Rule of Life (9 page)

Questions help people clarify their thoughts. Questions demand answers, and answers require the situation to be thought through, to its logical conclusion.

As someone very wise and very dear to me once said, “The better you understand the beliefs, actions, desires, and wants of others, the more likely you are to make the right response, alter your own thinking where necessary, and generally be successful.”

Asking questions gives you time to think, buys you breathing space. Rather than flying off the handle because you think you know the situation, it’s better to ask a few questions and find out the truth. You’ll be better equipped to respond logically, calmly, and correctly.

*I know I did but that was a joke.

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You can always tell the real Rules Players; they’re the ones asking questions while others are reacting, panicking, misin-terpreting, assuming, losing control, and generally behaving badly.

Ask questions of yourself constantly. Ask why you think you’re right—or wrong. Ask yourself why you are doing certain things, want other things, follow a particular course of action. Question yourself firmly and rigorously, because maybe there isn’t anyone else doing it. And you need it. We all do. It keeps us from assuming we know what’s best for ourselves.

And, of course, there is a time to stop asking questions—of others and of ourselves. You have to know when to back off.

All this takes a long time to learn, and we all make mistakes as we go. Any questions?

Q U E S T I O N S H E L P P E O P L E

C L A R I F Y T H E I R T H O U G H T S .

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Have Dignity

I’ve spent years watching successful people, and I don’t just mean successful as in having lots of money or a big-shot career. In fact, one of the most successful people I ever met lived incredibly frugally, simply, and reclusively and yet had cracked success in a really big way—happiness, peace, contentment. This was a person you couldn’t have wiped the inner smile off even if you had tried.

Almost all successful people have a sense of their own dignity.

Now what do I mean by this? Well, they are all pretty solid in themselves; they have worked out who they are and what they are about. They don’t need to show off or brag about what they have or who they are. They don’t need to draw attention to themselves because they aren’t particularly interested in what we think—they are too busy getting on with things in their own lives. They maintain decorum (lovely old-fashioned word) not because they are frightened of making a fool of themselves or falling flat on their face but because they simply can’t be bothered with attention-seeking stuff.

It is important—if you want to be a successful Rules Player—

to show poise and gravitas, be a bit separate from the herd, have good manners, be polite and considerate, and be someone others might like to look up to. You don’t have to be all aloof and stand-offish, serious and grown-up. You can still have fun—just don’t go making an idiot of yourself. You can still let your hair down—just don’t let go of control completely. You can still relax—just don’t fall off the edge.

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Dignity is about showing self-respect and having quiet self-esteem. It’s amazing how others will respect you and hold you in greater esteem when you start the ball rolling.

D I G N I T Y I S A B O U T

S H OW I N G S E L F - R E S P E CT

A N D H AV I N G Q U I E T

S E L F - E S T E E M .

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It’s OK to Feel Big Emotions

If we’re busily maintaining dignity and being peaceful, it’s tempting to think that we’re detached, and there’s no place for big feelings. Well, the good news is, it doesn’t work like that.

It is OK to feel emotions. It is OK to feel angry when someone really upsets you. It is OK to feel huge sadness and grief when you lose a loved one. It is OK to feel tremendous joy. It is OK

to be scared, anxious, relieved, excited, apprehensive, and all the others.

We are human beings, and we have emotions. This is all quite natural. It is quite natural to feel big things deeply, and it’s OK

to let it all show. We don’t have to be ashamed of our feelings.

It is OK to cry. Sitting on our feelings isn’t a good idea. They just get squashed that way. It’s far better to let them out, deal with them, and then get on with things.

If we go through trauma, upsetting experiences, and difficult times, it certainly doesn’t help to be thinking all the time that we have to keep a lid on it or people will think us weak or out of control. I know this might look as if it contradicts keeping our dignity, but feeling emotion is not undignified unless we express it inappropriately or at the wrong time.

Sometimes even getting angry is totally appropriate—as long as we remain in control and don’t do anything we might regret later. Getting angry reminds people that we aren’t a pushover and that they have hurt/offended/threatened us deeply and seriously and that their actions have caused us great pain. Of course, we shouldn’t get angry over silly things—instead, we should choose to show anger only when it is needed, and needed seriously. Likewise, it’s not good to get angry and take R U L E 3 6

it out on innocent people—if you can’t express the anger appropriately, then you need to find a way of letting it out that isn’t going to hurt anybody else. But let it out you must.

Bottled anger eats away at you.

It’s not just anger that shouldn’t be permanently restrained.

Neither should fear or anxiety or great joy or any of the other emotions. Just because we are feeling big emotions doesn’t mean we are out of control. We can be quite emotional and still be in charge of what we are expressing. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t feel stuff—and feel it big time. Emotions are natural, and you shouldn’t make an attempt to stifle them.

Of course, you can make sure emotion is let out at an appropriate time and place, but that is within your control. But then again if you do respond badly, you can always feel guilty about it afterward—and that’s OK, too.

S I T T I N G O N O U R F E E L I N G S

I S N ’ T A G O O D I D E A .

T H E Y J U S T G E T S Q U A S H E D

T H AT WAY.

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Keep the Faith

Keeping the faith is about sticking to your promises, going down into darkness rose-crowned, proud, and unreluctant, knowing you’ve done the right thing and stuck by your friends in times of trouble. These are perhaps old-fashioned values—

honor, loyalty, trust, pride, support, fidelity, reliability, dependability, strength, seeing things through, constancy—but no less worth having for all that. We live in a throw-away society, and keeping your word, being there when you said you would, being dependable and reliable, makes you stand out as a person of some value, some worth. This is a good thing.

We fight shy of being “good” these days in case people mistake us for “goody-goodies.” But that’s another thing entirely.

