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The Most Important Skill to Deal with Life

I’m trying to teach my kids to be flexible. Like me, both are obsessive planners. Just yesterday, my older son was telling me he’d been planning out his entire school year right to the last day. My advice to him?

Don’t get too locked into those plans.

Mood music:

I’m not trying to discourage careful planning. It’s good to plan; it keeps us organized. I find daily list making to be enormously helpful. I’m also not encouraging them to lower their expectations of life. We need our expectations to motivate us toward great things.

What I am trying to tell them is that when you set your heart to lofty expectations, you risk huge letdowns when things don’t go as planned. Letdowns are important, too, because they humble us and help us to learn and move forward. But too many letdowns can beat a person down, and a lot of the time it isn’t necessary.

I’ve set myself up for those kinds of letdowns in the past, when schedule changes seemed like calamities.

When I was a kid, I’d throw epic tantrums if we went to the movies and the film we wanted to see was sold out. That’s typical childhood behavior, but it followed me to adulthood. I’d rage if a traffic jam threw off the timing of when I’d get from point A to B (I still hate that, but my reaction is more muted). If plans for a night out with friends or a quiet night at home suddenly changed, I’d sink into a depressive funk.

I used to get ridiculously dramatic when something failed to meet my expectations. I’d give in to my addictive impulses, mope for days and, perhaps worst of all, I’d let disappointment completely destroy the rest of the day, weekend, holiday, what have you.

As I get older, I’m better at going with the flow, though I admit I still succumb on occasion. I have my expectations out of life, but I always keep in mind that unforeseen obstacles will appear. That way, when it happens, my brain can more readily move on to a revised state of affairs.

If I miss an appointment because of traffic, I can always reschedule the appointment. If we don’t get to a movie on time, we can find plenty of other enjoyable activities to fill the time. If one work opportunity caves in, there are always other opportunities waiting around the corner.

It’s a lesson I hope to pass on to my sons.

Survival Book surrounded by a jungle

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Emily Dickinson: Proof You Can Be a Happy Recluse?

Much has been written about the reclusive later years of poet Emily Dickinson. Eventually she rarely left her room, where she sat and wrote thousands of poems that didn’t see publication until years after her death.

Mood music:

https://youtu.be/bV-dWhYklqE

During a tour of her house last week, people in the group speculated on why she wouldn’t leave the house in those years. Did she suffer a mental affliction or phobia? Probably.

But whenever I look at her life, I’m struck by the fact that, despite the likelihood of mental illness, she stayed sharp, stayed creative and seemed happy.

No one will ever be able to tell us what went through her mind in those years. She shared herself in her poetry, to be sure. She wrote a lot about death, no doubt about that. One of her most famous lines was, after all, “Because I could not stop for Death — / He kindly stopped for me.”

But by most accounts, she wasn’t depressed or crazed. She didn’t live in darkness. The first thing that strikes you when seeing her room is that she had huge windows that bathe the room in light and offer spectacular views. In her day, before all the structures and foliage that’s there now, she had a view that likely stretched for miles.

She reveled in the nature right outside her windows. She wrote about adventures had by animals, birds and insects. Each blade of grass was a wilderness:

Fame is a bee.
It has a song—
It has a sting—
Ah, too, it has a wing.

I don’t profess to have any definitive answers on her state of mind. How would I know, anyway?

Reclusiveness is rarely seen as healthy. I know that if I don’t frequently see something of the world, I start to go bananas. I also know that there were times in my teens and 20s when I’d retreat to my room for long periods, and I was not in a good mental state.

But if the stuff that came off of Emily’s pen was any indication, home was all she needed.

Portrait of Emily Dickinson

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Happy in My Discomfort

I’ve written about information security for more than a decade, but I’ve never pulled the levers, so to speak, until this past week. It’s both terrifying and awesome.

Mood music:

People in my industry assume I know how to conduct a penetration test, process software vulnerabilities and manage compliance operations. Truth is, I know how to write about this stuff, but I’ve never actually done these things. I never claimed that I had, but since my writing has veered unashamedly toward the side of security advocacy, I can see where people might make the assumption.

One reason I took my current job is because I felt the need to be part of a security operation rather than simply writing about it.

In recent weeks, I’ve started the training. I attended a session on how to be an threat incident response manager and processed my first three vulnerabilities. I still can’t say I know what I’m doing, and I expect to screw up plenty when my time comes to jump into the fire. But the mechanics aren’t so alien to me now, and that’s a quantum leap.

But there’s a much bigger point for me to make: Getting this type of training is a watershed moment.

A few years ago, the terror of the unknown and fear of failure would have kept me from doing any of this stuff. Training can seem like routine to some follks, but when you live with things like fear, anxiety, depression and OCD, the wall to climb looks much higher than it really is.

That’s not to say I’m going about all these things in a carefree manner. I still have my episodes of self-doubt. I still experience stress when thinking about how best to manage the new skills in tandem with the editorial and writing skills that encompass 90 percent of my job.

But unlike the old me, I know I can do it. I’m at peace with the mistakes I know I’ll make. I’m prepared to be the guy people talk about in meetings when the subject turns to who fucked what up during an incident. These days, I can show up.

All this training a gift. So is the fact that I can accept the gift. And even though mistakes are inevitable, I can accept that as part of the learning process.

Bill the Cat leaning on lever behind sign that says Don't Lean on Lever

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Happy Depression

I’ve been in a mental space lately that some would consider strange. I’m somewhat depressed but also fairly content and happy. To most people, feeling all those things at once doesn’t make sense. You’re either happy or depressed. But I’ve found that it’s more complicated than that.

Mood music:

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/33409634″ iframe=”true” /]

I used to spend my depressive episodes curled up in a ball, feeling sorry for myself. Depression was cause for making the world stop and accepting everyone’s sympathy. It was a time to let things slide at work and to binge on food, alcohol and worse.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to see my depressed episodes as a mild nuisance, like the common cold or a toothache. It sucks to have it, but life has to go on. I still have to work, get my kids from points A to B and be available when a friend or family member needs help. Curling up in a ball is no longer an option, though the occasional 20-minute nap is OK.

Medication has helped. So has therapy. My faith has made a massive difference, too. But I think the bigger game changer in how I view my depression came from the realization that I had unrealistic views on what it was to be happy.

We have an overdeveloped sense of what happiness is supposed to be. I call it the Happily Ever After Syndrome. We have this stupid idea that if we can just get the right job, find the right mate, accumulate the right amount of material things and have as little conflict with people as possible that we’re going to be on cloud nine for the rest of our lives.

Deep down we know that’s bullshit. But we reach for it anyway.

It’s a battle of false expectations. And when we can’t reach those expectations, it’s a huge let down. It creates a hole in our souls that we try to fill with more material things and addictions.

That stuff makes us feel better for a few minutes, but before long we feel worse than ever.

I think that hole is still in me. But through the grace of God it’s gotten a lot smaller.

I used to raise my fist and scream at God over how unfair life can be. I saw myself as a victim. Now I get it: We all have our ups and downs. We all have difficult problems to carry on our shoulders.

Happiness isn’t the absence of trouble. It’s not the worry-free, rainbow-infested existence I used to think it was.

In my case, happiness comes from getting a shot at doing things that matter to me. When I feel depressed, I can still keep going because of all the good stuff in my life: my wife and kids, a job I love, this blog, etc.

The depression wants me to forget all those things and give in to despair. And that’s what I used to do. But when I keep focusing on the important things in my life, I find that the depressed periods go away sooner than they used to.

So while I’m a little depressed this morning, I’m also full of gratitude. I have a great life, despite all my missteps along the way.

October Sun