From the Situationist

You are then supposed to count how many items appear on both lists.

TierneyLab examined the responses. And the results are fascinating. Things appearing much more often on ‘expensive’ lists than ‘happy’ lists include:

• children
• marriage ceremonies
• divorces
• taxes
• most cars
• boats

Items that were on more ‘happy’ lists than ‘expensive’ lists included:

• meals with friends
• alcohol
• bicycles
• pets
• hobbies
• adult education
• church and charity
• books, music, artwork
• quality beds

And, finally, there was some overlap where things were both expensive and happy/fulfilling. These include:

• houses
• higher education
• travel
• electronics
• certain vehicles

The results are by no means scientifc, but it does make us think. Are the intangible things (things like love, charity, fulfillment, world peace, etc.) over rated? Have people changed so much over the years (i.e. become more “shallow”, etc.) that material things are now able to bring us fulfillment?

Well, we have centered our lives over money and finances (guilty as charged!) that it does seem the two are correlated. The more money you have, the more happy you “can” become. But even as we point that out, we see a lot of exceptions to the rule. We see people who do not have savings in the bank give off the most genuine smiles to us. We see people who are filthy rich wallow in self-pity and die of loneliness. To say though that money and happiness are NOT connected to each other is an irresponsible sweeping statement. It sounds a lot like what wealthy government or church people would say to poor people under their care.

Perhaps this quote by Laura Rowley of MONEY AND HAPPINESS expresses this correlation: “Money is a tool that ultimately expresses our core values. Beyond basic needs, money helps us achieve our life’s purpose and support the things we care about most deeply – family, education, health care, charity, adventure and fun. It helps us get some of life’s intangibles – freedom or independence, the opportunity to make the most of our skills and talents, the ability to choose our own course in life, financial security. I have found that the people who invest the time to figure out what they truly value and then align their money with those values have the strongest sense of financial and personal well-being.”

Psychologists have spent decades studying the relation between wealth and happiness,” writes Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert in his best-selling “Stumbling on Happiness,” “and they have generally concluded that wealth increases human happiness when it lifts people out of abject poverty and into the middle class but that it does little to increase happiness thereafter.”

Since World War II the gross domestic product per capita has tripled in the United States. But people’s sense of well-being, as measured by surveys asking some variation of “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life?,” has barely budged. Japan has had an even more meteoric rise in GDP per capita since its postwar misery, but measures of national happiness have been flat, as they have also been in Western Europe during its long postwar boom, according to social psychologist Ruut Veenhoven of Erasmus University in Rotterdam. [From the Newsweek article: Why Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness by Sharon Begley]

But in the end, I would like to think that the most important commodity you can buy with additional wealth is not any material thing; it is choice. If you have P1000 in your pocket, you can decide between going to an expensive restaurant or buying take-out fastfood for lunch. But if you have only P100, 7/11 is your bestfriend. Or if I have a car (which I do not currently have), I could go buy groceries in the groceries offering the best prices, instead of making do with the nearest grocery store to my house. Poverty, then, is not just the absence of money, or cars, or houses, it is the absence of choices and the opportunities that you could have had, if you had the money (or the connection, or the friends) with you in the first place.

What about you, what do you think?

Several weeks ago, I had a conversation with a young man who was asking me about what college course to take in college. And days after that, a former student who had just graduated from De La Salle University, called me up and asked if he was supposed to take the job that was offered to him.

I could have told them to check out my blog’s entries in decision making (right, that’s a shameless plug, but only if you click on that link. hehe); instead I talked to them about Jim Collins’ Hedgehog Concept.

We all know that there really is no formula to a happy life. But if there was, I think it would be something like the Hedgehog Concept.

The Greek philosopher Archilochus once told the story of The Fox and The Hedgehog. Like all fables with two animals, the fox is the predator here who wanted to kill, maim and eventually eat the poor looking hedgehog. And everytime he tries, the hedgehog would curl up into a tight ball, causing his spines to point outwards. The fox would try over and over again using different tactics but each time he would be foiled, because each time he tries to go for the hedgehog, it would curl up into a ball and point his spines outwards.

And Archilocus says, the hedgehog won and lived, because while the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing.

Some people call it a deeply happy life, others call it vocation, still others say it is what you are meant to be doing for the rest of your life; but call it all you want, the secret to a happy life is to know your ONE BIG THING.

But how do you know your one big thing? Jim Collins says that our one big thing (or our hedgehog concept) is a convergence of three aspects of life:

1) Passion. The first circle is your passion. What is it that you would gladly do, even if you’re not paid to do it? There are some things in your life that makes you feel so alive when you’re doing it. It may be playing basketball, or writing, or designing interiors. My sister realized after 6 years of working in a bank that her passion is really cooking.

Passion has to do with creativity. And just like any activity of creation, when you create, you’re really making sense of something inside of you. You’re unleashing something primal in you. There is flow. You’re in the zone. You can almost do nothing wrong.

