In which Wolf explains how not to hold yourself hostage. Watch this episode on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/oQyap2h71eM
When you think about the word "demand", what feelings come to mind? Most people find demands quite stressful, whether you're the one making a demand or the one receiving one. Demands have consequences, and demands without at least an implied threat are just whining.
Now think about the word "preference." A lot more easygoing, isn't it? It's nice to have preferences, to know what you like, or to know what someone else likes and be able to choose to accommodate their preferences.
Isn't it strange then, that we often hold ourselves emotional hostage over particular things we want?
"I'd better get my way here, or there's going to be hell to pay!"
"Oh yeah? What am I gonna do about it?"
"I don't want to know... it'll be really bad."
"Seriously, what am I going to do to myself?"
"Well... I'm going to feel bad!"
And if things don't go our way, well we knew the consequences: it's now time to start feeling bad.
Imagine you're on a hot beach, and see an ice cream stand. From a distance you see a big sign that reads, "Chocolate, Vanilla, Strawberry." As you get closer you can almost taste that chocolate ice cream cooling your tongue. But when you arrive, you see a smaller handwritten sign, "Chocolate sold out today, sorry!"
How you react in that moment depends on whether your desire for chocolate ice cream turns out to be a preference or a demand. I know "demand" seems like a strange word here: you're not going to stand at the ice cream stand demanding something they simply don't have (well, maybe you will, I'm just going to go to the other end of the beach.) I'm actually asking about how you're feeling in the moment. If your desire for chocolate ice cream was a demand then your mind is telling you how disappointed you are, and that you're going to keep feeling bad about it, and how life is so unfair, and how your day is ruined, and how you're going to tell all your friends about it later.
On the other hand, if your desire was a preference, then you'd be like, "Oh, OK, vanilla then."
The difference between a demand and a preference is that demands are backed by emotional consequences that you use to punish yourself, and often the people around you too.
As I've said in a previous episode, life is about taking aim at a target and making the best shot you can. What happens after that is not under your control. Getting invested in an outcome that you can't actually control is setting up an emotion-backed demand in your psyche; it's like pointing a gun at yourself and demanding ransom.
So as you take inventory of your personal assets and liabilities, and particularly your goals and desires in life, think about whether any particular desire is a preference or a demand. As you discover the demands you're making of yourself, try to "upgrade" as many of them as possible to preferences.
Here's the trick to upgrading your demands: start choosing to become mindful whenever you realize you're reacting to one of your desires negatively, either with fear that you won't get it, or disappointment that you haven't gotten it. Remind yourself that it's OK to have preferences; to desire a particular outcome, but that adding a heaping helping of suffering on top of that is a choice. As you learn to choose less suffering you'll start make a magical discovery: that there are important, valuable, beautiful things happening to you even when things aren't going your way, and now you're in a position to actually appreciate those gifts. They might even be better than what you thought you wanted originally, if you give them the chance!
One of my favorite parables from the Zen Buddhist tradition goes like this:
A man was walking across an open field, when suddenly a tiger appeared and began to give chase. The man began to run, but the tiger was closing in. As he approached a cliff at the edge of the field, the man grabbed a vine and jumped over the cliff. Holding on as tight as he could, he looked up and saw the angry tiger prowling out of range ten feet above him. He looked down. In the gully below, there were two tigers also angry and prowling. He had to wait it out. He tightened his grip on the vine, and then looked up at the cliff wall and saw that two mice, one white, the other black, had come out of the bushes and had begun gnawing on the vine, his lifeline. As they chewed the vine thinner and thinner, he knew that he could break at any time.
Then, he saw a single strawberry growing just an arms length away. Relaxing his grip enough to hold the vine with one hand, he reached out, picked the strawberry, and put it in his mouth.
It was delicious.
This parable teaches us that not only are things not always going to go our way, sometimes they are going to go positively wrong— and in any case the time in our life is finite— and despite all this the only way to live life well is to figure out what there is to appreciate right now and then do it!
But what do you think? Let me know in the comments, and please share the video with someone you think would like it too. See you tomorrow!