The Preamble
Steven Hawking has recently announced his theory of time travel and stated that he believes traveling into the future is a possibility. His theory, in my unqualified summary, states that if a ship could be built to travel faster than the speed of light, it could also travel faster through time. In essence, one day on-board this ship would be equal to that of a full year on earth — you would literally be flying into the future with a one way ticket.
He made no assertion of any technology that could be used to travel back in time, but this didn’t stop my indomitable imagination from conjuring up a scenario in which, on some distant day, time traveling Paul of the future could travel back in time to talk to young Paul — young Paul at or around 14 years old. What would he say? What advice would he give? What warnings would he give?
The List
Avoiding the usual axioms that accompany this type of fanciful thinking — using knowledge of the future to invent someone else’s technology, buying stock in google before they became GOOGLE, etc… — and taking into account the impact that chaos possesses over our inherently flawed notion of “fate” and/or destiny — after all, some of the pain that I’ve gone through has helped define who I am as a person, and I don’t want to lose that — I believe I would give myself the following 5 pieces of advice.
5. Don’t Take Things So Seriously.
I’ll admit it… I was one of the “back-porch” poets growing up. I would scrutinize every avenue of my life and drill out any angst, from any given situation. This usually led to me spilling my heart through a pen in the form of some (very) bad poetry. If one thing wasn’t right in my life, nothing was right in my life. This lead me down a road of constant, depressing, self examination and flippant mood swings.
To some extent I am still this way, and I’m glad I am, but the difference now is that I’ve been tempered with the principals of mercy. I no longer feel compelled to attempt to repair every little defect in my life’s encounters. It’s not a realizable task and thinking that it is takes all the joy out of living and leads to the oppression of legalism and depression.
4. Worry Is A Lose/Lose Situation.
More than 80% of the things I used to worry about when I was younger never materialized in life. But this worry kept me from enjoying my youth to the full extent that I could have. On my best days, it was often all I could do push negative thoughts out of my mind and just enjoy myself. On my worst days, I was borderline agoraphobic.
Here is the logic I wish I grasped then: Worrying about what might happen, whether it comes true or not, is a waste of time. If the feared event doesn’t occur, you’ve squandered time. If it does, that worrying does absolutely nothing to help prepare you for the trial at hand.
3. Choose Your Role Models More Carefully.
Oh young Paul, there are so many people I need to warn you about. I could fill a book with advice about how to deal with specific responses to specific people at specific times, but this would be a dis-service. Instead, just take this advice to heart: The character of a person matters.
Growing up, many of the people that I chose to look-up to fizzled out. I’m not trying to sound mean, but it’s the truth. Some people in their younger years appeared to have such charisma, and I was sure they had things figured out, only to fall to pieces at the first sign of trouble later in life. This isn’t to say that you swing the pendulum in the opposite direction and not look up to anyone unless they meet some unobtainable standard of perfection, but there are things evident in a persons life that point to the type of person they are:
- Their integrity
- Their courage behind their convictions
- The company they keep
- How honest they are
- The books they read
- How forgiving they are
- What they give and who they give it to
- Their spiritual life
- Their desire for wisdom
- Their desire for self improvement
- How they treat others
Many people who lacked some or all of these qualities I thought worthy of my admiration simply because they were witty with words. I would even go as far to state that people who don’t exhibit at least a few of these qualities should be avoided.
2: Please Understand That The World Is NOT ‘Out To Get You’
This is something I was taught, and wish that I had ‘un-learned’ long before I did. Though I won’t get into specifics of the origin of this belief, at one point it was all but blatantly communicated to me that being taken advantage of is the worst type of pain a person can experience. To summarizes this belief: Nobody can be trusted because everybody’s motives are dubious. By always being on a lookout for people and situations where I could potentially be taken advantage of, I robbed myself of experiences and relationships that would/could have been life changing.
The truth of the matter is simple: The world is not out to get you. Are there people who will take advantage of people if given the chance? Of course. But despite all the careful planning one could possibly put in to protecting yourself, there are times when it’s going to happen anyway. The best you can do is try to learn from the experience and get on with your life. The secret is not to become so disillusioned with people that you start shutting them out.
This is a beautiful world filled with extraordinarily interesting people to meet and experiences to enjoy — living in that constant fear will rob you of those experiences.
1: Avoid Negative People
In my short 30 year life span, I feel that I’ve been blessed with opportunities to meet many different types of people, from a diverse background. Though I haven’t always agreed with, or in some cases even gotten along with, some of them, there really is only one group of people I can honestly say I regret investing my time into. That would be the overly ‘negative people’.
These are not to be confused with people who are depressed, — though nine times out of ten a constantly negative person is one suffering for horrible depression — or friendly people who go off on negative rants. I’m referring to people who are consistently and tenaciously negative. The people who seem to exhume negativity from their very souls, the people who no matter what their life circumstance will always find a reason to complain.
These people are parasites. They leech off of good intentions and sympathy of the compassionate, but offer nothing in return on contribute nothing to their own growth. And what is worse, their negativity is more contagious than the flu. If you’re not careful and associate with them long enough, it’s easy to start show streaks of negativity in yourself.
Sometimes I just want to stare directly into the eyes of one of these negative people and ask them outright one of these questions, “Why are so angry?” or “Who hurt you?”. I would suspect that the answer to either of these questions would at least shed some light on why they are the way they are. However; it has been my experience that these people have no interest in losing their negativity. They often were it as a feather in the their cap and are completely unaware that most other people are either just pitying them, or trying to avoid them.
Final Thoughts
So that’s my list. I could easily add more to it, but the items I would add are merely offshoots of the top level items already listed. I could also list out specific people or experiences that I wished I had avoided, but in a strange way am glad that I didn’t. I’m sure a fair amount of the pain I’ve felt has help turn me into the glorious piece of unfinished work that I am now. And I like me.
July 7, 2010
Development, Featured, Thoughts