2) Skill. The second circle is your own skills. You can take for granted a lot of things that you do, and then you see someone else having such a hard time doing what comes so easy for you, and you realize that you

It is like you were actually wired to do it. My best friend paints so well, and I ask myself why painting is so easy for him and so hard for me. Give him a brush, some color and a canvas and he will create something beautiful with it. There are some things that are so easy for you to do, like you were born to do it.

That is your skill. And you have to acknowledge that.

Usually, when you have found your passion, and you have found your skills, it is easy to find the economic engine to support yourself. Some people focus on the economics first, and lose steam later on because their work, while it pays well, is not their passion.

A friend of mine works in a job that she loves, but is humble enough to admit that it will not support her, so she found a job that will support her WHILE doing that which she loves. Every time her bread and butter becomes too stressful and a burden, she finds her center once again by doing what she loves. She has also found a way from earning from it, and as she puts it, she’s “a year and a half” from quitting her job and doing what she loves full time.

So the next time you ask yourself what will make you happy, think about these three aspects of life and ask yourself if your life finds a convergence there. Are you passionate about what you’re doing? Do you have the skills and the potential to be the best in the world at what you do? Will it support your life and your other dreams?

Only you have the answers to these questions. And your honest answers will be the key to a happy and fulfilling life.

You might also want to check out Malcolm Gladwell’s take on passion and meaningful work:

Some weeks ago, I talked about GAINING YOUR SOUL, AND LOSING THE WORLD. And sometimes, we can live in clear cut dualities of: “the world” vs. “not-of-this-world”, or “love” vs. “hate”, or heaven vs. hell. But life is oftentimes gray more than black and white. And many times we are made to choose not between good and bad, but between bad and worse or good and better. That is when things get more complicated and not so clear cut. That is when DISCERNMENT becomes very important.

Today, let me talk about this in more detail.

When you have found your happiness, ironically that is when the real trouble begins. That is when the real battle, as it were, for your soul starts. Life is not as easy and as simple as forsaking the world and gaining your soul anymore. Our life in the marketplace and the world of work points us to the possibility of great success and the potential to do great, life-giving and meaningful work.

But we’ve heard of good politicians getting eaten up by the system, or of doctors gone bad, or of idealistic lawyers giving in to a corrupt justice system. These stories abound. Because just as there is success, there is also the possibility of losing integrity, and compromising your values.

So how do you gain the world and not lose your soul? How do you remain virtuous without losing your dreams for a better, more financially stable and comfortable life? How do you prevent yourself from getting corrupted by the “system”? How do you assure yourself that you sleep well at night and face yourself in the mirror during the day?

Here are some of my thoughts:

Work-Life Balance. One of the most difficult things to do when things start becoming really busy is balancing work and life outside work. I am constantly guilty of this myself.

But it is true; work can eat us up that we start losing perspective; and losing perspective is the first step to losing your sense of who you are and what is important for you. Sometimes, the promise of financial rewards can become the be-all and end-all of our lives that we lose sight of what is really important.

But the operative word here is BALANCE. I’m not saying to put family, enjoyment, exercise ahead of our jobs. I am saying to put these ALONG with your job. Because all these other things place your job in perspective. They make work more meaningful. They make life more enjoyable. They give you the impetus to work harder.

Which brings me to my second point.

Understand Your Priorities. I think one of the most important things we can learn to do in life is prioritization. I am talking about prioritization at two levels here: 1) Prioritization of the major facets in your life (i.e. family, work, health, etc.); and also 2) Making decisions about priorities in your work so you have direction and you experience less stress.

“Prioritization is particularly important when time is limited and demands are seemingly unlimited. With good prioritization (and careful management of deprioritized tasks) you can bring order to chaos, massively reduce stress, and move towards a successful conclusion. Without it, you’ll flounder around, drowning in competing demands.”

From Mindtools.Com

I have said many things about prioritization in this blog. These posts might help: Keeping Stress From Your Job, Seven Secrets to Stress Management.

Stop. Pause. Listen. We also need to step back once in a while and take stock of life so that we’re able to see life from a “longer” and “wider” perspective. By longer, I mean having the perspective of time—seeing life from beginning to what it is now. When we see life as the journey it has been; we become more grateful. We see how decisions we never saw as important before actually led us to where we are now. Successes are not as important. Failures are put in perspective. Suffering becomes optional.

By wider, I mean having the perspective of space. You do not just see life from beginning to what it is now; you see life from the perspective of the people you have touched and the lives you have shared with. You begin to see how your own story melds into the stories of other people; and even into the story the world. When we see life from a wider perspective, we become more humble. We see that we are not the center of the world. The world is not looking at us and people are not out to get us. We live life a little more lightly. We can laugh at the world. And we can laugh at ourselves.

