Being shy isn’t just an attitude. It can be a lifestyle and even a great hindrance to getting what you want in life.
My parents and family tell me that as a young child that I was fairly forward and active. Not at all shy and I always wanted to be in the thick of things. So what happened?
I’m not sure exactly when it happened but surely somewhere in my pre-teens I started becoming more withdrawn and quiet. I shunned being loud and drawing attention to myself. I even began dressing down. Not in a somber fashion like a goth but more in a plain fashion. I started to fade into the background. See my previous post.
I really didn’t care to stand out in any way. If I did something praiseworthy I would try to play it down and minimize it as if it wasn’t anything special.
In my mid 20’s I began to notice that this wasn’t the best attitude to have in life. People that I knew that were less talented than me but more boisterous began getting ahead in life and I was being left behind. It turned out that self promotion wasn’t a sin.
For a long time I resisted any sort of change. To me, humility was the greatest of virtues and casually discarding that was unthinkable.
Eventually circumstances forced me to be more proactive. My new position at work, in sales, demanded someone who was more proactive and forward and I started to come out of my shell. Sometimes too much. I had to learn just how much I could come out before I got obnoxious.
By my thirties I felt I had emerged sufficiently and I’ve tried maintaining myself at a comfortable level. It is a struggle. I have to admit that at times that I still don’t want to engage with the world. But I also realize that life revolves around the other people in your life and that the only way that it is going to work is if I become more sociable and not less.
6th grade at Paul Revere middle school in any case. A shiny new school at the time but already overcrowded. Rather than build another school, the district decided to invest in “temporary buildings”. Basically double wide trailer homes converted into classrooms behind the main building.
That’s where you might get in trouble. At lunch time no one is supposed to be back there. Everyone is supposed to wait and hang round the cafeteria till the bell rings.
As for me and my friends? We just figured that was a polite suggestion and didn’t apply to us. We would regularly sneak out of the cafeteria and hang out on the steps of the temporary buildings.
So there we are hanging out with other kids when we hear a commotion. The vice-principals are out hunting. Corporal punishment was very much in vogue back in the early 80’s.
We sneak behind the buildings and peek to see who’s coming. There’s old man Brailsford. A sadist that loved to wear a dark blue, three-piece, pin stripe suit and mirrored sunglasses in 90 degree heat. Slowly swaggering down the road.
He seems to know exactly where to look. He catches most of us, except….
I duck round the side of the building. Nowhere else left to hide. He just has to turn the corner to spot me. My only chance is to go around him right in the open. I take a deep breath and walk slowly and steadily around his right side. He’s busy browbeating my friends. I can’t believe this is working but I don’t dare stop walking. At most I’m 20 feet away from him and walking without any cover.
My friend Dean is there with the rest of the kids that got caught. All the kids are lined up against the wall of a temporary building like criminals. Dean looks right at me but doesn’t say a word. One foot in front of the other. I finally step out of sight and break into a run and make it back to the “safety” of the cafeteria zone.
I later catch up with Dean. Everyone else got saddled with 3 days detention. But rather than being mad at me, they celebrate my great escape. I still can’t believe it.
This wasn’t the last time that this happened. I’ve walked in front of people who I know in coffee shops and they’ve been totally oblivious to my presence. Sometimes I have to obnoxiously wave to people for them to notice me.
I have “one of those faces”. Nothing extraordinary about it. At times I have been mistaken for almost every imaginable ethnicity.
In a culture where everyone wants to be distinct and individualized it can be a bit bothersome to think that I am totally indistinct. But I suppose that I have to appreciate this gift for what it is. The ability to blend into the background and not be bothered when I don’t want to.
“Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature?”
Not just a quote from Hannibal Lecter and Markus Aurelius but a useful tidbit of advice. I think it’s the one question that all college professors should strive to implant into their students minds. Unfortunately in today’s career driven college environment it’s often overlooked and passed by in order to instill “useful” lessons and information into a student’s mind.
Something that I see at work, in my off time and in my interactions on a daily basis is that people can identify the end goal and what they want but not how to get there or even where to begin.
At work I see clients who want to find gold, or oil, or manage forests or farms using satellite imagery. A good solid goal. But then you ask them how are they going to use the satellite imagery to do that and they get a blank look on their faces. When you ask them if they even know what information a satellite image can provide and how that can be leveraged to get to their goal and then they really get bewildered.
