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Hey y’all,
I laughed when I saw this 2x2 matrix by @strangestloop on Twitter. It reminded me of one of my favorite lines from Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592): “Anyone who is afraid of suffering suffers already of being afraid.”1
In The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control, Katherine Morgan Schafler2 talks about how both stress and happiness are experienced in three stages: anticipation, event, and recall. There’s the anticipation that leads up to the event: dreaming about an upcoming vacation or dreading a scheduled meeting. There’s the event itself: the vacation or the meeting, which usually doesn’t last very long. Then there’s the recall: looking through the beach photos or replaying the meeting in your brain.
I really love this “AER” model — although I prefer thinking of it as anticipation, experience, and remembering — and I’ve been playing around with it this summer to stretch out the fun of things I like doing, like going on vacation, and to minimize the stress of stuff I don’t like doing, like writing book proposals.
Let’s start with stuff I don’t want to do, like writing a book proposal. Worrying about writing is actually more painful than writing, so what I try to do is not think about writing unless I’m writing. (This is impossible, because I write in my head a lot, but I try.) What I did for most of May and June: I simply told myself I was going to sit for an hour every morning and write before I did anything else in the studio and when the hour was up I was going to stop wherever I was in the document and get up and do something else. I did my best for the rest of the day not to think about the proposal until I sat back down for my hour the next morning. And what do you know? A book proposal got written. (Still with anguish, of course, but less anguish.)
For fun stuff, like vacation, I’ve taken the opposite approach: I’ve tried to really enjoy researching and dreaming about our upcoming trips, to read a lot and make a lot of lists, and generally fill up on a lot of information. Then, when we go on the trip, I try to forget all that stuff and just be in the experience of it all, soak it up, while also taking a lot of photos. On the plane home, I like to scribble in my diary, and look through all the photos, and sometimes even write a whole newsletter based on the trip. Stretching out the trip this way extends the pleasure of it.
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