morality

Good for Me; Bad for Me VI: Complexities

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, mindfulness, morality, Positive psychology, Self-Awareness

This is the sixth in a series of “good for me; bad for me,” namely things that are, quite simply good for me or bad for me. The pronoun “me” could be “you”, but the point is the many things are those that enhance one’s life while other things depreciate one’s life. Importantly, I have also suggested that the “things” that are good or bad can be people, places, physical things, or events in one’s life. I have further proposed that there is a spectrum that might reflect the intensity of something being good or bad, namely:

Something that is good for me                               /                             Something that is bad for me

Furthermore, I have suggested that we can quantify just how good something is by the following words:

  • Mildly or moderately good for me: interesting, pleasant, exciting
  • Profoundly good for me: enlivening, life-enhancing, life-sustaining

Likewise, we could quantify things that are bad for me with the following:

  • Mildly or moderately bad for me: uninteresting, unpleasant, aversive
  • Profoundly bad for me: dangerous, toxic, lethal

I have suggested that it might be profitable for you to quantify the things in your life that may be good, very good, bad, or very bad. You may wish to examine the origin of this discussion in the previous blogs.

My purpose in the present blog is to deal with the complexities of something being good or bad for you because life is not so simple as just good or just bad. We will discuss some of these complexities, e.g.:

  • Good for me at one time; bad for me at another time
  • Good for me but I don’t like it
  • Bad for me be I do like it
  • Seemingly neither good nor bad; just not very important

Good for me at one time; bad for me at another

As I just stated, “life is not so simple” as to suggest that something is universally bad for me or universally good for me. Times change. I change. Circumstances change. People change. Consider something (someone, some place, some thing, some situation) that was good for you but not is not good for you.

There was a time that it was very good for me to speak my thoughts and feelings freely. Having been brought up in a very outspoken and expressive family, I was subtly taught that a person should simply say whatever s/he felt or thought regardless of the environment or the consequences. Thus, my family’s philosophy was based on the unspoken belief that we all have the right to our thoughts, opinions, and feelings, and furthermore have the right to express ourselves at any time with anyone. As you might imagine, and as I certainly know, it is not always wise or kind to speak oneself openly. I slowly earned that I needed to add wisdom and kindness to my expressiveness in what I said, something that we might call discretion. I should add that I learned this lesson painfully. Part of the pain was the fact that I unnecessarily hurt other people, always without intention, but I also learned that they hurt me in return, as the book title Hurt People Hurt People so succinctly suggests. (Don’t buy the book; just remember the title and its meaning.) When I was so quickly outspoken, I was just as quickly judged, often negatively. People made judgments of me, probably largely out of their having been hurt by me. I slowly learned that while my heart and head might have been in the right place, namely to be “honest and forthright,” I was not cognizant of my audience, particularly their feelings. Whereas speaking my mind at all times and with all people was originally good for me, it is no longer so. It is also not good for other people, but we will discuss this matter in a future blog.

At the present time in my life I rarely speak my mind and heart. Now, having given this example of something that was good for me but not good for me now, I often feel sad that I most certainly should not express myself in many circumstances. Most pointedly, I have learned that I can say precious little of my thinking and feeling while I am doing psychotherapy although I am almost constantly both thinking and feeling. I have a kind of nostalgia for my younger days when I just said what I wanted to say, and sometimes think, “Wouldn’t we all be much better if we just did that?” But then I come to my senses and admit that it might not be so good after all. As Desiderata so poignantly says, one must “gracefully yield the things of youth.” The cost of giving up such things is first sadness, then contentment, and then wisdom. I am still learning.

