Do you ever find it infuriating when you ask someone to advise you on a particular course of action and, after listening to you describe your situation, their most considered response is “Well, it depends …”? As frustrating as it can be to hear, the “It depends” sentiment is amazingly accurate. And for a very good reason.
Understanding the appropriateness of “It depends” (and why many more advice givers should use these two words with much greater frequency than they do) hinges on understanding where the dependingness comes from. When you’re trying to decide whether to do A or B, the answer doesn’t depend on anything “out there” in the external world. The “depends” all comes down to you and your internal world. The suitability or otherwise of any course of action depends entirely on what you want.
The trouble is, we always have lots of wants. That’s why the “depends” is so important to pay attention to. If you’re deliberating over something, it must be because you’re not clear about how to respond. Should I go or stay? Should I spend or save? Should I study or party? When a decision between A and B (or A and not A) is occupying your mind, you could think of both A and B as wants or goals. Any goal you pursue is going to affect other goals that also exist within you. That’s where trouble can arise. The difficulty with lots and lots of wants is that many of these wants we want all at the same time.
Realising a goal of having a week-long family vacation staying at Santa Monica’s Hotel Casa del Mar may help with other goals you have such as creating cherished memories of special times, experiencing new things, building family relationships, and spending time in the sun. Getting this goal in the bag, however, might interfere with others goals such as installing a new kitchen, attending your boss’s retirement party, playing a club soccer match, and improving your cross-country skiing.
So, what should you do? Should you make the booking or not? Well … it depends!
Goals, goals, goals. It’s all about goals (or wants) and their relationships with each other. We always make decisions relative to other decisions we could have made or different goals we could have achieved. Is the boss’s retirement party more important than family relationships? Can your skiing technique be nurtured at another time?
Peace of mind requires acknowledging this relativity and squaring up all our wants and goals so that they are working together as much as possible and pulling in opposite directions as little as possible. When a battle is brewing with goals that won’t see eye to eye, understanding the interconnectedness of all the goals in our mind can help to calm the waters. As divergent as it might be to strive simultaneously for the goal of lighting a cigarette and the goal of giving up smoking, finding the interconnection amongst the goals lurking in the background will get you to a place where there is some common territory.
Perhaps lighting up a cigarette helps achieve the goal of loosening up in social situations which helps achieve the goal of enjoying time with friends and family which helps achieve the goal of living the life you want. On the other hand, maybe the goal of giving up smoking helps achieve the goal of saving money which helps achieve the goal of having more choices which helps achieve the goal of living the life you want.
Aha! So there’s the meeting place. From this position we might say that things are all square between the two goals that were at loggerheads just moments before. The longer you can linger in the penthouse of “living the life you want” and only view the blind alleys of “smoke” and “don’t smoke” from afar, the greater will be your peace of mind.
Life is a constant negotiation of both competing and compatible goals. The relativity of our day to day living is profound and pervasive. The more that we can operate from those precious, highly valued places in which the direction is clear, choices are easily made, and conflicts melt away, the less angst will be involved in the unfolding of our days and the more contented and satisfied will be our journey. Viewing life from the turrets of your world doesn’t mean you will be able to see around every corner and will know with certainty every decision yet to be made. It does mean, however, that you will approach those corners or forks in the road with certainty and assuredness that you know what’s best for you.
With an understanding of the relativity of life we can now see that equanimity is a product of the number of conflicts we have squared off in our mind. If none of our conflicts are squared, there will be no peace of mind and turmoil will rage. We can state this simply as: Equanimity = Mind * Conflict2 or E = MC2.
Perhaps you’ve seen this equation in other contexts that discuss relativity. Now, you can apply it to your own life for a richer, more fulfilling time on the planet.