Labels Aren't Just Used For Nutrition!

I have a Zen Calendar on my office desk that I bought at 5 and Below on a whim.  Zen is pretty cool, although much of it is a little too mystical for my liking.  This calendar occasionally has some Taoist words of wisdom as well though, so that makes up for it I guess.

Today’s wisdom was great: 

I love this.  And here’s why.  The world is an awfully complicated place, and yet we are constantly oversimplifying in just about everything we do.  It more commonly happens within our relationships with people, but let me step back and explain this from a very basic standpoint first.  You have a pen on your desk.  Anyone who is reading this is now visualizing a pen.  Does your pen have black or blue or red ink?  Is it a ballpoint pen or a gel pen or something else?  Does it have a rubber grip, or is it a cheap piece of plastic?  There are quite literally thousands of different styles for pens.  Yet they all are explained away with one word?

Now let’s think about people.  Let’s lump all the fat people together, and I can do this because I’m fat. =P  Now let’s use some logic (flawed logic, but logic nonetheless) and say that all fat people are lazy.  Well, we could be correct with this statement, but that's rather unlikely.  I’m probably the last person you could ever call lazy.  I jog two miles a day four times a week.  I try to write 5000 words a day.  I work from 8:30 to 5, which routinely involves solving technical puzzles and riddles that would boggle most people’s minds.  In the evenings I entertain a three-year old.  I may be lazy in journaling what I eat and following dietary guidelines, but does that make me lazy as a person?  And what exactly qualifies a person as being fat, anyway?  I most certainly am fat, obese by doctor’s standards, so I’m not counting myself in this.  But if someone is, say, six feet one inch tall and a hundred and ninety pounds—right on the border of being overweight according to a standard BMI chart, is he/she fat?  I could point you to thousands of athletes who are six foot one inch tall, weigh well over two-hundred pounds, and would never be considered fat.  Fatness, to me, is in the eye of the beholder.  It’s a label.  And it’s not a very nice one.

I’m not going to go on and on about how people bully others with labels here—I’ll save that for another time—but you get the picture.  Labels are so misleading.  Except maybe when it comes to relationships—if a person says he/she doesn’t want to label a relationship with terms like “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” or whatever, chances are that person is looking to dump you as soon as someone with nicer, ahem, labels comes along.  Labels mean EVERYTHING in relationships.  Am I right?

But labels are pervasive in our world.  Try reading a technical journal some time, especially one relating to a Microsoft product.  You’ll read about things such as Active Directory, Hyper-V, group policies, DNS, NAT, blah blah blah.  I’m really quite shocked to see immigrants who learn English as a second language (ESL) then jump into the IT field and become successful.  As if English isn’t hard enough to learn alone, they then have to master technical jargon.  Add in a programming language, which can be just as mystifying, and it’s just all that more impressive.  No wonder so many people complain about immigrants taking all of our jobs.  Far too many of us have too much difficulty mastering English alone, and we were even born here!

Of course, we live in a now, now, now and a me, me, me society, where most people want things done yesterday and often only worry about their own concerns.  When speaking to people like this, you can’t exactly use a hundred different words to describe something simple like a pen.  But you can think with an OPEN MIND.  When the reverse happens—when they talk to you about a pen, or a fat and lazy person—you can understand that their labels are simply that.  Labels.  Utterly inefficient words used to describe something that is clearly a thousand-fold more complex.

The Wrong Way to Manage

I’m fired up.  I’ve been seeing this problem lately of other people’s inability to stand in someone else’s shoes.  Far too many people in this world can’t seem to recognize that others may have a differing point of view that may be just as valid as theirs.  More importantly, people don’t ever want to hear that they may be incorrect in their assumptions.

Today I was alerted to a situation whereby someone in a position of power had an issue with an underling.  The underling, apparently, had not done what he/she had been asked to do.  Rather than directly approaching the underling and asking why, this person performed the task his/herself, then admitted this to me, saying, “I want to see how long it takes for un-named person to complete the task.”