There are many other examples of things that have been good for me at one time, and then later bad for me. Almost all of these things are in the arena of wanting the freedom that we can only have in childhood. I rarely do waterskiing, something that was very central to my life as a teenager, although I do have good memories. I almost never eat any fast food, and interestingly have little desire for such stuff. I used to work 12 hours a day and thoroughly enjoy it, but have found that 12-hour days are no longer good for me, and sometimes in need a 4-hour day, God forbid. During the current political squabble that we are in here in America, I can no longer read the newspaper with earnest interest because the Trump factor stares me in the face, as does the current Covid factor, and even the Black Lives Matter movement. I remain avidly interested in political and cultural matters but find it “bad for me” to see our country so inflamed.

Formerly bad for me, now good for me

It used to be bad for me to keep my mouth shut. I have learned otherwise partly because I have learned that introverted people are naturally inclined to keep their feelings to themselves. It was bad for me to keep quiet but it is no longer bad for me. Certainly, this change is a matter of personal growth, but I now value keeping my thoughts and feelings to myself, sometimes writing them as I am presently doing, and sometimes simply enjoying “going placidly among the noise and haste of the world knowing what peace there is in silence” (also Desiderata). In my psychotherapy work I probably say about 10% of what I think and 1% of what I feel although my thoughts and feelings can occasionally be quite helpful. More often in the past I have caused more harm by expression than by silence. If you had asked me some 40 years ago what I thought about being outspoken, I probably would have said something like, “everyone should just say what they think all the time.” By the way, my coming into psychology through the “back door” of existential therapy, there were many very good masters of existential therapy who did, indeed, suggest that you should just say anything to anyone at any time. While the hearts of these people were in the right place, their heads were not, and they were reacting against psychoanalysis, which suggested that the analyst said little or nothing, hence abstain from any expression of his/her own thoughts and feelings as well as Carl Rogers’ unconditional positive regard.

By the way, I could turn this story around and suggest that it was formerly bad for me to be so outspoken, but that begs the question. Yes, it was not exactly good for me to say everything I thought and felt, but it was something I needed to do because that is who I was, namely an outgoing, expressive person. I do not look at those years of being outspoken as being wrong, just lacking in wisdom and understanding. But there is the real opposite:

Formerly good for me, now bad for me

All “good for me; bad for me” categories can be of people, places, property, or experience. Allow me to briefly say that you can have a friend who is good for you and later bad for you even if s/he doesn’t change. Perhaps you just outgrow the person, or the person finds someone else who is better for him than you are. While painful, it is important to allow friendships…and family relationships…to be good at one time and then not be good at another time. The discovery that a person, even a very good person, someone who might have been a good friend or a valued family member, is no longer good for you…is hard to feel, hard to accept, and hard to know how to handle. I see many such situations in my office, two today where people moved family members into their homes and now resent these family members. At other times, a marriage has been very good but is not very bad, or perhaps somewhere in between.

Aside from people being good…and then being “bad for you” there can also be places, property, or experiences. Maybe the house you live in is no longer good for you, maybe the car you have loved for many years is no longer good for you, or the books you treasure. Experiences that used to be good but no longer are might simply be those of youth that no longer profit you as an adult, or that some experience in life has superseded one that used to be top on the list.

If you  find something that was good but no longer is good, you need to admit to that fact, then accept that fact, feel through the possible change in your life, and then feel the sadness of loss that always occurs when you choose to give something up that has nostalgic value, whether people, places, property, or experiences. Allow yourself to feel, accept your feelings, feel your feelings, and then take action. Most people fail in one of these elements. Frequently, people fail to take action because they don’t want to lose somethings (person, place, thing, or experience) that used to be good for them. Just as frequently, people can take action too quickly not having truly thought through and felt through the change of “good for me” to “bad for me.”

Maybe getting drunk was good for you, or being promiscuous, or even lying. Yes, all seem bad, but that is not the case. I could make a good case that all of these experiences could actually be good for people at one time, but I will defer that discussion while noting that many people have found such things to no longer be good for them. You might note, however, that I am subtly suggesting that there is very little that is intrinsically bad, but again, this is beyond the scope of the present discussion.

