Hello,
and welcome to the newest week of our lives!
We hope that your week is going extremely well so
far,
and
that
you're able to make the rest of it even better.
Jai sent me out to buy a few groceries the other
day. After I found everything on the list, I figured
I'd get out of the store faster if I used the self-scan
aisle. I slid my credit card into the machine,
followed the directions, and scanned my groceries
myself. The machine chirped, beeped and said I owed
$16.55, but issued no receipt. So I swiped my credit
card again and started over.
Soon, two receipts popped out. The machine had
charged me twice.
At that point, I had a decision to make. I could
have tracked down the manager, who would have listened to
my story, filled out some form, and taken my credit card
to his or her register to remove one of the $16.55
charges. The whole tedious ordeal could have
stretched to ten or even fifteen minutes. It would
have been zero fun for me.
Given my short road ahead, did I want to spend those
precious minutes getting that refund? I did
not. Could I afford to pay the extra $16.55? I
could. So I left the store, happier to have fifteen
minutes than sixteen dollars.
All my life, I've been very aware that time is finite.
I admit that
I'm overly logical about a lot of things, but I firmly
believe that one of my most appropriate fixations has been
to manage time well. I've railed about time
management to my students. I've given lectures on
it. And because I've gotten so good at it, I really
do feel I was able to pack a whole lot of life into the
shortened lifespan I've been handed.
Here's what I know:
Time must be explicitly managed, like money. My
students would sometimes roll their eyes at what they
called "Pauschisms," but I stand by them.
Urging students not to invest time on irrelevant details,
I'd tell them: "It doesn't matter how well you
polish the underside of the banister."
You can always change your plan, but only if you have
one. I'm a big believer in to-do lists. It
helps us break life into small steps. I once put
"get tenure" on my to-do list. That was
naive. The most useful to-do list breaks tasks into
small steps. It's like when I encourage Logan to
clean his room by picking up one thing at a time.
Ask yourself: Are you spending your time on the
right things? You may have causes, goals,
interest. Are they even worth pursuing? I've
long held on to a clipping from a newspaper in Roanoke,
Virginia. It featured a photo of a pregnant woman
who had lodged a protest against a local construction
site. She worried that the sound of jackhammers was
injuring her unborn child. But get this: In
the photo, the woman is holding a cigarette. If she
cared about her unborn child, the time she spent railing
against jackhammers would have been better spent putting
out that cigarette.
Develop a good filing system. When I told Jai
I wanted to have a place in the house where we could file
everything in alphabetical order, she said I sounded way
to compulsive for her tastes. I told her:
"Filing in alphabetical order is better than running
around and saying, 'I know it was blue and I know I was
eating something when I had it.'"
Rethink the telephone. I live in a culture
where I spend a lot of time on hold, listening to
"Your call is very important to us." Yeah,
right. That's like a guy slapping a girl in the face
on a first date and saying "I actually do love
you." Yet that's how modern customer service
works. And I reject that. I make sure I am
never on hold with a phone against my ear. I always
use a speaker phone, so my hands are free to do something
else.
I've also collected techniques for keeping unnecessary
calls shorter. If I'm sitting while on the phone, I
never put my feet up. In fact, it's better to stand
when you're on the phone. You're more apt to speed
things along. I also like to have something in view
on my desk that I want to do, so I have the urge to wrap
things up with the caller.
Over the years, I've picked up other phone tips.
Want to quickly dispatch telemarketers? Hang up
while you're doing the talking and they're
listening. They'll assume your connection when bad
and they'll move on to their next call. Want to have
a short phone call with someone? Call them at 11:55
a.m., right before lunch. They'll talk fast.
You may think you are interesting, but you are not more
interesting than lunch.
Delegate. As a professor, I learned early on
that I could trust bright, nineteen-year-old students with
the keys to my kingdom, and most of the time, they were
responsible and impressive. It's never too early to
delegate. My daughter, Chloe, is just eighteen
months old, but two of my favorite photos are of her in my
arms. In the first, I'm giving her a bottle.
In the second, I've delegated the task to her. She
looks satisfied. Me, too.
Take a time out. It's not a real vacation if
you're reading email or calling in for messages.
