Relationships – Page 6 – Speaking of Polygamy…

There he stood, in the front of our Ethics and Values classroom, curly brown hair, leather jacket that couldn’t hide his muscular arms, sexy 5 o’clock shadow, a deep voice. He was discussing the pros and cons of capital punishment, the controversial ethical topic assigned to his group.

I had dated a lot in high school, but now that I was in college, I was trying to be pickier, trying to figure out what my type was, and I had picked up the habit of analyzing men to discern which of his physical traits I liked and which I didn’t. I had never found a man I couldn’t improve upon, but as I sat on the back row that day watching and listening to Joshua, for the first time I couldn’t come up with a single thing I would change to make a man more attractive. I had found my ideal man, at least on the surface. Not only was he the most handsome men I’d ever met, but he was intelligent, well-prepared, and well-spoken.

At the end of Joshua’s presentation, I raised my hand to add to the discussion. Was it just my imagination, or did he like what I had to say? A little while later, I raised my hand again, but then I noticed that class time was almost gone, and I lowered it again. He noticed the question left hanging, and he approached me as the classroom emptied and asked what I had intended to say.

We talked for a few minutes before going our separate ways. But that was enough to get the ball rolling.

It was a series of coincidences that had led to our meeting. You see, we weren’t exactly classmates: We were taking the same course, but we were in different sections taught by the same professor. If things had gone according to schedule, Joshua and I would never have met. But something happened to shake things up: My brother had been called on a mission for the LDS Church, and I wanted to go with him and the rest of my family to see him enter the MTC, or Missionary Training Center. The end of the college semester was approaching, and since class time was being taken up with group presentations, my professor had started making class participation part of our grade to prevent attendance from declining. If I was going to see my brother enter the MTC, I would miss my class, so I talked to my professor in advance and got permission to make up the participation points by coming to another of her Ethics and Values sessions. I searched my schedule for a time when that would be possible. Most school days at 1:00 p.m. I was busy as an ASL interpreter for a religion class. Fortunately, those classes weren’t held on Fridays, which meant I was available for that one hour — which happened to be, of course, the day and hour of Joshua’s presentation in his own section of Ethics and Values. That’s how I came to be there that Friday afternoon.

After Joshua and I had parted company. I went to work for a few hours and then got ready for a date — a formal dance I was going to with a man named Ryan.

Now, Ryan and I were very close friends, and sometimes we acted as tho we liked each other, but the truth was that the woman he wanted to marry was away from home serving a mission for the mainstream LDS Church, and I was just a placeholder until she came home a few months later. I wasn’t particularly into him either, but we got along splendidly, and our relationship was convenient. We carpooled to school together, worked on our Calculus 3 homework together, hung out as friends on the weekend, and when one of us needed an official date for an event, the other person was usually available.

(As a side note, two fun stories: After his girlfriend got home from her mission, Ryan and she came together to my wedding reception, which was so romantic that they ended up getting engaged at it. They’re still happily married and have half a dozen kids. He’s a successful engineer, so I guess it worked out for him to study calculus with me, ha ha. Another guy I dated met someone at my wedding reception, soon afterwards they started dating, later they were also engaged. Have you ever heard of a wedding reception so romantic?)

I had asked my friend to do my hair in a fancy up-do for the dance with Ryan, and while she worked, I chatted endlessly about this man named Joshua I had met at school that day. I don’t know how I came up with so much to say about someone I’d only talked to for a quarter of an hour, but you and I both know how silly girls can be.

At some point in the course of our conversation I told her, “I think I’m going to marry him!” She responded by telling me I was crazy. (I still have the professional photo taken of Ryan and me at the formal dance, and it’s one of my favorites because of the fond memories I have of that day and even of my hairdo.)

I couldn’t stop thinking about Joshua for days, and he must have had a similar weekend. On Monday he got my phone number from our professor (with my permission), called me up, and the rest of our story is for future chapters.

Humans are obligatory problem solvers. They cannot help it. If they didn’t have problems of their own, they would invent them.

We humans love problems! Dealing with problems is essential to our health and well-being. Our brains are designed to anticipate them, think about them, worry about them, and eventually solve them. Our brains do this all the time, very well, and sometimes too well.

Even tho tendencies we may have are natural, evil can come of them when they are allowed to roam too far, or wander outside of the bounds the Lord has set. Problem-solving is one such tendency. It is so ingrained in our being that when things are going generally well, and no problems seem to be presenting themselves to us, we will, of necessity, create our own problems.

If they chose to, most people could objectively look at their lives and see how frequently the problems they had were of their own engineering, and their suffering self-inflicted. Yes, it is true that time and chance happens to everyone, and yet, it is also true that our lives are largely of our own making.