Formerly bad for me, now good for me

Let’s talk onions: used to hate them; now I love them. Used to love the Gophers when I lived in MN as a kid; now I live in WI and love the Badgers. Used to be bad for me to keep my mouth shut; now I find it a pleasant experience. There are lots of things, many of them childhood dislikes, that now are things that we like. But all of these are in the relatively mild/moderate “bad for me” that are now in the mild/moderate “good for me” category. It’s not terribly important for me to eat onions and enjoy the Badgers. The dial on the spectrum of good for me/bad for me has just shifted from one side to the other. You might think of things, often trivial, that used to be bad for you that are now good for you.

More important than onions and football teams could be people, places, and experiences. Consider someone in your past, perhaps a family member, maybe even an extended family member, a classmate or a workmate whom you really didn’t like. It might not matter why you didn’t like this person, but it is important that such a person was not good for you, or even was quite bad for you. You might think that your previous feelings about this person were “wrong” or that you were immature or something. I suggest that you simply admit that somebody in your past life was “just not good for you” and leave it at that while sequentially seeing that you now value this person and see that s/he is largely good for you.

In addition to things like onions and sports teams on the one hand, and people on the other, you might see that certain places or experiences might have moved from the “bad for me” side of the spectrum to the “good for me” side. I have replaced my three-times a week basketball playing, now eliminated due to the Covid phenomenon, with running. There was a time that running was mildly good for me, and then basketball replaced it to such a degree that I never ran. Even when I tried to run, I didn’t like it: it was mildly bad for me. Now, I run two or three times a week and find that running has barely crossed over to the “good for me” side of the spectrum. Our grandson lived with us recently for three months and pretty much hated the hiking and walking that Deb and I do pretty regularly. The needle moved quite a bit towards “good for me” evidenced by his walking on his own several times during his last few weeks with us.

Liking and not liking

I want to make a subtle distinction between “liking” and things that are good for me or bad for me. Such “things” could be person, place, experience, or something physical. There are roughly two categories in this discussion:

  • Things that I don’t like that are actually good for me
  • Things that I do like that are actually bad for me.

You probably immediately see the similarity to something that was once good for me but now bad for me, or something that was once bad for me but now good for me. I choose to distinguish the “liking” from “good for me” in order to make sense of many things in life that cannot wholly be described as good or bad.

There are, most importantly, some people that I don’t particularly like but see that they are actually good for me. Consider someone who you really don’t like, perhaps a political figure, a family member, or a friend who also is a good person in some way. Such a person might even be helpful to you in some way. But you just don’t like her. I think it is important to admit to you feelings of not liking this person while paradoxically seeing that this person is good for you in some way. Dentists come to mind. Who in their right mind “likes” a guy who digs into your mouth with nasty tools? The dentist chair could also be a “place” that you don’t like, and certainly don’t like the experience of a root canal while also seeing that the dentist, the chair, the tools, and the experience is good for you.

Consider the people in your life whom you respect, even love, but don’t like. They might be good for you, but you just don’t like them. Likewise, there may be experiences, places, or physical objects that you don’t like but see as essentially good for you. Who likes taxes? But they are eventually good for us, right? At least for the most part.

The other side of this discussion is something (person, place, experience, or thing) that you like but is bad for you. Certainly, all addictions fall into this category, whether addictions that are chemical or behavioral. It is hard for me to understand why people like sitting in front of a slot machine putting pennies or dollars into the machine for hours at a time while simultaneously knowing that they will most certainly lose more than they win. Gamblers just like gambling. I like sugar, God forgive me. I eat some kind of really-bad-for-you sugar just about every day despite knowing that sugar, at least refined sugar is bad for me. Additionally, I know that if I am ever to give up my sugar addiction, I have to start by admitting that I like sugar.

