Need Demotivated? I Can Help You

Yes, you read that right.  I think it's time for Grandma to share some of her own tips for constantly demotivating herself.  Not sure how funny this is going to be, though I started with an idea of parodying yet another of those about 8,790,000 online articles about how to get yourself to do something you ought to do when everything in you cries out No! Or at least, most of you does, and hey, it's July.

But what about demotivating yourself?  A mere 59,000 entries about something all of us do most every day.  You can see this is a field crying for more content.  Meanwhile, exploring this got to be fun right away.  I took the quiz on demotivate.com, whose motto is, "If you're happy and you know it, find another site."  Their other motto is,

 Life sucks, give up.  

The quiz told me I am ~

On your way to true demotivation You are headed on the right path, just pick up a few bottles of vodka, wait til your dog dies and you will begin to finally feel how worthless your existence really is!

It's interesting to a demotivator to look up images for "Life sucks."  On one hand, you quickly get sidetracked into things like Cheezburger, which collects "epic fails," the best of which involve trucks whose drivers were probably both stoned and working above their pay grade.

At least half of what comes up on Google about demotivation is trying to motivate you in a sickening sweet way.  Now, I don't blame the people who make those posters, and sometimes put them on Facebook.  I know lovely people who do that now and then.  They are just trying to feel better.  I blame the society for making us all want to BE SOMEONE, and telling us that you can do anything if you try.  Especially when it tells you you can feel better if you try.

(Parenthetically, you really can't make yourself feel better, take it from an expert.  What you feel, you feel, including long bad moods that are profoundly karmic in nature.  But you're not allowed to be depressed and listless, are you?  It makes your friends nervous.  Actually, moods - energies - are catching, that's been studied, too. It feels good to be around a hypomanic, for a while.  Same is true of a depressive, except backwards.

[Even more parenthetically, I had the perhaps unique experience of being yelled at in a psych ward by another depressive for being depressing.  Specifically, I was playing Barb'ry Allen on the piano, which is not nearly so bad as cracking gum loudly and glaring at someone who is playing a sad song.  Psych wards are full of passive-aggressives, of course, the resident doctors being the worst.])  

Okay, where was I?
 
I wanted to be a little Zennish for a moment. I wanted to say that, while demotivation from outside can work, unfortunately, motivation from outside does. not. You can find learned articles about experiments that demonstrate that, if you are a scholarly type.  If not, allow me to summarize:  a sign on your wall, a post-it on your computer, people telling you to cheer up (don't you hate that?), these things do. not. work.  I know I am annoying you with my feeble cliched attempts to emphasize the point, so I'll make the point and run:  to be sustained in an effort, your motivation has to be internal.

Nor is internal motivation always good.  For example, you may have internalized at a very young age that if you were only good enough, your father would love you.  At least respect you.  And actually, painful life things like the delusion that you can make rejecting parents notice you often lead people to work hard and do good things.  Though mental constructions like that (if you only work hard enough . . . ) are often proven to be incorrect (are delusions, in Buddhist terms) with disastrous results.

And this post is long enough, so click here for a coffee mug that will help you stay pessimistic.  It's hard, with all these puppies and kitties on Facebook. Remember, they only enjoy life because they have little tiny brains not capable of hanging onto elaborate mental constructions.  Bless them.  Well, bless us all.

Music and words and work and . . .

No, not this kind of carpenter ant.  THIS kind . . . 

Words. I have always loved words, as art, making word art (poetry, fiction), escape, words and puzzles, which have something in common:  both mental constructions.

If you have to have words, you can take them into the body with sound.  One way I have healed as a person, I guess I could put it that way, is that now music enters my body and my body expresses it.  Not just toe-tapping.  Chair-dancing.  Better to do it standing up.  Then you can move your feet and it's just dancing.

Saw The Carpenter Ants Sunday at Natalie's Pizza here in town, right here in Columbus, Ohio, which was a cow town when I moved here and is now a pretty cool place.  So is Natalie's.  The Rev. Bush, above, commented during their show that when you walk into a place and there's the owner to greet you, you know you're going to get good food.

