Psych-Out

If you’re someone who sees poker as a game of luck, then chances are you’re not a very good poker player. Elite poker players are master psychologists. They know themselves — their tendencies, strengths, and weaknesses. They read other players. They understand the probabilities behind their choices.

A great poker player understands that luck is a part of the game, but Lady Luck is not where he or she rests their hopes. When taking a chance, playing a bluff, raising, or folding, the best players understand the probabilities, the psychology of the game and the other players. At the drop of a hat, they can tell you why they played their cards the way the did.

Alan Schoonmaker lays out several central principles that great poker players live by in his book, The Psychology of Poker.

* Your greatest enemy is denial. We deny the truth about our own abilities. We exaggerate our wins, and fail to register our losses. We chase weak cards, or sit at games where we have no hope of winning. We tell ourselves stories that a flush is easier to draw than it actually is, or that we lose because we’re just unlucky, or someone else is luckier. Or, we fall prey to betting a hand that we know has no chance of winning because…well…just because.

* You should understand yourself more deeply. Why do you play the way you do? What are your tendencies? How does your style of play affect other players around you? Do you blame others, lousy luck, make excuses? Or, do accept responsibility when you have no chips left at the end of the day?

* Focus on other players. Are you self absorbed? Weak players fixate on their own hands. They think only of themselves.  Strong players study the players around them, their tendencies, their talk, and what their talk says about them. They engage the other players as much, if not more, than their own hands. Who is he? What moves the way she plays her cards?  They get to know the other players intimately.

* Playing styles are caused by and reveal people’s desires and fears. What do you want? Why are you playing this game with these people? What are your fears? How many times in our life do we get hijacked by wishes and fears — we chase that one card denying it’s poor probability, or we fold with a winner?

* Think visibly. Make your assumptions and thought processes explicit. Great poker players talk to themselves, at least in their own heads. They can tell you what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. Great poker players live mindfully, attending to each check, raise, and call made, as well as each card dealt and how it changes the whole table.  They play knowing that the last hand, win or lose, has little to do with the cards in front of him.

* One of the best ways to improve your results is to change your style. Change it up. If you tend to be loose and aggressive, tighten up. If you tend to hold back, push forward. Great poker players don’t have a one size fits all style. They are continually adjusting to the players in this game, and this pot.

In life, success is not always about winning or losing, but how effectively we navigate the bumps, opportunities, and good and bad chances that fall our way. There are times when that great hand we are dealt, falls short. There are other times, we win on a bluff that was better not taken. Either way, don’t fool yourself that the failure or success of one hand means anything. Until that last hand in life is dealt, there’s always another hand to play. There’s always room to improve our game.

Great poker players are self-aware, conscious of who they are for better and worse, take responsibility for their own results, understand probabilities, aren’t given to superstitions, don’t play in games they’re not suited for, and are brutally realistic about the hand they are dealt and the game they are playing.

Gotta know when to hold ‘em, and know when to walk away.

Watch Daniel Negreanu talk himself out of a winning hand!

In 1974, Philippe Petit stepped out of the ordinary and onto a tightrope that he’d secured between the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center. 200 feet of empty space from tower to tower. 110 stories up. No net. No harness. 6 years of planning. 6 years of patience, risk, setbacks, and heartaches. All for over an hour of daring.

As for the onlookers below? They, too, had been shaken out of their ordinary worlds as they watched the man dancing on the tightrope more than a quarter of a mile above their heads. “Is he crazy?” Who wouldn’t have asked it? “Of course…he has to be!” Still, no one could deny it was 45 minutes of awe — of beauty.

“Why? Why? Why did you do it?” he was asked over and over. Was it his childhood? An absent parent? Toilet training? Was he thumbing his nose at authority? Was he a harmless sociopath? Did he harbor a death wish? We had to have an explanation.

“There is no ‘why’,” he answered. Philippe Petit refused to cut it to pieces. He refused to make it easy to figure for the rest of us who choose to live on life’s sideline.

We are questioners. We are storytellers. When something strikes us as out of the ordinary, we are compelled by over two hundred thousand years of evolutionary history to fill what we can’t understand with a story. We are driven by a desire to make sense of our world, to reduce it to a single idea so that we can make life’s absurdities comprehensible.

The stories we tell will bring us comfort. Our world will seem less uncertain — more predictable. We will come up with that one answer that explains to us what on the surface may appear to be crazy. We will take the extraordinary and make it seem to be ordinary by bringing it to a predictable formula. The story doesn’t have to be accurate, only that we believe it to be so.

