Yesterday afternoon I was nearing the end of the book I’ve currently been reading through, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I picked this book up in the Psychology section of a local used book store, along with several others in the category. To be honest, it didn’t exactly “do it” for me for the majority of the book, but the author wrapped the book up very impressively; the last 25 or so pages really contain a lot of useful insight and suggestions and you’ll appreciate and probably be able to better utilize the material after reading everything that preceded this last chunk of the book.

The passage that really jumped out at me was this one below. I was reading this book during downtime at work and I couldn’t believe how hard it hit home; how precisely it described what I’ve been experiencing recently. I was so pleasantly caught off guard that I was motivated to write these sentences down to share in a post on this site.

“When there is no external force demanding that we concentrate, the mind begins to lose focus. It falls to the lowest energetic state, where the least amount of effort is required. When this happens, a sort of mental chaos takes over. Unpleasant thoughts flash into awareness, forgotten regrets resurface, and we become depressed.”    p. 348, Csikszentmihalyi

He goes on to describe how so many of us proceed to watch tv, have pointless conversations, and indulge in other meaningless activities just to avoid becoming frightened by what goes on in our mind when we’re idle.

It’s so true. When bouts of negativity hit me, they almost always come after a time of intense boredom. When I feel like I’m not accomplishing anything; and that there’s nothing to work towards, no concrete reason to get up in the morning. The author’s general solution to this problem is to find what you’re passionate about, what activity activates your creative energies and keeps you motivated and interested. To be honest, I do not know what my passion is. I have many interests, and a few hobbies, but I’m not sure what I could describe myself as being passionate about. If I was ‘born to do’ something, I truthfully do not know what that is yet. Also in this book, the author lays out simple (but not necessarily easy) processes that one can take to get on the right path towards finding out what sort of work they might truly enjoy. I intend to put these suggestions to use in my own life, and perhaps I can find what it is that I should be doing with my time.

So Monday morning my alarm clock goes off and… I can hardly move. Everything hurts, any joint/muscle involved in rotating or bending is just excruciating. I fumble out of bed and I attempt to walk to the alarm clock and I just collapse onto the floor. I end up crawling to turn the alarm off. I struggle to get back in bed, and obviously something is very wrong. I also realize that I can’t move my toes. At all. I’m looking at my feet and I’m telling myself to move my toes and nothing happens.

At this point I’m a little freaked out. I have one friend who just graduated nursing school so I call her and get her voicemail. So now I’m thinking who can I call who might have knowledge of whatever is going on with me. I end up calling my mom’s best friend/roommate who was a physical education and self defense teacher for like 30 years. She knows a lot about muscles and joints and stuff. So I’m on the phone with her, and her first thought is that it might be the flu. She said years back she woke up one morning and felt like she was hit by a truck - everything hurt - and that later that day the nausea and fever kicked in and she knew it was the flu. She recommends I go to the doctor right away.

My roommate just so happened to come out into the hallway about this time and I ask him to take me to the hospital. We end up going to “anonymous health facility”. I walk in and the entire waiting room is empty, we’re the only ones there and it STILL takes 30 minutes for me to get seen. I was a little annoyed by that, but kept it to myself.

So finally my name is called and I get led to a little room and the nurse takes my temperature and asks me how badly it hurts. I told her, it doesn’t really hurt when I’m not trying to move, but that everything hurts when I bend or rotate anything. And that I can’t move my toes. I was wearing sandles because I physically couldn’t put on socks, it hurt that much to bend (just putting on pants took some thought and effort as well). I told her “look at my feet, I swear to you I’m trying to wiggle my toes. I’m trying to right now and they’re not moving”. She doesn’t seem to care, and she leads me to another room and tells me to wait for the doctor.

