January 16, 2006
Advice and Presuppositions but Mostly Aimlessness
People give me a lot of advice. I think this is the case for everyone. In general though, I think this sort of advice is mostly just ignored. The few that manage to stick in the mind for more than a moment tend to be thoughtfully chewed for a week, and then ignored as more interesting things come along to think about. Sometimes, people may even think that the advice is worthwhile, and work on incorporating it into their lives, only to fail once their attention wanders or the advice fails to provide results.
That having been said, one of the most insightful things I've heard from a teacher, a communications teacher no less, was, well, it condenses into, “You should always be the one taking the initiative.” In particular, he applied it to relationships. Not necessarily between “you and your sweetie” as he liked to say, but also between friends and most anyone you might want to be friends with. You can't expect that others will take action for your sake, and so if you're bored, or feel a relationship is getting into a rut, or feel you're becoming distant from a friend, or want to get to know someone better, you ought to be the one coming up with ideas of things to do, making a phone call and catching up, or getting in contact and setting up a date or meal of sorts.
Of course this isn't something terribly new, but at the same time he said it in such a way that it made sense to me. I'd say that rarely ever is good advice expressing something entirely unknown to the listener, but simply a heuristic or approach at something coached in such a way that makes it apparent why and how one should the heuristic or approach. And of course, because such things are just heuristics, you can't universally apply them and should be aware of when it's appropriate to employ the advice.
Anyway, the point is that this teacher gave me advice which has been useful. Now that I think about it, I'm not entirely sure what the entire point of all that was, but that's been something that's been on my mind. Good advice is hard to come by, and I'm lucky I grabbed that bit from that particular teacher.
Which also sorta reminds me of something else that I've been thinking about a fair bit. As a result of a few different, unrelated things, the idea of racism and prejudices has been something that's been on my mind as of late. In particular, it's been causing me to think about my own prejudices and assumptions not necessarily about race, but about how I approach people and situations in general.
Often when I'm dealing with, say, a problematic situation, I've already made assumptions about the situation before I've even begun considering how to go about solving it. And then, in order to try and come up with a workable solution, I have to make other assumptions so that I can limit my range of choices to a few, feasible solutions to ponder at great length and make a final decision from.
Similarly, when dealing with people, we will make assumptions about their personality, their objectives, their feelings toward you, and what you think they want to hear, among other things. All of this comes together in shaping how you talk to this person, how you respond to their questions and conversation, and how you deal with them in general.
And sometimes, not uncommonly, we have problematic situations with people, where we make all of the above assumptions in our analysis and attempted solution to the problem. And.., I guess the point of all this is to say that we should all pay attention to these assumptions, as blindingly obvious or plain as day as they may seem. Often it happens that the problem lies not with the situation or the other person, but simply in what you think and believe.
You might think that something seems amiss and so you carefully analyze the events leading up to the situations. You find out things which, though previously unnoticed, suddenly support and contribute to the amiss-ness of the above something. Suddenly ulterior motives appear for otherwise innocent action, careless gestures betray hidden intent, slipped words speak of secret wants. You put these mostly unrelated bits and pieces together with crude and far-fetched reasoning to finally create a pedestal upon which you rest what you now realize is a Huge Problem. Funny that you didn't see it before, but now it's absolutely obvious that it's there and you must take action to get rid of or deal with it. Maybe you can confront the person about the problem and make them deal with it, or use an erector set to as to surreptitiously snatch the object away, or subtly leave hints so as to get someone to change their mind, or maybe just ignore the person related with the problem until the problem goes away or solves itself. Only, upon starting to take action (or inaction) against the issue, it's suddenly seen that people say shit for no reason at all sometimes, things happen entirely randomly once in a while, and the entire bloody world isn't out to make your life miserable. The waves crash in on your crappy sandcastle and you feel like an idiot for freaking out over a funny noise, a passing comment, an out of place object, a particularly lumpy rug.
Point being, people make bad assumptions all the time. And the more strongly you feel about a problem, the more likely you are to make a crappy assumption. Leave the detective work to those who do so for a living, and just ask the TA what the hell the circuit looks like, ask that one dude what his problem is, ask your girlfriend (slyly mind you) what she wants for your three month anniversary, and tell that creepy guy that he really needs to stop staring at you in class 'cause it's freaking you out.
