Sometimes the hardest thing to do is nothing. It can be even harder to say nothing.
Perspective is hard to gain but easy to lose.
Nothing makes you feel worse than parenting. It’s the best ego destroyer available, even better than marriage. To all the Zen monks in their monasteries: You want to destroy your ego? Try parenting.
The shit that makes us miserable is what keeps us alive. Do you ever think about that when you hear about a celebrity suicide? If that person’s kids weren’t already financially set for life do you think they would have killed themselves? As selfish as we can be as humans, it’s our responsibility to our loved ones that keeps us going in our darkest, most desperate moments. If I didn’t have to have a full time job I’d probably be a drunk. If I had plenty of money and no job to go to…yeah, I’d be drinking. It’s the ongoing “musts” that we complain about that keep us alive.
At some point in our lives will we get to a place where the details of whatever it is that we’re dealing with or feeling miserable about don’t even matter anymore? There’s always going to be something to deal with. Shouldn’t we be able to stop complaining, or at least minimize the complaining, and stop having so many feelings about every little thing and just handle what’s in front of us with some grace?
I was texting with a friend about a difficult week. Difficulties at home and at work. Parenting stuff and just being completely overwhelmed at work and knowing that the company is greedy and soulless. My friend replied that it sounded like a perfect storm. Then he said enjoy it. But the enjoyment part was referring to a beer he was going to drop off. He texted back to clarify that. “Enjoy the beer not the storm.” But being able to enjoy the storm is the secret to life. It’s not a natural way to look at it for most of us. And it takes a lot of effort and practice to be able to do it. Maybe most of us will never get all the way there but we can move the needle and change the way that we perceive the storms in our lives. Even being able to realize, while we are in a storm, that we’re going to get through it and that we can learn and grow and change from what happens in the storm is a big shift. Acknowledging to ourselves, while we’re struggling in a storm, that these are the moments that we learn from is not the same thing as enjoying the storm but it’s a turn away from just suffering. It’s all the cliche stuff about enjoying the journey and the obstacle is the path. Easier said than done, but our lives will be filled with storms. When it rains we get wet. Better to accept that than to be miserable about it.
It’s surprising how many adults don’t know the different between a tablet and a capsule.
Something I think to myself a lot when I’m talking to other humans: “I’m confused that you’re confused.”
A little something that’s occurred to me recently is that it might be more difficult to handle several small stressors than it is to handle one big stressor. And maybe that’s not exactly right. Maybe it’s not more difficult. Maybe it’s equally difficult in a different way and it feels more difficult because we perceive that smaller stressors should be easier. But when there’s several small ones, it’s not easier. With one large stressor our attention can be focused. We can even get pumped up for it. And if we can get a moment to put that stressor aside then we might get a brief reprieve and be able to let go. But with several small stressors, there is no break. If you stop thinking about one thing, you don’t get a break, you just move on to another stressor and you just keep cycling from one stressor to another. It’s exhausting.
When someone asks how you’re doing and you say “ok” it doesn’t mean that things are easy. “Ok” doesn’t mean easy. Being able to carry the load doesn’t mean that the load is light.
“I like how monarch butterflies look like leaves falling in autumn”, said my daughter.
If you’re fully open to the moment, how can you not be overwhelmed by emotion?
People don’t want to be corrected. People would rather just go along continuing to be wrong than to have someone correct them. (Yes it’s a big generalization but I still think it’s mostly true)
The difference between a reason and an excuse is whether or not it’s under your control.
This is not mine. I can’t remember where I read it but I really like it. “I always thought it would make a sound when you hit rock bottom, apparently not.”
Are we not doing things for fear of messing up? What if we did mess up? Would it even really matter?
It’s more important to know what day of the week it is than to know the date.
Who holds the CEO and executive board of a big company accountable? And don’t tell me it’s the shareholders because their interests are selfish. As an employee, I get held accountable for my performance. I even get held accountable for nonsense. I get emails asking why my team hasn’t completed a training yet, but the training’s due date will still be four weeks away. So let’s sort this out. The CEO and executive board give themselves millions of dollars in bonuses annually while the equipment the company uses keeps breaking, the software is outdated, there’s not enough staffing in many locations and they “can’t afford” to give employees pensions. This only makes sense if you’re the one getting the millions of dollars in bonuses.
