Curious regard

First published in the Wakefield Daily Item, February 20, 2024.

“Ugh.”

Maybe you do it too. The mindless reaction, the snare drum exhalation of breath, often followed by a barely perceptible, reflexive shake of the head. The reaction releases a miniscule but measurable amount of negative energy into the atmosphere.

What causes us to react this way? People, words, gravity, stupidity – the possibilities are literally endless. You clumsily splash your coffee on your lap. Ugh. Someone cuts you off on your drive to work. Ugh. Your boss or a colleague doesn’t respond to a message into which you put considerable thought. Ugh. Someone chimes-in with a trollish response to your social media post. Ugh. An extended family member casually utters a conspiracy theory at a holiday gathering. Ugh. (smh)

Depending on your psychological makeup, you might do this a few times a day or a hundred. But the reality is, it’s hard to go through a day or even part of a day in which one doesn’t feel the negative energy of frustration, annoyance, anger, or disgust, just under the surface, waiting for the opportunity to be released.

I recognized a while ago that I was doing this almost constantly. I reacted to every delay, every resistance, every physical and mental frustration, every dismaying news item, every disappointment or unexpected setback no matter how small with the “ugh” response, like pressing a negative energy button.

My impression is the reaction was noticed only by myself, but I’m not sure. Those who know me as a relatively even-keeled, patient person may be surprised to learn that a significant bit of my interior monologue is spent flinging little F-bombs of negativity at myriad tiny glitches and frustrations of the physical world through the day.

I know I’m not alone. I see or sense the reaction in people around me every day. And as anyone with a measure of wisdom from interacting in human society knows, that quick squirt of negative energy is felt by those in our immediate vicinity. Inside ourselves, we can feel it adding up, cumulatively building into a kind of plaque or coating that both darkens our appearance to the world and deadens our response to it.

What to do? I understood that the reaction was mindless, like a reflex, and emotional, having to do with feeling, not thought. As a person who frequently calls out mindless anger and fist-shaking in our political discourse, I berated myself for succumbing to this negative tic, and resolved to find an antidote.

The first step was to detach. No problem. I’m a person susceptible to excessive self-critique, constantly stepping back mentally to consider how I’m coming across to others, so this was easy for me. Then, the challenge was to counteract or prevent the negative energy from being released.

I pondered. It struck me that the emotion at the root of the reaction was anger – anger at self, anger at others, anger at the world. What counteracts or neutralizes anger? Happiness? No, trying to replace anger with happiness would just seem fake, like a smiley-emoji. Then it hit me: curiosity. Someone in the act of noticing something interesting and wondering about it is in the opposite frame of mind and emotional state from someone mindlessly reacting in anger and frustration.

So, combine emotional detachment with attentive interest and you get: curious regard.

I felt I was onto something. Here was the possibility of a more mature and measured response to all the little daily physical frustrations and mental annoyances of our experience in the world. We need not be enslaved by our emotional, gut reactions or overwhelmed with negativity at all the petty human ugliness and random, stupid messes and failings that flood our zone every day. We can free ourselves and rise above with an attitude of curious regard.

I worried I might be getting ahead of myself. I had come up with a neat, descriptive label, but “ugh” is so deeply ingrained. Could I actually implement the concept, replacing the pathetic zombie reflex with a more positive, mindful response?

It would be tough. It would require discipline. I thought of my Marine days. It would take the equivalent of dropping for a pushup rather than scratching every time I felt the itch of a mosquito bite.

I tried it out. When I bonked my head on a PVC pipe in our low-ceilinged old basement (something I’ve done a zillion times), and was about to let loose with the usual self-directed expletives, I caught myself, doing the quick, metaphorical step-back to achieve curious regard. The resulting picture in my head, of my old geezer self whacking my head and cursing, made me chuckle.

On my next commute to the office, I was inching along in my old Subaru, approaching a bottleneck intersection. The car behind me was hugging my bumper. When the car in front of me moved ahead slightly, creating a small distance between his vehicle and mine, the person behind me honked. I glared at the driver in my rearview mirror, ready to launch a scornful verbal blast. But stopped and instead made myself reflect: “Huh, I wonder what’s bothering him?”

After a few such instances, I started to get the hang of it. I started to feel better, lighter somehow. It was working.

I also discovered a quick verbal shorthand for the desired response: “Huh” – uttered with the chin-stroking inflection used when one encounters a different-than-expected answer or result. Like when you get a wintry mix instead of the forecasted snow, or when the IPA you ordered tastes more like a pale ale. Huh. In fact, it struck me that one way of thinking about this essential detachment from mindless anger, this transcendant release from trollish reaction, is as a transition from “ugh” to “huh.”

When I bend to pull on my socks in the morning and find I have a hard time reaching my feet. Huh. When I’m walking around the lake, waiting for the somewhat familiar-looking person coming in the opposite direction to make eye contact so I can say hi, and they never look up. Huh. When my favorite local columnist writes yet another piece bemoaning the high school logo or dissing the town Human Rights Commission. Huh.

Now, learning to utilize curious regard doesn’t preclude righteous passion for the right issues and situations. Of course there’s plenty in this world to be angry about and we should never lose our desire and ability to care about things and to distinguish right from wrong.

But mindless anger never helps any situation and being angry and negative so much of the time is exhausting and toxic, for ourselves and for those around us.

So give curious regard a try. It takes some discipline and effort, but once you get the hang of it, it’s easy. Oh, believe me, I’m not perfect and I still struggle sometimes to keep the inner F-bombs in check. But I can vouch for the positive health benefits, both physical and mental.

And lately I’ve had an interesting or crazy thought: a substantial increase in curious regard generally could be good for the whole country, or even the whole world. Imagine if everyone, before reacting in anger to whatever’s in front of them, inserted a moment of curious regard, stepping back to ask themselves a few basic questions: Why am I reacting this way? Is my negative reaction helping the situation? What’s really going on here and how can I make things better?

Huh.

© Jeff Kehoe