Not important

Certainly, you have wondered if there are things (people, places, experiences, or physical things) that don’t exactly fit on either side of the spectrum. I call these things “not important.” Consider things that are not important in your life. I hear from most people that the current political disaster in our country causes them much grief, and consequently, these people find that politics are very important. I also find people who simply don’t care about politics for some reason. I care deeply. There is nothing wrong with someone not caring. I care about psychology, theology, history, and culture, but many people don’t care about such things. A mother who is caring for a challenging child doesn’t even have the time to read, much less care about politics, nor does the nuclear scientist who works 12 hours a day looking for a way to control fusion.

In your regular life, there are many things that fall into the “don’t care” category. Certainly, this is true. I would simply caution you to know that if you are with a person, in a situation, in a place, or otherwise with something that is not important, you might stay too long there and find that the “don’t care” moved into the “not good for me” category.

Next week (?): Good for Me; Bad for You. And Bad for Me; Good for You.” These are real challenges and the heart of successful (and unsuccessful) relationships.

Good for Me; Bad for Me III

Ron Johnson appreciation, emotional maturity, Feelings, happiness, mindfulness, morality, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

This is the third in a series of “Good for Me; Bad for me”, which is a study of how things, people, and situations can, quite simply, good for you or bad for you. In previous blogs I have proposed a system of discernment about things that are good or bad for you, in other words, a way to quantify just how good or bad something is.

Review

To begin with I proposed that there is a spectrum that ranges from good to bad or very good to very bad

_____________________________________/________________________________________

Bad for me                                                                   Good for me

(very bad)                                (not so bad)          (pretty good)                                      (very good)

I further suggested that could label things more specifically on both sides of this spectrum. Specifically, I suggested that we could subcategorize the “good for me” side of the spectrum into things that were mildly or moderately good for me from things that were more significantly good for me, i.e.:

In the previous blog we studied the “bad for me” spectrum suggesting that there are mild/moderate things that could be uninteresting through unpleasing to aversive. Things that were more seriously bad would range from dangerous through toxic to lethal. Thus the “bad for me” side of the spectrum ranging from mild to serious would look like:

Uninteresting      Unpleasant      Aversive      Dangerous      Toxic      Lethal

(mild)                                                 to                                             (profound)

In this blog we will be discussing the “good for me” side of the spectrum, namely the range from mild to profound:

Interesting      Pleasant      Exciting      Enlivening     Life-enhancing     Life-sustaining

(mild)                                                  to                                             (profound)

As we did in the previous blog, we will discuss how to deal with the various things that are good for us, namely how to engage the things that are good for us to some degree with an emphasis on how to observe, accept, and enhance such things.

Observing something that is good for you

Here I will replicate what I said in Blog II, namely suggest that observing something, whether good or bad is a feeling process. As we noted in the previous blog, this human feeling is so important that it is undefinable, just like the important things of physics (time, distance, and mass) and the important things in psychological functioning like love and wisdom. Admitting that feeling is undefinable, we can however, note how central it is to human functioning and that feelings are the first (undefinable) expression of one’s central core (another undefinable element, by the way). Feelings evolve quite specifically through a four-step process, namely first physical, then emotional, then cognitive, and then active. So when I experience something that is good for me I will first feel something physical and then experience the other three expressions of feelings subsequently. Notably, however, people tend to “feel” their feelings in one predominant modality or perhaps two even though everyone feels all four expressions. It might be valuable for you to identify which one or ones of these expression is your primary means of feeling expression. Or you might read our book, I Need to Tell You How I Feel.

Feeling something physically usually means that a certain part of your body will “talk to you” as body therapists talk about. You will feel something in one of your extremities, somewhere in or on your head, in your chest, or in your stomach area although there are other areas on the body that people experience feelings, and sometimes it will not be possible for you to actually discern what part of your body feels something because you have a kind of whole-body feeling experience. Regardless of what you feel and how you feel something physically, the feeling will be pleasant to some degree.

