Minecraft Therapy

I’ve found a new video game that I really enjoy playing… in my 30-odd years of playing, I’ve never found another like it. It reminds me of certain stream-of-consciousness games I’ve heard about in sci-fi books like Ender’s Game or Lucky Wander Boy. It’s called Minecraft, and is one of a group of what are collectively being termed “sandbox games”, as in, here’s a whole world for you to play in, do what you want.

A primer, for those who don’t know what it is: Minecraft is a first-person game where you’re dropped into a simplistic virtual world, filled with randomly-created mountains, hills, valleys, rivers, and caves. There’s no real goal in mind; you just walk around, foraging for food and supplies, building a place to live so that you can be protected from the various monsters that come out when the sun goes down. As time goes on, you can build armor and better tools to dig for better materials, build a better house, cook food to keep your health points up, and basically just explore.

That’s if you play the normal version of the game. But there’s also a “creative” mode, where you can call up just about any object or material the game has at will, and you can ignore the creatures because they ignore you. There’s no health points, you can just spend your time building, excavating, whatever you like. Oh, and you can fly too.

That’s the mode that I’ve been working in ever since I got the full version of the game for Christmas. The first thing I did was to explore an elaborate network of caves that just happened to breach the surface near where I started. I’m still not done trying to clean it up and map it out. After a while I built the foundation for a house overlooking a bend in a large river, and a road that leads to the openings to the cave network.

I moved on to some nearby mountains, building a stairway up to the top of one (where I hope to build a castle soon), and then I moved on to a large hollow space under a nearby land bridge. I started clearing away all the exposed stone, eventually making my way back and under a hill until I had created a large cavern. I set up torches all over the place (which never go out, thankfully), so now I’ve got a huge, well-lit area. I’m still clearing out other regions of the cave (I’d like to make it all one flat area), but near one end I found a very deep hole, right next to a natural opening onto a sea. I built a small dock and a large ship (not too bad for a first try at free-form structure building), and then started excavating the hole.

I’m basically using the hole as a guide in making an inverted pyramid, a series of steps descending to the center from all four sides. By the time I write this, I’ve gone down about thirty meters, which means that the sinkhole I’ve created around the original hole is now sixty meters across. I’m following my original rule of not clearing away dirt, just stone, so there are now floating islands of dirt throughout the space (most types of land aren’t affected by gravity in Minecraft). Looks very Avatar-y. I’ve built a simple bridge (which I will later make more elaborate) that stretches from the exit to the sea to the far side of the sinkhole.

So, now that I’ve described what it is, what does it do for me? A few weeks ago, I wrote an entry about control, and how I’m coming to believe that most (if not all) the decisions we make in life are based on keeping or giving up control. I’m at a time in my life when I do have less control than usual, from the direction of my life down to how I spend my time during the day. Having no job and a three-year-old, there’s a lot of outside input determining how I should spend my time. However, in the midst of all this, I’ve found this thing that helps me feel more in control, a little world where I am the sole determining factor in what happens.

I have the ability to shape a virtual world that I can walk, swim, and fly around in. I could build monumental structures, pull down mountains, or dig until I reach the bottom of the world. Patience and strong fingers are all it would take, and I have both. I also love the immediacy of it. Before I drifted off to sleep one night, I happened to think of how I’d like to build a giant glass ceiling over my ship dock, just to keep it from getting snowed and rained on (oh yes, there’s weather in this game as well!). And the next day, I just sat down and did it. I really like how it turned out, and it’s given me some ideas about expanding the shoreline and building more things.

There’s something about making something new out of what surrounds us that has appealed to humans ever since they started making tools, and I feel that this is the primal instinct that I’m tapping into.

Jack and the Master

“Jack of all trades, master of none.” Sometimes I feel like that phrase sums me up. Mind you, these are my thoughts in a time when I’ve been out of work for three months, and even though a recent interview went promisingly, I will probably be at home for at least one more. I’ve never considered myself a person to be defined by my job. It’s something that I talked about in my last entry. A job sets boundaries and stable elements in your life, things you can count on. When there is no job, you’re forced to confront the after-hours version of yourself every minute of every day. I’d like to say that at no time have I found myself tense and irritable because I’m not sure how I should spend my time, but I can’t.