This life is horrible and makes no sense. I know that life and death are two sides of the same coin but why do some people have to suffer so much? This life is like the blooms on the lilies all around my yard. They are beautiful bursts of color perfectly shaped, but they are short lived. The petals whither, die, and fall off. This life’s cruelty makes me so angry but the anger quickly gives way to a deep sadness. No god that I can worship would participate in or allow this kind of blind cruelty. The only lesson I can take from it is to grab joy at any and every opportunity. Even in the midst of our darkest misery try to see the wondrous beauty that is existing simultaneously with the horror.
I am a patriot. I love this country. It’s a disappointing mess ruled by greed and discrimination but built into its foundation is room for hope and change. Living in the town that hosts the oldest 4th of July parade in the country is great. The 4th of July celebration reminds me of senior week in college. Those few days between the end of classes and graduation were filled with parties and friends every night. The 4th of July celebration has concerts every night, the orange crate derby, fireworks, a parade, a tennis tournament, and so many other events. All those events include spending time with friends. It’s a time outside of our normal reality. We don’t usually get to spend day after day with our friends. We’re too busy with work and other obligations.
It’s hard not to eat ice cream in the summer and it’s easy to drink too many beers on a hot summer afternoon after mowing the lawn.
I am highly entertained by musicians who make funny faces while they play their instruments. And while we’re talking about it, music is art in action. If you read a book or a poem or look at a painting, the work has already been done. The music was written without an audience but the performance of the music is a living thing existing for that moment in front of the audience.
I still love that summertime is baseball season.
There is no good and bad. There are only ups, downs, twists and turns that require a mindful navigator.
We don’t often see things this way but we can frame our interactions with the world and other people differently. I play tennis with a guy who can be a jerk. He likes to compliment his shots and laugh at or point out other’s misses. A few weeks ago he continued to hit high looping balls over the net to me and I continued to try to smash an overhead shot back. I kept missing. After a few of these exchanges, he laughed and said something about how he was luring me into those errors with his high shots. I didn’t respond. I wasn’t surprised by his point of view. But I saw it differently. We weren’t playing in a tournament or in a league match. There was nothing at stake. It was just practice. I am capable of hitting those overhead shots well. I’m capable of hitting a lot of shots on the court well, but the percentage of time that I actually do it is low. To me, he wasn’t luring me in, he was giving me chances to practice that overhead shot. Why I am telling you this? As parents we deal with repetitive behavior from our kids. And sometimes we adjust and handle it better as we repeat the cycle but sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we get frustrated that we’re in the same situation over and over again and it makes it even more difficult to keep our emotions in check and to handle it well. But what if we saw these behaviors from our kids like high lobs coming over the net in tennis? It’s just a chance for us to practice that shot. Damn, that changes things. To take this tennis analogy one step further…a big thing in tennis is to be able to leave the previous point in the past and move on to the next point. If you’re still feeling frustrated from the last point or down on yourself for making a mistake then you aren’t fully focused on the point that is about to be played. Any interaction with other people throughout our day that is annoying, frustrating or negative in any way can be like this. We wonder why someone said what they said or thought what they thought. We tell the story to the friend we see next or we go back to our coworker and complain about how the person acted. But what if we treated all these interactions like a point in a tennis match? What if we just immediately dropped it and created a blank slate to start the next interaction? We would feel better. The residual negative emotions from all these interactions would no longer be piling up on us. We’d be starting fresh every time instead and at the end of the day we’d probably feel lighter and less tired because we wouldn’t be carrying around that pile of negativity and frustration all day long.
