Category: Josh Feingold Blog

A friend of mine wrote the following very wise words:

“Every one is so different. Every one perceives beauty in a different way. So you might be gorgeous to someone and down right unattractive to the next… I have come to realize that you will never find happiness comparing yourself to someone else because no one is the same.”

I thought a little bit about why for me comparison was so much a part of my life, compared to her, and came upon the conclusion that it came down to the fact that I was more sheltered than her.

The main point being that the bigger the world that you find yourself, in the more you come to realize how futile comparison really is.  And in my case, growing up in a rather sheltered (read: narrow) world resulted in plenty of comparing, but in her case, as she found herself in a much broader world, she came to this lesson much earlier than myself.

I’m actually not sold on my logic, since in truth, I think there are certainly other primary factors such as our parents comparing themselves to others, a natural mimicking nature, that are probably more impactful, but I do think that this serves as a factor worth considering.  In truth, I could have just posted her quote, but I wanted to wrap it with some additional thoughts.  So I did.

We like to get our way.  It is a natural way to express our desire to control our world, and feel somewhat in control of our own life.  (Though, as you know, we truly have very minimal control, if any.)

So what happens when someone stands in our way from getting what we want?  Often times we manipulate the environment to help us achieve our desired outcome.

And when there is a gatekeeper (read: person) standing in the way, well, we manipulate the gatekeeper.  This is the point that I want to talk about today.  Those many ways that people manipulate us to get what they want.

Basically, it is the goal of the manipulator to figure out how we can best be controlled.  What is our personal carrot that makes us pull the cart forward?  That is they key and what they must discover so they can best take over control of our being to make us do their bidding.

For the spy novel, it could be sex.  And perhaps some pictures after the event to show the wife. (Fear.)

For the child, it could making an embarrassing scene in the mall (crying or temper-tantrum) so they can get that cookie or toy.

For the parent, it could be guilt, tapping those seeds of what makes you a good person that they planted early on.  “Don’t you love your mother….”

For the significant other, it could be anger, to get a rise out of their significant other just so they can have some type of (sad) relationship.

For the coworker it could be gossip, exchanging information for access.

For the subordinate, it might be praising the boss in public, to tap into his need for power.

For the boss, it might be praising the employee in public, to tap his need for security.

The take away from all of this is that we need to recognize the multitudes of ways that people may try to manipulate us, so we can be on guard for manipulative people, and try to focus on those people who are less fearful of the world at large, and therefore more open to letting go of a need for control, and letting things come as they may.

I wanted to take a moment to frame guilt a little.  It’s funny, but I thought that guilt was not something that I lived with all that much until recently.

Interestingly, what I didn’t realize is that I was not consciously aware of the impact on guilt on my life.

First a working definition.  Guilt is triggered when we take an action that goes against our personal moral fiber.  We experience guilt when we take action that we think is morally reprehensible.  Another way to think of it is as an internal cross-check that our body uses to keep us in line with our own belief system, when our actions and thoughts are contradictory.

So if we think an action as wrong, and we do it anyway, it will result in a brief thought of “I know I shouldn’t have done that” which in turn creates a feeling of guilt.

Working with the assumption that our beliefs are generally good, this internal system, keeps us safe.  However, as we know, many of our beliefs are not our own, rather things we have assumed from our environment (society, parents, friends, etc), and in many cases aren’t all that true or helpful.

Let’s make this a little more personal.

In my own case, my belief system says to make people like me, and do things that encourage them liking me, so when I do something that doesn’t make people like me, there is a feeling of guilt.  It is brief, and so quick, that if I hadn’t read and thought a little about guilt, I wouldn’t have even noticed it, but it is there.  And here is what I learned.  It is this guilt that motivates my action.

Meaning, that I have been thinking that I am motivated to nice action to make people like me.  However, in truth, I have learned that the motivating factor is to be nice, so I don’t have that feeling of guilt, which is so very uncomfortable.   Ironically, this is probably a learned reaction to being told to be nice by my parents (and society) and rewarded for good behavior.

At this point, there are really two ways to help myself.  One is to fix the belief that people need to like me.  They don’t.  However, many would argue that this is impractical, since man is a social being, and wanting to be being liked is probably a healthy thing.  Now like many truths, the answer is probably in the middle.  But I’m not sure that this really is 100% a fixable belief.

But the insight that guilt is the driver, gives another touch point from which I can manage myself.

Now that I can feel the guilt that I am trying to avert, I can take action to take more productive action based on the right thing, and not an automatic reaction to suppress guilt.  Of course, this new realization was only possible once I was consciously aware of my negative thoughts, but now that I have this consciousness, I think it will allow me a great tool to taking those actions that I feel are appropriate – and ignoring my own natural guilt.

Many years ago, when I was a poor man, out of despiration, I invented my own succah design.  It has worked well for me, so I thought I would share it here.

My old succah was 10′ x 20′, eight feet high, and was very sturdy, easy to assemble (30 minutes for one person), stores very small, and cheap (about $250)!

The secret was to use easily available parts, which basically involved taking what the world calls a “Shade Tent” and retrofitting it.

There are basically three parts:

1) The frame.

2) The walls.

3) The schach.

