Present Perfect November/December 08

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"Self knowledge is not always comfortable. If we don't like what we find we are, in all honesty, obliged to do something about it."

BKS Iyengar

IN THIS ISSUE

  1. Dear Present Perfect readers: Anatomy of an accident
  2. Accepting imperfection
  3. Black swans
  4. All I said was
  5. Food for Thought: Discomgooglation and other addictions

ANATOMY OF AN ACCIDENT

Dear Present Perfect readers,

A few weeks ago I had lunch with a good friend I hadn't seen for a while. We went to the local Cafe Rouge and were fortunate enough to get my favourite table. Along one wall they have a long bench seat covered with red velour; where the bench turns, a metre or so before ending at a pillar, there's a little table tucked away. My friend sat where the bench turned, next to the pillar, and I sat on the main bench at right angles to her. I'd been wearing my brand new raincoat, light grey, belted, slightly military looking. Folding it carefully I put it down on the bench beside me.

Everything was going swimmingly. The next table along the bench had been empty for most of our meal but then some people sat down and ordered. Bringing their drinks on a tray, the waitress stumbled, sending a glass of red wine flying, not over them but over me. I was wearing a cream top. The waitress was devastated. I was liberally splattered with red wine. The other people moved. The floor was a mess. In an instant, everything had changed.

At the time I was caught up in dealing with the accident, less concerned for my top than for my precious new raincoat (which seemed at first sight to have escaped), reassuring the waitress who gave us her phone number, insisting she'd pay for cleaning. But when I got home, as I treated my top with stain remover and put it in the washing machine, I was struck by how quickly life can change from OK to not so OK, from smartly dressed to red wine stained, from presentable to 'better go and get changed'.

How would you have reacted?

How would you have reacted? Or rather, how do you habitually react to incidents like this, minor calamities (we're not talking about major life-changing events here) that can change your day? Do you, for instance:

Of course, our response can also depend on how much pressure we are already under. If I'd had to give an important presentation that afternoon, I'd've been a lot more agitated at being covered in red wine than I actually was.

Emotional reaction - Accepting - Taking action

The way we respond to sudden changes of fortune can tell us a lot about ourselves, particularly since our immediate reaction is usually an emotional one and not easily within our control. It's where we go from this instinctive emotion that's so telling, what we do with that emotion, whether we hang on to it or can let it go.

A key difference between people lies in how long they hold on to their emotional reaction. If you're angry and hold on to your anger as you deal with the aftermath of the accident, you're more likely to get stuck in 'someone'll pay for this' thinking, and take action in the direction of revenge. If you hang on to your self-pity, you're more likely to act with resentment and be unable to see the best way forward.

A healthier response to sudden calamity will normally have three phases:

All three phases are important. We need to feel what we feel, whatever it is. Acknowledge our emotion, let it move through our body and subside. We need to accept what's happened: it's done and can't be undone. And in full acceptance we need to take what action is necessary. That's the ideal anyway!

With best wishes for an adventurous month

Chris Carling

ACCEPTING IMPERFECTION

I didn't tell you how I reacted. Actually it was in two phases: at the time there was relief that my new raincoat seemed OK, and acceptance made easier by knowing I could go straight home, and that red wine does come out. All this was helped by the waitress's concern, and the manager's promise to cover any cleaning and his gesture of taking a percentage off the bill.

My assessment of the damages wasn't entirely accurate, however. Once home I saw that my new raincoat did have some small flecks of wine, though they were on the inside where they wouldn't show. The result was a short attack of the 'if onlys' (if only I hadn't worn my new raincoat/put it on the bench) coupled with what I realise was regret at the loss of, well I guess the loss of 'perfection'.

This may sound odd, but if you think about it, when something's new, whatever it is, there's a short span of time before wear and tear set in, when it's pristine, it's perfect. By being cheated of that short moment, I had a tiny lesson in the fleeting nature of perfection, and the need to accept, to be OK with, imperfection. 'Accepting imperfection' is a lesson we're forced to learn as humans: to accept bodies that, as we age, show signs of wear however many times a week we go to the gym, to accept shoes that scuff and surfaces that get scratched.

