A Mason's Work

[00:00] I remember the exact moment.
[00:05] A guy I know.
[00:07] Good guy, genuinely.
[00:09] Great dude.
[00:10] Posts that he and his wife had just bought a place on the water.
[00:14] Not a big deal for some people.
[00:16] Big deal for me, because I had been thinking something like that for years.
[00:20] Not obsessively, but just the way you think about how you're going to get one of those someday.
[00:27] It's kind of quietly filed away in the corner of your mind.
[00:30] And then I felt it, that thing, that half a second of something that didn't quite have a name.
[00:39] And then before I registered it, my brain went to work.
[00:42] Yeah, but you know, he inherited the money from his father.
[00:47] His wife works in real estate, so they probably got it under market.
[00:51] And honestly, that area is not all that great.
[00:55] And the maintenance on the waterfront is probably brutal.
[00:57] Everybody knows that.
[00:59] For about 45 seconds or so, maybe even a couple of minutes, I completely dismantled this person's success.
[01:08] And it was all before I even knew I was doing it.
[01:12] And then this other thing happened that felt a lot like wisdom.
[01:15] It was this wave of, like, gratitude.
[01:19] Well, you know, I really love where I live.
[01:21] I've got what I need.
[01:23] Not everyone needs to have a lake house to be happy.
[01:26] I'm grateful for what I have.
[01:28] And I mean it.
[01:29] That's the thing.
[01:30] Like, I genuinely mean that.
[01:31] I told my buddy about it later.
[01:34] Not the flash of whatever it was.
[01:36] I kind of glossed over that part.
[01:38] But the gratitude part.
[01:39] Like, the perspective.
[01:40] Like, you know, oh man, that guy must have been in it for the...
[01:44] You know, he does it for the house.
[01:47] He does it for the money.
[01:48] He does it for whatever.
[01:49] Uh, and the perspective that I got while I was kind of commiserating with a friend.
[01:54] Like, we had passed this kind of mutual test where we didn't, you know, fall a prey to the nepotism and the wealthy family thing.
[02:05] And the chasing the next thing.
[02:06] And the never satisfied.
[02:07] Shaking our heads.
[02:08] We walked away from that conversation feeling pretty good about ourselves.
[02:12] And neither of us kind of moved an inch.
[02:15] Here's what actually happened in the sequence.
[02:20] That flash that I had that wasn't quite envy.
[02:25] It was more like maybe recognition.
[02:27] That there was a gap between where I was and where maybe I thought I should be or eventually be.
[02:35] That's not a comfortable thing to feel.
[02:38] So I didn't feel it for long.
[02:40] The attack on his motives was the very first move.
[02:44] It wasn't even like conscious.
[02:46] It wasn't like, oh man, I gotta, you know, let me figure out what I can do to make this okay.
[02:50] It was just kind of automatic.
[02:51] Like immediately going after what I thought were the reasons why.
[02:56] You know, he has something and I don't.
[03:00] It's kind of like the story of the fox and the grapes.
[03:03] And it's an ancient kind of psychological thing that falls into everybody's experience.
[03:10] At some point or another, or else there wouldn't be stories about it.
[03:12] So here's the part that's worth paying attention to.
[03:16] I didn't stay in that kind of attack mode.
[03:18] I didn't kind of go after him for a long time in my head.
[03:23] And I certainly didn't post anything about it on social.
[03:26] Instead, I pivoted.
[03:27] I pivoted to something that was like genuinely sort of good behavior, at least in theory.
[03:32] And it was gratitude.
[03:33] Gratitude is real and it matters.
[03:35] And I'm not arguing against gratitude, as you know, because we've talked about this in other episodes.
[03:40] What I'm arguing against is the way I used it.
[03:45] I used gratitude as a justification.
[03:51] I deployed it the moment I was uncomfortable and part of me wanted to change and move.
[03:56] But in that moment, I made sure I didn't.
[04:00] That was gratitude weaponized against change.
[04:06] And the functional outcome of that was suppression.
[04:09] And then I found somebody to make me feel good about that self-suppression.
[04:15] And we called it maturity.
[04:16] We called it, you know, rationally, like controlling what we needed or, you know, coming up with a good way to justify not doing anything.
[04:26] And that's the kind of challenge here.
[04:31] It's a type of transmutation where we take something that might have been, might have been a feeling we can work with, turned it into a feeling that's more acceptable, covered it under a sort of a virtue signaling kind of metals we can wear on our chest.
[04:47] And then that also kind of in gestalt feels like wisdom.
[04:53] It like put all that stuff together and it feels like, oh, yes, I came up with a wise solution to feeling that maybe I wanted something different than I'm getting or what have you.
[05:02] And this is where we get to start doing some work.
[05:09] The question that I've been sitting with and the thing that we should think about as we do this work isn't the outcome.
[05:19] It's not that I need a house on the water or any that kind of stuff.
[05:21] It's the emotional content of the conversation that happened within my head as I stepped from this flash of whatever anxiety it was through to finding a socially acceptable emotion that I could wear as a badge of honor.
[05:37] We're going to break stuff like this down over the course of the week here and get to what this looks like and what it means and how we can understand how to work with these things ourselves.
[05:52] If you've ever had an experience like this, you'll probably recognize the story that I'm talking about.
[05:58] And if you haven't look around, you've probably seen other people have these kind of reactions where when faced with somebody being successful, they immediately have to try and take them down a peg and then kind of work their way around towards why they're stuck.
[06:12] And all of that sort of mechanic is what we're going to break down and work with over the course of this week.
[06:18] See you tomorrow.