The doctor finally comes in and asks what my pain is on a scale of 1 to 10. Again I try to tell him the core of the problem isn’t really pain. He basically shrugs and asks if I’ve worked out or done any heavy lifting recently. I told him I worked out on Saturday evening, but I felt great afterwords and felt completely fine all day Sunday, and that I work out often and I’ve never had anything close to this before. He says it’s probably from the work out and that he’s going to prescribe me a muscle relaxant “that’s a really good drug. you will like it.”

In all he was there MAYBE two minutes at most, and that’s a generous estimate. He tells me to wait and leaves the room. I’m kinda hunched over on the table that’s covered by that white paper sheet, and decide to make myself a little more comfortable so I lay down on it. Bad move, because I honestly couldn’t get back up into a sitting position. I basically had to roll myself off of the table, I really wish someone was there to see it because I’m sure I looked like a caterpillar on drugs or something. Anyways, so after a few minutes a third lady comes in and says “here’s your prescription, you’re good to go.”

No one came even remotely close to explaining to me what could have caused this, and the doctor didn’t even mention my total lack of functionality in my toes.

To wrap this up, I took one of the muscle pills, and I felt a small something but decided fuck this I’m self-medicating if I have to. So I smoked a bowl and let me tell you… I’ve definitely found another legitimate use for medical marijuana. Smoking helped probably 5x more than just the pill by itself. This morning I woke up, slightly sore but feeling like a completely different person and I was fully able to go to work without any pain. And I could move my toes again. Still have no idea what caused whatever the hell that was, but I’m glad it’s over.

I’ve realized that a lot of the source of my frustration with woman is the fact that I simply don’t understand what they’re thinking, or why they do what they do. To me, by and large, women quite simply just are not logical creatures. But who’s to say what is logical? Societal standards often change drastically in just a matter of decades - and sometimes even at a more rapid pace. Socializing online, for example, in its infancy and early development was a novelty at best and was generally the playground of nerds and techies. Now, everyone who is anyone is on myspace, facebook, twitter, and others. What changed? At its core, facebook is basically a more complex and interactive form of online bulletin board, which have been around essentially since the baby steps of the internet. Back to perspective.

I process information in a way that makes sense. To me. I read a text message or an email, and I draw my conclusions from the material I just read. But someone else may interpret those same messages in a different way. What I view as sarcasm they may see as arrogance, or they may not pick up on any particular tone at all. Thinking about events and conversations I’ve experienced on various dates, I’m realizing that what I might have interpreted as one thing, even if it seemed conclusive/logical/straight forward to me, may not have been what the girl was intending. And frankly, many women (and guys too but thats not my concern) are just plain fickle and don’t really know what they want, so of course their actions might not add up in a way that makes sense to me… because I’m trying to draw a conclusion from their actions and they haven’t even come to a decision themselves.

I often feel like women are incredibly difficult to ‘figure out.’ Well, maybe that’s by design. As a man, I can relate to most men that I encounter without much effort. Even if I don’t agree, I understand their thinking. I ‘get it.’

Women… not so much. I often find myself at a loss when trying to figure out the status of a relationship in the early stages. In my mind I can look back on our conversations and our actions and demeanors when together, and I draw a particular conclusion. Historically I seem to get ahead of myself, and really feel like I’m getting somewhere with a girl when in reality, the level of closeness I felt may not have been fully mutual. That’s the puzzling thing to me. I look at the information - the looks, the touches, the kisses, the conversations, etc. - and I put the pieces together in a way that makes sense to me. I’m beginning to wonder if women - and their actions and intentions - might need to be viewed more like abstract paintings that can be interpreted in a variety of ways, rather than as formulas that can be solved from a purely logical point of view.

I have never felt so alone and utterly rejected in my life. I’ve recently had a string of dates resulting in particularly head-scratching results; including one particular girl who I really and truly felt a connection with. Apparently that was a one-way connection. I vividly remember the moment I knew something was amiss; that she had for some unknown reason simply lost interest in me. Friends aware of the situation encouraged me to hold out hope and to be patient. I knew there was nothing to hope for, and that pure instinctual feeling of mine has just been undoubtedly confirmed as accurate. I still don’t know why, and if I were to reconstruct our conversations verbatim, I have no doubt that the reader would be just as confused if not moreso than I currently am.

