It seems like the last thing Philly gave me was a sunburn, and the first thing Dallas gives me is a cold.
I haven’t gotten sick since 2020, I survived the pandemic without catching any symptom or testing positive, and last night I went to bed feeling the typical pain in the throat I’d get before a full blown cold, and my body felt cold that I needed more blankets - it’s like an illness forecast: the storms are coming.
I wonder what is making my immune system out of whack, maybe my body haven’t adjusted to the dramatic temperature difference between the 76F(24C) indoor and Texas™️ outdoor heat of 106F (42C);
maybe it was the stress and tension built up before leaving and my body crashing after suddenly being stuck at home all day feeling like doing nothing;
maybe it’s the amygdala pulling the alarm too often in the new environment, burning all the energy and taking up the bandwidth, leaving the immune system poorly funded;
maybe it’s my body’s way to get more sleep,
or maybe a cold is simply long overdue.
Whatever it is, a cold feels uncomfortable to say the least.
It sucks. And in sucky situations, we often want to run away, to avoid the discomfort, to look the other way from the pain.
We try to conjure up escape places in our mind, we try to sugar coat the situation, we make vague promises to ourselves of future imaginary happiness after the pain stops.
Counter intuitively, the right thing to do might be to STAY in the suck, to stop running from the problem, to look pain and discomfort in the eye and say I am not afraid of you.
Even better, try to make it fun, look for growth in a sucky situation, look for hope in the darkest place, turn the mistake into a surprising opportunity, or at least a funny meme.
There’s an interesting article published in Science in 2010, A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind. The author provided a TL,DR:
In conclusion, a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.
Our mind seems to have a natural tendency to stray, to defocus, towards chaos and entropy. This is our naturally equipped, default unhappiness generator.
In The world is binary, I talked about one of life’s mission might be to fight entropy. It’s weird that we would come with a default tendency to wander towards expanding entropy, it is as if we are born to fight some of our own nature. Maybe the devil/ enemy is indeed inside of us.
I like the title of the famous paper that started the Transformer AI architecture - Attention is all you need, and sometimes I think attention is all we have. It’s one of our most valuable resources.
David Foster Wallace once gave a graduation speech This is water(highly recommended), in which he said the most precious kind of freedom involves (having some level of control over our) attention and awareness.
What we focus on has great impact on the quality of our life. And when in the suck, I need to keep reminding myself, stay.
Like many things in life, it’s simple, but unimaginably hard.