Living in the Present and Revaluating Checklists

When I became a Resident Assistant for my university’s freshman dorm, I created a list of quirky things about me that hung in our hall to help my residents get to know me better. It included categories like my favorite things, my least favorite things, fun facts, and so on. One of the categories was “Things I want to learn” and the list looked like this:

·         How to spin a basketball on one finger

·         How to rock climb (like real rock climbing, none of this rec-center crap I did when I was 10)

·         Survival camping

·         Lock picking

·         A magicians secrets

·         How to speak sign language

·         How to use a sewing machine

·         Typing computer code

Don’t ask me why some of these things appeal to me, they just do.

Anyways, this is very typical me. Not necessarily the content of my list, while yes those are very me as well of course, but the list itself. My last post talked about one of my other habits of self-doubt – well, my next life habit is somehow making everything in my life a list. Everything.

This list above is the perfect example; I’ve literally taken my hopes and dreams and compacted them into a “to-do” list I can check off. It’s been a habit of mine from childhood and it’s proved to be both beneficial and damaging in all aspects of my life. On one hand, it makes me organized and reliable; I will actually get everything done in a timely manner and I will not forget a thing. I have gained a lot of success this way because it allows me to organize my thoughts into very realistic patterns that in turn, allow me to complete the tasks at hand. But that’s kind of the reason this habit sucks too – life becomes a task I can check off my to-do list.

For the longest time, I didn’t realize that this sort of mindset was actually making me quite miserable. I mean, I knew I was sad and I knew something was off, but I didn’t know why or how I could stop feeling that way. It felt like I always had something impending hanging over my head – like a boulder out of a child’s cartoon with the rope slowly snapping till it’s merely a thread. No matter what I did, no matter what context I was in, I always felt this boulder waiting to drop on my head and smash my skull in. And for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why I felt this way.

It took me many years of feeling like this for me to finally develop a theory on why this boulder existed for me. There was a common theme running throughout how I would go about my day, my week, my month, my year. With every moment I was given, I would turn it into a list. Let me give you an example, because I realize that this concept is bizarre.

I wake up in the morning, and immediately there is a list in my head of what I must complete in the next [insert time sequence here] for me to accomplish what needs to be done for the day. Wash face, brush teeth, put on clothes (that I most likely already laid out the night before), makeup, hair, grab backpack (also previously prepared), double check everything, leave.

Then, onto the bigger list. Breakfast for 15 minutes, walk to class takes 5 minutes, class, meeting at 10:30, lunch for half an hour, class, break for 1 hour, meeting, meeting, dinner for half an hour, meeting, back to the dorm. And inside this list is another list to accomplish; I often keep it written in my phone so that I can’t forget them. It’s the real “to-do” list. Like, visit abroad office to get USB stick, drop off papers at iPulse, send email to John about pitch… and so on for about ten other things depending on the time of year.

This is a vague description of what’s going on in my head. Throughout the day, this list is constantly being checked off, re-arranged, and modified to fit what’s going on.

It becomes like a challenge every day to complete the list and as many “to-do” items as possible. Only then, am I allowed to sleep.

I’m not trying to sound like a sociopath with no feelings, a work-laden laborer who just can’t catch a break, a person struggling with OCD, or anything like that. I’m definitely not. I have tons of fun things inserted into those schedules and lists that keep me from remembering the boulder hanging over my head and that have gotten me to the happy person I am today. Ask anyone I know and they will tell you I constantly have a smile on. Again, not in a sociopathic way.

What I am trying to say is this: I, like millions of other students and people in general, live life as a check list. I literally live to get the next thing done. I focus so intently on accomplishing as many things as possible on my self-made checklist that my subconscious actually creates a non-existent boulder hanging over my head so that my conscious self feels enough drive to finally check off that non-reachable “last item.” My motivation? I have an innate feeling that once that “last item” is crossed off, I will finally be at peace because there will be no more checklist. Deceiving right? A checklist meant to get you to no more checklists.