For the frame, there are two parts, pipes and connectors.

For the pipe, I used 3/4″ x 10′ Electric Metallic Tube (EMT) Conduit, which comes in 10′ lengths at Home Depot for about $4 each. 

Assuming you are making a succah 10 x 20, you will need a total of 19 poles, 6 for the floor, 7 for the ceiling, and 6 for the vertical rise (which connects the floor and the ceiling).  While you are at Home Depot, have them cut the 6 for the verticle rise to 8′ lengths, since you don’t want your succah too high.

For the connectors, do a search for Canopy Shade Fittings or Connectors.  They will look like this and run about $6 each. 

You want shape C1 for your corners, C2 for your ceiling in the middle, and C4 for your floor in the middle.  Total connectors are 8 C1, 2 C2, and 2 C4.  For a total of 12 connectors. If you want to use the connectors, I used, check out this seller, but there are a lot of other places if you want to shop around.

By putting the conduit together with the connectors you have your frame! (Hint: For ease of assembly, remove the screw pins that come with them and put in screws that you can use with a cordless drill. If you buy from the guy I mentioned, ask him if he can do this for you before he ships.)

2) The walls are very simple.  Just tarps, which we affix to the frame with ball bungies.  Each tarp should be 8′ x 10′ and you will need 4 tarps assuming you leave one full wall open.  Make sure the tarp says that it has grommits every 18″ since that is what you will use to attach the tarp to the frame.    I like white walls, which look nice and suggest matching white 6″ ball bungies since they will be the easiest to work with.  Each tarp takes about 25 bungies, so get a package with 100.  Here are some pictures of what you are buying.

At this point, the total cost of the basic succah is $85 poles, $75 connectors, $40 tarps, $25 bungies, for a total of $225 for the basic 10′ x 20′ succah.

All you have left is schach.

3) I used wood to support schach mats, but if you really want to stay cheap you could just use real schach.  To build the wood underframe frame, I purchased 8′ x 1″ wood sticks, and laid them in a herringbone pattern on top of the metal frame, which can then support your mat or branches.  To be honest, it would be easier to buy some just over 10′ (by 3/4″) wood boards (less than 3 tefachim wide), and just use those, but I didn’t want to make an extra stop.  In the long run, if you have a lumber supply house, I would go that route (and will do that myself for my new succah).

That’s about it, so have fun building and feel free to be in touch with any questions!

 

 

In researching my feelings of aloneness, I came upon a novel idea, called Solace.

In skimming a mostly academic book on Solace, called Solace by Paul Horton, he explains the concept behinds Solace in his mind.  Since I only skimmed this book, I’ll give you my take on what he is saying, but can’t really say that it is what he meant.

Solace is the process by which we as humans calm ourselves in times of pain.

It is a process that starts when we are born and suckle at our mothers breast, before we actually have cognition that there is such as things as a split between ourselves and our mother.  At that young age, all we know is that when our body tells us something is lacking, something (our mother we later realize) helps makes the pain go away.

As our cognitive functioning grows, and we come to realize that we exist, apart from our mother, and that our mother can’t always be there to comfort us, we transfer our object of solace to other things that remind us of the mother, such as a soft blanket, pacifier, stuffed animal, or other favorite toy.

As we continue to grow in cognition, we continue to transfer the solacing object to other objects, experiences, and people, and bring them to play in our life.

Thinking about things, it would explain why some people like to sing, or to listen to music.

His book ends at development about age 34, and he doesn’t get into what we do after that (I just bought his next book… so we’ll see what he says), but I will guess that we learn how to internalize solace.  Meaning that we learn that the solacing object is not external to us, rather internal to us, which it has been the whole time, but we were too immature to realize it!

To clarify this past paragraph, the whole time that we are children, we think that the solacing object is outside of ourselves, so we use that object internally to provide solace.  As we grow, we realize that in fact we might as well skip the step and provide our own internal solace.

One important exercise that comes from this is to ask yourself, what brings you solace, and how solace feels to you.  As always, knowing a truth about ourselves, can add value no matter how we institute it in our life.  And this is a truth that we must know and recognize.

I know for me, when I hold certain objects from my youth and when I sing I find solace.  I also now find solace in spending time alone in nature, away from all the burdens of the world.  I also self solace by biting my nails and rubbing my neck – as any body language observer or good poker player will identify as a tell.

To take this an apply it to one aspect of loneliness, which is how I originally found the idea, in the book Positive Solitude by Rae Andre, I would guess that part of the emptiness that we feel when we are lonely, is from the fact that (by definition) we do not have a solacing object around to help us.  We know something is missing, since from birth we were trained to have a solacing object when we nursed, and now we are left as adults with no solacing object around to help us feel whole.

As adults we go off to transfer the solace that we want upon another, and take a lover, so we can transfer the solacing power of our mother onto them.  However, we can now see that this is only a band-aid, since the lover is very much external to ourselves, and they come and go, or at a minimum we feel closer and farther away from them from time to time.

To really rid ourselves of loneliness then, we must learn to self-solace (which we can do by focusing on the internal parent child relationship) and then the pain of loneliness will fade away as we learn that the object of solace is none other than ourselves, and we have been there the whole time.