I’ve had acquaintances ask me if an adjustable rate mortgage would be a good option to buy a house. I ask them if they know the initial interest rate would be and how it will adjust over time and how much are they putting down and what are the other terms of the loan and they get a confused and persecuted look in their eyes.
I understand that you want a house but shouldn’t you make an effort to understand the loan that you will be dealing with for the next 15 to 30 years?
Goals are fine. Goals are great. They give us a direction to go and something to shoot for. But before we get there shouldn’t we know something about the road that we’re traveling on?
I’m 4 years old and I’ve just been put in front of a thousand pound horse and I can’t wait to get on. Five minutes later the horse slips in a gopher hole and rolls over me, nearly crushing me to death. Let me try again.
I’m 22 and alone in the Colorado mountains. I’m standing in front of a raging mountain stream that I have to cross to do an environmental report. 30 seconds later I’m being washed downstream banging against rocks. I crawl out of the water and crawl to the road where some rangers find me and take me to the local hospital for cuts and a sprained ankle. Two days later I’m packed and ready to head back into the woods.
I’m 27 and I’m wandering round a “bad place”. Montrose was a no-go zone for suburban kids back in the 80s. Where pimps and junkies would just as soon cut your throat as look at you. Why go inside the loop when you have everything you need in the ‘burbs? But by the mid 90s I’m hearing things out in the Richmond strip. Stories about some clubs and restaurants inside the loop. Around Montrose and Washington avenue. So I lock my doors, roll up the windows and drive into the city in my Gold colored Saturn and drive round. Still plenty of tattoo parlors but no drug dealers or junkies, no roving gangs. Some of the boarded up brick houses are being renovated. Just then a rock comes flying from out of the dark and dents the passenger side door. I floor it and end up lost for the next hour till I stumble onto loop 610 and find my way home. For the next few years I would slowly begin exploring the inner loop one street at a time.
I’m 44 and standing in an overgrown wind tunnel about to try indoor skydiving. The instructor warns me to be careful and not smash my face against the side of the tunnel. Nothing happened. I had a good time. Not all my adventures wind up as disasters.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t just automatically walk into dangerous situations just for the hell of it. I’m not blind to the possible dangers. I have hesitated at times before embarking on something new or potentially dangerous.
But overall I never find that hesitation is all that worthwhile. For the most part I find hesitation in any part of my life has done me more harm than good and being bold has for the most part paid off.
I’ve hesitated about opportunities in life, about business decisions, about personal decisions and rarely has it paid off. You totally should hesitate when you find yourself in a totally unknown situation but if you find that you hesitate because of an imagined danger or what you think might or might not happens then I would strongly urge you to put aside that fear and try.
At the very least you’ll come out with a treasure trove of interesting stories.
We will believe what we want to believe and doubt what we want to doubt and most of the time there is nothing that can be done about it.
Once a person develops an opinion or idea about a subject then it becomes nearly impossible to dislodge. I’ve found this to be true more often than not in the sales arena. A client will have some preconceived notion about a product or service and my job has just become that much more difficult. A good argument for always making the best first impression.
But is there an argument to be made for being more skeptical and allowing ourselves the freedom to doubt even though it might be easier and certainly less time-consuming to blindly go with our first impression?
Why do we even go with our first impression anyways? Usually it’s to do with experience. Our mind goes through examples from our memories and compares it to the present situation and comes up with the closest or most relevant scenario and how that turned out. An opinion is born.
Early on in life this will usually turn out to be wrong as we don’t have that much experience to draw on. We add in new experiences over time and as we age that “gut instinct” gets better and better all the time but sometimes it’s still wrong.
Not just a little but totally wrong and that’s when we have to step back and realize that we needed to do some analysis on the situation before rendering judgment.
But how do we develop and engender that skeptical voice in our head without becoming paralyzed with indecision? I think it’s mainly a matter of putting more thought into everything that we do. We tend to run on “auto pilot” throughout a lot of our day. We save the analysis and introspection for the “important” things in life.
Granted there are mundane and thoughtless part of our existence. For me it’s little decisions like what to eat for lunch or what to wear and I save the analytics for what I consider the worthwhile things like thinking about projects or writing proposals or even writing this blog.