Part of it comes from the fact that I don’t know how long I’m going to be out of work. If I had an end date in sight, or even if knew that I was never going to hold down a job again, I could at least start to rework my world with that in mind. As things stand today, I really don’t know how long it will be before I have to be up at seven o’clock in the morning again. There’s no point in drastically altering who I am or how I perceive myself, because I could get a phone call at any moment that would change it. (I probably won’t, at least not for several weeks, but I *could*.)

I didn’t mean to digress so far… what was I saying? Oh yes, Jack of all trades, etc. Sometimes I feel like a fool because I don’t have more ambition. Folks who have gotten somewhere in their lives, those who have achieved what they wanted to, are all driven by either ambition or passion, or a combination of both. Maybe I’ll just use the term “passion”, because what is ambition anyway but a passion for being in a better place, a better social or economic position?

So I guess what I’m lacking is passion for any one thing. I’ve always been interested in a spectrum of things, not necessarily related, and pursuing any one of them never lasts for long. I tend to go through phases of interest, but there’s no one through-line. It sounds like a bland, directionless existence, doesn’t it? But there are real flashes of passion there. They just don’t last. As a society, we tend to term success as a person who doggedly pursues one thing, through good times and bad, never giving up on it, never ceasing to believe in it, never doubting that it is what they were meant to do. But doesn’t it sound psychotic when you put it that way? To me, it kind of smacks of desperation. Aren’t people, by nature, supposed to grow and change? Aren’t our interests, beliefs, and truths supposed to evolve as we grow and learn? Devoting your life to being only one thing – say, a lawyer or a restaurant owner or a car salesman – and never thinking that you want to be (or *could* be) anything else, starts sounding like self-delusion to me, even a stubborn refusal to grow.

Of course, the problem is that if you never stick to being one thing, you never really excel at it. That’s what I meant by the cliché I started this entry with. I think I’m passably good at a lot of things, and I can pick up new things to competency pretty quickly. I just don’t find many things interesting enough to keep following. I’m a firm believer in artistic self-expression, but it seems like the only kind I’m interested in are those that are mine and mine alone. In high school, I toyed with the idea of being an architect, because I loved the designing process, but when I started to think of all the other people I would have to be involved with in order to get even one building made, I lost interest.

Same with film-making. I’ve always loved films, but the thought of being the one person making decision after decision on a movie set, being the one person everyone is looking to for direction, and the necessary detail that goes into every frame, makes me want to not even get into it. A perfectionist I’m not, and even though I know there are filmmakers who just let the pieces fall where they may, in general those aren’t the films that interest me.

I guess that’s why, for me, it always comes down to writing. It’s one of the forms of artistic expression that are mostly distilled from the mind of one person, to be handed over to one person. There are no extraneous veils in between the creator and the viewer. Just raw words, at its best, one mind talking to another, perfectly silent, perfectly clear.

And the circuit doesn’t even have to be closed that way for the art to have effect. I don’t even know if anyone but me will ever read these words I’m writing now, but they’re already having the desired effect. Even if I highlighted this whole entry and hit delete right now, what I’ve written has already made a change in me. I’ve taken words and ideas and strung them together, and the exercising of the creative muscle will inform what I write tomorrow, and the day after that.

Maybe I’m wrong after all. Maybe passion isn’t just the thing that you cling to. Maybe it’s the thing that keeps finding you, the thing that’s continually changing and fresh in your mind. Maybe, at forty years old, the time to start thinking that I still don’t know what I want is over. Maybe I *am* master of something. And I’ve proven it to myself here, today.

In Fugue

There’s a form of classical music called a fugue. Bach wrote a ton of them, and the most famous pipe organ piece that people can immediately recognize – the one that you might hear in old horror movies, paired with the image of The Phantom of the Opera hunched over the keys – is part of one, technically “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor”. Fugues, like most classical pieces, are called that because they follow a certain set of rules.

First, a theme is played by the highest voice performing it… the right hand, if you’re playing it on a keyboard. Then the theme is replayed by the next lowest voice in a different key, while the right goes on to elaborate with a countermelody as it continues. The theme keeps getting repeated in different, lower keys (on the pipe organ, you can also play melodies with your feet) while the other parts add ornamentation above it until it’s been played by every voice. (The most Bach ever did was six, all going at once.)

What’s amazing about a fugue is its restraint, its control. It has one of the most rigid structures in music – once you’ve created the theme, you’re stuck with repeating it until the end – but within that there’s the potential for a lot of elaboration and ornamentation. When the higher voices are done with the theme and they can go off on their own, adding layer upon layer of music, as long as it still fits with everything else.

