It took even longer to realize that I am a stranger.
That&8217;s a great idea. I do something similar while driving. I think of the other cars as containing vulnerable people whom I could harm if I&8217;m not careful. Almost like they&8217;re babies. Totally changes how I drive, when I remember to do that.
Hi David,
I think the Buddhists have some good rules of thumb when it comes to what&8217;s appropriate to say.Say what you feel but when you speak, first ask: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it helpful?Don&8217;t say you&8217;re okay with something if you&8217;re not, but be kind.
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Nina Simone sings:
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At firs,t since these lessons were supposed to be taught to grades schools, I thought I knew them all. I agree that they will take some time to learn. Though my kids won&8217;t understand them now, I know in time they&8217;ll remember these teachings and apply them when they are ready.
Luey
I believe if we can live in that gap between stimulus and automatic response we give ourselves room to choose a better way forward. Lay enough thoughtful breadcrumbs and you make your own journey.
Regarding 1 &8211; for most of my life I was driven by that fear and it pretty much did drive me crazy. I did a lot of negative things to avoid it, including indulging in all sorts of addictive behavior. I was a manipulator in my relationships instead of being an honest participant.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
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In particular the points about letting people dislike you, being afraid and doing things anyway, being forgiving and talking to strangers resonate with me the most.
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Mastering it is the work of a lifetime, but all you need to do is notice what it feels like when attraction arises, and notice what it feels like when aversion arises. Know what &8220;cookie&8221; it is you&8217;re attached to here, and when it&8217;s no good for you, defy it and see what happens.
Point 6 and 7 confuse me. Dont they kind of contradict each other? &8216;Let things happen&8217; vs &8216;control the ctors that change your life&8217;
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
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I am still getting over the idea that people I don&8217;t know are &8220;strange.&8221; Some of the most rewardingmoments of my life have happened while breaking this rule.
Wow, this post just blew my mind&8230; I do agree that if we&8217;ll educate properly just 1 generation, we&8217;ll change the world forever.
Another fine blog, I particularly liked the breadcrumbs analogy.
Excellent practice points, especially 1.
7 High-leverage life skills they should teach in grade school? high school life skills store,These skills aren&8217;t easy. I suck at most of them, but I know they&8217;re all I really need to know how to do. Simply introduce them and they&8217;ll lead a person to anything else he needs to know. In me, the seeds have germinated, no question about that. I am gradually getting better at them. They take years, so I wish I&8217;d started in grade school.
Imagine if nobody regarded anybody as a stranger, but rather a person they didn&8217;t know. You can&8217;t have wars without strangers. For that and other atrocities, we need a group of people so alien and blank to us that we don&8217;t care what happens to them.
Very provocative blog and comment. One of the hardest things (for me) is knowing that no matter how self-aware I am or try to be, someday, sooner or later, I&8217;ll probably be hurtful and thoughtless again, let the worst of me show, and how to make that ok within myself. It is easier to let someone else off the hook than being ok with my own screw-ups.
Wow &8211; love this! 1 & 6 are things that I am working on at this time and finding that the more I embrace them, the more incredibly free I feel&8230; like I have a weight taken off of me. Just those two have made me live each day so much happier. I will definitely work on the rest and watch the way those impact my life as well. Wonderful things to share with everyone, especially when they are young.
Here&8217;s a quote you may like if you haven&8217;t already come across it:
George Costanza:Yes! Everyone has to like me!
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Dear David, awesome article! Thx for sharing it with us! I love the paragraph about strangers, it all sounds so miliar to me and the more I think about it the more I realise how much harm this rule has caused in my life. I wish schools would adopt your approach and teach these important skills. Michaela
Great post David.
Jeff
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In this particular article, the paragraph on forgiveness struck a chord with me in a way that few things have lately. Being hurt by someone you love unconditionally can be the most painful feeling a person experiences emotionally in their lifetime. What I have found to be the most difficult and confusing about the period of recovery following such an event is that unconditional love. How can I still love a person who has shown me no respect, and no evidence in their actions that they love me in return? The conclusion seems to be that it doesn&8217;t matter. I can only control what I have the power to control, and that is myself. Like you said, to waste energy contemplating all the alternate paths that could, or might be, is fruitless. That unconditional love is not a betrayal of ourselves, it is instead a reminder: We are good. We are ithful. We are human.
