Transcript
Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. Today is Tuesday, March 26, 2024. I want to talk about a question I'm asking myself. It's, in which ways am I being pulled?
Rather, in which directions? I don't know.
So I'm thinking about this in context of a lot of different things. Often in context of to open up or to close off emotionally so who is pulling me towards, feeling more who's pulling me towards feeling less so who's pulling me and say yeah no it's okay to feel sad it's okay to feel angry who's telling me stop feeling sad stop feeling angry stop caring so much who's pulling me towards feeling hopeful and excited and who's pulling Who's pulling me saying, ah, you know, life sucks and you should just be hopeless. Nobody cares about you. Who's pulling me in the direction of to give up. Hey, just stop working on what you're working on. Just go get a job. Who's pulling me in the direction of to keep pushing forward.
Who's pulling me in the direction of just move on. You know that person you know that happened before the relationship happened or the person passed away and you know it's time for you to move on and who's pulling me in the other direction of, telling me to keep holding on and uh and which way is my body pulling me in which direction is it pulling me is it pulling me to do a business that's much more like a non-profit but it's an an individual, which is kind of unheard of in some ways.
I think that's the direction my body's pulling me. And then I think a lot of people in my life are pulling me to make it more normal, make it more standardized, just pulling me back towards the center. And I think a lot of it is this. It's that I think we have certain things that are normal in society, which tend to be what the majority of people do. And i think if we stray if we go uh we become abnormally uh one way or abnormally the other way people tend to pull us back in but sometimes inside of us it's pulling us out it's pulling us to the edges so i was sitting here thinking about this all afternoon and then i stopped by they have these little i think they call them little libraries it's these little tiny almost like like birdhouses that people build and put them on their front lawn or like this one was in a park. And the books are free for taking so people will take a book and they'll leave a book and so anyone can go up there and take a book if they'd like or leave a book and i was like let me see what this little library has and i look in there and there's a book called tender warrior i'm like what the heck is this about so let me open it up but it's talking about spirituality it says god's intention for a man and i didn't grow up with religion and so sometimes i have some skepticism around some things that are more religious and i open it up and it's about a guy who was a green beret in vietnam talking about his call like his wake-up calls to realize that life is short and he should really love his wife wife more deeply and that he might die and to just really appreciate And I'm like, whoa. And so there's all these different things that are pulling us in different directions. I was thinking earlier about a conversation with some friends that are pulling me in the other way of like, you know what, just stop caring so much.
Life just happens, you know. People don't really care about you as much as you think they do. People are just indifferent, and that's how it is. That's reality. It is what it is. This kind of jadedness, in a way. And here I pick up this book, and this guy says, No, no. How many times do you have to get slapped in the face until you realize that life is short, and we should appreciate it before it's gone? And then another friend of mine, when I was talking about being kind of struggling struggling with some of this dilemma, conflict stuff. He goes, I just, you do you. And I'm thinking, maybe he's not pulling me in either direction. Now, do I appreciate that? Do I actually want to be pulled? You know? Is that kind of, I don't know. There's a lot of that. Well, I don't want to pull you in either direction. Should we just disconnect? Can we disconnect? I don't, I don't, I don't know. How often are we pulling somebody in a direction?
And how often are they pulling us? How often are our own feelings pulling us in different directions? How often do our memories and culture in general pull us in certain directions? And I don't know. It's just because I've been asking myself, okay, if I say, for example, I want to open up and feel more connected to emotions. I want to be much more aware of how I'm feeling, how other people are feeling, how a goose is feeling that I walk by in the park, or a little worm that's trying to cross the sidewalk and feel stuck. If I want to feel more like that and be more aware of how I'm feeling, what if somebody doesn't? What if somebody doesn't want to feel jealous? They don't want to feel angry. They don't want to feel sad. They don't want to feel intensity. They just want things to be calm and steady. Can I.
Should I pull them towards feeling more if they don't want to go in that direction?
But should I just let them go in the other direction? I don't know. I just, I really struggle with this question. And I think a lot of people will say, ah, just let them do them. Which for me is to let go. Or at least the appearance of letting go and disconnecting.
But I don't think we actually disconnect. I think this is just a myth that we tell ourselves. I think we're all inextricably tied together. And that if one person goes one direction, it takes us with them. And unless we fight and go the other direction, almost like this tug of war. I'm sure I've talked about this before. And in thinking about like a tug of war, if two people are pulling in opposite directions and one person lets go and says, ah, man, you can do what you want. The other person will fly, might fly in the other direction. Distortion um i thought about that earlier as if i let go and then people fly in the direction of closing off that might really hurt them but you know if they let go and stop trying to close me off maybe i'll fly in the other direction of really opening up huh interesting uh i don't know i just I just think sometimes there are so many forces acting on our lives that we just don't recognize that they're acting on our lives. And if you think about, oh, this is a great example. And I'll say this in the end because I'm getting out of time. There was a website that was explaining how airplanes fly. And it was talking about air pressure. And if you want I can either add it in the show notes or I could send the link to you. It talked about how air pressure and wind movement and things like this is not all it's so many air particles moving in so many different directions and causing so many different forces on something that the net force is kind of the net vector going in one direction but it's not that like Like if the wind is blowing right now, the wind is not blowing just east. Like wind being the air particles. They're blowing in all sorts of directions, but the...
The sum of those forces lead to it pointing east. And so if you've ever taken a class on physics and dealing with vectors or vector math, that's kind of how vectors work. You have all these arrows pointing in different directions and arrows of different lengths. And then if you add them all up, you eventually get one arrow pointing in one direction based on the combination of all those arrows. And so I wonder what is kind of the vector force on our emotional lives. Oh man, I'm getting nerdy on this stuff. But really, how do all of these forces, these emotional forces, pull us in different directions?
And which one wins? If I'm feeling excited to do something and scared to do something and somebody tells me i shouldn't be scared and they they tell me i should be i should just give up then does that voice is that voice louder than the other voice i don't know i'm going to explore this concept a little more but i'm going to end so it doesn't reach 10 minutes talk to you all tomorrow.
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