Why Is The Unexamined Life Not Worth Living?

A fool insisted on riding the river backwards. Because of his touch and training, he believed that the best way to navigate was by steering away from the boats behind him. Every few days, he would crash into a boat in front of him and yell, "Why don't you look where you're going?!" And so he kept crashing, wondering why the river was so full of fools.

Einstein once defined insanity as, "Expecting to solve any problem from the same level of thinking that you were at when you created it." In other words, if you're expecting tomorrow to get any great without changing yourself today, you're an idiot. By that definition, how many of us need our heads examined? We know that something is missing in our lives, but we keep waiting for person else to fix our problems. We keep hammering away at the same problems with the same hammers, and then we wonder why nothing changes. We do exactly what we did yesterday, and we hope tomorrow will get better.

Train Table For Kids

Have you ever heard the expression, "God only helps those who help themselves?"

The cause of the blurring is not laziness, but frustration. We all want to help ourselves, but too often we don't know how to get started. We see only problems. We don't all the time see where our problems came from in the first place. In order to solve problems, we need to understand the nature of cause and effect.

Cause and follow plainly states that for every follow on the river, there is a definite cause, or causes. In other words, any situation that you touch in your life is the follow of something that caused it. If you can locate the cause of a situation, then you can effectively turn that situation. But if you try to turn a situation without clearly understanding that situation's cause, you can waste a lot of energy fixing the wrong things before you sit down exhausted, wondering why nothing has changed.

One of my students-of-the-river was so frustrated with her husband that she was inspecting leaving him. She wanted to know what I thought. I asked her to elaborate the definite cause of her frustration.

"He all the time expects me to do everything," she told me. "I all the time have to pick up after him. He never picks up anyone for himself. He comes home, opens a bag of chips, eats two and leaves the bag on the table for me to pick up. I've tried talking to him, but he doesn't care what I want. He tells me to just hire a maid, but I don't want to waste money on a maid. Besides, what maid will follow nearby behind him picking up his messes? A maid only comes once a week."

"You want him to pick up after himself?"

"Yes."

"You have talked to him about what you want?"

"Every day."

"You've been married for eight years. For eight years, you've been saying the same thing; and for eight years, he hasn't been paying attention?"

"Yes!"

Well no wonder she was frustrated. "If explaining to him what you want the first time didn't generate the follow you want, and the second time didn't generate the follow you want, and the third, and the fourth," I asked, "then what makes you think that explaining to him what you want the thousandth time will generate a different effect?"

As she realized her own illogic, she started to giggle.

She had made the same presentation to the same person over 24,000 times, and she had received the same response. Her touch was a excellent case of cause and effect. She hadn't changed her presentation, so she had no imagine to expect a different effect. Her husband defined her actions as nagging, and she nearly believed him. But I define nagging as misunderstanding the nature of cause and effect.

If your boat keeps crashing, then maybe you should redesign your boat; and if you want a different follow on someone, then maybe you should turn your presentations. The only way to get people to pick up their socks is to make them want to pick up their socks. And while people will seldom "pick up their socks" for your reasons, they will sometimes "pick up their socks" for their own reasons. In order to get the follow she wanted, my pupil needed to learn the rules of the river. Rules like persuasion and communication. Rules that don't advocate production the same, ineffective presentation twice.

At this point in my story, people all the time interrupt to ask, "What did she do?" They want to know her technique, so they can run home and try it for themselves.

Well here, for the record, is "what she did."

She stopped swimming against the current. She stopped trying to turn her husband and learned to turn herself.

She learned to use the rules of the river to scrutinize the real cause of her unhappiness. She learned to redefine herself as more than her family's caretaker. She learned to reflect, focus and strategize before taking action. She learned to allocate her resources and to understand process. She took control of her life. She stopped giving energy to what she hated, and she started giving energy to what she loved. She began to attract, nurture, understand and work on the people nearby her. She learned to read the river's currents and to let life flow.

She even learned to use creative delegation and turned her husband's clutter into a game for her kids. But most importantly, she stopped seeing for happiness in the circumstances nearby her, and she started to scrutinize happiness inside herself. Eventually, my pupil did find satisfaction, but only when she stopped trying to turn the river and started learning to navigate it.

The biggest frustrations encountered on the river regularly manifest when we endeavor to turn how people talk to us. We can't turn people into what they're not. However, the moment we stop trying to turn people, we begin seeing the energy to turn ourselves. And when we begin to turn ourselves, we automatically turn the circumstances wherein we find ourselves. We waste so much energy focused on the wrong end of problems.

Stop fixing problems. You can't fix problems. Problems are effects. They are the natural follow of something that was done to cause them. turn the cause of a problem, and the problem will take care of itself.

What causes problems? Failure to persuade; failure to communicate; misunderstanding; fear; doubt; blame; unwanted advice; expecting people to turn for your reasons; misinterpreting cause and effect; not understanding the rules of the river.

When you learn to fix the cause of a problem, you will fix that problem's effect.

Of course, there is a catch. This rule only helps you to solve problems if you can settle where your actions contribute to those problems. Any problem that you can't work on by your actions is not your problem. Any problem that you can't work on by your actions is a fact of life, so you might as well get over it.

In other words, "Why doesn't so-and-so love me?" is not your problem. While, "Why am I letting this situation work on me so much?" is your problem.

"Nobody listens to me," is not your problem. While, "How can I elaborate this so people will want to listen?" is your problem.

What other people think, say, or do is not your problem. While what you think, say, or do is your problem.

Can you see the difference?

The only way to turn something is to turn the cause of that something. So if you want to work on the river, you need to keep peeling away at the causes of things until you find a cause for which you're responsible and then find a way to work on that cause. Only then will your actions be worthwhile...

Why Is The Unexamined Life Not Worth Living?