It’s no wonder why I have battled anxiety attacks for the last few years – I have created an imaginary elusive goal that I can never attain so that I will never stop striving. It’s a normal thing for our minds to do since it helps me function and maintain sanity. But the primitive mind most times lacks the awareness of our spiritual needs for non-survival things like love, relationships, and ultimately happiness. It’s looking out for our physical survival, not our emotional well-being. That’s where the rest of our brain comes in and says “You’re working way too hard, here, take a seat and enjoy that wonderfully fattening caramel Frappuccino for a sec.”

Well, at least that’s what mine says.

Millions of people feel a similar way, and those same people are the ones struggling with over-diagnosed illnesses such as anxiety and depression. I'm certainly not going to pretend to be a licensed therapist but I believe that many of these types of illnesses are from similar feelings of unfinished business or meaningless existence.

We’ve figured out many times throughout human history that all of nature seeks out peace. Even in science, the universe is constantly using up its energy so that it can reach an ultimate level of silence and balance. Humans innately seek the same thing inwardly, and the best of our kind have acknowledged it in many ways, but perhaps my favorite of all comes from the Dalai Lama:

“Man surprised me most about humanity. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”

This quote, along with another similar one I will post at the bottom of this, quite simply flipped a switch in my head and made me revaluate how I was cashing in the minutes of my life. I thought back to how I spent every New Year’s celebration thinking of how remarkably fast the year had gone by, and how sad I was that I had blinked and it was over. I remember one year I even made it my New Year’s resolution to “slow down time” and I went about finding out how best to do such a thing. My conclusion was this:

The more I focused on making every minute of the day a task to accomplish, the faster life went by me.

It all started with the smallest unit – I would constantly be working to “just get to 5:00” then from 5:00 it would be “just get to Wednesday” which became “just get to Friday,” to “just get to December,” where I inevitably found myself sitting on a bar stool at another New Year’s Eve celebration with a melting drink in my hand and a deafening thought in my mind, “This year was even faster than the last.”

At what point do I get to my 99^th New Year’s Eve party and think to myself, “I wish I had been happy all those years.” Which by that time, it is sadly too late, and the one life I had given to me is wasted constantly living for the future, only to regret the past and neglect the present. This, truly, must be the meaning of non-existence.

So, have I made you cry yet? Perhaps question the meaning of your life, sitting there staring at the computer screen in a dark room where the only thing to keep you company is your morbid thoughts about death and the afterlife? I’m so, so sorry for bringing you down buddy. Seriously, if I could give you that Frappuccino I spoke of earlier, I totally would right now. So sorry.

Fortunately, all is not lost. Questioning our existence, making mistakes, reconfiguring our lives and our mentalities over and over again is what life is about! René Descartes would even assure you that simply thinking this stuff means you’re living – Right. Now.

Slurp on that Frappuccino my friend, for today we live!

Upshot: checklists are good in moderation. Just like anything else, they can become a danger to our mentality and literally threaten our existence. They’re fine for organizing and keeping things in line but be careful that they don’t morph into your stream of consciousness, like they did for me. Just as with anything else, even the most insignificant habit can snowball into becoming a way of life. Living in the present is difficult, especially for those of us that have been born into a culture where immediacy is worshiped. The key to slowing down time and elongating your life, is to saturate it with being present and choosing happiness in the moment. It may only be a moment, but it can be a moment more of happiness than of stress. It’s okay to dream of the future and it’s okay to remember the past, but it’s not okay to live in either one. Give yourself a spiritual break and let go of the lists and schedules! It's okay to designate time to doing something that genuinely makes you happy, as hard as that may be. Practice, practice, practice.

And finally, to leave you with the quote that became my mantra for practicing happiness; a sort of summary of what the Dalai Lama spoke of in line with Buddhist teachings:

“If you are depressed you are living in the past.
If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present.”

-          Lao Tzu

Failure as a Cornerstone

There are many things in my life that I have learned because for the greater majority of my years I played competitive volleyball. You’re probably thinking, “What the heck does volleyball have to do with anything?” And that’s fair.

But if you’ve ever played a sport, coached a sport, or perhaps even loved a sport, you know what I’m talking about. I learned more about life in small microcosms on the court than I ever did in a classroom, from teachers or from friends. In fact, it wouldn’t be untrue to say that volleyball has shaped the person I am and my understanding of the world around me in ways I never would have experienced if it weren’t for the people I met and the trials I went through as an athlete.

