Listen to Your Lookout

If you’re in a close relationship, you have a resource others don’t have. You have a lookout.

When the wheels start to come off, everyone is prone to develop their own kind of problem and make their own kind of mistakes. Some get depressed or anxious or angry or just withdraw into themselves. Others use substances, or gamble, or have sex with everyone, or can’t stop shopping; others get controlling. Some have a combination of several kinds of problems and mistakes. Everyone’s got their thing. Your own type of problem and mistake is yours because it’s the very thing that sneaks up in your blind spots. When it fools anyone into thinking it’s a good thing, it fools you first. Continue reading →

A Guide to Pain and Suffering

Your feelings tell you about the state of your body. If you’re putting on a roof, carrying shingles up a ladder, swinging a hammer until your hand falls off, sweating it out at a hundred and ten degrees, your body will have a lot to say. You may not want to listen to it. You’ve got to cover the roof before the rainstorm comes; but, your body is trying to tell you something. It would be in your interest to listen sometimes.

The feeling of pain is the way the body speaks to you when it wants to say, cut it out, you’re exceeding limitations. When you swing a hammer until your hand is ready to fall off, tendonitis is developing. That’s why the old guy on your job, who used to swing a hammer all day, can’t anymore. He ruined his hands swinging that hammer, so now all he can do is talk to customers, write up estimates, and yell at you that you’re doing it wrong. He’d like to be on the roof and show you how to do it, but he didn’t listen to his body when it told him to stop. Continue reading →

Dissatisfaction and Craving

Sharpening your point until you miss it

There are two ways of wanting something; you can be broad, or you can be precise. It’s possible to be too broad or too precise.

There are many other words in the vast family of wanting: annoyance, anxiety, boredom, complaint, discomfort, dismay, displeasure, disquiet, distaste, exasperation, frustration, discouraged, disgruntled, distressed, and malcontent. I call the broad variety dissatisfied, and the precise kind, craving. Continue reading →

Don’t Play the Problem’s Game

When Problems Take Over a Relationship

How does a persistent problem get started and what keeps it going? Why does it seem to be immune to your attempts to defeat it? Let me explain how it gets so hard and how problems manipulate you into feeding them. Continue reading →

Ride The Ego Balloon

The ego is a good tool if you understand its uses and limitations

It all starts with you being a child. You have it really good. People take care of you, they feed you, clothe you, give you hugs, and put your awful drawings on the refrigerator with unrestrained praise. But nature cannot allow you to remain a child forever. It needs to stir the pot. It wants you to get out, take chances, spread your seed, and do stuff. How does nature get you to leave childhood? It casts a spell on you, makes you an adolescent and a little bit crazy. It takes you for a ride on the ego balloon. Continue reading →

Create Problem-Free Zones

When Problems Take Over a Relationship

If you’ve been hurt and a Problem has taken over your relationship, there’s plenty that you can do, other than succumb to the Problem yourself. Just because your boyfriend wants to get stinking drunk every time he goes out, doesn’t mean you have to clean him up when he comes home. If your girlfriend picks fights with everyone, it doesn’t mean you have to make excuses for her. If your husband chooses to gamble away his paycheck, it doesn’t mean he has to spend yours, too. Get out a little, be healthy, let your partner clean up his or her own mess. Create a Problem-Free Zone. Continue reading →

Feed the Person, Starve the Problem

One Halloween when I was a kid, I came home from trick-or-treating with a plastic pumpkin full of chocolate. My mouth had been watering ever since the second doorbell, but my costume prohibited taking an early snack. As soon as I got home, the mask came off, and I had my first piece of chocolate. The taste of that chocolate was so exquisite that I can still recall it. If I wasn’t a kid and didn’t know anything about it, I would have said I was having an orgasm over that piece of chocolate. It was so good that I had another and another and another, until, before I knew it, or my parents knew it, the entire pumpkin was gone, and I was so sick I barfed all the chocolate right back into the pumpkin where it came from.  Continue reading →

Self-Sufficiency

There was one point in my life when I was infatuated by the idea of self-sufficiency. It was when I was the most un-self-sufficient. I was coming out of adolescence, had no degree, no marketable skills, no place other than my parents’ to live, and was totally without savings. I declared I would be self-sufficient. I was not so self-sufficient that I didn’t need to tell others about it. Continue reading →