Jon Krakauer wrote, “So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation…”

You wake up every morning at 7. Get to work by 9. Eat lunch at noon. Come home at 6. Plant yourself in front of the TV or computer screen until you fall asleep — then, the next day, and the next day after that for months and years, do it all over again. You will owe the world no explanation. And no one will think to ask you why.

But what if you decide to go backpacking in Nepal for a year, or spike your hair and join a rock n roll band, or suddenly take up comedy improvisation, or string a tightrope between two towers and walk from one end to another? The question will start to roll. Why? Why? Give us an explanation, please?

We all take comfort in the story of Sisyphus who was doomed to an eternity of rolling that rock up the hill day in and day out, only to have it roll back down. We take comfort in it, even as we curse it as our own fate. Sisyphus had no doubt what his eternity of tomorrows would bring. How many ideas do we nip at the bud because they seem to ourselves, our friends, and our families to be just a little crazy, or that they may bring that dreaded uncertainty to everyone’s life.

Unlike that cursed son of a king, we can even for a moment each day, week, or month of our lives step out from behind that rock.

Change a routine. Break from the chains of our predictable day to day. To be able to wake up to a day of uncertainty may be cause for our greatest anxiety — yet it can also open some door to our greatest joy.

As Philippe Petit said, “Life should be lived on the edge of life. You have to exercise rebellion. To refuse to taper yourself to rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge, and then you live your life on a tightrope.”

kandinski

Excuses

by Charles Bukowski

once again

I hear of somebody who is going to

settle down and do their work,

painting or writing or whatever,

as soon as they get a better light

installed,

or as soon as they move to a new

city,

or as soon as they come back from the trip they

have been planning,

or as soon as…

it’s simple:  they just don’t want

to do it,

or they can’t do it,

otherwise they’d feel a burning

itch from hell

they could not ignore

and “soon”

would turn quickly into

“now.”

Dejected?  Disappointed?  Has some expectation suddenly spun out of reach?  At  such times, nothing like giving yourself over to a good dose of moping.  Brood, a little.  Sulk.  Let the gloom take hold.  To mope is to surrender to gravity - and gravity is a formidable force of nature.  The spirit sinks.  Eyes glaze downward.  Walking is a chore.  No sense even trying to force that smile.

We can mope on a sunny beach.  We can mope in a house filled with family and friends.  The passenger seat of a car is a great place to mope.  We can mope in a crowd, or alone.  It’s nearly impossible, however, to mope while speeding on a motorcycle, or whitewater rafting, or downhill skiing.  Can’t mope playing a guitar, or flying a kite.  Moping is anti-action.  It’s sloth-like.  Moping moves in slow motion.

It helps when someone sees that you’re moping.  Better still when they comment.  It adds an exclamation point to the misery that has rolled into your soul.

Moping is storm clouds, no thunder.  No rain.

Moping signals a kind of misery that wants notice, but not company.  Comfy chairs where you can curl up are a great place in which to mope.  Moping inside is best, especially on a bright sunny day.  If it’s scorching hot, leave the air-conditioner off.  Physical discomfort enhances any good mope.  If you have to answer the phone, make sure the person on the other end knows that you’re in no mood to talk, but without directly saying so. Have chores to do?  Brush ‘em off.  Instead, trudge from that comfy chair to the refrigerator, move things around on the shelf, then slink back to that chair empty-handed.

Stay away from drugs or alcohol, though.  The numbing effect can ruin a good mope.  There’s a kind of pleasure we get in letting that sour, melancholic mood take over.

Bad day?  Go ahead.  Give yourself permission. Bring your system to a halt. Don’t fight it.  Acknowledge your misery.  Twice a day.  For 30 minutes. Then afterwards, get on with your life until your next moping session.  Either you’ll come to find your thunder and with it the lightening bolt energy to make some change, or eventually, the gloomy clouds will simply roll their way out.

Our thoughts, spin, twist, twirl and agitate around the cage of our brains.  With all of the billions of neurons in our brains firing on/off - on/off, there’s bound to be a bit of noise.  Buddhists call it our monkey-mind.

In any given hour we’re besieged by hundreds of thoughts.  Most of these thoughts are the same thoughts we had the hour before.  And, the hour before that.  The same thoughts over and over — for hours, days, weeks, and even years.  Sometimes they just come on their own.  Sometimes, we coax the more compelling of the bunch so we can poke and prod them over and over.

