A Stack of Christmas Cards

Sometimes, we come upon realizations from the most unexpected places. For me, one such place was the table in my apartment. I received Christmas cards recently and they are on top of the kitchen table in a messy stack.  It's not too much of a stretch to state that for most people, greeting cards bring joy and remind them of the people who care about them. This is the "normal" reaction someone should have in such a situation. My reaction? Well, I guess that's where my realization occurred.

For those who have not read my blog, part of my day job involves searching through the last known residences of lonely deceased individuals who passed away in Los Angeles County. One of my responsibilities is to try to locate living relatives for these folks. One of the main strategies I use when searching through a residence is to find greeting cards and personal letters from family and friends. I then read the cards and check the return addresses for clues on where potential family might reside. Why am I describing all this? Well, this is important context for what I experienced when I looked at the stack of Christmas cards on my table.

What did I think when I looked at those cards? Did I think of the people who sent them to me? Did I think of the importance of family and friends and staying connected? Did I think of all the positive and wonderful feelings associated with the holidays? No, unfortunately I didn't. The very first (and vivid) thought that came to mind was my own death and what would someone in my position do if they were searching through my apartment. Would they go straight to the cards and find return addresses? If they know how to do their job, they most likely would.

Sometimes, we aren't strong enough to handle the emotional burden of a situation. I thought I could handle this job, but I don't think I can. I believe it's time to admit that the presence of these morbid thoughts in mundane situations isn't normal and I need to find a new position as soon as possible so I don't have to deal with such feelings any longer (or as often). I wouldn't have come upon this realization (or at least as soon as I did) if I hadn't looked at those Christmas cards and paid attention to my thoughts.

Being reminded of death every day is tedious. It's tiring. Thinking about the lives of lonely and wretched deceased individuals makes me tired. So. Fucking. Tired. At this point in my life, I am enough of a grownup to admit that something is too much for me to handle. Perhaps, "maturity is knowing what your limitations are" (Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle) and accepting them.

I am too afraid to share these thoughts with friends and family. I will just have to write them here for now.

Life Lessons

I recently read letters written by the author Rainer Maria Rilke. He sent  these letters to his friend Mr. Knopps. Rainer provides thoughtful and moving advice to his friend to help him gain perspective on the life difficulties that he is facing. There is an immense amount of wisdom in Rainer's words and he helped me gain clarity on various issues that I think about in my own life. My hope is that by sharing these thoughts, I can help others with their difficulties as well.

Rainer begins by discussing the importance of remembering our inner worth even when we find ourselves in difficult external circumstances:

And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds—wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories?

It's important to remember that even during our struggles and when life isn't going in the direction we want, we still have a rich inner world that we have cultivated and formed throughout our lifetime. This internal value cannot be taken away from us even when our surroundings have changed for the worse.  We can tap into this core and use it as a source of emotional strength to help us persevere through arduous times.

Related to this idea is exploring our inner selves to discover solutions to our problems and for tapping our creativity:

Sir, I can’t give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create.

Often times, going deep into ourselves can be a terrifying experience and it potentially scares many people because they end up being viewed as someone who “takes things too seriously” and “overthinks” everything. Additionally, if one does not have experience with introspection then the inner world has remained largely unexplored. If something is unexplored, it contains numerous uncertainties and unknowns. Such an environment (whether real or in our mind) can be an intimidating place to enter, at least initially. Rainer uses a beautiful metaphor to describe this foreign inner landscape and why it can be frightening:

Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing.

Furthermore, such introspection could have heavy costs because

every person must choose how much truth he can stand. ― Irvin D. Yalom. 

By going down the road of self-awareness, we eventually start discovering issues that are emotionally challenging to confront. For instance, we potentially end up asking questions about life's meaning, what we are meant to devote ourselves to, what it means to lead a fulfilling life, what should be our priorities, and other "big" questions that do not have easy and straightforward answers. Such questions are difficult and intimidating to face directly and a simpler and more tempting solution could be avoidance and distraction.

However, having said that, the “cost” of going down this path is absolutely worth it and we can end up living more honest, genuine, and meaningful lives. We might not be as happy as someone who didn’t go through the same trial but at least we will be more self aware and honest with ourselves. Rainer touches upon this topic as well: 

Nevertheless, even then, this self-searching that I as of you will not have been for nothing. Your life will still find its own paths from there, and that they may be good, rich, and wide is what I wish for you.

