Blog post #200
Image by dima_goroziya from Pixabay
Two hundred weeks of consecutive blog posts tonight. Solid proof of the power of incremental improvement. Of course, I do not expect anyone to read all my 200 brain dumps. That was never the purpose. The purpose was to improve my writing skills. And it is impossible to not improve if you do something for 200 weeks straight. And by the way, it is also impossible to not deteriorate if you commence in harmful activities for 200 weeks straight. The only difference is that it is a lot easier to be consistent with bad habits. Consistency with activities that improve your life and the life of everyone around you is very hard.
There is another nice benefit of this little library of mine. Should I die tomorrow, my kids can read these posts and get to know me even if I am not here anymore. That is such an amazing way of communication, even if it is one-way. Maybe they can choose to read these texts at several stages of life, for example at 20, at 30 and by 40? If there is one thing that I would love to pass on, it would be the knowledge not to step on any of life’s stupid landmines that I have done. I just want them to be better than I was. In hindsight, I have dodged several bullets that surely would have changed the course of my life to something worse. When I think about some of these occasions, I often curse out “how could you be so stupid to do X… or Y?!” Choices that I now consider so unthinkable that it hurts my brain, often seemed like a pretty good idea at the time. Yeah, I know that the counter argument is something like “But you did the best you could, don’t be too hard on yourself”. And there is some truth to that for sure. But not enough to accept and move on. I must set a better example for my boys than what I acted out back then.
Recently I listened to an interesting conversation with a retired judge, who had dealt with many hideous crimes during her long career. The most important takeaway from that conversation was about the effectiveness of hard punishments. One purpose of punishment is to incapacitate by locking them up and throwing away the key, and that protects the rest of society. But as a rehabilitation and to deter, it will not work. Especially deterrence I found interesting. Why will young men commit murder even if they know that they might get 25 to life? The answer is that the brain is not fully developed and the capacity for impulse control is not there yet. Even if the punishment would be that you mess up your life forever, the criminal will reason that yeah, but I will probably get away with it. And that train of thought I recognize in my younger self all too well… Consequently, there are some things that simply cannot be fixed any other way than by getting old.
But what I can do, is to act in a way so that the chances of my boys ending up in situations where they are confronted with stupid choices and making an obvious wrong turn, reduced. Writing has been invaluable for me in this regard. If you do not write down your thoughts and make them real, they will stay abstract, and you can be in two or more incommensurable places at once. But when you write your thoughts down, you are forced to become precise, and you must take a stand for something – in a certain point in time. In ten years, I might and probably will have changed my mind on certain issues whereas other values I will take with me to the grave no matter what happens. By keeping a writing habit going over a very long period – years and even decades – you will likely start to see patterns and a hierarchy of values. Which values change and which values stay the same?
I reckon it is a good thing to recognize and know where your red lines in the sand are. The older you get, the more precisely you can determine where they are, exactly. And when you know what is negotiable and what is not, life just becomes so much easier.