I’m sorry, but that’s not a good way to foster the potential in others.  It’s catty, deceitful, and wrong.  I’m not at all surprised by this situation today, as this person is a habitual micromanager and loves to illegitimize the work of others.  This person also repeatedly shirks ethics and moral obligations, but that’s a whole other story that I won’t get into now.

Why are people like this?  Why can’t people just approach a situation as reasonable adults, discuss the reasoning behind their conflict, and come to some sort of understanding or agreement?

I’m not saying I’m perfect.  My wife told me yesterday that we no longer had Hershey’s Syrup to make chocolate milk for my son.  I still checked our pantry anyway.  She derided me for this, but I could have sworn I saw some in there the day before.  What I saw was barbeque sauce.  Oops!

But I’ll at least admit my mistake.  I won’t play games, especially if I hold a position of power.  Games, after all, are for grade school children.

Positive, Negative, Polarized America!

This morning my wife and I were listening to the radio on our way to work.  The DJ was discussing a recent New York school that was handing out the Plan B pill and birth controls to girls without parental consent, and numerous people were calling in either for or against the school for doing this.

Obviously the people for it were the liberal type, saying that kids would have sex anyway and that they should be given every opportunity to avoid pregnancy.  Many were adult parents that had their children while in their teens, and they reflected on how difficult their lives had been and how they wished they had those types of options back then.

The people against it were the conservative types, and their summarized views were that society is failing these kids by doing this.  Instead of teaching abstinence and morals, they are encouraging kids to have sex, and that’s just not right.  One lady called in and bashed another lady for saying that kids would just have sex anyway, saying that her kids wouldn’t because she talks to them about it constantly and they know that they shouldn’t have premarital sex.

And I find this serious topic strangely amusing.  Not for the topic itself, but because this is just a microcosm of how polarized Americans are today.  It’s like nobody seems to notice the gray area anymore.  For the people who are for birth control and Plan B, you need to make sure the program is done properly.  Handing these things out like candy is going to be problematic.  Just like what the naysayers are saying, you are almost encouraging kids to have sex if these things are being handed out without counseling, guidance, etc.

On the other hand, the ones who are against it are missing the point entirely.  You can talk to your kids all you want, but kids are kids.  They rebel.  That’s what they do.  And honestly, if you are too strict with them, they’ll just rebel even more.  You may go to church and instill religion and morals and fear into your child, but you can’t be with them 100% of the time, and that 1% where you aren’t watching—guess what, your kid could be out there getting pregnant.  Don’t be so naïve to think your child is special, either.  Unless they don’t have hormones, which would be a medical enigma, they are probably going to have sex before they are out of high school.  After all, the average age for virginity loss is 17.0 in males and 17.3 for females in the United States, so unless you have a gifted kid that’s already gone off to college at that age, your kid is probably going to be having sex in his or her senior year of high school.

Regardless, I just love how people get so fired up over topics like this.  The school offered parents the ability to “opt-out” of the program by filling out a form.  It wasn’t like they were going against the wishes of the parents and forcing the kids to take them.  They were just making this available to kids who needed them, kids who may otherwise be too scared to go to their parents—parents like those same conservative ones who swore up and down that their child would not be having sex.

But it’s like that with every hot button issue now.  People are either decidedly for or against Obama or Romney.  People are either for or against abortion, gay marriage, the Affordable Healthcare Act, over-sized soft drinks, SpongeBob, toe jam.  I hate to tell you, folks, but the world isn’t as yin and yang as you make it out to be.  What seems like a great or horrible idea to you might be the opposite to someone else, but what in the world ever happened with our ability to compromise?