The more we think something, the more likely we’ll think it again.  That’s a neurological fact.  To the brain, thought is an action.  To think a thought, then to think it over and over, we strengthen that circuitry.  Fire it up, baby! Soon, it’ll glow at the slightest provocation.  And if fear attaches and catches hold, instinctively we’ll fix to it.  Feed it.  Nourish it.  Hold onto it and watch it grow.

Fear is one of those feelings that’s in love with itself.  It will take the slightest sign of trouble to justify and amplify it’s own existence.  And, if that sign isn’t there?  It will make it up.  It scans the world, our imagination, our memories for it’s reason to be, because…well…that’s what it’s supposed to do.  It’s a feature, not a bug.  Why?  When it comes to survival, it’s better to be wary, wrong, and live, than to take your time to be accurate and end up as somebody else’s meal.

Genetically speaking, physical survival is king. Yet, our psychological lives are tied to this very same survival system.  These days, most of us can go a lifetime without ever having to run for our lives.  Instead, we have deadlines.  Mortgages.  Car breakdowns.  Hundreds of unanswered e-mails marked “urgent”.  Our  freedom from physical danger allows us the privilege to exercise our threat response on bosses, co-workers, lovers, kids, husbands, and wives.

We’re free now to imagine all kinds of threatening possibilities to stir up that monkey cage.  Even better, let’s put that threat sometime in the future when there’s nothing we can do about it.  Watch our monkey-mind agitate.  Imagine that fear coming to get you sometime next week — the body will react as if it’s right in front of your face!

And if we forget that we were afraid?  Oh right!  Let me get back to that! We’ll conjure it back.  We’ll encourage our own obsessiveness over our envies, our grievances, our jealousies, our losses.  We’ll do it in future time where they haven’t yet happened.  It will happen.  It will…it will…it will.   Now, we can sit bracing ourselves while tied to our helplessness.  We’ll sit.  Wait.  Stew within the electro-chemical buzz.  We’ll find meaning in all that brain noise.

Shhh…listen…there are messages in that static.

How we love to rattle our own cage only so we can watch our monkey-thoughts scream, hop about, and agitate.

Nature loves deception.  She weaves camouflage.  Encourages disguise.  Elaborate games of hide and seek are played out in rain forests, deserts, and suburban backyards for her creatures to secure mates, food, status, and safety. Everything from orchids, to moths, to we humans.

All of us deceive — big deceptions, little deceptions. Who hasn’t exaggerated a resume, or hidden feelings from a friend, boss, or spouse.  Then there’s the excuse as to why you didn’t get that report in on time.  Try to live a full day of nothing but the truth.  You’d be impossible to your loved ones.  Impossible to yourself.

Biologist Robert Trivers wrote, “One of the most important things to realize about systems of animal communication is that they are not systems for the dissemination of the truth.”  Animal signals convey correct information, misinformation, or both.

Nature has given we humans an even more clever deceptive capacity – self-deception.  We not only hide our truths from others, we are masters at hiding it from ourselves.  Biologists consider self-deception an elaboration and improvement in our deceptive abilities.  It provides a much needed check on our self-awareness.

As important as self-awareness is to both our well-being, and getting along with our loved ones, it also has its shadow. Awareness of every single motive, of all the biological/physiological mechanisms and sensory signals bombarding us would paralyze our capacity to act decisively.  We’d never do the things we need to survive, to mate, to improve our lot in life.

It’s dog eat dog out there.  With every attempt to get ahead, there’s a potential rival out there with the intent to get there first, or at least thwart your attempts.  Want that job?  That mate?  Money back on your tax return?

Trivers writes, “Self-deception renders the deception being practiced unconscious to the practitioner, thereby hiding from other individuals the subtle signs of self-knowledge that may give away the deception being practiced.”

We play hide and seek with our own motives.  Like expert investigators, we’ll build a case to support some action — a case that is so convincing that we  can keep even ourselves in the dark about what we’re doing, and why!

We spin stories to deceive others and ourselves, so we can bypass conscience and self-awareness;  so, we can get what we want comfortably. When was the last story you told where you were the villain, and someone else the hero?  How many times in our stories of some misdeed are we the wronged party?

With many of our motives remaining unconsciousness, we are thus better able to hide deception’s signals.  In essence, we increase the probabilities of meeting some need without the telltale signals that accompany our sometimes burdensome awareness. We even create entire belief systems with hidden self-serving biases.

As Triver’s writes, “The more skillfully these self-serving components are hidden from both the self and others, the more difficult it will be to counter them.”

