Last week I wrote that if our goals are to add to our happiness, they should meet certain conditions. The first of those was that a goal actually be possible in the world.

One the face of it, this seems obvious enough. If we want stuff that’s not attainable, our suffering must necessarily increase. But it’s surprising how often our behavior reflects our wanting something that can’t actually happen. I wish I could go back in time and undo some bad deed. I want to eat doughnuts every day, but not gain weight. I want the freeway to be clear for me just once during rush hour. I wish I could fly like I can in my dreams.

It’s surprising, particularly in relationships, how we slip into wanting things that defy the natural law order of things. And it’s surprising how much agitation we get from wanting such things, despite the fact we know very well they aren’t possible. It sounds silly, but most of us could stand being more aware of which is reality and which is fantasy, and practicing to reel ourselves in when we find ourselves spinning in a desire for something unattainable.

To live is to want. Each act, word and even thought, reflect some volition, however small, that moves us towards something we want. Most of this movement is so small (reaching for more salt in the soup, remembering to call so and so), it hardly seems worth noticing. In fact, we rarely associate most of our actions with wanting. We pursue while being unconscious that we want. Mostly we become aware of wanting only when our desires are frustrated. Then we become painfully aware of wanting.

This habit of unawareness of wanting means that what we desire often goes unexamined with regards to three criteria, that if unmet, makes life more difficult. That is, if we have a goal in mind, big or small, if it doesn’t meet certain requirements, we either won’t get it, or if we do, it will cause pain. I learned these requirements from an NLP training years ago and still find them very useful.

If having a goal is to add to your happiness, it must…

• Be possible in the world
• Be under one’s control
• Do no harm to oneself or others

One way this can be useful is to work backwards from some difficulty. That is, if you’re experiencing some negativity or having a difficult moment, day, week…, one thing to consider is that you may likely be 1) wanting something you’re not getting, 2) unaware of that fact, and/or 3) wanting something that violates one or more of the above conditions. Becoming more aware of what we want and disciplining ourselves to focus our wants on things that are possible, under our control, and do no harm can be difficult and highly irritating. But doing so will add to our happiness. Guaranteed.

Every act of kindness in a relationship makes some contribution to what I call a fund of good will. It is an account, much like a savings account, that can grow and diminish with deposits and withdrawals. The overall sense of harmony and good will in a relationship will tell the net balance in the account.

While all kindnesses increase the fund, most of us will at times make withdrawals. Knowingly or not, our stresses spill out on those around us, particularly those closest to us. Of the various types of withdrawals, two are worth noting because they entail a much bigger withdrawal than people realize.

The first one is in any way referring to the possible end of the relationship. This obviously includes threatening to leave, but also statements like, “I can’t take it anymore.” Delivered in the right way at the right time, this is also a threat to leave. Questioning the very existence of a relationship is a raid on the good will fund. In fact, it zeros out the account.

The second type of withdrawal is betraying any information given to you in vulnerability and confidence. Such information must be treated with great care. Whenever speaking of it, if you do not match the importance and respect with how you were told, the person will feel betrayed. And a disagreement or fight is never the time to bring such things up.

A wife once confided to her husband in a moment of courageous openness, that she had just recently seen in herself that which drove her crazy about her mother. It was hard to see and hard to say, but such an important step in having real choice about those behaviors. Weeks later, in the midst of a fight, the husband mentioned this behavior to bolster his argument. He was not mean. In fact, he convinced himself he was helping by bringing it to her attention. It’s not that he mentioned it, it’s how he mentioned it.

People who refuse to make these two types of withdrawals save themselves much unnecessary difficulties.

There are fast talkers and slow talkers. Fast walkers and slow walkers. Some people seem to pack way more life into a given day or week. It may just look like they’re getting a lot done, or it may look like they’re in a kind of constant hurry. There’s a spectrum of speeds that we all operate in. Sometimes we move slowly, sometimes fast. And though that varies, we all tend toward our own personal pace.

For any two people in relationship, most likely those paces will be different. If the difference is striking, awareness may be there, but most often it goes unnoticed. And it is surprising how this innocent difference in the way we filter our experience can cause difficulties.

