On my seventh night in New York City I ended up, almost accidentally, living out a fantasy of mine — mingling with writers and photographers, in an expensive Upper West Side apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows, drinking a hundred-dollar bottle of wine.

Some details were different, however. A rainbow of throw pillows covered half the main room and the woman I was talking to was naked and I was in my underwear.

It was my first, and so far only, naked party, and it was the beginning of the end of a thirty-year era of rather severe self-consciousness. I’d always had a burning fear of the judgments of others. In particular, I couldn’t bear the thought of someone else seeing me as bad or wrong. I just couldn’t let it happen, and unconsciously designed a life that minimized that risk, which means it minimized interactions with other people.

This self consciousness declined very slowly throughout my late twenties, and after my trip to New York it began to fall away in large chunks and now I feel very little self-consciousness. In the big picture, I know that my relatively sudden shedding of self-worry has come from a gradual accumulation of insights. By the time of the trip, I had learned a little too much about the world and myself to continue to be so afraid of both.

But insight alone is often not enough. Life has to make its principles clear by demonstrating them to you in real time. An unfamiliar experience must act as a catalyst, illuminating your accumulated insights and leaving you with a new and unfamiliar sense of yourself. When you notice that the feeling of being you is an easier and more natural feeling than it used to be, you know you have grown.

In the case of my graduation from self-consciousness I know that the catalyst for the final untangling began at the naked party in Manhattan.  Read More

About six months after I got my first guitar, I had reached a stage where I knew a lot of chords and I could play recognizable bits of songs, but I couldn’t play even the simplest song (Wild Thing?) without flubbing chord changes all the way through. It felt like I hadn’t actually begun to learn at all.

I found some comfort in online guitar forums for beginners. Hundreds of others shared my frustration, believing that they were every bit as bad as they were the first day they picked up the instrument.

One day, a slightly more experienced player thaught us a trick that makes it 100% clear how far you’ve come since you started. You rotate the guitar so that your fret hand becomes your picking hand and vice-versa. Then you attempt to play anything you know.

This puts you exactly where you were when you started — your fingers have to find entirely new positions and make entirely new motions, and you recognize how much skill and nuance you’ve gained since that first day, which is the last time the guitar felt that unfamiliar and awkward to you.

When I have discouraging moments other areas of life, I use a similar trick to remind myself how much more capable a person I’ve become.

I think about where I was exactly a year ago, or two years ago, or five years ago today — what was going on in my life and what my biggest dilemmas were. I then imagine being given a chance to deal with those issues knowing what I know now, today, as 2013 David. A lot of the time today’s Me would make short work of those problems, even if today’s Me isn’t on top of all of today’s problems.

This exercise reveals real growth, and that kind of personal growth tends to come in little breakthroughs. These little breakthroughs have two ingredients: 1) you learn something you didn’t know, and 2) as a result, you try doing something differently than you used to do it.  Read More

I was 31 when I figured out breakfast, and after that life’s overall difficulty level declined a bit.

Every month I buy a bag of bulk steel-cut oats, a bag of trail mix and a six-pound bag of Royal Gala apples. Every morning I make a heaping half-cup of the oats and cut an apple into slices. About six months ago I added a cup of Ceylon tea to that.

That’s breakfast every day now. I used to keep my options open, figuring that going with what I “feel like” in the moment is going to naturally lead to a more appropriate, fulfilling breakfast experience.

After years of being confronted with a decision shortly after waking, I decided to be done with deciding what was for breakfast. My usual is now the only thing on the menu, and since I stopped deciding what’s for breakfast, mornings have had a significantly different feel. They are clearer and more spacious.

I thought my newfound clarity was a byproduct of having more whole grains in my diet, or the self-satisfaction of finding a breakfast that costs 11 cents. I now believe it has nothing to do with oatmeal at all, but rather with the fact that I have much more than 11 cents to spend on breakfast, and in today’s global food system that gives me way too many options.

As affluent Westerners we’re fortunate to have so many choices, but according to psychologist Barry Schwartz, having too many possibilities — which we do in almost every area: breakfast, clothing, careers, lifestyles and creative pursuits to name some major ones — makes it consistently harder to be happy with the options we choose. In his TED talk he identifies the ways too many choices erode personal welfare instead of serving it.

When we’re faced with a number of options, we’re always going to assume that one of them is better than all the rest. This means the more options there are, the more likely we are to choose one that isn’t the best one. We also presume it would take more homework to choose the right one. In other words, as options increase every decision becomes bigger, and so the more likely we are to delay our decisionmaking.