You get this wider and longer perspective by doing many little and big things: reading a good book, watching a good movie, doing a review of the day before you go to sleep at night, going on regular retreats, climbing a mountain, having intimate conversations with someone you trust. I have found walking aimlessly inside a mall, a surprisingly relaxing experience. And for the past month, I have also swam regularly late at night. The exercise is not just physical, but mental and spiritual–it has kept me in perspective, and has made me reflective. Basically we all need time to pause, and take stock of our lives and literally catch our breath.

from octeenministry.com

Integrity. The word integrity comes from the word integer. An integer is a whole number (as against a fraction). To have integrity therefore is to be whole. To be whole means to do what you say. To act on what you promise. To have integrity means not to be fragmented–a fraction of yourself. When what you think is integrated to what you feel, and what you say is what you really mean, then you have integrity.

In a sense, every person is moving towards or farther from his/her own integrity or integrated self. Because the journey towards wholeness and real peace is a journey towards your very self.

Finding God in All Things. Fr. Arrupe, SJ says, “Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is than falling in love in a quiet absolute and final way.” In a more and more modern (post-modern?) world, we have become very adept at keeping God out of the confines of our lives. We have become very good at compartmentalizing our lives into “God” and “not for God”. We have lost the capacity to find God in the world.

And while I talk about God, I do not talk about religion here. Rather, I talk about spirituality. In a world full of hate and pain (oftentimes caused by religion), I think Spirituality is the way to go. We could use more spiritual people–people in touch with the divine and radiating it to people around them; people waging PEACE and not war; people whose arms are bigger than their own religion and willing to embrace humanity; people in touch with their own pains and the pain of the world.

People who see God or the divine, or That Which Is Bigger Than Myself are people who love more truly. They are able to see fleetingness of life, and are able to forgive more willingly, while not forgetting the lesson/s learned from the experience. They’re able to see that a blessing is not what happens to you–but what you do after what happens to you happens to you. They’re able to accept (while not negating the doubt, anger, bargaining, denial) that God can work in any situation. Even in suffering; ESPECIALLY in suffering. I do not say this lightly. I say this with the perspective of experience and the knowledge that while pain is very difficult, we all have the capacity to be stronger than our pain.

Love. There are millions of citizens who refuse to give in to what their more cynical neighbors call “reality,” who insist with their lives that there has to be a better way. Wondering about this, the study listened to stories of educators, entrepreneurs, homemakers, youth workers, artists, attorneys, writers, scientists, religious leaders, and physicians who are working to improve schools, health, business practices, race relations, economic conditions. The study eventually came to be known as Common Fire: Leading Lives of Commitment in a Complex World. The study strived to find the patterns that characterize their lives.

They found out several things. But the thread that links all the major reasons is Love.

They found out that people who try to do it on their own oftentimes fail. Love is what brings people together in community. In our highly individualistic culture, we tend to uphold a romantic vision of the hero– a lone, isolated individual who stands against the tide for what is right, not caring about what others think. And yet few if any of the people studied represented this stereotype. Rather, they cared about what others thought and felt, and were characterized by a particular capacity for connection, an ability to draw others around them into communities of comfort and challenge.

They also found out that people need to feel love in order to go on. When Valerie Russell, a veteran civil rights worker was asked how she managed to stay the course, especially when it got discouraging, she responded immediately: “Meals and music.”

Others spoke similarly. Meals shared together with a few friends and colleagues provide the nourishment for body and spirit that comes from a combination of good food and good conversation –conversation that gives perspective, heals, and helps us to say “yes” all over again. And music can help us hold it all together – the suffering and the wonder of life itself –in a way that anchors and re-energizes the soul. How we are together and what feeds our souls is what finally makes the difference in a world hungry for hope and love.

How we are together, and what feeds our souls is what will make difference in a world hungry for hope and love. In a world hungry for people who will not lose their souls. In a world hungry for people who will leave the world a better place than when they found it.

“There is much talk these days about all the choices we have, and about how it is up to each one of us to choose our own lives, but more often than not they seem to choose us. Our best laid ten-year plans are interrupted by life’s own plans for us: by sudden illness and surprise babies, by aging parents and the economy. Terrible things happen and wonderful things happen, but seldom do we know ahead of time exactly what will happen to us. Like Mary, our choices often boil down to yes or no: yes, I will live this life that is being held out to me or no, I will not.

If you decide to say no, you simply drop your eyes until you know the angel has left the room. Then you smooth your hair and go back to your spinning or your reading or whatever is most familiar to you and you pretend that nothing has happened.

Or you can decide to say yes. You can decide to be a daredevil, a test pilot, a gambler. You can decide to take part in a plan you did not choose. It does not mean you are not afraid. It just means that you are not willing to let your fear keep you locked in your room.”

–Barbara Brown Taylor, writing about “the Announciation”.

By Steve Jobs

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife.

Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.”

My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it.