Now that I’ve had some time off from work, I’m starting to see how the structure of a work day fit into the rest of my life. It was something like a fugue itself… the day was split into work, family life, and my own pursuits, by which I mostly mean entertainment – movies and TV that no one else is interested in, podshows and music to listen to, videogames to play. This latter category was what I usually did after everyone else went to bed. And it all worked very well, I think.

And why? Because it was a way for me to do extracurricular things without having to sacrifice any time with my wife and daughter. If I were trying to find a way to set aside a big chunk of time for myself, I’d be constantly pressured, trying to finagle things to work out the way I want, feeling guilty the whole time I was off doing my own thing, and watching the clock to see how much time I had left. I’m coming to realize that not only did it work for me, I *thrived* on this method, those little pockets of time I could use for other things without giving up anything else (well, except maybe a little sleep), working around the existing structure to add my own little ornamentations, my own little elaborations on the fugue of my life.

Now that the work portion of the day is gone, I’m having a hard time figuring out how all the other pieces should fall. We’re trying to establish a schedule, but without external needs having to be met it’s very easy for things to get out of whack. The other day I slept until almost 10 o’clock, which I honestly didn’t think was possible for me to do. The whole rest of the day felt truncated and off kilter. I find myself constantly trying to figure out how to proceed with the day… if we eat lunch now, then this won’t get done until later, and if that happens, dinner will either be too early or too late. At times it’s exhausting, not having a structure to work around, a theme to follow so that everything’s sure to come together when it’s supposed to.

What it comes down to is that I’m the sort of person who requires stability to be happy. I’ve lived on my own enough to know that I’m far from happy when I have complete control over every minute of my day. I’m apt to lose myself in my casual pursuits, indulging in videogames or movies or the Internet for days on end and then ending up depressed that I haven’t done anything better with my time. I like to know what I should be doing and when, even when it comes to my downtime. It’s quite opposite from my brother – a professional actor who often can’t say whether he’ll be working or what he’ll be doing next month. I just don’t understand that kind of life, not because it’s wrong, but just because it’s so not me. The stress of it would kill me. But that’s why I want a desk job that I know I’m going to go to day after day.

Like I said, this is how my life works for me. Clearly-defined structure, with clearly delineated spots for improvisation. Everyone needs to conduct life (or music for that matter) their own way. I think the key to happiness is finding that method, and aligning yourself with people whose own life-music complements it.

Big Book Love

I’ve always been fascinated by books, in particular big ones. I don’t know exactly what it is about them. Maybe I look at books like Atlas Shrugged or Moby-Dick the same way an athletic person looks at an upcoming marathon; it’s a challenge, all that everyday effort being concentrated in one place. I think the first book I ever read strictly for its size was Stephen King’s It back in the summer of ‘86. It was my first 1000-pager, and it really felt like climbing a mountain – a lot of fun, and its length added to the sense of involvement I had with all the characters.

From there, I moved on to other longish books – the two I mentioned above, along with L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, King’s The Stand, The Lord of the Rings (which was really intended to be just one big book before the publishers chopped it up and named the pieces themselves)... and I still have copies of Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Joyce’s Ulysses sitting on my shelf at home, ready for the next time I’m in this frame of mind. In all cases, the main reason I got into these books was because they were BIG, not because I heard good things about them or they had anything else in particular to offer. The fact that some of them are considered “classics” just legitimized my wanting to read them.

Another part of it, though, is that I marvel at people who really have that much to say, that they would sit down day after day and just keep weaving the same tale. I’m not the kind of person who is able to just talk and talk without having some sort of real content to it, and I’ve never had that kind of stamina in terms of writing either… Even in my writing projects that have made it past short story length, I’ve had to drape my story across an already-existing frame to give it the sense of structure I need. For “28 IF” it was the Beatles’ Abbey Road album, for “Tints of Dread” (which I still haven’t finished) it’s Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”, and for my still-unfinished novel “Nadir”, it’s Dante’s Inferno.

Even stories about such mammoth tomes really intrigue me … Spalding Gray did a monologue in the early ‘90’s called “Monster in a Box”, which concerned his process of writing an incredibly long novel that he eventually scrapped. But the way he would talk about the “monster” was fascinating, the myriad story lines and how it started to take over its life because of its sheer size and psychological weight.