In between is the gray area where that “grain of salt” should be. Being introduced to a new person or reviewing a phone conversation or digesting a news article.
Think about what was presented to you. Was it fact or merely opinion dressed up as fact? Is it a matter of cold and unblinking data or is it a matter of belief and preference?
Not everything is at it seems. The wise man learns to question.
One last note about skepticism. It is not cynicism. Cynicism has a very variable definition depending on who you ask and how it is used but lately I find cynicism in society to be a negative force. An expression and distrust and frustration of other people and their idealized motives. I admit that I get very cynical at times about some people’s faith in government as others get cynical about things like religion.
But do we ever really sit down and think that maybe the other person is genuinely motivated and enthusiastic about their ideals and is merely trying to live up to what they believe is right? Should we be more skeptical about our own cynicism?
I mean it’s a nice thought and all but just going by the raw numbers it’s a fallacy. Numerically, there are more men in the world than women. A gender distribution of 50.4% male to 49.6% female or a deficit of nearly 60 million women.
That’s just simple numbers. Then you figure in a host of other factors such as age, geographic distribution, preference factors, and others inputs and the facts can really get you down. Finding a “someone” is a bit of a challenge for the average person.
Bars, Clubs, Groups, book clubs, or whatever? I have a wide array of acquaintances but few friends and those few friends I cultivate over a long time. You can imagine how long it takes for me to decide that someone is special. Usually by then it’s too late.
You may ask “Can’t technology and the modern information era help?”
I’ve tried online dating and for the most part it’s been less than satisfactory. For all the technology, the search philosophies, and the paid services that they advertise, they are essentially all the same. Additionally, some deliberately skew results based on arbitrary factors.
Years ago I ran across this little gem of a video.
Basically the idea behind the video is that you could carefully use data, statistical analysis, and market research to find that person that you would want to spend your time with.
I liked part of the idea. Using data and statistics to see how many women there are in the greater Houston area that I might want to date. I put together a list of criteria fitting my own requirements, I then looked up some demographic information for the Houston area and ran the numbers. The results weren’t all that encouraging.
In a population of 1,045,000 women in the Houston area (2012 numbers) there were about 88 women that fit the criteria. I looked back through the criteria to see if I was being unreasonably picky. Some of the criteria: single, age between 36 and 45, college educated, relatively healthy, and attractive to me which I set at about 10%. I fiddled with the population size to include the surrounding communities and loosened up the tolerances but I never got over 513. No, not a scientific survey but it did give me some scope to the problem.
Searching for 513 (not to mention 88) women in a population of over a million and spread out over a 600 square mile area didn’t really seem like a doable task. A lot of knocking on doors and a lot of slapped faces.
But I mean even setting this aside. Supposing I find “the one”, the other part of the equation remains as an open question. Does “the one” like me?
That’s the part that always trips you up. Basically you have to run one set of equations on one side and the other person has to run the same equation and both have to hope that the numbers match up. Makes you wonder how people manage to hook up at all and also makes you think that maybe there’s a good reason why so many marriages end up in divorce.
But does this mean that I should just despair; just throw my hands up and quit looking?
No and yes.
Firstly, no. I am not throwing up my hands in despair and quitting. That’s just not me. I may quit for other reasons but never for despair. Long ago I once found love. It didn’t last but I’ve kept on trying ever since.
Secondly, yes. I am getting older and the biological imperative to find “someone” to procreate just isn’t as pressing anymore. I have several nieces and nephews already and for the most part the trend among people in my generation is towards smaller or no families at all.
Also, looking through some of the demographic data from the US census, the trend for older Americans to be single or to live alone, has been increasing since the ’90s. So I am not alone in this.
So will I keep looking? Sure. I will continue to look for that one woman who I can share adventures with, or live quietly with on a day-to-day basis, or just hold close. Someone that feels like my partner or co-conspirator in our escapades.
I think though that I might step back from the process for a while. Watch and wait for a bit. Work on myself and make my side of the equation a little more attractive.
I once wrote that one of my biggest fears was growing old alone. I hope that will not be the case. But I need to be prepared in case that turns out to be my future.
Those old 1980s anti-drug ads are partly correct. No one grows up hoping to be a junkie.