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

This week, we will be talking about the actual steps in making decisions. While these are not foolproof, you are assured of making an informed decision when you follow these steps. Remember, intuition comes in all steps of this decision-making process. It is important to allow your gut feel to guide you.

1) Pose the Discernment Question or the Question for Decision Making.
Make it as objective as possible. Ask yourself something answerable by yes or no.

“Should I become a doctor/lawyer?“
“Should I marry this person or not?“
“Should I work in this company?”

2) Gather Data

• Look at yourself: your talents, your abilities, your weaknesses. Be very honest.
• Examine your motivations: why am I attracted to this choice in the first place? What can I get out of it?
• Pinpoint the issues and activities that excite you, make you feel alive, and energizes you.
• What is it that makes you really happy?
• Seek counsel. Other people might see your situation more objectively. Ask people who have gone through what you’re going through.

3) Weigh the Pros and Cons

• List down pros and cons of one option. Immerse yourself in that option.
• List down pros and cons of the other option. Immerse yourself in that option.
• Pray about these options.
• Use the power of imagination: imagine yourself in the situation where you are living out the option already. Notice the feelings and ideas that come to you when you think about it in your imagination.

From DizzyDog.Com

4) Gripping Conviction

• After a certain point, a gripping conviction is felt towards one option. It’s an intuitive feel that one option is better than the other/s, or that one option is RIGHT at this point than the others. Sometimes, this step is a no-brainer. At other times, it takes a while to get to this gripping conviction. The important thing is to have the courage to act on this gripping conviction.

5. Make a Tentative Decision Subject for Confirmation

• Act and live as if you are already living out what you have decided.

Some Reminders:

• Never make any decision when you are overly distressed.
• Also do not make any decisions when you are overly happy.
• Discernment is done in quiet, in calmness, and in the context of prayer.
• Be wary of external signs. Sometimes, we can delude ourselves into thinking that external signs point to one decision and we can focus on “signs” instead of going through the steps listed above or listening to our feelings and intuition. The “signs” are within you: your feelings, your gut instinct, the data you have gathered, the things you want to do but cannot explain. Listen to these more than external signs.
• If, a few days after making the decision, you find yourself feeling troubled, sad or unhappy (even after having done all that you can: after going through all the steps in the discernment process), then by all means, stick by your decision still. That does NOT mean that you have made the wrong decision. But if after a long time (say, 6 months or 1 year), you are still NOT at peace, then you must think about discerning about it again.

This is the 4th part of the AngPeregrino Series on Decision-Making and Discernment. For the other parts to this Series, follow the links below:

1. Living in the Tensions: The Paradoxes of Life
2. Living in the Tensions: On Discernment
3. Notes on Decision Making
4. Honing Your Intuition
5. Steps in Decision Making

If you’ve ever said, “I just knew it was a good thing” or “I can not explain why, but I just had to do it” or “It just felt right” or “I had a really bad feeling about it”, then you’ve experienced what some people would call “intuition” or “gut feel”.

It’s that primary, basic, instinctive system meant to keep us out of harm’s way, even protecting us from accidents, or from marrying the wrong person. We’ve heard stories of people deciding at the last minute to cancel their flights on airplanes that eventually crash, or making choices that years down the line make perfect sense even when they didn’t when they first made it. Our gut instinct allow us to “know” more than we can ever explain logically.

Thomas Stewart of Fortune Magazine fame, has observed that “People who make decisions for a living are coming to realize that in complex or chaotic situations — a battlefield, a trading floor, or today’s brutally competitive business environment — intuition usually beats rational analysis.”

This was proven in a experiment with the US Marine Corps in the 90s.*

Research suggests that neither intellectual rationality nor pure gut inspiration is right all the time. The best approach lies somewhere between the extremes, the exact point depending on the situation.

If we can just harness this gut instinct more, then we’ll be able to make better decisions—decisions that are in harmony with our most basic desires while taking into consideration all possible angles from a rational point of view. Because when we talk about life and its complexities, we don’t usually “calculate” a decision; we arrive at one.

But how do we hone this instinctive feel of things and people? How do we help ourselves develop an “informed gut” (something called a GUT IQ by some)? Here are some specific tips. The list is not exhaustive, but I have tried my best to include the more salient points.

1. Practice makes perfect sense. Howard Gardner, Harvard professor and psychologist, points out that “Gut instinct is basically a form of pattern recognition.” Compared to computers, people are lousy number crunchers but are great pattern recognizers. So that the more you practice, the more patterns you will intuitively recognize.

List decisions you’ve made that turned out right — and also the mistakes. Then reconstruct the thinking. Where did intuition come in? Was it right or wrong? Are there patterns? Write down your first impressions of colleagues, customers, friends, etc. Check whether you’ve been right or wrong about these.

2. Learn to listen to your felt knowledge. There are some things you just feel you know but can’t articulate or can’t articulate fully. Give these moments the benefit of the doubt and act on your hunches.