Following your physical experience of feeling something good for you, you will have an emotional expression of feeling. This will generally be a joyful feeling. You will notice the joy in some physical expression like a spontaneous smile, but this joy could also show itself in some body movement, like jumping, dancing, or swinging your arms. To the degree that something is good for you, you will feel some kind of excitement. It is also possible that your emotional experience could be milder, something that might be described on the “good for me” spectrum as simply “interesting” or you might experience a more profound sense of pleasure that leads to some outlandish vocal expression. Truly joyous experiences can also lead to tears of joy.

If you are less inclined to feeling expressions that are physical and emotional, you might notice that you are thinking, and that you are thinking about the object, situation, or person that has brought you to a pleasant experience. People who are inclined to this kind of feeling expression are generally less inclined to vocal expressions of joy or excitement, but rather tend to think about how something that is good for them came about and how it has developed.

Finally, there is an expression of feeling of action, or sometimes words that reflects a feeling of “good for me.” If you are inclined towards action, you will feel compelled to do something to enhance this positive experience. If you are more inclined to words, you will tend to talk about what could be done or might be done to enhance the experience.

Once you have experienced these four expressions of feelings, usually primarily preferring one or two of them, you will be at an important time in your day, or perhaps in your life: you will need to accept the “good for me” experience.

Accepting something that is good for you

You might think that this would be natural, i.e. to accept something that is good for you, but that is not always the case. In fact, the better something is for you, the harder it is to allow the process of feelings to move from physical to active. Recall a time, for instance, when you thought something was “just too good to be true.” But before we explore this “too good” phenomenon, let’s look at things that are in the milder range, i.e. something that is just interesting, pleasant, or exciting. Such things tend to occur in the immediate present, short-lived, and not particularly necessary in life. If you’re a sports fan, you might have one of these milder forms of pleasure when you team wins, or perhaps within the game a moment of pleasure when someone scores a goal or achieves some kind of success. If you’re more artistic by nature, you might experience something mildly pleasurable when you visit an art museum, hear a particular piece of music, or enjoy some form of nature. Accepting these simple joys is not very difficult and makes life, well, more pleasurable and joyful. It is easy to accept something that is mildly or moderately good for you because you know that such experiences are generally short-lived however fun they are.

It might not be so easy to accept something that is on the more profound side of the “good for you” spectrum. Note that the three terms I have chosen for these pleasurable experiences all have to do with some lasting effect they have on your life, from enlivening, through life-enhancing, to life-sustaining. Note the centrality of the element of life. Things that might alter your life in some way would include such impossible things of winning the lottery, being hired for that perfect job after a grueling series of interviews, or seeing your new infant taker her first breath. There are many other life-changing events and experiences. A person, or less likely, a group of people, might change your life for the better. We will discuss the great variety of things that are good for you, as well as things that are bad for you, in our next blog.

Before we leave this section of accepting things that are good for you, it behooves me to discuss grace. Grace is defined as “unmerited favor,” or something that you didn’t deserve. Many of the things that are life-changing come to us without our bidding, and often without our having earned the privilege of having such a person, thing, or event. I will not belabor the point, but it is important to note that grace is very hard to accept because of the very element of “not deserving” such a thing. We do not deserve the love that people have for us, this regardless of how important it is to be loved. We do not deserve the other joys of life that come without warning. And we certainly do not deserve to win the lottery, which of course, is much more by luck than by someone’s grace. When these very special…gracious…things come our way, we often come to tears. We might even feel “embarrassed,” which by the way, is repressed joy. Nevertheless, it is a challenge to accept the truly great things that come our way because we do not earn such things nor can we pay for them. They come by grace. Accepting and enhancing good things can be quite hard for people who seem to be in most need some grace from the world, largely because such people may have fallen into a life of felt neediness too long, that they have developed an unfortunate feeling of entitlement.