Facing any decision is to some degree stressful, whether it’s picking a menu item, or picking an investment vehicle for your retirement. Delaying decisions because you don’t want to make the wrong decision only compounds this stress. This trepidation is a fear of future regret, and the resulting paralysis can lead to procrastination, which in turn leads to self-esteem issues, which only compounds indecisiveness further.

Even once you make a decision, the more options you turned down the more likely you have lingering doubts that you missed the boat — or at least, some boat. Even if you make the best choice, you never really know that, and you’re likely to wonder what you’re missing.

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Lying is regular a part of being polite.

Long-time readers know that I don’t accept guest posts here, other than two or three by-invite exceptions. But I get requests all the time and I try to turn people down graciously.

Even though a lot of them are probably mass-mailing their submissions, I reason that in each case there may be a sensitive and hopeful person reading my response, and I don’t want to hurt them by being cold. So when I reject their offer, I add a lie. I tell them I am afraid.

“I’m afraid I do not accept guest posts on Raptitude.”

“I do not accept guest posts on Raptitude,” sounds too unsympathetic I guess, so some ridiculous habit has me claiming that this fact actually scares me, so the submitter knows I find my own policy as unforgiving and insensitive as they do.

Our language customs are full of these kinds of insulators. The truth, in very many cases, is just too brutal or embarassing to state as a fact, so we add in little fictions.

“Hello, Mr Smith, I was just wondering if I could borrow your pickup truck Saturday afternoon.”

In my culture, it’s normal to be afraid to even ask, “May I borrow your truck?” So you phone Mr Smith not to ask anything of him, but just to declare to him something you’ve been wondering about. Presumably, you believe he is the type of person who may find it interesting to know what topics you’ve been pondering recently, so you phoned to let him know. Perhaps he will then have the idea to offer you the truck, so that you no longer need to continue to wonder if it is possible that you could borrow it Saturday afternoon.

In a restaurant, I notice that when I decide that I want the veggie wrap, what I do not say to the waiter is, “I want the veggie wrap.” I don’t want to be crass. Instead I tell him that I would like the veggie wrap, as if we’re talking not about our immediate desires but hypothetical ones in some peripheral universe. Essentially I’m saying, “If we were in a situation where we were actually stating what we want here, I would tell you I want the veggie wrap — just so you know, for what it’s worth. Do with that information what you will.”

I have a memory of running punishment laps around the basketball court, while our coach stood on the bleachers yelling, “Sorry is the most misused word in the English language! Don’t tell me you’re sorry! You aren’t sorry, not yet!”  Read More

The antibiotics didn’t work, so next I’m going to try doing the dishes.

The illness I referred to in my last post two weeks ago — the one that I said has been impeding my consciousness, shrinking my world down to its most selfish and short-sighted concerns — is still going strong even after taking the whole course of pills prescribed by the doctor. It’s been almost a month altogether.

If it doesn’t get better in a few days I will consult modern medicine again, but in the mean time I’m going to start treating the symptoms in my own way. The coughing and fatigue are annoying, but by far the worst effect of this bout of sickness is that I’ve become a lot more reactive and stressed than normal, which I described in the last article as being stuck in the “lower latitudes” of the overall human spectrum of consciousness.

This lowered consciousness causes all kinds of secondary side-effects. I’m less patient about cleaning up properly, which leads to house-clutter, which in turn creates more mental clutter. I haven’t been especially pleasant to be around, which leads to a correspondingly ill social life, and a growing feeling of missing out. The mental fog makes writing a lot more difficult, and being more reactive means I’m quicker to throw out ideas before I give them a chance to develop. Together, these side-effects create an exaggerated sense that my life and all its little duties are beyond my current capacity to meet.

I normally derive a lot of my sense of stability and peace from the habit of mindfulness — the way in which I walk across parking lots and make tea — and since I’ve been sick it has not been very appealing. I tend to want all the normal moments to be over, or to not happen at all.

A month is a long time to be in such an impaired state and I’m alarmed at how far I’ve fallen in that respect. It’s normally very easy for me to just let my attention settle on an ordinary moment, and find that it reflects some peace or beauty back to me. But right now it only takes a few seconds before something annoys me: the pain in my chest, or the weird clamminess I have, or how it is almost mid-April and still freezing.

If my compromised physical state has created a compromised mental state, then I suppose that treating my current mental state is only going to improve my physical state. It certainly can’t hurt. I need a single, regular place to apply deliberate mindfulness every day.

Signs have been pointing to my sink. My mother’s dishwasher broke months ago, and she never bothered to fix it, because doing them by hand was almost as easy and nothing about it can break down. Read More