As I mentioned in my last post, I spent much of last week in lovely Southern California. Happily, I did little more on vacation than swim at various beaches and eat insanely good avocados. As a result, I found myself loving Southern California and wondering why, for my entire life, I have insisted on living in and staying in New York. I found myself literally rattling off all the reasons why New York was clearly terrible, including things like trying to get to work on the subway in 100 degree heat while wearing a suit, the fact that we only have about two months of beach weather, and the quality of the aforementioned avocados.
In essence, I couldn’t allow California to be good, without making New York bad. I literally found myself arguing about the relative qualities of the Atlantic versus the Pacific Oceans.
At some point, I came to my senses and started to realize that in order for California to be good, New York didn’t have to be bad. They could both be different and great in some ways and not so great in other ways.
I know that many times in my life, I’ve viewed various experiences in this all good/all bad paradigm. After having lost some weight on the Atkins diet, I literally could not understand why everyone wouldn’t want to try this diet and lose weight. I would see people eating bagels and think that they were crazy. I would think, Why would you eat so many carbs (so bad!) when you could go on Atkins and lose weight (so good!)? When I gained back the weight on Atkins and later started with Weight Watchers, I would think the exact same thing but with slightly different wording: Why would you not count points and eat so much fat (so bad!) when you could go on Weight Watchers and lose weight (so good!)? I thought this, of course, until I gained back the weight because diets don’t actually work. Nonetheless, I used this paradigm with so many things in my life, from jobs, to apartments, to guys I dated. In order to make one thing good I always had to make another one bad.
Even the good/bad paradigm isn’t all bad—it makes decision making much easier. It fails to take into account, however, the reality of much of the world, which is (and this is very hard for me to say as someone who follows politics) not typically all good or all bad. Most of our bad experiences have a drop of something good in them, something that we learned to overcome or that informed our choices later in life. I could look back on all of the crazy-making dieting I used to do and just see it as all bad, or I could look at the gifts it gave me, including a career in helping people stop dieting and learn to love their bodies. Our good experiences often encompass something difficult that we had to work through as well. The more we’re able to acknowledge the nuances of our experiences, the more we’re able to experience them fully and grow as a result.
This week, take a moment to think about something in your life that you have the all-good/all-bad approach to, and see if you can change your perception of it to one with more nuance. Feel free to comment below and let me know what you noticed!
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So true, PJ. I like how you related this to needing to deal with problems right away. It's true; sometimes if you let go of finding an immediate solution you can find it a little later on. Thanks!
Great piece. I can very much relate. I think along with absolutism comes the tendency to want to attack problems instantaneously (I must work out a solution NOW, even if it's one a.m.!) I've been a lot happier since I've decided that some things can just slide for a while, and that some people can be given second (or even third) chances. Why all the damn pressure all the time?