When Jai and I went on our honeymoon, we wanted to be left
alone. My boss, however, felt I needed to provide a
way for people to contact me. So I came up with the
perfect phone message:
"Hi, this is Randy. I waited until I was
thirty-nine to get married, so my wife and I are going
away for a month. I hope you don't have a problem
with that, but my boss does. Apparently, I have to
be reachable." I then gave the names of Jai's
parents and the city where they live. "If you
call directory assistance, you can get their number.
And then, if you can convince my new in-laws that your
emergency merits interrupting their only daughter's
honeymoon, they have our number."
We didn't get any calls.
Some of my time-management tips are dead-on serious and
some are a bit tongue-in-cheek. But I believe all of
them are worth considering.
Time is all you have. And you may find one day that
you have less than you think.
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Now we come to the power of the Sensitive, the
Modest, and the Small--a power that all Piglets
have in potential, whether or not they have
anything to do with it. Of all the
teachings of East or West, Taoism places the
greatest emphasis on that power, which in Taoist
writings is personified in its varying aspects
as the Child, the Mysterious Female, and the
Spirit of the Valley. Significantly, these
are also personifications of the Tao itself.
Let's begin our examination of the Sensitive,
the Modest, and the Small by considering
Sensitivity. In the West, sensitivity is
considered a Minus rather than a Plus.
("Oh, you're just too
sensitive!") But even in denouncing
it as something to get rid of, the West
acknowledges a little of its tremendous
power. For example, it is widely
recognized that being negatively sensitive about
one's health through worry-imagery and
pessimistic self-talk can make and keep one
sick. What is not so widely recognized,
however, is that being positively
sensitive about one's
health--"listening" to the body,
avoiding damaging influences, imagining and
directing healing energy, visualizing perfect
health, and so on--can make and keep one well,
as an increasing number of people are
discovering, some of them through curing
themselves of "incurable" illnesses.
Sensitivity
and skill develop together--as one of them
increases in the process of learning something,
so does the other. A skilled ballet dancer
is aware of his or her muscles as they stretch
and contract, tighten and relax, through
exercise, practice, and performance.
Applying that sensitivity, the dancer leaps,
twirls and lands without apparent effort.
A skilled athlete of any sort is aware of just
how to move, how to hit or throw a ball in the
right way at the right time, how to do this or
that in order to score a point. Our last T'ai
Chi Ch'uan teacher had developed his
awareness to such an extent that he would
immediately know when anyone was trying to sneak
up on him. In their areas, at least, the
masters of any such skills are very
sensitive--and therefore very alert. As
Chuang-tse wrote:
Those of perfect Virtue cannot be burned by
fire, nor drowned by water. Neither can
they be harmed by heat or cold, nor injured by
wild animals. It is not that they are
indifferent--it is that they discriminate
between where they may safely rest and where
they will be in danger. Watchful in
prosperity and adversity, cautious in their
comings and goings, nothing can injure them.
The word for Taoist sensitivity is
Cooperate. As Lao-tse wrote, "The
skilled walker leaves no tracks"--one is
sensitive to (and therefore respectful toward)
one's surroundings and works with the natural
laws that govern them. Like a chameleon,
he or she blends in with What's There. And
one does this through the awareness that comes
from reducing the ego to nothing. As
Chuang-tse put it:
To those who dwell not in themselves, the
forms of things reveal themselves as they
are. They move like water, reflect like
mirrors, respond like an echo. Their
lightness makes them seem to disappear.
Still as a clear lake, they are harmonious in
their relations with those around them, and
remain so through profit and loss. They do
not precede others, but follow them instead.
Living
Life Fully, the e-zine
exists to try to provide for visitors of the world wide web a
place
of growth, peace, inspiration, and encouragement. Our
articles
are presented as thoughts of the authors--by no means do
we
mean to present them as ways that anyone has to live
life. Take
from them what you will, and disagree with
whatever you disagree
with--just know that they'll be here for you
each week.
To become
different from what we are,
we must have some awareness of what we
are.
Bruce Lee
Never
Decide to Quit a Race While Running Uphill
Many
of my life lessons have come through running, mostly
because I do so much of it. I enjoy running
almost always, though there are those times when the
run doesn't feel all that good and I can think of a
whole bunch of things that I'd rather be doing other
than continuing to run.
Sometimes, though, there are reasons for a run not
feeling good that have little to do with my personal
state of mind or health. Running uphill, for
example, is one of the things that makes a runner
feel much more of a challenge than a level run will
offer, and depending on the hill or the day, an
uphill stretch can be anything from challenging to
miserable. Of course, we battle gravity with
every step we take on this planet, but when we're
going uphill, the struggle intensifies.
