Rules Of Engagement

Hello, Hello. Hello, Cadre. Good morning. From Silver Spring, Maryland. Different background just because I am in a different part of my office. This is a northeast Minneapolis artist named Jonathan Rice. If anybody knows him, please tell him to reach out to me to let him know that, I don't know, 20 years after I bought this painting from the State Fair Fine Arts Building, it's still hanging in my house. Things are a little rough in the world right now, Cadre. I don't know if you've noticed, many of you are in Minnesota.

I don't know if you've noticed there's one or two things going on around you. I certainly have. And first I want to say things are rough. And I see that. And it's got to be hard on everybody. The general environment in the world. At some point, my cat is going to come say hello. The general environment in the world. I liken to smog like it's not good for you. It's ever present. Good morning, Rose. It's ever present. Here comes the cat. You can see him lurking about. It's not good for you. You can still function.

You can still go about your life and do what you need to do. But the whole time you're just breathing in something that's really difficult and hard on your body. And at some point you're going to pay a price for it. I liken it to smog in general attention places. Other places than the difficult place you feel compelled to put your attention in order to stay functional. And I have PhDs in all of this. Like I am mistress of parking my brain in neutral. Recovering alcoholic, first of all. So booze was a great idea for me.

For a long time it felt like it was a great idea. I have not had recreational sugar in 36 years, but that is because I used to eat constantly. I used to weigh, I don't know, 80 more pounds than I do now. As I've said many times, yes, Cafe Marisa. My cat does that too. Yes, my cat. As soon as he hears me on a zoom, he just. He at least once wants to come visit if he's in the room. And today I just left the door open. So here he is, this cat. My other cat sometimes visits, sometimes doesn't. So I have done a lot of checking out with sugar, with booze, with cigarettes.

I used to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day. I just got a new primary care physician here in Maryland. And she sort of looked at me. I said all of this when I was 19. And she said, 19. I said, yeah, well, There are reasons that I needed to do it when I was 19, But anytime is a good time. But since I've been in recovery, I still master the art of zoning out. It's just in healthier ways, ways that aren't going to kill me in the long run. Things like reading, particularly genre fiction of a variety of stripes.

TV scrolling has become a really good one. And I realized for somebody like me who has a pretty significant freeze response, I go pretty quickly from being anxious to being completely frozen. And it took me a long time to understand that me just sitting there scrolling, me reading when I should be doing something else. Any of those behaviors on my part, and for you, they may include drinking or smoking or eating too much or whatever it is. All of those were my freeze response. I could not figure out how to engage in activities of my choosing that I would think were fun or pleasurable.

I could not figure out how to think about or engage with the problem that was sitting right here in front of my face. I felt like I should be dealing with a problem in front of my face. I could not figure out how to do it. So I would just go into freeze mode. Years of this. In my free time, right? Work actually sometimes functioned as a way to get out of myself and sometimes functioned as a. As a reason for me to freeze up. But, you know, I think that's true for all of us. So I set a goal. As I started working on my anxiety more clearly, the overall goal was to feel pretty good most of the time.

And this means two different things. One, the mean voices in my head about me, about my life, were less loud, less frequent, and less lengthy. And two, that most of my time is spent in upward trend activities of my choosing. What does that mean? I can choose to read, but it has to be a choice. I can choose to watch tv, but it has to be a choice I can, to the best of my ability here I can choose actually to scroll. And sometimes I do because I hacked my algorithm enough to see a lot of baby animals and, you know, tap dancing.

But it has to be of my choosing. And when the days when my anxiety is pretty bad are the days when I realize I am not choosing between doing the most important thing and the second most important thing. I'm choosing between doing something and doing nothing, doing anything and doing nothing. And so I learned to ease up on myself when I'm anxious and I'm tempted to just. Check out, park my brain in neutral, and I have written on my wall over there where I can see it from here, activities that I can choose to do often.

The message from my meditation and from myself is keep moving. Whatever I do, keep moving. Don't whatever. I, you know, do a little house cleaning project. I can read, but stand up while I read. I can scroll, but stand up while I scroll. Whatever it is, just keep moving to the best of my ability. Answer emails, go downstairs to the ground floor of the building and check them out. Something, just anything and nothing to just move a muscle. Change of feeling, and that often helps kickstart whatever it is I need to do next.

