Have you ever been looking forward to a nice, easy, Saturday afternoon, doing nothing but reading the paper and watching whatever happens to be on TV, only to have your most well thought out plans for laziness destroyed by a friend in need? Rides to the airport, helping somebody clean out their garage, and worse of all, moving, are things that define a friendship.

You wouldn’t ask that guy you see at the gym every couple days to pick you up at the airport, would you? Of course not. So, one the one hand, getting a call to do something horribly tedious and un-fun is a clear weekend killer, but it is also a remind that at least somebody counts you as a close friend (or a sucker).

I had just woken up, and was lying on my sofa, flipping through the channels when my cell phone went of. Since I recognized the number, (it wasn’t the IRS or an irate ex) I figured there wasn’t much risk in answering it. Oops.

My friend was having some problems in his backyard. He had gotten into a dispute, or a discussion, rather about some big tree. This big tree had some roots that were getting a little bit out of control, and they were starting to mess up their shared fence.

He and his neighbor had had the fence put in a few years ago, as the old one was nearly falling over. But the roots of this tree were stretching out under the fence into the neighbors hard. My friend’s backyard was all grass, but the neighbors was concrete, and he was worried (reasonably so) that the roots would damage not only their fence, but also his expensive concrete backyard.

So my friend request was to help dig out this root in his backyard, and stop it from spreading. The problem he was having was there were so many roots going all over the place, he didn’t know which was which. He didn’t want to kill the tree, as it was a really nice looking one, especially in spring.

I suppose the only good thing about this whole mess was that I didn’t have to take a shower or shave or anything before I went over to destroy his backyard.

We started digging, looking around, and sure enough, there were plenty of roots.

This was going to take some work. We were also going to need to get some more tools.

Roots can be an interesting topic, so long as you aren’t digging them up. Some trees have huge root networks that expand much further than the topside of the tree. Kind of like icebergs, some trees have most of their material below the ground, rather than above the ground.

From the perspective of a human, this doesn’t make sense. What good is a tree if most of it is underground? But from the perspective of the tree, it makes perfect sense. From a trees persepctive, it’s all about using whatever you have at your disposal to collect as many resources as possible to fulfill your objective.

And I suppose the objective of a tree is to live as long as it can, while making as many other trees as possible. So it stretches out its branches both above the ground, and below the ground to get as many resources as it can.

The fact that humans come along and put a tire swing on one of its branches is completely incidental.

Of course having roots is also quite limiting. You can very well get up and walk around with huge roots going several meters into the earth (unless you are one of trees from “Lord Of The Rings”)

Sometimes it’s best to cut your roots if they are giving you problems. Things that you used to depend on earlier may be a hindrance later on. Things that were originally built for safety can inhibit your freedom later on. The trick is to understand which roots are safe to cut, and which ones you should leave untouched.

This, of course, can take some digging, and an ability to take a step back and understand what it is that you are really after. And whether or not those roots are really giving you the benefits that you think, rather than just some imagination based on the past.

After a few hours, and a few trips to Home Depot (for digging tools I didn’t even know existed) we finally had all the roots identified, and had determined which one was threatening the fence, and the neighbor’s back yard. I turned out this particular root wasn’t nearly as deep as the rest, so cutting this wouldn’t cause any problems. There to be some big rock or something that had deflected the growth of this root several years ago. Otherwise it would have grown down, rather than out, like all the rest of the roots.

When we finally got the pizzas (yes, plural) after all that digging, it was just in time to watch some good movies on HBO.

And that’s how I spent my Saturday.

I have a friend that lives in Korea. He’s never been to any other countries, and he told me the country he’d like to visit most is the United States. Not move there to live or anything, just to visit. I asked him why, and he gave me a rather peculiar answer, but it made sense after I thought about it for a while. And after he told me of his answer, I never looked at the world the same.

I remember when I was in third grade, when we first learned about plate tectonics. How all the continents are like giant pieces of an ancient jigsaw puzzle that used to fit together snugly, as one large mass of land. And of course, due to the structure of the Earth, the land can float around, albeit extremely slowly, at least according to human standards.