If you want a Buddhist lesson, there is an important one in that.  Natalie owns it, designed it, it expresses her, it is her work and that work gives something of value to the world.  That makes her a very lucky person - she has found what she has to give.

I am dis-couraged about that myself.  Giving poetry is hard; most people don't want poetry in this, what my students would call "today's modern contemporary world."  (I still laugh a little when I write that. Bless their little hearts.)  And I guess it is hard to separate yourself from the desire to suck-cede, I mean succeed, to Be Someone, to Matter, to imprint the world, so as not to totally die and disappear.  Why should I bother with a poem or, of course, with this blog?  So one day some lonely adolescent behind a locked door, some elder who's not very mobile anymore, will feel connected, might feel connected to me?  That's what I got from poetry when I needed it.

That would have to be the motivation, because there ain't no money in poetry, and many people competing for it.  And because poems come to me, so it's something I do, weird and archaic as it's become.  I like words on paper more than words in the datastream.  I actually rediscovered recently the pleasure of writing with a wooden pencil.  I'd forgotten.

So that, and getting used to Being Ordinary.  I wonder how many other people get the edged gift at birth of a mother who is sure you're going to Be Someone Special, though she never was?  It seems to propel some people, though not into poetry. Not that being Special is the road to happiness; I'm sure it's not.*

And gosh, I almost left out how hard it is to be old, energy depleting, and on top of that cursed with a cycling depression.  At least the damn thing cycles up the hill as well as down.

Music is good for you.  I recommend it.  I vow to listen to it and to make it, if only by tapping a spoon on a glass and a wooden table.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*I just used that semicolon with defiant pleasure, because Kurt Vonnegut taught never to use them.  I don't have to listen to other people on these things anymore.  At least not in this blog.

A Word of Caution

Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren't any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn't be here in the first place. [Buckminster Fuller]

I confess that I pulled these two sentences out of a paragraph clearly intended to be motivational, about how one person can change the world.  My take on that is, Yes, but a lot of the time that's not such a good thing.

Maybe I'm down on this kind of thing because it's one of those times when it's all I can do to live my own life, and not doing real well at that either.  For instance, getting to exercise or getting to the eyeglass place to order some needed new glasses.  Or . . . you get the idea.  I don't need anyone telling me to change the world. Usually, when someone does tell me that, they want my money.

As for the above, I think that first sentence is a good one.  But don't get above yourself thinking about your uniqueness.  Every maple leaf on a tree is unique, different than any other.  You don't need a magnifying glass to see it.  We cat lovers know that every cat is unique and irreplaceable, though also catlike and not doglike.

The second sentence?  ridiculous.  I was not put on this earth to be born in September of 1942 because the world needed another crazy artist (it does make me laugh to call myself that, so indulge me); I was born because my father came home on leave in December 1941.  Did they intend to make a baby?  I never asked.  But I know this - if they had an intention, it was to have a boy.  Furthermore, I don't think God or a conscious manipulative universe sent him home on leave and made them be careless or set out to make a baby.  Do you think it works like that?  Really?

For me, after a few minutes on Facebook I feel most or all of us would do better to stop getting motivated to do great things and have some humility - to compare ourselves, say, to blades of grass.  But we are blades that can jump up and down and shout, Look at me, look what I can do!  That seems to get many people in a whole lot of trouble.  I don't follow celebrity overdoses too closely, but they stream past me on the evening news.  In the world of popular music, death from wanting to be spectacular is common.  Uppers so you can give a pow concert; downers so you can sleep.  I wish I could have said to Michael Jackson (for example), Really, you and your performances don't matter that much.  Relax.

There are some things worth dying for, but being wonderful is not one of them.

(If you want to be wonderful, you could try to paint like this guy Charles Demuth. Though he didn't get there by trying to paint like anyone else, now that I think about it.)