I love Anne Lamott’s books for the most part. I think the books are about as self-aware as you can get. Even though I’m not sure why that is, I do love the writing style and her perspective on the way we live and the world we live in.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Anne Lamott discusses the importance of not allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed by our own thoughts. She says, “We can’t think. We can’t stop thinking. We can’t stop analyzing. We can’t keep thinking about what we’re thinking. We can’t stop analyzing what we’re analyzing. We can’t stop thinking about our opinions and our feelings.
I think her quote could also be applied to our lives. It’s all about being aware of our thoughts and the emotions they evoke. As we think about something, we often get caught up in the emotions that it evokes. We can get caught up in the emotion of sadness and despair, which can lead to depression, or we can get caught up in the emotion of anger and rage, which can lead to being reckless and reckless.
There’s actually so much emotion that we’re capable of that it’s almost hard to keep track of. I always find it hard to keep track if I’m not constantly on the edge of my seat.
In the same way that our thoughts and emotions can influence our behavior, our emotions and thoughts can have an impact on our behavior. Because our emotions and thoughts can have a significant impact on our behavior, if we are not aware of them, then they control how we behave.
For example, we all have strong negative emotions that most of us don’t even know about. If I, for example, had a negative emotion like anger and had never felt it before, I could be angry without even knowing it. If I did it on a daily basis without being aware of it, I would probably be more reckless. But because I was aware of it and I had the power to choose how I was being affected by it, I decided to be more reckless with my anger.
An example of this is how an argument can lead to a person taking the wrong side in the argument. As you get more emotionally involved in an argument, your natural instincts tell you to get involved with the person who has the stronger hand, which will get you the opposite result. So when a friend tells you he is going to leave, you get angry, but you also feel bad, probably because your natural instincts tell you to try to convince him to stay.
Anne lamott quotes a few sentences to illustrate how this works. I’m not talking about the first sentence, but the second sentence, which says, “I’m not going to leave you without saying something, but I’ll show you how I’ll convince you to stay.” The second sentence is, “I’ll tell you how I will convince you to stay.
When we are on autopilot, we usually don’t get angry. We do have some kind of mental state we’re not aware of, but we can’t let it influence our behavior. So when we’re on autopilot, we can’t do anything but look at the screen and say, “That’s enough,” and we can’t really do much else.
But when we are on autopilot, we let our ego interfere with our ability to reason. It is very easy to fall into the “if I had not been on autopilot, I would not have done this” trap that we can easily fall into when were not aware of our autopilot.