No one likes losing. Nobody in sales goes to bed thinking “Tomorrow I’m going to give a presentation and it’s going to fail.” No business owners is happy at the prospect that their business might go down the drain. No person wants to hear that they might have a life threatening disease. No one goes into a fight intending to lose.
Most people go through life thinking that things will generally work out. Even pessimists are on the whole somewhat optimistic about the future. If they weren’t they’d be called suicidal not pessimistic.
Generally the optimistic thinking goes “When A happens then I can do B and then C can occur” and I’m not even talking about grandiose plans just day-to-day stuff like “I’ll catch the bus so I can get to work so then I will get a paycheck to pay the bills”
But sometimes our best laid plans go to hell. Sometimes we get a piece of bad news. We keep working away at our problems and keep hoping against hope but despite it all the signs are there that things are going to go badly for us no matter what we do.
This is where a bad situation can be managed to become just a bad result or without proper planning it can turn into a disaster.
So where to start? You get news that something is going bad for you. Could happen months from now or maybe 5 minutes from now. Either way you’ve got no time to waste.
Assess the situation.
How bad is it? Is it something life threatening? Will it alter your lifestyle significantly or is it just a short-term shock to the system?
You need to be coldly clinical in your approach as if it’s happening to someone else. Stick to the known facts and not emotion filled guesses. The facts won’t change but assessing them carefully might help you make better sense of what you’re facing and thinking more about the situation may make it less daunting.
Life threatening situations usually require immediate action. If you’re in an accident or a fight or something bad is about to happen you need to do something. Doing something is always preferable to doing nothing at a time like this. Doing nothing just insures that the worst possible outcome will happen. Whether you prefer to fight your way through this or run away is up to you but doing nothing is not an option.
Something more long-term. Here’s the meat of the subject.
You have time to think about it. Firstly know that your first impression of the situation is always going to be wrong. It’s not going to be nearly as bad as you thought and the consequences aren’t going to be as dire. You will make it out alive on the other end of this, the sun will rise again, and life will go on. On the other hand maybe things aren’t as rosy as you think. Maybe those things you are pinning your hopes on are illusions and you need to dig a little deeper in to find out that there is something fundamentally wrong somewhere and it needs to be addressed now or things will totally collapse.
My point? You don’t really know till you start thinking about things. Look at the root causes of what’s really going on.
So you’ve assessed the situation and know that the bad thing will happen. Now plan on how to lessen the impact on your situation. If it’s a disease (for you or someone you love) begin thinking how you will adapt your life to this. Make the necessary arrangements beforehand. Find the help you need. If you’re going to lose your job, start talking to people you know for job leads, for advice, for moral support. Look through the want ads. Not for an immediate job necessarily but to see what employers are looking for. If you’re in school and you know that you’re going to flunk a course find out what you can do to get back on track? Not for this particular course but for your academic career as a whole.
List out all the negative impacts that this event will have on you and have either total or partial solutions for each of these impacts. Don’t just hope that it won’t be too bad or stand paralyzed by fear and do nothing.
Lastly the short-term shock to the system. Usually this is something personal and highly emotional. A broken heart, the death of someone close, some sort of tragedy. In some ways this is the hardest thing to get over. Even though you can share your burden with others, they will still not be able to fully understand. Even though you want to think about it logically, logic won’t apply here. Just remember that life does go on. This is just a part of your life not the whole narrative, unless you let it become that. Let yourself feel bad for a time and lean on others for support.
“How we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life, wouldn’t you say?” – Captain Kirk
So to paraphrase that, planning for failure is just as important as planning for success.
My remodeling caper precipitated a rare burst of cleaning and consolidation on my part. Amazing how much “stuff” you accumulate in a couple of decades without even trying.
I’m going through a bunch of boxes and realizing that I’ve picked up more than my fair share of statements, and addenda, and advertising, and plane ticket receipts, and pay stubs, and who knows what else.
“throw away your bank statements and keep love letters” goes a line from a popular advice column. Ain’t that the truth? My paper shredder is getting a workout.
I get past the miscellaneous papers layer and get into some books and manuals. College textbooks that I thought would help me in my post collegiate career, magazines I saved from 20 years ago because they had one interesting article. Then I find my engineering notebooks.