Keeping the faith is something you do. Being a goody-goody is when you try to convert others. Having your own values and keeping them to yourself (sticking to Rule 1) is fine. Trying to make everyone else do the same as you is a bad thing. That makes you a goody-goody.

No, it doesn’t apply to me because I’m only giving out information, not trying to convert you. It is entirely up to you whether you pick up this information and run with it. But I can guarantee you I shall keep the faith, and the information I give you today will be the same information I would give you in 20 years’ time. Old-fashioned values never go out of style (perhaps they’ve always been out), and I shan’t let you down.

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K E E P I N G T H E FA I T H I S

S O M E T H I N G YO U D O .

B E I N G A G O O DY - G O O DY I S

W H E N YO U T R Y TO

C O N V E R T OT H E R S .

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You’ll Never Understand

Everything

Look, we are tiny complex humans in a huge complex world (and even bigger universe). It’s all so unimaginably, fantasti-cally strange that, believe me, we’ll never be able to understand everything. And that applies at all levels and in all areas of life. Once you grasp this rule, you’ll sleep easier at night.

There are likely to be a few things going on around you right now, as there always will be, that will remain just slightly outside of your comprehension. People will behave oddly and you won’t understand why. Things will go unexpectedly wrong—

or right—and it won’t make sense. Spend all your time desperately trying to work it all out and you’ll drive yourself crazy. Much better to just accept that there is always stuff that we won’t understand and let it go at that. How simple that is.

It’s the same principle for the big stuff—why things happen to us, why we are here, where we go afterward, that sort of thing.

Some of it we’ll never know, some of it we can try and work out, but I have a sneaking feeling it won’t turn out to be anything like we think.

It’s as if our lives are an enormous jigsaw and all we get access to is the bottom-left bit. And from that we make these huge assumptions: “Oh, it’s a ….” But when the veil gets taken away, we see that the jigsaw is massive and that the one tiny bit we were scrutinizing was actually something else, and there we are looking at an entirely different picture than the one we’d imagined.

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We are now collecting information faster than any human, or any computer, can process it. We can’t understand it all. We can’t even begin to understand a tiny fraction of it. Same with our lives. Stuff is going on around us at such a rate we’ll never get to the bottom of it. Because as fast as we try, the picture changes, new information comes in, and our understanding alters.

Be curious, ask questions, wonder to yourself, talk to other people if you like—but know that this won’t always give you a clear and concrete answer. People don’t always make sense.

Life doesn’t always make sense. Let it go, and discover the peace of mind that comes with knowing that you’ll never understand everything. Sometimes it just is.

P E O P L E W I L L

B E H AV E O D D LY.

T H I N G S W I L L G O

U N E X P E CT E D LY W R O N G —

O R R I G H T.

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Know Where True Happiness

Comes From

No, I’m not about to reveal the secret people have sought since the beginning of time—where true happiness comes from. But I do know where it isn’t to be found. And I do have an inkling where it might be. Let’s take a scenario. You go out to buy a new car/house/suit/computer/whatever turns you on. You have the money (no, I have no idea where you get it from; this is just an example) and you buy whatever it is, and it makes you feel incredible/happy/excited/fantastic. Now imagine whoever it was who built/made/created whatever it is you bought.

When that person made it, where did he fit that feeling in? I think you might have brought that feeling with you.

Now imagine you fall in love. It is incredible. You feel fantastic, happy, excited. You go to meet your new love, and when you see him, that feeling spills out in all directions. You feel amazing because you are with him and he is generating that feeling. Right? Wrong. Again, you brought it all with you. You may look to him to trigger it, but even if he went to the other end of the planet, you’ll still have that feeling.

You get fired. Ghastly. You are given your papers. You walk away devastated. You feel like nothing. Now where in that documentation is that feeling you now have? Nowhere, that’s right. Again, you brought it all with you. We all go to work every day with the potential to have that “I’ve just been fired”

feeling. We all meet new people with the “I’ve fallen head over heels in love” feeling.

But no amount of falling in love, buying new stuff, or getting sacked is going to keep that feeling going for longer than it R U L E 3 9

takes us to get over it. People get addicted to buying new stuff or falling in love or whatever because they just love that feeling without realizing that they already have it. They have to keep having their “fix” because they think it’s the only way to get that feeling going. The secret is knowing how to trigger it without anyone else or anything else being involved. No, I don’t know. You have to find that one for yourself. Clue: It’s the one place you’d never think of looking—yep, right inside you.

I T H I N K YO U M I G H T H AV E

B R O U G H T T H AT F E E L I N G

W I T H YO U .

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Life Is a Pizza

I love my kids. I love reading to them, playing with them, watching them grow up, listening to them talk, teaching them to ride bikes, taking them to the beach, and generally hanging out with them.

Mind you, I hate picking up after them, listening to them squabble, and being spoken to in that dismissive way that only teenagers can really do justice to. But I can’t seem to have the good bits without the picking up, the squabbles, and the sharp end of a teenager’s tongue from time to time. I wouldn’t be without them, though (most days).

I love pizza, too. I love crispy pizzas, and I like the soft squishy ones. Any pizza really. I love peperoni and mozzarella and tomatoes and juicy chunks of ham and piquant capers and crispy onions. Mind you, I hate olives, and they sometimes appear on pizzas without being ordered. Disgraceful. And those dried up tomatoes you sometimes get. The ones that are all chewy. Ugh! I always pick those off and throw them away.

When my kids were little, they’d refuse to eat a pizza that had something they didn’t like on it. They’d burst into tears and sob, “I hate mushrooms!” or “I can’t stand cooked tomatoes!”

They had to learn that, if they couldn’t work round the mushrooms or cooked tomatoes, they couldn’t have pizza at all.