Then a few years ago I heard about Henry Darger. He had a troubled childhood – if I remember right, he had some mild form of mental illness -- who ended up working as a reclusive janitor in the very sanitarium he had spent a lot of time in as a child. He seemed like a quiet, unassuming loner until he passed away in the 1970’s… and when his apartment was unlocked, his employers found a secret project he had been working on for over 30 years. It was a novel called “The Story of the Vivian Girls in the Realms of the Unreal”, a 15,000-page fantasy novel about a fictionalized Civil-War-type conflict between armies of children and child slavers, that takes place in a world he had completely devised on his own. Not only that, but there were also hundreds of panoramic watercolor paintings that he had done, illustrating the many fantastical battles. The estimated length of this work is over 9 million words (for comparison, all seven Harry Potter books added together are just over 1 million). There’s a great documentary film about Darger and his work called “In the Realms of the Unreal”. That just blows my mind, the sheer power of imagination that must have involved.

And then there’s Charles Crumb, brother of famous underground comic artist Robert Crumb (the guy who came up with the “Keep on Truckin’” logo in the ‘60s). It was actually Charles who became obsessively fascinated with comics as a kid, and got his younger brother to take it up. Charles drew many comics of his own, but eventually gave it up. Well, not exactly gave it up… in the documentary film “Crumb” (directed by Terry Zwigoff) you can see Robert thumbing through some of his brother’s later work, and it’s bizarrely fascinating. Charles’ obsession seemed to center on the story of Treasure Island, more specifically on the Disney film version that the Crumb kids all saw when they were young. Charles would write volumes and volumes of comics about Long John Silver and his young apprentice, but after a while his focus seemed to change… there’s a scene in “Crumb” when Robert flips through a particular comic, and as the pages go by, you can actually see Charles’ obsession running away from him… the figures in the comic panels get smaller and smaller, the text starting to take up more and more of the pages. After a while, the words take over entirely, small, crabbed writing filling the whole page, and even further along Charles stops using words altogether, with page after page full of squiggles that look like words until you examine them closely.

Crumb and Darger seem like flip sides of the strange obsession that writing can cause… where Darger, over the course of decades, was able to construct something huge and weird and impressive, Crumb’s own writing devolved until it wasn’t writing at all, just barely-organized scrawls across a page. Sadly, but not too surprisingly, he committed suicide in the mid-90’s.

I’m also really intrigued by the film Se7en… in the scene where Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt find the apartment belonging to Kevin Spacey’s serial killer character, they find bookshelves filled with those standard black-and-white composition books, each one of them filled with tiny writing, the meticulously set-down thoughts of a madman raging at a world he only imagines that he understands. This movie really got under my skin the first time I watched it, but that scene in particular… I think it’s because insanity that focused, that precise and clear in its own self-analysis, is more frightening that any random act of violence. At least, it is to me.

(That scene, in fact, inspired a story of my own, called “Outside My Window”, in which a man on death row writes obsessively, and it’s not until it’s too late that you realize he has somehow become capable of bending the physical world to his will through the process of telling his own story.)

When you think about it, there’s nothing particularly challenging about a long book… it just takes longer, that’s all. But I can’t help but feel a big sense of accomplishment when I finish one. Maybe it’s the knowledge that not many people have attempted to read such a long book, and even less have finished it. I think it’s just a way of taking my bookish leanings and making them seem like more of an achievement than they really are. It the same reason why have a list of every book I’ve ever read, every movie I’ve ever seen… it takes something that I do for fun and would do anyway, and turns it into some sort of accomplishment.

It’s a good thing I’m not more of a loner than I already am, or I get the feeling I’d be chasing this ideal to its end, trying to find the subject(s) that would allow me to write, and write, and write… still, I love hearing about these writers who, for better or worse, have dedicated themselves so single-mindedly to their art. But I’m also glad I have family and friends to keep me grounded, to prevent me from running off too far into my own fantasy lands…

Weird on Top

In the next few weeks, there may a breakthrough in physics unlike anything seen in the last hundred years. Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland are closing in on the elusive Higgs boson, the subatomic particle that gives atoms their mass. If this particle actually is proven to exist, it will change much of the way we think about matter, the Universe, and, well, everything.

On this occasion, I thought I’d take a stab at writing down an explanation for one of the weirdest (proven!) scientific theories I know. It concerns the rules that we understand about the Universe on the smallest scales we know of. These rules are collectively called “quantum mechanics”.

So what’s so important about quantum mechanics in the first place? Well, we humans have figured out the physics how things work on big scales.. and by that I mean things atom-sized and larger. We understand most things about how gravity and electromagnetism works, and use that information to create all the cool, useful tools we have today. For example, did you know that GPS satellites have to take into account how the mass of the Earth distorts space-time when they’re figuring out the best way to get you to the mall?

