If you’ve been following me, you know that the last time I did this I was recovering from a whole-brain information overload after my latest foray into Crypto-World.

It was a bit messy.  I retreated into my comfort zone, taking solace in the Hawaiian real-old style, a beautiful self-indulgence, I thought.  (I sure enjoyed it.)

You can dive into the last post by clicking on the button below:

AND THEN FURTHER THOUGHTS ENSUED

However, a little later, after I had regained my equilibrium, it occurred to me that the video that sprained my head was actually pointing me towards another pathway to explore.

It led me to another question – one, I am sure, most people ruminate on when they’ve met and, maybe, exceeded their most puissant goals and achieved their way-out-there Ultima Thule lifestyle.

“Happily-ever-after” can stretch out for a long, long time if you finish your hero’s journey and zoom past the finish line way ahead of schedule, it seems to me.

After you’ve reached the pinnacle of the mountain you set off to climb and achieved that lifestyle you’ve been drooling over, the one you’ve strived so hard to achieve, WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Okay.  Here’s the deal:  I’m gonna try this one again….

HERE GOES….

Poets are peculiar people.  We feed ourselves on words.  I heard a phrase recently that struck me as a truth: “Lifestyle is the answer to everything.”

It was Raoul Pal who said it.  Pal is a former hedge fund manager, economist and investment strategist who retired at 36 and is now bent on sharing his knowledge of the world of money and high finance with the rest of us bobos.  His Real Vision company is an on-demand financial TV channel that features interviews with many of the top financial thought-leaders in the world.

Pal was talking to entrepreneur Tom Bilyeu in a podcast, “Everything You Need to Know About CRYPTO, and How to Gain Wealth in the Bitcoin Revolution,” produced by Bilyeu’s media company, Impact Theory.

The podcast has been uploaded to YouTube and is also on Spotify and as an Apple Podcast.

Bilyeu co-founded Quest Nutrition (an international seven-figure company selling healthful snack bars and such.)  The media company he leads today is working on helping everybody ramp up their mindsets to get past what he calls being “defined by your zipcode.”  (Bilyeu has often pointed out that it may not matter if you are incredibly talented and multi-skilled if you live in a place where there are no opportunities available for you to shine or even to share what you can do.)

Click on the button below if you’d like to experience the talk-story between these two power-houses.  It is a good start on at least getting a (sort-of) handle on the Bitcoin thing, I am thinking.  Both guys are heartful dudes.

(Be warned:  the video is over an hour-and-a-half of densely packed and very lively conversation.)

I came upon the video because I was trying to get my not-so-savvy head around the cryptocurrency phenomenon and was not having much success.  When I tried reading the “Dummy” book about it I got so lost I gave up.

However, I did find it interesting how during the video interview, these magi lit up when they crowed about how their new game is allowing them to get in on the start of a newly constructed paradigm that could be the beginning of a sea-change in the existing money and financial systems as we know it.

Pal and Bilyeu don’t know where this new form of value exchange is going, but they seem to be thrilled that they’ve been able to get on the bus.

In their conversation, Pal expanded on his lifestyle comment: “To be rich is not a future state.  To have the lifestyle that you want is the future state…and that can be anything.”

They have also both built the lives they wanted and are in the middle of living those lives.  The Bitcoin thing is just an add-on for them and is a way for them to stretch their wings and fly higher and faster than they have before.

It occurred to me that these financial magi are involved in an effort to transcend the ages-old concepts and systems that have been set in place and have been in play for many generations now to facilitate the economic well-being of our modern-day world.

It’s also important to keep in mind that both Bilyeu and Pal have had a great deal of experience and success in learning and playing the current money and power games that are predicated on making connections with others by using symbols that represented a certain agreed-upon value.

Other models and iterations are getting born.  And, as always, the scams surrounding these new complexities are also ramping up.

Bitcoin is already changing the ways some of us go about trading one valuable thing for another valuable thing.  It is being rapidly embraced by a lot of people all over the world and has gotten huge.

As a poet, however, I did start thinking on a whole bunch of other stuff besides little bits and bytes and the multiplicative powers thereof.

WHAT THE MAGI TAUGHT ME

It seems to me that these guys are really showing us that if you make the effort to stay awake and aware as you build the world of your dreams, then you have also built an awesome set of often-rare skills and gathered together a really cool set of tools that you can use again and again to keep on building more and more worlds.

This all gives me hope that life never has to get dull, even when you get to your Heaven.

All you have to do is look in the mechanic’s toolbox, he said.  If the guy has a plethora of tools with a lot of wear and tear on them and he knows how to use (and abuse) every one of the tools well and the results he gets are mostly good, then you’ve found the gear-head of your dreams and can get on with rebuilding that wreck you’re restoring.

Hmmm….

Here’s a poem:

ANOTHER DAY

Dull ache radiates from my lower back, neck too stiff to turn.

Here’s another day spent trusting invisible means of support.

High cliffs rising, sheer earth-bone walls.

Look at the trees clinging to the edges of tomorrow-dreams.

Electronic boxes blather out new clichés of yet another

Little “peace action”, of downturns, shakeups, upswings.

Brother warrior standing still, wary, waiting for your move.

A pause…in-gathering…then a quick jab passes through his imperfectly accepting hands…first touch.

‘Iwa bird, thunder bird, flying high, poised in omen.

Storm-time coming – clouds obscuring clearness of sharpest blue.

Beloved face gone blank and still, puzzling over some conundrum

As he wanders down yet another path he is reluctant to share.

The Needle at ‘Iao has no eye,

But, then, we have no camels.

Another day, another dollar

Or some other reasonable facsimile.

By Netta Kanoho

Header photo credit:  “Bitcoin” by Zach Copley via Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.0]

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE:

(Click on each of the post titles below and see where it takes you….)

• NAVIGATOR MINDSET
• REVIEW: #GirlBoss
• WHAT DOES WEALTH MEAN TO ME?

……

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post BEYOND “EVER-AFTER” (LIFESTYLE 2) first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

ACK!  I’ve been wandering around, lost, in the Bitcoin virtual currency world these past few weeks in (another) failed attempt to understand what the heck is going on with that.

I chose very good virtual teachers, I thought.  The guys are brilliant money-meisters and entrepreneurs who are plenty smart and all kinds of savvy.  They seem to be heartful dudes and they know how to talk to the clueless.  They are most enthusiastic about this newest of financial games.

I could handle it for an hour-and-a-half video, right?  Not.

I shoulda seen it coming.  I mean, I threw the Bitcoin “Dummy” book against a wall.  When I asked a young friend who was playing around in there to talk to me about it, I realized I didn’t even know enough to ask the right questions.  He giggled.

I wandered around that place in that little black box and now I’ve got a sort of hazy blur of an outline of this thing that may be likely to replace (or at least run concurrently with) our world’s centuries-old systems of value exchanging and such.

To me, it looks like a manga movie.

What I am seeing in my mind’s eye is the inside of an electrical storm in space with heavy-duty dust clouds and lots of lights flashing, replete with thundering zap and pow noises and an annoyingly repetitive voice-over sound track plus bleeping noises for the special effects.

There are a bunch of guys in spacesuits with jetpacks flying around among these weird-looking floating blocks that are moving around very fast – zooming up and free-falling down or getting shoved sideways. The landscape morphs and the blocks disintegrate and reform or merge together with little rhyme or reason.

The little guys seem to be mining something in there and they carry off bits of the blocks to go stack them someplace or other.  There are even little dudes with black robes who look like they are doing somehow-nefarious things.

The thundering noises I am hearing in this mockup are the blocks crashing and clashing and some of those little flying guys are getting squished between them.  It looks dangerous in there.

Sheesh!  I am still suffering through the aftermath of massive brain overload and the only thing I’ve got to show for it is a dumb cartoon.  (OUCH!  That hurt!)

I do not think that I am one of those people who can get good at living in a Tetris game.

BACK TO THE REAL OLD-STYLE

After turning my mind into a veritable pretzel sans mustard, I settled myself down into re-reading a book that focuses on native Hawaiian ways of exchanging value and connecting with people who had little to do with money or the various iterations of digital money-substitutes.

It was very soothing, that.

For me, the best thing about it is that it moves slow.

This book is in its third printing now.  (Mine is a first edition, published in 2003.)  It is a mind-boggle of a different sort.

Meyer is the Director of Indigenous Education at UH West Oahu.  She is an internationally known native scholar and cultural practitioner whose work has focused on the discipline of epistemology, which is basically a branch of philosophy that studies the nature, origins, and limits of knowledge and belief.

Some people call epistemology “the theory of knowledge.”

Meyer has spent her whole time as an educator working on trying to incorporate and integrate Hawaiian and Polynesian cultural values into the existing public and private educational systems in the Pacific.

Dizzy from the magi-thoughts and my micro-visit into digital money world, I sat there re-reading the “About the Author” section at the end of the book where Meyer talks about her mentors and teachers as a child growing up as the fifth daughter in a family of seven children.

(Most Hawaiian cultural practitioners tend to acknowledge and honor the teachers who inspired them to set clear intentions, choose the directions of their actions, and then accomplish their goals.)

Besides the humans of her very large extended family, Meyer says, she received her earliest lessons from the natural elements of the land that surrounded them:

“Beauty was our mentor and I had a love affair with the ocean and early morning sunrises…. Pōhaku (stones) have taught me how to live – I am animated with their presence.  Water teaches me about wealth.  Wind teaches me about friendship….”

(Obviously, the lady’s a bit of a poet.  But then, so are many other Hawaiians.)

They did, however, have complex and embedded ways of relating to each other and to their island worlds that worked about as well as the money and the science and technology thing has in ours.

Rather than being enamored by the progressions and behavior of numbers and data and the left-brained “rational” world of objectivity and logic and such, Hawaiians were ruled by metaphors and story and by the senses, emotions and physicality of their bodies as well as by their keen observations of the world around them.

Words and methods for gaining useful insights and understandings that came from their ways of sussing out and learning how to do new-to-them things were an integral part of the Hawaiian culture.

THE MAKING OF A STONE CARVER

I was reminded of the way my late husband Fred (who was three-quarters Hawaiian) grew into an expert carver of Hawaiian stone implements.

Like every other Hawaiian guy, Fred wanted his very own poi pounder…just ‘cause.  I refused to let him buy an old one.  (You want to spend HOW much for an old ROCK?)

The stubborn man decided to make one for himself.  Since there were no master stone carvers in our circle, he grabbed a rock he had picked up on the beach and started whaling away at it with a welding slag hammer and his own two hands.

Fred was a master auto body-and-fender guy, so he knew how to use various sorts of hammers and pounding things into shape was not new to him.  He’d say, “The old people did this.  I can too.  The stone will teach me.”

He was right.  All it took was years of repeatedly pounding on more and more beach rocks.  Eventually he figured out how to use the stones themselves to shape other rocks.

There is an old saying that goes, “The best way to find old knowledge is to use old doors.”  Fred literally pounded on a very old door until it opened for him.  He had a lot of fun along the way.

[The image above, by photographer Masako Cordray, shows Fred’s hands as he worked with a stone ball and a stone bowl, using the rocks to shape each other.  In the background there is one of the poi pounders he was working on as well.]

TAKING IT SLOW AND MAKING IT GO

This foray back into the real old-style world also reminded me that there are many different ongoing attempts at and explorations of the old Hawaiian and Oceanic cultural ways of doing things that are happening right now.

Much of the impetus and direction of these projects grew out of the work done by Meyer and other deep-thinking ocean-people illuminating the concepts that are an underlay for the real-old style of Oceanic living and for being a human being connected to self, to other people and to the worlds that surround us all.

One of my favorites is the explorations about caring for and making use of the natural land and ocean resources in one section of my home-island that is spearheaded by the Lind ‘ohana (extended family) in Kipahulu, Maui.

Author and indigenous scholar Emalani Case, in her 2021 book EVERYTHING ANCIENT WAS ONCE NEW:  Indigenous Persistence from Hawai’i to Kahiki, expounds on the phrase, “aloha ‘aina”, which is used by modern-day Hawaiians to describe a way of living and consciously working towards protecting the place we call home.