The mental and emotional effort that we exert will not be in vain and we can come out the other end as someone who is more prepared to lead a fulfilling life. Additionally, such a deliberate introspective quest can allow us to truly address the root of our anxieties and fears:

The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly.

Throughout this whole process, Rainer advises a change in our perspective and learning to accept uncertainty and asking questions instead of fearing it and hoping it will go away as soon as possible. He advises

to have patience with everything unresolved in [our] heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.

He recommends welcoming the mystery and looking at it as a challenging puzzle to discover and solve over time because

it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult.

The more challenging an ordeal is, the more we learn in the process of conquering it. Further, the most worthwhile goals, wants, and desires are difficult to attain and take an immense amount of work and a certain amount of suffering. But, if something is difficult to attain, it's likely that the sense of satisfaction and happiness after attaining it is going to be significant. Additionally, the journey towards the goal itself will be full of growth and self discovery.  This is assuming the goal isn’t rooted in consumerism or anything else equally superficial.

Rainer explores this issue even further with a wonderful metaphor:

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Such a change in perspective is essential for confronting aspects of our lives that create fear and anxiety.

Rainer then continues on to discuss the importance of forming valuable friendships, He believes we should

seek out some simple and true feeling of what [we] have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when [we] change again and again.

Instead of focusing on what an "ideal" friendship is or having a laundry list of restrictions for filtering out who can be our friend and who can't, we should instead focus on core attributes such as how kind and caring the person is. For instance, if we can't have a deep intellectual connection with someone, should we discount them as a potential close friend? What if this individual is caring and is there to support us when we are facing difficult emotional situations? Such a personality trait should not be discounted and it can survive and always be a friendship-strengthening force no matter what kinds of changes we go through. A friend who cares about us is always a blessing, both during difficult and favorable times.

However, if we do end up failing to form close friendships, Rainer has additional advice:

If there is nothing you can share with other people, try to be close to Things; they will not abandon you; and the nights are still there, and the winds that move through the trees and across many lands; everything in the world of Things and animals is still filled with happening, which you can take part in.

If we find ourselves being consistently disappointed and hurt by the people in our lives, we should cultivate hobbies, learn to appreciate time spent in nature, and have solitary activities that we can be involved in as a way of coping with interpersonal shortcomings and struggles.  This isn't an ideal path to take since it involves further isolation but it's perhaps better than doing nothing at all and becoming even more idle and potentially depressed.

Rainer also discusses the importance of moving past personal boundaries and expanding our horizons. He uses an apt metaphor to make his point:

If we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain security.

We are often times tempted to settle for security instead of exploration or going past our boundaries. Being cautious provides us with comfort and security and such a path is quite tempting. A sense of security is comforting in the short term but it gains us nothing in the long-term and it stifles growth.

Rainer also has encouraging advice for getting through our melancholic days:

But in every sickness there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And that is what you, insofar as you are your own doctor, must now do, more than anything else.

It's true that sometimes the only way to power through a low point is to do our best to simply wait it out. Depending on how serious the issue is, sometimes a single night's rest can do wonders in changing our outlook and mood. However, for more serious situations, it could take considerably longer. But the underlying idea should not be forgotten: the passage of time can have a healing effect. 

And finally, let's not forget that going through difficult times and experiencing emotional setbacks can give us a unique insight into helping others during their times of most need:

And if there is one more thing that I must say to you, it is this: Don’t think that the person who is trying to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes give you much pleasure. His life has much trouble and sadness, and remains far behind yours. If it were otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words.

Sometimes, the words "I know, I've been there and it does get better. Let's talk. I'm here to listen" can mean the world to a person who might be at their lowest point. Them realizing that we have experienced something similar to what they are feeling now can help immensely and allow them to trust us to listen to them non-judgmentally.  Being there for someone and having them feel heard can have immense emotional benefits, but if the person also knows that we have relevant personal experience, then they are even more likely to feel comfortable and share their innermost troubles with us.

I hope Rainer Maria Rilke's thoughtful commentary and beautiful metaphors can help others as much as they helped me. That is my goal for sharing this.

