Curiosity Archives - Farther to Go!

Always Look on
the Bright Side of Life

March 8, 2025 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Monty Python’s Life of Brian is a British movie but Always Look on the Bright Side of Life could easily be America’s theme song. Barbara Ehrenreich covered the pitfalls of what some call toxic positivity in her book Bright-Sided, which I read shortly after it was published in 2009. It probably goes without saying that I have never been on the positive psychology bandwagon so I welcomed her blistering critique of compulsory optimism.

As one reviewer of Ehrenreich’s book said, “There’s no need to try to sugar-coat the world; reality is far more interesting.”

But what better way to keep our attention focused on the bright side than to get us to compulsively itemize the things we are—or ought to be—grateful for? In fact, many of the benefits cited by a majority of articles and videos promoting the development of a gratitude practice are aimed at generating or increasing a sense of personal wellbeing.

The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done? —Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided, How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

The primary purpose of counting our blessings, in the view of many, isn’t to make us better people. It isn’t to fortify us to go forth and help create a more equitable or humanitarian world for everyone. It’s to make us feel better about ourselves.

Gratitude is touted as a coping mechanism, an alternative to “junk food, self-medication, shopping, etc.” Some so-called coping mechanisms may be inherently less harmful than others, but all coping mechanisms are intended to modify a perceived negative emotional state: to change the way we feel without addressing the circumstances or situation.

When we practice gratitude, we shift our attention from what’s wrong or missing to what is here. —Rev. Connie L. Habash, LMFT

Putting attention on “what’s wrong or missing” is assumed to be counterproductive to this aim. Yet some who have explored the gratitude practice phenomenon have discovered a dark side to trying to drum up gratitude. One negative side effect is invalidating difficult or unpleasant emotions. Emotions provide us with information, so trying to avoid some and only experience others disconnects us from that stream of information.

I suppose that 20 years ago when my partner died suddenly, I could have focused on being grateful for the decades he and I had spent together or for the fact that I still had Tashi, our cat, or that I could remain where I was living. But thinking about what I still had would not have diminished the enormous chasm in my life. He was missing. And that meant something to me. When I think about identifying what I was grateful for in that instance, it feels at the very least dismissive and shallow.

Making ourselves feel better, or trying to, has limits—at least if we want to retain our humanity.

It’s impossible not to conclude that the emphasis on looking for things to be grateful for, no matter what angle we come at it from, serves to—in some cases is even intended to—maintain the status quo. It keeps us focused inward, on ourselves. It chips away at our sense of agency. It requires us to be beholden to someone or something else: the giver who bestows gifts based on criteria we are unaware of and have no influence on. It admonishes us to be satisfied and content—to not wish for more.

It’s an extremely powerful barrier to creating transformational change.

When I said “more,” above, I wasn’t referring to accumulating material goods or status. I mean “more” in the sense of aspiring to be more, to have a more satisfying and meaningful life, and to achieve the objectives that make that possible. The brain is an insatiable wanting machine that will seek immediate gratification unless we train it to help us up our game and our aspirations.

Living = Acting in the World

Essential to creativity is a ferocious dissatisfaction with the status quo. —Roger Mavity, How to Steal Fire

Focusing our attention on what we have is an attempt to inoculate us against dissatisfaction, especially ferocious dissatisfaction, along with anguish, discomfort, sadness, longing, tragedy, confusion, loss, or just a bad mood. There are numerous problems with this trajectory, one of which is that it also inoculates us against joy, exuberance, desire, curiosity, and aspiration.

The most useful—and the most human—way to proceed is to be grateful when we’re grateful, dissatisfied or uncomfortable when we’re dissatisfied or uncomfortable, sad or confused when we’re sad or confused, and joyful, happy, or exuberant when we’re joyful, happy, or exuberant.

And then to be curious. What is it we’re grateful for, dissatisfied with, uncomfortable or sad about? What is the source of our confusion? What is making us happy, joyful, or exuberant? What are we longing for?

Lastly, is there something for us to do about what we’re experiencing? We are not stuck with any status quo. We are not required to accommodate ourselves to our circumstances. We have an ability to create positive, intentional, significant, and sustained change. That’s what we are built for.

There is one more post to come in this series.

