Having lived in the city for the last two years, I’ve come to realize that a large body of the American people spends a great deal of time under stress. A few weeks ago I was actually early for class, so I stopped to talk to a guy on the street who was asking for donations for some charity walk that may or may not have existed. I ended up giving him the only dollar I had left, because hey, at least he made an effort instead of just asking for a handout. He even had fliers and everything.

Anyway one comment that he made while we were talking was that people in Boston are always in too big a hurry to give a moment of their time. Which, when I thought about it, is true for me most of the time too. You’re always running late for something, be it class or an appointment or lunch or whatever. Events are tightly scheduled in our solitary worlds.

That said, it seems like people can always use a psychological break from the tension, and a lot of times these come in the form of time savers. Anything that saves time, or even appears to save time is a wonderful thing.

Which brings me to my point. Life needs more buttons. Allow me to elaborate. Have you ever been in an elevator pumping the “Door Close” button, and stop to think about how the elevator doesn’t actually operate any faster while you’re pushing it? My theory is that the button isn’t even connected to anything, it’s just there so people can push it and feel better about themselves.

One can’t deny though, even if it doesn’t in fact do anything, that it does feel rather soothing to have a time-saving button that you can lean on. I think many of the buttons at intersections, you know for pedestrians, operate on the same principle.

So ultimately this begs the question, why not more buttons on everything? Why shouldn’t subways and buses have “Go Faster” buttons all over them? Or maybe clocks could start having “Slow Down Time” buttons that you can just push when you’ve got fast-approaching deadlines. I could go on.

But the fact is, most people don’t understand enough about anything to ever question whether the buttons do anything or not. Heck, I don’t know anything about elevators, so how can I know what the buttons actually do? So why not give people more buttons to press? In the end, I think it would lead to an overall healthier and slightly more stress-free existence.

A couple weeks ago I wanted to get on here and moan about expectancy and that sort of thing, due to some goings-on that had left me a little disillusioned, which isn’t an altogether uncommon occurrence as you may or may not already know. As could be surmised from that last entry, I wasn’t having a particularly articulate week, and I couldn’t really find a thread to be able to adequately discuss what I was thinking at the time.

Well, even though my outlook has changed slightly since then, I’ll still discuss expectancy some. I feel like my go-with-the-flow attitude has been developed in no small part due to necessity as much as to natural leanings. The reason being that expectancy causes a great deal of superfluous stress, and stress causes me to not function as a human being very well.

From an early age I have been taught through school projects and being stranded places by my forgetful parents that you can’t really count on anyone but yourself to have your same priorities, and to contribute fully to those ends that you yourself deem to be important. I don’t mean to imply that all people are untrustworthy, but that with a high degree of probability, they have something that they would prefer to do than what you would have them do. It’s simply a matter of perspective.

The end result, however, is that you learn that the only person who shares your priorities is you, and chances are you become jaded and isolationist believing that the world is out to get you and the like. I’m not really an exception to the rule, although I’ve more passively decided to just count on myself and not expect much of other people, to avoid the feeling of being let down.

Of course sometimes I still manage to become excited at a prospect, and almost invariably it seems that the more I allow myself to get worked up, the less likely the prospect is to come through at the scheduled time. Of course my view is probably skewed, but every time such a thing occurs, it strengthens my resolve never to rely on outside sources for satisfaction.

This isn’t to say that one should sit in a state of idleness and complacency, for there is another aspect of this way of living, and that is the element of surprise. That is to say that as you create your own world in which you can live happily, then there is the possibility of the unexpected to take place, which is where further delight and wonder can enter into your life. The stipulation is that you must do enough to allow these surprises to take place. You must partake in acts of risk-taking without expecting any return on your investments.

I don’t mean to imply that I live my life as the perfect ideal of what I just described, far from it. I’m just trying to put forth a model of how my own personal life could work to make me happy within my own structure of morals, ideals and abilities. This way I can encourage myself to continue in the taking of risks and the doing of good deeds, which are things I try to do day by day to improve myself and my life.

Anyway, as I mentioned I had suffered a couple of setbacks wherein I had gotten excited and let down, but in the ensuing weeks I received a series of wonderful surprises that more than restored my faith in humanity and in the way of things, and I just wanted to take some space to thank the purveyors of these surprises, because it is you who make my little life-system work.

So it would seem that the golden “Do unto others…” rule does indeed apply after all, but the “others do unto you” part typically won’t come from where you expect it. When you start expecting things, it seems that’s when people get hurt and stressed out and so on. This is just my own observation based on experience.

That’s all I have on this subject, but I’m going to go ahead and write a Thanksgiving entry too.