There I was in Vegas… with a surly waitress and some crummy little shrimp and… I was as disappointed as a four-year-old staring out the window at the rain.  See the “Surly Waitress” incident. 

What to do?  What to do? sought direction.  I called on my two guidance systems.  

The Emotional Guidance System said:  You are being a brat here.  This meal costs twenty-five dollars, you CANNOT just leave an expensive meal.  You’re making too much of this!  You are too picky.  Hundreds of thousands, no, millions of people around the world, are going to bed hungry, and you, you are turning away from an expensive meal of shrimp.  There was a time when you and the special person travelled with a steno pad and wrote down every penny spent, staying in ratty motels and able to get lunch for a dollar (loaf of bread and a can of bean dip).  What’s happened that you are now such a brat?  It’s your fault for ordering seafood in the middle of the desert. These shrimp were flown in over many miles.  Think of it, woman.  These shrimp have given you their lives!

The Thinking Guidance System said:  Okay, probably life would be easier if you were a bit more adaptable, but the FACTS ARE…you can afford to walk this joint and find a cozier place with a happier staff. While there was a time when you would have to do without something else that day if you spent five dollars extra on a meal…but that was then.  This is now. You can afford to escape. The reality is, no one but you will be inconvenienced by your changing restaurants.  No one. 

I decided to split.  I asked for a to-go box and packed up the shrimp. (Which I dumped in the trash on my way to the next restaurant, as intended…but I thought taking the shrimp to-go and faking a mild emergency made me look less foolish….Okay, I know…I didn’t say I escaped the waitress from the frowny side of the street and her tiny shrimp without some concessions to my Emotional Guidance System.)

I left the waitress a ten dollar tip and a smile, hoping her day might pick up and headed for the buffet and a really perfect booth where I computed and piddled for hours. (Did you know the buffets in Las Vegas now have all day passes for tourists wanted to have it all and often?  I ask you, could this be a good thing?)

The Point:  Sometimes you can escape.  Remember the people who grew up in the depression and couldn’t spend money in accord with current circumstances?  Of course, many people attempt to spend themselves out of anxious situations when they cannot afford the cost … and end up causing all sorts of long-term problems.

An important contribution of the Thinking Guidance System is in avoiding generalizations.  The Emotional Guidance System lumps situations together saying, “If you allow yourself to switch restaurants and end up paying for two meals, what’s going to keep you from buying a bunch of timeshares in Tahiti you can’t use?”

What?

The ‘Woman Who Didn’t Stop at the Bathroom’ Incident–

Dateline:  Willie’s Place, I-35 between Dallas and Austin.  If I can’t get a grip at Willie’s Place, I might as well just jerk that license off the wall and give up the pretense. 

Hail to those of you tagging along on this rickety journey toward growing up just a wee little bit.  Now, friends, we begin an examination of  HOW MUCH of WHO WE ARE is  the result of CHOICE and how much is no more than our automatically acting and re-acting in TO KEEP OTHER PEOPLE CALMED DOWN.

Figuring out when we are using our BEST THINKING and when we are doing the please CALM DOWN JIG is not an easy task.  Because the EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM is not just a big fat liar, the EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM is tricky.                                                                                                                                            U                                                           

Sometimes we make a choice against what we think…we say “Yes” when we mean “No”  (this usually involves some sort of volunteering) or “No” when we mean “Yes” (This often involves FEAR).

We  react automatically …because we pick up on the choice an important other person wants us to make….and the relief of going along FEELS like we’ve made a thoughtful choice.  Example:  a woman says to her husband, “I have decided to take up mountain biking.”  The husband says, “What?”and proceeds to outline the costs, dangers, and generally  neglect of others…should the woman persist with the mountain biking idea. 

For a while she struggles.  Then she gives up the idea.  The tension in the couple goes down.  The woman eats a pie and criticizes the man next door for leaving the lid off his trashcan.  The whole neighborhood is ruined!

The relief experienced when ‘going along’  FEELS  like we’ve made an actual choice.  This sort of capitulating may look noble, but there’s nothing brave  about deciding that the best way to stay calm yourself is by doing whatever will keep the other person calm. 

Of course, after studying the costs, dangers, and time required the woman could have opted out of mountain biking following her own BEST THINKING.  I’m just saying the glory of ‘relief’ makes it hard to tell ‘why’ a particular decision is made.

Now, about the woman who thought she needed to make a bathroom stop and over-ruled herself .  Oops, here’s my chicken-fried steak.  Tune in tomorrow to hear the exciting adventure of ‘Go-Along-Woman.’

Dateline:  A woman took her seat on the plane beside the Texas A and M Rugby Coach (See The Rugby Coach that Changed the World).

The woman was bubbling over with excitement as she looked through the stack of brochures she’d picked up on the way to the airport. “Sorry, sir,” she said, “I don’t mean to bother you, but I just have to show these to someone. They turned out so well….Can I show you?”

“Okay….” the coach said.

The woman smiled and showed the coach …the brochures for Bridginghope.org.  Mostly the pages were filled with photographs taken at the home for abandoned girls in Nuevo Laredo. The coach would smile politely, then dive back into his Sports Illustrated, right?

Of course, a rugby coach isn’t going to be interested in a project to bring hope to throw-away girls crowded together in Nueveo Laredo, Texas.  Of course not.