Some common forms of self-deception:

Beneffectance: We all tell our stories as being beneficial and effective. We exaggerate our own role in a beneficial outcome, and minimize our responsibility when things go wrong.

Exaggeration: repeated tales of humanitarian accomplishments grow in the retelling.  Memory can always be counted on to supply the new facts.

Illusion of consistency:  We rewrite past experiences to make them seem consistent with present realities.  Consistency gives the illusion that we make very few mistakes. We even add details to memories to alter new information that may be potentially derogatory.

Perception of relationships: We are altruistic.  It’s someone else who is selfish.

Perceptual defense and perceptual vigilance: We see what we wish to see. We eagerly embrace any information that is self-satisfying.  And, if it’s not? We have built in biases that will make it seem that way.

The best we can do?   Own that we are one of nature’s creatures.  Be honest, about our wonderfully irritating capacity, to tell stories that deceive ourselves as well as deceiving others..
________________________________________

Trivers, R. (1985). Social Evolution. Menlo Park: Benjamin/Cummings.

Ali accepts Foreman’s blows

“The crutch of Time can do more than the steely club of Hercules.”  Baltasar Gracián

Nothing can be more disarming than restraint in the face of powerful forces you can’t control.  To simply lay against the ropes.  Hold back.  Let the forces around you work themselves out.  Sometimes it means accepting the blows, while protecting yourself in the best way possible until the time is right for you to act.  The right time to make your move.

No one thinks of the courage, strength, and fortitude that restraint requires of us.  Our instincts compel us to act quickly in face of perceived threat or danger.  Push out, quickly.  Fight or flee.  Our evolutionary heritage has wired us with the decision rule, “it’s better to be wrong and act quickly, than to weigh it all out to be accurate.”  In the wilds, the time you take for accuracy, could be the last time you see.  When running from lions, it’s a great strategy.

But what if you’re in the ring and there’s no running, no readily available escape.  And what if to fight, at least at that moment, puts you in even greater jeopardy.  It takes over-riding millions of years of evolutionary programming to lay back, protect yourself, and wait.

On the night of Octoer 20, 1974, in Kinshasa, Zaire, one of the greatest and most cunning fighters ever, Muhammad Ali, came to such a moment.  After the first round, Ali came to the sudden realization that he couldn’t master his opponent, the powerful George Forman, by taking him head on.  He couldn’t out punch him.  Forman was far stronger.  He couldn’t out dance him.  Foreman was far younger, and would endlessly stalk him.  He couldn’t intimidate him.  Foreman was confident and fearless.

Foreman had dominated every opponent who had entered the ring with him.  He’d readily knocked out Joe Fraziar and Ken Norton.  Two boxers who had handed Ali his only losses.

Foreman crushes Joe Frazier

What strategy did Ali come to?  He laid against the ropes and waited.  The famous Rope-a-Dope.  It’s unimaginable to think of the blows Ali suffered for three rounds.  Foreman owned arguably one of the most powerful punches of any boxer in history.  The continuous volley of blows to Ali’s gut and head were punishing, even as Ali did the best he could to protect himself.

But Ali waited.  He waited knowing that eventually Foreman’s force would punch itself out.  All he had to do was survive until that time.

Of course, most of us aren’t boxers in a ring.  But in our day to day there are times when we find ourselves against the ropes with no place to go, and lashing out would make matters even worse.  There are forces around us we can’t seem to control.  Sometimes, the best strategy?   Hold back.  Restraint.

By the 8th round Foreman had punched himself out.  In one of the most amazing moments in boxing history, George Foreman was knocked out.  As the old saying goes, “Time and I can take on any two.”

from When We Were Kings,  Ali masters the beast in Zaire (Watch it!)

“More humans have run away from their enemies than have fought them.”
Theodore Zeldon, An Intimate History of Humanity

We are escape artists.  We are a species more prone to flight, than facing our battles with our backs up, teeth bared and claws ready to dig in.  (Our teeth and claws are pretty useless in a fight, anyway, except against each other.)  For most of us, to stand in there and fight means over-riding a highly evolved impulse that commands our bodies, “Run!  Get out of there!”

Escape brings us to safety.  Escape brings us respite.  If successful, we come to a place of real or imagined sanctuary, whether physical or emotional.  Escape allows us safe haven where we can gather our wits, our strength, and our allies.  And if we need, it allows us to lick our wounds.   Emily Dickinson wrote, “Escape – it is the Basket/In which the heart is caught.”