Sudoku, Provisional Assessments,
and the Space of Possibilities

February 6, 2024 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

I enjoy working Sudoku puzzles, especially the hard or challenger level, and I always look forward to the super challenger puzzles on the back pages of Dell’s Crazy for Sudoku books that take days to complete. (They look like the puzzle pictured above.)

A friend once said that she’d completed a Sudoku puzzle and, having solved it, did not see a point in doing it again. Certainly completing a puzzle successfully is one point of Sudoku, but for me it’s the incomplete puzzle that’s juicy, especially if I’m struggling with it and not sure I’ll be able to solve it.

Sudoku puzzles are a great example of one of the aspects of existential troublesome knowledge I talked about in the last blog post: what we don’t know exceeds and is more important than what we know. The numbers that are not filled in are more important than the numbers that are filled in. And there’s no way to know at the outset which numbers go in which blank spaces. You can only find out by taking action. As you fill in more numbers, you get more information, and eventually you solve the puzzle. This is a life lesson some of us struggle to learn.

There’s always a point where I feel stuck, at least with some hard or challenger level puzzles. I can’t find a next number to fill in. I used to get frustrated when I was stuck, but after going through this process so many times, I’m quite familiar with it and am no longer frustrated by it. I think Sudoku has trained my brain to recognize that being stuck is a temporary condition and so I actually appreciate the experience now.

I don’t know if or how I will solve the puzzle, but I now appreciate the space of not knowing, of uncertainty, because it’s also the space of possibilities. This is the same space I get into when I’m grappling with a conceptual problem or puzzle. And in both Sudoku and conceptual problem-solving, one is more likely to arrive at a “solution,” by trying different approaches.

If the only puzzles I have available are easy or medium level, I create “rules” to make them at least a little bit more challenging. I would never, for example, start by filling in all the 1s, 5s, or 9s I can fill in because that’s too easy. But in a challenger level puzzle, I would definitely start that way in order to get at least a few spaces filled in.

In Sudoku, there is only one correct solution to the puzzle. The same isn’t necessarily so for conceptual puzzles where my aim is usually to arrive at a provisional assessment rather than a definitive conclusion because in the conceptual world we never have all the information. But I don’t think this difference is particularly significant, and I heartily recommend activities like Sudoku to train the brain to appreciate uncertainty and to sort of force ourselves to recognize how much we don’t know—and how neither condition is either fatal or even undesirable.

Moving around Inside the Space of Possibilities

The fact that what we don’t know is more important than what we know has been a subject of discussion in classes, workshops, and individual meetings. I asked a couple of different groups to consider, write about, and summarize their responses to statements that described different aspects of our lack of knowledge. Here’s what they had to say. (The statements they are responding to are in italics.)

Our predictions about the future are constrained by the present.

When we try to imagine our future, we can only see a small slice of possibility—based on our current mental model. The same is true about understanding our past—we do so based on who we are in the present. When we move to a different rock, we see new things and, to some extent, lose sight of what we saw before. —Susie

We are driven to make sense of the world, whether or not the world makes sense.

It never occurred to me that one would not be able to make sense of the world. Why, all one has to do is work hard enough, read, listen, observe, and have the intelligence to integrate all the available information, and understanding will come. Right? I’ve long assumed that the world not making much sense (in many ways) was a failure on my part (I’m obviously not getting it all, nor fast enough) because of course all things must be understandable, given the right type and amount of information/instruction etc. —Lisa

Our brain habitually constructs coherent and compelling stories—tailor-made for each of us—based on the information available and our mental model of the world.

We seem to live in some illusion of reality or a unique reality to each of us that is constantly shifting towards a pre-existing story that the brain has developed. We aren’t aware of the information that the brain is picking, discarding, ignoring or overlooking until after the fact. How to consciously participate in this story of our own reality? If it’s based on the information available to us and on our mental model of the world then it’s necessary to expand both, to become aware of what the brain is choosing to add to the stories. —Imelda

We prioritize cause-and-effect explanations and discount randomness (because we can’t account for it).”

How can we imagine a future without our history? Can I only imagine a future rooted in my past or can I possibly imagine a future untold? To understand that we are not divining our future but to accept that randomness plays a role in a possible eventuality serves up the possibility for change. —Sammie

Each of us is weaving stories, not uncovering absolute truth.

