Solving for X

“Very rarely do things happen for a reason. I either give reason to things that happen or give cause for things to happen.”

JPO

What I am trying to say here is that things happen to me in life that I have at one point or another defined as good, bad, or indifferent based on the impact it has had on my life. What made these things good, bad, or indifferent is my perception of things and how I interpret them.

I believe that the human mind is designed by nature to solve for the unknown variable, or the equation of “X”. It is evident in the oldest forms of math, such as strategic battles to guess your opponent’s next move. This auto-questioning is formed to fill in the blanks of ‘what happened’.

When something has happened, it is a predisposition of my perception that will define it as good, bad, or indifferent. My predisposed perception begins with the question, “How did that get there?” When a situation has caught my attention, it has shocked, upset, scarred, or even scared the shit out of me. An example is the first time I ever asked, “Why did this happen?” My first automatic response was to fill in the blank based on what I thought I knew, as harmless as that may seem. The event could have been something as simple as an embarrassing moment or dealing with another kid teasing me. So time after time, I solved for the unknown variable of “X” and established this phantom variable as reality or truth. The real truth is that what had happened just happened, and I took the situation as personal or literal. Even worse, I could take it as fact.

In Part Two of my statement, I have given reason to things that happen. In this mindset, things happen for a reason unconsciously out of this perception of myself. I constantly recreate that which has happened in the past. When I first solved for “X”, I did it with the irrational thoughts and emotions of a child. With the thoughts I may have in areas of my life (whether it is my job, wife, kids, driving a car, my business, drinking, fighting in a war, having sex, etc.), I am still behaving at an unconscious level and living out the behaviors and actions of this perception of this particular self. To keep this simple (for my safety), this perception is very linear, kind of like listening to music with only one headphone in your ear. However, these perceptions are more-or-less layered due to the fact that some of the other perceptions were created at different timeframes in life when a different situation happened. These include infancy to adolescence when there was no rational thought; a story was made up and now “X” has been solved