Don’t walk. Dangerous Curves Ahead. Beware of Falling Rocks. No Trespassing.
These are the signs that appear in plain sight.
Don’t go in there. It’s dangerous. It’s scary. It’s a bad idea.
These are the signs that are instinctive.
Signs carry consequences. The consequences aren’t always bad. If I saw a sign that said Festival! with an arrow, I might follow that sign’s direction and have an exciting time.
But if that sign was pointing to a cliff’s edge, and I blindly followed it, my immediate future wouldn’t be very festive.
A skier comes across this confusion often. There are signs with shapes and colors that indicate the difficulty of a particular ski slope. Sometimes the sign is 2 shapes with 2 colors. This means mixed terrain but where and when that difficulty changes isn’t clear. It’s up to the skier to decide, based on their perceived skill level, whether or not moving forward is potential enjoyment or catastrophe. Many a skier can attest to a time when they thought they were on a slope they could handle, only to find out that sliding down on their butt was a safer alternative. Others slid down on a stretcher.
My point here is that the signs we see in the physical world aren’t always clear. Sometimes a stadium-sized billboard flashing Danger! in my face isn’t enough to distract me from the shiny thing I’ve built up in my mind. Other times the offramp to a brighter roadway isn’t clearly marked so I just keep on keepin’ on.
One of the things that can help with understanding signs is to have a fellow traveler to help read and navigate them. Left to my own devices, I can easily convince myself that the festival I want to experience is just beyond the cliffs edge. The reality that is my future is first created in my imagination. I can see myself there, but the path I need to travel to get there is shrouded in the mist of indecision, and often poor choice. It takes others to help me formulate a realistic plan – to go from where I am to where I want to be.
Let’s face it, though. Warning signs are ignored. Help is avoided. Being aware that a mistake could be forthcoming, or that help is needed, requires willingness to admit that we are flawed and that we can fail. Without this developed and practiced insight, a person can blindly follow a path to chaos, calamity or catastrophic circumstance. It happens all the time. People will tune out important life navigations from trusted sources in favor of immediate ease or gratification. People will walk a dark path leading to nowhere.
Something the mind likes to avoid is stress. There’s a misconception attached to stress – that no stress is the optimal mental state. What’s not considered is that the mind has been evolved to process stress. Stress is something that can be put off, but never fully avoided. The optimal state of the mind is as a stress manager. When this happens, a person manages the normal stressors that cross their path, and then bring balance to the imbalance caused mentally, physically and emotionally. When unexpected stress comes into frame, that stress is also managed. It is weighed against the other factors in life and then integrated as an unbalanced factor. Then with patient management, all stress is balanced into the mix.
In a perfect world stress-balance would function as a well-oiled machine. In a utopian world stress doesn’t exist. It’s been said that if a utopia were to come about, the people would tear it to pieces just to see what would happen. An environment free of stress produces mundane boredom to the point of temporary (or permanent) insanity. Nature has stressful situations built into life. A person can have the most well managed life of peace and tranquility, right up until something jumps out of the bushes and attacks them. That something could be a car wreck, a weather event, a downsizing, the dissolution of a relationship, or any number of stress injections that disrupt life-balance.
We have warning signs to reduce the possibility of meeting the consequences of stress. If I read the warning label on a pack of cigarettes, it says clearly that if you follow this path it will end in debilitating if not life ending health. But I smoke a cigarette anyway, because this one cigarette isn’t going to cause all that. Nor will the next, or the one after that. But 10,000 warning signs later, now I’m not feeling so well. I pass it off as a minor thing, ignore the doctors warning (if I actually go see one), then 2,000 warning signs later I’m unable to physically function and have to seek medical help. 1,000 warning signs after that and there’s no need to warn me anymore.
The above example is the formula for self-destructive addiction. Despite physical and instinctual warning signs, a pattern is repeated because the negative effects aren’t readily there, and the continual moments of instant gratification wear off too soon to have lasting benefit. Essentially the greatest fear of men – the fear of dying – is not an immediate threat, so continued use is relegated as harmless despite public and private warnings to the contrary.
In my circumstances, and the circumstances of others I’ve witnessed, the last person to know and/or admit that they were addicted to self-destructive action was me. People outside of me knew it, they even re-enforced the warning that if I kept doing what I was doing I would regret it. Deep in my habit, though, I was sure that one more time of feeling good (or not feeling bad – same mental process), couldn’t possibly harm me any more than I was now. It becomes the perpetual cycle of a belief system dictating that destroying myself slowly is preferrable to sober reality. Even when the effects were obvious, it was still preferable to repeat destructive behaviors than to admit the truth.
When I am incapable of being honest with myself then it’s time to have faith that others in my life are giving me direction that is to my benefit. If others take up the courage to tell me the truth about me, even if it pains them and me to do so, and even if they are gambling with our relationship, then that is a warning sign that should not be ignored. Why would a trusted person lie to me about my behaviors, behaviors that I’m lying to myself about? There has to come a point when I stop resisting help and start seeking it.
Signs are signs. You read them or you don’t. You heed their warnings, or follow their direction, or you don’t. People’s lives need navigation. People’s compasses need calibration. People need a flashlight in the dark. Most of all, people need a friend. And when that friend appears from out of the dark, and points to a better pathway to travel, there is a source of light to walk towards. That light is a sign that everything could be different than we think it is, it could be better than we are told it is. Follow the signs that point toward positive change. Follow your instincts. Follow your heart.