She credits the late Kekuni Blaisdell, former professor emeritus of medicine at the University of Hawaii and an acknowledged thought-leader for the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, with setting the parameters for this way of thinking.

Blaisdell was fond of explaining that ‘aina means “that which feeds;” and that, therefore, “aloha ‘aina” means “loving that which feeds us.”  Blaisdell’s basic definition was expanded out to include the land beneath us, all of the waters on and under the land, all of the seas and the air surrounding it, the heavens above it, and beyond.

Honoring and protecting all of the sources that sustain and nurture us humans, he said, are encompassed and contained in the “aloha ‘aina” mindset.

In the early 1990s, John Lind (Uncle John) and his wife Glenna Ann (who is almost universally known as “Auntie Tweetie”) and their friend Mike Minn began the work of restoring old taro lo’i (patches) in the Kapahu area of Kipahulu near ‘Ohe’o stream on land that had been worked by generations of the Lind family.

In order to continue and expand the work they were doing, the trio established the Kīpahulu ‘Ohana, a grassroots nonprofit, in 1995.  The Kīpahulu ‘Ohana entered into a formal cooperative agreement with the Haleakala National Park for the management of what became known as the Kapahu Living Farm.

This traditional taro farm became a springboard for a number of other sustainable culturally-based agricultural and resource management projects that are designed primarily to honor and enhance both the traditional and more modern practices and concepts held by Hawaiian farmers, fishermen and hunter-gatherers and to educate others about them as well.

The following 2021 YouTube video, “Kīpahulu ‘Ohana Virtual Huaka’i,” was created by a group of middle-school students from Hana School on the island of Maui and uploaded by the Maui Huliau Foundation.  These students visited the Farm and were introduced to several of the group’s ongoing projects.

The work begun by the Linds has continued for almost three decades now.  There have been other successful, (and even award-winning) collaborative efforts and projects with different organizations and agencies that grew out of that first collaboration with the National Park Service.  It keeps on evolving.

You can click the button below to access the ‘Ohana’s website to learn more about what they are doing.

FINAL THOUGHTS

An ancient Hawaiian proverb says, “In the word is life; in the word is death.”  That remains a truth, I think.

The Hawaiians in the featured video use different systems and ways of thinking to help them live with nature and to interact with the human and spirit worlds surrounding them than the ones used by the master entrepreneurs and money-meisters in the video that bent my head.

For all of them, however, all of their learning and a lot of their efforts begin with a single word.  The magi in the Bitcom video would probably say their initiating word for the moves they are making is “survival.”  The same word also inspires the efforts of the Lind ‘ohana.

The lifestyles they lead as a result of their efforts are very different.

Here’s a poem:

YOU THINK YOU KNOW ME

With my smiling eyes, my happy words,

The smokescreen I’ve been taught to wield

Fogs your mind and keeps me safe.

The Happy Native, that’s me: 

The Eaten One.

I have been

Colonized…

Assimilated…

A simulated you.

A paper doll, I am,

With packets of clothes just like yours

And all the best accessories

(Or imitations thereof).

I am a clever little bird,

Trying hard to be like you,

And not quite making it.

I am domesticated, docile and demure…

An ersatz-you, really.

Cute, huh?

You think you know me.

Good.

Keep thinking that.

My ancestors still walk behind me;

I can feel them at my back.

They are in the land that owns me,

This land I will not abandon,

Despite your desecration,

Despite your condescension,

Despite your lack of breath.

My descendants walk before me

And they will dance and sing.

It does not matter what you think me,

For I am only one in a procession

And we are making human beings.

I don’t really care what you’re making.

By Netta Kanoho

Header Photo Credit:  “Light is good from whatever lamp it shines” by Nattu via Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE

(Click on each of the post titles below and see where it takes you.)

• YOUR TURN TO TRY
• HOW TO LIVE WISDOM
• INDEPENDENCE, HAWAIIAN-STYLE

……

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post BEYOND STUFF-LOVE (PART 5): Lifestyle first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

Oh, finally!  After beaucoup years of nonsense about “finding your passion” and “following your bliss,” people of influence are finally telling us more ordinary sorts a better truth.

Passion is not a path.  Passion is not a guidepost.  Passion is really not a will-o-the-wisp phosphorescent light that dances ahead of you and maybe leads you into a bog or something.

Passion is a feeling.  It comes, it goes, it morphs, it grows.  And, more than anything (like every other human feeling), passion is a go-juice you can use to make your moves in the world.

ABOUT THE WORD “PASSION”

For years now “passion” has been a word that postmodern pop self-help psychologies and the human resource contingent have embraced.

Running with it, they have been dragging the lot of us all over the landscape looking for that special source of personal motivation that will spark up a certain intensity of feeling that will somehow give extraordinary meaning to our existence as we know it.

It makes more sense when you understand that at one time “suffer” used to just mean “to undergo.”

It’s interesting to note that the ordeal that Jesus the Christ went through during his last days on earth (leading up to and beyond his crucifixion and then resurrection) was dubbed as the “passion of Christ” in early Latin translations of the Bible beginning in the 2^nd century CE.

Poets kept playing with the word until, by the end of the 16^th century “passion” came to signify some uncontrollable emotion like rage or a strong sexual attraction or deep love.

Poetic passion involves a lot of trauma and drama and make the best kinds of stories that you really don’t want to have to live through.  Many popular writers and poets down through the centuries sure had a lot of fun with it.

THE PASSION “PROMISE” IS A CON

These days we are assured by many self-help mavens and other celebrities offering a profundity of life-advice (mostly in graduation and other motivational speeches) that if we look hard enough we’re supposed to be able to find this “passion” thing somehow.

For years now they’ve been telling us that if we do find some passion or other and then pour it into the work we do in the world then the world will make a stellar sort of sense, our ducks will all line up, and our lives will go along swimmingly ever more.

Yeah, right.

We are further assured that mixing in passion with our work would rev up our disengaged and limping motivational engines and miraculously fix our unproductive “bad” attitudes post-haste.

Mostly it did not quite work out that way.

For one thing, passion isn’t a something that you “find.”  It’s already there in you (or it’s not).

However, where the passion “promise” really went wonky was when the human resources contingent got ahold of it and started beating us over the head with the thing.

They tend to quote some fake Confucius thing: “Do the work you love and you will never work again.”

Ummm…guys, for real, there are jobs that need to be done that nobody can love.  They still have to be done and somebody’s gotta do them.  And, sometimes, that somebody is you.

Deeply held passions do help you find grand directions to explore and passion can help you get through the parts that suck.  What it doesn’t do is magically make the suck go away.

Even worse, you may get some nasty shocks when you reach the top of your beloved mountain and can see all the other higher mountains to be conquered in the distance.

ARGH!

PASSION AS DREAM-REALIZATION FUEL

Myself, I’ve always tended to follow the poets.  I believe their take on the word “passion” – that it is a deeply felt emotion as well as a source of turmoil, chaos, and change — is more right than not.

I also believe the smarty pants who’ve studied such things and say that all of our very human emotions are the most readily available kinds of fuel we can access for moving our butts around in this old world.

Because of this, I’ve come to the conclusion that passion its-own-self is like high-grade fuel.  In my world, passion is just another kind of “go-juice.”

Robbins’ most important takeaway is this: “Passion is the energy that you bring to everything that you do.”  It’s not what you do; it’s HOW you do it.

It makes sense, that.

As far as I can tell, in order to develop your own personal mana and refine your power of agency and your ability to just do stuff that’s focused on making your dreams come real you probably need to have a large holding capacity for passion (and even that can be grown).

Some folks come into the world with huge reservoirs of passion and have intense emotions and feelings just oozing out of them; other people, not so much.

(Those who we may consider “mad” are more likely to be wannabe visionaries who fail to focus or control their accumulated cache of passions, but that’s another story.)

Recognized visionaries of various sorts in more recent times have pointed out how passions can, indeed, fuel our own makings.

Harriet Tubman once told us, “Every great dream starts with a dreamer.  Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.”

Nelson Mandela pointed out, “There is no passion to be found in playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”

Steve Jobs once said, “You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right.  If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out.”

The caveat to all that is the one about not letting your passions push you around in directions you really don’t want to go.  As Ben Franklin once advised, “If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.”

Old Ben (a.k.a. The Pragmatic One) did have a point.  Passion can be an inflammable and most destructive thing.  (Just ask the poets and the storytellers.)

The trick, if you’re going to follow Old Ben’s advice, is not to let reason dampen down and smother the fire it helps you generate.  (You don’t want to run out of steam, ya know.)

THE GROWTH AND FEEDING OF PASSIONS:  LEARN SOMETHING

The cool part in all this passion stuff is that you can develop a passion for anything by concentrating your attention on some fascinating-to-you bit of the world or other.  The feeling of passion is often compounded by your stores of knowledge and the insights and understandings you’ve collected.

One resource you might like to keep on your bookshelf to explore is the 2017 book, MINDSHIFT:  Break through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential, by educator, writer and engineer Barbara Oakley.

Oakley is the creator of what’s touted as the most popular massive open online course (MOOC) in the world, “Learning How to Learn,” which she has taught for years alongside legendary neuroscientist Terrence Sejnowski.

Click the button below to learn more about their Coursera class:

You don’t have to “find your passion.”  You just need to grow one.  You can even grow more than one.  In fact, you can grow as many as you can hold.

Combining a number of passions that you hold can help you realize some dream or other or advance a cause that you believe in and then the world is gifted with some new thing that helps the people all around you live better lives.

ADOPT SOMEBODY ELSE’S VISION AND GROW YOUR PASSION

Author and vlogger Simon Sinek has an interesting take on passion.  In his 2020 video, “Where Passion Comes From,” he points out that most of us ordinary sorts are not particularly good at being the kind of visionary who can come up with a clear, realistic and credible vision that impacts the whole world.

We mostly do know the kind of world we’d like to live in and we can choose to help make that one more real in the place and the time where we are.

What could be better than living in a neighborhood that has all the things and people you like?

If we want to grow our passion, Sinek says, all we have to do is go look for and find somebody else’s vision that resonates with us and then use our innate talents and the skillsets we’ve developed in our lives to help make that future world come real.

Hmmm….

Here’s a poem:

DREAMING AGAIN

The wise guys

They all say

Life’s a dream,

No more than

A glimmering gleam.

In an instant

It can vanish

Like some phantom

Shadow flickering past

Your eyes’ corners.

This one dies,

That one leaves,

The other one

Loses his way.

The plot thickens.

This game lost,

That one shattered,

The other one

Scattered like chaff.

Where’s the wheat?

This treasure snatched,

That one ruined,

The other one

Null and void.

It’s all gone.

A lifetime built

Around small passions

Melts away in

The acid of

More empty space.

And your heart

Again breaks open,

One more time,

The pieces piercing

Through the veils.

And you sit

And pick up

All the pieces

As you wonder

About the sequel.

They tell me

Passions help you

Move the world.

And help to

Make it sparkle.

Seems to me

Passions just help

You figure out

How to get

Yourself to Next.

Is it good?

Is it bad?

It isn’t indifferent….

Life keeps calling.

What’s your answer?

By Netta Kanoho

Header Photo Credit: “Passion Spring” by Nathalie via Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE:

(Click on each of the post titles below and see where it takes you….)

• HEART, PASSION AND THE WORLD
• BEYOND STUFF LOVE (Part 4): On Wabi-Sabi
• WHEN MAGIC HAPPENS

……

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post PASSION IS A FEELING first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

The process-oriented mindset is one of several styles of moving to the beat of your own passion.  Another name for it is “mastery.”

One of the best breakdowns of the requirements and outcomes of pursuing “mastery” is the one the celebrated art curator Sarah Lewis delineates in her book, THE RISE:  Creativity, the Gift of Failure and the Search for Mastery.

This 2014 book is a fascinating exploration of the constant pursuit of excellence that is pretty much what distinguishes real artists and artisans, real explorers and thinkers, and real entrepreneurs from the wannabes.