So we’ve pretty much squared away how things work on a macroscopic level. However, when you start looking at things on smaller and smaller scale, the less sense they make. Then things quit making much sense It appears that empty space itself is full of random pairs of tiny particles that spring into existence out of nowhere, then collide and return to nothingness again. It’s a kind of “quantum foam” that forms the very fabric of the universe. And because the particles appear only to disappear again mere billionths of a second later, no energy is gained or lost. We kind of understand how this all works, and in fact about a third of our tech gadgets use some aspect of this odd, counterintuitive side of the Universe to make them work.

But it gets weirder than that. Say you have a flashlight that only emits one photon at a time. If you shine it at a window, does the photon bounce back at you or pass right through? The answer is… *it depends on whether you’re watching or not*. This is where things get seriously crazy. Until you check, the photon actually does both. It passes through *and* it gets reflected. And until someone looks, it stays merely a probability (say, 50% refraction/50% reflection). But when someone looks, or checks on it in some more subtle, indirect way, it finally decides where it is -- inside the house or out -- and retroactively makes it appear that it had been that way all along.

Now, you might be thinking the same thing I did when I heard about this: WHAT THE HELL?!?! Up until I started looking into this, the way I believed the Universe worked was very linear. Allowing for some distortion, time moved forward. But if we accept what the evidence is telling us, it requires time to be rewritten as things move along. Either that or… and this seems to be the solution that seems most elegant to me… multiple universes.

This is an idea that I had been turning over in my mind for a long time, just from reading lts of sci-fi, but never really had any context to put it in. The idea is that both results exist, and when you check to see how it turned out, you push the Universe along a particular path. The fact that other people who check will see the same thing proves that everyone is moving along the same path. But the truly mind-blowing thing is that this is happening millions of times, every second of every day. (It also brings up the thought of who actually can push the Universe along a path by observation – if a cat looks, is that enough? How about an amoeba? Is sentience required? Or any kind of consciousness at all?)

This theory is something Brian Greene talks about in his book The Hidden Reality. I haven’t read it yet, but I have heard interviews with him, discussing the theories involved in it. Apparently this idea of multiple possible universes meshes nicely with “string theory”, which basically says that all particles are made of unfathomably small loops of some unknown cosmic material, and when they vibrate at different frequencies, they become a photon, or an electron, or any of the other particles we know about. The geometry of the strings apparently explains how our universe can exist alongside others almost like it, and how they can split off from each other.

But one of the great things about this theory is that it’s somewhat testable, which has been the problem with string theory up until now. One of the many things they’ll be doing with the Large Hadron Collider in Europe is smashing particles together and seeing how much energy they get out of it. If what comes out is less than what they put in, they’ll know that in high-pressure and high-temperature situations, it’s possible for energy to get knocked out of our Universe and into a nearby one.

So, as usual, the Universe (or the Multiverse, as some people are now calling it, considering there might be many slightly different ones right alongside ours) turns out to be more complicated and bewildering the closer you look at it. Barry Gifford wrote it and David Lynch used it as the main idea of one of his movies: “The whole world’s wild at heart and weird on top.” And it just keeps getting weirder.

Warning: Old Man’s Ear Hair Freely Discussed Here

A few weeks ago, Amy and I took a rare night out to go to a play that a good friend of ours was in. Standing in line outside the theater, waiting for the house to open, we ended up standing behind some season ticket holders, all of which were older folks, divided mostly into couples. One gentlemen was by himself, though, and even if he had been in a crowd, his status would have been evident by one aspect: his ear hair.

I’m aware of the ridiculous things that happen to men as they grow older, and I’m certainly not looking forward to any of them. I could go down the list, but ear hair is the worst, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because, unless someone feels comfortable enough to tell you that it can been seen by the entire general public, there’s no way you could ever be aware of it on your own. Seriously, I’ve tried to see my own in the mirror. There’s just no angle or configuration of multiple reflective surfaces you can pull which affords both the right sight lines and the correct lighting to see if there’s anything there, much less guide your hands toward removing it. All you can really do is stick an electric trimmer in the vicinity every week or so and hope for the best.