“We’re living and working thru the collapse of an empire.” -AB That feels like an accurate statement to me. Anyone who works for a big company knows what a shit show these companies are. They don’t care about their customers or their employees. The CEO and executive board care about maximizing their bonuses and keeping the shareholders happy. Fun fact: Shareholders don’t give a shit about the company in any real way. They just want the stock price to go up or the dividend yield to go up. Letting their opinion determine how a company is run is a recipe for disaster. And how about the country in general? Have you looked at any headlines lately? It feels like the Earth is fighting back against us dumb humans trying to eliminate us. The news and media outlets haven’t been interested in serving the public by providing facts and information for a long time. They are interested in clicks and ratings. They show us the extremes of human behavior and the extremes of social/political ideologies. Those extremes, on both sides, are scary. It appears that no one with any power, whether it’s political power, monetary power or media power, cares about anything but their own selfish agendas. We’re in a predicament. We have access to so much information and we can see the facts laid before us. It doesn’t seem like a big exaggeration to conclude that we are speeding toward Armageddon. But we are mostly powerless. It’s like being a citizen of the Roman Empire. Who cares about the drama among leadership in Rome when it’s so removed from what matters in our daily lives? Their bullshit seems so meaningless and unimportant. And most of our “leaders” aren’t likable, believable, or trustworthy. So, we are simultaneously spectators and participants in the collapse of the American Empire but we have no real power to prevent the collapse.
but our show began with karma as well. I got a random email months ago telling me that I had access to a presale for Taylor Swift. One of our credit cards was a sponsor of the tour. I didn’t think too hard about how many other people must have also received that email. I just shot out a text to a bunch of guys I’m friends with asking if they had a kid who’d be interested. Surprisingly, only one said yes and he had access to a presale too.
He’d seen T. Swift with his daughter on the last tour. As a previous attendee he got invited to an earlier presale than mine. By now, even if you don’t care for T. Swift, you are likely aware of the difficulties that arose with the ticket purchasing experience. As it turned out, we would not have been able to purchase any tickets with my presale. But my friend got tickets. Two for us and three for them. He was planning to bring his eighth grade daughter and one of her friends. I would tag along with my fifth grade daughter. I was scheduled to work that day but that was just a detail to be sorted out.
Getting the tickets should have been the hard part but there were two big twists still to come. The twists are a story of their own so for now we’ll just stick to the impact of those twists. My daughter had to be sixty miles away in a different direction at 7:45am on the morning of the concert. My friend’s daughter would not be able to attend at all.
New plan: my daughter and I would be up at 5am, on the road at 6am and then have to get it together later to get to the concert. The other three tickets would still include the friend who was in on the original plan plus two other eighth graders (without another adult). Of these three young women, I only knew one and not well. In fact, it had been years since I’d seen her although I still considered her parents as friends.
As the concert date approached the other parents began to have thoughts about their daughters making their way through the crowd of 65,000 people into and out of the concert. (You see where this is going?) I was asked to step up. But we already had a long day and we weren’t sure when we’d be able to get to the stadium even though we hoped to get there early. Not everyone shows up to a concert at the same time but everyone leaves at the same time. The bigger crowd and bigger chaos would be after the show. I’d be able to help with that.
Fast forward. We got to the show later than we would have liked but still well before Taylor Swift took the stage. Our three young lady neighbors were in their seats when we arrived. It was raining. And it kept raining. There were lulls and even when it was raining hard it wasn’t a true downpour. Until the last couple of songs. It really started to come down near the end of the show. By the end, no one was dry.
I hadn’t talked to our three companions much. I wasn’t sure if they were even told that I’d be walking them to their pickup car. I didn’t know two of them at all and the third I barely knew. I thought I’d introduce myself to them when we got there but they were their own group of three and didn’t seem interested in us. My daughter and I were tired, arriving later than we’d hoped and it was already raining. I didn’t want to intrude on the independent adventure of the other girls either. Looking back on it, they are eighth graders and I am an adult man that they didn’t know. It was really on me to break the ice and I probably should have just introduced myself. But it was ok. They had their night out on their own without me bothering them.
When the concert ended, I just said to the girl I knew that I told her mom that I’d make sure they got to the car. No big deal. We walked down the stairs together then down the ramps with the mass of other people. A few times it took a little effort to stay together but it was pretty easy. When we were out of the stadium but close enough to it that we were still in the midst of a big crowd, one of the girls I didn’t know stopped, looked around, and said “Where’s Shawn?”. I was right behind her where I was supposed to be.
