subconcious | The Action Story

Day-to-day life over the past month or so had left me kind of burnt out. I was inexplicably feeling exhausted. I was not at my best- which I truly hate. I’d realized weeks ago I would eventually need a day to disconnect. We all need that every once in a while. I figured out that I would not want to hear everybody’s recap of the election (regardless of the result), and Wednesday’s weather was forecasted to be unseasonably warm.

So, I took Wednesday off, got in my car and just started to drive. I had no plan, no idea as to where I would be headed when I left. I purposely refrained from making a plan. I didn’t look into options, or pre-meditate in any sort of way. I wanted to try something different than what we all typically do when we travel. I wanted to lean simply on my instinct, and just let it determine where I should go as I go. Everywhere I went, every decision I made regarding when and where to turn, I made on the fly, just based on what felt right.

I went west out of Denver, following highway 6 through Golden, than 93 north, and 72 west towards Nederland. I continuously resisted the urge to pull out my map book, or my phone, or turn to any other source of information to achieve a welcome break from one of the things that may be exhausting all of us in the mid-2010s. This is the process of gathering information. In this era, often gather way too much of it, agonizing over it, to the point where we delay actually making the decision, sometimes far too long!

Along the way, I experienced this strange hyper-emotional calm. I began to tear up. I was breathing heavy. But, it felt really good. It felt as if for the past couple of months, emotions were one by one filling up inside my head, bouncing around like molecules until they gradually started to reach a critical mass, where there was no longer room for them to move around. They had just become jammed . And, now, with whatever barrier that was keeping them inside removed, I was suddenly free to just let them out, and let them all out at once.

As I continued along this windy path, this strange hyper-emotional calm became accompanied by a feeling of optimism. I felt like I knew I was in the right place, doing the right things, and making progress toward where I wanted to be. I’d freed myself from all the data, all the second guessing that gradually erodes away at our confidence. I knew that, both that day, and in life, I was moving in the right direction even when I didn’t see the destination.

For a while, I had no idea as to why I was experiencing burnout. The term typically conjures up images of someone working long hours into the night, neglecting their friends, their families, and other areas of their lives. Burnout is people working 70+ hour weeks, which I most certainly had not been for the duration of 2016. So, why was I burned out? Why did I feel drained so often?

Having searched for answers regarding this, through reading, conversation, and observing people, I came to a series of important realizations about burnout, which run contrary to the image of long nights with pots of coffee.

It’s not the amount of work that burns us out.

Workload can contribute, but more important is how we feel while we are doing our work.

The primary source of burnout is feeling as if we are being phony, or fake.

Pretending to be someone else, for whatever reason we do it, is exhausting. It is not sustainable. The only way to be is our true selves. That is what our instincts tell us to do.

Negative energy in all forms leads to burnout.

One of the nastiest forms is fear, trying to prevent some sort of bad outcome such as loss of job or status. When we act out of fear, or anger, hate, etc., everything we do is significantly more draining.

One of the most exhausting things we do is try to prove ourselves.

I’ve seen plenty of instances where someone is working long hours, but is not burned out because they are doing what they love and they feel confident while doing it.

My instinct even took me down a random dirt road, something I otherwise never would have done if it were not my previously specified destination.

I ended up at a place called Rainbow Lakes, part of the Indian Peak Wilderness.

I hiked roughly 2.5 miles, getting to the treeline, which was surprisingly nearly snow free! This is definitely not encouraging for fans of winter sports.

As, well, as can often be the case in our lives as a whole, the change of season that winter sports fans are waiting for is simply not happening yet. This hike, on Wednesday Nov. 9th, felt shockingly similar to the way it would have felt in the middle of the summer.

Just over the ridge, I got myself to a place that was extremely inspiring. Unfortunately, I did not get a photo, as, well, my phone died. It was a sign that what I needed to do was disconnect, and, once again, connect to my own thoughts. Just for good measure, though, here’s a pic I found of the exact place where I sat.

rainbowlakes_20161109

I actually stared at that one little gap in the rock straight ahead.

Our subconscious thoughts do take into account recent information, even as our conscious minds look for more info and don’t know what to make of it. My subconscious mind, my instinct, though, processed all of this; the election, interactions with people, my own feelings, and summed it up neatly in one sentence, a sentence that simply popped into my head…

The age of deference is over

Make what you want of that.

I also came to another revelation regarding a matter that is more specific to my life. I had been thinking a lot about the concept of acceptance. It is why we are always trying to prove ourselves, and often exhausting ourselves. Afternoon exhaustion, dissatisfaction, lack of inspiration, all of these concepts are inter-related.

We want to be accepted, and can only be accepted as who we are.

But, for each person individually, myself included…

If we want to be accepted as who we genuinely are, we must do so for others as well.

We’re all looking for acceptance, but if we make it easier on each other, as well as ourselves, we might all have a bit more energy leftover for other things.

The previous night’s election, regardless of how any of us feel about it, is yet another example where sometimes more information, more data, is not better. The best models, based on every piece of data available, made predictions that were quite flawed. My instinct, many months back, came to a more accurate conclusion about what was to occur.

