How should we cope with change?

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Cope with daily life plus slack., Coping with change, Coping with emergencies.

Our personal situation is always changing and we are always challenged with how we should adapt. The obvious answer is that we should look to the possibilities that might come our way and prepare for them now, while we have the time, thoughtfulness and resources. What does that mean? In part, it means to be mentally prepared to adapt instantly to any changing situation. But, being human, we have the ability to think about our future situations and thus to position our resources in such a way that no matter which of the reasonable alternatives actually come into existence we can cope well because we have pre-thought about the situation and prepared for its problems and opportunities. If we have sufficient forethought, things that are destructive to most of those around us can benefit us. Great disasters can also be great opportunities if we are prepared to take advantage of them.

Part of future preparation is to have reserves of the necessities of life — food, water, comfortable living quarters — because if we are weak from deprivation we can’t do anything useful. It always helps to have a buffer of money readily available as even in a disastrous situation money will still be valuable. In some situations “cash is king.”

If we are prepared for Black Swan events and have enough slack to cope easily with them we will also have enough surplus to perform some beneficial actions for ourselves and others. When we are properly prepared in mind, body and resources, coping with unusual situations becomes just another activity that is within our routine abilities. To have slack means to avoid being overextended in one’s daily life; it means having enough to cover everything plus some in reserve. Most of the people of our world are in debt to someone like the bank, their employer, their landlord, even for daily routine things.

People must fear change when they lack the resources to even cope with their daily routine.

Think about it, and choose your own goals.

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Avoid doing as they say., Choose your own goals, More thoughts on lying

We always have the problem of having other people’s goals thrust upon us. Some of them are well thought out and tested against our group’s aspirations like our country’s laws. Some things seem like they might be good, such as what our television shows us as appropriate behavior, but obviously, one’s personal morality being learned from several hours per day of TV dramas is unlikely to be good for anyone.

Our society is embedded with an abundance of nonsense. I have written about the common Christmastime lie, Yes Virginia there is a Santa Claus, and the New Year’s Resolution absurdity about dieting and Epictetus’ thoughts on lying.

The most pernicious lies are probably brought to us by local moral authorities of the various religions telling us what we should be doing. These authorities of virtue are occasionally caught doing things that are directly contrary to their pronouncements. Their standard defense is, “Do as I say, not as I do!” But that means they are incapable of following their own advice although they claim to be on a higher moral ground when they make their proclamations. What that means to me is what they ask is impossible, or they don’t believe what they say and that implies they are only preaching what sounds appealing with the intent of getting control of you and your money.

To base our behavior on what those people say, and to do as they say, is to base our acts and thoughts on their premeditated lies! – Let’s call it what it is! Lies! Therefore it becomes essential for us to learn how to identify lies, and probable lies, and eliminate their influence on our behavior. Think about your personal needs, and choose your own goals for satisfying those needs.

A simple indicator of a lie is when it seems too good to be true, coupled with the probability it will be a benefit to the speaker if you do as they say.

I seek to treat people better.

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Diary, I seek to treat people better., I walked the labyrinth twice today

Today I attended the memorial service for David and Judy Paulsmeyer at the UU Fellowship Church. I didn’t know them well, and our Sunday conversations had always been short and very pleasant. Generally, I spend my time there at the UU finding things to do. Easy little things like greeting people at the door, filling the dog watering bowl, wiping the dust of the benches, opening and closing the huge sanctuary doors, and picking up the collection. Also, I almost always bring a rock for the labyrinth and place it near the front door and pick up an earlier rock left there and take it to the labyrinth and place it in an appropriate location. My ten-minute walk in the labyrinth is a simple pleasure and gives me a bit of time to think in a noncommittal way about life in general.

Today was a special service for the Paulsmeyers who both died in a driving accident while coming back from visiting their grandchildren in Colorado. The service made clear what wonderful people they had been and the kindly service they had provided to their various local clubs, friends, and relatives. They were the salt of the earth in the kindness that they spread everywhere they went. True peacemakers.

I had parked my car a distance from our building but near the labyrinth and so I walked it both before and after the service. I needed the extra time to think about how I can be nicer, kinder and more helpful to those whom I encounter. Actually, I’m pretty good about that already, but I want to be much better, much kinder, and more accepting of people for who they are. I do post this blog with those thoughts in mind for the public to potentially benefit from, and I do lots of tiny things for the public benefit but when I heard today about David and Judy’s life I realized I can do much more.

I seek to treat people better.

Think for yourself and do the right thing.

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Do the right thing !, Think for yourself?

It is to be expected that everyone will do what they believe is best for themselves. Thus it becomes important to know what people consider to be themselves to understand what they are doing to promote their own well-being. The usual starting point in this process is what is most beneficial to the person’s physical body and their status in relation to the people they consider important.

