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Yesterday, I hit my thumb with a hammer. In fact, the thumb I hit still has a bruise from being hit a month ago. Immediately, I knew this had happened before. While my attention was intensely focused on the pain in my thumb, I felt angry and wanted to lash out or get away from the pain. Of course, there was nowhere to go, so I stayed here in the moment wondering how did that just happen.
With my thumb beginning to throb to make sure I was paying attention, I drifted back over how in the world I could do this to myself again and realized this: I was thinking of something other than hitting the right nail, and I ended up hitting the wrong nail. My attention was not fully on what I was doing.
OK Bob, what were you thinking about?
I was thinking about other things that had to be done after I finished what I was doing. My attention was on prioritizing experience beyond the moment. With awareness in my imagination rather than the world where my thumb was, I simply and painfully did something I would never choose to do consciously. I forgot about caring for myself with all my senses. My desire to accomplish more than I was already doing stopped me from continuing. Pain is a great teacher.
Because I let my subconscious mind run my body, I put my body at risk.
We are, by nature, designed to learn constantly. Anyone who has done something painful remembers how it happened. The memory may be beneath our conscious awareness (subconscious), but it is there. Yet somehow, the understanding about hammering my thumb got disconnected and I ignored what I already know. Don’t hit your thumb. Why, how did this lesson escape me?
Scales of Pleasure and Pain
The insight I am offering has to do with the pleasure-pain principle which drives all our behavior. Everything we do is to experience pleasure and avoid pain. Our memory is a library of millions of catalogued experiences ranked from highest to lowest in pleasure and pain. Our brains and nervous system constantly scan the environment with our senses looking for pleasure and pain references in our memory
The ongoing input from our eyes, ears, skin, nose, taste buds is used to make instantaneous choices about what to do now. This is how you can walk into a dark room and flip on a light subconsciously while thinking about getting a sweater out of the closet.
Your personal history knows the dark is potentially dangerous, you might trip and fall, or bump into something. Or maybe like me you still believe deep down there are monsters. In any case, the light gets turned on while your primary concern—the sweater in the closet—takes up most of your awareness. The sweater offers pleasure that ranks higher than the threat of falling or bumping.
When I hit my thumb I was not paying attention to the hammer. Rather I was concerned with doing other things. But what? And more importantly, Why?
With the throbbing settling into a constant pain, I could see that my thinking about the future was part of an old lesson I’d learned in childhood. The lesson, which is only partly true, is this:
If you accomplish a lot, you’ll be respected and valued.
A focus on respect and value is helpful so long as we are respecting and valuing ourselves in a worthwhile world. Hitting a nail with a hammer, straight and true, is a valuable experience. It can lead to building worthwhile structures. The project I had begun was just such a thing. It was worthwhile until the old mental habit of trying to impress others replaced it. For a moment earning respect replaced being respectful, and…. OW!
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Learning enough to have a set of values and memories takes a while. Any parent can see it happening as infants begin exploring. As they do, as we have, there are lessons which must be unlearned. Paying attention to valuing the present moment is the most important lesson.
Right now I’m valuing writing this as a way of helping others understand that our awareness in this moment doesn’t stop. Our awareness can bring good into an experience but that might disappear into imagining something else is better than this moment.
When it’s from a desire to have others’ approval, it becomes a liability. With our awareness away from our bodies, we put them in harm’s way.
So I’m still learning to value this moment, what I’m doing here and now. This lesson is universal and applies to all of us regardless of age. There is no reprieve from the press of life, moving through us and around us, offering itself in very predictable ways. If you hit your thumb with a hammer, it will hurt like the dickens. Pay attention to what you’re thinking, and protect your body like it’s your child.
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Photo credit: Getty Images