I was watching a Scott Pelley interview with President Obama last week, and the CBS anchor directly asked the President why he can’t seem to get along with Republicans.  And Obama stated, “I’ve joked in the past to my staff and to some Republicans, ‘Look, if you want me to come over and wash your car, walk your dog, I’m game, if it means that we’re actually getting stuff done on behalf of the American people.’”  Funny, because I can’t see Mitt Romney doing that.  I can’t really see Obama doing that either—but at least he’s saying he’s willing to compromise and work together.   But the Republicans reject everything he puts before them, and they dislike his views so much that Romney wants to repeal the Affordable Healthcare Act as one of his top priorities.  And Democrats aren't off the hook either.  What’s up with all of this non-stop mentioning of Romney’s tax returns?  Yeah, the guy pays less than most people pay.  It sucks, it's unfair, it's BS, but it’s because the tax codes are flawed.  Yes, if elected, he probably won't do anything to change that--and may even make it even easier for the super-rich to get more money--but let’s at least hear what he has to offer in his plan to fix our country’s woes.  THEN we can vote for the people who can get them all patched up—by WORKING TOGETHER.  Let’s not make our judgments until we know each plan inside and out.

Really, all this fighting has to stop.  People may not see eye to eye, but let’s at least agree to disagree and move on.  Or maybe we just open our minds up a little.  Everyone has an opinion, and yet so few of us are ever willing to hear out the other side.

Maybe last night that Seattle Seahawk really didn’t commit offensive pass interference before simultaneously catching the ball even though the Green Bay Packer player had it hugged to his chest tighter than a newborn baby.  Ok...yeah...maybe in some instances there really isn't much gray area...

Mind Your Manners, Son!

Not my son, per se.  My son is getting his manners down pretty well, saying “please” and “thank you” and “you’re welcome.”  He makes me a proud papa every single day.  That is, every single day he manages not to fall asleep during lunch and activities in daycare.  But that’s a different story about a kid that loves his parents so much that he hates going to bed at night.

The manners I’m talking about are the ones the majority of others on this planet seem to lack.  I mean, I’m thinking we all need a refresher course in how to treat others.  It’s like we all had the little angels and devils on our shoulders telling us how we should behave, except the angels all fell off, leaving only the devils to give us their evil guidance.  Because disrespect seems the norm, at least from this guy's perspective.  And I say, "Yuck!" to that!

Let me start with an incident that occurred a few days ago.  A person asked me to perform a very unimportant, IT-related task for her, but that task required about thirty minutes of my time.  She was incapable of performing this task herself, and it was my duty to assist her, so I did it.  I was extremely busy with other things, and I expressed this to her as politely as I could, but I still performed this task anyway.  I finished, received a “thank you,” and left.  I checked it off my list.  Yay!  Now onto more important matters, like saving the world from squid-like machines that use humans as batteries.  BUT...then I received a call from this person, a mere thirty minutes later, asking me to undo the task I’d just done for her.  No joke.  Now ordinarily I wouldn’t have complained, but this particular individual has become notorious for these types of requests.  Apparently the fact that I was supremely busy was completely lost to her, or else her own personal agenda was far more important than mine.  And that seems to be the case more often than not, I’m afraid.

We all have seen drivers on cell phones, talking or texting, driving erratically.  Check out my Twitter page (https://twitter.com/rastrohman, @rastrohman) to see a picture we snapped of a teenage girl texting while using her wrists to drive—I’m just amazed at how she managed to do this without killing everyone else on the road!  This seems to be an epidemic!  Worse than an impending zombie apocalypse!  People are so self-consumed in their own little worlds that they can’t even put down their phones for the 10 minute drive from work or school to home or whatever.

There’s a kid at my son’s daycare whose mother is ALWAYS on her phone.  She works on the other side of town like us, and we’ve followed her for MILES to the daycare watching her chat on her phone.  She’ll even frequently pull up to the daycare or, unbelievably, pull over a block away to finish her call—taking as long as 10-15 minutes before going to pick up her kid.  Really, lady?  Your call is more important than picking up your son?  We’ve rationalized her behavior by speculating at her profession.  Maybe she’s a crisis counselor talking someone off of a ledge?  Or perhaps she’s a doctor or IT person like myself, assisting someone with some medical or technical emergency?  I doubt it.  She’s just one more self-absorbed person, mindless to the world around her.  I don’t even think she realizes how often we see her chatting away on her cell phone as her son sits and waits for her.  Poor kid.

