Blog #120--Simple Math Can Confirm Life's Constant Changes
Many people fear change in their lives and work diligently to prevent it. No matter how miserable their lives may be, they prefer the known to the unknown. Unfortunately, they are often unaware of the many changes they experience on a daily basis. If you are one who is convinced you have control over your life and can prevent change, I challenge you to consider a simple study that can help you either to prove the correctness of your belief or expose you to other possibilities.
Remember all those graphs you had to plot in school math classes? Many right-brain dominant students have mental blockages about studying math because it is a left-brain exercise. And graphs can be boring for those who see no value in studying them. But there is value in evaluating our daily lives, and graphs can help us recognize how often our perspectives change over time. Please consider trying out the following exercise, which can be used in a variety of ways.
Take a sheet of paper and create a graph with 0-100 on the vertical axis and the days of the week, month or year on the horizontal axis. Using the number 50 as your average day, estimate your degree of positivity or negativity for each time period you are studying and then plot that number on the graph for its corresponding time slot. The best day of your life would be 100, and the worst day of your life would be one. If you do this daily over a period of weeks or months, you can begin to see how much your perspective fluctuates over time.
Some weeks may work out extremely well for you, so your graph will show a line from day to day that is above the average of 50. Your best year may show many days well above the 50 mark. However, success might be followed by failure, meaning a downturn to numbers smaller than 50. On your worst year, your cycle of happiness will be at an all-time low compared with the average. Sometimes, one can go from euphoria to depression and back again in short order. Extreme variations from moment to moment or day to day can indicate a possible manic-depressive pathology.
Since moods can change dramatically from moment to moment, especially when we are involved with complex work or observing an activity for which we have a vested interest, we can also make a graph that is subdivided into minutes or hours rather than weeks or months. If we are cheering on our favorite team in an important game, we might end up with a graph that makes big jumps up and down. We can be excited about temporary success and then frustrated by a reversal of fortune. If we are working on an important project, a sense of eager anticipation may be replaced quickly by sadness if failure occurs.
Plotting these mood swings can help us realize how much change we experience and survive on a daily basis. Another graph can be used to study the luck factor. Any self-evaluation requires honest appraisal without bias, and this is especially true for a study of luck. Most of us tend to believe more in good luck than bad luck, or vice versa. But both are normal for all of us. Checking out our personal luck factor can be revealing.
Stuff happens, stuff that is far beyond our control. Sometimes it brings us good fortune, and sometimes it initiates a downturn in our fortunes. Studying luck can begin to awaken us to how the forces of Nature play an important role in our lives. I have done this while playing computer hearts, a card game with four players. One must either take all 13 hearts plus the queen of spades, a success that is called “shooting the moon,” or take the least number of points possible. The winner accumulates fewer points than his three opponents; in the computer version, the game ends when one player reaches 100 points.
When individual hands are dealt, we sometimes get high cards sufficient to garner most of the points but not necessarily all of them. When we play out the hand and take fewer points than expected, we are happy and can credit a degree of good luck beyond our control. At other times, getting stuck with the queen and/or a number of hearts despite having mostly low cards in our hands indicates bad luck compared with average results.
It usually takes me around 10 minutes to complete one game. Over the course of one half hour, my luck graph can be well above average, or it can be the reverse. Most times, I end up with a graph that goes back and forth across the middle. I may have good fortune one hand and bad fortune the next. Or I might have good luck on one trick, followed by bad luck on the next trick.
The key to these studies, especially the one related to luck, requires us to be totally honest with ourselves. The game Hearts, and life in general, have components we cannot control. Those of us who are unwilling to accept that we might not have free will all the time will find it difficult to do this exercise because they believe they cause their own success or failure. But an honest appraisal demonstrates clearly how our luck factor fluctuates back and forth. We may have great success one day and terrible misfortune the next. We may have a good week followed by a bad one or a good month or year followed by a bad one.
In the long run, our moods and experiences fluctuate back and forth. We can determine an average day by taking an average of all days in the study. Some will have an average considerably above others, proving they have benefitted from more good fortune in their lives than others. They may praise their own talent while denying the luck factor, but those with consistent bad luck can take solace in the realization they were subject to forces over which they had no control. It can help them accept their lot in life. It would also help the lucky ones, especially when their best efforts fail them.
If we are truly honest with ourselves, we can use simple graphs to demonstrate the wave action of our lives. This back-and-forth process occurs with everyone, whether we want it to or not. If many of us perform this test, we can begin to develop a hypothesis to explain how life works. This hypothesis, which deserves plenty of research and testing to determine credibility, can begin to shine a light on a subject our egos have tried to hide since the beginning of time.
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