She says,

Mastery requires endurance. Mastery, a word we don’t use often, is not the equivalent of what we might consider its cognate — perfectionism — an inhuman aim motivated by a concern with how others view us. Mastery is also not the same as success — an event-based victory based on a peak point, a punctuated moment in time. Mastery is not merely a commitment to a goal, but to a curved-line, constant pursuit.

Mastery is more than goal-setting and doing the grind to meet whatever goals you set so you can move on to the next set of goals and the next.

It’s a deeper way of playing and the path you follow curves and spirals on inwards and outwards, upwards and downwards.

First, you have to believe that whatever skills you have are infinitely expandable.

You must also hold on to a deep conviction that if you just put in the effort to learn and practice and build on your skills until you get to Good, then you’ll get the chance to put in some more work to go past your best Good to something more.

And then you go do it, one step at a time.

If you change your mind about your favorite passion or if you get bored with it once you get good, the cool part is that you can take the skills you’ve developed so far and apply them to another, new passion.  That’s a major two-fer, I say.

MASTERY AND WORK

A while back, I played around in Cal Newport’s thoughts on “craftsman mindset” as presented in his 2012 book, SO GOOD THEY CAN’T IGNORE YOU:  Why Skills Trump Passion in the Work You Love.  You can access that post by clicking on the button below.

You do need to remember that passion is still the fuel you will need to use in this style of moving.

If you don’t have an intense emotional investment in whatever you’re doing, what’s going to get you up on the morning of Day 2,357 when you’re facing another massive pile of stuff that needs to get done?  How will you move your sorry butt along this interminable road you’re following?

FIVE KEYS TO MASTERY

Because a lot of the postmodern “follow-your-bliss” crowd who heeded the call to the “Hero’s Journey” that professor of literature Joseph Campbell famously explored have been standing around lost and all, a bunch of folks have been making the choice to get onto ye olde mastery road.

If you’re one of the brave souls who want to do that, you might want to take a gander at an acknowledged classic in the world of in-the-field guidebooks for wannabe masters.

In 1991, the late George Leonard wrote a book, MASTERY:  The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment.  At the time, Leonard was already an Air Corps pilot, an educator and one of the leading thinkers in the rapidly developing “human potential” movement.

Leonard helped found the ground-breaking Esalen Institute in 1962.  He was already the author of a number of published books as well as a master of the Japanese martial art, aikido.

All of that stuff went into the making of this small but really powerful book.

Leonard arranged his books around what he called the “Five Keys to Mastery.”  These are:

• INSTRUCTION. To be a master you need to get guidance and instruction.  This doesn’t mean you need to go get a guru or anything like that.  You just need to follow your curiosity about whatever you want to do better and go find the people who can help you do that and help you get better at what you already can do.  Teachers are everywhere.  You just have to notice.
• PRACTICE. Practice, practice, practice.  Make your practice as deliberate as you can.  Make it as right as you can.  Welcome the inevitable plateaus that you’ll experience when nothing seems to be happening because that’s when the learning is happening.  Practice some more.
• SURRENDER. Surrender to your passion.  Let it take hold of you hard so you’ll be able to do all that learning and all that practicing when nothing seems to be working out right.
• INTENTIONALITY. Make your dream real and present right now in your consciousness.  Act as if your dream has already happened and is there with you in the here and now.  Make your moves for the dream whenever you can and then go practice some more.
• THE EDGE. Play the edge.  Work on pushing it further outward from where you are and dance.  Keep on doing that.  And practice some more.

Whew!

AND NOW, A STORY….

Thanks for coming with me on this mini-exploration.  As your reward, here’s a wonderful YouTube video with a plain name, “Olson Guitars Shop Interview.” The 11-minute video was uploaded in 2014 and tells the story of one master’s journey through the world that still keeps on going.

Jim Olson, the luthier in the video, started handcrafting and selling acoustic flattop guitars in 1977 during a time when there wasn’t much demand for them.  He kept making them anyway.

Eventually, because his guitars were taken up, prized, and played by musicians of international renown (like James Taylor and Phil Keaggy), Olson got to make more and more of them and kept on getting better and better at what he does.

The video, which was produced by Thomas Strand, tells his story.  Enjoy!

(If you’re interested in his guitars and what the guy’s doing now, click on his name above and it’ll take you to the Olson Guitar website.)

WALKING ALONG THE CLIFFS

Shadows press in.

The cries for help sound in my ears

And “but” and “but” and “but” –

Objections rising up on all sides

As I step and step, avoiding potholes,

Negotiating fallen trees and rock slides

Along this narrow ledge

Winding up some other precipice.

Times like this make me wonder

Why I keep on following this road,

But that’s not real.

This is the road I am walking.

The only real in all of this

Is that there are no definitive answers

To any of the Big Questions:

“Who am I?”

“Why am I here?”

“What can I do to help?”

Conditional answers spring to mind.

My moves are linked to those made

By others in my life

And we’re tied all together by

Invisible threads stronger than titanium.

So we follow each other ’round and ’round,

Winding each other up in cocoons

That limit the moves we want to make,

The moves we CAN make.

The lesson comes again:

You cannot love another to safety.

They have their own cliff edges to walk,

And the best you can do is

Try not to trip them up

And to try to keep yourself from

Falling off your own ledge in this process.

The howling wind does not help.

The rain’s making it a slushy mess,

But, you keep on walking because

That’s the all of it,

Isn’t it?

By Netta Kanoho

Header Photo credit: “towards ?” by Leonard Matthews via Flickr [CC BY-ND 2.0]

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post A MASTER’S JOURNEY first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

Who has NOT heard it?  If you want to be creative, the ubiquitous They tell us, you have to “think outside of the box.”

The only problem is, it takes a different mindset to get out of that other-people-imposed box than our more usual ones. It makes sense that you do need to train yourself to climb or crawl out of that box in the same way that you train yourself to do some sort of physical discipline or other that isn’t just regular walking.

It occurs to me that Parkour players, martial artists and master craftspeople or performing artists are made, not born.  They work at developing and improving their unique skillsets until they achieve their own kind of mastery.

There are all kinds of things you can do to train up your creative “muscle.”  Guidance for doing that abound these days. There are all kinds of courses and coaches, blogs and books about it.

Katan is also the co-creator of #ItWasNeverADress, a social movement that “inspired over 50 million people worldwide to see, hear and celebrate women as superheroes,” it says here.  The aim of the campaign is to shift perceptions of women working in male-dominated fields.

What got me hooked on the book was the quote from our beloved Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geissel) that starts it off:   “Why fit in when you were born to stand out?”

Wo!  Oh, yeah!

A BOOK OF RULES YOU PROBABLY ALREADY KNOW

Katan wrote the book after she figured out, as she says, that “We don’t need to work in a job or field that is uniquely creative in order to be uniquely creative within our work.”

In it are her 21 “Rules for the Creative Trespasser.”  None of them are unfamiliar.  All of them are ways that an ordinary mortal can impact every part of a workday routine to fabricate and fashion extraordinary and exciting projects and initiate grand adventures that sparkle up the place.

The book is all about how you, too, can live an ordinary life in an extraordinary way.  Me, I’m really down for that.

When I went through that rule list, my whole gut kept going, “yup, yup, yup.”  There were few sour notes.

My top three favorite Creative Trespassing rules are these:

• #3 – Take permission – ‘cause no one is gonna give it to you.
• #19 – If all else fails, keep rehearsing.
• #21 – Show up.

The other rules in the book are also useful, but it seems to me these ones are foundational.  You can build a framework for your life on these three rules.

TAKE PERMISSION

As Katan points out in her book, “Someone will always give you a reason not to pursue your dreams if you ask them.  So don’t ask.”

American actor Matthew McConaughey agrees in this 2020 YouTube video, “Don’t Ask Permission,” uploaded by Motivation Thrive.  In it he gives his take on why it’s a bad idea to ask for permission to do what you really and truly want to do.

You might also want to check out my post, “Set Up Your Own Rules” by clicking on the button below.  In it I explain the kaona, the inner meaning, of rules and how you can play with them so you can get yourself to where you want to be.  If you know how to do that, you won’t need to worry about asking for permission.

Also, if you really, really want a scientifically proven technique or something, take a hack from American professor Brené Brown, author of DARE TO LEAD and a pioneer in positive psychology.

Brown uses the permission slip — that form your parent (or guardian or other person designated as being responsible for your elementary school self) had to sign so you could go on a class field trip to a butterfly farm or something else equally cool – as an in-your-hand, physical metaphor.

You can make up personal permission slips about how you want to behave or feel or act in a situation that makes you feel excited or uncertain or positively daunted.   For example, you can use those permission slips as a reminder that you want to act on the life options that scare you as much as they thrill you.

• Go ahead.  Make up your very own permission slip.  Print it out.  Decorate as you will.  Read it over and then sign it.  (After all, you are responsible for and in charge of you, right?)
• Keep it in your wallet or in a pocket or something so when you hit a place where you have to decide whether to go or not-go, you can pull it out and remind yourself that it is your intention to be brave.

It’s a simple, nitnoy thing.  It does work.

Don’t know how to create a permission slip?  ModernType Designs has a very simple printable permission slip for sale online.  (Click on the company name to see the sample).   Or if you want to get fancy, you can test-drive the free permission slip templates on Canva.

As a counter-weight to all this airy-fairy positivism, you might also want to ponder on this maxim I got from one of my mentors:  If you need permission, you probably should not do it.

The thing is when anybody came to him for advice about “getting into real estate” he would usually try to talk them out of it, candidly telling them about all the pitfalls and all the reasons why they should NOT do it.  Most of the wannabes would wander off and go do something else.  He hired on the ones who didn’t.

I asked him once why he kept doing that.  That was the first time I heard the maxim.

It took a while, but I finally realized that very often people will chase after whatever works out well for other people.  They see this one or that one getting very good results from doing something or other and immediately want to get in on that action.  They don’t stop to ask themselves whether this is a thing they truly want to do, one that makes their hearts sing or anything like that.  They are just dazzled by all the gold and the goodies the other person is racking in.

KEEP REHEARSING

Katan understands the value of being relentless.  Every time you fall down, you stand up again.  You can’t keep on going if you’re all curled up in a ball and rolling around moaning or whining.

The stack of hacks in Katan’s section on Rule #19 are as follows:

• Question rejection. (The corollary to that one, Katan says, is “Rejection is just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”
• Beta-test your life.
• Practice absurdity.
• Put it to the test.
• Lead the charge on changing your mind.

All of these hacks do work.

Practicing these things over and over again help to prepare you so that when you do make egregious mistakes (or possibly fail) you still have the freedom to figure out what you’re going to do about it next.  You can look at what has gone before as a rehearsal or as experiments and explorations that show you what doesn’t work.

• The best way to be the best at what you do is to never stop learning, never stop questioning, never stop trying things that help you improve and hone your skills and broaden your knowledge base.
• You do need to completely own your mistakes and flubs and wandering off in wrong directions. It’s the only way you’ll be able to figure out the most effective ways to stop doing the same-old stupid things.

The coolest part about doing these kinds of exercises in counter-intuitive thinking and behavior is that when you come to a place where you really feel you need to do something, you will become comfortable enough to react or respond as you see fit without hesitation to the situation in which you are involved.

Working on these sometimes-silly exercises can make you ready to move when your gut says YO! and your heart says YAY!  By consistently trying to do them, your mind will have gotten used to dealing with the assorted aftermaths of casting your vote for your dreams and for the things that make your heart sing.

This 2020 YouTube video, “This Choir Sings In Harmony From Their Cars to Keep Everyone Safe” is a wonderful example of what can happen when you are determined to keep on rehearsing.  It was uploaded by the Sunday TODAY show.

As somebody or other once pointed out, “You’ll figure out what to do after you’ve taken action.  Until you take action, it will all be hypothetical.  But once you act, it becomes practical.”

SHOW UP

About her final rule, “Show up,” Katan says, “Let relentless curiosity be your guide as you forge a unique path toward a totally kick-ass life!”

She recommends that you bring along your magic and your humor with you everywhere you go because, as writer Toni Morrison has admonished, when you want to fly “you got to give up the sh*t that weighs you down.”

Katan points out that every day brings with it new opportunities to practice leaping into the unknown.  The first step, of course, is showing up at the edge of Possibility.  If you can get to there and you’ve done what you can to get yourself ready to fly, you’ll figure out and do whatever comes next.