I remember asking my teacher how that was possible. She said that even though the Earth appeared to be a solid object, we can walk on the surface without falling through, it’s really liquid underneath. Really hot liquid, and the surface is really sort of floating around. She described it as a giant pie that’s cooking in the oven. The top is solid, or becomes solid while it cooks, but the inside is always liquid, especially if it’s an apple pie. And if you look at one of those time elapsed movies of an apple pie cooking, the surface will seem to expand a little bit, and move around.

There are many metaphors that are based on the “solidness” of the earth. Solid as a rock, immovable as a mountain etc. But these metaphors only hold true when compared to the attention span of your average human society, which isn’t nearly as long enough to appreciate the fluidity of a mountain range. The English language has only been around, in various forms, for a few thousand years at most. A mere blink compared to plate tectonics.

I remember once I was taking a sales course in handling objections. We learned many different ways to overcome a client’s reason for not buying our product or service. These are pretty handy techniques, and can be used in a variety of situations. One of the presuppositions of being able to out frame somebody’s objection is nobodies objection is ever set in stone.

They might not be able to buy today; right this second, but they will someday, or at least they think they will someday, otherwise they wouldn’t be talking to you. (Unless you happen to be a really aggressive door-to-door salesperson).

Whenever they give an objection, or a reason, or an excuse or whatever, you just say:

“Yes, but for how long?”

That usually throws them for a loop, and gets them thinking outside of their small “now” frame of not being able to buy. Once they start thinking in terms of some time in the future, when they will be able to buy (and their objection is no longer valid), you simply bring that feeling into the present.

“I can’t afford it.”
“Yes, but for how long?”

“I’m not sure I like the color.”
“Yes, but for how long.”

“I’m just shopping for now, kind of looking around.”
“Yes, but for now long.”

Unless you’ve done something wrong and they’re ready to kill you, they won’t usually answer with “Forever!” before stomping off.

A flip side to this is to say a variation of “No yet?”

“I don’t really like the color.”
“Hmm. Not yet, huh?”

“I’m not sure if I can afford it.”
“Yea, not yet?”
(Note: for you conversational hypnotists, they won’t be sure if the “not yet” applies to them not being sure, or them not having any money)

If you have good rapport with your client/target/mark, these simple questions will get them out of right now, where all their problems are, and get them thinking in the future, when their problems have already been solved. Then they can take that feeling of already having solved their problems back to now, and the current situation will look a lot more doable.

Obviously, you can use this in any kind of conversation, for any kind of intention, so long as you have a win/win outcome in mind. Sales, therapy, seduction, getting your kids to clean their rooms, whatever.

So when I asked my friend why wanted to visit the states, it was for the simple reason to be able to look out toward the horizon, and see nothing but flat earth. Korea, being a pretty cramped peninsula, has many mountains, and no matter were you are in Korea, no matter which direction you look, (unless you are looking out over the sea) you don’t have to look for to see mountains.

But in the United States, there are plenty of areas with nothing but flat ground, and open sky. He wanted to be able to look out his window, or whatever, and see nothing but uninhibited views of the ground stretching flat seemingly forever until finally meeting up with the sky. And look to the right, and to the left, and see a perfectly flat horizon, endlessly expanding in both directions.

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All it took was a brief second of eye contact with her peeking out behind her living room curtains and we would have nightmares and create a million more reasons to be afraid of her.

One Halloween, one of the kids was chosen, on dare, to go and knock on her door. She always kept her house completely pitch black on Halloween night, and as far as anybody could tell, nobody had ever had the courage to do that before.

He went up to her door and timidly knocked. I think he was afraid to ring her doorbell for fear of electrocution or something. He knocked, waited, knocked again, and then ran. It took a while before we could pass by the house again, at least by ourselves. We were sure she was plotting some kind of evil and painful revenge on whatever kids had disturbed whatever she did in their in the dark on Halloween.

