Thursday, August 7, 2014

You Win Some, You Lose Some

Niyama(Personal Observances) and Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow continue to inspire me. Yoga's Second Limb encourages us to see purity, contentment, discipline, self-study, and celebration of the spiritual in our daily lives. The book requires its readers to examine gambles revealing emotionally induced fallacies in decision making.

It was preached to me as a small child that luck didn't exist. Chaos and random events were superstitious and by definition a threat to God's order. Until that point, luck was just an easy way to refer to all the stuff that didn't make since. Confused, I accepted this as another truth I would understand when I was older.

Life is more random than we can accept. Our fallacy stems from lack of contentment: the ego-inflated idea that we deserve something somehow better than the chaotic world God has created- risk, responsibilities and all. Every decision is a gamble, and our insignificance can allow us the luxury of broad framing and ability to see mistakes as somehow appropriate.

Photo: www.the-open-mind.com

When we make short-sighted decisions, we fail to consider the wealth that life naturally afford us- opportunity. Ignoring a chance to succeed for fear of failure is a manifestation of an unhealthy view that God is not generous and that higher thinking is foolish.

If we are to contemplate outcomes at all, it is largely unproductive to do so on a decision-by-decision basis. It is certainly more natural, but only because it is easier to integrate fewer pieces of fresh information. The healthiest view of ourselves requires us to know everything or have an extraordinary amount of compassion for ourselves and others. The former will never happen, and punishing ourselves for this fact is a complete waste of the energy we could be using to develop said compassion. 

It takes tremendous creativity, but also discipline and faith to orient ourselves to the big picture. There will be losses, and there will certainly be wins, and the sooner we accept our limitations, the more loveable we are. A human, framed narrowly, is limited by size, age, location, health, and resources. God isn't, and the second luck and risk fail to exist is the second He has forsaken us.         

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