Category: Josh Feingold Blog

I wanted to write a post about divorce, being inspired by an article that my sister shared via Facebook.

Divorce is an opportunity.

Of course, this strikes one as at odd at first blanch, since we know that divorce is full loneliness, horrid pain from loss, and more unintended consequences than you can shake a stick at.

However, like all events that transpire in our life, it too is an opportunity.  An opportunity for growth, which like all opportunities that come our way, we can ignore, and squander, or grasp, and come out on the other side with a new version of ourselves.

Josh 2.0, if you will.

Having finished a year since my separation, I can now look back at the amazing opportunities that this past year has provided, that there is no way that I would have had, if I had remained married.  It’s not that they couldn’t have happened, but my environment and emotional self was not set up in such a way to allow for them.

A year ago, I never would have had the amazing opportunity to travel to Portland this past weekend, where I would eat lunch with a stranger named Rick and discuss an experience he had when he was five, and he experienced an intimate connection with the world; or meet and spend the morning touring around with Leanne learning about her school she started in Africa, and an amazing discussion about place and energy; or met the homeless man who offered me what he had collected so far that morning, when I bought him breakfast.

Ironically, the main issue with divorce is not that we can’t live with the person we were with, rather that we can’t live with ourselves.  So we leave our situation, only to find that we are still there.   I would bet that most people who get divorced, then settle for someone else just so they don’t have to be alone.  Sounds familiar doesn’t it?  They should have just stayed married in an imperfect relationship and they could have saved themselves the pain of divorce.  Now that is a squandered opportunity.

Rather, divorce serves as an opportunity, not to find someone else, rather to find ourselves. And commune with ourselves.  And enjoy ourselves.  And just be one on one with the world.

And to patiently wait for that next special person, who has already done the same.

Last week, I took some time to talk about the many reason why we choose to marry.  I was planning on going one by one through this list and putting some thought into the base reason for each of them, but having read a very interesting book on the brain this week, called Incognito, which I suggest to anyone who is interested in this blog, I concluded, that in fact, for many the reasons of why is simply biological and evolutionary.

Actually, as I finished that paragraph, I came to realize what I really believe, which is that the why is complicated, and has some components which are evolutionary influenced, and others that are influenced by our environment, or other things that we learn along the way.

So take for instance, the simple desire to have someone in our life.  This desire, I would argue is something that is ingrained in us from birth, and in a force below our consciousness.  It is a practical drive that has helped us survive over time as “two heads are better than one.”  However, there are other influences that drive this and make the need stronger, to include social conditioning, learned helplessness, and similar change factors.

There are a few lessons from this blog.  One is that we shouldn’t simplify causes – since often there are multiple reasons that phenomena happen.  Naturally, we are drawn to simple solutions, since we are lazy thinkers, however, in doing so, we cause ourselves a disservice.  Rather, we should try to find all of the causes to any effect, and understand each of them for what they are.

Perhaps I will return to that list from the other day. 🙂

 

Today, after being lied to, I realized who the real victim of lies is.  You might think that it is the person who is lied to.  The person who gets hurt, or damaged, or harmed in some way.

However, while they are certainly a victim, I think they aren’t the main victim.

So that seems to leave the liar themselves.  After all, what is a lie, but a fear on behalf of the person who is lying to face up to the reality of their life.  And someone who lives their life surrounded by fear is really entrapped in their own little world of non-existence.  To some extent, you could argue that they don’t even exist (from their own perspective) since they can’t live in their own reality.

But I don’t think that is really the victim, either.

Rather, the real victim is society, and those yet unborn, who enter into a world where they don’t realize the impact of their lies, on themselves and others, but lie out of rote, because those that set the example, themselves didn’t know any better.

Over the past year, I have taken numerous breaks.  Shopping breaks, dating breaks, electronic breaks, etc.

Looking back on these breaks as a whole, I can now effectively reflect on the value provided by these breaks from the norm.  In short, they allow for one to understand the emotional attachment and values that these actions provide for us. Well, if we think about it, they do.

With every break I have taken, there has been an emotional tug to cheat on my break.  This sensation, have given me more information about myself, my desires, and my fears than I typically can get through simple introspection.

So take a break from something that is important in your life.  In doing so, you will come to understand yourself better, and appreciate yourself as well.

Recently I have been giving a lot of thought to anger.

Anger isn’t something that I was raised with, and looking back probably was taught that anger wasn’t appropriate.  Looking back this was a stunting message, since in truth, if we feel it, it is right, and suppressing any emotions is not healthy.

Rather, the correct message is to understand that there is a difference between feeling anger and expressing anger.  and that we should feel it and not express it.

Usually.

I say this because, usually the object of our anger is another person.

As I read recently, “we need to learn to hate the action, and not the person.”  Wise words.  After all, the target of our anger is just a person like each of us, and while their their action might have been deplorable, it is really just a reflection of what they have learned in their path through life.  So why hate them, we should feel sad for them!

Plus, in most cases the thing we are angry about is really a reflection of our own insecurities and expectations that the world works according to some predictable pattern that we control. Which it doesn’t.  So usually anger is our problem, not theirs.

So where is anger appropriate?

When the anger is reflected at an idea, that is something we need to jump on board with.  When there are things in our world that need to be fixed, and no one takes action, we need to leverage anger in a positive way to create change.

At issue is that as a society, that likes to think we can control the world, we look down on anger since anger, like fire, is man uncontrolled.  We don’t like that.  It makes us uncomfortable.  We stay away from it, and disassociate from it.  Rightly so, since in general, as we saw, it is silly to associate with someone who is angry, since it is misplaced.

The lesson for us to take away is not to  throw the baby out with the bathwater, and leverage this important emotion to reacting to injustice and impacting the world in a positive manner.