One of the cool things about Halloween is all the candy that we got. Most of it was normal, everyday candy you would see at the store, but there would always be one really cool neighbor that would get some kind candy that we’d never seen before. Candy that was made specifically for Halloween. Edible ears, fingers, spiders made out of chocolate. Stuff you’d expect to see in a Harry Potter movie.

One year there was this neighbor that gave out full sized candy bars. Not the small miniature sized ones, but full size snickers, and mars, and three musketeers bars. He must have spent a fortune on candy. It didn’t last long, though, as soon as the kids found out, he quickly ran out.

I was riding the train into town the other day, and this guy sitting next to me started talking about his business. I’m not sure how we got onto that subject, or what his business even was. The conversation just kind of ended up on this. So he was explaining that he had this old roommate, and his roommate was involved in a similar business, which somehow had something to do with his. And he said that he was helpful in the beginning, but then he moved on to bigger and better things, which left him all alone to figure these things out. One of the things that he said was to be sure to always pay attention to opportunities that are around you. And the trick to always finding new opportunities is to see them where others do not. Which means you need to always be able to look at things from a different perspective, and different angles. That way you’ll see this differently than others do, and be able to really get a lot of benefit from this.

My favorite candy of all time was those yellow, waxy candy corns. I never really saw them except during around Halloween. Even though waxy candy corn really doesn’t have anything to do with Halloween. I guess it’s just one of those things. Something that you know you really like and you can really look forward to enjoying this when you get the opportunity.

And one summer, something really interesting happened. The old woman had this cat. And apparently, she had never gotten around to getting it neutered, or spayed, or whatever they do to cats. And this cat had a bunch of kittens. This of course, was very interesting to all the kids, and when we saw this old woman outside taking care of the kittens, she suddenly stopped being a scary witch. She was really a nice old lady that was just scared of going outside. When the kittens came, she was forced to go outside and help take care of them, and the kids noticed them, and it became like a neighborhood project. A few of the kids even took some of the kittens home. She seemed to be a friendly grandmother type after that. She even invited some of the kids inside and let us see her old record player and records from the great depression era. It turned out to be a pretty cool experience.

As such, when elephants go wandering off like this young elephant did with his friends, they were concerned, but not overly so. They knew that the elephant would initially find its way. Of course different parents had different time when they let the elephants go roaming off by themselves. After all, they really couldn’t get very far. It was hard to find a large group of elephants slowly moving east. It might take a young adventurous elephant a few days, but they usually found there way fairly easily.

Which of course, was why the parents of this particular elephant weren’t very worried, because he had shown fairly good memory so far. They had made the trip three times already. The first two times the young elephant had stayed very close to his parents, and had wailed considerably when they tried to run up ahead to see if he could find his way. On the third trip, he seemed to be able to stay fairly clear of his parents. Whenever they tried to round him up when they were getting ready to leave with the rest of he group, although he had eventually caught up with them, he seemed to have an “I can do it by myself attitude.”

You know how it is, when you feel a little bit resentful when people are telling you that you should do a certain thing, even though you know that you should probably be doing it anyways, but you kind of resent being told what to do? That is exactly how this elephant felt on that trip.

But now it had been three days since he had seen any other elephants. He had found a couple of small streams to drink from, and finding food wasn’t a problem, because after all, he was an elephant. But he was starting to get lonely. He missed the company of his friends, and that feeling you get when you see something familiar. He was right at the halfway point between enjoying being on his own, and feeling that familiar pull of doing what you are used to all the time. Like you feel like if you go one way, you will go back to how things always were, but if you go the other way, there is no telling how much fun and excitement you could have. The only problem is by going the second way, you might encounter danger that you didn’t know existed before, and you don’t know if you can handle it.

It’s like you have to choose between normal, safe, medium amount of fun, to an opportunity of fantastic excitement and adventure, coupled with a chance of horrible slow impending doom. Even though you are afraid of the doom, you can’t help but to feel compelled to follow this new path. To keep going forward until finally figure out exactly what you are looking for. Like following the familiar path is following the path of other people, and following this new path is following your true heart, wherever it may lead.