Back home in Colorado, I was sort of a self-made millionaire in the sport. I started from pretty much nothing, no connections, no raw talent, nothing, and became one of the top players in my region and gained the last spot on the number three team in the nation by my senior year. That’s a little brag-ish but I can’t tell the story if I don’t boast a little of my accomplishment, and hey, I’m damn proud of it.

Anyways, back to the story. When I was thirteen, I had my first introduction to the volleyball world. I had never played before, but my mom was always a star volleyball athlete in high school and college. With me as her first born kid, she didn’t know much about the club world yet, but we had to start somewhere. The only club she knew of was Front Range – the most elite club in our region. But… we didn’t really understand the gravity of that.

So I, at the ripe age of thirteen, showed up at the Front Range tryouts. I’m wearing yellow shorts with bows on the side, a t-shirt, and sneakers. I walk into the gym with my mom – just in time for several giant girls my age to walk past me decked out in the full enchilada: spandex, knee pads, Mizuno volleyball shoes, ankle braces, and Front Range t-shirts. If you can picture these badass thirteen year old girls walking in the doors in slow motion with their glimmering gear and Digable Planets “Rebirth of Slick” playing as they strut past little dorky me in my yellow shorts… then you have a good picture of that moment.

I’m assuming my mom realized how out of place I looked, but I, in my thirteen year old mind, knew no better. I just wanted to play.

So I go through the tryout. Looking back I can only imagine what I looked like. I clearly did not fit in. At all. It was basically the equivalent of you just up and trying to join the Miami Heat basketball team – showing up for tryouts like, “Oh hey ‘Bron, just thought I’d pop by for a quick game with you and the boys.” That was me. Yellow bows on my shorts and all.

After the tryout, the head coach came up to me and my mom to inform me, surprise surprise, I wasn’t going to be placed on a team. My mom and I walked back to the car. I have this habit of getting my hopes up as if everything is going to go the way I want it to no matter what. It makes dreams coming true all the sweeter and dreams getting crushed all the more devastating. Anyways, this was one of those moments – where you just kind of think you’ll get lucky, no matter how far-fetched it was.

As my mom and I sat in the car, my mom waited for my reaction. Just as she began to try and comfort me, I turned to her and said these words:

“Someday, they’ll want me.”

Mom just looked at me, looked at the road, and drove us home.

I cried in my room that night. As I buried my face in my pillow, I remembered with embarrassment about how stupid I felt at the tryout and how out-of-place I felt being told I didn’t make it. This is the thing – even as a thirteen-year-old I demonstrated this vital life lesson right from the start.

Failure has a way of polarizing everything we knew beforehand and making it seem unreal. Because of this, we have a tendency to feel the uncomfortable creep of doubt, wrapping its dark hands around our confidence and giving it an anaconda squeeze.

But this was the lesson I learned from that experience: the biggest mistake we can make in facing the adversity of failure, is to doubt ourselves.

Think back to the last time you messed up, you were wrong, or you didn’t succeed at something you thought was a shoe-in. What was the first thing you felt? I’m sure for the majority of you the first thing you felt was doubt. It’s only natural – the minute we face failure we immediately look for why it happened, and we throw ourselves under the bus wondering, “What did I do wrong?” “Maybe I’m not as good as I thought I was” or my personally most used, “I don’t know why I ever thought I could do that in the first place.”

Well these thoughts are totally wrong. They’re the easy way out – they’re the habit we’ve lived nearly our entire lives. Throughout our lives we have gradually conditioned ourselves with the idea that if something doesn’t work out, it’s because we did something wrong, or we shouldn’t have done it in the first place. In retrospect, it leaves us constantly questioning ourselves to a point where taking a risk to be wrong is no longer worth the doubt failure brings. Eventually, we just stop taking risks all together.

This is a habit that can very swiftly take over your life, and I encourage you to practice rejecting it. It’s not easy, in fact, it feels very, very impossible. The next time you fail at something (not to sound like a jerk here but if you’re human, it will happen again and very often) tell yourself over and over statements of confidence. These are some that I use; a lot of them are from my years of volleyball:

I am a champion.

