Author :
Jan B. Hurych
Title :
PARALLAXES
Essay:
PARALLAXES AND PARADIGMS (1)
Parallaxes and paradigms.
I have a method which helps me to overcome the stress, whether I have big problems, worries or just find myself totally depressed. I will share it with you free of charge, in spite of the fact that one California shrink - I mean the psychiatrist - is making pretty good money on that idea.
I works like this: I just imagine that I am going to die, say tomorrow same time as now. Why? That's not so important - I actually don't want to die, but that imagery is important for my method. Next thing I am going to imagine is that it is already tomorrow, five minutes before my imaginary death. And I will recall all my yesterday's - that is my today's problems. I hope you still follow me so far. And guess what: all my troubles will seem to me so ridiculous, so secondary, so petty, that I will start laughing. And if I won't die from that laugh, I will gladly and peacefully return to present time and will be happy I have only my present, unimportant problems after all.
Well, this is my idea and I can assure you I got it few years before the mentioned shrink ever thought about it. But to give him some credit: I really think that method is as old as the mankind itself. After all, how else we would have so many religions?
As you can see, I started with unsurmountable problems, and ended up happy and on higher note. I simply transformed everything to another platform, to another dimension. They call it a shift of paradigm, that is the change of the method or model we use to thing by. We can proclaim that everything actually depends on our attitude, our approach, our angle of view - or the parallax of our view. Our whole life is the chain of attitudes, which sometimes even seem to look - at least to some of us - like being more important that the problem itself.
I said "they seem to", because that is also part of our attitude, like in the story about the bottle filled up to it's half mark. You don't know that story? Well, there are those two guys: an optimist and a pessimist. The pessimist says: "The bottle is already half empty". The optimist however is pleased, that "the bottle is still half full". Of course, their attitudes do not change the fact (that is 50 % fill-up) at all. I usually add one more guy to the story: the pedant. He keeps pouring whisky in the bottle, in and out - just because he is not pleased, that the level is not exactly on 50 percent mark. And like the proverbial rabbit in the proverbial race cannot reach the turtle, our pedant will never finish his job to be able to drink from that bottle. And yes, it is our attitudes and not the whisky alone which affects our behavior. There is a saying that our life is a "series of choices rather than chances". In other words: we all get our chance, but only those, who will recognize it and use it, will eventually succeed.
On the other hand, it is not always the pure logic, which can lead us to the right solution. In one laboratory, they made an experiment with two empty bottles - I wonder, why it have to be always bottles - and laid them on the table. One bee was inserted into the first bottle and the fly in the other one. Of course they didn't plug in the corks since they wanted to know, which one would escape sooner. The bee was trying very hard to get through the bottom of the bottle, so hard that she eventually died of exhaustion. The fly of course kept flying to and fro, with no apparent plan. Still, soon she have found the opening and escaped. Still, the fly had no plan or method how to escape, while the bee was listening to its instinct: to follow the light, the sun, the source of life. And she died, because her instinct was right but the situation was wrong and she was not able to change her paradigm.
Stoic Zeno of Citium once said that the life is like a book: it is not important how many pages it has, but how good it is. And our philosophers are still arguing, how many of those pages we are really writing by ourselves, be it the whole society or individuals. But that does not matter so much - important thing is to realize that it all depends only on us to turn our lifelong play into comedy or tragedy. The term "comedy" is meant here of course only as an opposite to a tragedy and not as a farce, that would be rather overdoing it :-).
Yes, we can change our paradigms and suddenly we are adding new flavor to our problems and solutions. And when we think it is just our bad fate, let's change the angle, the point of view - and suddenly things don't look that bad. Yes, there is a plenty of hope while we are still alive: problems can be solved, people can be healed, mistakes can be corrected, situation can improve, some harm can be remedied. It is only people who are being difficult: they change very little a and what's more - they hate changes . . .