Yup. A friend of mine is having a pretty bad personal crisis right now, and he's just begun to realize how he's numbed his emotions for so many years (like, maybe 20-30 years). It's going to be an interesting couple years of therapy for him.

Right — and then that little bit of yellow is a highlight, and it'll stand out easier for you to remember.

That's exactly what the illustration suggests.

Rather than merely dwelling, this advice is about unraveling, recognizing, and understanding the feelings.

Like being upset by rush hour traffic — is it just the traffic, or does the upset feeling come from another root? Is it making you late for your appointment, or does the guy blasting past in the slow lane make you worried about what could happen to the safe drivers?

A lot of stress comes from not understanding. If you can ease your reactions to your feelings, you can begin to observe them, and then eventually understand them better.

One thing that helped me was noticing that I affected the people around me. And if I could have a positive effect, then I gained a reason for being more positive about myself.

The opportunities came with minor leadership positions at work, conversations with family and peers, and even making friends with people in my neighborhood (neighbors, store owners, whoever). If I went to the same sandwich shop often and ordered the same thing, it was easy to become recognized as a “regular”, and then it was easier to make small talk.

You have to understand, though, that I planned NONE of this. It just happened organically. But if I could go back twenty years, I’d tell myself to keep doing whatever I was doing because it would work out.

I thought Gravity was great in 3D because the takes are soooo long that my brain didn't have to spend time reorienting itself. Action movies with quick cuts force me to spend a split-second to understand where everything is each time the camera cuts to a new view. But Gravity allowed me enough time to figure out the scene and where all the objects were.

Look for an AMA that was posted not long after yours here in GetMotivated (I can't cross-post a link) from a Buddhist monk. He talks about how to form good habits, among other things.

Heard a story in a podcast last night (pardon me if I paraphrase):

A fisherman went about his daily routine — go out on his little boat in the morning, catch a small amount of fish, bring it back, sell some and keep some, and then go home to relax for the rest of the afternoon.

A tourist met him and learned what he was doing and how little his one-man fishing operation was.

"You know," the tourist said, "what you can do is, if you go out again in the afternoon, you can bring back twice as much fish to sell in the market. Then after a while, you can make enough money to buy a bigger boat, and then you can catch more fish. Work hard and you can get together a small fleet of boats, and then you can make more money and sell more fish. Then you keep doing this for a while longer until you make lots of money and become the boss of a large company. And then, finally, you'd have enough money and free time to relax in the afternoons."

The fisherman leaned back in his chair and smiled quietly.

I've got a friend who used to go on vacations with no plan besides "keep driving that way until we reach the water, then turn around". They'd go all the way from the Midwest to, say, Oregon, or Louisiana, or wherever, visiting all kinds of places along the way.

That's what it is -- that's the key. When you reduce your longings — when you can stop stressing about a future that hasn't even arrived yet — you can begin to better appreciate the present.