Random statement here, but I like to sleep with my bedroom window open, especially in the spring and fall when the air has a chill to it.  However, I live on a long, flat road with a private club for war veterans about a half a mile away, and many of the patrons of this club ride motorcycles.  Every night between 1 and 2:30 AM, these guys go ripping down the road in excess of 50 MPH (the posted speed limit is 25 MPH) on their hogs.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I love motorcycles.  I owned one a few years ago, and I plan on buying another when my kids are older.  But I’d never open up the throttle at 2 AM when people are sleeping.  Maybe on a highway, but never in a residential neighborhood.  That’s just freakin’ rude.  And Monday mornings are the worst for sleeping with my window open, because the garbage trucks do the same thing.  One of these days I’m going to go out there and snap a video of these garbage truck drivers doing 50-60 MPH in a 25 and send it to the company and the local police.  It’s not like I can sleep with their loud, obnoxious trucks driving by so fast anyway.  Manners, people!

Everyone has their pet peeves.  From a coworker with quirks to bad or obnoxious drivers to in-laws or lazy or insolent teenagers or whatever.  But did you ever just consider why we are annoyed so much by other people?  A majority of the time it’s due to a lack of manners.  People deficient in understanding how their own actions affect others.  People that hog up an aisle in a grocery store as they compare the prices of green olives or Ginkgo biloba vitamins.  People that go to public parks with their dogs and refuse to obey the leash laws.  People that constantly summon a waitress over because they need more ketchup/jelly/sugar/attention and fail to see the other patrons anxiously waiting for her to return to their tables to fulfill their needs.  People that just live in their own little worlds and don’t give a crap about anyone else.

I’m not saying I’m perfect.  I’m sure some random stranger has been pissed at me for driving too slow or taking too long to go at a green light when he/she was late for an appointment.  I’m sure my big body inadvertently blocked a grocery store aisle.  I’m sure someone was upset because they felt I was taking too long to perform a certain IT-related task (because I should be an IT fairy with a magic little IT wand, right?)  And hey, for all those people, I’m sorry.  I didn’t do it intentionally.  Because I really, honestly, straight-up try to have top-notch manners.  I pay attention to how my actions, however minute they may be, affect those around me.

Yes, I am conscientious.  When someone asks me to do something, I respond as soon as I’m able.  If I see someone approaching me in a grocery store aisle, I’ll move my cart over to the right as far as possible.  If I owned a dog, I’d keep it on a leash if we were out in public and people were around.  I try my hardest to pay attention to how I’m affecting others, and I rectify any issues before they even manifest.  I actually do give a damn.  But that’s just me.

Maybe all of those other people are just jaded.  Maybe they’ve seen too much selfishness in the world, and they’ve given up or given in and gone that route as well.  It’s a “me, me, me” world, and nice guys finish last.  Right?

Not me.  I’ll mind my manners until the day I die.  The question is: will you?

Blind to the Ways of the World

I’m amazed at how content some people are with ignorance.  They live day to day without reading newspapers, watching news, surfing the web.  And I’m finding more and more of these people each and every day.  People that choose not to encumber themselves with technological tools such as smart phones and Facebook accounts.  People that don’t have cable or satellite subscriptions or even a television to watch them on.  What gives?

My wife’s aunt  is in her late thirties or early forties and can’t read.  Not English.  Not Vietnamese, which is her native country.  I just can’t imagine stumbling through life and seeing WORDS everywhere and not knowing what they say.  I mean, how could anyone go through life without having any inkling of what is going on around them? 

On the flip side, I see people that seem to LIVE on social networking sites.  I've even had some recent Facebook "friends" that have lost all social etiquette.  It seems some people, rather than choosing to give updates on their daily happenings or posting pictures of things they find interesting or exciting, have decided that Facebook is a prime market for proselytizing their political agendas.  It’s not like he or she would go around telling people in public that Romney is an idiot or Obama is inept.  Doing so would probably, at the very least, get a few choice vulgar words or middle fingers tossed at them.  Yet on Facebook they have no problem posting graphs and phrases outlining the fallacies of our president and/or his competitor.  Or worse yet, a few of my Facebook “friends” have posted glaringly inappropriate content.  Nobody wants to know that you think that lady’s butt looks nice, even though you used some outrageously vulgar language to express your sentiments.  Nobody cares that you think certain people have lied to you for years, and that they can all reside in a fiery biblical residence for their rest of eternity.  Nobody cares about your religion or your politics or anything else you post in an attempt to make people see your point of view.  Because either people will agree with you, or they won’t, and the ones that won’t will just think you are nuts and defriend/block/ignore you.

