Test it

The same way I did. Against your own life, carefully, and without letting yourself cheat.

Here’s a practice. Before something that matters to you, a hard conversation, a pitch, a first day, write down four things. What you want. What you’re getting in the way of ideas and hunches about it. What you believe is true about the situation. What you expect to happen. Then note how you feel, and roughly how far apart those four seem.

Afterward, write down what actually came back from the world and how you felt then. Don’t go back and edit the first page; memory will want to tidy it up for you, and you can’t let it.

And add one line to each page, because the book’s own ethics say my side of the notebook isn’t enough. Before, write down what you expect to come back from the specific people the thing touches. After, write what did. If ease on your page keeps landing as weight on theirs, theirs is the reading that governs, and that one line is what separates this from a book about getting what you want.

Do it a dozen times. See whether the size of the gap you wrote down matched how the thing went. See whether the moments when you let go of the grip were the moments things moved. See whether what came back from other people surprised you, and whether you listened to it.

You don’t, unless you wrote it down first. That’s what the page is for.

Expectation is one of the four directions. TSR says you see the past through it constantly, and that includes the past ten minutes. Memory will fold what happened into what you expected, and it won’t ask your permission. The page from before is the only thing that can catch it. If the pattern only shows up when you look back, and not on the page, that’s expectation doing the work.

A dozen pages won’t prove the Current exists. They’ll tell you whether this way of seeing makes your life easier to understand and easier to change. From here, that’s the test I can give you.

Then write that down too, and take it seriously.

Before you start, write one more line: what would make you think TSR doesn’t describe your life. Be specific. If the pages keep showing you that, believe the pages over the book.

If the rule, run honestly by other people, started producing pieces that didn’t fit together, that would matter to me a great deal. The whole reason I trust TSR is that everything in it holds everything else up. If that stopped being true, I’d want to know.

Here’s what I watch for in my own life. If any of these stopped being true, TSR wouldn’t apply.

• If the choices people make when they’re scared, stressed or worried looked and felt no different from the ones they make when they’re happy, joyful and at peace. TSR says those choices come from very different places in the crossing, and they feel different, before and after. If they didn’t, it wouldn’t apply.
• If you could force realization. If straining at a problem produced the answer as reliably as putting it down does. It’s one of the most consistent human experiences there is: you push against a problem, give up, take a walk or a shower, and the answer arrives. If that weren’t consistent, TSR wouldn’t apply.
• If meditation didn’t work. If quieting the mind never let anything new through, for anyone.
• If letting go of the grip made things worse. If the people who loosened their hold on a problem, a plan or a person consistently got worse returns from the world than the people who tightened it, the whole direction of this book would be backwards. That one can fail, and I’d want to know.

I don’t expect any of those to happen. But they could, and that’s what makes them tests.

Less than I’d like to claim, and more than nothing. Let me give you the careful version, because it’s stronger than the one I’d rather give.

Psychology has every one of those findings, and it has them separately. Stress narrowing attention is one literature. Answers arriving after you stop working on a problem is another; they call it incubation. Meditation lowering reactivity is a third. And there’s a fourth that matters most to me. When researchers ask people about their regrets, the ones over things they did fade with time, and the ones over things they never did grow. Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec found that in the mid-1990s. The pattern has held up; what’s still argued is how much the old regrets hurt, with Kahneman reading some of them as wistful rather than painful. That’s the gap at forty hurting more than it did at twenty, with data behind it. Standard adaptation theory says you should get used to a career or a marriage that doesn’t fit you. The regret research says the unlived side of you keeps coming back, year after year, while the regrets over what you did fade.

What psychology doesn’t have is one mechanism that produces all four. TSR does. Every day of contrast sends new desire through the filter into the Current, so the unlived side of you keeps growing instead of fading. Resistance is what holds you off the Current, so stress narrows and quiet opens. One rule, four findings that were sitting in four different journals.

And the mechanism makes one further claim the separate findings don’t. It says the effect comes from the direction of the flow, not from the stress itself. Ordinary goal-setting says progress scales with effort: push harder until you solve it or burn out. TSR says that when you’re stuck in an old expectation, pushing directly on the problem with more Focus thickens the resistance and widens the gap, while stepping away into something easy that lowers your resistance, even something unrelated to the goal, contracts the felt distance to the next step faster than grinding does. That’s a prediction you can run, and how to run it is at the back of the book. If push and tune come out the same on the page, that part of TSR is wrong.

Psychology already knows a break helps; it calls that incubation. What separates my claim is the kind of break. Incubation says time away. TSR says ease away, and a break you resent is holding on with the load off. If resented breaks work as well as enjoyed ones, it was incubation all along. And passing would show that resistance works the way I say it does on this side, in a nervous system, which a neuroscientist can describe in neurons and I describe at the crossing. It wouldn’t show that the Current is shared, that what you expanded into culminated with everyone else before it came back. Nothing in a notebook can show that. That part stays where this chapter puts it, in what I don’t know.