I'm useless, but not for long

Depending on circumstances, we are all many people and while in one instance we can be confident, in another we can be insecure. And there are always many instances running simultaneously and pulling for our attention, much like open tabs on a browser.

There is a lot going on in my life at the moment, there are many tabs open and depending on which is in focus in a given moment is going to affect my thoughts, my feelings and how I am going to act or react. I see this process as similar to having many faces, different versions of myself that all reside hidden within me until they need to make an appearance, wanted or not.

The environment dictates how we act heavily and a lot of what we do is set by default habits or social norms, which face appears is going to depend on what we are doing at the time. I illustrate this process through the difference in the way we speak to various audiences, as we change our voice if we are speaking to a boss, a child or a lover. Which is our real voice, who is the real "me"?

We are consistently inconsistent in who we are and under one set of variables we can appear to have it all together, change the tab and we can look like we are falling apart. This is a challenge for dealing with the outside world as those we deal with have no idea which tabs we browse, nor do they care all that much. We rarely get to choose what we must deal with, especially in the negative, as most of us don't willingly choose the negatives of life - at least, not consciously.

We do choose many of them through our default habits though and how we approach the world. Some people spend a lot of time doing what they want and avoiding the difficult, without realizing it makes them weaker, makes them more likely to keep avoiding - never facing, never strengthening, never growing and never overcoming. We can build habits to support us, we can build them to tear ourselves down.

As I was saying to someone recently, in my experience working with corporations and personnel, the more often someone avoids work, the higher the frequency of avoidance becomes. It is habit building. They are also less likely to get opportunities as they rarely demonstrate getting the most out of the opportunities they get and then, they often avoid work more as they are demotivated by the lack of opportunity they will have in the future. It is a process of self-destruction.

As said, there is a lot going on in my life currently and very little of it is what I would consider enjoyable. One of the worst things in my experience is feeling useless and having nothing I can do to improve a situation. One of the tabs open on life's browser is the decline of my father's health toward the inevitable end and while I understand the natural process of this, currently my brother @galenkp and his wife are dealing with it all - and there is nothing I can do about it - no support I can give, other than being grateful for their service to our family.

I know that I am lucky in many ways as I will have the opportunity to remember my father the way I saw him last, which was 9 years ago when he visited Finland and met my wife, before she knew she would marry me - but I am also concurrently unlucky for the same reason, as I know that it is not the truth of the situation, it is not the reality. While comforting in memory, this is uncomfortable in experience and something I will live with for the rest of my life also. This is one of my faces within, one of failure as a member of a family I care about.

But, no failure is complete, as there are always more tabs that need attending to and many more that will open as some close. Letting one dictate the reactions to all is going to create a situation where processes for dealing with one aspect gets mixed with another and default reactions in one arena aren't necessarily healthy when applied to another. We all have to compartmentalize to some degree, adjust our actions to suit the environment in which we are in.

Over the years of travelling, I have walked down some shady roads and been in some less than ideal situations, but being hyper-aware to only threats will mean that a lot of opportunity and beauty of the world will be missed. When focusing too heavily on one aspect of life, much gets passed by as it is outside of the vision and even if in peripherals, won't get paid the attention it perhaps deserves. If I dwell on one tab, what will it cost the others?

For example, they say that the worst thing that can happen to a parent is losing a child - this is untrue. Worse than losing a child would be losing two children. If a parent has two children and one is lost, the other has to take precedence over the grief, as that child is going to live an affected life also and helping the living has to come before grieving the dead. A difficult and harsh reality that parents hopefully never have to consider in anything other than thought.

Being shattered in one of life's tabs, doesn't mean we have to be broken in all.

Life goes on until it doesn't and the reactions we have to the events we face are going to affect our own face and which will be brought to the surface at any given moment. We are consistently ourselves from birth to death, yet we are also evolving and changing continuously affected by the life we lead, continually reshaping and we have some influence over the directions we take by working on the default reactions we make.

Who we are today need not be how we react tomorrow, but if we leave it up to our emotions to decide our course and create our attitude toward life and the people that inhabit our environment, we are likely going to end up in a position where we are rudderless and at the mercy of the sea, tossed and turned, bitter that we have not accomplished we thought we would, even though we didn't give it our best.

We choose what content we browse on the internet, but not necessarily in life as there is always the potential for randomness to take hold and flick the tab. However, more and more we engineer our lives for consistent results be reducing random, searching for comfort, avoiding difficulty. We want to be strong, we want to be healthy, we want to be successful - but we do not seem to understand that the pathway to strength is stress, to health is diet and exercise and to success, is action toward what we consider important in our own lives.

Very little of what is good for us feels good in the short term, much of what is bad for our long-term, feels good now. Setting defaults that favor feeling good now can cost us everything later. It is like a debt cycle where we continually borrow on the future and our obligation to pay back means that we not only have to forgo opportunity with capital, we will have less potential to borrow more. Bit by bit we get less capable to satisfy our momentary needs and we still have built nothing to stand upon.

I just realized, I have 71 tabs open in this browser instance and not one of them is for entertainment, it is all work, crypto related or a mix of both. My tabs of life are a bit different, but I spend more time doing what I consider actively generative over passively consumptive. I do not know if it is for better or worse, but I get the sense that there are going to be a lot of people twenty years from now who will wish that they started earlier, that they had built habits toward improving themselves much earlier.

My father is going to pass away an old and man with a broken mind, but the tabs of his life that he has managed, the discipline he has developed and the beauty he has generated makes my life pale in comparison. I would like to say that it is because he lived in a different time, a generation where there was more opportunity, but that is not the case - he just took opportunities as they arose and made the most of them to be successful in what he considered important. He will die financially broke, but his life generated a wealth of experience and affected many for the better - none of it was digital.

I am glad that he doesn't know the face he shows now, as he would never have shown it if he had. We all have this face within us, some just make the worst of themselves their default by habit under the lie of "this is the way I am". No, each of us is many people, each of us can affect who we are in the moment. In time, our attention toward competence becomes unconscious and then, we do what we need to do without thinking.

Think about who we are and who we want to be and work toward it. Some tabs may need to be opened, some may need to be closed - we will never have control over them all, but we can control our reactions to what life brings our way.

I'm useless, but not for long
The future is coming on

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]