While I was driving today, the word constant kept banging around in my head. It really needs no definition by Webster's terms. Everyone understands it. It's always, impermeable, completely...there.
To be a constant anything, you've got to have either dedication or mania. Dedication to a task, to a person, to a perspective. Mania in a can't-escape-from-a-thought-or-action kind of way.
But, are you constantly anything?
I like to think of myself as a happy person, but I understand that constantly doesn't really fit there. Constantly happy. Who is? Someone who hasn't experienced anything, ever, I guess.
Unfortunately, I hold myself to an unreachable standard in pretty much every aspect of my being. So, a bad day for me is magnified into complete failure. Rationally, I understand that I, nor anyone else, can expect me to be happy, smiling all of the time--constantly. I don't always run with a rational mind, unfortunately.
If you google constant or constantly (I did), you will find all kinds of quick-fixes for life's most difficult circumstances: dealing with constant crying, a constant complainer, constant back pain, a constant canceler (someone who makes plans and then cancels--we all know them), constant bickering, constant rejection, criticism, even constants in math (which I can't begin to explain).
In my head I have to break it down like this: no person is every constantly anything, but they can be constantly there. And if/when that person is no longer a part of your life, the consistency of your life subsides. So, you have to find new constants, because we yearn for consistency in our lives. We cannot, however, be consistent in the way that we talk or act. To me, it seems that there are many levels of constant.
I had a bad weekend last week. I got to meet one of the most amazing softball players of my generation, and I still had a bad weekend. For that, I felt guilt. And I also felt guilt that I couldn't control the bad weekend, which brought out this amazing force of anxiety that I haven't felt in a long time. I fought it like a world champion, but it still got me.
Essentially, I regressed into the person (or, rather, the thoughts of the person) that I was a year ago. Anxious, emotional, and basically unstable.
Tonight, however, I have experienced revelation in this thought process.
My amicably-divorced-lady and I spent a lot of time talking about my impeccable, constant coping issue. So, I've spent the better part of a year figuring out how to cope without coping. Strange, isn't it? I thought so, too. Until I started thinking about what coping really is.
Coping is refusing to shift perspective. It's mulling over the same problem using the same tactic over and over and over again. Someone (who is not so brilliant and who will remain nameless) once told me that the definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. So, what my lady and I failed to venture is that coping can lead to crazy, at least in my case.
To give myself credit, I don't have to cope nearly as much. Give me a bad weekend, and its another story, but for the most part, I'm pretty much cope-free. I spent much less time analyzing every word that comes out of someone's mouth, their tone, their body language. Lately, I've been relaxed, which is a much nicer feeling. Especially considering that these days, I spend the majority of my time around people that I barely know on a surface level in an environment that I'm not quite comfortable with yet. A year ago, this probably would have put me on edge.
The shift in perspective, the idea of it, is something that I've had many conversations about with my celebratory friends. Usually, we talk about it as it relates to work or to other people. But, tonight, I'm thinking of it as it pertains to constant.
Last weekend, Jessica Mendoza talked about finding something good in the one person that you can't stand. She was talking about a bad teammate, namely, and at the time, I wasn't in the right mindset to take anything away from it. But now I get it.
It is an attitude, a choice. Find something good every day. There's good in every person and in every situation, you just have to be willing to see it. You have to be willing to shift your perspective to find the positive in the worst situations.
Perspective is partially inherited by watching people around us and its partially discovered in environments outside of our homes. Nurture vs. Nature. Does the entire spectrum of human nature always have to go back to this? Whoever came up with that dilemma is a genius. And he will drive me crazy for the rest of my life.
So, while I don't grasp or particularly like the idea of constant, I do fancy the more substantial thought that perspective is a constant ebb and flow of life's focus, and that perspective has control over the majority of every day energy.
And to make this thought process even more complicated, energy* is the outcome. Bad energy, good energy, lethargic, excited, dull, dramatic energy.
*Before I go on, I'd like to say that I'm not talking about auras or magic or dirty-hippie energy, dudes. I'm talking science (in laymen terms).
Everyone has energy, and just like perspective, its constantly changing (hopefully). Energy can change your perspective, your perspective can change your energy. The only constant is the constant. Change. How you respond to change, the energies around you, perspective.
So, back to the part where the ideas started swirling. Over the last year, and without my conscious knowledge, my coping shifted to an awareness of perspective. It moved from a focus outside to a focus inside, where I could control it. In most cases, if I can change my perspective, I can change my energy. If I can feed off of the energy around me, I can change my perspective. You might call this easily swayed, but if you can look past the negative connotations and view it more as a survival mechanism, it might just click.
The ability to see the positive or feel the positive where there really is no positive is a grating task on our souls. That's where the constant interplay of energy and perspective come in, I think. For most people the search for contented happiness is ongoing and often a daily struggle.
In a yoga class last week, our instructor gave us a meditative focus for the day: Breathe in..."I am"....Breathe out..."enjoyable." The intensity of the words or the idea behind them vary in interpretation, but, like most things, the mantra got me thinking. How can something so simple refocus your energy and perspective? Because for the rest of the day, by damn, I was really enjoyable.
Truthfully, no matter how in control (or aware) we are of perspective, we lose it. We let the bad days drown us and wallow in the self-loathing. And then we find our way out. There's always something or someone that pushes that shift in perspective or translates that positive energy.
Lately I've been thinking: If I have the crappiest day, someone else is having their happiest. So maybe my energy has temporarily left me and someone is borrowing it for the day. It's similar to the idea that when something bad happens to someone you love, you'll carry around their sorrow and anxiety for them, hoping maybe they'll feel less of it. If you need to borrow my energy, please do so. I've gotten pretty good at not coping, minus a bad day here and there.
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