Whether something is on the mild/moderate side of the “good for me” spectrum or on the more profound side of the spectrum, it is important to move beyond observing and accepting these things to a place where we enhance such things. Before we engage in that discussion, however, let’s look at some of the things, experiences, and people who are good for us:

Things that are good for me

Things:

  • Money
  • Property
  • Nature
  • Art
  • Music
  • Color

Experiences:

  • Nature
  • Play
  • Work
  • Rest
  • Health
  • Forgiveness

People:

  • Parental figure
  • Mentor
  • Good friend
  • Accepting group
  • Reuniting

I invite you to note one or two elements in each category what might have come your way. You will immediately see that many such things have come unexpectedly. You might also note that you did not necessarily truly observe or accept such things as they came. More importantly, you might not have taken the time to find ways to enjoy the moment of the mild/moderate “good for me” experiences or found ways to enhance the more profound things in your life.

Enhancing things that are good for me

The first ingredient in being able to enhance the joyous and pleasurable things in life is to observe them and accept them as well as taking time in each of these steps, each of these processes. There is the simple, “Take time to smell the roses” in life, but enhancement of things that are good for me are not always obvious, like the sight or smell of roses. The group of things that are in the mild/moderate side of the good for me spectrum come usually unbidden and unexpected, and can go unnoticed. It is easier to notice the good things that I have earned, perhaps by some effort. This does take time, but more than time, it takes observation and acceptance. As noted above, it can be much harder to accept things that we have not earned and are truly coming from some part of the gracious universe. You will find that the more you observe and accept the simple pleasures of life, the more your life will be enhanced.

It might seem easy to enhance the joyous and pleasurable things in life, but many people struggle with being able to do so. There are many impediments to accepting and then enhancing things that are good for me:

  • I might be afraid that I will lose this thing that is good for me. Note the key word here: fear. Fear is by far the greatest impediment to enhancement of joy and pleasure.
  • I want more of what I received and thus fall into the trap of thinking that I have earned something that is good for me. You can never earn someone’s love. Neither can you keep it forever, just as the Israelites could not keep manna from heaven from one day to the next
  • You don’t know how to enhance something that is good for you, or it might be costly for you to do so. You might have to give something up in order to enhance your life with something that is truly good for you.

If you choose the path of enhancement of joyous and pleasurable things, you will notice that these things last longer than you expected, that they almost always end sometime, and that they have left an indelible mark on you. This mark is humility: you have recognized that you didn’t earn many of the good things you have, that you can’t pay someone back for the grace they have shown you, and that you can only “pay it forward” to others. So, you might:

  • Simply thank the person who gave you something, whether property, time, or comfort
  • Enjoy the moment however that moment might last, seconds or years. The moment will most surely end but there’s no value in worrying about it ending.
  • Remember what you have enjoyed, what was good for you
  • Make some note of how you can inculcate this “good for you” thing in your life
  • Pay it forward

Next up: Complexities in the Good for Me; Bad for me:

  • Good for Me: Bad for You.
  • Good for You; Bad for Me.
  • Good for Me but I don’t like it.
  • Bad for me but I do like it

Wanting It Both Ways

Ron Johnson Discovery, Feelings, grief, mindfulness, morality, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