Please Write

"The act of writing is itself enough; it serves to clarify my thoughts and feelings. The act of writing is an integral part of my mental life; ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing. My journals are not written for others, nor do I usually look at them myself, but they are a special, indispensable form of talking to myself."


-Oliver Sacks


An important part of living responsibly and in a healthy way is knowing how to take proper care of yourself. Most of us know that we must exercise and eat properly to stay in shape and be healthy. But, there is another kind of self care that is not discussed as often: mental and emotional exercise. Just like your body, your mind needs care and attention as well. One of the main ways of accomplishing this is through writing. As Mr. Sacks so eloquently hinted at above, writing has numerous mental, emotional, and even physical benefits.

The list of benefits is extensive and the therapeutic effects of writing have been studied for several decades:

Experiments going back to the 1980s have shown that 'therapeutic' or 'expressive' writing can reduce depression, increase productivity and even cut down on visits to the doctor. The act of writing is more powerful than people think.

In one particular study, writing about stressful life events was even effective at fighting serious illnesses such as asthma and rheumatoid arthritis: 

Patients were assigned to write either about the most stressful event of their lives (n=71; 39 asthma, 32 rheumatoid arthritis) or about emotionally neutral topics

Experimental group participants showed greater rates of improvement and lesser rates of worsening than the control group across both diseases 

Writing about stressful life experiences improves physician ratings of disease severity and objective indices of disease severity in chronically ill patients 

Of evaluable patients 4 months after treatment, asthma patients in the experimental group showed improvements in lung function (the mean percentage of predicted forced expiratory volume in 1 second [FEV1] improved from 63.9% at baseline to 76.3% at the 4-month follow-up; P<.001), whereas control group patients showed no change.

Rheumatoid arthritis patients in the experimental group showed improvements in overall disease activity  

Results confirm the hypothesis that writing about emotionally traumatic experiences reduced symptoms in individuals with chronic illness.

Additionally, a meta-analysis of all the studies on this topic found numerous other benefits associated with expressive writing:

Longer-term benefits of expressive writing

Health outcomes

• Fewer stress-related visits to the doctor
• Improved immune system functioning
• Reduced blood pressure
• Improved lung function
• Improved liver function
• Fewer days in hospital
• Improved mood/affect
• Feeling of greater psychological well-being
• Reduced depressive symptoms before examinations
• Fewer post-traumatic intrusion and avoidance symptoms

 Social and behavioural outcomes 

• Reduced absenteeism from work
• Quicker re-employment after job loss
• Improved working memory
• Improved sporting performance
• Higher students’ grade point average
• Altered social and linguistic behaviour

Medical conditions that might benefit from expressive writing programmes

• Lung functioning in asthma
• Disease severity in rheumatoid arthritis
• Pain and physical health in cancer
• Immune response in HIV infection
• Hospitalisations for cystic fibrosis
• Pain intensity in women with chronic pelvic pain
• Sleep-onset latency in poor sleepers
• Post-operative course

If all of the above wasn't convincing enough evidence, one should also consider that

the effects produced by expressive writing are substantial and similar in magnitude to the effects of other psychological interventions, many of which are more involved, time-consuming and expensive.

In addition to the numerous psychological and health benefits, writing has more practical uses as well. Often times, we have difficulty properly identifying the issues in our lives that are causing the most stress and are consistently present. Without clear feedback, we have a difficult time learning about ourselves and which areas of our lives we need to prioritize addressing. Writing can help with such matters as well because if you find that the same worries and issues are consistently appearing in your writing then that's a strong signal that those particular issues need to be prioritized and resolved first. For instance, if you have an intense pain in your knee, would you ignore it and instead address a minor itch on your wrist? The same concept applies here but it's a bit more difficult to grasp because it doesn't have easily recognizable physical attributes that we are more familiar with.

Writing also provides you with a sense of control because it's a

formalized form of thinking [and it] helps [you] derive information from [your] experiences that helps [you] guide [your] perceptions, actions, thoughts and emotions in the present. Drawing specific, causal conclusions about life’s important events may also help reduce the burden of uncertainty and threat that may remain active.