The young elephant kept trudging along, all of these thoughts swirling around in his quickly developing adolescent elephant brain. He came up to a rise, and surveyed where he had been, and where he could go. Up ahead, about five miles, to the east, he saw a large, slowly moving cloud of dust. At first he was happy to see it, because he knew it contained his family, his friends, and the rest of the group. To the west, he saw a vast plain filled with unknown trees and mountains and animals he may have never seen before. He knew that up ahead, in six weeks, time, both paths would converge, and all off the elephant groups would meet together. He looked one last time at the far away and slowly moving cloud of dust and certain safety, and then to the west, to the unknown. And he made his decision.

Conversations can be tricky sometimes. Like Forest Gump says, you really don’t know what’s inside unless you bite into it. Sometimes you’ll see a really mean looking person, and when you start to talk to them, they turn into the friendliest person you could ever meet. Other times, somebody seems to projecting an aura of friendliness and kindness, but once you start to talk to them, they look at you as if you’d just ran over their puppy. People can be extremely interesting.

I was reading this book, and it was saying that you really do have the power to find this interesting. It’s like a movie. Sometimes you don’t find this movie very compelling, other times you just have to keep your eyes focused on this. He said that the more you can choose to feel interested, the easier it gets. It was kind of a strange concept, purposely turning up your interest level so you can find something very intriguing that you wouldn’t normally do. I guess like everything else, it takes practice. He compared it to a situation when you meet a new boss that you will be working closely with. At first blush, he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy you’d want to spend more than five minutes or so in a bar, but since you are in a situation where you have to interact with this person, you somehow find a way to find interest in the same things he does. It’s almost as if by pretending, you actually generate strong interest. I know more than a few marriages where the wife will say at first she wasn’t interested, but this guy kind of grew on her. Persistence pays.

So I asked the woman where she was going this evening, and she said she was going to the airport to see her daughter who was away at university. The reason she looked so bored was that she just hates to travel. She said that she would much rather use those devices on star trek, where you just disappear one place, and then reappear in another place. That kicked off a great conversation about high tech electronic gadgets and where we’d be without them. Which just goes to show you, you never know until you bite right into it and see what’s inside.

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One technique that has helped me enormously in this regard is the power of perspective. This is really nothing more that imagining you are in somebody else’s shoes. I’m sure you’ve heard that before you judge someone, walk a mile in their shoes. The reason this simple saying has spanned many generations and cultures is because it is one of the most fundamentally sound principles that can really open up human communication.

Now the tricky part. How exactly do you do that? You can’t very well go and physically borrow the other person’s shoes. One way to do this is to imagine that you are actually watching yourself when you are talking to other people. Next time you are having a conversation with somebody, while you are talking, really imagine that you are watching yourself out of the other persons eyes. If you can find a partner to practice doing this with, fantastic. Otherwise, I would advise at the very least doing this with a friend whom you are comfortable with. When you do this at first, it can seem a little strange imagining that you are watching yourself from the eyes of the person you are talking to. After you practice this a few times, you’ll be surprised at what you see, and you won’t be able to help changing how you communicate with others, if only a little bit.

Once you master this, you can begin to imagine seeing other things from even more expanded perspectives. And the greatest thing about this is once you start to practice on a regular basis, you’ll be thinking of new ways to apply this idea almost automatically. And that can help in more ways than you can imagine.

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I don’t usually like to wait, which is why I don’t like going to doctors offices without an appointment. I made the mistake of thinking I could sneak in one Friday afternoon about an hour before I had another appointment with somebody else. Boy was that a mistake. Never make an appointment on a Friday afternoon and then just ‘pop in’ to the doctors office. I had been sitting there, already given up on the magazines that all seemed to be at least three years old. I kept checking my watch, already thinking of when I would be able to reschedule my appointment that I was already an hour and a half late for. When this guy sitting next to me starting talking. I normally don’t talk to people in doctors office waiting rooms, but you never know what can happen. You’ll be sitting there, and all of a sudden you will find yourself in the middle of a discussion that you aren’t sure where it came from.

