Christmas time is always fun for me. Even though I have family and friends around, I still get a little time to relax, recharge and do a few things I don’t get to do much.
This past weekend I was in Puerto Rico on a sailing vacation. My friend brought along Robert Carlson’s Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff… and It’s All Small Stuff.
It’s a very good book filled with 245 little pieces of useful, helpful advice about how to be more in tune with the present and with your life as you’re living it. We went through it aloud together.
I like the book because it jibes with my belief that we can and should take back control of our bodies from all the distractions forced on us.
In fact, we’re taught to be distracted.
It’s gotten very bad in the modern world, because we use our brains to disconnect from what our bodies are feeling. We take our brains somewhere else through TV, or music, or “busyness.”
Carlson has lots of good advice about this. But he says two things in his book that were particularly helpful. For me, they are not intuitive. In other words, I would not have gotten to them without the book.
The first is allow yourself to be bored.
We think of being bored as a negative thing, and we’re told that allowing yourself to be bored is kind of a step toward laziness, so you want to resist that before it happens.
So you come home, and as soon as you get home you start opening the mail. Then you say, “Oh, I have to clean these dishes from this morning,” and then you go flip on the TV, and then you go look and see what’s in the paper…
You sequence things to occupy yourself and think if you were to allow yourself to be bored it would be a negative thing.
But Carlson says, I have a surprise for you. Try it, and see what happens when you say, “OK, well, I’m just going to do nothing and not worry if I’m going to be bored, just to feel the feeling of being bored and see how long I can take it.”
A funny thing happens. You’re only bored for an instant, and then that transforms into relaxation.
He says that if you will first get over that thing that tells you, “Don’t have nothing to do,” you’ll allow yourself to just sit. It doesn’t require anything except that you just stop.
Don’t do one thing after another, don’t try to think about too much, don’t try to do anything. Just stop. And the benefits are extreme.
So I tried it. And sure enough, I never really even got bored. I flirted with the thought of being bored, but it instantly transformed into an entry point that allowed my mind to stop. I was completely at ease.
It was very useful.
The other thing I learned from his book that I wouldn’t have thought of was that he said to become comfortable not knowing.
Without making it too long a story, he tells the parable of a farmer who goes to his village wise man and tells him frantically, “My ox has died and I have no animal to help me plow my field! Isn’t this the worst thing that could have possibly happened?”
The wise old man replied, “Maybe so, maybe not.”
The man hurried back to the village and reported to his neighbors that the wise man had gone mad. Surely this was the worst thing that could have happened. Why couldn’t he see this?
The next day a strong young horse appeared on the man’s farm. No one seemed to claim it, so the farmer did. He was overjoyed. Plowing the field had never been easier, plus he had a horse to ride.
He went back to the wise man to apologize. “You were right. Losing my ox wasn’t the worst thing. Otherwise, I never would have gotten my new horse. Now I see that losing my ox was the best thing that could have happened.”
The wise man replied once again, “Maybe so, maybe not.”
The farmer thought the wise man was surely crazy now.
A few days later the farmer’s son was riding the horse and was thrown off. He broke his leg and would not be able to help with the crop. Oh no, thought the man. Now we will starve to death.
The farmer went to the wise man. This time he said, “How did you know that capturing my horse was not a good thing? You were right again. I’m sure that this is the worst thing that could have possibly happened. You must agree this time.”
The wise man calmly looked at the farmer and in a compassionate tone replied once again, “Maybe so, maybe not.”
Enraged that the wise man could be so ignorant, the farmer stormed back to the village. The next day troops arrived to take every able-bodied man to the horrendous war that had just broken out. The farmer’s son was the only young man in the village who didn’t have to go. He would live, while the others would die.
The farmer wanted to force the wise man into a position of committing, of knowing the consequence of what happened each time as being the absolute best or worst thing.
The moral of the story is you can’t do that, because you can’t know. You never know what’s coming next.
Be comfortable with not knowing and make the best of it, because look at how many times the farmer wanted to prevent the good thing. We often try to force what we think we know on a situation, when we really have no way of knowing.
What we do have is the capacity to feel what’s happening inside of us in a much more complete and detailed way than most of us imagine. Only usually we can’t, because we’re so distracted.
I think if you can allow yourself to slow down and be bored, and be comfortable not knowing, you’ll have a happier, healthier New Year.