The Nature of Reality

Our call was so abstract and complex, I already knew it would be impossible to come up with a catchy title, and still cover its essence. (and not be empty clickbait)

So to compensate for its lack of juicy content, I will try to keep it short, and therefor sweet.
And who knows!
Maybe these findings are the missing keys to your life, and you’ll find them fascinating and just what you need to turn everything around for the better.

To understand the conclusion, I first need to draw a picture of the impossible task I present Sara with, every time we start a call.
Which is that I barge into it, Kramer from Seinfield- style, and open with an unfinished but for some reason incredibly important-to-me model of reality, that I drop on our proverbial table.
My energy says: “Look Sara! Don’t mind the mess, I know there’s something brilliant in there somewhere, but I’m stuck.”
And then, without missing a beat, I take her deep into the rabbit-hole of some sort of highly abstract model of reality, that would explain my most pressing problem, if only I could find the final missing piece.

I often have moments when I fear she’ll one day say she’s tired of coaching me, because it is just too much. And she would be right.
But to me, her coachee, it is so welcome to have that one time every month, and that one person, with whom I can share these new inventions without holding back.

And low and behold! We always finish them.

Having an extra pair of eyes to assess what it is we’re really looking at, always turns out to be extremely helpful.

Maybe you too are someone for whom the solution lies with understanding how things came to be a certain way in the first place.
Someone who does not need, nor want, nor is in any way helped by, a conversation about how it makes you feel, but should instead wonder things like:
– How did I get here?
– Why is this in my life?
– Is it part of the larger constructs or contexts I have agreed to, or is it an intruder?

For example – and I really mean just any random example because this is not judgement but just the first thing that pops to mind – a preventative screening for diseases can cause a lot of complicated situations.

But if you had beforehand made a decision at a more abstract level that you personally believe in and endorse preventative screening, and that it is part of your life, then you can act much calmer if something shows up, because you’ve done the groundwork.
Whereas if you’re in the midst of medical unrest, it may be because you never bothered to make the principal decision if you want to even engage with that part of (preventative) medicine.

Very often we find ourselves in difficult situations that actually have multiple causes or are composed out of multiple layers.
Some of them could have been smoothed out, and dealt with, as if they were a separate chapter. Because they are.

Abstract problem solving, and abstract living according to your own values, makes life far less chaotic, stressed, and like you’re at the mercy of other people’s ideas and interventions.
It enables you to make conscious decisions, and push your own agenda.

For me personally, pulling a problem apart into its components has proven to be the only real way to solve it. And some have taken me decades, but now that I know what I’m doing, and also have Sara to look over my shoulder, the process has sped up for sure.
And new problems actually excite me, because they’re like a puzzle.

With the medical stuff I mentioned, my decision is to reject screening, but I would have been equally happy if I had decided to be pro-screening, and might have gotten more screenings than Dutch government offers for free.
So the secret is not in the choice itself but in the fact that I’ve made a conscious choice to begin with.
And these are choices at an abstract level, before you take it down to execution level.

But the catch is that most problems and situations are not singular, but have many moving parts!
Which means that before you can make a decision or understand why something did not or does not work, you need to develop a working model of reality.

You have to come up with an abstraction of your problem;
Only then, can you make this decision or understand what to change for better results.
And making new models takes a lot of times. And, in my case, a lot of calls with Sara.

“My only task is to help someone to keep on going,” Sara said.
She wasn’t looking for the satisfaction of providing magical quick fixes or in being able to claim miracle results thanks to her amazing coaching skills.

If what I needed to keep going were meta conversations, centered around a pile of unfinished ideas;
Then she was happy to help.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living