3. Do the Review. At the end of every day, before you sleep, try to look back at the events that happened that particular day. Just go through the day’s events and recall the different feelings you had while you went through it. This exercise helps you become more attuned to your own feelings, to how events affect you, and to patterns that emerge in your day. And if intuition is pattern recognition, then discerning patterns is a good exercise to do. Ignatius of Loyola calls this THE EXAMEN.

4. Find solitude.The best way is meditation. Find at least thirty minutes a day to spend alone with your thoughts. Learning to listen to yourself in solitude will train you to listen to your inner voice when you aren’t alone and will lead to catching powerful intuitive ideas right when you need them.

5. Empathy is the name of the game. By imagining yourselves in someone else’s shoes, and by actually experiencing what other people experience, you are actually giving yourself the opportunity to think and feel from a wider perspective. Great battlefield generals know this. They know that it is always good to get down and dirty and fight in the frontlines, or at least get the feel of the frontline in order to make better decisions. Get out of your own bunker and ride up to the front line and see it, feel it, and act on it. You will be a better person because of the experience.

6. Ask questions – lots of them. This is what I call intuitive bodybuilding. Questioning is the best way to create stronger intuitions. The most powerful creative intuitions will come to you after long question and answer sessions. Get together with a group of curious people and discuss complex issues – philosophical, scientific, sociological, theological topics. The most power comes not from the answers but from questions, bringing you down paths you hadn’t considered, spurring further questions and more answers.

By practicing now, and by following through on your everyday hunches now, you are taking “test drives” that hone your listening and intuitive skills. These practice sessions will serve you well when the bigger, more important decisions have to be made.

*Paul Van Riper, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, was taught that rational thinking is what wins battles, and he drilled this to his students when he ran the Marines’ leadership and combat development program in the ‘90s.

But Van Riper noticed that in the swirl and confusion of war simulations — let alone actual combat — rational decisions always seemed to come up short. “We used the classical checklist system,” he says. “But it never seemed to work. Then we’d criticize ourselves for not using the system well enough. But it still never seemed to work, because it’s the wrong system.” Frustrated, Van Riper sought out cognitive psychologist Gary Klein. At the time, Klein was studying firefighters, who operate under conditions quite like war. Klein learned that firefighters don’t weigh alternatives: They simply grab the first idea that seems good enough, then the next, and the next after that. To them it doesn’t even feel like “deciding.”

1. Living in the Tensions: The Paradoxes of Life
2. Living in the Tensions: On Discernment
3. Notes on Decision Making
4. Honing Your Intuition and Gut Feel
5. Steps in Decision Making

Last week, we talked about Discernment and how it is about honing a gut feel of what is right and wrong. Two weeks from now, I am going to talk about HOW to hone this gut feel exactly. After that I am going to discuss specific steps to make well-discerned decisions. For today’s post however, let’s just step back and talk about Decision Making in general. Let this be Decision Making 101.

Instead of coming up with a longish article on Making Decisions, I have decided (hehehe. Sooo witty!) to write random snippets/notes gathered from different sources. Some of the notes here are points from Discernment talks I gave in the past and I was greatly inspired by this article from UBALT.EDU.

1. The Latin word Decido has two meanings: “to decide” and “to fall off”. Thus, plants are called “deciduous” if their leaves fall off. To decide then is really some kind of falling. To decide involves some kind of “taking the plunge”. According to the great Fr. Roque Ferriols, a time comes in your life when you have all the data you need, and then you decide—“lundagin mo beybe!” (Make the jump!)
2. The fear of making serious decisions is called decidophobia, coined by Walter Kaufmann at Princeton University in 1973.
3. When making your decisions, put yourself first. It’s important that you’re better off as a result of making the decision. And not just in the result that you get, but more especially, as a person. The decision should allow you to maintain who you are, without compromise.
4. Decision-making usually involves a three-pronged process:

   a. It is triggered by a recognition of a need: A dissatisfaction within oneself;
   b. A decision to change–to fill the void or need;
   c. A conscious dedication to implement the decision.

   Decision then is not just about what we want to do, but what we HAVE to do. There is a certain “ought-ness” to real, life-changing decisions triggered by the need to change something within ourselves.

5. Never make any serious decision when you are overly distressed, angry, hurt, desperate or frightened. Do not decide when you are FORCED to decide by someone else! Do not decide just to get revenge or to harm someone else. Do not make decision when you are incapable of rational thought. Make decision for the right reasons and when you are calm and emotionally quiet. Learn to wait.
6. While it is (usually) easy to decide between “right” and “wrong”, and it is easy to tell “good from “bad”, decisions become more difficult when it is between “good” and “better”. The toughest decisions of all are those we have to make between bad and worse.
7. Do not make decisions that are not yours to make. Don’t waste your time making decisions that do not have to be made.
8. Be sure to choose based on what is right, not who is right.
9. Some people decide by asking whether the decision is “God’s will” in their lives. What is God’s will anyway? St. Ignatius de Loyola says that God’s will is found in the intersection where my greatest/deepest desire meets the world’s greatest need. Eve Ensler, who wrote the Vagina Monologues, puts it this way: “When we give to the world what we want the most for ourselves, we heal the broken part inside of us.”
10. Once the decision has been made, don’t look back. Do not second-guess, and do not regret a decision. Put the “what ifs” aside. It was the right thing to do at the time. Now focus on what is right at this time.