There are facts. 2+2=4. Truths are when we try to assign meanings to our perceptions of something that happened. Each of us has our own way of assigning meanings so no truths can be absolute, or shared by everyone. So we might as well weave beautiful stories, or at least useful ones. —Ann

We mistake perception for reality.

My perceptions seem to be more on the trees and not the forest. Actions and thoughts seem to be driven by a false narrative of what I perceive to be true. I can base life itself on little discussion and shoot from the hip decisions made in the small dark damp room on my shoulders, without much input from “me.” —Kelly

Our predictions about the future are constrained by coherence.

The future is way more exciting with those blinders noted. I am not even confined by my imagined trajectory! Why not create? —Adam

Onward

I invite you to consider these statements for yourself, along with the comments prompted by them. Where do they take you?

Asking ourselves what we don’t know in a given situation is useful even if we can’t answer that question just because it’s a reminder that we are always—100% of the time—operating based on limited information. Could there be something we don’t know, the knowing of which would change everything?

Existential Troublesome Knowledge

January 18, 2024 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

There’s troublesome knowledge—and then there’s existential troublesome knowledge.

The concept of troublesome knowledge was developed in academia and has since been applied and utilized in many academic and non-academic areas including scientific exploration, mathematics, politics, finance, history, and even writing.

To refresh, knowledge is troublesome when it:

conflicts with preexisting beliefs, especially if those beliefs are deeply held
is counterintuitive or seems illogical
is complex or difficult to understand
is disconcerting
requires a (transformational) change in self-perception

Troublesome knowledge within a field of inquiry or endeavor is one thing. But troublesome knowledge about the very nature of how we as humans function and our experience in and of the world—i.e., existential troublesome knowledge—is something else altogether. It’s troublesomeness squared, at the very least.

Many of our most basic assumptions about ourselves…are false. —Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal

Phenomenal Individualism and Its Implications

The pursuit of existential troublesome knowledge leads us to a number of inescapable conclusions that point in the direction of what has been called phenomenal individualism.

Our experience is not an accurate reflection of reality, which means things are not as they seem.
We cannot fully know or access the experience of any other person or creature.
What we don’t know far exceeds what we know, and no matter how much we learn, this will always be the case; yet we operate as if what we see is all there is (WYSIATI).
Not only is everything everywhere in motion all the time, but everything (including each of us) is a process, and everything is an interpretation.
Rather than being, or resembling, a mechanical system, each of us is a complex adaptive system, physically, mentally, and emotionally.
These factors all constrain our experience of being in the world—and there is no way out of these constraints—but they also create a space of possibilities, including the possibility of creating transformational change.

I believe the fact that our experience is not an accurate reflection of reality is the foundational threshold concept that we must get (incorporate into our mental model) in order to grasp the nature of our existence and experience: our space of possibilities.

You may recall that threshold concepts are likely to be, among other things:

Transformative: they lead to a significant shift in perspective that alters our sense of who we are as well as what we see, the way we see it, and how we feel and think about it.
Irreversible: they involve crossing a “threshold,” after which our previous understanding is no longer readily accessible.
Integrated: they reveal relationships and connections of aspects and ideas that were previously seen as unrelated.
Troublesome: they are difficult concepts to grasp and are therefore troublesome (see troublesome knowledge above).

The Space of Possibilities

What you or I make of the characteristics that circumscribe our existence—how we interpret them and work with them—depends on our mental model of the world, which includes our personality and our beliefs.

Do you find the idea that things are not only not as they seem, but never as they seem disturbing, confusing, trivial, or intriguing?

Is the idea that the extent of what we don’t know will always be far greater than the extent of what we know frustrating, obvious, or expansive?

Does knowing that everything you experience is the result of your brain’s interpretation of data that other brains are very likely interpreting differently make you curious or does it feel unnerving or even threatening?

The Thin Slice

It has become clear that our brains sample just a small bit of the surrounding physical world. —David Eagleman, Incognito

Although what Eagleman says is true, and it’s possible to grasp the concept intellectually, it is simply impossible for us to experience. That’s because our brain is continuously assessing and interpreting the data it has access to as if it is all the data there is. How else could it operate?

