How To Always Get What You Want
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010
Yesterday, Bea left a great comment that raised an excellent question. She said, “I was wondering how to feel good when nothing seems to be working out as desired or wanted or dreamed in life.” I offered one way of doing this in my last post, but now I’m going to simplify it even more.
Notice that in Bea’s question, she makes a connection that we all make—or at least it’s one that I’ve always made. She connects naturally feeling good to having things the way we want them to be.
It’s a reasonable connection. Of course we feel good when things are working out the way we want to them to.
So how can we always have things work the way we want them to? (more…)
Imagine a cute little toddler who is learning to walk. She’s gotten to a point where she can pull herself upright. She can take herky-jerky steps, those steps that always remind me of the lurching gate of the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man. She can careen a few feet before she plops on her adorable tush. She does this over and over, stumbling, tripping, falling, trying again.
I chose a big gyrating bowl of cherries. My theory was that the system of neurological connections that handle memory was like this bowl in that each memory was a new cherry dropped into the moving bowl. As the bowl churned the contents, the cherries agitated, and the new, whole cherries (new memories) got broken down over time. Eventually they became bits and juice and pits. The bits, I suggested, were those snippets of memory we have that are incomplete, that we can’t seem to connect with other things. The juice is all of our memories, most of it not accessible by our conscious mind but there nonetheless. The pits are long term memories, the ones that we can easily pull up.