The notion of escape gets a bum wrap in cool-headed times.  Only cowards fail to turn and face the test, we’re often told.   But, how much we enjoy those Hollywood chase scenes (nearly all movies have one), and how many times do we whisper to the hero or heroine when the villain is nearby and has the upper hand, “Get out of there – please.”

Matrix Bike Chase

In the Alain Resnais film Mon Oncle d’Amerique, the real-to-life neurosurgeon, philosopher, and behavioral researcher Henri Laborit proclaimed that science confirms the opinion of the ancient sages – to run away is the truest wisdom.  Fighting, if successful, becomes addictive and draws us into the stress of a competitive life.  And the chronic stress of a competitive, combative life will eat at us from the inside out.

You see, it’s not escape that’s the problem, but an inhibited fight-or-flight response.   Inhibition can affect health and our immune systems.  Once we start a cycle of inhibited action that habit engraves itself into our body-memory.  Instead of fighting or fleeing, we will habitually freeze in face of those pesky modern day threats, and thus render ourselves helpless.

Cat and mouse between blind Audrey Hepburn and Alain Arkin, Wait Until Dark

As Laborit urges, escape first and foremost from your inhibitions.  We need to fight;  or,  we need to flee.  If neither is possible, then find some other way of turning the unbearable situation into meaningful action. Talk.  Write.  Get angry.  Laugh it off.  Insult the person who’s annoying you.  Whatever it is, do it with a sense of purpose.

Watch an animal escape from a trap.  He’ll escape with power, assuredness, and intent.  How far will he run, once free?  Until he’s out of harm’s way — no more, no less — then, back to business.

Our escapes are many.  We escape into alcohol, religion, art, sports, vacations, movies, drugs, sex and rock-n-roll.  We no longer escape boars, bulls, and saber tooth tigers, but bosses, spouses, bill-collectors, kids, and head-concocted threats that live in either our memory or our imaginations.  When we meet the enemy now, often he is us, and as often there’s no place to run but to select corners of our own thoughts.

Remember, however, escape, too, can be habit forming.  When we run often we forget to stop, or run too far, or run to the wrong corner, or don’t look back so we know when we’re out of harm’s way, thus over-stressing our resources. Sometimes we overstate the danger before us and run when there’s nothing to run from.  And other times, we mistake a healthy dose of flight with avoidance, choosing to hide out indefinitely in our trees, caves, or burrows instead of stepping back out into the bump-and-grind of everyday life.

Escape from swift Cheetah!

“A querencia is a place the bull naturally wants to go to in the ring… It is a place which develops in the course of the fight where the bull makes his home.  It does not show at once, but develops in his brain as the fight goes on.” Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway

We all have a beast within, a bull to kill…whether it be a habit, a troublesome attachment, a pattern of thought, a sorrow, an addiction, a mood, a fixation, a fear, or something that brings us to rage.

Know that bull.  Study where it’s taken its place of refuge.  That place in your life where it burrows in.  It could be in a bottle of scotch.  It could be a room in the house, a chair, your garage, or even in front of your TV or computer screen.

“…in his querencia he is inestimably more dangerous and almost impossible to kill.“

It could be a state of mind, or that way in which you address your lover, kids, husband, or wife.  It could be a place in your imagination where you return again and again to relive a conversation, an encounter, or a past or future dread.  It could be a thought, or a cherished belief.

“The bull may take up his querencia in a place where a horse has been killed in a previous fight, where he smells the blood;  a place where he has tossed a bullfighter, or any part of the ring for no apparent reason at all;  simply because he feels at home there.”

In that place, your bull will be confident, brave, and secure.  When you, or anyone else, attempts to challenge it there, you may feel its stubborn refusal in your brooding, or snapping, or numbing, or anger, depression, anxiety, or irritation.  The bull has lifted its horns for the goring.  Pity the poor loved one who tries to step toward it there.

Like a great matador, we need bring the beast out from it’s place of safety.  After a long day’s work, refuse to let it establish its place in your ring.  Risk making it uncomfortable.

“The bull must be brought out;  but he is gone completely on the defensive and will not respond to the cape and will cut at them with his horns, refusing altogether to charge.”

Step away from that computer.  Change your tone of voice.  Refuse to spend the night brooding in that chair.  Reach for that novel you’ve wanted to read, instead of the TV remote.  Pull out that bike, camera or drawing pad, instead of cracking open that beer, marijuana, or bottle of Xanax.  Kiss your partner, instead of barking out that complaint.  (Or stamp your feet and yell, instead of that half-hearted kiss, if that’s where the bull chooses to live.)  Go to that movie by yourself, instead of waiting by the phone.  Cook that delicious meal, instead of another night of pizza or take-out chinese.

