{"id":37477,"date":"2024-04-16T09:00:06","date_gmt":"2024-04-16T16:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=37477"},"modified":"2024-04-14T11:56:36","modified_gmt":"2024-04-14T18:56:36","slug":"midnight-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/midnight-thinking\/","title":{"rendered":"Midnight Thinking"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clear Thinking <\/em>was a great book to end the semester on. It was a quick, easy read and applicable to many different situations. Shane Parrish builds on his experience within the Canadian Intelligence Agency and shares how to think through problems clearly, allowing oneself to make good, consistent decisions. He encourages good decision making by recognizing our defaults, setting up guardrails and being consistent. This book became immediately applicable to real-life parenting within hours of finishing it. It helped me think clearly and save a relationship.<\/p>\n

Last night, my seventeen-year-old daughter did not come home from work on time. This behavior is fairly abnormal, but she has been known to stop and pick up late night fast food. She was supposed to be home by 9:30pm but after 11pm I woke up to make sure she was safe at home. Her GPS showed that she currently was and had been downtown in a parking garage for over two hours, static and not moving. I tried calling multiple times, texting and had her sister text as well. Still no response. As I quickly got dressed to go explore the city, my mind was racing. Something bad certainly could have happened (the static GPS marker in the parking garage led me to think this). She might be out with a friend (a boy maybe?) But Parrish encouraged us to get out of simple binary thinking and to explore at least 3 solutions or challenges.[1]<\/a> Maybe her phone was stolen at work and the car was out of gas? Thinking through other possibilities helped me from becoming too scared or too upset.<\/p>\n

I had woken up from a dead sleep, and now had a dopamine and norepinephrine overload causing stress as David Rock wrote in his book on our brain function.[2]<\/a> Daniel Kahneman wrote about such rare events and stated, “The emotional arousal is associative, automatic and uncontrolled, and it produces an impulse for protective action.”[3]<\/a> It did not take long before I was in my car driving towards her work first and then her last location with the GPS. I was fully engaging my System 2 thinking and it was taking a lot of brain power to do so.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

Vigilantly, I was looking at every car on the road, driving faster than normal and thinking through my actions. I would go to her work first because it was on the way to her last known location. I determined I would call 911 when I had searched the parking garage myself quickly and report her missing. As I was about to enter the parking garage my wife called, my daughter was on the way home, she had been out with a friend and had turned off her phone. Sudden relief and then anger overwhelmed me. I told her to have my daughter wait for me in the living room for me to return so I could \u201clet her have it!\u201d She told me our other daughter was already chewing her out for scaring her as she had sent text messages to her whole group of friends at 11:30pm waking some of them up.<\/p>\n

This is where Parrish\u2019s insights saved the relationship. He asks the question of his kids, “Is this behavior moving you closer to what you want or further away?”[5]<\/a> I asked myself this question over and over. How do I want this situation to be resolved? Do I want to come home angry and simply punish her? I thought through my default response.[6]<\/a> It was almost midnight, and my default ego might not be super undefended. So, I set up a guardrail to help me think through what I wanted to say and how I wanted to act. As I drove home, I rolled down the window and drove right past my house. I headed out to the farm roads and decided to think through my response before I got home. This would do two things. First, it would help me think through what I wanted to say. Second, it would cause my daughter to sit and stir in the living room for twenty extra minutes while she waited for me.<\/p>\n

Parrish encourages the reader of his book to think of their future self and to make decisions with the future self in mind. “You can think of first-level thinking as your today self and second-level thinking as your future self.”[7]<\/a> My second-level self began to reflect on the kind of relationship I have had with my daughter as well as the relationship I want to have with my daughter in the future.<\/p>\n

I chose not to yell or say much. In fact, at that point of the night, with the brain fog I was now in, I chose to simply say three sentences and then headed upstairs.<\/p>\n