The next thing Coach knew, he was setting up a schedule for the A and M rugby team to visit the home.  But this is still a joke, right?  College jocks on a mercy mission in Nuevo Laredo?  Come on.

How could he know that the woman with the pictures would change his life forever.  The rugby team’s been involved ever since.  Two young men changed their majors to service careers.

One player took the next semester off to work full time in the home because, he said,  “I can go to college anytime.  I couldn’t stop thinking about what the girls needed now and how I could help make their lives better.”

Anyone who’s been involved with Bridginghope.org had left saying, “I got so much more from being with the girls than I could ever give back.”

With Christmas coming, the girls each (there’s almost 700) were asked to make a ‘wish list’.   And, the number one request?  As any kid you know if he or she can guess what a poor girl in Nuevo Laredo would want for Christmas and I’m betting no one guesses.

The number one request?  A toothbrush.  

Please check out the website.  And, oh yeah, I’m hitting you up, but not for money.  PREPARE for a mysteryshrink contest.  No cost to you, not even shipping and handling.  When you win, I contribute in your name, so how’s that for everyone wins…. A toothbrush…

 First we looked at that spark that gets us going (See “Just One Little Spark”) then we moved on to a closer examination of what it takes for us to LOSE that spark. 

What happens to get you off your mark? 

What does it take before you declare a STATE OF CATASTROPHE? 

Or WHO?   Who’s approval do you need  . . . ALL THE TIME?    Gad. Now you understand why some people solve the DOWNER problem–the problem of your emotions, your forward-seeking energy, your “zone” BEING UP FOR GRABS  . . .  all the time . . . by moving to Alaska and living in an abandoned school bus.

Next best alternative?  I mean, until that brain transplant procedure is perfected?  Work on our own brains.  We can CHANGE our brains by what we think.  When we change our brains, we change what “happens” in our lives.  No magic.  When your in you’re not anxious–

When you are in your  ”zone:”

You have better judgment . . . You see more alternatives . . . You respond less defensively . . . You listen to what the other person is saying . . . You are less “black and white” . . . You do not see one person as all right and one person as all wrong . . . You open the door for better OUTCOMES.  And, I’m just guessing on this, but I imagine I, uh, you would get fewer traffic tickets.

So, how do you get to that calmer place?  For starters, copy the following sentence and keep it handy.

This (whatever) is UNFORTUNATE, UNPLEASANT, and INCONVENIENT, but NOT a CATASROPHE . . .   unless I DECIDE  to make it one.

Perma-weinnies, such as myself, will have to take on responsibility for our own “zone” a little bit at a time.  Manana.

Oh yeah.    The accumulation of all your leftover junky thoughtstreams about your many failures and weakness.  Story later today.

   We’ve lived in the same house for years which has a large laundry room on the second level.  The dryer, like all, has a removable lint filter (cleaned often) which has behind it a tube leading through the wall to the outside.  Sometime during growing up I was told that if you didn’t keep that tube clean, it was a fire hazard.  Then I’ve seen thirty foot wire brushes designed to clear that pipe.  (Okay, it was that Air Mall catalog always in the front pocket of your seat with the marshmellow gun.)  Then there is the occasional unexplained house fire.

   Think of this pipe as a room in your brain.  This room is full of bad stuff about yourself that you remind yourself about and worry that if enough lint accumulates . . . Oh, who knows?  But it will be awful.  So we need to worry.  

  On the occasion of a new dryer I called in a chimney sweep to clear out the pipe, which after all these years, had to be disgusting.  I left him to pull the old dryer away from the wall and get to work.

   He called me in a few minutes later.

   ”Clear already?” I asked.

   “Yep.”   He stepped to the side of the pipe hole in the wall.  “Do you see that light, ma’am?”

   “Yes.”

   “That’s daylight.  There’s no pipe here accumulating anything.”

  Turns out I made the whole story up.

   Your brain cannot think two things at the same time.  It may seem like you can, but actually, you’re popping back and forth between streams of thought.

    And, sense YOU’RE IN CHARGE, you can force feed something new into your brain and blast those nasty little put down thoughts OUT.  When I was showing jumping horses I had a bad crash on a wall.    Okay, now I was freaked.  (I was never a monument to guts to start with.)  But now I was paralyzed.  I’d go around a series of fences, then came the wall.

   The thoughts screaming in my head were:  ”You’re going to crash!  You’re going to mess this up!  You’re going too fast–no too slow–too fast–LOOK OUT!”  Because my Emotional Guidance System was running the show, my THOUGHT STREAM was likely to CAUSE TO HAPPEN what I FEARED would happen.

   My coach’s plan was this, “Barbara, from the instant you come through the In-Gate, I want you to sing Mary Had A Little Lamb at the top of your lungs.  She planted herself on the railing in the coliseum and anytime my voice straggled, she yelled, “I can’t hear you!  Louder!  Louder!”

   It worked. I stopped concentrating on all the terrible “what ifs” and let the horse take care of both of us.  Of course, my singing nursery rhymes at the top of my lungs sort of took the horsy set dignity out of my ride, but it wasn’t like I’d never humiliated myself in the showring before.

  This is a start.  For now, try to collect a few of your “thought streams” that create difficulties in your life. 

Possibles:

      “I know he doesn’t love me.”

        “You are such a control freak!”

      ”You jump on every chance to say I’m wrong.”

      “I’ll never accomplish my goals.” 

     “No one in the world knows how to drive except me.”