That was the moment. They did know that the plan was for me to walk with them and as much as they may have enjoyed going to the concert on their own, when they were tired, at the end of the night, walking in the rain, through that crowd, not really knowing where they were going, they wanted to have an adult with them. I was glad I was there.
After we found their ride, my daughter and I still had to get back to our vehicle. As we got closer to where we had parked, we were rewarded with the sound of frogs. There were little ponds from the collected run off of the parking lots. We had parked on the end of the last row in the lot. I thought it would be easy to get out but they had wood barriers blocking the way to the road I came in on so I would have to go all the way through the parking lot. We were not first. We were last.
The road that was blocked to me went through the middle of what was two lots and kept going beyond our last row of cars. When we parked, there were two police vehicles stopping cars from going any farther down the road beyond the parking lots. I asked one of the officers if that road would be opened and we’d be able to sneak out after the concert. He said it was a new road and he didn’t know but he thought they’d make us go back out the way we came in. And that’s what we found as we walked back up that road at the end of the night. The two police vehicles were still blocking the road and the barriers were blocking me from accessing that road anyway.
Cars were already lined up just sitting amidst the parked cars not going anywhere. We had to deal with ourselves being soaked and trying to get more comfortable. My daughter fell asleep quickly in the back seat and I was prepared to just sit for an hour or two. But after a few minutes the police vehicles left. And a few minutes later a little cart with parking employees moved those wooden barriers that were right next to me blocking my way out and they exited down the road that the police had been blocking. That was it. I started the engine and took off. Our windows were all fogged up but I wanted to escape before everyone else noticed that this back exit had opened up.
My excitement ended quickly as I didn’t get very far before stopping and turning off the engine behind a line of other cars. But from the time I sat behind the wheel of my truck expecting to wait forever to the time I pulled out on the main road was only 50 to 60 minutes.
So, we had a little karma of our own. By trying to share my presale with others I ended up in an even better presale and that’s how we got tickets. Then at the end of the night, if we had gone straight back to our vehicle maybe I would have been tempted to pull out of our parking spot and get into what would have appeared to be a shorter line to leave. I would have been stuck in that line and missed the escape out of the back of the parking lot that opened up later.
I got to bed at 3am but still had to work that morning. No surprise that I left for work later than I should have. Pulling out of the driveway I noticed a white iris blooming. This iris comes up every year but rarely blooms. It wasn’t blooming when we left at 6am the day before. All that rain woke it up. Then on the main road to the bridge out of town I would have been speeding to get to work but the driver of the white SUV in front of me kept us at the speed limit. The police were waiting in one of their usual spots. I would’ve been pulled over if that SUV wasn’t in front of me.
One more thing. Since we didn’t get to the concert early, we missed out on people exchanging the friendship bracelets they’d made. My daughter didn’t know about that tradition early enough to make any bracelets but I’d hoped she’d receive a bracelet at the show. We got to our seats and had totally forgotten about that and realized later that we missed our chance. But at some point in the show, the person behind my daughter in section 315 row 15 tapped her on the shoulder and gave her a bracelet. Thank you to that Swiftie for your generosity. I expect that karma will come back around for you too.
There is a fundamental flaw in a society that loves an imaginary right more than the lives of its citizens.
This is the Second Amendment: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. The first thing it states is “a well regulated Militia”. “Well regulated”, not a free for all.
There is also a longer history of gun control in our country than anyone now seems to remember. The propaganda about gun rights ignores the truth of the past.
Many of the same people who are banning abortion in their quest to protect life are also opposing gun control. How do they decide which lives to protect? Only the ones that are convenient for them perhaps.
My inability to find time and headspace to further develop any of the thoughts and ideas I have continues. I have recently diagnosed the cause of this but it is not within my power to change it. In the meantime, here are some quick hits.
There are some problems and situations that we can’t really help other people with. They have to help themselves.
Some things we encounter in life are hard to handle. They are even harder to accept, but when we do accept them they become less hard to handle.