I’m not sure which is better, being completely naïve to the ways of the world or knowing entirely too much, especially with regards to close friends and members of your own family.

When I turned eighteen, I got a tattoo on my leg of the Chinese symbol for the word slave.  I had it lasered off in my late twenties because, well, it was the Chinese symbol for the word slave!   And really, I think it might have actually meant “female slave”—I know, how awful is that!—and I felt extremely embarrassed about it when I frequented Chinese eateries.  But the reason I got the tattoo in the first place was purely philosophical.  It was to always remind me that I am a slave to my desires.  In other words, I live in a capitalist, keeping-up-with-the-Jones’s society where everyone is judgmental of everyone else, money equals power, and we are raised from a young age to place value in material possessions.  I will always want things.  And each and every time I see something I want, that something begins to own me.  I’ve lost control.  I’ve become nothing more than a child lusting over a piece of candy.

For a while I actually dreamed of moving to China and joining a monastery.  I wanted to train my body and my mind to think without influence, to exist without needs, to accept all and judge nothing.  Of course, being a white American kid, I realized those were merely pipe dreams.  Sure I studied martial arts and read hundreds of books on eastern philosophies, but I had to be realistic.  And now that I’m a father and a husband, I wouldn’t trade my family for the world.  But I still envy those monks, knowing that they know nothing and yet everything at the same time.

Our minds, as babies, have not yet developed enough to understand the world in which we live.  And as we grow, we learn to love, hate, value, judge, believe.  We learn what is right and what is wrong, what makes us happy and what makes us sad.  But unfortunately all of that is relative.  What I judge to be good, like maybe voting for Obama for president, someone else may judge to be bad.  I value my Dodge Ram pickup truck, and yet I know a few people who detest the make and model and even hate the people who drive them, as I learned one day when a friend not-so-eloquently put his foot in his mouth by bashing people who drove them, not knowing that I had just purchased one a few weeks prior.  Oops!

So really, all of these things that we’ve learned since the time we were born really seem quite trivial and meaningless, don’t they?  Even down to the mere words we use to describe things.  Is it a spoon?  A utensil?  A lifter?  A ladle?  A spatula?  Did you walk here?  Or stroll?  Trot?  Bounce?  Saunter?  Oolala!  We use labels to define things, and yet those words do no justice for what I’m describing.  Each of you reading this is  picturing a different type of spoon—plastic, ornate, wooden, soup, large, small.  Does it matter?  All this knowledge in our heads is pointless.  Rather we should be focusing on the tangible and intangible.  Focus on what we observe.  Pass no judgment.  Do not label it.  Observe it, understand it, and then move on.

Having an empty, clear mind is a wondrous thing.  Because without that, we are all mindless slaves.  I’m a slave to my desires, and so are you.  I can’t just give up social media.  I mean, I can, but how else would I let all of my followers know I have this wonderful blog?  I can’t quit my job, because then I couldn’t put food on the table for my family.  I can’t give up drinking Red Bull.  Ok, maybe I can, but why should I?  We are born to be consumers.  We are born to grow up, go to school, get a job, have a family if we choose, grow old, and die…and buy buy buy all the way through.

Sad, really.  Life for those monks seems so much simpler.  And easy.  And peaceful.  They know a spoon is for eating rice, and that’s that.  They don’t get to hear daily about gas prices going up, injustices toward others, etc. etc.  It's no wonder they are some of the greatest thinkers mankind has to offer.

Maybe my friends and family who live life outside of the proverbial “Know” are onto something.  And maybe I shouldn’t have had that tattoo removed.

