Thinking makes it so

At least fairly often, I've had occasion to be tired, busy, overworked, overwhelmed, angry, sad, and uncertain, though blessedly not all at once. One peculiar thing is that all of these feelings have also meant different things to me at different times. That is, there are times I have been tired and thought "this is the absolute worst, I want to go to bed and I can't, and that just makes me so utterly miserable I can't bear it". However, other times I have thought "yep, I'm tired alright", and really not been bothered at all.

I've noticed a very similar thing with learning new stuff, something I'm quite fond of. You usually run into an early wall you run into where the number of things you don't know is growing quicker than the number of things you do. Each thing you learn leads to ten more things you haven't learned, and each of those leads to ten more. This situation feels so utterly overwhelming that it's hard to imagine ever getting through it and reaching any kind of understanding. I have distinct memories of that feeling, something like a hot crushing sensation coming at my brain from all directions.

But lately, perhaps just from experience, I've started to accept that feeling as being part of the process of learning anything new. The overwhelmed sensation doesn't go away, exactly, it's more like it stops being such a dominant and negative part of the experience. Instead of thinking that you're overwhelmed because the material is inherently too complex to understand, or you're inherently too stupid to understand it, you can just think "yes, this is what learning a lot of new things at once feels like", and not be particularly bothered by it.

To be clear, I'm not trying to advocate the idea that bad things aren't bad. I would take not-overwhelemed any day if it was available, and similarly I'd go for awake over tired, happy over sad, and leisurely over busy or overworked. Those things are, to my mind, objectively better. However, I think there are two layers to any situation: there's the thing that's happening, and then your reaction to it. A bad thing that's happened can't be helped, but a bad reaction can.

Imagine you're in a dinghy slowly filling with water, and while you're trying to figure out how to bail it out, everyone around you is screaming because the boat is sinking. Nobody would argue that the dinghy sinking isn't a bad thing. It's definitely bad. But although the wailing and gnashing of teeth might most accurately reflect that badness, the reaction of quietly acknowledging the situation and setting about making the best of it is, perhaps, more helpful.

There are still a lot of good reasons to avoid getting into bad situations in the first place, but they have a way of popping up anyway. When that happens, I think the best thing you can do is just accept the situation as exactly as bad as it is, and avoid the temptation to make it any worse.