It is important to know where people’s motivations are coming from because so much of the time they are telling you what to do. We live in a flood of information coming at us from all the media, and it isn’t unreasonable to assume that nearly all of that information is intended to influence us in some way that is beneficial to those paying for the media. That’s okay if what they are telling us is for our benefit, and even if they are only trying to sell us some product that is okay, but this is true only if we need that product and they are giving us a fair transaction.

We are the ones who make these decisions and we make those decisions based on our own thinking about the data input that is coming our way. Thus we must set up good filters to clear out the stuff that isn’t right for us and let the good stuff come through.

A disaster isn’t over until it’s all over.

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Disaster recovery, Ongoing expenses after disasters, Ponderosa tree fell thru our roof

During the worst windstorm in the memory of Bend, Oregon’s old-timers, my house was hit by a falling Ponderosa tree. Four other trees fell within striking distance but only one hit the house. Another one took out a chunk of our backyard fence, and in addition, a large spruce tree in the front yard got stripped of all of its branches on one side. It’s the side facing the street so passers-by for the next hundred years will be looking at a damaged tree.

A chunk of the front of the house was knocked off and the guys that restored the roof might have taken it away with the remains of the ruined roof, but they set it to the side of the house. That was finally removed today by a specially hired team who took  it to the city dump. They also took five forty-two gallon bags full of tree detritus, mostly chainsaw chips, which I wanted to be removed before the 4th of July annual fireworks extravaganza. That annual insanity is guaranteed to burn down our tree-covered city to our house foundations, in the long run. So far we have been lucky with our annual fire and only Pilot Butte gets burned. The last 4th I watered everything possible around the house but after watching a YouTube demonstration on how houses catch fire it made sense to scrape everything close to the house down to raw dirt. Particularly dangerous are flammable things that accumulate around the base of the house, like pine needles, tree leaves, and little windblown seeds. They catch fire easily and if the pile is more than a few inches high the flames can reach the underside of the eves.

People generally don’t face ugly facts until they have some personal experience, and a big tree woke me up.

Have we evolved to tolerate human stupidity?

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Evolution of society, Evolution of tolerance

The Eveish selection theory creates a plausible method for humans to have evolved the ability to speak and understand sentences. With the ability to generate sentences about one’s environment and thoughts, there arise conflicts with other speakers of the language representing different ways of speaking about the same thing.

We are aware that elephants will probably feel different, look different, smell different and taste different depending upon how they are approached, even though most of us have no close-up experience of elephants. As we grow to adulthood we realize that other people’s perceptions are different from ours and to maintain harmonious relations we tolerate their expressing themselves in ways incompatible with our perceptions. Most of us also learn to appreciate these different ways of seeing things, like elephants, because we realize a different point of view might be valuable to us at some time.

With a spoken language the problem of the foolishness of a person’s behavior comes to the fore in two main guises. First is some foolish behavior because of not knowing some particular piece of information, and that is usually forgiven when the facts are made available and whatever foolish behavior that came about because of the lack of information stops. The second kind of foolishness comes about when a person has available correct facts and for some unaccountable reason still maintains some form of counterproductive behavior.

Does our tolerance for the second kind of foolishness, the stupid kind, come about because of our tolerance for the first kind, the lack of correct information kind? Is this tolerance a wholly learned attribute we associate with our culture and limit to our own tribe? Or, is there a genetic component to tolerance? Not a hardwired genetic response, like a reflex, but more like the DNA that humans have that permits us, as children, to learn a language easily. We learn tolerance for our own kind of people easily and intolerance for outgroups just as easily. This trait seems so universal it seems there must be a genetic component to it. How could that arise?

Women in their mate selection must make a similar balance when they choose a man who will defend them but not be so aggressive that he will harm them. A man who will defend the tribe but not combat excessively with tribe members. A man who is sensitive to verbal truths and acts upon them but is willing to tolerate unknowable speculations about things and hesitates to act.

We have evolved to tolerate human stupidity because it makes society possible?

I had a strange thought on human physical beauty today.

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Creating more beautiful women, Creating more beauty, Strange thoughts

I was chatting with my geriatric dudes at the Looney Bean coffee shop this morning when one of the beautiful girls that frequent this wonderful place walked by. I mentioned to R, a retired professional artist, how great she looked today. He looked, he smiled, and we chuckled and lusted in ways only mid eighty-year-old guys can understand. Yes, it’s pathetic! All the same, we both have eyes long practiced in appreciating beautiful things, including women. About this time an obese young woman walked by, and then another. We both looked at them and then one another,  and I noticed a trace of sadness drift over R’s expressions.

Over the previous few weeks, my thoughts on creating a new form of food diet and planning to publish it as a book within a couple of months came up. Thus we were primed to rehash what might be done to help these women regain a more beautiful and more healthful form. We have already hashed over the ethical arguments of interfering in other people’s lives and have come to the conclusion that the fact that American people are spending thirty-three billion dollars on diet plans per year indicates that these people are pleading for help. I have been carrying that thought a bit further and felt that my not sharing my methods with this suffering public would itself be immoral behavior. That feels a bit arrogant and pretentious but while expressing those concerns to R I had another thought.