Would You Be an Effective Leader? Or Would the Power Go to Your Head?

I’ve been slacking here on the blog front, so I thought I’d add a little post.  Well, maybe not little…hehe.

So Todd Akin’s statements prove that he is an idiot.  I’m sure there is a very small minority out there who would disagree with me, and for them I would advise that they go find some health textbooks and learn something about the female anatomy.  What’s more shocking to me though is his refusal to exit the Senate race, despite his own party pressuring him to quit.  I just have to wonder if he’s that power-mad?  Is his quest to become a Senator so important that he’s willing to jeopardize the entire Republican party?  Very scary stuff.  We don’t need people like that ruling our country!

I think it’s an illness that may affect many politicians nowadays.  They may start out with lofty ambitions to win a seat or office, hoping they’ll be able to make some significant and positive change (even though “positive” is such a relative term), but then they become institutionalized, lose sight of their original intentions, and then just fight and fight to stay in power when it’s obvious to everyone else that they must leave.  I think our government needs to overhaul the term limits for certain positions.  Of course, it’d be easier to ask my son to throw away all of his Spider-man toys and gear.  Not going to happen!

I was watching Hotel Hell from last week, and the owner of the hotel, when confronted by Gordon Ramsey (who is just amazing in the way he motivates people), actually had the nerve to tell his employees that “if they don’t like it, they can find a job elsewhere.”  Gordon Ramsey just completely lost it on this jerk, repeatedly asking him “how dare” he “say something like that.”  And he’s right.  Anyone who manages even one other person has absolutely no business in that position if that’s his or her opinion.  Unfortunately, nearly everyone I know has heard a boss or supervisor utter those words.

Some managers and business owners seem to have this sentiment when their employees start complaining.  Instead of trying to rectify the situation, they’ll just dismiss it.  It’s the sign of a person who lacks leadership qualities, who is too afraid to effectively communicate, guide, listen, and even reprimand their staff.  These people tend to struggle with conflict and try to avoid it at all costs.  And there’s nothing wrong with that, except that if that’s the type of person he or she is, that person needs to not be a manager.  If an employee is complaining to you, whether it be about working conditions, gossip, wages, etc., it’s your job to listen to them, identify if their gripe is valid, and then communicate your thoughts and come up with a plan of action.  Don't just ignore it!

I’m about to get a little wordy here, but I just want to mention one case in particular (while protecting the names of the innocent).  We had Bob, an employee and a manager of a group of five or six, who reported to Frank, a low-level executive.  Frank also had Sally, Mary, and Pat reporting to him from other departments.  Sally, who ran a department with close ties to Bob’s, and several of her underlings had it out for Bob, and they repeatedly complained to Frank about Bob’s department.  However, Bob’s department was setting all sorts of records, so much so that even the President of the company complimented him on his work, and his staff’s morale was at an all-time high.  Sally’s complaints were petty attempts to make him look bad, but Frank couldn’t stand all the bickering and infighting among the departments, and at one point he actually asked Mary (from a third department) to “keep an eye on” Bob and look for certain things that Sally and her underlings complained over (which Mary never witnessed, I might add).  Pat, who worked in yet a different department, overheard bossman Frank’s plan, and so he told Bob about it.  Bob decided immediately to leave because he couldn’t put up with the departmental bull crap and poor management by his supervisor.  He couldn't believe that Frank wouldn't discuss the "complaints" with him and would rather have someone spy on him.  And who could blame him?  After he left, a new employee, James, was hired to move into Bob’s spot.  And then things went downhill from there.

Frank’s inability to effectively manage his staff caused the loss of a valuable employee.  And then, believe it or not, Frank was promoted even higher in the organization.  And James, who had no managerial experience, failed miserably without any guidance or training at being a manager (no surprise given that Frank was his boss).  The department continued to do well, mostly because of initiatives that Bob had put into place before he left, but morale began to slip to an all-time low.  James even at one point, frustrated over an employee’s complaints of having too much work to do, broke a lamp in his office.  He repeatedly threatened to write up his staff members for innocent or non-existent mistakes, and the department severely suffered.

