1) Life Is Not A Contest.
You know the sort – every time they play Scrabble the world’s peace-keeping forces are put on red alert. If you tell them you bought a lovely pair of shoelaces today, tomorrow they send you a link to their Pinterest page with photos of their comprehensive shoelace collection – which they uploaded last night. And for some people life is a contest from the playground to the grave, an endless saga of compare and contrast – with themselves. Every comment and situation is taken as a direct challenge to their validity, or masculinity or pretty much any part of their life that makes them feel they are important or worthy of whatever position they hold in their own imaginations.
And whatever problem you are experiencing, they have had a bigger, more serious or significant one to help you put yours into perspective.
# Let them win but make sure they lose you out of their lives. Spend more of your time with people who don’t have to self reference everything.
2) Avoid Tension Seekers.
Unlike attention seekers who can be entertaining and the life and soul of the party, tension seekers bring nothing to the party or any other situation except tension. They attempt to bring everything and everyone down to their level. They delight in putting people on edge and on the defensive. They ask inappropriate questions often of a personal nature, talk about subjects normally off limits and are always on the look-out for a chink in your armour which they hope to exploit or embarrass you with. While they are doing all this they hope that nobody notices how lacking they are in social graces, intelligent and stimulating conversation, general emotional development and all the other things that people trying to better themselves strive for.
I sometimes call them ASWATES as they are often Always So Wise After The Event.
Whatever you have been through or are experiencing now, they sure know how to make you and the situation feel worse.
# If you cannot confront them, give up on them as very few people will ever change them.
3) Leave Mountain People Where They Are And Move On.
My favourite FB post of 2014 (not that there was much competition) read something like ‘Stop crossing oceans for people who wouldn’t jump a puddle for you’
Such Mountain People are very easy to avoid as you always have to go to them, do things their way and generally fit in with them. Compromise, reciprocity and mutuality just ain’t in their vocabulary. They are emotionally and socially immovable, and of little use to anyone but their self-serving selves. Often they are like emotional vampires draining you dry of your life force whilst you buy into them being the centre of attention.
At one point this year I looked at all my recently sent FB messages, emails and texts and realised 90% had received no reply. Can you take a hint? Such people’s lives are lived to the exclusion of everybody else’s unless useful to their own ends. Or you weren’t that close anyway.
# Be a potential priority not a potential option.
4) Beware Of People Who Call Themselves Spiritual.
If you have a spare couple of centuries, read every religious book, all the lives of the saints and about holy and spiritual people generally. You will rarely if ever come across any spiritual person calling themselves spiritual. People who think they are spiritual are not usually a problem – it’s those who tell you they are. In our 21st century the word spiritual has come to be used in conversation and print mainly by the amoral, either to smokescreen their ultimately selfish behaviour or to establish common ground that proves to be quicksand. They might meditate, go to all the right festivals and lectures as well as read self help books but like Mountain People they worship the same god – themselves.
# It’s not set in stone that you dance to other people’s tunes so give them a taste of your own music.
5) It Is Better To Walk Away And Live Another Day Than To Die Trying To Win.
Toward the end of June my father went into hospital critically ill and came out worse. About the same time my phone-line was slammed and I lost my broadband connection for a month. Unbeknown to me I was about to embark on a four month Kafkaesque odyssey to scrap my car and finish a similar odyssey to change electricity supplier . I was let down by Ombudsmen, The Metropolitan Police, The Consumers Association’s Which magazine, the DVLA, the NHS and the Post Office.
I could have taken matters further but I was reminded of a time a few years ago when I had to re-mortgage my house because of changes to the law relating to pensions. Without any sense of irony my Personal Financial Advisor told me that if I wasn’t happy I could take on the British Government .
There is a chance you can take on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with a sling and a handful of pebbles and win – but realistically?
I could have embraced the challenge and found my unfair share of tension seekers and that sometimes life is a very biased and unfair contest. It is not just Mountain people who never move but also the likes of monolithic organisations with teams of lawyers and shareholders who need to be satisfied. I could have made myself as ill as my father was. Or worse. But I chose to walk away.
# Save your energy, sanity and health for potentially more fruitful days.
6) There is More to Life Than Coping.
Whilst I did cope with all that happened in 2014, it did make me realise that there is more to life than just coping. Are you just about coping? Waking up from your living nightmare to realise that there more to life than coping is a major step towards defining your goals and future happiness.
# I’ll say it again – there’s more to life than coping.
7) Seek out Peaceable People.
Peaceable people don’t turn life into a contest. They shun tension and the people who cause it as much as possible. Mountains ain’t on their maps and they rarely if ever call themselves spiritual. Ultimately they are interested in people and not in what people can do for them no matter what they or you are coping with.
Seek peaceable people out and you will find them happy to compromise, to meet you half way and to give without expecting to receive.
Associate with peaceable people and your stress levels will plummet. Your self image will stop being such an issue. You will find yourself apologising less. Your opinion of yourself will improve. Your opinions will be of interest to other people. Your interests will broaden. Trivia and a life permeated by soundbites and social media will recede into the past. Your experiences will be more fulfilling. And ultimately you will feel better, more content and peaceable yourself.
# May 2015 see your life enriched by peaceable people.
P.S. My father is better.
davidalexanderjackson 