If we really understand and acknowledge this aspect of reality—that we are always working with limited information we treat as if it is all the information—we must realize that a likely majority of the conclusions and explanations we take for granted are inaccurate, sometimes extremely so. Our brain can’t take into account factors of which it is unaware. Yet there are always factors that affect us of which we and our brain are unaware.

The conclusions and explanations we arrive at daily are often good enough for us to get by—not so erroneous they threaten our survival. But that isn’t always the case. And even if they don’t threaten our survival, they can modify our mental model in ways that lead to maladaptive perceptions of our internal and external world. Taking all of our perceptions for granted can have detrimental effects on our experience and therefore on our actions in and reactions to the world, as well as our wellbeing, and our relationships with others.

We are not significantly different from humans of the past who didn’t believe in the existence of germs or bacteria because they couldn’t see them with the naked eye. Or humans who believed the earth was the center of the solar system. Or that the brain was a useless organ—or that we only use 10% of it. Or that our memories are accurate, and eye-witness accounts are reliable.

When more information was obtained, we modified our understanding of germs and the solar system and the brain and memory and eye-witness accounts. We have enough information now to modify our understanding of how we operate and how our experience is based on our interpretations.

If we don’t, or don’t want to, understand this thing called phenomenal individualism, we will constantly be at the effect of our mistaken beliefs, locked into a perceptual and experiential system within which we have very little room to maneuver and no room at all to create transformational change.

On the other hand, we can step into and take an active role within this space of possibilities.

More to come!

Butterfly Nets, Smartphones, and Coffee Shops

August 8, 2023 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

In A Tale of Two Kitties (my last post), I shared my current working definition of affordance: “an action possibility available to an agent within an environment.”

This doesn’t deviate radically from other definitions, but it does explicitly identify the three most salient aspects of the concept as it pertains to creating sustained change. An affordance offers or suggest a possible action that an agent—you or I—might take within an environment.

Affordances are like obstacles in that it is an agent with a goal or a desired outcome, preferably both, who interprets something in the environment as either an affordance or an obstacle. A boulder in the middle of a road is just a boulder in the middle of a road. It isn’t an obstacle unless there’s something you really, really want on the other side of it.

Similarly, a fitness center located across the street from where you live is simply one of several businesses in the area unless you have a strong desire to increase your own fitness or level of vitality, in which case you identify it as an affordance. (If it’s occupying the space where you want to establish a hair salon, well then it’s an obstacle.)

Many people find affordances difficult to understand because they are relationships, not properties. —Don Norman, researcher, professor, author

Affordances, like obstacles, are interpreted as such by your brain and brought to your attention based on their salience (importance) to you. If you get hungry while on a long drive, food becomes salient, and restaurants you might otherwise ignore become affordances. After you’ve eaten and are no longer hungry, food becomes less salient, and restaurants—if you even notice them—are once more just restaurants. But salience isn’t only based on your immediate internal state or external conditions/circumstances.

It’s (Always) All about the Action

The nature of reality is that everything everywhere is in motion all the time, everything is a process, and everything is an interpretation. The brain continuously interprets both internal and external sensory data in order to determine what action to take next. It bases its interpretations on our mental model of the world, which it has built up over our lifetime largely as a result of our actions—especially the actions we repeat.

Let’s say you regularly frequent a chain of coffee shops, such as Starbucks. Maybe you’re particularly fond of iced vanilla lattes. And maybe the coffee shops are also places where you get together with friends or groups. (When I was in various writers’ groups, we tended to hold our meetings in either bookstores or coffee shops.) Repeatedly spending time in Starbucks increases its salience. It’s an affordance that offers you the possible actions of getting the coffee you enjoy or meeting and connecting with other people.

So you are much more likely to notice a Starbucks—and by “you,” I mean your brain—and its potential affordances than someone for whom Starbucks doesn’t have the same importance. Your brain has paid attention to your repeated past actions, and as a result, it focuses your attention on current or future possibilities for action in your environment by identifying affordances.

I like to use the image of an infinity loop to distinguish between “you” (the agent) and “not you” (your environment) to illustrate the dynamic and ongoing engagement between you and your environment.

