Review of Brianna Weist’s 101 Essays…

Changing the way you think is tough. Brianna Weist’s 101 Essays that Will Change the Way You Think will help you re-frame your worldview and your relationships.

A couple weeks past, this book showed up at my doorstep. No doubt a helpful friend wanted to give me a chance to change the way I think. I could be irritated about that, the idea that I’m not thinking correctly. On the other hand, if a book shows up unexpectedly at your doorstep, it’s the Universe’s way of telling you to read it. So I started. The book is full of essays of modern positivism and suggestions for maintaining your emotional maturity and emotional intelligence and some other things that everyone wants to have. Underneath the concept that you should know who you are and go where you’re going is the subtext that by being true to yourself you can be true to others and have better relationships.

The essays are aphoristic, for the most part, like Nietzsche, which worried me a little bit but it hardly seems fair to damn an entire essay structure just because it was used to explain the Will to Power.

Thinking Creates Your Future

One of the ideas that Weist brings forward is that thinking creates your future. I am on board with that. “You have to think about what you want, and then it comes to you,” is the theory. It’s good as far as it goes, but it has its limits. No matter how much I think about it, I’m not going to Mars or back to the age of thirty, and I could waste much of the time which is left trying to conjure things by thinking of them. But overall it’s sound. Although not all thoughts are equally constructive. mind is a horrible thing to waste, but it’s also a dangerous engine. Turned to the wrong ends (think the Joker) a person could create great destruction on themselves or others. Or both.

Weist, of course, is far from that. Her book is helpful, even elegant, and her propositions (her aphorisms) while offered in a forthright way as if the listener is disinclined to quibble, are nonetheless proffered for the reader’s own good.

Things More Important than What You’re Thinking Right Now?

Brianna Weist’s 101 includes a list of things that are more worth thinking about than whatever is consuming you.

My first question: how does she know what is consuming me? I think the thing that’s consuming me is pretty important, actually.

These are some of the things that might supersede it, however:

#1 The way it will feel to have the life you want. (Okay, I can see her point.)

#21 The idea that the current problem in your life is not the problem, and that your perception is skewed …  (Well, here also I understand what she’s saying, but I always feel nervous when people claim that my problem is a problem of perception.)

#24 Your mortality…

Mortality is No Joke With Me

Now here I have to pause and think. Because the truth is, I spend a lot of time thinking about mortality, and have since I was about 17 when the fear of death first assaulted me. Death actually seems less scary than it did back then, but it’s still pretty bad. I do almost everything I can to avoid it. Although I know I can’t. Though you could avoid death on the original SIMS game by enclosing the Grim Reaper in a closet before he got to your character. That seemed like cheating to me. My son Victor used to do it though.

#35 Other people’s motivations and desires. Now this is something I find interesting at times. The third grade student wants to befriend other students, including the boy or girl they have a crush on, who is almost certainly in the class … and to do something really cool, so that he or she can be noticed as superlative. And to beat everyone else on the test. By getting the only A+ 100. Or similar.

Thinking About People We Love … And Also Bad Relationships

After the 101 more important things Weisst serves up this essay which pretty much stopped me in my tracks. How the people we love become strangers again.

I don’t know, people, but the men I have loved, they’re still pretty much the same as they were. I understand them for sure. They aren’t strangers to me. Or am I just lying to myself?

“Do you ever forget your lovers’ birthdays?” Weist wants to know.

I don’t know, Brianna, how many did you have? If you remind me to think about it, I remember. But without being reminded, II mean, I can’t even remember my parents or my kids’ birthdays. I can’t even remember my own. I just forgot my daughter Tiara’s this week. Is there something wrong with me?

My Bad Relationships Ended in Fire Not Ice

I have to say, citing Frost’s Fire and Ice poem, that my bad relationships, or relationship endings, generally occurred in the fire phase of fighting and screaming and not the waking up and realizing that I don’t care anymore ice phase.

But in Brianna Weist’s 101 she writes most poignantly:  “I want to believe that you either love someone, in some way, forever, or you never really loved them at all. That once two reactive chemicals cross, both are changed … I don’t want to believe that we write each other off because we simply don’t matter anymore.”

Well, Brianna, that depends on the person. I was never actually involved with anyone that I thought “didn’t matter.”

What Happened to Our Now-Gone Relationships?

But let me help you out. This is what happens to your relationships:

1. You’re boring and you didn’t take care of yourself and they don’t care anymore because someone more interesting showed up. Or they just don’t care because you’ve lost what you had.
2. You are mean and neglect their needs and they’d rather live alone than with you.
3. They pretended to love you because they needed a person or God forbid a person’s money and you fit the descriptions and living alone sucks.
4. They have a major personality disorder or substance abuse problem and after dealing with the fact that you just aren’t that important to them, compared with their addictions, they’re off. It was never about you, not really …  
5. I guess what I’m saying is there’s true love and it’s permanent. But that’s not the basis for most relationships. Most relationships are expedient. Love the one you’re with.
6. And when the pleasure to pain ratio becomes too great, these expedient relationships become to burdensome and people flee. Then people who were selfish and insensitive and addictive and emotionally violent sit down and cry and say “he/she left me! How could this be!”
7. But the thing is they did didn’t really give you any choice.
8. This is why parents say character is so important in relationships. Because lack of character is often what breaks your relationships. That, and/or there being effectively no foundation on them in the first place.
9. She who has ears, let her hear.

The final thing I want to say is this. Brianna Weist’s 101 suggests that one of the things more important than whatever is consuming me is “getting to inbox 0.” I looked at that and thought “Wow.” Because at work, my inbox *is* zero. But … my personal email dates back to … 2006. It has 92,813 emails, most of which that haven’t been read.

Getting to Email Inbox Zero? Really?

I go to Yahoo and look my email over. I click on Inbox. It says, “Susan do you want to clean up your email?” Yes, Yahoo, I do.

It says I can archive all the emails. They will all go to the archive folder; they will not be lost. So I push the button. It says it’s archiving. But when it’s done … there are still more emails! Now it says I have 82,813 emails.

I see. It only archives 10,000 at a time. I’m going to have to do the archive button repeatedly.

As I write this, they are archiving. There are some of those emails that might be useful. They include a number of letters from my father, now deceased, and some have manuscripts attached that might be of interest to me … I suppose … though if they were really useful wouldn’t they have been published by now?

I check the archive. The emails are still in there, they’re just not in the inbox.

Can I trust Yahoo to keep them safe?

My Life In Email — Straight to Archive

I may need to read up on this.

But Brianna Weist’s 101 has given me something. I feel a certain sense of glee as I see the emails disappearing. Notes about Twitter DM’s. Conferences with parents. Zillow notifications for house hunts in which the house was long since bought and sold. School notification emails for the kids. My God, LinkedIn updates from 2012? I was on LinkedIn way back they? In 2011, twelve friend requests in one day on Facebook. Who and why? Now it’s 2006 and I see emails for my horse magazine editing job … photos and sources and advertisers … I finish the job by archiving 2, 813 emails that go back to November of 2006, the last of which, I kid you not, seems to concern buying some backyard chickens.  

Okay, it’s done. They are archived. A tagline appears on my inbox. “Your email inbox is empty.” Then an ad from USAA, my insurance company. I stare at it.

For a second I wonder: could this cleaning up of email inbox be more important than what’s consuming me? Or perhaps … it was just moving the emails from one file to another so I don’t have to look at them?

But I have to hand it to Weist. I got to email inbox zero in only ten minutes, and I thought it was impossible. Brianna Weist’s101 essays to change the way you think … has changed the way I think. About this, at least.

I wonder what else might be possible if I try.