Walk With Me

'People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.'

As this quote from Maya Angelou suggests (unintentionally perhaps), we are limited by natural laws and processes when interacting with others. This advice is both insightful and frustrating. Insightful, as it is important to consider how a person might feel as a result of your actions, or else your relationship could suffer long after the event. Frustrating, as we are not always capable of making the right choice. It is also potentially dangerous to only remember how we felt, without perspective and context. In reading Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer and Willpower by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney, some of the natural laws and processes governing human interaction were made clear to me. I would like to share my new-found understanding, and my insights on whether it is possible to overcome our limitations.


As an example of Angelou's process, think about people you know. A work colleague, a classmate, even a friend. If I asked you to tell me a bit about them I expect all you would give me is an impression. A list of personality characteristics, with little substance. In essence, how you feel about them and how they make you feel. If they have recently done something particularly noteworthy it might be at the forefront of your mind, providing an anecdote to substantiate feelings, but over time this will likely fade from your awareness.

This links to the first natural law I am going to discuss: the limits of our consciousness. More specifically, Moonwalking refers to 'The Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two'. This was termed by Harvard Psychologist George Miller, who found we are, without exception, limited in our ability to juggle information to about seven items. This might sound like a lot, but consider our thought process. At any given moment we might ask: What does that look they are giving me mean? How am I coming across? Do they like me? Do I like them? Is my shirt tucked in? Hungry. Sexual impulse. 'What did you say?' We can easily fill our ability to process information with predominantly pointless, selfish thought. It is no wonder recall can be difficult, and others are relegated to mere ghostly impressions.

Consider another natural law, our inconsistency. In Willpower it is well evidenced our ability to self-regulate depends on a finite resource: our willpower. This store is replenished with sleep and fueled by glucose (hence the dieter's catch 22, of requiring food in order to resist it). With every decision we make, be it to act or abstain, this store is depleted. Levav found, in surveying over a 1000 instances in the Israeli prison system, there was a 70% chance of parole being granted in the morning, versus a 10% chance later in the day. Regardless of competence the Judge's 'decision fatigue' made it increasingly likely that inmates would be put back in the system, to be processed another time.

To make this more applicable (as I hope those reading don't end up hoping for an early morning court hearing), think of the vast number of decisions you make every day. Then think of commitments you might have; the "big three" being career, spouse, and children. If you spend all day at a stressful job at least one is likely to suffer. The day will leave you without the will to engage with other commitments effectively, and so you lose control. Argue with spouse. Alienate children. If people do not easily forget how you made them feel this can cause a lot of damage. Even the good you might have done in the past, assuming it is not forgotten, comes to be seen through a different lens. In the eyes of others, in the eyes of yourself, you become seen as an impatient person. You may work hard, but those you care about do not appreciate it (or you). How can they when they see only one facet, and use that to form their impressions?

Philosophers approach such issues by asking what constitutes a whole. I will give one example from Collingwood's The Idea of Nature, in which he relates the problem to our perception of climate change, and the need for a lengthy span of data. Note that as a philosopher Collingwood is obligated to explain everything at least three times, and bore you by over-explaining basic principles:

'When a man walks at three miles per hour, making three steps in every two seconds, during any given hundredth of a second he cannot properly be said to be walking, for walking is a kind of locomotion effected by standing on each foot alternatively while swinging the other forward'

The point he is making is that we need to see a lengthy span of frames, in order to identify the whole. In regards to our interactions with people, if all we see are the final frames, of an overstressed, short tempered wreck, we soon lose our appreciation for the person. Ideally we would avoid over-encumbering ourselves with commitment, but society expects and demands a lot. Willpower also illustrates how hard we find it to identify when our decision making ability is impaired, and so make the necessary changes. It is important we empathize and remember we are not always seeing something that represents the whole.

There are people that mean a lot to me, and I cannot willingly forsake their efforts to my ability to forget, or to predominantly remember the instances where they have hurt me. This can be intensified by a malicious tendency to focus my energies on the negatives. Thankfully, in spite of our fundamental flaws, Moonwalking gives reason to hope. The book is a testament to the vast potential of our memories, provided we know how to use them. Our limitations are not so much of memory, but of consciousness. We are limited in our ability to pay attention and recall what we need, in order to provide our own personal sequence of frames, to better represent the whole.

I heard an example of personal sequencing being done by the headteacher of the school I help at (which part-inspired this article). She keeps a diary, with a twist. At the end of the day she writes down one or two positive things that have happened, regardless of how stressful the day might have been. On some days this must be very difficult, but I imagine revisiting the diary can be a powerful experience. The waves of time may wash away the jagged edges, and leave something smooth behind: a career both satisfying and meaningful.

I am not advocating tricking the self. If you are genuinely unhappy you cannot force yourself to feel otherwise, and would be foolish to try. That said, inconsistency--ups-and-downs--is inevitable. The purpose should be to maintain motivation, and perspective of the whole, provided you truly believe it worth it.

An example of how this could be applied to our interactions with people would be to write/list all the things a person has done which were special to you. (I say done, based on a quote from Descartes: 'To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.') This sounds simple, and deceptively pointless. However, I think you would be surprised how difficult it can be to bring such things to mind, particularly in our gloomier states, when our limited-conscious swims with negativity, and we are left unsure why we feel the way we do at all. Even the simplest of notes can act as a guide for our conscious, leading it to revisit and remember what might otherwise be denied.

Sending readers off to write a diary is not the point. The point is that we must be consciously aware of (1)the fundamental limits we all share, and (2)the power of directed reflective thought in helping to overcome these limits. How you decide to use this knowledge is up to you. I do not believe our interactions, particularly with those we love, should be carried out through a warped (emotive) frame of reference. Without taking note of behaviors which better represent the whole and empathizing with limitations, while working to mitigate our own, we can lose perspective of why we care about a person, or lose them altogether. We all move through life, but few of us capture the movement of others, and travel alongside.