In 2020 filmmaker Eddie Pinero posted a motivational YouTube video, “Keep Showing Up.”

In it he points out, “Those waiting for life to hand out miracles will always be left behind by those who simply show up and do the work.”

A thing to think and act on, I say.

Here’s a poem.

LIVING IN GOOD FAITH

Parental discretion should have been advised, I think.

(Not that I would have listened.)

Probably this would not be

Something recommended for children.

Living in good faith:

Being steadfast and true,

With sincerity and impeccability,

Balanced and trusting too.

It’s been my best ideal,

The one I’ve tried to follow.

It makes you want to fly.

It turns your insides hollow.

It’s funny how wise you can be

When you’re innocent and young,

When the world has not yet grabbed you,

When you’ve only just begun.

I’ve followed after this glimmer

Of a thought that might be real,

And in all of this following,

My fate, I guess, is sealed.

I’m never going to fit into

The way things seem to be.

I’ll have to find my own way somehow,

The one that just fits me

By Netta Kanoho

Header Photo Credit:  :  “In the Box” by Loves_TaiShan via Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

Poets give each other weird gifts.  About ten or so years ago, a friend of mine gifted me with a chewy metaphor that I’ve gnawed on for a while now.

He said he thought that, at birth, every person got issued two infinitely expandable notebooks.  He said one of the books was a YES-book and the other was a NO-book.

I imagined them to be like the kind I use for making my journals but with automatic pages or something that appear as you write on them so you don’t end up with mountains and libraries of journals.

I don’t know how the things stay small enough for us to carry around but since the books are invisible, maybe they don’t weigh anything.

Often, these other-people blatherings are not particularly pertinent or useful, but, hey…they care.  That’s good, right?

The records of the explorations and adventures that each of us do along our own life-paths also end up in there.  Sometimes these quests of ours bode to be epic and huge.  Sometimes they are just trips to the grocery store that went sort of sideways.

He opined that the books affect us and the way we walk whether we refer back to them and look through them, ruminate and cogitate on what’s in them, and then do some move or other that adds more pages to either our own YES-book or NO-Book…or not.

They’re a bit creepy, those books.

Like a collection of maps and blueprints, our YES-books and our NO-books help us find our way.

SOME FOOLING AROUND AND FANTASIZING

As a metaphor, I thought the thing was pretty cool.

We all know people who have big YES-books and small NO-books.  They are always up for an adventure, always trying out new stuff, always opening every door and climbing through all kinds of windows and such.

Some of these people are absolutely unsinkable.  They’ve got the improv-thing down and they are magnificent change agents as well.

Others with the really big YES-books and very much smaller NO-books may tend to get sucked into all kinds of mishaps – sometimes interesting, but often dumb — and they may be prone to broken heads and hearts and things like that.

(Sometimes they seem to really be a bunch of airheads.)

They’re often massively self-disciplined and canny as all get-out.  Mastery is their game and they’re on-focus.  They’ve got well-defined boundaries and Teflon shields and some of them can approach a relentless sort of awesomeness.

If the NO-books get huge and the YES-books get tiny, some of these folks seem to end up living lives that are pretty small and often circumscribed.  The boundaries turn into walls and moats or even cages.

Sometimes they seem pretty fearful of the world and they may not like to do much of anything different than what they already do.

They may be a lot judgmental and not so much fun to be around.  They may be prone to misunderstanding other people’s moves and motives and they also tend to be misunderstood, it seems.

WOO-WOO ALERT:  ABOUT THE “AKASHIC RECORDS” THING (AND THE LIBRARY AT ALEXANDRIA TOO)

The way I figure it, the individual YES-books and NO- books are our own contributions to the mystical, magical big ol’ library popular with the woo-woo contingent since the time of the Theosophical Society (which started in 1875 or so).

That library was dubbed the “Akashic Records.”

The Society assured their neighbors that the ideas they espoused were old ones that actually date back to a lot of early Theosophists, especially the Greek and Alexandrian Neo-Platonic philosophers who were around since the 3^rd century CE.  Whatever.

If you don’t know about the Akashic Records, click on the button below for a very well-done and even-handed treatment of the thing.  It’s a 2019 post shared on Medium, and was taken from the blog Holisticism.

As a book freak, I’m picturing a vast library – bigger than the fabled Library of Alexandria on the southern coast of the Mediterranean in Egypt.

I confess that I have a fondness for the historic Library at Alexandria.  Here’s a video from TED-Ed that tells the story, “What Really Happened to the Library of Alexandria”:

The video was written by educator Elizabeth Cox and animated by Inna Phillimore.

My own imaginary library goes on forever, backwards and forwards until now (and maybe even into the future).  There are books and scrolls and other story-carrying devices and vehicles that just hang out there.

These days there are probably laptops and electronic gadgets in there too.

I imagine that a lot of the writings in the ancient books and things in that old library have faded away or are inaccessible somehow.  Maybe there’s been damage by water and fire and worm.  Maybe the words are written in old and forgotten languages that we can’t understand.

I like the thought that I’m one of the contributing writers to the thing.  I don’t even have to apply seat to chair and turn on my brain.

I just have to keep on doing whatever it is I am doing in this old consensus world and my Yes-book and my No-book write their own selves.  YIPPEE!  (Talk about a writer’s fondest dream!)

AND THEN I GOT TO THINKING….

If the Yes-book and the No-book each of us carries are actually metaphors for the mindsets we hold to, hone, and practice from day to day, then the whole thing makes a kind of sense.

Your Yes-book contains all the foundational stuff for all of those character traits that mamas and daddies, as well as other favorite elders and teachers, BFF’s, motivational speakers, writers, life coaches, and other support people tend to focus on.

Your passions and your loves, your curiosities and your dreams, your obsessions and your attractions tend to take up a lot of space in there.

The rules-of-thumb in your YES-book help you to learn and to grow, to cope with change, to be flexible and resilient, to endure and persevere, and on and on and on.

All of your denials and refusals to see things as they are find their way into your NO-book.  So do all of your anger and resentments, the guilty secrets and miserable failures and mistakes…and pain – lots and lots of pain.

The rules-of-thumb in your NO-book are very useful, I say.  They can help you avoid making the same old dumb mistakes you always seem to gravitate towards.

In fact, those rules-of-thumb can help you make new, improved mistakes that take you to much more interesting places that can help you scrub off some of the extraneous gunk that keeps your sorry self from shining brighter.

I’ll just ask a couple of questions:

• Which book are you adding to in your life?
• Which are you looking through and learning from?

I WILL NOT DO IT

I told her I do not forgive.

I told her I never forget.

And that confused her

(It was so NOT-P.C.)

So then I told her my own truth,

And I’m not sure she got it,

But, hey, so it goes….

I told her

Forgiving feels like I’m obliged to smile and say,

“Oh, never mind, I don’t care.

Step all over my face; I’ve got a spare.”

Forgetting feels like I’m supposed to shrug and tell the world,

“It doesn’t matter, not at all.

Do what you like; this is Liberty Hall….”

Well, I am not made like that.

I’ve lived too long, gone through too much

To set aside the who-I-am

For the who you think I “should” be.

Your “forgive” feels like a glib and facetious lie,

Like I’m handing out one more

Permission slip in a long line of them

To folks who (let’s face it) are careless.

Your “forget” feels like I’m supposed to

Numb down, closing off my heart,

Squinching down into small

So everybody can go on being comfortable.

Your forgive-and-forget anodyne

Seems to me a happy-pill of great price

And I won’t pay for it.

I’ll choose to stay wide open, thanks,

When every nerve is screaming “stop”

And every neuron wants to make a run for it

And my back is all crawly from anticipating

Yet another stab from a traitorous un-friend.

This is not a simple thing,

To stop the pain of trust-betrayed

From swallowing up your loving heart.

To just let that whimpering thing lie there,

Throbbing, seeping out blood,

Requires a firm willingness to wait

Until the hurting subsides and the healing starts.

It takes a while.

Stopping your raw, torn heart from

Shrinking into a nubbin and

Keeping it from scurrying away to hide

In some dark corner is a practice of a lifetime.

The shadows will not claim me.

I will not back down.

I’ll take my heart and warm it in my hands.

I’ll let it sit there, leave it open to life’s vagaries.

I’ll whisper to it and encourage its defiance,

Urging it to move and dance with the changes as it can.

I’ll stoke its willingness to flow where it must,

And when it is ready, when it grows strong again and firm,

I’ll take that heart of mine and

Launch it one more time into the sky.

I plan to keep on doing that until it flies.

So…no….

I don’t forgive,

And, no, I won’t forget.

I’m too busy, okay?

by Netta Kanoho

Header photo credit:  “Journey” by Mattia Merlo via Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts

It’s likely that anyone who is serious about the art of investing money has at least looked at author Bud Labitan’s fan book, THE FOUR FILTERS INVENTION OF WARREN BUFFETT AND CHARLIE MUNGER, which first hit the bookstores in 2008.

It lays out the thinking processes these acclaimed money-meisters used to frame and make their financial decisions as they built fabulous fortunes for themselves and their clients.

These “filters” are the rules-of-thumb Buffet and Munger developed to help them make good decisions and appropriate moves by allowing them to winnow the grain out from the chaff in the investment options they faced.  (They sure made good bread that way!)

The most important take-away from the book for me is the one about the value of developing a particular set of filters or rules-of-thumb that define what you are looking for as an end result in complicated situations that are likely to recur in your life.

THE DARK SIDE OF FILTERS

Other books about filters and similar heuristics have surfaced over the years.  The scariest one for me is Eli Pariser’s book, THE FILTER BUBBLE:  What the Internet is Hiding From You.  It was published in 2011.

Pariser lays out (and tries to tackle) the sociological nuances of the never-ending, overriding techy quest of online information and content providers and platforms to “personalize” the information we get whenever we go wandering around the Web

This is not necessarily a bad thing.

Using their little bots to track us in our wanderings through the vast Universe of the Web, the cyberwizards and online community managers build and develop algorithmic filters and such that whisk us off into our own customized, bespoken little worlds where we can find what they tout as answers to our very own heart’s desires.

It is sort of mind-boggling, actually.  The Smarty Pants contingent turned the virtual Indra’s Web of Infinite Possibility into a universe of mirrors that reflect back the images of each of the individual pilgrims wandering through the thing.

In your customized, bespoken virtual world, you are confronted only with information that supports and resonates with your own mind-constructs.

This has the effect of validating your stance, whatever it is, which solidifies your mind constructs until they become your only “truths” and your real Real.

In the virtual universe where the information that individual users encounter gets run through assorted pre-set filtering algorithms, it gets a lot harder to stumble across thoughts that are different than the ones you are already thinking.

It may even get really hard to get past your previously-reached conclusions and formerly successful solutions to find other, maybe better, resolves to your complex life-problems.

Here are some questions to ponder:

• If you never rub up against ideas that are way different than the ones you habitually use, how does that affect your ability to expand your creativity?
• Does your ability to flex and improvise in new situations atrophy?
• And if you have few experiences with ideas that are not like your own, how are you ever going to deal with all those other people who act and look and think in ways that are not-like-you?

Hmmm….

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE

In my analog life as a residential property manager, I have to constantly deal with people who come to every situation and circumstance with their own mindsets (and their own personalized filters).

Often these differing mindsets may not mesh well.  Very different mindsets do tend to collide.

The “gravity” a particular mindset generates can be huge in each person’s life.

When two big planets are moving through each other’s orbits there can be all kinds of very distressing results.  The same thing can happen when two very different mindsets have a close encounter.

Basically, when things come to a head and start bubbling and boiling over, it is my job to figure out how to facilitate helping these battling world-makers build some bridges and doorways that allow them to come to some sort of a meeting of their minds.

One of my aims is to help them move on towards their own individual goals without making massive explosions all over the place.