Accepting something does not mean that we suddenly like it. It does not mean that this thing doesn’t still suck or that it won’t still be hard. Maybe incredibly hard. Accepting means that we see things for what they are. We are no longer surprised by it, we are no longer asking “why?” or telling ourselves that things shouldn’t be this way. Accepting means we see what’s in front of us and deal with it without all that extra emotion and baggage. We may still suffer but we will suffer less than we would if we continued to resist it.
I just saw a little video clip where this guy is explaining that our brain doesn’t understand negatives. His example: “Don’t think of an elephant.” You just thought of an elephant, right? His second example was telling someone skiing through the trees not to hit a tree. All the skier will see is the trees. But if you say to look for the path & follow the snow, then instead of looking for trees the skier is looking for the path through the trees. He took this further by saying that if we are focused on obstacles in our lives we will only see obstacles. But if we are focused on the path then we will see the way around those obstacles.
I have discovered that the special gift of middle age is that even when there is no major stressor in our life we can still feel an underlying stress. Middle age has it all: job, kids, spouse/significant other, maybe health problems or money issues, maybe aging parents. So even when there’s not one big thing to be stressed about, there’s still an undercurrent of stress.
It seems like people gravitate to one extreme or the other but there’s always so much room in the middle. If we tried I bet we could find a place somewhere in the middle where we’d both be comfortable enough.
Time does not operate the way we’ve been told. I wonder if there is any past or future at all or if it’s all just happening at once.
If we stay comfortable and never bump up against our limits or push past our limits, then we aren’t going to learn or grow too much. It might even be boring. The hardest moments, when we feel like we have nothing left and we may not even know what to do, are the moments where the treasure is buried. But you’ve gotta dig to find that treasure.
In our lives, if we wait for a moment of calmness, if we wait to have everything crossed off our to do list, if we wait until everything is in its place, we will always be waiting. We have to create the eye of the storm.
I am not a collector. I don’t like “stuff”. But it’s good to be a people collector. Instead of leaving people behind as we move from one place to another, one job to another, one phase of our life to another, we should instead add people to our collection. Keep that collection growing. It takes a little effort to add someone to your collection. It doesn’t just happen. It’s worth the effort.
Postcards are an easy, fun way to stay in touch with the people you’ve collected.
Is there any relationship more complicated, complex, heavy, twisted up on itself and potent than the parent-child relationship?
Feeling good for a moment can happen on its own. We may receive a gift, get good news or be at a fun event with friends. But to feel good for longer, to have a sustained feeling of good through our lives requires cultivation. It is created by the way we live from day to day and all the little choices we make. We all know what we need to do. Get enough sleep, eat well, be physically active, spend time with friends, and have a way to calm our minds and deal with stress like meditation or prayer.
If you treat someone decently they are likely to treat you decently in return. If you are adversarial…
It’s so easy to be swept away and carried along through life. We are distracted and over-scheduled. We are detached from real life by screens and notifications. We are separated from the real world by where we spend our time: climate controlled building to climate controlled vehicle into another climate controlled building.
It takes an effort to pause and notice where we are, what we’re doing or even who we are. Is who we are something that we are actively aware of and steering or is who we are just another thing that’s happening to us? Another product of being swept away and carried along?
That’s fucked up. But if we just let life happen to us then who we are is more about these external forces and distractions than it is about what we really want and how we really want to live. If we aren’t noticing where we are and how we are acting and what we are doing then every moment just becomes a white noise filled blur. We look back and wonder how we got here.
That protective plastic film that comes on our new watch or new screen is supposed to be peeled off. If we don’t consciously engage in the moment in which we are living our autopilot will take over for us. But our autopilot is like that plastic film. We are supposed to turn off autopilot and engage with our life.
At any moment during the day we can come back to our breath to reset, to become aware and in touch with the present moment. We can pause. When we pause we can remind ourselves that we are choosing the life we are living. We choose every moment over and over again. By not consciously choosing we are giving up our chance to direct our lives. When we come back to our breath we can ask ourselves what life do I want to live? Do I want to be positive and happy? In that second, we can regroup and change course. It doesn’t matter what happened in the second before.
