RICK OGDEN Challenges Jacob Ghitis
On POSITIVE THINKING
Jacob, this is a flexibility challenge. Try to figure out a way that all these situations could be wonderful instead of the negative interpretation that immediately comes to mind. Practice putting on different colored lenses until you find a "right interpretation" for the description.
Example Situation: You and your family have almost no food to eat--less
than a day's worth. You are all sleeping out on the ground with very
little to cover you, and the nearest help is miles away.
Example Situation's Happy Interpretation: You are on a family camping trip
with a sumptuous feast in your back packs. You stay overnight after a
scenic day's hike, enjoy your fireside repast, crawl into your thin summer
sleeping bags, and watch the stars until sleep comes. The next morning you
hike back perfectly refreshed.
For the rest of these situations, try not to use any explanation more than
once.
1. You are up to your neck in a liquid that contains a wide variety of
poisonous chemicals.
2. You're resisting and violently struggling with someone who eventually
overpowers you and pushes you out of a plane without a parachute.
3. Your body is aching with burning sensations.
4. Slowly, again and again, a needle is inserted into your body.
5. Many people all around you are counting on you in an extremely tense
situation. They watch you closely, some are quite desperate. Then, right
before their eyes, you fail them, and all they wanted is left unfulfilled.
6. You viciously kill an attacker. So hard do you strike out that your own
blood is mixed with the remains of your victim.
7. Someone tells you, quite seriously, "You are going to die. Prepare
yourself."
8. You're colder than you have EVER been in your entire life. You can
hardly breathe. In your fear, you are almost certain that you are dying.
The brightest light you have ever seen shines painfully into your eyes.
Then the worst pain you have EVER felt in your entire life hits you.
The Happy Solutions are given below.
**********
Rick, I'll give my solutions below, to be compared with yours.
************
Ask yourself, Jacob,
What's more important when interpreting a situation, my imagination or the
context of the situation?
** The context offers the first impression. The imagination is actually the flexibility to look for other possible explanations. In the present exercise sight plays no role. The first impression is given by the way the situation is described, since it describes the context. **
How do words (and how they are strung together) so strongly overpower my
neutrality? How often do I allow an "inner jury" to consider something
before I have an opinion about a situation?
** Clear-cut interpretations are possible when enough evidence is offered. In linguistic analysis this principle is concisely condensed by the advice:
"Be unambiguous." In the presence of ambiguity of language, false interpretations are the rule. The situations described above are necessarily difficult to interpret, yet the ambiguity is decreased by the fact that clarifications are offered about annulling the ambiguity by finding simple, noninimical interpretations. **
Do I always have an interpretive choice or do some words and phrases
"always say what they mean"?
** Depends: if a patient tells me that he has a headache I have no interpretive choice. But if it is my wife, the interpretation depends on the context. **
How often do I assume the wrong context for a situation? Should I become
more "aloof" or scientific about my conclusions?
** Ambiguity is the mother of all misconceptions. A fellow told a friend that he had just seen his wife doing things with another man. The friend ran to his house, and upon his return he explained that it was the same man who was doing things with the wife. **
Why do I feel like these "situations" are unfairly worded? Who promised me
that this exercise "wouldn't cheat?"
** They were worded with an explained purpose; it was not unfair. **
Are any of life's tragic situations interpretable or is the meaning of all
of them absolute? Wars? Famine? Genocide? Suicide?
** Everything has a physical explanation, which I not always can express, but almost always, because I follow a physical path to philosophize. I can explain how the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis came about. Just ask. **
How often do I apply a false interpretation to a behavior of mine so that
it seems "better?" Do I tell white lies?
** I do not apply a false interpretation to my behavior, because I do not care. White lies, yes, also colored, but I do not always succeed now, in contrast to my earlier years. **
When I look into the mirror, how happy am I with my looks? Do I think
photographs look like me?
** Photographs do me disfavor, that's why I prefer to show myself because I like how I look, especially in certain poses. **
Do I lie to children? Do I attempt to pre-filter reality for them to "save
them" from something?
** I try to save them from unpleasant surprises by informing them about the reality. My grandchildren knew early that I was going to die, and they promised to cry, but not too much. **
Happy Solutions:
1. You are swimming in a pool with chlorine and other highly diluted
chemicals.
** I got it quite rapidly. **
2. You're a stuntperson on a movie set.
** I thought it was a nighmare. **
3. You are in a gym working out and going for the burn.
** Couldn't gess it, and I do not go to gyms. **
4. You are getting acupuncture.
** I thought of it, but not one, but several needles are used. **
5. You are Greg Norman and come in third in the Masters, but you win
hundreds of thousands of dollars playing a game you love.
** I do not know those people. I thought of a boxer winning against the bets against him. **
6. You swat a mosquito.
** Yes, rapidly. **
7. Your friend wants to tell you about the latest thriller movie with
incredible special effects and exaggerates in a typical fashion.
** A fellow with a placcard and a bible tells me that, and I say, I know, I am prepared, have a spare coffin in my closet, together with the skeletons. **
8. You are being born.
** Couldn't get it. The description is false: I was always at a homeostatically controlled 37 oC; I did not need to breathe because I got oxygen from the cord before it was severed. I had no fear, although I felt something unpleasant, which only later on I recognized as palpitations. I had no fear of dying. I had not seen light, and my visual acuity was flat.
I had not felt pain, but the slap in my behind hurt. Yet mostly I felt displaced from a cozy place, and protested loudly. At that moment my personal sense of injustice started its upward way. Only later on I learned that there are codified statal definitions of injustice. When I came to realize that I get angry when I sense that an act is commited against my personal interpretation of injustice, I could no more become angry. I react by affecting anger while cooly planning how to get even with the SOB@&!%$!%.aol **