Why this individual felt the need to string me along with no intentions of pursuing a relationship I may never know. Frankly, I don’t think I want to understand what would motivate such a cruel and apathetic mindset, continually advancing the illusion of mutual interest and attraction, all the while having absolutely no desire to follow through in any tangible way.

The possibility of never finding someone is becoming increasingly more likely, and I feel myself getting more and more jaded of the world around me. I truly do not deserve the way I have been treated by the opposite sex over the past couple of years. So many bizarre turn of events and stupifying situations have occurred that not even my growing support system of close friends and family can come close to providing any meaningful input or conclusions. I retell the situations as accurately as I possibly can, and they’re just as stumped as I am.

How can I learn from these experiences when I honestly don’t know what went wrong? The only conclusion that even slightly makes sense is the very likely possibility that the women I’ve encountered are deeply flawed and have underlying issues that prevent success in relationships. As sincere and earnest as I possibly can be, I just don’t think I could have been the core problem.

Regardless of the what the problems might be, the result is predictably and painfully the same: I’m rejected. Single. Alone. Without the one thing I have been truly longing for, the one thing I feel like I desperately need. A significant other.  Someone who both accepts my love and who accepts and loves me. I’d rather die young then grow old alone.

I’ve decided to write down two sets of goals, motivated most recently by a couple of books I have been spot-reading. The first are goals that I have direct control over, things that I can accomplish through hard work, routines, practice, etc. The second set of goals are longer-term, and ones that while I can take initiative and perhaps get the ball rolling so to speak, I have no direct control over the outcome.

I’ve chosen to title the first list “Goals for Myself” and the second “Goals for my Future”… which I think reflects my point that my future is not a direct result of my intentions and actions in the present. I might be able to choose my general direction in life, but where I go from there is determined by many different factors. And now for the lists:

Goals for Myself:

Continue to work out regularly and reach my physical potential.

Make time for reading and intellectual pursuits.

Acquire a second source of income from an activity I enjoy.

Goals for my Future:

Find the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with.

Advance professionally; be able to provide for a family.

Take the vacations/trips I’ve always wanted.

It was like the ultimate push into all sources of instant gratification. I was riding the wave of human desire, sometimes constantly riffling through various impulses and thoughts, and other times just basking in the satisfaction of a fantastic new discovery. I would let my mind wander through the seemingly endless maze of uncharted territory, tapping into previously hidden branches of my imagination and creativity. It was indulgence with a purpose, and I was consumed with the need to utilize every second of this higher level of awareness so as to not waste such a precious and wondrous moment of clarity.

I’ve been wanting to write some posts on here several times in the recent past, but I’ve been conflicted about how personal I want to make this blog. Also, I generally have “light bulb” moments in regards to inspired ideas to write about, but if I don’t act on those ideas right then and there, I tend to forget them… or at least they lose their appeal when I try to reconstruct the concept in my head.

Today, for instance, in a rather rare occurrence of purely in-the-moment emotional decision-making, I requested to come over to a friend’s house to talk. To someone that knows me well, it was clear in my messages that there was something wrong, although I was very vague (and later flat-out denied anything being amiss). This is actually something that I’ve almost done numerous times before, but I always decided against it for several reasons. First and foremost, I don’t think anyone would *want* me to come over and just ramble on about the largely negative topics I want to get off my chest.

If I was overly honest, my request would literally be “I want to talk about all the things that I feel are dragging me down in life. My problems, fears, concerns, annoyances, regrets, etc. I want to just open up a giant can of worms covering many years of my life.”

Obviously, that is not a conversation that any sane person would want to be on the receiving end of.

However, and this may be of overriding importance, I believe this is a conversation I NEED to have with someone, sooner or later.