Each of us is engaged in this continuous interaction; it’s anything but static. But our tendency to perceive the world as being far more fixed than it is prevents us from being attuned to the dynamic nature of our relationship with the world and can easily blind us to the possibilities—both positive and negative—within it.

Everything Is an Interpretation

The affordances described here and in my previous post are generally positive. But in and of themselves, affordances are neither positive nor negative. Given that they describe relationships, they can not only be interpreted differently by different people, they can also be interpreted differently by the same person at different times or in different circumstances. While a smartphone, for example, offers access (to others, to information, to assistance, etc.), it can also offer unlimited distractions that may provide immediate gratification but divert you from more substantive or satisfying activities.

But maybe, in the moment, a distraction is what you want (say, cat videos or a game) while you’re waiting to board your plane or for a friend to show up. Or maybe you need to get your car towed. Or you want to find out if the yarn store has the specialty yarn you need to complete an important knitting project. A smartphone can help you get what you really want (a desired outcome) or it can get in the way of you getting what you want. That knitting project won’t complete itself while you’re playing Wordle.

A purse left unattended in a shopping cart suggests an action to a thief—or a would-be thief—that it hopefully doesn’t suggest to you or me.

It Was Never Just about the Butterflies

Lewis Hyde, author of Trickster Makes This World, among many other books, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times that was published last month. He says:

[O]ne thing I have not yet discarded is the butterfly net. I carry it in part to catch and release the few things I can’t identify on the wing but mostly because of the way it changes the way I walk.…I don’t know if the same is true for birders with their binoculars…but for me, walking with the butterfly net alters my perceptions. It produces a state of mind, a kind of undifferentiated awareness otherwise difficult to attain. It is a puzzle to me why this is the case, why, that is, I can’t simply learn from walking with the net and then put it away and transfer what I know to walking without it.

Perhaps it has to do with the way the net declares my intention, which is to apprehend what is in front of me. Walking with the net is like reading with a pencil in hand. The pencil means you want to catch the sense of what you are reading. You intend to underline, put check marks and exclamation points in the margin and make the book your own. You may think you can read with the same quality of attention while lying in bed at night without a pencil, but you can’t. The mind notices your posture and models itself accordingly.

The butterfly net, when used intentionally to generate a specific state of awareness—and likewise the binoculars around one’s neck or the pencil (in my case, pen, highlighter, and Post-It® flags)—are what I call contrivances. Contrivances are affordances—generally positive in nature. Next time I’ll describe the three different types of affordances and where contrivances fit into that scheme.

Bite Me! The Anger Post

November 25, 2022 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Anger is defined as a strong feeling of displeasure or hostility. It’s considered by Paul Ekman, among others, to be one of six basic emotions, the others being surprise, disgust, enjoyment, fear, and sadness. (I have issues with Paul Ekman and his take on emotions, but so be it.)

There are many gradations and flavors of anger. In no particular order (and definitely not an exhaustive list):

annoyance
rage
frustration
contrariness
bitterness
fury
irritation
resentment
resistance
vengeance
agitation
outrage
disgruntlement
vexation
grumpiness

There are numerous theories and opinions about anger, some of which quite honestly just seem to be fabricated. I think we tend to interpret anger primarily based on our personal response to it. Someone’s agitation, for example, might be easy for one person to ignore, but another person might feel uncomfortable or even threatened by it; they might perceive it to be something stronger, such as outrage. If anger activates your brain’s threat detection system, you’re bound to have a lower tolerance for it than someone else might have.

An organization promoting a Buddhist perspective made the claim that anger was delusional. I responded that the relentless pursuit of happiness is far more delusional, not to mention destructive. Why is there so much less concern about that?

In addition, a wide variety of mental and emotional states are commonly interpreted as expressions of anger: excitement, unbridled enthusiasm, intensity, insistence or persistence, directness, and even passion or passionate engagement.

Feeling vs. Doing

“The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.” —Edward Abbey

Anger tends to be viewed, more often than not, as a negative emotion, something that needs to be “managed,” like time (good luck with that). The emotion of anger is also frequently conflated with the expression of anger (aggression), as if you can’t have one without the other. It’s probably the verbal or physical expression of anger that people want to manage and not the actual emotion.

