Something Personal: The Rules

Over the course of teaching interpersonal communication and doing my own life, I've come up with a set of rules that I try hard to live by, and recommend that other people do as well. As they are excellent guidelines for human functioning, here they are:

1. Stay Away From Crazy
   
   Yes, yes. I understand we all have a little bit of crazy lurking about inside of us. Things set us off and make us behave irrationally. I'm not talking about that. I'm also not talking about any sort of legitimate mental illness. I'm talking about people who either refuse or don't know how to behave correctly. I'm talking about people who lie compulsively, who are manipulative, who aren't willing to take responsibility for their actions, who make more excuses and explanations than sincere apologies. I'm talking about people, who when you interact with them, routinely make you feel angry or hurt or frustrated.
   
   Why should you stay away from crazy? Because crazy people are takers and not givers. They are usually too self absorbed to actually contribute anything meaningful to our lives and people like this drain us of resource that we could be giving to other people who feed us and help us to grow and live a life full of love. For more on that, see the Glowworm lecture.
2. Never Ask a Question You Don't Want Answered Honestly
   
   It amazes me the number of times I've seen people shocked when someone gives them an unpleasant truth in response to a question. Just a few examples: "Have I gained weight?" "Am I a diva?" "Do you think I make bad life choices?" "Do you fantasize about other women?" "Did you cheat on me?"
   
   If you're going to ask a question like that, you had better assume that there is a possibility that you aren't going to get a nice, tidy, socially appropriate, self-esteem-affirming response. If you are being a diva and if you ask me if you're being a diva, I can assure you that 100% of the time I will tell you that you're being a diva. You may be asking, why wouldn't I just tell a nice little lie that will make you feel good about yourself? Because you asked. And because you asked, you've given me permission to tell you the truth.
    
3.  Seize Joy
   
   I don't just mean stop and smell the roses. I mean go out of your way and find some roses and smell the heck out of them until you suck the scent right off of them and love every minute of it. You have one short, little, precious life on the planet. Go out and seek and grab and pull to you those things, experiences, and people who fill your heart with boundless delight. Be responsible (no, "seize joy" isn't equivalent to the idiotic mantra of millenials, "YOLO"), but know that joy isn't going to happen to knock on your apartment door while you're bingeing on whatever you binge on when you're home alone at night. Rather, ya gotta go out and get it. And when you do, hold the hell on to it.
4. Act Right
   
   Usually, when I tell people this in conversation, the whole rule is, "Act right; it ain't that hard". Perhaps my greatest pet peeve is when people choose to do what they shouldn't or fail to do what they should. In my experience, there are few situations that legitimately impede a person from behaving in whatever way is called for by the situation or relationship in which they are behaving. Rather, we fail to adhere to our responsibilities because we don't want to, and then we make excuses for it. What really drives me bananas is when a person, in the course of making excuses for a failure to act right, bemoans the negative consequences that accompanied whatever ill-conceived choice they made instead of acting right.
   
   I don't care why you didn't do what you should have, or why you did what you shouldn't have. I don't care what unfortunate thing happened to you as a result. Your job, my job, the job of the collective humanity is to behave in responsible ways that minimize to the best of our ability, the chance that our actions in any given moment are going cause someone hurt. Put that way, why wouldn't you act right. It really is too easy.

So, these are the rules. Sincerely, I try very hard to live by these. I don't always succeed, and some I struggle with more than others, but I find them to provide a good framework for making the best of my small little life.