And that brings me to my opening statement of this post: how personal do I want to get? Does anyone out there on the internet (I think maybe 3 people total might read this blog on a completely irregular basis) really care about what’s going on in my life or in my head? Not likely. But then I have to remember why I’m writing this in the first place… it’s not to entertain bored internet surfers that might have clicked here on a whim, or by accident altogether.

I’m writing this for me. I feel like this is one of the few constructive things I do in my free time. And I know that while I may write most of my posts in the spare of the moment, I’ll still have this blog to look back on in months and years to come. It’s sort of like having my own personal diary of ‘outside the box’ thoughts. Rather than bland summaries of my day, this blog is like a highlight reel of random ‘ah-ha!’ moments for me. I write in this blog only when I feel inspired to do so. If I was to turn this into an actual journal, it would become a chore or at the very least a routine. That is not what I want. I also don’t want my personal struggles to be published in this type of format.

The truth is, I really do need to have a deep talk with someone. But I believe that is the correct course of action; talking it through face to face with someone I trust. Now I just need to find someone I can be brutally honest with without hindering our relationship. It’s certainly more complicated than it might seem.

Conflict resolution could easily be described as a tough skill to master. Essentially, a conflict takes place when there’s an underlying incompatibility between two people. This conflict is often revealed during the process of a difference of opinion leading to a disagreement that snowballs into an argument. The specific topic of said differences is nearly irrelevant. Rather, it’s how the individuals involved choose to react to this difference that potential conflicts are sometimes escalated as tempers rise and anger (often prematurely) develops.

You can ardently defend a position without reverting to hostility or anger. You can help avoid potential flair-ups by choosing words carefully and refraining from sarcasm. Clearly, we as emotional beings do not always exercise thorough conflict resolution practices. We often react to opposition by increasing our verbal volume, as if it were a direct representation of our level of passion and fervour.

I think the root of the problem is in the concept of just what a disagreement is. It’s someone attacking your point of view. Attacking your idea, telling you that you’re wrong, or that your ideals are inferior to theirs. If we are all just skin and bones, then our thoughts, opinions, and ideas would reflect our most true self. If someone challenges you on an intellectual level, they challenge who you are. If they believe your ideas are not worth being taken seriously, they’re challenging your self worth.

With that being said, I think the approach of “let’s talk this through” is often not the correct one for the situation. Being in an intense argument is much like being in the heat of battle; sympathy and patience go by the way side and you find yourself resorting to tactics that you would normally frown upon. Sometimes the recipe to prevent disaster is as simple as giving individuals time and space. Other times, avoiding the sore subject altogether might be the wiser choice if peace is to be maintained. Everyone has conceptual buttons that can be pressed that triggers their primal need to defend themselves from attacks both verbal and physical.

So I was “attaining the positive effects of THC” from a vaporizer recently, and it just felt like… I advanced to another level. Of life. Of Consciousness. Like I was never really this awake, or this aware, or this ALIVE as I was now after using the vaporizer. Shortly after, that period was followed by being unavoidably and undeniably lost in thought. It was sort’ve like reaching a secret hidden part of my brain that didn’t necessarily function that efficiently. It contained lots of cool stuff in it, just not very well organized. It was a treasure chest of awareness, but a messy one.

Gratification is the instant happiness, enjoyment, or entertainment we get from a task, exercise, or practice. It is pleasure; feel-good emotion in its most primal form.

Satisfaction is the result of calculated decisions to sacrifice gratification in exchange for greater long-term good for ourselves and others. You can have instant gratification if you cheat on a difficult test and receive an A without studying or putting in due effort. You can attain satisfaction after excelling in a classroom, on a subject with which you initially struggled, by earning an A through hard work and determination.

Ultimately, gratification cannot create a lasting enrichment of life. It is a hollow happiness. Satisfaction is the realization or recognition of accomplishment. There is no short-cut to satisfaction. It is not an instant cause-and-effect outcome. However; the reward for the process required is in the lasting positive effects of satisfaction itself.