I can, I must, and I will.

I am a risk-taker.

It’s not about how many times you fall, it’s about if you get up afterwards.

One more failure is one step closer to success.

These are kind of cheesy to some; my favorite ones are quotes that remind me I’m not alone in my failure. One of my favorite speakers and author of “Eat, Pray, Love” Elizabeth Gilbert said in a TED Talks speech that failure propels us into a darkness where we are put on the outside of everything, and feel very alone in the process. The objective of many of my statements of confidence are to remind me that failure doesn’t have the power to keep me in the dark, and that if I feel alone being there, I’m far from it.

Back to my story – how does something like volleyball teach me a life lesson about failure? Well, that night I learned an important lesson I would keep with me all the way into adulthood. I would go on to work my rear end off in volleyball, climb my way up the ladder, and of course, have many many many failures in between. In fact, I think it’s safe to say I had more failures than I did successes. However, not a single one of them kept me from my goal, and it was all because I kept that mentality from my try out at Front Range at thirteen years old. No failure was going to make me feel unwanted, undeserving, or under par. I was going to show them.

Over five years later, my senior year of club volleyball, I received a call from that same head coach asking me to be the tenth player on the extremely elite Front Range 18-Black team. Coveted by many, Front Range was one of the top clubs in the nation and dominated the club volleyball scene. It had been my dream to play on this team, with the players I had looked up to as my idols for years. I said yes, and that year was the greatest year of volleyball of my life. The success of playing for Front Range amongst my heroes that year made every failure I had ever gone through completely worth it.

Over time, I had made myself an asset to the competitive volleyball world. I had worked my way up, without connections, simply from hard work and a competitive ethic. And it took countless failures to get there.

They finally wanted me.

Back to the lesson – ultimately, what did playing teach me? It taught me that doubt is the enemy, not failure. It taught me that taking long shots is what life is all about; that hard work is what gets you to the stars even when you were shooting for the moon.

This is something that is not easily learned – I don’t know if anyone truly masters it in their life. I know for me, I struggle with failure on a mainstream level and it certainly has me doubting myself quite often. Even after telling you this fantastic story of a Cinderella-esque magnitude for my club volleyball career, I have failed as a collegiate athlete for three years in a row since. I have failed to lead my team to a successful season, and I have failed myself in becoming the team player I wanted to be.

But – I try as hard as I can not to doubt my essence. Who I am is far more valuable than what I have not accomplished. It’s not to say that failure is acceptable, because anyone who has done anything at a high level in their life knows that it is something we do not expect, ever. However, failure is not always failure. It’s the next step in a long, strenuous line leading you to success, as long as you stick with it, have faith and confidence in yourself, and believe in who you are.

I struggle with this ideology. I can’t tell you how many losing seasons I’ve walked away from wondering, “What the hell is this all for? What am I doing wrong? Why do I care so much about this anyways?”

I can’t tell you I’ve found an answer. I’ve often tried to calm myself thinking, for those who say it’s just a game, that’s all it will ever be to them. This sport is my life; I put passion, heart, time, effort, money, everything into it – so I have a hard time hearing “it’s just a game.”

Athletics are just games, if you let them be just that. To me though, they are a learning experience, teaching me at every moment about myself, about others, and about the truths of the world I live in. It’s taught me how to work hard, how to trust others, how to believe in myself, how to function as a team, how to have discipline, how to make sense of questions you have about life. If that’s just a game, then I’m all for it. It’s a game I want to continue getting better at.

In the meantime, do your best to stay humble but confident. That’s what I’m working on as well – although my bragging about my self-made volleyball career during this means I need a little more humility than I thought ;)

Continue to practice conquering failure’s aftermath, because in the end, “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

Rethinking Being a "Boss"

Recently, the video campaign against the word “bossy” exploded across various social networking sites – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, all blowing up with the mantra, “Ban Bossy” as made viral per celebrity-status women such as Beyoncé, Condoleezza Rice and Jane Lynch. The video, now grossing over 2 million views on YouTube, promotes the idea of female empowerment through discouraging the use of the word “bossy” and likewise synonyms to describe powerful women. Thus, the statement from Beyoncé, “I’m not bossy, I’m the boss” became idolized by millions as a means of standing up for women’s roles in powerful positions.

