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When your mind is at work, it is earning a mental salary to take with you and spend on the forthcoming experiences you have. When I have bursts of creativity to write, it is because I have left the act of writing and sought context elsewhere to bring back and deliver my point with. Everyone wants dad to be home more, but if he is home all the time watching Jerry Springer then he isn’t being the person we miss having around and who we look up to. The reality is you need to experience the sensation of loss around a concept in order for your mind to start finding distance from that point on a map to look back on once we’ve sketched out the rest of the region and appreciate more fully. Oftentimes we encounter the ends to wonderful things as something like a book with no pages left or a well that has runeth dry. The reality is what we encounter in life, including life, is moreso a gravitational pull between ourselves and a concept we have had the opportunity to pass by as a comet would a planet. Sometimes the pull we feel from a concept is negligble, sometimes polarized even, other times the pull feels so entrenched in your own center of gravity you feel like you are the concept itself, but you are not. Ideas are what pull us. Ideas about who we are or ought to be are what influence our decision-making and ideas about us not being enough if we don’t have, do, or behave in a certain way are what cause us to undermine our own ability to make effective decisions.

Ideas about who we are create the very fabric we weave our thoughts with, integrating the opinions of others hand in hand with one of the sewing needles you carry and the your own ideas about yourself in the other needle. However, we all have a handedness to things, so naturally one will get a priority in every situation and not always to the same degree. Sometimes a comet is just passing by in the night and other times it could be hurling straight at us. That is basically what ideas about ourselves are like. They are either very fleeting and recognized as mutually exclusive from our own orbit, or we feel the pull of it when we are able to relate with it with increasing context to the point of it being smackdab in our face and plain to see before our very eyes.

This is why generating and exploring ideas about who you are and learning about yourself as humans learn about the planet is what makes you more effective in your understandings of a matter when you come back home from the mental work you’ve put in. We love to picture our minds as dark hallways and corridors, with many doors kept shut representing our failures, shortcomings, and trauma. Ideas, including such a metaphor, are what mix the cement that pours the foundation of the thoughts we build on it. When you picture your mind as a dark hallway in a seedy hotel, you are structuring your thoughts about yourself in a way that orients you to compartmentalize aspects of yourself and sort them into rooms based on what you think would generate the most value rather than how you want to run your business. The customer is king, but who you identify as your customer in life is who will benefit from what is produced and provided by the mental work you put in. If it is just for you, then only you will benefit but your business will never grow. However, if it is for everyone, then you are not a business providing something of value but the doormat of one that was bought out by the person you’re selling it to. We are all trying to please or satisfy something, so who and what you envision as what truly stands to benefit from your actions is who and what will benefit from them. Oftentimes we are the unwilling midwives to a lot of our own actions and we choose to support them even if we don’t believe in them because we cannot envision anything better and surely cannot fathom what it must be like to do it on our own, even though we do it all the time when no one is looking or asking us. We hold onto ideas about ourselves and who we want to be in order to get us through tough times or trials in front of us and whatever methods we learn to validate ourselves as humans with value eventually have to be unlearned and dequalified as inappropriate methods for assessing the strength and efficacy of our own free will and understandings of the world. Nature’s only call is to survive and we answer that call with ideas when we lack struggles associated with satisfying the basest needs to keeping our biology intact. It is the burden of the privileged to survive their own ideas about themselves in order to make it through the world that has afforded us every other basic need that ought to be afforded to everyone, but is safeguarded by those in the world of Having for fear of becoming Losers. We protect what we have with all our might, including our ideas about ourselves, so that our ego can survive and reproduce as its own biological imperative.

In a universe of increasing entropy, life is orderly by contrast. That’s not to say that living isn’t chaotic, but everything in-between the central dogma of molecular biology and true self-expression is a cloud of probability. Life has its characteristics. Everything works as a baseline, because that is how we take in energy from our surrounding environment and transform it into metabolic processes and survival. As a default, our egos will operate with the understanding that what they perceive is correct. However, our egos are just a parent to two unmanageable brats called Optimism and Pessimism and inevitably one is going to share their side of the story first and will be the one your ego sides with more often than not due to historical evidence and trending of relevant data to help make it ‘corrected’. However, no one is infallible and therefore the children of your ego represent the white lies of a 10-year old trying to get their way that we at times give into just to shut them up if they don’t stop nagging about something. However, we’ve all seen that one kid in a Wal-Mart setting the scene for what everyone defines as ‘bad parenting’ when we don’t really corral the misgivings and spoiled tendencies of our ego’s ways.

This is why context is something you bring home with you from mental work. It is why it has value, because a child more well-behaved when not at the store is much more likely to behave when at the store in front of people. Having a better understanding of who you are and the way your shadow side creates an inner brat at times is how you can call out your own bad behaviors and put them on time out or to bed for good. If you want to go out there in life and spend the disposable capital you have earned from your mental work, then you need to put in the hours and ensure you’ve done whatever minimum is required for you to feel you are living a life of quality. If you make yourself your own customer, then you will start to realize how much you are sleeping on the job in relation to the big quotas the biggest ideas in your mind about yourself are setting for you. If you make yourself your own customer, you will start to realize why you have been so unhappy with the value of the experiences life is producing for you because you will start to realize you have customer requirements that need to be satisfied if you’re going to buy into your own life more. The joy you experience in life is like a cup of coffee on a cold winter day. If your customer requirements are that it just has caffeine, then you’re in for a bitter experience (and should probably brush your teeth after). But if your customer requirements are for an extra caramel, non-sweetened (lol) macchiato with goat’s milk, chances are you’re going to be an unsatisfied customer to many of your experiences in life, but if you understand the consequences to your decisions then sip up. A satisfied customer is one who gets what they expect, so after identifying yourself as the customer, the next thing to understand is what you want for yourself so you can more readily make a choice at the menu of options when it is your turn in life to give your order.

So, now that it is your turn, may I ask, what is it that you can make for you?