Ill probably be hurtful and thoughtless again, let the worst of me show, and how to make that ok within myself. It is easier to let someone else off the hook than being ok with my own screw-ups. Keep up the good work.
Best,
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You&8217;re b, David. Just discovered your blog a few weeks (?) ago via a friend. Love your thinking &8212; man, we&8217;d have fun playing w/thoughts of Life! Keep blazing your trail, fellow brother. ox
I&8217;ve experienced a lot of resentment in my life. I&8217;ve mulled it over, wished, ntasized, rehearsed confrontations and diatribes in my head, but I have never once found any true benefit to justifying resentment. All of it is out of control, all of it is painful, all of it is addictive.
Between stimulus and response there is a space.
It takes an enormous amount of energy to try and manipulate people&8217;s knee-jerk impressions of you, and it makes you into a fearful, pandering creature. It&8217;s completely impossible anyway, and there&8217;s so little to gain even when you pull it off. Instead of someone getting a baseless negative impression of you, they get a baseless positive one.
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There is a comforting feeling in hatred. We imagine it protects us from getting hurt again. This ntasy gives us a spike of relief when we feel powerless, but there is no real power in it. It&8217;s as helpful as thinking about food when you&8217;re stranded on a remote island. Resentment feels good in a bad sort of way. It&8217;s pure mental junk food, only it makes you powerless instead of t.
Jen
This is a wonderful post, very well explained. I hope this will help for those who teach in grade school.
The sequence unfolds the same way, nine times out of ten. One moment it&8217;s &8220;Oh man I am never doing that.&8221; Then you take that first step &8212; and it literally is a step, a movement of the leg. You watch yourself moving into it in the first person and the mind is saying &8220;Holy , this is it, I&8217;m nuts.&8221; Then you&8217;re in the middle of it, saying what you need to say or doing what you need to do. Then you realize you&8217;re on the other side, things happen in a place you thought was forbidden to you. Then you&8217;re giddy and grateful the rest of the day.
Maybe in the conventional sense. But you can introduce concepts and values. Just get the seeds in the ground and if it takes it takes.
Kids can still be taught to keep themselves safe without instilling such a damaging view of the casual passer-by.
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This is an excellent read, for me as a teacher, as well as a person in general. I find a lot of resonance in 3 and 5, because I often use hate to bury a lot of unresolved issues when people hurt me, and like you, I am the worst at confronting my fears, and I am still very bad at it, so in a way, I&8217;m also encouraged by what you have written and I am going to be more conscious in confronting my fear.
Perhaps that is why they say that forgiveness begins with forgiving yourself.
Already one of my vorite raptitude posts. There have been phases in my life when I was something of a master of 2, turning strangers into people. It was naturally comfortable to be sitting &8220;too close&8221; to someone in a crowded cafe, and waiting in line wasn&8217;t a chore, and all sorts of unusual behavior in others was somehow understandable. The other points are inspirational and I want to work on them now. Thank you for articulating all this!
Those feelings will still appear now and then, maybe always, but to forgive is to decide you are done indulging in them. That means no more revenge ntasies, no more nasty remarks. Finally it can begin to recede in your mind.
Elaine Benes:Who cares if she doesn&8217;t like you? Does everyone have to like you?
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I just discovered your blog through a RT from one of your followers. Great article, I wonder how many centuries we are away from our school systems to accept such curriculum&8230;
Imagine if you could feel thesepushes and pullsacting on you,then decidewhat&8217;s actually in your best interest, then do it.
Wonderful lessons to share with &8220;wee ones,&8221; David.
I have spent so much time trying to please everyone, and acting in a way that works for that paticular group. I have a hard time realizing who I really am. I have been taking steps in being truer to who I am, and doing things that I know people will not like(makes me very uncomfortable), but telling myself that in 100 years none of this will even matter. There is a problem that I have run into. In the past I could get along with anyone because I would make myself into whatever the situation called for. Now that I am taking steps to always be myself, I find that sometimes it puts me in situtaion where the lines are getting blured with being apporiate and polite, and chosening to say what I feel. What Im saying is that ceratin situation come up(work, and wife friends.) where I feel like being polite and saying nothing is going against what Im trying to change in myself. I want to not care, but at what expense.