Among other things I had been in engineering school for a year. Aerospace Engineering to be exact. I was going to be a rocket scientist. This was part of my “flying” phase that I passed through during my teens. I was all about airplanes. I wanted to fly them, I wanted to build them, I wanted to do nothing but talk planes all day and night.
I would go to the library and pore over the latest copy of “Jane’s All the world’s aircraft” and read and re-read every section till I memorized the vital statistics of every plane I saw. I would hang around the engineering building and talk rockets with professors all the time. My life was aerospace engineering.
But after a year I found that I was really not cut out to be a pilot or an engineer. My eyes weren’t up to snuff to be a fighter pilot or a test pilot. My mathematical ability wasn’t up to the advanced calculus required for the theoretical maths necessary for the latest air designs.
So after my freshman year I quit engineering school and moved over to the geosciences and finally found my way into geography. A big change, I know. But it felt right and I can’t say that I regretted the decision.
I’ve never looked back or longed to go back to that career. I’ve kept these books and airplane plans mainly due to inertia. They’ve followed me round from place to place and survived past cullings. Every time I do one of these ‘cleanings’, one or more items from my old life go into the trash. Most if not all of it will end up in the garbage this time.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed my time as an engineer. If I would have had the skill to make a go of it I would have been an engineer or a pilot right now and maybe I wouldn’t be writing this blog.
I’ve broken away from several other interests over the year and I don’t regret letting go of them. At some point you have to let go of the last vestiges of that old life to make room for the new.
Besides which, these are “things”, physical things. They’re not that important. That advice is correct. Throw away those old bank statements (things) and keep the love letters (friends and family). With luck and some care I have maybe another forty of fifty years of life left.
I have enough time to get more things, I can develop more interests, I can accumulate the detritus of life all over again. The people though. Those I intend to keep.
I’ve moved about quite a bit since I left college. I’ve gone from apartments to different houses and I always tended to think of the structure as just a space to hang my hat for a while. But this was to be the place that I could finally settle into and feel comfortable.
It’s been nearly seven years since I bought my house.
The structure was fine and the roof was new and generally it looked like somewhere that I could call home. But it has always been slightly “off”. I couldn’t quite bring myself to get totally comfortable in the house.
A few major “imperfections” existed. The chief imperfection was the carpeting. As I’d always rented, I never paid much mind to flooring. “Not my place”, so it really never mattered that much to me.
But looking at my place, “my place”, I could see that it did indeed make a difference. Even in its most pristine and new state, carpeting, seems drab and shabby. A cheap floor covering, a compromise material that makes no one happy. It had to go.
Before that happened however, the great Houston drought of 2011 took hold of my foundation and wrecked it. I spent quite a bit of money repairing the foundation and the interior re-decoration had to be put on hold.
Finally in 2013 I began a multi-year project to make this house a home and as of this last week the project is now finished. I have to say that the results were more than I hoped for.
I am finally beginning to feel that this is the space that I was meant to inhabit. The house has a more airy and roomier feel. It’s almost as if the living space is crying out for me to be more creative and proactive.
Thinking about the old carpeting brings to mind a soul sapping morass that was holding me down. But this, this cries out for me to be more imaginative, more energetic, and more optimistic.
I know it’s ridiculous to ascribe so much to flooring but I think environment can be important in setting your mental mood for success or failure.
Another thing is that I’ve now finished this long-term project. That in itself makes me feel good but at the same time it leaves a bit of a hole in my long-term plans. I have some ideas and no doubt this new living space will inspire me think and plan out new challenges.
This has buoyed my spirits quite a lot. It has been a bit of a challenging year and getting a success like this under my belt really helps a lot. I just hope that this is the start of a long series of successes.
Life gets hectic, even impossible sometimes. It just does.
When push comes to shove we sometimes have to shed some activities or habits in order to keep the rest of our lives running.
“Just the essentials”
We all come upon these times in our lives. Right now my household is turned upside down, my ankle is twisted, my air conditioning is broken, my…. You get the picture. It’s a mess. Why am I at a keyboard then? Even for a short post?
well I suppose I can take comfort in writing, I can keep practicing something that I like doing. It provides a little bit of focus in a world out of focus.
More importantly I don’t have anything else to do. I have to wait for others to make decisions, to come back with answers or to do some work.
I have nothing else to do, so why not write. Even just this short blurb.
Just the essentials. Sometimes, something like this is an essential.
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