• There is the Steam-Roller who firmly believes that forcing her way through every obstacle, clambering over every challenge and flattening the opposition will get her to where she wants to go. She’s having to deal with the Stoic who just as firmly believes that perseverance and enduring will get you past everything that comes at you.
• There was the Man of Reason who has been trying to deal with a contractor who is a Ball of Resentment making a much-needed repair to the house the Man of Reason owns. The results have been decidedly mixed.
• There are the Born-and-Bred Free Spirits trying to cope with a Suburbia Culture Code that is totally foreign to them and that keeps on blindsiding them with their neighbor’s unspoken rules and mores and norms and such that make absolutely no sense to the Freedom Runners.
• There is the Young and Clueless One who has been trying to deal with a massive mountain of stuff and issues that are a part of the legacy left behind by his hoarder dad. He has been failing miserably.

Let me tell ya, I could use some good filters and rules-of-thumb to deal with these sorts of circumstances.

A COUPLE OF ANCIENT RULES-OF-THUMB FROM THE WISE GUYS

It occurred to me that the ancients had to work on the very same issues that our naturally diverse human mindsets call up.  Some of the best minds on the planet (then and now) continue to try to figure out ways and means to get around or under or over or through the dilemmas and challenges that arise.

The two most popular filters from ancient times that try to address the kinds of problems that arise when different mindsets bump into each other have gone through every kind of permutation, iteration and revision with a massive pileup of commentary besides.

One of the most enduring, it seems, is The Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Some version of the Golden Rule can probably be found in almost every ethical tradition, according to Simon Blackburn, an academic philosopher who studies metaethics (the thought constructs that are the underpinnings of various systems of ethics).

It certainly is a good rule-of-thumb.  The Golden Rule can and does engender all kinds of charitable efforts, good works, loving kindnesses, and sweetness-and-light blessed helpfulness on the part of the givers.

The actions taken by do-gooder people guided by the Golden Rule can be irritating, possibly noisome, and maybe even downright dangerous for the recipients of the (often unasked-for) “blessings” of these Gold-following sorts.

Some deep-thinking folks have pointed out that the Golden Rule, as scientist Carl Sagan observed, takes no account of very real human differences.

Maybe I don’t WANT to do what you think I should be doing to reach your sort of good life.  Maybe I don’t think your good life looks so grand.

Is it so strange to imagine that a person might not really appreciate your heartful efforts on their behalf?  Are they supposed to feel grateful to you for your doing something for them that they really didn’t want in the first place?

I did have to laugh when I came across a story about how one man’s hell might just be another man’s paradise.  I found it in Eric Weiner’s book, THE GEOGRAPHY OF BLISS:  One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Place in the World.

According to Weiner, when European missionaries first landed in Greenland several centuries ago, they offered the pagan natives the standard message:  Convert and you get to go to Heaven.  Don’t convert and you will be condemned to an eternity of Hell.

So, the curious natives asked, “What is this Hell like?”

“Oh, it’s very, very bad,” the missionaries told them.  “It’s very hot…all the time.”

The Greenlanders looked around at the frozen Arctic tundra that was their home and thought on it some.  They decided that maybe they would prefer Hell.

Hmmm….

Instead of looking at the good you can do for other people, you focus on the bad you can avoid doing to them.

He said that this one phrase was “the whole of Torah and the remainder is but commentary.”

The chief value of the Silver Rule, it seems to me, is that it tells you to stop and think before doing anything and to try to make sure you’re not making some situation or other worse for everybody involved.

While the Silver Rule is less likely to engender outpourings of burgeoning do-good efforts that the Golden Rule will, it does keep you from annoying folks and might keep you from doing them (or yourself) irreparable harm in the name of your kind of good.

There are, of course, other metallic rules.  I’ve run across the Bronze Rule, the Iron Rule, and the Platinum Rule in my perambulations. There’s even a Diamond Rule, and I suppose there are probably Rules that are named for assorted other minerals.

None of these have quite the same panache and patina of the Silver and the Gold, but neither of those ancient filters help me figure out what I am needing to do in the situations that I keep having to face as the middle person in a confrontation between adversarial mindsets.

AND THEN THERE IS THE GRACEFUL WAY

I do know that there is one other way of dealing with the conflicts and conundrums that arise out of the interactions of people with very different mindsets.

I’m not really sure it has a common name.  I would call it “grace,” but that word has been effectively co-opted by evangelical Christians and I’m not sure they mean the same thing I do when I use the word.

• When I say “grace” I mean what the online dictionary defines as “simple elegance or refinement of movement.”
• When I say “grace” I mean the kind of “courteous goodwill” that respects the validity of another’s point of view.
• When I say “grace” I mean “a smooth and pleasing way of moving” and “a polite and thoughtful way of behaving.”

Somewhere, under all the details and hoo-hah, there is very often at least one set of appropriate actions that can help to allow a good resolve for everybody concerned.

The deal is, though, the actions you choose to make have to be well-executed in their proper time and place with firmly held goodwill towards everyone involved in the situation.

The most important thing to remember in all of this is that you’re just one element in the thing and maybe you can’t do a heck of a lot.  It can get really frustrating.

The biggest problem with this way of walking is that it isn’t left-brained logical and it is a lot counterintuitive.

You can only find the appropriate actions to take if you can set aside your own notions and preconceptions of all of the differences between you and the other persons involved and focus instead on your commonalities.

Perhaps it is just another form of practicing the South African style of walking called Ubuntu – You are Me and I am You.

You are more than my brother, more than my sister.  You ARE Me.

(I haven’t been able to get the moves right all the time yet, but I do keep trying.)

WHAT ABIDES

That things will change,

It is a given…

There is no argument:

ALL constructs WILL be riven.

Still and yet, the world

Keeps turning in its place.

Still and yet, there’s joy,

And rainbows and grace.

Change comes, change goes,

And so do you and I.

The thing we get to keep

Is the way we walk and fly.

By Netta Kanoho

Header Photo Credit:  “When Worlds Collide: Spheres of Influence” by Matt via Flickr (art by Peter Thibeault) [CC BY-NC 2.0]

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

One of the more intriguing bits in Nilofer Merchant’s book about the care and feeding of wild ideas that can dent the world, THE POWER OF ONLYNESS, is the one about taking a closer and more considered look at “the question that you can’t answer but can’t stop thinking about.”

That annoying question is like a bedraggled, adorable con-artist mutt that follows you around and accepts occasional handouts from you but warily stays out of reach.  It hangs around.

It is also distracting as all get-out.

As internationally acclaimed numerologist and life advisor Christine DeLorey points out in her book, LIFE CYCLES:  Your Emotional Journey to Freedom and Happiness, “Perhaps what you believe is a distraction is actually a reflection of something that is crying out for your attention.”

It occurs to me that this annoying question might also be an important pointer and guidepost for “putting soul into your game” a là contrarian thought-leader Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Another IPS (Inner Peace Symptom):  a tendency to follow the unanswerable questions that you can’t stop thinking about.  [Scratching the questions that itch can open a treasure box of curiosities that beg to be examined and explored.  The most intriguing ones keep you searching for what ELSE is in there.]

HOW TO CAPTURE THE WILD QUESTION

Once you notice the mutt-question, Merchant points to a tried and true methodology for stalking that untamed wild question and luring it to you.  It’s pretty simple:

• Give yourself permission to pursue the question you have even if others might view this as a bit nuts.
• Do the necessary work involved in looking more deeply at the problem even if you don’t know exactly how the effort you are putting into it will turn out, and even your very small actions will generate changes both in you and in what you want to achieve.

(After all, it’s only through the actions you take that change can happen.  As your own perspectives and skills expand and morph as a result of your own actions, the wild question will become clearer to you and you will be able to see more ways to move forward with playing with it.)

• Go slow. Be thorough.  Think “unfolding.” 

(Imagine that the question is some badly wrapped gift box covered in old newspaper comics that you are opening with the tremendous respect and care you would give to a gift from a beloved friend that’s been covered in rich brocades and gold and tasty bits of ornamentation.)

Merchant says that it’s in the PROCESS of doing that work that you prepare yourself to figure out how to use that question to make your dent in the world.

Each little act lures the wild question out into the open more and more.  Each of your targeted actions draws the question closer to you.

Every little act helps you develop more and better skills that allow you to tame the little wild question.

A STORY BREAK

Michael would do this thing every day and the bird kept getting closer and closer.  One day it plopped down onto the table.  Eventually it climbed onto his hand and started eating.

Worm came back year after year for many years and the two of them had very good visits.  It was a wonderment, that.

BACK TO THE STALKING

Once the wild question is standing right next to you and stays still, maybe you’ll be able to work with it to unfold the treasures it holds for you and for the world. Maybe by then you’ll be ready to figure out how you and your little idea can go make some dents in the world.

Be aware that devoting your full attention to the wild question and to noticing how its presence in your space and your time affects the world you live in can help you figure out what you can do to help the idea stand in your world better and make that idea more real.

One important bit of advice from Merchant: “Stop looking for success.  Instead, look more deeply at the problem.”

Your deep-looking will lead to other questions, other puzzlements, and more dent-making skills as well.

LAST THOUGHTS

I fell in love with this thought I found in one of the stories in urban fantasy writer Charles de Lint’s DREAMS UNDERFOOT collection:  “It’s the questions we ask, the journey we take to get where we’re going that’s more important than the actual answer.”

Here’s a poem:

MISFIT

Well, here I am again.

I am neither small enough to fit in the everyday,

Nor am I big enough to fill the sky and play.

Why am I here then?

What is this for?

Who and how and where?

Questions, only questions.

Maybe I am just a riddle nobody wants to solve –

Least of all me –

Or maybe I’m just a little lump trying to act tall.

Maybe it doesn’t matter at all, at all.

Maybe I’m just nothing trying to be something.

Or is it that I’m something trying to be nothing?

So, tell me…

Has anybody else figured it out yet?

By Netta Kanoho

Header photo credit:  “human footprint 2” by jedydjah via Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.0]

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

Throughout the ages humans have gnawed on the conundrum of getting to “happy.”  We know we want it.  We’ll do a lot to get there, we say, as we set up and set out on some course of action or other to “pursue” our own kind of happy.

There are whole libraries of wisdom-words from past generations of sages and wise guys, from the research and cogitations of scientists and other smarty-pants over the past half a century, as well as from the everyday musings and head-scratchings of the man (or woman)-on-the-street that we can tap.

Everybody agrees.  Happy is better for us humans – physically, mentally, and spiritually — than not-happy.

• Do we run towards or after happy? Or do we sit there and wait for it to land on us?
• Is happy inside us? Or does it come to us as a gift from the World, the Universe, the Divine or something other than ourselves?
• Can someone else make us happy? Or is it a D.I.Y. project?

ARGH!

THE TROUBLE WITH LOOKING FOR HAPPINESS OUTSIDE OURSELVES

It seems to me that the problem with the whole “pursuit” thing and with seeing happiness as an end-goal or even as something that is outside our own selves is addressed in this extraordinary YouTube video, “Happiness,” uploaded in 2917 by Steve Cutts:

Ouch!  That one sure feels familiar, doesn’t it?

If the Big Happy is not in us, then we are likely to be in for a really rough struggle getting to our “happy place” and the odds aren’t looking so good for us.  Recovering-Control-Freak Me has a really hard time accepting that one as a viable, sustainable option.

A HAPPY SYNERGY UNPACKED

In the mid-1990’s a couple of social scientists, Rick Foster and Greg Hicks, began a most intriguing study never before tackled by smarty-pants of their ilk.  They wandered around the countryside and then the world asking, “Who is the happiest person you know?”

In every town or village or organization the researchers visited, there was usually some consensus about who the happiest-seeming person was in that place.  In the course of their three years of research the pair tracked down hundreds of extremely happy people.

Like all good scientists, the first thing the researchers did was ask the people who did it best to define what “happiness” was.

Here’s the definition they formulated out of all the answers they got:

“…true happiness is a profound, enduring feeling of contentment, capability, and centeredness – the 3 C’s.. It’s a rich sense of well-being that comes from knowing you can deal productively and creatively with all that life offers – both the good and the bad.  It’s knowing your internal self and responding to your real needs, rather than the demands of others.  And it’s a deep sense of engagement – living in the moment and enjoying life’s bounty.”