And that’s clearly all the solitary guy waiting in line could do. He might not even have known to do that much; he had a disturbing “blossoming” situation going on, so much so that I was surprised he could hear anything. All I could think was that there’s no one looking out for this guy. He’s got to figure this out all by himself. It was kind of depressing, even after someone came to stand in line with him. It was an older woman about his age, maybe a good friend, but it clearly wasn’t his wife. If it were, my guess is that would have taken better care of him.

Maybe that’s the lesson that ear hair has to teach us (and I can’t believe that I actually just wrote that sentence). The lesson is that we need someone that close to us, who can tell us when things aren’t right. Not only do we need to be told sometimes, but someone has to be willing to take tweezers in hand and right the wrongs, ones that we not only aren’t aware of, but are in blind spots we *can’t* be aware of. It’s a special brand of intimacy, and I’m very thankful to report that I have it in my life. I know beyond a doubt that I’d just be another guy with ridiculous ears if I didn’t.

Taking Control

The strength of humans is our ability to see patterns. Not only can we recognize them, we feel compelled to find them, to discover the reasons behind the reasons that every facet of life works the way it does. We even see patterns when they’re not really there. In some cases we’ve been extraordinarily successful. We understand enough about the natural world to harness electricity to light up and connect the world, and we use the properties of gravity to build enormous structures that stagger the imagination. We even manipulate the very atoms that surround us to make our world safer, more pleasant to look at, easier for us to live in.

But what we don’t really understand is ourselves. We’ve spent more time examining “the human condition” than probably any other subject. People, as a whole, are so flawed and seemingly unpredictable, that we want to know why it is that we do everything we do. There have got to be rules, we think, shouldn’t there? And I think I’ve stumbled upon something that might lead us in the right direction.

The idea started to coalesce after my daughter was born. As a baby, at first she couldn’t do much. Everything she did, everywhere she went, was dictated by her parents. Once she started being able to move around and grab things, I noticed that she would often try for the biggest object she could reach for, regardless of what it was. And if she could get it to make some kind of noise, so much the better. I realized that the object itself was largely irrelevant. What she wanted was the effect: the noise, the change she could create in her environment.

She wanted to have control over something, because she didn’t have control over anything else. And the thing is, I don’t believe that changes as we get older.

In this light, life appears to be mostly about levels of control: what we control in our lives, what we feel comfortable in allowing others to control for us, and what we choose not to exercise control over at all. One of the biggest paradoxes of life is why people do things that are physically and emotionally dangerous. Many people go out of their way, and against all logic, to put themselves in horrible situations that they have been in before. And this idea, the one of control, explains it. A person who jumps out of an airplane does so only when they’re convinced they have control over how fast – or slow --they hit the ground. A person who was abused as a child is more likely to be an adult abuser themselves, because it’s the only way (at least in their minds) to take back the power – the control – that they lost. They might not even be consciously aware of why they’re doing it.

Hoarders? They have a heightened level of need for control, and look to do it by hanging onto every possession, no matter how trivial. Gossips? They want to control information, and maybe the opinions of others while they’re at it. People-pleasers? They seek to influence how people think, in particular about them. And, as always, the pendulum swings the other way too. Substance addicts are all about losing control, not being responsible for a while. It’s a very seductive level of existence. After all, more people than not use some kind of mind-altering substance to “unwind” or “blow off steam” on a regular basis. Not to mention that there are plenty of high-power executives who have such responsibility in their professional lives that they will gladly pay someone to take all semblance of control away from them during their off hours.

Then there’s the third option: deciding not to attempt to assign control at all. I’ve been told repeatedly by my wife, family, and friends that I have the ability to recognize things that I have no control over, and not give them a second thought. They seem to think that this is a good trait to have, since it decreases my overall level of stress. I tend not to fret over politics, overseas strife, and “the future” in general. I’d agree with them, it if weren’t for the assumption that goes along with this… that I’m a good judge of what things I can affect, and what I can’t. I’m sure that there are whole rafts of things that never cross my mind because I can’t imagine that anything I do will change them, and I doubt there are any people who have changed the course of history who thought that way.

Of course, what I’m describing are extremes, but don’t all of us have this attribute, even if it’s in smaller degrees? It’s only a problem when one particular need for control – or need for the lack of control – becomes the main motivation behind most of your daily actions. That’s when your ability to function in society becomes impaired.

Help me figure out if this theory holds water. Take a moment to think about all the things you feel you must do during the day, and the things you’re perfectly comfortable with letting someone else do. Somewhere along the line, you’ve decided that some issues need your direct control, and others can be left to someone else, or be ignored altogether. Are there any obvious holes in this?