It’s true that the Latin root of the word emotion is emovere, which means “move out, remove, agitate.” More recently neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Lisa Feldman Barrett have described emotions as providing information from the body/brain to conscious awareness. Damasio refers to them as homeostatic indicators. Are things going well or is something amiss? The purpose of this information is to assist us in determining if we want to do something to adjust our current condition.

We don’t have to respond to sadness by weeping uncontrollably or crawling into bed for the duration just as we don’t have to respond to anger by throwing or smashing things or pushing other people around. Emotions let us know what is going on with us and give us an opportunity to acknowledge that and determine what, if any, action we want to take. In a way, all emotions are somewhat agitating since they’re intended to get at least some of our attention.

State vs. Trait

It’s important to make the distinction between states (or incidences) of experiencing anger (reacting to being cut off while driving or to having someone else take credit for your work or good idea) and the trait of anger (a tendency to be pissed off by the mildest—or sometimes even positive—provocation). Given enough incitement, anyone can experience anger. But for some of us, anger comes preloaded; it’s our default emotional response.

Defaulting to anger has consequences, of course. My experience is that being so familiar with anger, I tend not to be blown away by someone else’s expression of anger. I may or may not like it or approve of it, but I’m rarely freaked out by it. I don’t automatically equate anger with danger or even discomfort, so I have a higher tolerance for it. Those with a low tolerance for anger appear to more quickly or easily interpret intensity or directness as anger.

The downside of defaulting to anger is that it can feel very compelling, energizing, motivating and even righteous. That can lead to stewing in angry juices at the very least or taking ill-advised action that can be destructive or hurtful. I got a handle first on not acting on anger and then on not automatically expressing it. That left me with the inner experience of stewing in angry juices, which I did not enjoy! But eventually I gained greater control over that, too.

Hide and Seek

Deciding to limit the stewing helped me recognize a significant fact of life: I was probably not going to stop having the impulse to anger, given I’d been having it since infancy, but I could alter the effect it had on me. I didn’t have to run with it. I could change, but there were limits to what I could change.

There’s a fairly widespread notion that anger is a “secondary” emotion—that it’s covering up something else, something we don’t want to experience or express, as if emotions are under our immediate control. As if we choose to experience one emotion instead of another. If you understand how the brain works and how slow ordinary consciousness is compared to the unconscious you realize how impossible this is.

I’ve tried to locate the source of the secondary emotion idea, but so far haven’t been successful. Ultimately, I don’t think it matters where it came from. What does matter is that it’s been absorbed as a fact by many psychologists, therapists, and people in general in spite of the fact that it makes no sense from a survival standpoint.

It doesn’t make sense from a homeostatic indicator standpoint, either. There is nothing at all to be gained by being forced to figure out how we’re really feeling while we’re in the grip of another—entirely different—strong emotion. That’s like being provided with intentionally obscure or misleading information. The brain doesn’t work like that, either.

Deception vs. Self-Deception

I suspect the secondary emotion idea is an attempt to cut anger down to size, so to speak. So-and-so isn’t really angry; he or she is actually sad or anxious or depressed or afraid or hurt: wounded in some manner. They’re not threatening; they’re vulnerable. You wish! (Sorry; couldn’t resist.)

Obviously, it’s possible to behave in a hostile or combative manner without experiencing the emotion of anger. Just like it’s entirely possible to behave in a pleasant and congenial manner without experiencing friendly feelings toward one’s companions. We do it all the time. We can also express interest in something someone else is talking about when we not only don’t care but fervently wish they would shut up right now. When we act one way while we’re feeling something else, we know we’re doing it. We have a good idea of what we’re feeling in spite of the fact that we’re not acting in accord with it. We’re hiding our emotions from others but not from ourselves.

The secondary emotion promoters want us to believe that when we’re experiencing anger, however, we’re hiding our emotions from ourselves.

Fortunately, not everyone subscribes to the secondary emotion theory. And, anyway, the most important thing to remember about emotion, any emotion, is that you have no idea what I’m feeling, and I have no idea what you’re feeling. Instead of making assumptions and interpretations based on our own biased perceptions or beliefs (if that happened to me or if I were in that situation or did that, I would be feeling [fill in the blank]), we could instead be curious—about both ourselves and others. We could check in; we could ask.

On a side note, being comfortable with a wide range of emotions has many benefits and few downsides.