I recently had a therapeutic hour with a patient who “wants to have it both ways.” I know exactly how he feels because I have had the same desires, as have many people who privilege me by coming to my office for my presence and counsel. Let me explain what “wanting it both ways” means. It means that you want two things, both valuable, that are incompatible. Like, I would like to have a million dollars and I don’t want to do what it might take to make a million dollars. I don’t exactly know what it would take for me to make a million dollars, but I suspect that if I did what millionaires do, I might be able to do it. I have a patient whom I recently saw together with his wife. During the conversation, which included finances, the man said that they had lost a million dollars during the recent economic turndown and stock market decline. A million dollar loss, I thought; what does that mean about what this man is worth? My conclusion, if my figuring is correct, is that the stock market is down about 25% and so losing a million dollars that suggests that this man (and his wife) used to be worth 4 million. Interestingly, this man reported to me that he often worked 80 and 90 hours a week to build his independent business. He evidently did this for many years and now a man of about 60, he is hoping for an early retirement and bask in the sunshine. So, here we have guy who’s worked his ass off for like 30 years and made his millions. What has been the cost? Why do you think I’m seeing his wife and him in my office? Is it not obvious? He has worked and worked but he has not put anything like 90 hours a week into his relationship with his wife and kids (now grown). He hasn’t put 9 hours into a relationship with his wife. Now, what he has done is quite remarkable, if we singularly see that he has made millions of dollars by his blood, sweat, and tears. But the cost has been the marriage. I am now working with people who are not only substantially different in personality. He is an ESTJ and caretaker/analyst temperament; she is ENFP and lover/player temperament for those of you familiar with such things. These differences have never been noticed, much less appreciated with the result that they have been unhappy together for years if not decades. The more remarkable thing about this scenario is that this hard-working, intelligent and honest man seems to think that the millions he has made should offset the lack of any kind of depth relationship with his wife. He wants it both ways: work all the time and make his millions, and then expect that his wife would honor, respect, and “appreciate” him, as he has often said. Not going to happen. He can’t have it both ways. He can’t have his millions, wrought by his hard work, and have a meaningful relationship with his wife. He really doesn’t get it…yet. We’re still working on it. By the way, his wife, as noticed by her personality type and temperament, also wants it both ways: she wants the millions but also wants a relationship. This man and wife collectively “have it both ways,” but one of them has the millions while the other has the desire for an intimate relationship.

“Wanting it both ways” covers a multitude of sin, meaning multitude of situations where people seem to think that they can have two things that are incapable. We have recently taken the responsibility of caring for our 14-year old grandson due to a complex set of circumstances, agreeing to this arrangement for a period of a few months, or less if it work out well. My grandson is bright, loving and kind, but he has no interest in doing any kind of work, no real passion, no direction, nor any purpose in life. He is effectively 7 years old emotionally and socially, meaning that he wants to play all the time like typical 7-year olds want to do. Nothing wrong with wanting to play all the time, but by the time you’re 14, you would think that you would have some understanding that life is a combination of work and play, that those two elements are intrinsically related, and come to grips with the fact that you have to work to play. Unfortunately, he has not learned this fact, so he tolerates work of any kind, always looking to race through it and get back to playing. There are many other children that are in this situation, almost always due to indulgent parents who didn’t provide the balance of loving and limiting. I wrote a blog (and a book) that I entitled “The 4-8-12 Child” that describes many children. My grandson got too much loving and not enough limiting, or perhaps more accurately, not a balance of the two. He wants it both ways: play all the time and have the privileges that only work can provide, like money, success, and a spirit of pride in work.

The wanting it both ways phenomenon comes in many forms, not only in adults and children as illustrated, but with one’s own life. Another man that I see is also very bright with a deep sense of intuition, particularly about other people. It may be his most important gift.  Recently, I had a conversation with him in which we talked about how he is able to “know” something about other people. He would like the privilege of telling people what he “knows” about them. He would also like to have the security that he will not hurt the other person, much less be rebuffed by the other person. Additionally and importantly, if he “knows” something about someone and says what he knows, he might actually discover that he sees only part of the picture of the other person. So his intuitive knowledge, while accurate, may be one of several matters that are relevant to the other person. This might be like someone telling me that I did not  put together colors in my attire for the day, and then telling me that the colors were out of sync without knowing that I am color blind and do not see colors the way most people see them. Now, it could be that I could profit from my friend’s analysis of my color scheme for the day, but it would be equally possible that I would be offended, perhaps depending on what else was going on in my day. So this individual who would like to be able to “know” something about other people, speak his intuitive knowledge, and be confident that his speaking will be well received, is not possible. He can have it one way or the other. In other words, he can speak his intuitive knowledge and take the consequences, which are unknown. Or he can keep his knowledge to himself and take the consequences. The consequences, by the way are, on the one hand, the distinct potential of hurting or harming the other person, or on the other hand, failing to say something to this person that might be life enhancing or even lifesaving. He would like it both ways. Nothing so out of the ordinary to want “your cake and eat it too,” but you can’t have both.