You know the feeling--your legs start to get more
tired, your breath gets more difficult to
catch. When I'm running, the effect on my legs
is even more pronounced, as I'm trying to propel my
body weight uphill as well as forward, at a faster
pace than I'd be going at while walking. My
legs simply get more tired, more quickly, and the
temptation to stop and walk the rest of the way up
the hill becomes much, much stronger.
The beauty of running hills, though, is the feeling
I get after I crest them. When I reach the top
of the hill and start to run on level ground again,
or even start to go downhill, it's a wonderful
feeling not just because the running is now easier,
but also because I've just accomplished something
important--I made it all the way up the hill, even
though it was a struggle.
In a race, things are worse on hills because I'm
running much faster than I normally run. My
legs get more tired, and the temptation to stop and
walk becomes stronger. But I know that the
temptation is stronger because I'm challenging
myself more, and I really want to live up to that
challenge. If I'm running a 5k race, for
example, that has one or two significant hills in
it, I know that how I do in the overall race has a
lot to do with how I run the hills. My pace
may be much, much slower while climbing the hill,
but that's okay--I'll pick up the pace when I finish
the hill. If I stop and walk, though, because
the hill is challenging, then I've done more than
just walk--I've given in to temporary discomfort and
sabotaged the entire race because I didn't finish
the hill I started.
Some of the challenges that I face in life are very
similar to the hills I climb in races. They're
very challenging and very difficult, and they make
me want to give up, to slow down and walk, or to
completely quit the race. This happens in
teaching a lot, when conditions at certain schools
become rather unbearable--the temptation is to throw
in the towel and move on to something else that's
less challenging. When I'm doing work around
the house, I often find that it becomes much more
difficult than I had planned on it being, and I want
to give up and move on to something else.
I watch students fall out of races constantly, as
soon as a class or a situation becomes too
difficult--they just give up. One of my goals
then is to try to get them to see the value in
persevering, in keeping on and working to make their
ways through challenges rather than let challenges
control them. In their situations, they've hit
an uphill section of the course--something that's
more challenging than what they're used to--and
making the decision to quit while they're on the
most difficult part of the course they're on.
Of course, there are times when it makes sense to
quit a race--if I get hurt, I'm out. I prefer
to maintain my health rather than risk further
injury. And some races just aren't worth
it--there's no compelling reason to make it to the
finish line. I've been in situations in which
continuing on the current course made no sense at
all, for it benefited no one at all in any
significant way. When I tried to learn to play
the piano, for example, it became very clear very
soon that this was a race that didn't need to be
finished, because it would be full of uphills and
the end result would be that I would be a mediocre
piano player at best.
Where are you right now? You're probably
running several different races simultaneously,
dealing with family, relationships, work, school, or
any number of other life situations. Some of
them are probably going smoothly, but what about the
others? Are you going uphill, running a more
difficult section of the course? Does the
uphill make you want to give up and move to
something else? It may be that giving up is
the best thing for you, but I would encourage you
not to make the decision to do so while you're on a
difficult stretch. Wait until the road levels
out and your legs aren't feeling like lead and
you're finding it hard to catch your breath, for
your best decisions are going to be made when you're
able to perceive a situation from a place of
balance. And believe me: slogging uphill
does not provide us with a sense of balance.
Yes, life
can be mysterious and confusing--but there's much of life that's
actually rather dependable and reliable. Some principles apply
to life in so many different contexts that they can truly be called
universal--and learning what they are and how to approach them and use
them can teach us some of the most important lessons that we've ever
learned.
My doctorate is in Teaching and Learning. I use it a lot when I
teach at school, but I also do my best to apply what I've learned to
the life I'm living, and to observe how others live their lives.
What makes them happy or unhappy, stressed or peaceful, selfish or
generous, compassionate or arrogant? In this book, I've done my
best to pass on to you what I've learned from people in my life,
writers whose works I've read, and stories that I've heard.
Perhaps these principles can be a positive part of your life, too! Universal Principles of Living Life Fully. Awareness of
these principles can explain a lot and take much of the frustration
out of the lives we lead.
Explore all of our
quotations pages--these links will take you to the first page of each
topic, and those pages will contain links to any additional pages on
the same topic (there are five pages on adversity, for example).
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