Not good.  Would you want to work in a place like that?

Somewhere along the line, someone should have recognized Frank’s inability to lead and pushed him in a different direction.  Frank was great with numbers and reports and business analysis, but he was lousy with people.  And that’s just the way it is sometimes.  Not everyone is a born leader.  But nobody pointed this out to Frank, and so the atmosphere created under him was toxic and still remains that way today.  And by the way, I know Bob.  He’s doing great in his new role.  He’s also very happy and thankful he got out of there when he did.

Are these people just blinded by their power that they can’t see how harmful their actions are to those under and around them?  It reminds me of a line from a Nine Inch Nails song: Capital G.

                Don’t try to tell me how some power can corrupt a person

                You haven’t had enough to know what it’s like

                You’re only angry ‘cause you wish you were in my position

                Now nod your head because you know that I’m right.  All right!

Truly sad, but we all know people that certain people in authoritative roles tend to feel that way.

So what’s my point?  My point is that being a good leader isn’t for everyone, obviously.  But the Tao Teh Ching has some good advice for those who want to try.  By the way, check out my pocket-sized one--I suggest everyone get one and read it!  But anyway, for those of you who think you can be a leader, just contemplate these:

Chapter 17 of the Tao Teh Ching:

The highest type of ruler is one of whose existence the people are barely aware.

Next comes one whom they love and praise.

Next comes one whom they fear.

Next comes one whom they despise and defy.

When you are lacking in faith, others will be unfaithful to you.

The Sage is self-effacing and scanty of words.

When his task is accomplished and things have been completed, all the people will say, “We ourselves have achieved it!”

Chapter 24 of the Tao Teh Ching:

One on tip-toe cannot stand.

One astride cannot walk.

One who displays himself does not shine.

One who justifies himself has no glory.

One who boasts of his own ability has no merit.

One who parades his own success will not endure.

In Tao this things are called “unwanted foods and extraneous growths,” which are loathed by all things.

Hence a man of Tao does not set his heart upon them.

Could You be a Hoarder?

http://tlc.howstuffworks.com/tv/hoarding-buried-alive

So I must have spent half a day watching Hoarding: Buried Alive over the weekend.  That show is like the ultimate roller coaster ride.  It starts out with a house, seems normal, but as they approach and go inside, you gasp in horror.  It always seems to go from bad to worse, with some new atrocity of piles of used diapers or roaches crawling over everything or dead animals buried under the messes.  We actually tried to eat dinner while watching it, and I can honestly say that if you want to lose weight, put that on while you are eating.  You won’t be going back for a second helping.

After watching three or four episodes, I decided to clean up my own tiny "hoard" in my garage.  My father-in-law came out to help, and in no time we had three garbage bags full—mostly newspapers and cardboard I never got around to hauling off to the recycling center.  I only spent maybe an hour and a half before my allergies got the best of me, but my daunting mess of a garage is much cleaner, and I can't wait to set up my workout bench again and hang up my punching bag so that I can use a portion of it as a gym!  Yay!

But back to hoarding, I can’t quite figure out how people allow themselves to live in filth.  Granted, my house isn’t always the neatest or the cleanest.  My kid loves to make messes, and while he’s great at cleaning them up at the daycare, at home…well…not so much.  Add volumes of junk mail, my wife’s mountain of shoes inside the doorway, laundry, newspapers, etc., etc., etc., and sometimes I feel like I spend way too much time cleaning up.  But my house will never EVER EVER come close to looking like those houses--even in most of the "after" pictures.

I’ve realized that there are really two problems that are presented on Hoarding.  You have the people that just don’t want to let go of anything, which to me seems like a real mental disease, and then you have the people that are just lazy.  On this one particular episode, this woman lived with her two kids (a 17-year-old girl and a 15ish-year-old boy).  The mother claimed she had fibromyalgia and couldn’t do anything without suffering extreme pain, and the kids wouldn’t do anything either.  Mountains of trash piled up, and nobody seemed to care or notice.  The mother blamed everything and everybody but herself, and she even got to the point where she refused to talk to the therapist because the woman was "belittling her" and saying she was "unfit to be a mother."  This lady was also a diabetic, and instead of putting her USED NEEDLES in a sharps container—or even a plastic bag—she was just throwing them into this garbage heap beside her.  They actually had to have a HAZMAT team come out and clean up her needles, and sure enough the team found at least one that wasn’t capped.  Are you freaking serious, lady?!?!?!?