I would like to be able to be face-to-face with everyone during this time of medical caution during the Covid crisis. I really don’t want to do mostly conference calls with patients although I have already done three this week. I do them because it is required of some people to do them, whether out of state, out of city, or simply by individual choice. So, I can’t have it both ways, i.e. see patients face-to-face and occasionally shake hands or hug some of them, and take the chance of acquiring, or God forbid, spreading some kind of disease. I have to decide how I shall meet this current crisis.

I am not the only person who has to decide how to acknowledge that we can’t have it both ways despite the desire to do so. We all have to make this kind of decision every day: speak or don’t speak, hug or don’t hug, laugh or don’t laugh, swear or don’t swear, tell the truth or tell a while lie out of respect for the other person, and many more such difficult decisions. I think, however, it is not a “decision” so much as it is a discovery of what we should do in situations when we want it both ways. To discover is to listen to one’s inner spirit, not so much one’s thoughts, not one’s emotions, not one’s normal way of going about life. Inner spirit is never wrong, but it is deathly hard to see, feel, trust, and act upon. Then, when I have trusted my inner spirit and discovered which way I should turn in a certain situation, I will then be sad. Why will I be sad? Because I will have lost one opportunity for the sake of the other. If I force a hug on someone who might not like it, it might be good for him or bad for him, but if I think it is necessary to hug him, I will need to take the consequences of my action. The only way I can discover whether I should hug him or not is to find, trust, and follow my inner spirit.

If we can’t have it “both ways,” what can we have? We can discover which of two (or perhaps three or four) ways to go: speak or not speak, move or not move, hug or not hug, swear or not swear. What are we trying to discover? We are trying to discover what it right to do. How do we know what is right? By find, following, and trusting our inner spirit, a spirit that is never wrong. While the spirit is never wrong, the words, lack of words, action, or lack of action, might be wrong in some way. So, if I have discovered what is right, I must conclude that it is right for all concerned. Einstein said that the universe is “friendly” and God is not chaotic, or as Desiderata says it, “whether or not it is clear to you, the world is unfolding as it should.” The “right” may be hard on you or good for you, hard on the other person or good for him, or maybe a mix of all of these. Finding the right means pushing away any and all concern about what you think and feel, as well as any concern about what other people might want and feel to find the “right” thing to do. You can learn from your thoughts and your feelings, but then put them aside and do the right thing.

You will not succeed in this endeavor. By this I mean that you will do your best to find the right thing to do, and then sadly, realize that you didn’t trust your spirit enough, listen intently enough, said poorly constructed words, or taken action that was not entirely thought through. But you will have done your best: speak or not speak, acted or not acted. And whatever discovery you made for words or action, you will most assuredly be sad. You will be sad because you can’t have it both ways, whatever these two ways might have been. Deb and I have written about the centrality of sadness in life and have proposed that of the four basic emotions (joy, sadness, fear, and anger), sadness is the most important because it is based most squarely on love and the loss of love. We eventually lose everything that we love, whether property, person, or idea. An important part of maturity is coming to grips with this essential nature of human existence. The more you become familiar with taking action (or not), speaking (or not) and taking the natural consequences of these words and actions, the more frequently you will be sad, and most importantly, the shorter this sadness will be.

So, go forth into the realm of uncertainty. Do as Luther suggested when asked how one could find God’s will: “study thoroughly, pray fervently, ask wise people, and then sin boldly.” “Sin boldly” means going forth into the unknown, but with confidence that you have done your best to trust your inner spirit where God most certainly resides.