The Size of Our Suffering Is The Size Of Our Secrets
What am I up to?
Occasionally, what the hell am I up to?
This question seems to be at the core of what it means to be human and at the same time it’s the secret we’re all keeping from each other.
Dax Moy, introduced me to the question: Do you a. struggle knowing what to do or b. struggle consistently doing it?
Almost everyone answers B. when they really think about it.
Yet at the same time this isn’t our predicament with everything. There are things that we effortlessly do that others struggle with.
It’s like in some areas, often our area of competence “all of us” is aligned behind the thing and action feels effortless.
Then we turn to another area of our lives and we can want to do the thing, we have the desire for the result, yet we find ourselves unable to create the consistency that will both get us the result AND allow us to keep it.
It’s as if part of us is pushing forward and part of us is resisting.
Faced with the choice of experiencing ourselves as both outside of our own control and incompetent or, in control and compete we obviously choose the latter not least to keep our sanity in tact.
Which would be fine of course if that place we didn’t want to look didn’t have the rest of our lives attached to it.
For example, you sleep poorly. That might seem ok in isolation, at least for a a while. But soon the energy demand of the day causes you to start reaching for sugar and caffeine to lift your energy. Which leads to even stronger energy slumps which leads to more sugar and caffeine. Which leads to worse sleep. All of which leads to difficulty concentrating, particularly in meetings or things you don’t find interesting or energising. You start to struggle with memory consolidation so you don’t learn as fast and start to forget little things, promises made. You have less patience for people who don’t get to the point. You get frustrated with your kids because they haven’t yet mastered tidying or managing all the complexities of life in a way that’s convenient to you. You start giving the worst of yourself to your partner.
One thing and the whole thing unravels, and there are PLENTY of threads to pull on, sleep is just one of many.
And perhaps the root isn’t even sleep?
Sleep is an involuntary process after all. Anyone who has driven tired on the motorway knows that it’s a battle you can’t win for long. You can’t force a sleep that doesn’t want you but when it wants you it’s taking you. Unless you’re sat in a Casino in Vegas with trick lighting, alcohol and a room pumped full of oxygen.
The root isn’t sleep. It’s the secret. You don’t know what the hell you’re up to. In this area at least and that’s terrifying.
We’re worried that there might be something uniquely wrong with us despite the fact that this describes all of us.
Perhaps I’m more lost than everyone else? We think.
I think there is good evidence for this idea too.
We cannot stand hypocrisy.
Matthew 23:27-28 “You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.”
I looked that up because the etymology of hypocrisy described hypocrisy as “the sin of pretending goodness or virtue”.
We hate it when people say they have things together when they don’t. We hate it when people give advice they aren’t qualified to give or pass judgement thus acting ‘holier than thou.’
It seems to be something like resentment for claiming unearned competence or status.
Perhaps it’s more though.
Humans learn by copying. We have neurons in our brain known as mirror neurons that modulate their activity both when an individual executes a specific act and when they observe the same or similar act performed by another individual.
This indicates that humans learn the way to go by copying those around them that know. So claiming to know when infact you don’t is potentially leading the whole tribe astray. Perhaps that points to our built in hatred of hypocrisy?
We know we learn by mirroring too because we say things like,
“Kids learn from what you do not what you say.”
And; “if you want to learn what someone is up to watch what they do not what they say”.
Both point to the idea that we must be conscious of our own actions because that’s what teaches and other people’s for the same reason. Which is to say, be careful from whom you learn.
You are the average of the 5 people you spend most of your time with. They say.
That’s even more true of the people that surrounded you in your formative years.
I believe that what you believe to be true is what you act out, not what you say you believe is true.
And I think we behave towards others like we believe this too.
We judge people for their actions. We also convict them for their actions.
We also give advice like JUST stop smoking, quit your job, leave him or her, start exercising, go to bed earlier, pick up the phone, what ever it might be.
Yet privately we have a whole bunch of things we tell ourselves to JUST do, that we can’t seem to get ourselves to do.
I believe the resistance we face is our beliefs.
You can say of course that you intellectually believe that you SHOULD exercise for example but if you don’t then on some level you don’t believe you should.
Belief is a funny thing. For example thousands of people online claimed to “believe” that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex ring from a Pizza restaurant in the US.
Despite knowing where it was, the police weren’t inundated with calls and only one person stormed with place totting a riffle. Clearly intellectually believing something is different to functionally believing it.
I’ve also found this time and time again with my clients.
A CEO I was working with was having trouble consistently exercising. He told me this story about his grandad.
He was walking with him through an amusement park and there were some overweight people eating takeaway food.
With a look of disgust on this face his grandad had said “fat people are so lazy.”
5 words and that memory had stayed with him for 47 years.
Whats going on there?
By now we know that our memories aren’t just libraries that accurately store up everything that ever happens to us ready to play back at will.
Our memory appears to hold onto and condenses information that it believes (at the time) will allow us to survive or take advantage of opportunity in the future.
My clients 7 year old brain learned in that moment something like, to avoid disgust and reducing your status in the tribe you need to avoid getting fat.
I can’t say it was exactly that but he acted like that. He only exercised when he feared he was gaining weight or would if he continued in his current behaviour.
When we started to find evidence to refute this belief he started ACTING like it wasn’t true.
Then we found other things he believed and started finding evidence to support it that supported how he wanted to act.
Looking at the question from the beginning “what am I up to?” What we’re up to is, acting out what we believe.
The nature of how we learn though means that those things we believe and act out weren’t necessarily put there by us.
They were passed to us. Indoctrinated into a child brain not fully formed and not equipped to filter, reflect or resist.
They were handed to us, often by well meaning hypocrites. Those determined to not have us follow their indoctrinated actions.
Themselves victims of the secret that we all often feel unable to do those things that we believe would most serve us.
Which brings us to what exactly we can do about this?
We have to start telling the truth.
First to ourselves, perhaps with pen and paper, why do I do that? How do I really feel, what do I really believe given the way I behave. This is some of the work I do with my clients.
Then we start telling the truth to those closest to us, then to everyone all of the time.
What that looks like in practice is often speaking less, saying I don’t know a lot more, not giving an opinion when you don’t have your own. Being careful to not let other people’s words come out of your mouth.
As every major religion states, “the truth shall set you free”.
If you found value in this please share it with someone you think would find it valuable too.