The kids didn’t want to live there, and yet the girl cooked (on one burner amid a pile of trash) for her mother and didn’t want to leave her.  I kept thinking that those kids should have been placed with their father or in foster homes, but I realized that the daughter was fiercely emotionally attached to her mom, because otherwise why would she live in this filth?  Not to mention the place was crawling with roaches.  Yes, roaches.  Queue the vomit...

In the end they got it all cleaned up, and the family lived happily ever after, blah blah blah.  I don’t buy that though.  That lady had to have been one of the laziest people on the planet.  She couldn’t take trash out because she was in pain, yet she was walking through the house just fine.  She couldn’t even put her needles in a bag so that they weren’t poking people?

What drives people to such low points in their lives?  This lady obviously was depressed and sick and just in a horrible mental state, but to subject your kids to that?  I just don’t get it.

On another episode, one lady actually claimed that she was a very selfish person, she knew it, and she would never change.  Her boyfriend was ready to leave her because of her hoarding, and this was their final straw.  They cleaned up their place and worked out their differences, but I think that lady’s honesty said it all.

We have a hoarder house about a mile away from our residence.  We drive past it nearly every day.  We've watched over the past few months as they have filled three or maybe even more dumpsters, and the house itself isn’t all that big.  Part of me would have loved to have seen the inside before they started, but if given the opportunity to actually go, I ultimately would have declined.  Just cleaning out my cluttered garage was enough to send me into a horrible sneezing fit.

I could never be a hoarder.  Someone very close to me was on the verge of (probably even crossed the line of) being a hoarder, and unfortunately I had to deal with cleaning up most of the hoard several years ago.  Luckily I found some auctioneers that helped us sell most of the stuff, but we had both a big and a little dumpster of pure trash hauled out.  I don't mind talking about it to people, but I'll just summarize it here--it taught me a lesson, that's for sure.

These people that are just lazy hoarders, the ones that won’t throw away their trash—they just need slapped silly or else tossed in jail for a month or two to learn discipline and respect for others.  And really, that lady from that show should have spent some time in jail for abusing her children by forcing them to live in conditions like that.

But for the ones that have to hang on to material possessions, I understand it's a mental disease, but I can't identify with them at all.  They find value in garbage.  The one had a 55-gallon drum filled with ballpoint pens.  Seriously?  Like 10 of them aren’t going to last you the rest of your life?  You really need 5000 of them?  I had to throw out 10 pairs of worn shoes when cleaning up the hoard I had to deal with.  Not one of them was fit for wearing even around the house.

I have a little Zen Calendar on my desk, and one saying in particular was so good that I kept it, cut off the date, and taped it to my monitor.  It reads:

“Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you obtain it, it is nothing special.” – Shunryu Suzuki

That's the way I've TRIED to live my life since high school.  I don’t let material possessions own me.  I may give in once in a while, but at least I try, and I think I'm rather successful.  I mean, I look at my own house now, and I really think it would take a small-sized U-haul for us to move.  If it burned down, I wouldn't be upset.  I'd just replace the things we need, buy a few things to have fun with, and move on.  And here's a good example of my philosophy: the other day I was looking at Poweriser jumping stilts, thinking they’d be so cool to have, and then I realized that I’d probably wear them a handful of times, get hurt or realize that I’m not 18-years-old anymore, and then put them in a closet or up in my loft where we keep all of our stuff that we no longer use.  Yeah, check them out.  They look pretty awesome, right?  But how many times would a 35-year-old use these things??

Bottom line, don’t be a slave to your desires.  Don’t be a slave to material possessions.  The next time you go to buy something, ask yourself if you really need it.  Because chances are that you don’t.