In an era where we have access to unlimited information, and are often bombarded by it, sometimes we need to realize that less is more. I, for sure, will, going forth, make a better effort to rely less on data and more on instinct. After all, it brought me to Rainbow Lakes, without even so much as looking at my atlas, or my Google Maps App.

Tea is not something I ever give any real thought to. For me, it is one of those products that has always just been there. As much as I claim to be a curious-minded person, I had never even sat and pondered who was the first person to come up with the idea to take a bunch of ground up leaves, put it in a tiny little bag and dip it into a cup of hot water. In fact, if you think about almost every product we use on a regular basis from the standpoint of a culture that has never been introduced to that product, it probably sounds absurd. As I write this, I am eating a bagel. Imagine telling someone who has never heard of a bagel that you have an idea to take condensed bread, bake it into a cylindrical shape with a hole in the middle, and maybe put some random seeds on top.

You would have probably been told, by at least some portion of the people around you, that your idea was either absurd, or unnecessary. If I could, I would communicate this point to an entire generation of aspiring entrepreneurs, as nearly all of them, will at some point receive a similar reaction from people they describe their idea to. In fact, some will even be turned down and laughed at by potential customers and investors.

One of the reasons I had never given tea too much thought is that in my mind I had always associated it with things that I do not find too exciting. Our subconscious minds have this strange ways of synthesizing our experiences, the experiences we hear about, and even some of the media we consume into some general associations. Whenever anyone mentions tea, the image that naturally pops into my head is a fancy table with fancy chairs on someone’s lawn, in front of a garden on a day with the most pleasant weather imaginable, and people wasting that pleasant afternoon, with so many possibilities to engage in activities and explore what the world has to offer, just sitting around drinking tea.

In fact, I did not even start drinking tea until I got my first job after Graduate School. It was free at work. I started drinking it to save both money and calories, particularly on chilly mornings. The only variety of tea that was free at my job was “black” tea, which is perfect, because, as I learned at the Celestial Seasonings tour, it is one of the most heavily caffeinated teas out there (surpassed only by Oolong tea). So, I conditioned my taste buds to the rather plain flavor of black tea and did not ponder other options.

However, Celestial Seasonings is a place that has way more character than the stuffy images I think of when I think of the average “tea time”. It was started by a bunch of hippies, which should not really surprise me given that it is in Boulder and was started in the late 1960s. They would gather leaves in the Rocky Mountains outside of Boulder to make their beverages.

However, the leaves that constitute “tea” come from plants that cannot be grown in this part of the world. So, the beverages they put together were drinks that could not actually be considered “tea” by the technical definition. They would have been considered “herbal infusions”. The phrase “herbal infusion” had a clear association with the hippie movement. So, to sell these products to the general public, which was (and still is) largely skeptical of the hippie movement, they labeled the beverages “herbal teas”.

Now nearly a half a century has passed. A lot has happened. First, the hippies reached full-fledged adulthood (over 30, is that what they said?), got jobs, bought houses on cul-de-sacs, and, eventually SUVs and mini-vans. A new generation emerged, powered by a rejuvenated economy, and became Yuppies. They managed to both continuously enlarge the houses and vehicles in suburbia, while also turning formally blighted neighborhoods in city centers across the country into high-class urban playgrounds. Many of the areas that were once focal points to the hippie sub-culture, including San Francisco, and even Boulder, are now firmly under the domain of this new urban culture. Of course, this is all an over simplification, but hippie communes still exist, largely in the same way soda fountains and other relics still exist. A family will randomly encounter one in an out of the way place on a road trip, and grandma and grandpa will explain to the children what they are/ were all about.

Yet, the label “herbal tea” is still there, both in this tasting room, and in their packaging. It is still there despite the fact that so much has changed. Not only does the general public have absolutely nothing to fear from the hippie sub-culture anymore, but, I would argue that many of their ideas have penetrated our mainstream thinking, both “right” and “left”. We do not wear suits to baseball games anymore. People aren’t mocked or reprimanded nearly as much when they explore their feelings, and try to find themselves. There is no more stigma around going to seek therapy, and tons of people participate in yoga classes. We may largely be in boring cubicles and offices, but it is not unheard of to openly defy the authority structures there.

Despite all of this, people are still drinking “herbal tea” instead of “herbal infusions”. “Herbal teas” are Celestial Seasoning’s three top selling “teas”. Is this simply the power of inertia? Are there still a significant enough number of people that would shy away from drinking something if it was labeled an “herbal infusion”? Or is something greater at work? Our world is in a constant state of flux, and that flux includes language, definitions, and standards. The hippie movement did not survive, but some of the ideas joined the mainstream. Maybe, although, these “herbal infusions” were not considered “tea” in 1969, they are now. Very few people, when they buy these products at the store, even ever realize that they are not actually drinking tea. For all practical purposes, it is tea despite the technical definition. After all, Colorado is already a major part of a movement that changed the standards for what is considered beer, why not another product?

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