For a few weeks, I was, on paper, a whole other person. And I felt it! I didn't walk around with a big sack of footballs, spiking them periodically while screaming a deep, throaty "YESSSSS!" Nothing so crazy. But I did project a certain confidence. My mood was markedly different.
At the same time, I lost 20 pounds, and projected a certain confidence as a Thin Person. The weight loss had happened rather suddenly, and I was still more or less fitting the same-sized clothes. But the scale doesn't lie! My mood was markedly different.
The scale, however, lied. Long story, but I didn't actually lose that weight. Just the 8 pounds previously lost (before re-gaining a couple in Pennsylvania Dutch Country). So, yeah, I'm pudgy again. Though nothing really changed, either way.
Nothing really changed. Not in either story. Nothing real improved or declined. Some abstract numbers reconfigured - a couple of meters reported differently - that's all, yet this entirely transformed my mood and confidence. Which means I still haven't fully learned!
I haven't fully absorbed the Holiday Blues story lesson, that what's happening right here and now (if I "come back to my senses" rather than indulging mental abstraction and story-telling) is the only reality...and right here and now is always pretty delightful (unless you think about it). For example, a bubble of life-giving oxygen somehow follows me everywhere, to the point where I actually take it for granted, even though I'm dangerously vulnerable to the briefest pause in supply.
I haven't fully lost my attraction to Skinner Boxes. Those are the familiar lab devices that train mice - via reward - to press one button and - via punishmnent - to not press the other (the same process which, if you pay attention, propels virtually all human behavior). This despite my having declared independence from their feeble machinations. I wrote earlier this year that...
I entirely eschew Skinner Boxes. I don't grab at trinkets. I don't seek wins or validation or kudos. I've been through all that, experiencing both profusion and scarcity, and am no longer opted-in to the process.Hey, there's realizing and there's realizing. There's rejecting and there's rejecting. But now that I've framed framing, I undestand better. Realizing and rejecting are framings, and framings are dynamic. We constantly reframe, and that's a feature, not a bug, because a frozen perspective is hell.
If you shift to a perspective of full cognizance - the "full framing", completely dilated without resistence or constriction - and somehow made yourself freeze there, you'd be prey to all the maladies of frozen perspective - depression chief among them - even though everything seems incomparably lovely and problems strike you as soulful and intriguing wrinkles in an infinitely captivating tapestry.
At some point captivation recaptivates. Hmm, what an interesting tapestry! And back into the drama we dive, resuming the continuity of our inner storytelling and placing our chips on the table to savor the delicious stress of stakedness as we chase the nominally good outcome and evade the nominally bad one. A few dollars gained (on paper) or a few pounds lost (on a malfunctioning scale's readout) feel like WINNING, despite the hilariously disconnected flimsiness of it all. As I wrote here,
If you pay close attention, you'll notice the reward is always chintzy (which explains - I've buried the lede - why humans are "never satisfied") and the punishment is always oversold (which is why the worrying is always worse than the actuality).The chicken, trained to endlessly hit the red button which rewards with a corn pellet (and not the red one which punishes via mild shock), thinks it's just killin' it.
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