The feedback loops

Sitting in the bus for one of the last time before I start taking the train more regularly since they finally change the schedule and add more departure next week, so it will be easier for me to take the train after dropping the kids to school.

While driving to the parking lot this morning, I was thinking about my last post (which I didn't publish yet, I know... weird, you might have noticed that the date and time of the post is around lunch time on Monday January 5th, after my empty house oil tank adventure. The blog keeps the date and time of starting to write the post and not the one it was actually published. I was just too busy this week and wanted to double check a few things before publishing the post)...

So this morning, I thought about the concept of the feedback loop that I was hinting on in that other post. It made me realize that it can actually go both ways (and in physics, there are actually two types of feedback loops, the positive and negative feedback loops), and we can say here that the positive one can lead us to Nirvana while the negative one is more likely to lead us to a void.

Here are two examples... When I was married, my wife (even though she was a very nice woman :-) wasn't giving much positive feedback. Whether it was for the artistic creations I was having fun with, or even the things I was doing to try and make her happy. OK, it could be that I wasn't doing the right things, but I had a very hard time identifying what I was doing right or wrong without the feedback, right?

So since I wasn't getting much positive feedback from her, I was looking for it elsewhere... Don't get me wrong, I was faithful, I'm not talking about that type of “elsewhere”... I was just spending more and more time on my artistic creations with which I was getting some positive feedback from friends and family that was appreciating what I was doing. So the negative feedback loop with my wife was getting me to spend less and less energy trying to satisfy her, since I didn't get much encouragement on that front, and she wasn't one to ask for much, so it slowly died down... Which is where a negative feedback loop leads you... The void.

I often get asked where do I find the time to do all these things I do, I guess it came from there...

Now a positive feedback, on the other hand, as I was saying in my previous post, can help keep the flame alive... If you don't feed a fire, it will die, right? It is the same thing about the passion or the spontaneity of the early days with a new partner can bring us... If we enjoy it, we should keep finding ways to feed that fire and let it last for as long as we can... For as long as we live actually...

And don't get me wrong, it is not about letting everything else down. We still have friends and family, we still have other interests (like artistic creations for me), and we should never let them down, even in the very intense early phase of a new relationship... Maybe that's one of the other mistakes we make that makes it hard to keep it up after this early phase. We need to leave room for friends, family and individual interests in the early phase, so that we don't get to miss it, and start blaming the early flame and slowly let it fade away...

I think that at my age, with kids, it is a little easier than it was in our early twenties... because we have accumulated more individual interests, we may have more friends, and family is also more important, especially our own kids... For those of us that put our children's interests ahead of our own, we don't have a choice but to have a certain control over the early fire... But it is not because we prevent the whole house to burn down that we put out the fire... We can still have a very intense fireplace, without burning down the house. If the house burns down, so will the fire, and we will have nowhere to live after that... Whereas, if we just take good care of the fireplace, it can burn forever and even warm our house... As long as we keep feeding that fire with good wood, and good care...

Arriving at the terminus, so I will end this by telling you to never forget to have very hot fun!!!

BYE
MAD... the fireman! ;-)