This guy started talking about his job. He is a resource manager for a temporary staffing agency. He said that is always important to gather resources. And there really never is a good time or a bad time to gather resources. I guess since he is in that line of work, it’s important for him to keep that frame of mind. Of always being open to new things, because you never know when you are going to find this useful. He always carries a stack of business cards with him, because you never know who you might run across that you may be able to develop a mutually beneficial relationship with this person. And because the most valuable resource you can ever discover is other people, it always pays to treat people with respect. Once you’ve successfully cultivated a resource that can provide many years of valuable service, both to yourself and to the person providing the service, you can truly enjoy a beneficial relationship.

Which is why, by the time I saw the doctor, I had forgotten all about my appointment, which this guy explained to me was a sales appointment. He explained how you can easily sniff out people that are trying to sell you something from those that just want to help. And the doctor really was apologetic, it seems he had been in an unexpected surgery all morning, and was trying his best to get through all the patients.

Wonderful things happen when you wait. The rice seedlings drop their roots in to the soil, and slowly pull up the nutrients they will mix with the air to grow bigger and bigger. And after a couple of months, you can see the rice growing from the stalk. And a month or so after that, these small seedlings have turned turn into giant resources of food that can be harvested for nourishment to feed entire countries. Amazing things happen when you wait.

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It reminds me when I was on the beach once, waiting for a friend. I was kind of learning against a wall they had separating the boardwalk from the actual sand. I was standing in the sand area, leaning against the wall, facing the ocean. It was really beautiful. The sun was off to the left, and was going to be setting soon. I was hoping my friend would arrive so we could enjoy the sunset together. But then again, it was one of those times where you are just relaxed and content to sit and let whatever happens happen.  Which is probably why I became so curious about the guy who started talking to me. It seems he was some kind of a performer, and would walk up and down the beach until he found a large crowd, and put on his show, and accept whatever donations they felt were appropriate. He started talking in sentences that didn’t really make much sense, but there was something intriguing about him, so I just listened, wondering where exactly he was going with all of this.

He sorted of reminded me from my friend from Australia, that I see every once in a while. This guy is a philosophy major, who is always going off on weird tangents, but he usually makes a lot of sense when you look below the surface. It’s like you have to take a step back to and figure out how to look at the broader concept of what he is talking about to make sense of it all. Sometimes you really need to pay attention to what is being said so you can really understand it. And many times he doesn’t make any sense then and there, it’s only when you begin to think about this that you can later find ways to apply it to your own life. He also likes to surf, which is probably why I started daydreaming about him while this guy was talking about whatever it was he was talking about.

Which ended up being that he was a fire eater, among other things. He had a bag with him, and while we were talking, or rather while he was talking and I was listening, enough people showed up. He kind of just broke off right in the middle of his story and then put on his fire eating show. And also he walked on fire, and rolled around on broken glass, and all kinds of cool stuff. All in all I think he collected a couple hundred dollars from the crowd. Not a bad take.

After my friend was wheeled into the emergency room, someone finally was able to summon the courage to intervene as a translator for the poor guy with the sick daughter. Turned out she just had diarrhea, and was dehydrated. That’s why she wouldn’t stop crying. Another person in the waiting room offered a solution that calmed his daughter down enough so the poor man was able to enjoy some peace until he finally saw a doctor. While we were waiting for my friend to come out of surgery (from which she fully recovered) he left and gave a gracious thanks to all that helped him.

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It’s like when I go to the movies. I am pretty easy to impress and entertain. Sometimes I read the reviews of movies I want to see, sometimes I don’t. An interesting thing that I’ve found was that when I read a particularly unflattering review of a movie, it allows me to enjoy this more, because I go in with less expectations. Like when you really expect to enjoy something, you sometimes can have an unconsciously higher standard that is harder for something to live up to.

I guess that is why on the stock market they always wait and see if earnings beat the markets expectations. Even ones that don’t make a lot of money, if they make more than the analysts have expected, then the stock will go up on that particular day. I remember a company I used to work for had a stock that performed tremendously well. The company had earnings in excess of one dollar per share, which is a lot. One particular day, when the earnings came out, they were only 99 cents a share instead of a dollar a share. Any company that earns 99 cents a share is a very financially stable company, so imagine the surprise when the stock went down almost 4 percent that day because it “didn’t meet the analysts expectations.”