That definition feels just about right, it seems to me.  It’s sufficiently complex and complicated enough to be real, yet simple enough to get your head around.  It’s just ordinary in an extraordinary way.

Happiness, it seems, doesn’t come from any specific circumstance.  Happiness begins with each person and the patterns of choices they make that work together to create a kind of synergy, an energy field, that builds up around them and affects how the mega-happy people move and what they do.

It also became evident that how these ultra-happy people move and what they do affect the way they see their worlds.  The perspectives they develop as a result of their actions generate (bet you guessed it!) their own brand of happiness.

Integrating the nine choices into the way they lived their lives gave these happy folks lives filled with meaning and mana.  The side-effect of that was the feeling of happiness, as defined by those who lived this way.

Using the patterns they discovered, Foster and Hicks made a “happiness model” that became the basis for their book, HOW WE CHOOSE TO BE HAPPY:  The 9 Choices of Extremely Happy People – Their Secrets, Their Stories, which was first published in 1999.

The book, one of the first of its kind, was an instant bestseller.  It has been on bestseller lists ever since.

THE NINE CHOICES

If you look over the table of contents in Foster and Hicks’ book, you’ll get a quick overview of the nine choices:

• INTENTION: an active desire and commitment to be happy and the decision to consciously choose attitudes and behaviors that promote happiness;
• ACCOUNTABILITY: choosing to create the life you want to live and assuming personal responsibility for your actions, thoughts and feelings while refusing to blame others for your difficulties or to view yourself as a victim;
• IDENTIFICATION: the ongoing process of looking deeply within yourself in order to find out for yourself what makes you happy;
• CENTRALITY: a non-negotiable insistence of making whatever brings happiness to you the center of your own life;
• RECASTING: a two-step process that you can use to transform stressful problems and trauma into something that has meaning for you and is a source of emotional energy;
• OPTIONS: deciding to approach life flexibly by creating multiple scenarios and being open to new possibilities in any situation;
• APPRECIATION: choosing to deeply appreciate your life and the people in it and to savor the present by turning every experience into something precious;
• GIVING: choosing to share yourself and what you have with the world – family, friends and community – without expecting a “return”;
• TRUTHFULNESS: choosing to always be honest with yourself and others;

You will note, I think, that none of this stuff is rocket science.  They’re just regular stuff you’ve probably been told since you were a kid that it’s good to do.

The moves the authors have highlighted are not extraordinarily complex or anything.  They are things anybody can do.

I think it’s just cool to know that these simple yet profound choices have actually been scientifically and empirically proven to work over and over again by thousands of folks who’ve tried them since the researchers constructed their roadmap.

Happy happens when you do these things.

THE REST OF THE STORY

The Foster-Hicks happiness model of nine choices was used all over the world by universities, corporations, hospitals, and churches and has been acclaimed by major research institutions as a groundbreaking analysis of how people create happiness and as a key to the mind/body connection.

Through the years since the book was published the authors continued to dedicate themselves to studying people and communities that thrive.

Their work, which apparently generated a roadmap to happiness, physical and physical well-being as well as success, had them traveling to very many places in all the seven continents of the world (even Antartica).

The researchers are sought-after lecturers and have written several other books that grew out of the paths they’ve chosen to follow using their roadmap.

They’ve collaborated with others to develop intriguing ways to use the nine choices to form a synergy of energy that also proved to be good for the world around its practitioners in the worlds of business, medicine and social change.

Click on the button below to take a look at their website.

FINAL THOUGHTS

It isn’t often that a person comes across something that delineates a lot of what sounds true and weaves these truths together into a useful and useable form.

What absolutely thrills me is knowing that the researchers didn’t go ‘round to experts or extraordinary people with special knowledge and outré experiences to generate some esoteric wisdom thing.

Foster and Hicks did not go around like metaphorical lepidopterists chasing down magical butterflies, anesthesizing them and sticking the dead bugs onto foam-core backings with pins, trying to analyze some dead thing to get insights into the living, breathing version.

No unicorns were harmed in the production of this work.

“Is happiness within your grasp?  Yes.  Have we created a tangible, clear guide to happiness?  Yes.  Can we make you happy?  No.  You have to make yourself happy.  What we can give you is a portrait showing you how to grow, learn and change.”

That one, too, sounds real.

WUNJO – JOY

(Finding Out What Nourishes You)

So maybe they were wrong –

All the ones who told me

“happy” was all about

Filling up a treasure house

Full-full-full with worldly wonders.

Seems to me that treasure house thing’s a crock:

Who wants to be the one to dust all that stock?

Maybe they weren’t right –

The ones who said having

All the toys made the birds sing sweeter,

The sun shine brighter.

Who wants to fix all those ridiculous toys,

That blink and squeak and make all that noise?

Maybe they were lying –

The ones who said trudging through

The mud and the blood and the beer,

Bringing home the latest and the greatest

The new and improved, the bestest of the best

Would take me to incredible heights of ecstasy…

Right now, right here.

They never mentioned that ecstasy’s not all it’s cracked up to be

When the one who pays the bills is me.

Yep.

They were definitely wrong.

Tried it.

Didn’t work.

Now what?

By Netta Kanoho

Header photo:  “Euphorical issues #2” by Daniel Horacio Agostini via Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Thanks for your visit.  It’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

It is a truly amazing thing to witness what people who own their passions can build on a legacy dream that has a solid foundation grounded in taking joy in the fervor, fire and zeal that comes with a devoted pursuit of an appreciation for the power of the creative human spirit.

On the island of Maui, Hawaii USA, there is a community-supported radio station that describes itself as a “non-commercial secular FM broadcast station.”  Its official call letters are KMNO and it streams at 91.7 FM from around 7,000 feet on the slopes of Haleakala mountain.

Click the button below for a look at the station’s website.

The freeform, eclectic mix of music and other bits gets no funding from any government, religious, or other organizations unless these organizations are “underwriters” bound by an impressive array of rules and regulations enforced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Much of the money comes in as monthly donations from local (often very small) businesses and listeners from around the world who love what the deejays and their support crew are doing.

Mostly, the station has been running on heart for almost twenty years now.  Along the way it has helped to build and hold a community together as well.

(It occurs to me that KMNO-FM was living “crowd-funding” before there was even a word for it.)

They call their station “Mana’o Hana Hou Radio.”

The word “mana’o” is Hawaiian for knowledge transmuted into understandings, insights, and life-meanings that come from “living from the gut” and shared among people of good will.

The phrase “hana hou” in Hawaiian can be roughly translated as “Encore!”.  It’s often heard, shouted from the audience at the end of a brilliant on-stage performance by a musician or other performer.

ONE GUY STARTS ON A JOURNEY = ORIGIN SAGA

The original Mana’o Radio began as KEAO-FM, a low-power 100-watt station, that was first broadcast from a spare bedroom in the Waiehu home of the founders, Barry Shannon and Kathy Collins, in 2002.

The station’s debut happened in the former bedroom of a grown and gone teenager.  The walls and ceiling were still plastered with stickers and assorted youthful rock and roll memories.

Back then, the husband-and-wife team were veteran radio personalities who, along with several long-time deejays and radio performer friends, were displaced by the decimation and disappearance of a couple of well-loved local radio stations into the automated and computerized maw of the corporate airwaves.

He was back in the City in 1966 – just in time for the flowering of the “rock and roll ballroom scene” and the rise of psychedelia.  He became the chief engineer/technical wizard and program director at KMPX-FM, “The Rock & Roll Voice of The Revolution” for a couple of years and went on from there, finally ending up on Maui in the mid-1980’s more than a little bit tired.

It was on Maui that he met his wife, on the job at yet another local Maui radio station that Shannon took on to keep from expiring from “rock fever.”

Collins was a Lahaina-girl, born and raised.  From plantation camp beginnings, she pursued her dream to become an actress, storyteller, and lively radio personality with high energy and style.

The pair didn’t really expect much from the baby station they were building.  They thought maybe a few friends would listen in.

“In a five-year burst of energy and creativity, Shannon and his partners secured a rare “low-power” 100-watt FCC license, built a station, moved it two or three times, and finally had it broadcasting around the clock with a willing but wildly improbable staff of volunteer deejays. Along the way, Shannon became patron and impresario for poets, actors, storytellers, kodo drummers, bagpipers, blues bands, doo-wop singers, and any other communicators wanting to share their mana’o.”

Click the button below for a look at the heartful April 8, 2007 post from The Time Machine Radio Show blog that is headlined, “Maui Radio Loses Barry Shannon…we lost a friend…”

The Time Machine radio show with Michael McCartney and Summer Blue still runs every Saturday afternoon at Mana’o Radio.

Collins carried on as the radio station’s manager after Shannon’s death.

In 2015, Mana’o Radio went off the air due to a transmitter failure.  Within a 45-day span, a new non-profit group, the Maui Media Initiative, was formed by supporters of the station.  A new studio location was built in Wailuku and a new Nautel transmitter was installed.

The online Radio + Television Business Report announced that KMNO-FM was donated “free of charge” by Collins to the new organization.

Collins, according to the report, said,

“It is with pleasure that I inform you of the Mana’o Radio Board of Directors’ unanimous decision to transfer the KMNO-FM license to Maui Media Initiative, for no monetary consideration. Mana’o Radio will also donate, at no charge, all broadcast and/or internet streaming equipment owned by Mana’o Radio, including its music library, CD players, turntables, microphones, computers, and all transmission equipment.”

Since that time, the radio station continues to flourish and adapt as the world changes around it — a sure sign that its founders built the foundations well and that their backup crew has kept up the good work well-begun.

Many people still call it “the coolest radio station on Maui.”

One of the latest innovations is a podcast series, MANA’O@HOME hosted by Maui radio personality and community journalist Trish “da Dish” Smith who provides a weekly platform for Maui musicians to “share their music live, earn tips virtually and be interviewed by a rockin’ journalist” every Thursday on Mana’o Radio’s Facebook page.

The hour-long past episodes are available online after they’ve aired on the Facebook page as well.

THE INDEPENDENT SPIRIT IS ALIVE AND WELL

Musician Esperanza Spalding once opined, “The benefit of radio is, something beyond your realm of knowledge can surprise you, can enter your realm of knowledge.”

That is a truth, and one that the auto-pilot formatting of a lot of commercial radio is not so likely to fulfill.  There is, arguably, a need for the independents, the ones who want to dazzle you with stuff you’ve never heard before, who call you out to come explore.

One YouTube video, “How to Start a Radio Station in a Pandemic,” uploaded in 2020 by NBC10Boston, takes a sprightly look at the brave start by founder Danielle Johnson of a brand-new online radio station “Spark FM,” in Boston.

This new station features urban and Caribbean music and founder Johnson, like Shannon, encourages the deejays to follow their own mana’o about the music they love.

As NBC10 Boston interviewer Sue Connell says after encouraging her viewers to give the station a listen, “Let music surprise you again.”

KEEPING THE AIRWAVES STIRRED UP

Since 2009, three radio-lovers have been writing about radio and its relevance as a “participatory communications medium.”  They are they say critics and fans and they’ve gathered a tribe of fellow radio aficionados.

Jennifer Waits is the founder and editor of SpinningIndie, a website devoted to the culture of college radio.  Her title is “College Radio and Cutlural Editor and Social Media Director.

Fellow co-founder Matthew Lasar, teaches United States history and broadcasting and telecommunications policy at the University of California at Santa Cruz.  He also serves as the groups business manager and has written a couple of books about radio history in the Pacific.

The third member of the triad is Paul Riismandel, a non-commercial radio operator for 20 years who also serves as the group’s business manager.

Their trio’s lively and very informative blog, Radio Survivor, about the trials, tribulations and triumphs in the world of independent radio, is Patreon-funded.  It’s a grand glimpse at yet another avenue that creativity can take.

FINAL THOUGHTS

People who are passionate about something do figure out how to make room in their lives for doing the things they love and living their own way.  (It may actually be the price you have to pay for maintaining the passion in you that sends you soaring.)

The main takeaway I got from the Mana’o Radio story is that if you live and do your passion the best way you know how and you build yourself a structure that will endure all of the challenges that come with the territory as you keep calling out until you find a bunch of people who want to do the same thing too, then It – whatever your It is — can happen.