While these two ideas may seem to be at odds with one another, they are both true. It is true because: what happens to us is only half of our life. The other half is how we respond to the things that happen. This weightier half is made up of what we think and do about the things that happen to us, and those around us. It is our response to both the past and present, and also our response to the future.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. – Shakespeare (Hamlet; Act 2, Scene 2)

We interact with the past thru our our mental and emotional analysis of our memories. We interact with the future thru our mental simulations of possible events. We imagine the things we might say or do, and we play these things out on the stage of our mind. The data we have collected, and analyzed, from the past is fed into these simulations of the future. We interact with the present thru our choices, which are determined by the outcomes of the simulations of our future. After running these simulations, we do a mental calculation. We weigh the pros and cons, consider the benefits and costs, the difficulty and feasibility. In other words, we plan, and then we choose the action based on our plan, however hasty or shortsighted it may be.

molehills “Problems” have everything to do with our perception of them. As I mentioned above, we even have the power, in our minds, to transform non-problems into problems, or small issues into big issues. The proverb speaks of turning mole-hills into mountains.

For example, it is normal to have disagreements with those around us. It is even normal to argue about those disagreements, but it takes special effort to turn agreements into something to argue about.

Here is an example of what I mean. In episode 10 (of the second season of SSW), Brandy comes back to visit the McGees. Brandy is spending the day with Paige, chatting and helping with the household chores. In this scene the two women are folding laundry together, and we quickly see that things are not going very well. I don’t know how much of this scene is the result of “editorial sculpting”; regardless, this exchange is illustrative.

Brandy: “Do we fold the same?”
Paige: “That’s what I was looking at. I was like, yeah, she actually folds like I do.”
Brandy: “Nice.”
Paige: “That’s pretty cool.”
Brandy: “So, are you particular about, like, say I would have, (she begins to demonstrate folding a towel another way) because there is another way, and so…”
Paige: “No, I would have fixed it. I wouldn’t have said anything; I would have just fixed it.”
Brandy: “You would have fixed it?”
Paige: “Mm-Hmm.”
Brandy: “Ok, so there is a particular way of doing things?”
Paige: “Yeah. There’s a right way and a wrong way.”
Brandy: “Any other, like, pet peeves or particulars? Like, if it was my day to do dishes – would you come in behind me and see if the dishwasher was loaded right?”
Paige: (Nods, Yes)
Brandy: “Yeah? I used to be very particular, but now I’m just so grateful if someone helps. I’ve gotten to where I’m just like, just put it in the closet and shut the door.”
Paige: “No. Towels, they have to be put in a certain way because they will fall over. So, you have to fold them a certain way.”
Brandy: “So, how would that work, you know, with me coming in? If I come in, like, how would that work?”
Paige: “You’ll just have to learn to do it my way.”

Towels

If you can grasp the reality, that our lives are largely what we make of them, and yet you continue to feel like you can’t stop worrying, can’t stop creating problems for yourself, can’t stop creating problems for others, cant stop sabotaging yourself and your relationships; then perhaps there’s something wrong with your understanding of the human brain and our search for happiness and satisfaction.

We aren’t made to experience “happiness” in the way normally think of it: carefree, pain free, completely fulfilled, excited, and free of any suffering. Rather, we were made to survive, and survival, in a very human sense, means to create. The strange thing is that suffering (that is, the mental component of suffering), and creating are connected. A large part of suffering involves a mental process called rumination.

Rumination is when we focus all our attention on the ways we are suffering, on its possible causes, and on our failures (and the failures of others) that have led us to our suffering. These thoughts are repeated over and over (thus the name, rumination) without resolution. We allow ourselves to rehash and dwell upon the causes and consequences of our suffering, rather than dwelling on its solutions.

Instead of devising the next step for our life, we ruminate on the last one. Rather than imagining new opportunities, we assume nothing better is possible. Rather than taking control of our life, we embrace an attitude of powerlessness. We become helpless, and our suffering becomes meaningless because we are at the whim of how the world makes us feel, but we were meant for better things. We were created to create. We were made to act, and not to be acted upon (See 2Nephi 2:14-16).

So what is the connection? Rumination (a component of mental suffering) and creativity are controlled by the same parts of the brain, and they have an inhibiting effect upon one another. Suffering will result when we stop creating, and visa versa.

Pain is Inevitable, Suffering is Optional

When we focus on creating, our pain is no longer meaningless – it is no longer “suffering for suffering’s sake”. Rather, as pain cannot be altogether avoided, it becomes an expected part of the process – the pain becomes “worth it”. When we focus on creating and doing, we no longer categorize our emotional experiences as: “things that feel good” or “things that don’t”. Instead, we use the vastly superior categories: “things that are worthwhile” and “things that aren’t”.

Use your mind and energies to create, to do, and to improve. It will give your brain something productive to do. These are the things in life that are worthwhile. These are the things that will give our lives actual meaning, and in a deeper and more satisfying way than complaining and worrying about things will ever do. I repeat, our lives are not made meaningful nor satisfying by complaining. Our lives are not made meaningful nor satisfying by worrying. Our lives are not made meaningful nor satisfying by suffering needlessly, nor by needlessly increasing the suffering of those around us.

Our lives are made meaningful and satisfying by the things we do and create.

Increase the talents given to you, rather than hiding them. Read a book, write a book, grow a garden, fix your marriage, plan a trip, learn a foreign language, learn to play an instrument, go back to school, make your children a larger priority in your life, become a regular volunteer for a local charity, change your own motor oil, quit an addiction, start exercising, organize a chess club, get yourself right with God.

The possibilities are quite literally endless. There are so many things you could do. There are so many thing you ought to do, and you know it. God is the creator, and we are made in his image. We were made to create. We were made to improve.