A very compatible couple I knew ran into some challenges when some intense family and work stress overwhelmed the man. In general, they did very well with it, but talking with them, I could tell that when dealing with this particular issue, they spoke, thought, and reacted at very different speeds. The emotional stress slowed him way down. His partner happened to be a very quick, intelligent and highly verbal person who, with a sense of urgency to help, thought and spoke even faster than usual.

This mismatch in pace had an innocent, but confusing impact on their ability to talk in this important time. He struggled to find words to relate what was happening, sometimes getting emotional. And seeing his pain, her mind would race to possible things that might help, offering up the best ones she could think of as quickly as possible in hopes to shorten his distress. But you could see that the rapidity with which these ideas came to him added to his overwhelm and slowed him down even further. She would then get a little hurt and confused as to why her good efforts weren’t better received. But when she was able to slow down to his pace, her care, attention, and ideas slid right into place.

The key here is flexibility. She was able to change her pace quite significantly, which had a big impact on her ability to connect to a dear one in distress. There’s no “right” pace, but for any given situation, one tempo may be more useful than another.

Every moment, through our various senses, flows millions of bits of experience that overwhelm our capacity to be aware. And if you include the mind, with its stream of thoughts as sensory input, it is easy to see that even to sit quietly at a window entails far more than we consciously know. All the colors and shapes in our visual field, every minute part of our bodies, every sound, taste and smell, plus the stream of mental activity, is a vast array, only a tiny fraction of which we consciously register. But which fraction do we register? What we pay attention to and what we delete forms a very interesting perspective on our uniqueness, on who we are.

Based on our history, our biology, our environment, we develop a way of prioritizing all this input. We attend to some information more than others. One of the most basic filters, is our tendency to favor one sense system over others. Most of us know in general whether we are more sensitive to visual or auditory information, for example. But even within one sense system there can be filters.

Both me a dear friend of mine are visual people. My friend is a city dweller, whereas I grew up on the water with a much leaner visual landscape. Two events showed the effects of our environment on what we saw. First, when we were sitting on a beach, I commented on a couple of large boats I saw out on the horizon. My friend literally could not see them. Those specks were indistinguishable from the horizon. Shortly thereafter, we weere riding in a cab going to a restaurant neither of us had ever been to in mid-town Manhattan. When we were still two blocks away, my friend, with no apparent effort, spotted the cafe’s sign in what appeared to me to be an utter sea of visual confusion. With great effort, I finally saw it when we were 50 yards away. Clearly, we attended to, and filtered out, quite different visual information.

Knowing some of the many filters we use to organize our experience I have found both useful and fun. To know our filters is to know ourselves, or at least some interesting aspect. And a good place to start is our simple sense preferences for sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Do you know yours? Can you detect this preference in others?

To know it, you simply need to pay attention to what people say and do (yourself included) related to that sense. Does someone say, “I see what you mean,” or do they say, “that sounds good to me”? People do not choose their metaphors randomly; they are a direct reflection of the sense system they use and prefer. Is someone bothered by the sound in the restaurant, or do they never fail to comment on how you look? Which is more likely to distract someone from their task or conversation, a sight or a sound? We tell each other about ourselves all the time. See what you notice.

So here’s an oddly brutal exercise I find very useful…

Imagine you’re laying in bed one night asleep and a sharp pain wakes you. You are visited by a thought or a being that lets you know, without the slightest doubt, that you will be dead by morning and there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it. At first you fight it and panic, but soon understand this is futile and so lay back, resigned to your fate.

What do you think about? Does your life flash before your eyes? If you’re like most people, what will arise in the mind with greater and greater force, is unfinished business. Not the unfinished business of yesterday that made it difficult to fall asleep. Not the to-do list on your night stand. Not the grocery list on the kitchen counter. This to-do list is the stuff that you most deeply want to happen in your life but hasn’t. It’s the stuff that will keep you from dying happy.

It’s a wise thing to keep aware of what’s on that list, and to keep it current. It can change from year to year.

And it’s a wise thing to finish up what business you can on that list, or as a good friend of mine who builds things likes to put it, “Let’s get ‘er done.”