Last week, I talked about Living in the Tensions in terms of accepting the paradoxes of life. This week, let’s talk about living in the tensions in terms of it being a prerequisite for discernment.

St. Ignatius of Loyola has another word for living in the tensions: indifference. He said that we should be able to to hold ourselves in balance: not putting ourselves in one or the other choice or extreme. God’s will is said to be found in the tensions.

It is not to be reduced to a numbers game: when you’re asked to give money for example and you have P10,000.00 and you give P5,000 because that’s the numerical middle. Sometimes, living in the tensions means giving all the P10,000 and sometimes it means giving nothing at all.

It depends. Living in the tensions means weighing every situation like it is a unique one because if we think really hard, every situation is a unique one! To find balance then, is as much in the weighing as it is in the actual choosing.

Because rules are not so clear cut, because formula is non-existent and nothing is imposed from the outside, then life is a little more difficult. Sometimes it’s easier to just have rules and regulations written down and to just follow without thinking like children. But we’re not children anymore. (And even children ask why a lot of times!)

Now that we’re older (and hopefully wiser), we realize that life is an eternal discernment process. There is a constant struggle to make easy and difficult decisions. From the moment we wake up to the time we go back to sleep, we have to make decisions. Some decisions are no-frills and require no thinking (like choosing what to eat for lunch). But other decisions are more life-changing–like whether to continue with Law School or to take up Nursing for college. Or to settle down. We have a status message in Friendster that I love–it’s called IT’S COMPLICATED. Probably because we realize that life, for all our desire to put it in neat boxes with labels, is complicated. It’s complicated encapsulates in two neat words a whole story of pain and hope and crisis and loneliness and the difficulty to be neither in a relationship nor single.

And because life is complicated, then we need the capacity to live in the tensions. To discern. To have a gut feel of things. And to have the courage to say yes. Or no.

The image of a string used in an arrow comes to mind, which is the image used by the ancient Greek philosopher Heracleitus. A string can not be too taut or too slack. If it’s too taut, it runs the danger of breaking. If too slack, the arrow will be unusable. It needs to be just right. But once again, there really is no formula for what “enough” is. The archer—if he’s an experienced one—knows with an instinctive gut natural feel what this “enough” is. He knows how hard he is going to pull the string.

We have a word for it in Filipino: alalay. He knows when to pull harder and when to give slack so the string won’t break. Alalay lang.

Alalay is a Filipino word that also means “helper”. Someone who helps. Someone who assists. Because that’s what an alalay does, and that’s how to do alalay—you listen to the string, you feel it in your fingers, you sense it in your bones; and with an intuitive gut feel, let the arrow go. Archers–the really good ones– swear they become one with the bow and the arrow.

In the end, living in the tensions is knowing when to push and pull and when to give slack. To discern is take everything in consideration, think about it, mull over it, feel it, and then when the time is right, when it feels right, jump to a conclusion.

Yes, you may be wrong or right. But the point may not even be in getting it right. The point may be in honing yourself to feel. There is no external formula. The formula is inside you. The formula is in honing your gut feel. To know when to tighten and when to give slack.

Because knowing that is a much better skill in the long run than getting it right the first time.

Watch out for how to hone this discerning heart/gut next week.

1. Living in the Tensions: The Paradoxes of Life
2. Living in the Tensions: On Discernment
3. Notes on Decision Making
4. Honing Your Intuition and Gut Feel
5. Steps in Decision Making

Last week, I talked about the 20 Things I Learned in Life. I forgot to put in that list one really important lesson I have also learned. It’s good though because then it gives me a chance to talk about that topic today.

This lesson is something I learned in the Novitiate of the Society of Jesus, and it was taught to me/us by the great Fr. Benny Calpotura. He calls it “living in the tensions”. The concept is similar to Parmenides’ Golden Mean (check that out yourself in wikipedia! hehe).

For me, living in the tensions has to do with (1) finding a balance in the paradoxes of life, and as (2) a prerequisite for discernment.

First of all, living in the tensions means allowing and accepting the paradoxes of life. It is giving permission to what would seem inconsistencies and contradictions in life.

There is loneliness, but there is happiness as well; sickness and health; suffering and hope. And they can come together in your life. And you do not have to escape one or the other. The earlier you accept that this is so, the better for you. When the paradoxes of life are allowed, the person becomes more compassionate, more accepting of people, and more real.