Not only that, but It will keep on happening even after you are gone.

And that one’s a very cool thing.

 MUSIC STORE INTERLUDE

Two young men, eyes shimmering,

Talk of music and playing the guitar this way or that.

The one behind the counter

Shares his love, his obsession,

Shares his cache of knowledge;

The other one shares his newfound joy.

They burble and they babble

As I listen to the music of some slack-key master,

And I think that this must be how every master starts:

Always dreaming, always reaching,

Holding onto their great passion,

Even though there’s a sale to make.

I smile and just enjoy them,

These young ones reaching for the stars.

A marvel, don’t you think?

By Netta Kanoho

Header photo credit:  “Classic old radio 1960s or 70s style” by Robert Ashworth via Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

When you’re a poet, words and phrases can have a powerful effect on you.  Words are more than simple vehicles for communication.

Certain words and combinations of words really “speak” to you.  They can grab you by the throat and drag you down strange alleys.  They can tangle up your feet and make you fall.  They can lift you up and help you fly.

Getting enchanted and be-spelled by words is probably one of the biggest hazards of the ancient craft of poesy.  (Poets probably make great con artists.  They are also probably among the most vulnerable for getting scammed.)

Poets tend to get sucked into all sorts of adventures by words and by their own passion for words.

ONE GUY WHO TELLS IT STRAIGHT

I have just discovered the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, one irascible, opinionated, straight-shooting contrarian who has a jones for bonking fuzzy-thinking scholarly sorts, politicos, and other self-proclaimed prognosticators, oracles, and experts.

I get the feeling that Taleb is a poet.  He has studied and dissected words mercilessly and he understands their power and uses them well.

The brilliance and shine of his mind-constructs are a testament to the work he’s been doing, studying and playing with the various facets of probability, randomness, uncertainty and ambiguity in the realms of high finance and academia.

The five stand-alone books in the series are:

• FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and the Markets (2001) about the underestimation of the role of randomness in life was selected by Fortune magazine as one of the “smartest 75 books known;”
• THE BLACK SWAN: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007 to 2010), probably one of his most famous of his books, about highly improbable unpredictable events that change the world;
• THE BED OF PROCRUSTUS: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), a book of pertinent aphorisms;
• ANTIFRAGILE: Things that Gain from Disorder (2012), what he calls his “central work,” about how to dance successfully in the stream of life’s inevitable changes; and
• SKIN IN THE GAME:  The Hidden Assymetries in Daily Life (2018) about the importance of being a person who “eats what they cook” and actually takes the same risks that they advocate and advise for other people as well as about learning how to recognize and deal only with those sorts of people when you’re headed out on a risky adventure of one sort or another.

Taleb also published a dizzy-making technical version, THE TECHNICAL INCERTO (Statistical Consequences of Fat Tales) in which he provides all kinds of mathematical proofs and head games related to his mind-constructs, opinions and theories that probably makes sense to those who speak in tongues.

I started with SKIN IN THE GAME, the last of Taleb’s books in the set.  His thoughts in that book evoked a big YES! in me

In this short 2013 YouTube video, “Nassim Taleb:  Skin in the Game,” the author-philosopher explains the value and moral purpose of requiring all investors to have “skin in the game” to a group of students at Stanford.  It was uploaded by Stanford eCorner.

It is in that same book that I found the “soul in the game” paradigm that I’m going to start to explore in this thing.

I’m pleased to report that I am now lost in Taleb’s ANTIFRAGILE.  It’s one of the few books I’ve ever found that clearly explains (in a way that an Occidental sort of mind can encompass and sort of understand) why it’s wise to learn how to stand comfortably in ambiguity.

SO…WHAT IS HAVING “SOUL IN THE GAME?”

In ANTIFRAGILITY, Taleb presents having “soul in the game” as the highest, most ethical level that a human can play at in the game of life.

In Taleb-speak, “no skin in the game” refers to those who keep the benefits of any risky venture for themselves while passing on the downsides and the losses on to other people.

The ones playing with no skin in the game own “a hidden option at someone else’s expense,” he says.  It riles him up.  No question about it.

Among Taleb’s no-skinners in a handy-dandy chart in his book are people like bureaucrats, politicians and centralized governments, theoreticians and data miners, bankers and risk vendors, corporate executives, editors and journalists who “analyze and make predictions.”

According to Taleb, a lot of the folks who are putting soul in their game are just everyday people doing their own and helping others along in their own quiet way.  No fanfare, no cheering crowds, no statues raised.

Taleb makes much of behaving with courage and with dignity.  He says, “…dignity is worth nothing unless you earn it, unless you are willing to pay a price for it.”

(I think that Taleb probably has a warrior’s soul as well as a trader’s mind and a poet’s heart.  It certainly makes for interesting reading.)

NOW, WHAT ABOUT YOU?

It’s unlikely that Taleb’s description of his sort of “soul in the game” people will match your own definitions.  Each of us is shaped by our own life experiences, by the people wandering through our lives, and by what we value most and hold dear.

One of the results I got when I Googled “what is soul?” was this: “emotional or intellectual energy or intensity.”  Another, from Wikipedia, was “the incorporeal essence of a living being.”  Whatever.

I personally like to compare the “soul” thing to the scent of flowers.

The fragrance that emanates from a lokelani rose is very different from that of a ‘awapuhi ginger or puakenikeni blossom.  Yet, for me, each one has its own sweetness and can be used, alone or together, to weave an entrancing sort of lei that scents the air all around and adds to the beauty of the world.

Hmmm….

Maybe you are getting the idea that nobody really knows what we’re talking about even though we all do think that we know what “soul” is…sort of.

AND WHAT ABOUT THE MEANING OF LIFE?

It’s very likely that each of us will decide at some point that the whole “soul” thing is connected somehow to the “meaning of life,” another big amorphous bunch of ideas that wise guys, smartypants and fools have pondered on down through the ages.

YEEP!

ONE MORE TAKE….

One of my favorite veteran actor-comedians Alan Alda is most famous as the guy who played Hawkeye Pierce in the war television series M*A*S*H.  He also wrote a couple of books, one of which is THINGS I OVERHEARD WHILE TALKING TO MYSELF.

The book is a compilation of the speeches the actor was asked to give through the years before audiences of graduating students, scientists, business folks, politicians and such interspersed with rambling musings and reflections about his amazing life.

The last essay in the book features an imaginary speech which is the result of a challenge by a friend, violinist Arnold Steinhardt, who asked Alda, “If you were asked to give a commencement talk on your deathbed, what would you say?”

In the “speech” that Alda imagined the most striking advice he gave was this:

“My dear friends, are you looking for meaning?  Don’t do it.  I’ve driven myself crazy with it.  I have the distinct suspicion now that there is no hidden meaning to life…. Whenever I’ve wanted some meaning, I’ve had to make it myself.  It wasn’t included in the box from the store.”

He winds his way through his experiences with the process of chasing down the meaning of life and wrestling it to the ground and/or choosing to sit quietly and waiting for the deepest, most lasting satisfaction to come to him on its own…or not.

1. Find someone to laugh with.
2. Find something to laugh at (yourself is always good).
3. Keep moving.

He tells his imaginary audience, “Just noticing life can be the whole bottle of beer.”

And he tells the graduates in his audience, “Go forth.  And stay there.”  Rather than returning to your starting point after completing an adventure, he says, “Why ever give up trying to get where you’ve never been before?”

It seems to me that’s a pretty good way to wander through the world, looking for the kind of soul you want to put into your life.

Go play!

Here’s a poem:

MULTIPLE QUESTIONS

The questions tend to multiply

And permutate into more and more…

A nest of questions,

All pertinent, all relevant,

All waiting for debate

With self or other,

Back and forth and back.

They can get to be a

Maze that keeps

Evolving and changing

Into more alleyways

And byways

And hidey-places

Where you think

Meaning can be found,

A labyrinth of asking

Why and how and where.

They can turn into

A monolithic ivory tower

Where you sit and ponder

All day, all night,

Doing nothing more

Than warming some cushions

While your mind runs

Around in circles

Until it falls down dizzy

And you throw up watery

Conundrums all over the floor.

They can turn into branching paths

That keep you wandering

Through the wilderness,

Always finding more and more

Until the world turns dark

And the stars all go away.

The trick, you know,

Is learning how

To live in them.

By Netta Kanoho

Header Photo credit:  “Life’s Uncertainties” by Fadzly Mubin via Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The Light of My Life likes to tell a story about how he learned one of the most important lessons an artist can learn about doing line-work well.

In the village of Masset in Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia), Mathew happened to wander into the studio of a local artist, Wayne Edenshaw, who works in the Haida Indian traditional style.

In case you’ve never seen Haida art, here’s a short YouTube teaching video, “Haida Art!!,” uploaded in 2020 by Art Around the World with Morah Brooke.  It shows some of the “form line” shapes and patterns that are typical of the style.

For a taste of the directions modern artists have taken this Northwest Coast Indian art style, here’s an image of “Hummingbird Copper Dress” a wool dress that was the result of a collaboration between Haida artist Dorothy Grant and Haida-Tlingit artist Robert Davidson.

Cool, huh?

After admiring the artist’s works in progress and the finished stuff around the place, Mathew turned to the artist and said, “Wayne, those are the most beautiful lines.  How in the world can you draw lines that exquisite?”

Wayne replied, with a mischievous grin on his face, “I’ll show you the secret!”

He walked over to where Mat was standing and admiring a drawing in progress on a large drawing board.  Next to the drawing board, hanging off the side, was a string.  On the end of the string was dangling a huge eraser.

The artist laughed as he explained, “You just keep doing it until the line is right!”

HOW THE ERASER CAME TO BE

Whenever it was that people started making marks and symbols on assorted surfaces in an effort to communicate, to keep records, or to make it all pretty, it’s been a given that they also spent a bunch of time removing the marks they made and substituting other marks.

Corrections and drafts, rewriting and copying, as well as updates and revisions have been an integral part of the writing and drawing processes since the beginning.

People who worked in clay, wood, and stone had assorted ways to disappear the marks they made to make way for other marks they wanted to make instead.

The inventor said he inadvertently picked up a piece of gum arabic (also known as caoutchouc, its ersatz Native American name) off his work table instead of a bit of bread and discovered that the thing worked way better than bread bits for making the offensive marks disappear.

By 1778 everybody was calling the plant-based substance “rubber.”

Rubber erasers became common once that happened.

Then, on March 30, 1858, Hymen Lipman of Philadelphia received the first patent for attaching an eraser to the end of a pencil.

The patent was later invalidated because somebody or other pointed out that this innovation was simply a composite of two devices rather than an entirely new product.  Lipman lost his patent.

Erasers come in all kinds of sizes as well.

DO THEN UNDO THEN REDO.  REPEAT, REPEAT, REPEAT…

This self-correcting mechanism is called “developing mindfulness.” It includes things like “noticing and rethinking old, dumb habits,” “revamping or creating new routines,” and “practicing the new moves until you get blue in the face.”

Those moves don’t come with buttons.  (For one thing, their names are too long.)

Computer programmer Bikash Paneru laid out the process for de-bugging a program that keeps glitching up:

1. You discover the problem.
2. You look around and find out what caused the problem.
3. You try to come up with solutions.
4. You pick the solution that you believe will work best.
5. You try to fix the problem with the solution that you came up with.
6. You run the software again.

This Smarty Pants does point out the one major downside to trying to shoehorn the de-bugging process into the conundrums of dealing with Real Life issues.  Like my young friend, he noticed that there was no “reset” button you can poke to run the new programming.

“With life, you have to move forward and fix the problem WHILE you live your life….You have got to make sure that the solution you came up with won’t mess up other things that are working right.  You don’t want to make something work while breaking some other things.”

Uh-huh….

AND THIS IS HOW THE BIG BOYS PLAY….

Self-made millionaire and business book writer Keith Cunningham is regarded as “one of the world’s foremost authorities on business mastery,” it says here.  He’s taught top-flight executives and entrepreneurs not only how to make money, but how to keep it as well.

