How much have you changed?
Little or big. Share an account of something that has changed in you, or that you changed in yourself.
Maybe when you were a child you hated asparagus and loved chocolate, and now the opposite is true. Maybe you used to be conservative and now you're liberal. Maybe you used to be shy and now you're outgoing. Maybe you used to believe that Jesus was your savior and now you don't. Maybe you used to feel that life was meaningless and now you find it very fulfilling. What changed? How did it happen?
Maybe when you were a child you hated asparagus and loved chocolate, and now the opposite is true. Maybe you used to be conservative and now you're liberal. Maybe you used to be shy and now you're outgoing. Maybe you used to believe that Jesus was your savior and now you don't. Maybe you used to feel that life was meaningless and now you find it very fulfilling. What changed? How did it happen?
posted by Ted Miin at 3/25/2007 02:03:00 AM
4 Comments:
I'll go first. I used to have this minor OCD thing with counting.
Whenever I ate anything, I always had to count the number of ingredients in it. Bread, turkey, cheese, tomato, lettuce, onions, pickles, mayonnaise... the more the ingredients the more fun I had counting them, over and over.
The same with floor tiles, United Nations flags, stacks of bananas at the grocery store, everything. If I couldn't count them individually, I tried to devise methods to make really good estimates of the actual number.
At some point that habit got to be very disruptive, and made me feel anxious whenever I was faced with an unidentified quantity of objects/items/components.
At this point in this post I was expecting to have some great cognitive solution that I could recount, but I just realized that I never really consciously did anything about the counting. It still happens now and then, but less frequently, and not uncontrollably. I kind of just grew out of it. So I guess there's something that changed.
Everything. Nothing. My politics have gone progressively to the left (for good reason)...oh yeah.
db
As recently as a year ago, and my entire life before that, I had a feeling that time was infinite and I had only an abstract concept aging and I never thought about it. Now I think about it constantly and everything I do is accompanied by an uneasy feeling that I might be wasting my time completely. I often feel anxiety for no apparent reason and I think this is why.
Hi Kevin, thanks for posting. The feeling of wasted time is a pretty big issue, and although I can't say I feel the same, I highly doubt you are alone. Would you say that the uneasy feeling is characterized by a feeling of unproductiveness, or lacking big accomplishment? Are you very in tune with your values and passions, but are not finding them?
The immediate suggestions that come to mind are all very cognitive, and probably not very useful. But if there is something that you can know that would affect your feeling, it would probably be covered in Stephen Covey's "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People." Have you read that book? I would recommend it. I would also recommend Ken Wilbur, and some Buddhist philosophies.
I'm a strong believer of the power of the mind, and the ability to consciously mentally improve one's own condition. Perhaps you are more empowered than you think.
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