Bait and switch books

I just finished two books in one day that did the same strange thing: switching directions on the reader in an unexpected way.

Our parish often gives parishioners a book on major feast days, and our Easter book was Matthew Kelly's I Heard God Laugh (affiliate link). People rave about Matthew Kelly, but I have never finished one of his books. This one, I decided, I would finish. He began, as he usually seems to begin, by talking about how prayer can change your life. Ten minutes a day, he says over and over, can transform everything. He has a formula for those ten minutes, and I thought the book was going to focus on applying the formula. But then he changes direction. He talks about his experiences as a teenager learning to pray, feeling drawn deeper and deeper into prayer. The title of the book comes from a mystical experience that occurred after he had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours of prayer, in a season of his life when prayer was his highest priority.

Is it just me, or is that a little odd? In my view a prayer life is a little like triathlon training. You can't get ready for a triathlon in ten minutes a day. It's better to run ten minutes per day than zero minutes per day, absolutely! It's 100% worth doing! But you can't go the distance if you don't build up the endurance beforehand. Would I have a mystical experience of God's presence if I used Kelly's formula faithfully for ten minutes every day? Maybe? I think I'll let someone else try it and tell me how it works out, though.

A few weeks ago I was checking out an e-book from my library when a different book caught my eye. A guy named Brian King, a standup comic with a PhD in psychology, wrote a book called The Art of Taking It Easy. Sure, I thought to myself, I'll see how it is.

The first chapter was really good! Smart, funny, polished! I was a fan! And then things got considerably less polished. My suspicion is that he smacked that first chapter around until it sparkled when he was in the proposal stage, and then he was like, "Wait, now I have to write a whole book??" There are insights and funny stories scattered all the way through, but I would not have been as enthusiastic if I had read, say, chapter 4 first.

These are some of the things I want to remember from the book:

1. He says stress is a reaction to a perceived threat, but most of the threats we perceive are not actual threats. If you live your life thinking that the unlikely bad outcome is worth losing sleep over, you will lose a lot of sleep. The thing that stresses us out most is...nothing. We stew and fret, we think of the worst outcome, and what happens is...nothing.
2. If you can learn to think differently about situations that are stressing you out, you can change your stress level. Does that sound obvious? I found his presentation of contrasting options here to be smart and funny, but it sounds pretty straightforward now that I have typed it out. I guess I thought that the stress level drove the thoughts, but apparently the thoughts drive the stress level. You guys know how much I tend to worry, and King thinks this is a terrible use of my brainpower. If you can't do anything about a situation, he says, then why worry about it?
3. I read that question and a stream of defensive thoughts flowed: I don't know; it does sound dumb when you put it that way; that's just the default mode for my brain. King says that people who have formed the habit of worrying tend to default to worry when their brains are not engaged in a task. Occupy your brain with something better than worry! Busy brains are likely to be happier brains!
4. I want to keep thinking about the relationship between resilience and happiness. Like, I wish that I could bellow, "I get knocked down, but I get up again; you're never gonna keep me down," but instead it's more like "I get knocked down; I lie on the ground briefly and contemplate the unfairness of the universe. I gingerly palpate the part that hit the ground first. It hurts, dernit! Who knocked me down? Can I speak to the manager? Also, in order to process this I need to write a blog post from my position on the ground -- could someone bring me my laptop?" Which (a) doesn't scan and (b) doesn't make for a very happy life. King says we need to reframe difficult situations by thinking about what actually happened instead of what could have happened. This is timely for me tonight, because I am still feeling some adrenaline residue from earlier. Stella came in shrieking in pain and disgust; a bird had pooped in her eye and she was really hurting. King would tell me to think about the actual outcome (eye flushed, good cheer restored) and not about the uncertainties.

I was going to write a quick paragraph about the things I highlighted in the book, but it turns out that I highlighted a whole bunch of stuff and this post is already pushing a thousand words. Maybe I'll write a little more about it tomorrow.