It's a lesson, however, that many of us firmly resist. Indeed our culture of beautiful bodies and eternal youth encourages us to resist it. Over the years I've coached many self-confessed 'perfectionists', who've worn their perfectionism with pride while admitting the stress striving after perfection had wrought. 'Accepting imperfection' is a more subtle position. It doesn't mean dropping your standards and anything goes. Rather it means replacing 'I'm a perfectionist' with 'I have high standards'; it means doing the best we can in an intrinsically imperfect world.

BLACK SWANS

My baptism in red wine was unexpected. But was it unpredictable? Was it a black swan? This question arose as I started reading Nassim Taleb's 'The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable', a fascinating study of the random events that underlie our lives from best sellers such as Harry Potter to disasters such as 9/11 or the tsunami. Taleb argues that these events ('black swans') are nearly impossible to predict yet their impact is huge. After they happen though we try to rationalise them, deluding ourselves that we know more than we do.

'The Black Swan' is a book about uncertainty, about accepting that we know a lot less than we think. Accepting too that the 'experts' we rely on, particularly in the realms of finance (Taleb has mathematical expertise in the complex field of derivatives so he knows what he is talking about here), don't know as much as they would have us believe either. Politicians, he says, act as if going to war has predictable consequences; pension advisers make predictions about growth as though they can confidently predict conditions years ahead. And we go along with all this, I guess, because we want to believe the world is a more controlled and predictable place than it really is.

What he is arguing for is for us to factor in uncertainty rather than deny it by rationalising that random events were really not random at all. For us to accept that our plans are never more than provisional, and be ready to adapt to black swans.

Tips for dealing with uncertainty

(These are mine not Taleb's. I haven't finished the book yet!)

ALL I SAID WAS

Whenever I come across the phrase 'All I said was', I can usually make quite an accurate prediction: that the person uttering it has said something provocative and is acting surprised that their provocative remark produced a reaction.

In an article on the growth of nastiness in the world, Shappi Khorsandi wrote (Guardian, 28-8-08):

'A few weeks ago, a young office worker threatened me with a punch on the underground. She had violently pushed past me and all I said was: 'May I suggest anger management?' It seemed to make her more angry.'

Of course I don't condone the threat of a punch that appears to have been the office worker's response to the 'anger management' remark. But if you further provoke someone who is already so volatile that they are pushing others out of the way, you are potentially escalating the problem. If the punch had been delivered it would not have been a black swan!

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Discomgooglation and other addictions

A recent YouGov survey suggested that Britons are suffering from what it called 'Discomgooglation', a term they used to describe how lost people feel when they can't get on to the internet. The survey claimed that three quarters of internet users said the 'could not live' without the web.

And a survey on how often people check their email found that while 64% per cent of respondents claimed to check their email once an hour, and 35 per cent said they checked every 15 minutes, they were actually checking much more frequently (about every five minutes). Suw Charman-Anderson writes: (Guardian 28-8-08): 'For some people, checking emails is no longer a conscious and deliberate act, but a compulsion they are barely aware of. Dr Tom Stafford, lecturer at the University of Sheffield and co-author of the book Mind Hacks, believes that the same fundamental learning mechanisms that drive gambling addicts are also at work in email users. 'Both slot machines and email follow something called a 'variable interval reinforcement schedule', he says, 'which has been established as the way to train the strongest habits. This means that rather than reward an action every time it is performed, you reward it sometimes, but not in a predictable way. So with email, usually when I check it there is nothing interesting but every so often there is something wonderful, an invite out or maybe some juicy gossip, and I get a reward.' This is enough to make it difficult for us to resist checking email even when we've only just looked.'

PRESENT PERFECT: PASS IT ON

If you enjoy this issue of Present Perfect, pass it on to a colleague, friend or family member and encourage them to subscribe from my website. If you have any questions or feedback on any of the ideas or views expressed here, do drop me an email.