This is for those of us who already know.
Okay. Here we go. You started reading so you already committed at least some amount of energy to this. Stopping anytime in the next fifteen seconds would be a waste of time, what if you like this? It already feels a little informal, so it might be at least fun for a while.
The title of the book “How To Get Over A x” is spelled that way because the ‘x’ is a variable, not a normal ‘x’.
See, now you’re 25 seconds in, way past fifteen. You’re super committed now but in a good way. Might as well go for sixty seconds! What other kinds of things can these words predict? Maybe in 70 seconds of reading it’ll tell me something even more interesting, like about that title. The A is an ‘a’ not ‘an’ plus “How To Get Over An Ex” would make more sense immediately. But this book is about more than that. Well kind of. It is about that specifically. But it can be applied to anything. So if you’re still with me here, following along, you’re doing great. If not, just jump back to the ‘25’ and read up till here again. By the third or fourth time you’ll fully understand what I’m saying. Consuming information quickly brings down your understanding of that information. Give yourself time to think about things as they happen. If you sit down to play chess, which we’ve all done (we haven’t). Wait I’m lost. Okay here we go: If you sit down to play chess, you take the time between each turn to think over what the situation is and what will happen if you do each action you’re imagining. So when you read a sentence once or very quickly and you don’t understand it totally, you drop that information into your head incorrectly. You’ve made a bad move. Now it probably isn’t that bad because your understanding was pretty good, like 99.8%, because we are super good at consuming information quickly.
I’m like two minutes of reading in now, maybe more with all this re-reading stuff you probably didn’t do. And now it’s confusing ‘I’s and ‘you’s and what are all these little weird ways it’s writing stuff.. Is it supposed to be “am I talking to myself” or “is the book talking to me”? I don’t think this could actually go on for a book length, so why would it say that? I know it isn’t a book. Is it trying to pretend? Books can’t pretend.
When the information is more complex, as life often is, we must take more space in our attention for better understanding. We must slow ourselves, waiting and listening, to understand. And when we understand, we can make fewer bad moves. (but how do I know if a move is bad?)
Now back to our title. A variable ‘x’ means it can be anything. Like in ALGEBRA. Why all caps? It’s because it needed to be different so you thought more about it. Humans naturally do this, they allocate a little more room for thinking when something is different. Maybe that’s why people like to be different? Because they can tell that people think a little more about them. Is that why I’m different? Is that why you’re different? Wrong. We all different, you are unspecial in how special you are. Everyone thinks they’re different because they know themselves. Back to math. It’s because I want you to think a moment longer about algebra because most people’s reaction to math (or related words) is negative (because of forced learning). So THINK a moment more and it may not be as negative as you initially thought. That’s true, I think. I’m no expert though, so really everything here is just a guess, but is it untrue?
You can’t tell if a move is bad with certainty ever. You can kinda tell in the short term, but you never know the long term effects. You chose to take the time to read this and because of that your entire life is different than if you hadn’t given the time. Not immediately, but as we get further from the moment of choice it becomes more frayed. We make these choices constantly to an infinitely small resolution. And so at that point all you can do is try but there is a lot of evidence that our constant attention enables us to control our future. You don’t become what you want to be, or what we all want to be, by not trying. So you must try but with attention and effort, we are able to decently well guide the uncountably large amount of decisions we can make. Nobody knows where the line is between what we can control and what we feel like we can control. By being ourselves, we can’t know that. We can only guess. So to tell if a move is bad.. well you can’t.
But you can try to guide your moves so the outcomes seem good and of course it takes ‘forever’s of practice of this to… be where you are. You’re constantly doing it and will continue to improve until you stop doing it (we can’t know when you would stop either because it could go on infinitely or not or anywhere in-between. And we have no way of knowing if we’re observing the full spectrum of what we can observe or not, so we’ll keep growing our observation but it could very easily never end and if it did, we couldn’t know if it was really the end because we wouldn’t be able to observe the other side of that end without improving our observation but that always seems impossible or might be if it’s actually the end of our possible observation).
If you're enjoying this, it's for you. I guess if you're enjoying it, you already know too.
We can approximate moves well when we think about them. We can remember a long time so we can gauge the effects of a lot of things. Plus, we can imagine how these things can connect and influence each other, which really gives us a pretty clear picture of what’s going on in quite a large spectrum of scope. I know how I feel before and after I drink coffee. You know how you feel before and after you stop communicating with someone permanently. So we must approximate our moves to get the best results because stopping to think about each move would take too long, we’d never make a move. We would be born and then just imagine all the lives we could have within our light and feeling only scope of observation. We would never breath and we’d just die. We must let ourselves think for us sometimes, but sometimes we must think for ourselves. Fortunately for us, we can control how much we let that happen generally. Plus if you fill your life with generally good results, the worse results don’t have room. The best part about bad stuff is that you just have to do good stuff to push out the bad. You never have to make the bad stuff going away without replacing it with good. You can replace it with more bad, but if you want you can just choose to replace it with good.
So, how to get over an ex or do anything?
Just try and think.
Your pal,
ER
PS Your attention is ripe for the taking.