Essentially, writing is a practical and easy way of understanding what is happening to you and it allows you to feel like you're an active participant in your life instead of a passenger who's not in the driver's seat. Such an increasing sense of control is essential for attaining healthy self esteem and the confidence to take on challenges. It also allows you to more effectively deal with uncertainty. 

Ultimately, our first line of defense against mental and emotional difficulties is ourselves. If there is a low-commitment and practical way of taking care of ourselves, we need to utilize it whenever possible. By no means am I cautioning against relying on mental health professionals. Such experts have a role to play as well, especially for more serious cases. But, we should still take personal initiative in addressing mental problems.

Sources cited:

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/benefits-writing-why-you-should-write-all-the-time.html

http://selfauthoring.com/WritingBenefits.pdf

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/07/10/419202925/the-writing-assignment-that-changes-lives

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=189437

http://apt.rcpsych.org/content/11/5/338.full

Respect for the introspective

The thoughts in this post were inspired by a recent article I read in the Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maya-lau/what-the-peace-corp-taugh_b_1099202.html

The article is written by a Peace Corps Volunteer in Senegal.  She talks about her experiences and how the Peace Corps taught her the true meaning of failure and learning to accept it as a normal part of life.  Here are some thoughtful quotes from the article itself:

"One benefit of the program that is never trumpeted (and likely never will be) is that it produces a group of young Americans who understand failure."

"Americans are immature when it comes to honestly accepting failure and maybe that's why so many of us lack the emotional depth to make sense of it" 

"Our hyped-up expectations of success are often quashed--we learn quickly that smaller is better." 

"I survived two years in the Peace Corps. My proudest accomplishment during my time in Senegal, one that can't be expressed on a résumé, is how much I grew up."

The focus of this post is NOT to comment further on the author's ideas and provide my own thoughts on the meaning of failure (perhaps this is a post for another time).  My focus is on the author herself and my respect for individuals that are able to live through an experience and be an ACTIVE and analytic participant. What I mean by this is that in addition to going through an experience, such individuals attempt to take a step back and analyze what actually happened.  They ask questions such as "Why did I act in such a way?", "Why am feeling so ashamed or sad or satisfied with myself right now?", "Why did this person react the way they did towards me? Was their reaction justified or irrational and out of my control?" and "What could I do differently the next time I find myself in a similar situation?"  These are just examples and there are numerous other questions and thoughts that can go through this individual's head.  The overall theme here is that this individual is being introspective and attempting to analyze and think about what occurred. He is not being a passive participant of what is happening to him.

For instance, in the posted article, this particular volunteer could have simply made a laundry list of her failures and described her experiences at a superficial level. She could have made no attempts to draw out lessons learned or the potential effects of her experiences on her personal growth and ideas. From personal experience, A LOT of people are satisfied with such low-level descriptions that lack analysis or introspection.  I don't think there is anything wrong with such an approach but an individual is not reaching his full potential if he stays passive like this his whole life.  Sooner or later he has to realize that he needs to challenge himself and actually THINK.

Ultimately, this is why I respect introspective story-tellers.  They go above and beyond simply reporting the facts.  They analyze.  They think.  They provide hypotheses. They dig deeper.  They actively attempt to learn from what they go through.  

I learn immensely from such individuals and I truly am lucky to have such people in my life.  I hope I continue to meet such thoughtful and analytic folks and grow as a person in the process. 

Why I'm doing this

Over time, I have come to realize that as much as I like to bash my own ideas and not think much of myself from an intellectual standpoint, I DO have thoughts that are worth putting down and dwelling upon.  I don't read as much as many people out there but I enjoy following current events, blogs, and articles from pretty much any field ranging from finance, human behavioral research, to astronomy and space exploration.  A lot of times, I am intrigued or moved by a certain idea that I see in an article, or video talk, or a book and I have the urge to write something about it.  However, I have stopped myself and not pursued this desire for no legitimate reason that I can think of.  Starting today (and hopefully for a long time to come), I am going to change that and actually force myself to more intimately explore my thoughts.

If anything, doing this will help me fulfill my introspective desires and improve as a writer in the process.

I would like to note that if a thought or idea is inspired by someone I know, I will not be listing their names or revealing anyone's identity.  Unless they specifically request me to that is.

Let's see where this little experiment takes us.