When you constantly live in the tensions, you cannot but be real to people because you understand what it means to be real to yourself. You don’t live in an ideal world where sin is not committed and perfection is hammered on you. You become accepting and open to other people’s perspectives, and you will really be hardpressed to impose yourself on other people.

The Jesuits under Fr. Arrupe, were asked, what is it to be a Jesuit? And they wrote a beautiful document that begins by saying, “It is to know that one is a sinner, yet called to be a companion of Jesus as Ignatius was…”

This shows the tenuous tension that Jesuits (and everyone else in fact) are made to live. Sinner. Yet Called. You can not be one without the other. You cannot choose one over the other. You are both. And to choose one over the other is to lose the tension and to lose your meaning. To focus on the sinner without the “called” part for example, puts you in danger of going into depression and feeling that there is no salvation. To focus on the called without the “sinner” part on the other hand is to become proud and pompous and feel superior over everyone.

In fact, this might be the reason why our beliefs in the Catholic Church are formulated in paradox: Christ is true God and true Man; God is Alpha and Omega; The Kingdom of God is here, but not yet. To lose the paradox is to lose meaning. To lose the paradox, to lose the tension, to choose one over the other is even heresy!

Share your own thoughts about living in the tensions in the comments below. Next week, I will talk about how living in the tensions is a prerequisite for discernment.

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When I was younger this fear immobilized me. I did not want to make a mistake. I saw my friends get married for reasons of social acceptability, or sexual fever, or just because they thought it was the logical thing to do. Then I watched, as they and their partners became embittered and petty in their dealings with each other. I looked at older couples and saw, at best, mutual toleration of each other. I imagined a lifetime of loveless nights and bickering and could not imagine subjecting myself or someone else to such a fate.

And yet, on rare occasions, I would see old couples who somehow seemed to glow in each other’s presence. They seemed really in love, not just dependent upon each other and tolerant of each other’s foibles. It was an astounding sight, and it seemed impossible. How, I asked myself, can they have survived so many years of sameness, so much irritation at the other’s habits? What keeps love alive in them, when most of us seem unable to even stay together, much less love each other?

The central secret seems to be in choosing well. There is something to the claim of fundamental compatibility. Good people can create a bad relationship, even though they both dearly want the relationship to succeed. It is important to find someone with whom you can create a good relationship from the outset. Unfortunately, it is hard to see clearly in the early stages.

Sexual hunger draws you to each other and colors the way you see yourselves together. It blinds you to the thousands of little things by which relationships eventually survive or fail. You need to find a way to see beyond this initial overwhelming sexual fascination. Some people choose to involve themselves sexually and ride out the most heated period of sexual attraction in order to see what is on the other side.

This can work, but it can also leave a trail of wounded hearts. Others deny the sexual side altogether in an attempt to get to know each other apart from their sexuality. But they cannot see clearly, because the presence of unfulfilled sexual desire looms so large that it keeps them from having any normal perception of what life would be like together.

The truly lucky people are the ones who manage to become long-time friends before they realize they are attracted to each other. They get to know each other’s laughs, passions, sadness, and fears. They see each other at their worst and at their best. They share time together before they get swept into the entangling intimacy of their sexuality.

This is the ideal, but not often possible. If you fall under the spell of your sexual attraction immediately, you need to look beyond it for other keys to compatibility. One of these is laughter. Laughter tells you how much you will enjoy each other’s company over the long term.

If your laughter together is good and healthy, and not at the expense of others, then you have a healthy relationship to the world. Laughter is the child of surprise. If you can make each other laugh, you can always surprise each other. And if you can always surprise each other, you can always keep the world around you new.

Beware of a relationship in which there is no laughter. Even the most intimate relationships based only on seriousness have a tendency to turn sour. Over time, sharing a common serious viewpoint on the world tends to tour n you against those who do not share the same viewpoint, and your relationship can become based on being critical together.

After laughter, look for a partner who deals with the world in a way you respect. When two people first get together, they tend to see their relationship as existing only in the space between the two of them. They find each other endlessly fascinating, and the overwhelming power of the emotions they are sharing obscures the outside world. As the relationship ages and grows, the outside world becomes important again. If your partner treats people or circumstances in a way you can’t accept, you will inevitably come to grief. Look at the way she cares for others and deals with the daily affairs of life. If that makes you love her more, your love will grow. If it does not, be careful. If you do not respect the way you each deal with the world around you, eventually the two of you will not respect each other.

Look also at how your partner confronts the mysteries of life. We live on the cusp of poetry and practicality, and the real life of the heart resides in the poetic. If one of you is deeply affected by the mystery of the unseen in life and relationships, while the other is drawn only to the literal and the practical, you must take care that the distance doesn’t become an unbridgeable gap that leaves you each feeling isolated and misunderstood.