It reminds me of a book I read on self improvement. If I remember correctly, it was a relationships book. And they key to having a happy relationship was having accurate expectations on what to get out of the relationship. Because when you are with somebody, and you find this person interesting, you have to make sure that you like this person because of real reasons, and not imaginary ones. Because when you start to expect reality to behave based on your imagination, and not an accurate assessment of what is out there, you can run into trouble. The book went on to say that one of the best ways to have a really good, solid relationship with somebody was to establish solid expectations based on communication, and your own observations of each other’s behavior in certain circumstances.

My friend, who is married with three kids told me about this. As soon as he learned to plan ahead for his family taking almost an hour sometimes to get ready to leave the house, he was able to make plans, carry out these plans, without having the added stress of expecting his family to meet unrealistic expectations. He said that in the beginning, when it was only him and his wife, he could kind of push for her to be ready earlier, but the more people they added to the family, the more impossible this got. So he naturally realized that the best way to reduce stress, when other people are involved, is to stand back, and watch their behavior, and plan your activities based on reality rather than fantasy.

Which I have gotten down to a science. I used to rush to the movies, buy my large popcorn and coke, then rush to the theater to sit down. It took me about three months of willpower to not eat all my popcorn before the trailers finished showing. Now I usually get to my seat just as the real movie is starting. I’ve learned to ignore the stated start times in the newspaper, and use my experience as a guide. I find that is much easier, because I’d rather enjoy my popcorn while watching the movie I came to see, rather than the movies I’ll most likely come to see in the future.

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Like sometimes I’ll be driving to work, and the traffic is just totally backed up. And the interesting thing is, is that sometimes there really isn’t a reason for the traffic to be what it’s like. And no matter what you try and imagine, now, it’s hard to come up with a reason for this. And that can be totally frustrating. You are just sitting there, not moving, and you don’t even know why. The radio doesn’t help, they just say try to use this exit, or that exit. But it doesn’t really help because since you aren’t going anyplace, you can’t very well take the next exit anytime in the next three hours.

Which is why I usually bring some audio books in the glove box. I don’t usually like to listen to music in the car unless I’m driving at a reasonable speed. If I’m stopped, and can’t get anywhere, I usually prefer to listen to people talking rather than upbeat music. I’d read the paper if it wasn’t so dangerous. Sometimes I’ll pop in a language tape, sometimes I’ll pop in a lecture. Once I put in a lecture that was about the great tonal shift in the English language. Supposedly it happened about a generation before Shakespeare. Which is interesting because he wrote all these fantastic plays, and was using a language that had recently undergone a drastic change. Had Shakespeare lived a generation earlier, or had the great tonal shift happened a generation later, Shakespeare’s plays wouldn’t be as accessible as they are today. When you find something like this that is really fascinating, and really appreciate the coolness of it, it’s hard not to be amazed at how much stuff there is out there to discover.

Similar to people who make it their life purpose to discover things. Like scientists, doctors, and artists, and certain types of engineers. Some people can get so involved into what they are looking for they seem to use lose track of where they are going. Like when Edison was discovering the light bulb, he burned through about seven thousand different filaments until he found one that would be economically feasible. Because he was able to lose himself in search for new information, and be able to apply it in ways that would help a great amount of people, this tends to happen.

Which is why I enjoy doing things like this. And sometimes I totally lose track not only of time, but of how many eggs I have in the refrigerator. Which is kind cool because sometimes when you run out of eggs, you can find other things that are just as healthy that you hadn’t noticed before. And it’s important to stay healthy, so you won’t have to rush to the hospital, like my neighbor did when he almost hit me. He later apologized, and told me that he didn’t turn around because he knew I was ok, and he knew that he would have plenty of time to apologize later. And I was glad the heart attack he thought he was having turned out to tendonitis, from doing too many pushups.

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