That’s something we get hung up on. We think that it does matter what happened in the second before. If we do try to tune in and take back the controls from our autopilot, we become stuck or hindered by what has already happened or what we’ve already done. But that’s over now. You can change course at any moment.
Every moment, all day long, everyday, day after day, we can choose our life and who we are. If we do not, life will still go on and we will fumble along on autopilot. But if we want to be who we want to be and be engaged in our life then we have to wake up and pay attention. All the noise and details we are often paying attention to are actually distractions from what we should be paying attention to.
Christmas made me sad this year. Not all day but it’s the destination that I finally arrived at. Nothing stays the same and even the way we feel about and experience holidays changes over the course of our lives.
Christmas this year was pretty smooth. A nice family time. No real drama. Our kids are still young enough that Christmas is fun and they’re into it but they are old enough that we all know what’s happening. The “magic” is gone.
I’m not sure that I like that last sentence but I don’t know how else to word it. I think getting together with people that you love and the act of giving them a gift is pretty magical. But it’s a fine line between that positive experience and the obligation and commercialism of it all.
Anyway, Christmas this year wasn’t stressful. It was easy to enjoy. But as the day progressed, the kids went off to do their thing with their new gifts and as an adult I was left in limbo. It’s good to have a day to chill out and relax, but Thanksgiving is like that too. Christmas has a different feel than Thanksgiving. It was the second half of the day let down. The “now what?” feeling when the presents have been opened and the fun part of the day is over.
Eventually, during that limbo part of the day, my mind began to think about all the people who would be part of the Christmas magic for me but are now gone. I really try to force myself to see the positive side of these remembrances. When it’s the birthday of someone I love that has died, I remind myself that instead of being sad that they are gone I can just as easily be happy that I have the excuse to think about them and remember them. And thinking like that kept me from feeling miserable this Christmas but it didn’t snap me out of the melancholy.
I thought back to what past Christmases were like for me. As a kid, it was all about the presents and maybe seeing some family, but as the day went on I would just play with my presents and maybe we’d play a family game or something. As I got a little older, I’d go out with friends or a girlfriend on Christmas night. I’d escape the limbo of just sitting around the house. I definitely went to see a movie a few times on Christmas night. Then as I got older, I’d go out to a bar. I know that there were a few years, when the Chicago Bulls were really good, that they’d play a Bulls game on Christmas and even though sports isn’t very Christmasy, it was still a fun thing to do at the end of the day.
This year we did end up playing some family games so we came back together and enjoyed each other’s company. And my wife and I wait until the end of the day to give each other our stockings alone, just the two of us. We don’t get big gifts for each other. We do stockings for each other with smaller, fun gifts. And that was a nice moment in the evening toward the end of the day. It’s a moment together to appreciate what we’ve got and what we’ve been through and it is a chill, meaningful way to wrap up the day.
But even the family games and quiet, private moment with my wife didn’t completely extinguish the tinge of sadness for me this year. The day was unexpectedly smooth. I couldn’t have hoped for it to go better. Maybe that’s what created the space in my emotions to find that sadness. I wasn’t already worn out by some drama or unpleasant family moment. Maybe it’s just weird to be middle-aged and I’m still getting used to it. Whatever the cause, there was a sadness around the edges of Christmas and it felt strange since it really was such a good day.
What do we learn from winning or success? Pain is often a better teacher. It’s not as much fun to learn from pain or failure but the opportunity to learn is bigger than it is with our successes.
When we are lying on the ground gasping for breath there’s something to learn. Whether we are alone, there is someone leaning over offering their hand, or someone kicking us in the ribs, that is a point of view full of lessons.
Whether we see it that way depends on the story we are telling ourself. Our minds create a story to narrate our lives. In your story are you a victim or the hero? While a victim looks for blame and feels sorry for themselves engaging in self-sabotage by saying to themselves “I am not smart enough. I am not good enough. I can never do this. Life is not fair.“ The hero looks for things to learn, ways to improve and ways to grow. The hero does not look for something/someone to blame and is not afraid to self-critique.
A victim will look up from the bottom and only see the depth of the hole they are in. The hero will look for a way out and, although the climb may be difficult, they see the opportunity.