For anyone who doesn’t know what video I’m talking about you can find it here

 

When I first watched the video, I distinctly remember commenting on my friends Facebook post with something along the exact line of, “Love it!!! :D” And indeed…. I did love it.

Over the course of the next week, the video stirred in my mind as I watched it several times and of course, shared it with my friends. However, the more I watched it, the more something felt…. off. Something about the video was bothering me, and I wasn’t quite sure what it was yet.

Finally, over the course of dinner with my boyfriend Adam, who is usually the chosen victim of my unrelenting vent sessions, I realized why the video had come to leave a bitter taste in my mouth.

I’m not bossy, but I’m not a boss. I’m a leader.

Let’s take the video a step further, shall we? I challenge you to think outside the catchy, well-made popularized video that has caught the attention of so many people, including myself, for just five minutes, and think, really think, about what the word “boss” still entails.

To me, a boss is someone who knows what needs to be done and isn’t afraid to tell people what that is. They order, direct, and take command of others when things need to get done and they are the most qualified personnel to do so. A boss walks into a room, sees things as they are, and knows they can be better. So, they tell people how things should be.

This sounds great, right? This sounds exactly like what we want from modern women who aren’t afraid to take charge and tell people how it is. After all, a man can do the same thing and he is immediately respected as the boss, whereas, and the video makes this connection seamlessly, women are given the negative connotation of being bossy.

But what if I don’t want to be the boss? What if I don’t want to tell people what to do, but would rather, tell people what to do and then do it with them? This is the difference between being the boss and being the leader. A boss stands behind others and tells them what to do. A leader stands with others and works with them on what to do.

The video is absolutely right. Women who take charge are immediately shot down, avoided and seen as “control-freaks” or “bitches.” Because of this, girls from the youngest of ages turn down opportunities to take charge because they would rather follow than be seen as one of the above. In this way, I’m totally on board with the Ban Bossy campaign and discouraging words that further this vicious cycle.

However, even the video itself states “words matter” and again, I can’t emphasize this enough, they’re absolutely right. Words DO matter. And the word “boss” still doesn’t encompass what we should encourage from our female population.

Let’s encourage women to be leaders. Let’s promote the idea of being unafraid to tell people what to do, and then being as equally unafraid of doing it with them. Let’s further the gender-equality goals of women by using a negative-connotation-free word while also furthering a work ethic that extends to all genders. Let’s love the idea of both women and men, acting as leaders in the world through their actions and words.

Let me do a bit of restating here in case Beyoncé fans are reading this, and I realize there’s a lot of you. I’m fine with this video and this campaign. I love that the media is taking a role in trying to change the stereotype of powerful women by utilizing fabulous celebrities. Of course the communication major in me also loves the fact that people are taking time to realize what words mean. It’s been said before by countless language-lovers: there is no such thing as a synonym. We need to think about what a word means, not just regurgitate what others feed us with open mouths and empty minds. I myself already stated that I am completely guilty of doing this with this video in particular. My immediate reaction of “Love it!!! :D” could not be any more obvious of that. This happens with a lot of things – popular celebrities say a word or an idea and we as the consumers eat it up, letting the word go in our ears and directly out our mouths. Instead, I think those words, as good-intentioned as they may be, should take a detour from our ears, to our minds, where they can be processed and evaluated before exiting the mouth. It would really save a lot of bad ideas from spreading. Cliché alert, but I posted this Proverbs verse on social media a while back that seems appropriate, “A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion.”

 With all that said, I’m not trying to stop this campaign from gaining attention. It's awesome if you like this video; I still do. I’m just saying it only went halfway in redefining a good role for women. Being a leader is humbling, it’s about furthering our purpose as human beings to help others through loving others. It’s not about being better than others so you now have the entitlement of telling people what to do, it’s about truly being a better person than you were yesterday, which makes you capable of achieving greatness among others.

I challenge everyone and anyone who might be reading this to think about what we see. Let’s all start thinking of ourselves as leaders, innovators, doers, and workers. Go further, strive to be a leader, rather than a boss.

Words do matter, make them count.