What if a large percentage of obese and overweight women actually used my diet plan and returned to a healthier condition—wouldn’t they look better? Wouldn’t the two of us former artists enjoy our few remaining years even more just by seeing more beautiful women walking around in our favorite coffee shop? Furthermore, wouldn’t all the young men around here be more appreciative too, and wouldn’t the formerly obese women feel better being thought of as beautiful rather than … ignored?

Publishing this “Love Our Life – diet” plan seems like a win-win situation for everyone.

You and only you are in charge of what you eat.

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LOL diet is a lifestyle, Love Our Life - diet, You choose

Other people may have a lot to do what is on your plate, but you and only you are in charge of what you eat. Also, you and only you are in charge of what you do. There is an infinity of things that influence everything we do and much of the time we have very little influence over what that will be. There are forces like gravity to which we must submit, and many people will complain about how arbitrary nature seems to be. And yet, nature operates under the most fine-grained laws of behavior. It is beings with a choice of action that are arbitrary in their relationship to us, and humans are the most arbitrary of all. Yet, even with human beings, there is a lot of predictable actions and reactions that we can depend upon in almost all situations. Generally, people follow the Golden Rule, and if we treat them well they will treat us well.

It is when we come to our relationship with our own selves that we have the most flexibility and the most problems. The specific problem I have been thinking about these last few months is the food we people eat and tend to overeat. Why are people overeating and at the same time are reported to be spending five hundred billion dollars per year to eat less? Famine is the natural thing being avoided by overeating, but nearly all of the billion obese people are not facing a famine at present, and probably have never faced one in their entire lives. That they don’t want to be obese is proven by the fact that they spend so much money trying to drop the excess weight. They are asking for help. Desperately asking for help! They are not getting help, they are getting advice, but the advice is impossible for them to follow as is proven by the obvious fact that billions of people are clearly getting heavier every year. They know what is best for them but they can’t do what is best for them. Why? Their advisors spread the guilt deep and say it is because of these people’s lack of willpower. And yet, people of normal bodily weight are exerting no willpower at all to maintain their healthy status. It isn’t willpower that is lacking, it is a totally wrong approach by the diet and medical industries that is the problem. People are being told the wrong things to do.

“You and only you are in charge of what you eat” is an obvious statement and would seem to be spreading even more guilt upon obese people. It is the total number of calories eaten versus those burned by the person’s body that determines the gain or loss of weight. Probably true to the last calorie, but you can’t see calories. So what is the problem, and more important, what is the solution?

I will get to that and it will be easy and fun.

3,500 posts on Probaway WordPress

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3500 Probaways, Probaway milestones

For me, this is a celebration day because the automatic post counter provided by WordPress just turned over 3,500 for probaway dot wordpress dot com. Of all the people on Earth, I am the only one to give a hoot. But, hoot, hoot, hoot!

People occasionally ask me what my favorite post was and my standard answer is today’s post. When I look back every post astonishes me! I can’t imagine having that huge number of ideas and that I posted another new one last night.

In the very first post on January 1, 2008, I laid out my general strategy for writing these posts and the direction that these posts would go. I named my blog Probaway – Life Hacks ~ Many helpful hints on living your life more successfully.

The next day, the first post about a subject rather than strategy, was on Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer. That post is still relevant for demonstrating the way I wanted to go and went. I was lucky to have chosen Cesar Millan of all people for my beginning. His main subject is dogs and their relationship to people but what he does is surf right past all the intellectually profound philosophers, psychologists, historians, scientists and he demonstrates how we as individuals can relate effectively with dogs and people.

I think of Cesar Millan as in the same ranks with Sun Tzu, Lao Tzu, Machiavelli, and Jesus, each of whom saw to the core of human relations and presented their ideas in ways that could be used effectively by thinking people in positions of authority over their relevant environments.

The super milestone will be 3,650. Will we live to see it?

Some women are intriguing. #5 – Black River Falls, Wisconsin

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Black River Falls, Black River Falls Wisconsin, Intriguing women, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Death Trip

I’ve been intrigued by a photograph taken about the year 1900 in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. It falls into the trend of these previous women in that it seems to carry a message of fear associated with perfect facial features. Perhaps it is only the brooding mouth and the wide open eyes staring at me, but I find it difficult to look away. Even having the picture over to the side while I am writing this blog post is disturbing. Is she bothered by me and what I am thinking or is she watching carefully and waiting for a moment to do some mischief? Leave this picture on your screen for a while and you will understand my concern.

This Black River Falls woman was in Wisconsin Death Trip; perhaps she was the infamous window smasher.

The window smasher went from town to town breaking windows so she would get a week’s room and board at the city jail.