That pint of ice cream you seem ever destined to eat?  Look it square in the eyes, then show it your cape.  Weekends get you down?  Drink too much?  Take a canoe trip, instead of burrowing in and letting that bull raise its surly horns through your boredom, or list of domestic chores.

“…a bull who knows how to use his horns and who cannot be made to leave his querencia is as dangerous for the man to come within range of as a rattlesnake….”

Be brave.  Be clever.  Change it up.  Break routine.  Coax it out.  If just for an afternoon, flash your cape, and by surprise, slay the fear that owns you.   Olé!

________________________________________________________________________

Death In Afternoon, Ernest Hermingway.  p150-151

’“An olive won’t ripen any quicker, however much you mess with it.” (Tuscan Proverb)

Olive grove

We are time–addicts. Time-sick. We’ve come to feel our lives as tiredly, time-deprived. Time is our heroin. We mojo our lives trying to find ways to score more and more. Let’s add time for me. Time for you. There’s work, there’s exercise. There’s family time. Special time for e-mail. Oh, and then there’s organizing those seven hundred thirty-six digital photographs. I’ll save that for next month. That novel I’ve always wanted to read? I’ll make time next year.

We gorge ourselves, yet never end up satisfied. Our solution? More activity at even a faster pace. Speed reading, speed meditating, speed yoga.  Let’s keep that rat-wheel turning. Speed up. Keep moving. That fix is coming. “I’ll move faster. Schedule my time better. I’ll find that plan so I can finally squeeze in every want, desire and need.”

We hire personal coaches, buy the latest scheduling technologies, we read dozens of books by time gurus. But, like a drug deal gone bad, the best laid plans go astray. We can’t open that vein to slip that last half-dozen activities in. Depression and anxiety ensues.

Queen, Under Pressure

In his book Slowness, Carl Honoré writes, “In this media-drenched, data-rich, channel-surfing, computer-gaming age, we have lost the art of doing nothing, of shutting out the background noise and distractions, of slowing down and simply being alone with our thoughts.”

We get a kick from going fast. Literally. Think roller coasters, and downhill skiing, and snowmobiles. Even rushing to and from work, or the yoga center, will give us that kick. There’s a heady surge of sensory input when we go fast. Adrenaline and noradrenaline shoot into our blood stream. Two chemicals released during sex; two chemicals tied to our most basic stress response. Fight or run.

When we start off our mornings in a mad-dash rush, we signal to our bodies DANGER DANGER. Even if we’re just driving to the library. We trigger our sympathetic nervous system into high gear. Then, it stays there for the rest of the day. Fight-or-flight with nothing really to fight, and nowhere to flee. Day in, day out. More hours in the day than not. It’s not the place in our bodies where we’re meant to make our home.

Our sympathetic nervous system is meant for special occasions, or periodic spurts during the course of the day. Say, when that lion is chasing us, or we haven’t eaten in days and we need that kill. Or, when times are good and we’re up for mating. Little surges of challenge here and there during our days are okay. Some stress is good for us. It invigorates our spirit, makes us more resilient. Like that sports car that occasionally you need to take onto the highway and rip open full-throttle.

Still, it’s the opposing parasympathetic nervous system where we find our true home. Eating figs by the watering hole, with nothing much to do but rest and digest, whether it’s food, or the day’s experiences.

It’s here in our parasympathetic nervous system where we consolidate memories, heal our bodies, digest our food, organize our thoughts, solve our problems, restore our sanity. We’re most creative when we slow down. Have a problem you’re trying to work through? You’re more likely to find that creative solution taking a bath, or brushing your teeth, or taking a stroll, or lollygagging in the back yard, than when racing into and through that next activity fix. Albert Einstein would sit in his Princeton University office for hours staring into space. He changed the world.

Our time addiction can be slowed. Take a day a week, or even just an evening or two, and ignore those Time tyrants. Forget those plans. Bring a spontaneous revolt to your soul. Throw off the self-help books, blackberries, e-mail, to-do lists, or that novel you were intending to read. To hell with yoga, meditation, the kid’s soccer game, the book club, and weeknight hockey. Tell your gurus and those pushers of personal growth to go jump in the lake.

Go outside and stare into the sky. Take off all your clothes. Or, turn off all the lights, build a fire, and watch the flames flicker and dance. Dare yourself for a day, a night, or even just an hour to live in the glow of knowing that time is forever and always at hand.

Simon and Garfunkel, Sound of Silence