There are many other keys, but you must find them by yourself. We all have unchangeable parts of our hearts that we will not betray and private commitments to a vision of life that we will not deny. If you fall in love with someone who cannot nourish those inviolable parts of you, or if you cannot nourish them in her, you will find yourselves growing further apart until you live in separate worlds where you share the business of life, but never touch each other where the heart lives and dreams. From there it is only a small leap to the cataloging of petty hurts and daily failures that leaves so many couples bitter and unsatisfied with their mates.

So choose carefully and well. If you do, you will have chosen a partner with whom you can grow, and then the real miracle of marriage can take place in your hearts. I pick my words carefully when I speak of a miracle. But I think it is not too strong a word. There is a miracle in marriage. It is called transformation. Transformation is one of the most common events of nature. The seed becomes the flower. The cocoon becomes the butterfly. Winter becomes spring and love becomes a child. We never question these, because we see them around us every day. To us they are not miracles, though if we did not know them they would be impossible to believe.

Marriage is a transformation we choose to make. Our love is planted like a seed, and in time it begins to flower. We cannot know the flower that will blossom, but we can be sure that a bloom will come.

If you have chosen carefully and wisely, the bloom will be good. If you have chosen poorly or for the wrong reason, the bloom will be flawed. We are quite willing to accept the reality of negative transformation in a marriage. It was negative transformation that always had me terrified of the bitter marriages that I feared when I was younger.

It never occurred tome to question the dark miracle that transformed love into harshness and bitterness. Yet I was unable to accept the possibility that the first heat of love could be transformed into something positive that was actually deeper and more meaningful than the heat of fresh passion. All I could believe in was the power of this passion and the fear that when it cooled I would be left with something lesser and bitter.

But there is positive transformation as well. Like negative transformation, it results from a slow accretion of little things. But instead of death by a thousand blows, it is growth by a thousand touches of love. Two histories intermingle. Two separate beings, two separate presence, two separate consciousnesses come together and share a view of life that passes before them. They remain separate, but they also become one. There is an expansion of awareness, not a closure and a constriction, as I had once feared. This is not to say that there is not tension and there are not traps. Tension and traps are part of every choice of life, from celibate to monogamous to having multiple lovers. Each choice contains with in it the lingering doubt that the road not taken somehow more fruitful and exciting, and each becomes dulled to the richness that it alone contains.

But only marriage allows life to deepen and expand and be leavened by the knowledge that two have chosen, against all odds, to become one. Those who live together without marriage can know the pleasure of shared company, but there is a specific gravity in the marriage commitment that deepens that experience into something richer and more complex.

So do not fear marriage, just as you should not rush into it for the wrong reasons. It is an act of faith and it contains within it the power of transformation. If you believe in your heart that you have found someone with whom you are able to grow, if you have sufficient faith that you can resist the endless attraction of the road not taken and the partner not chosen, if you have the strength of heart to embrace the cycles and seasons that your love will experience, then you may be ready to seek the miracle that marriage offers. If not, then wait. The easy grace of a marriage well made is worth your patience. When the time comes, a thousand flowers will bloom…endlessly.

Was attributed to Mr. Eduardo “Eddieboy” Calasanz. But he has since disavowed writing this.

Sir Eddieboy is my (favorite) teacher in Philosophy. I still keep my notes of his classes. I think I signed up for about five philo subjects under him.

We have an ongoing “conversation ” about commitment. In my Philo oral exams, we would talk about the subject matter for 15 minutes and talk about what it means to make a promise for the next 45 minutes.

Everytime we meet, we’d continue the oral “exams” — talking about new insights we’ve had because new experiences were had in the interim. The latest conversation happened about two weeks ago, over breakfast. I said that there is a type of love that endures, a love that is able to bear pain and suffering. But we should be careful because endurance shouldn’t be mistaken for love. Ang pag-ibig ang dahilan ng pananatili. At minsan ang pananatili mismo ay pag-ibig. Ngunit maraming nanatili na hindi na umiibig. He said that on the other hand, love is perfected, precisely by enduring. Ang pag-ibig ay nagiging buo at wagas, dahil marunong manatili ang umiibig. There really is no hard and fast rule when you’re talking about commitment and love.

How do you promise something you don’t have a hold of, like forever? We don’t have and cannot have (i think) a hold of that. Forever is the language of God. We know yesterday, we know today, but we do not know tomorrow. We do not have a hold of tomorrow. And yet, when we make a commitment, we have the werewithal to promise a tomorrow which we do not really know yet. We say: I will love you tomorrow. I will be here tomorrow. I will stay with you tomorrow. It is very tricky, because you change even as the promise ought to remain. What if you realize new things about yourself? What if you see things from a completely different perspective now? What remains? Where is the crux of the promise?

I do not have answers to many of these things.

That is why the conversation is far from over.

Photos from gettyimages.com