And then my brain gets back in gear. I can start thinking about what. What needs to happen next and what can I handle to do next, right? My brain gets back in gear enough to help me choose what to do next. I forget what rule number of engagement number it is, but trust, Trust the decision you made when you were thinking most clearly. And when I was thinking most clearly, I thought keep moving no matter what. Okay, so then I do my best. When I notice I want to park in neutral, I do my best to keep moving.

And then what does it make sense to do? And my brain is online enough to understand that I'm having a hard time. And I've learned over time, okay, then what is the next right thing to do? It might be, you know, take the recycling down to the recycling bin or whatever it is, just keep moving. But I have enough attention to know not to expect myself to do the hardest thing on my to do list, but also to expect myself to do something other than not pay attention to my life and to the world and what's going on around me.

That's why I'm bringing all this up in the era of pay attention. Because this week it can be hard to pay attention to anything. To anything. And my invitation to you, if you find yourself in that place, if you find yourself overwhelmed by what's happening in the world, take a deep breath and choose what to do next. It does not have to be the hardest thing. It does not have to be. Quit everything in your life and dedicate to fighting whatever it is you think needs fighting right now. It could be as much as take a deep breath and be present in my own life, do some dishes, do some laundry, put on something besides my pajamas.

It could be write a letter. It could be call a friend. It could be check in with other people and ask how they're doing. And really listen and pay attention to the answer. That is a service we can all provide each other right now in the world is how are you doing? Are you drinking enough water? There's a lot of people in my life that I just check in with them and I say, are you drinking enough water? So pay attention. I think when I first thought of this as a topic, when this was first proposed as a topic, I think at the time I thought, oh, that'll be a great time to think about what it means to stay present and embodied.

I don't like the phrase mindfulness, but I'm sure that comes up for a lot of people. That might have been what we were thinking about then. But as I thought about the topic this morning, I realized the struggle right now. It's always a struggle to pay attention and be present in my own life because I have the past tugging at me and I have the future tugging at me. Right? You know, living in the wreckage of the future or living in the wreckage of the past. One of these other is what I'm tempted to.

That's what fear does, and that's what regret does. We talked about that. But right now it can be hard to pay attention to anything beyond my nose because so many people in the environment are upset or frozen or numb themselves or acting out in ways that are not supportive of their highest values for themselves. It's scary. We may have social conditioning to think. We don't know how to think about what's going on. There's no special skill to think about what's happening right now. It's just you and your good heart and your good brain and how far can you take them down the road?

Now I curate how I read the news. I have an app, there's a website called Ground News that I use to filter the news that comes to me because it tells me the bias of the sources that they're using. So that's up front. It tells me what stories are being ignored, what stories are very popular. Just gives me a lot of information. Who owns the media sites that are reporting on these stories. It gives me enough context so that I'm not sitting there consuming news like, what is the point of view of this newspaper as, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

It's given me a way to put some bubble wrap and some guidelines on how I consume news so that I can know what's going pay attention, so that I can pay attention to what's going on in such a way that I can also not freeze in place. That is my goal for me, and I share it as a goal for you to be able to pay attention to what's going on, to find what works for you and to stay present in your own life. To stay present in my own body. To be able to move forward on the things that I do that are important to do.

My work speaks to this moment very well. And so I'm trying to find ways to share my work with people. But if I freeze in place, I can't even do that right. So I need to consume information at a pace I can handle. Consume information at a pace I can handle and handle means so I can keep moving forward in the world. So, Cadre, that was a little. It's a little heavy. The world's a little heavy right now. One of the ways, one of the key ways I have of making sure I have enough attention for the world in my life is to make sure I'm having fun.

That's the other thing I'm doing with the people I'm checking in with. I know things are hard. Is there a moment of sweetness or joy that you want to share with me? Right. And often people send a picture of their pet or talk about something sweet that happened or a success that a loved one had. Great, great. Find these moments of sweetness and joy. Be very deliberate about it. Be very deliberate about fun right now. You know, Dan Savage famously talked about, you know, living through the AIDS epidemic.

They, let's see, maybe it's worked in the morning so he could protest in the afternoon so they could dance at night, something like that took care of each other in the morning, but dancing was part of it. That I know. That I know. So I hope you find ways to take meaningful upward trend action in your life. And I also hope you find the time to dance this day, this week and every week. You all are great Cadre. I hope you have a great week and I will see you next week.