In this 2015 YouTube video, “Thinking Time – Getting Unstuck,” which is derived from his musings in his 2006 book, KEYS TO THE VAULT: Lessons from the Pros on Raising Money and Igniting Your Business, Cunningham presents a common-sense message about the need to ask the right questions.

Cunningham’s 2017 book, THE ROAD LESS STUPID:  Advice from the Chairman of the Board, is my current “break feast” book.   It sits in my Kindle reader on my computer waiting for the times when I need to get my head reset after yet another series of pounding my head against the wall of my own general dumbness.

In one of the first chapters in the book, Cunningham lays out what he calls the “Five Core Disciplines of Thinking:”

• Find the unasked question — create a question that will result in clarity and generate better choices.
• Separate the problem from the symptom – identify the real obstacle that is blocking progress.
• Check assumptions – differentiate the facts from the story you’re spinning.
• Consider second-order consequences – clarify the risks and the possibility or cost of being wrong.
• Create the machine – create the executable plan and identify the resources (people and money) required to solve the real (core) problem and make forward progress.

Of these five disciplines, the one that seems to best work with my young friend’s puzzlement is the second one, separating problem from symptom.

Cunningham suggests three questions to ask that will help you get clear about the root problem or obstacle you’re facing:

• What are the possible reasons I am noticing this symptom?
• What isn’t happening that, if it did happen, would cause the perceived gap (between where you are and where you want to be) to either narrow or disappear?
• What is happening that, if it stopped happening, would cause that perceived gap from disappearing.

It’s certainly a great way to avoid looking at a problem that isn’t!

My young friend now has a copy of that book.  I gave it to her.  I also gave her a brand new sharpened pencil with eraser intact.

FINAL THOUGHT

My lesson from all of this stuff is that “old-style” works just fine.  That’s probably how a particular way of walking got to be one of the go-to styles of walking for people living in other times and other places.

GETTING TO GRACE

Promises unkept

Again.

And here we are

Standing with bated breath

As the fateful domino teeters

On the edge of falling over.

I already see in my mind’s eye

The lines of black rectangles

Falling over,

Falling down,

Chika-chika-chika-slap,

Chika-chika-chika-slap.

Compounded excuses hang in the air,

An incipient, obfuscating cloud gathering,

Trying to obscure the Real

Of something left undone,

Still unfinished past its time.

Righteous anger wants to be unleashed

And all the insecurities, all the fears

Are circling ’round

Like scavengers waiting on another death.

A sourness grows

As entropy breaks down structure

And the whole ferments, rotting.

Hmmm….

The wait-and-see card is in play now.

So what happens next?

It is a given, you know:

I will continue with this dance.

It is a thing I do.

Whether you continue is yours,

Not mine.

Whether the dance continues

With you or without you is your choice.

There’s always Plan B.

There’s always Plan Z.

Only the uncertainty remains:

How to untangle this mess

Of promises unkept,

How to get back to grace.

By Netta Kanoho

Header Photo credit: “CANS FESTIVAL” by JOHN19701970 via Flickr [CC BY-NC 2.0]

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The stress of coping with the effects of the global pandemic in 2020 and beyond – social distancing, forced quarantines, and travel restrictions as well as the awkward and unsettling changes in day-to-day living and the resulting changes in our accustomed lifestyles — led many of us to re-examine what makes our own lives meaningful.

I suppose it should not come as a surprise that making connections with other people and working on keeping these connections going and growing will always play a large part in adding meaning and richness to our lives. 

For many, the job went away or morphed in ways that made it difficult to maintain old ways of walking.

The result of the strongly suggested retreat behind our physical shields – our walls and our masks – and clearing spaces around ourselves seems to be a noticeable uptick in impaired and deteriorating physical and mental health among the ones who are most isolated.

Physical and mental isolation is not good for us humans.  The ancients and the smarty pants down through the ages have told us this and so do those folks in the white lab coats.

ONLY CONNECT

There’s a lot of advice out there about how to cope with the effects of isolation, pandemic-induced or otherwise.  A lot of them seem to involve either:

• distracting yourself from your fears by getting ultra-busy doing stuff or making things or taking walks or self-comforting regimens or working on some other life-improvement project;
• staying focused on your “mission” if you’ve got one or developing a mission if you don’t; and/or
• building up your social networks in new ways that don’t involve face-time, skin contact, and coughing or sneezing on each other.

The problem is none of these solutions will actually satisfy our deep-seated human need for high-quality connections with other people that convince you that those other people probably do have your back.

“High-quality” connections are the ones where positive, short-term interactions between two people occurs, says Emily Esfahani Smith in her book, THE POWER OF MEANING: Crafting a Life That Matters.

“High-quality” connections happen when each person is tuned into the other one and both reciprocate positive regard and care.

The warmth of a shared smile, a handshake, or a hug; the mingling together of the sounds of our easy laughter and joyousness with those of the people we like; and participating in soft and heartful conversations by people who care about each other have always been touted as part of building our sense of belonging, our sense of togetherness and unity.

And for most of us, belonging and community do matter.

As academic research professor turned best-selling author and leadership guru Brené Brown says,

“A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to.”

We know this stuff already.  The pandemic response just helped us see it even more clearly.

AN OLDER WAY OF WALKING

Archbishop Desmond Tutu is one of South Africa’s best-known human rights activists.  The first black Anglican Archbishop of both Cape Town and Johannesburg, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in to resolve and end apartheid.

In this 2013 YouTube video, “Ubuntu: The Essence of Being Human,” the archbishop, a much-loved icon, gives a beautiful, brief explanation of an old African mindset, ubuntu.  It was uploaded by the Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation, it says here.

In 2014, Carnegie Hall put together a festival celebrating South Africa’s musical tradition.  The following YouTube video, “UBUNTU – Concept of ‘Ubuntu’,” two of the participating artists also try to explain the idea further.

When I browsed through all of the different vlogger and blogger takes on ubuntu, it struck me that this concept has as many interpretations, explanations, and even some blatant exploitations as another (also ancient) Polynesian concept, aloha.

I found similar echoes in other ancient wisdoms as well — in various Asian, native American Indian, and in the shamanic, Jewish and Celtic traditions that I’ve explored.

The interdependence of people, wise guys all over the world and through the ages say, is a given.   You cannot be a human without other humans.

PUTTING ON YOUR WALKING SHOES….

The little snippet doesn’t tell you what to do, but the guy wrote five books, all of them best-sellers, about how you can walk in the world as it is and get to the place you want to be without turning into a me-Me-ME monster.

Another interesting resource is a book by author and yoga instructor Arthur Jeon, CITY DHARMA:  Keeping Your Cool in the Chaos.  This book about how to cope with the challenges of urban and suburban life has gotten mixed reviews from the crowd at GoodReads.

For many, it isn’t Buddhist enough or too New-Agey or something.  I like it because it is so ordinary.  Life-hacks that work tend to be that way.

FINAL THOUGHTS

When you’re into self-improvement, you can lose sight of the fact that every move you make (or don’t make) may not have a lot of impact on or meaning for the rest of the world.

You are, after all, a tiny little bit of the world.

It’s like making coffee, it seems to me.  One grain of a ground-up coffee bean swimming around in a cup of milk doesn’t do much.  You need a whole lot of ground-up grains from a bunch of beans to get a decent cup of latte.

And that can be a very good thing.

CENTER

Well-a-day tra-lah, tra-lay,

Here I am, by myself again.

No matter what,

This is where

It always goes:

Me sitting here

By myself again.

All the fancy-dancing,

All the moves –

To be seen

To be heard

To be noticed –

And then this:

Sitting here alone,

By myself again.

Why is that?

I don’t know.

There’s no crowd,

No one noticing

Your every move,

Your every word.

No eyes watch.

No ears listen.

No voices cheer.

There’s just me

Sitting here alone,

By myself again.

By Netta Kanoho

Header photo credit:  “Self” [2] by Magdalena Roeseler via Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

Lately I’ve been stumbling over books and assorted other offerings by shiny people and various sorts of life-advisors parsing out all the advantages (plus some of the disadvantages) of “being different.”

If you do this, they say, you will stand out.  You will be an “interesting” being.  You will be a Winner-with-a-capital-W.  Maybe you’ll even get to be rich and famous.  And isn’t that a cool thing?

The problem, as these life-advisors will also tell us, is that “being different” can turn your world into a battlefield.

Despite what some of these folks seem to be saying, this “being different” stuff is not just a matter of adopting some stance or other that looks good on you and pretending to be that.

You can make life very simple or very complicated. Some people try to be what others want them to be.  Others try to be different just to stand out.  In both cases, they are changing themselves to impress others.  Neither of these paths has a heart.

Stutman goes on to advise, “Just be true to yourself.  It’s that simple.”

It can also be the most difficult thing in the world to pull off.

Resolutely insisting on making adamantine self-disclosures of your own, latest truth-of-the-week without taking into account the sensibilities of the folks around you may not be the best way to proceed on your own journey.

The other people in these scenarios have a vested interest in how things are now.  They don’t particularly care about your individual take on things nor do they want to even consider how you want to change their outer consensus-world to suit your own self and your own needs.

THE THING ABOUT SNOWFLAKES

Here’s how the familiar argument goes:  Even though there are billions of us humans on this here planet, each and every one of us is an individual, different from every other person in the world.

Even Science agrees. DNA signatures, it has been found, mark our body fluids, our fingerprints and other bits of our skin or hair and can be used to differentiate us, one from the other.

It’s an old cliché:  All of us are just like snowflakes — as unique as a frozen water droplet can be.

Either that, or you will spend a heck of a lot of time getting around a lot of obstacles that arise because of your differences which you may feel obliged to keep on explaining and explaining and explaining in order to stave off blatant attacks.

THE “GREAT PRETENDER” TIP-OFF

Actually, this may be one way to tell whether we are truly being ourselves or if we are trying really hard to be The Great Pretender.

If you’re truly being yourself, you might not be able to change around your presentation of yourself enough to suit other folks.  You may not be inclined to spend a lot of your time explaining yourself to them either.

In the middle of our celebration of our own uniqueness, we do tend to forget that us humans are more alike than we are different.

All of us have feelings.   All of us can be hurt.  We all have basic needs that we want to satisfy.

Many of us want to “belong” to something bigger than ourselves.  We very often want to make our own life stories meaningful.  We all want to be “understood.”

All of us get lonely.  All of us are unsure of ourselves at times. None of us has all of the answers.

What we choose to reveal of ourselves – the ways we differ from and the ways we are the same as the other people around us — are a matter of choice. They are probably the only choices we can actually make as individual humans.

Sometimes the choices we make can be directed or even dictated by the world around us.  When you feel like you’re an outlier or an outsider, it’s a given that you will probably be aware of the collective might of the people around you.

(Working on ways to get out of that gnarly place is also a good life-skill to develop.)

If you’re in a place where it’s okay to be different, be grateful. This is an incredible privilege that you have been given, I say.

POSTER CHILD FOR DIFFERENT

Mayim Bialik is an American actress who is best known as the title character in the NBC sitcom “Blossom” from 1991 to 1995 and later as the neuroscientist Amy Farrah Fowler in the CBS sitcom “The Big Bang Theory” from 2010 to 2019.

In real life, Bialik really has trained to be a neuroscientist. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in between acting stints.  Besides this she is an active vlogger and social media maven with millions of followers.

Since 2015, she has spent a lot of time exploring (and explaining) life-style choices – her own and other people’s – as well as the ramifications and results of making such choices.  Her thoughts about it all are often quite interesting.

I suppose Bialik could be described as a poster-child for “different.”  She’s made a career of highlighting all of her differences, after all.

The following video, “Hurts To Be Different” was uploaded by Bialik in 2016 and features her thoughts about what it feels like to be on the outside looking in.

TO YOUR OWN SELF BE TRUE

This YouTube video, “Being Different” is a slice of life that was uploaded in 2019 by “Caught In Providence,” a local weekday television show that captures real-life people in the middle of their stories.

This one happened in Judge Frank Caprio’s traffic court in Providence. It features a young autistic boy whose mom is in court for a number of minor traffic violations.

The boy in the video has no choice but to be different.  Diagnosed as autistic with a side-order of ADHD, he received a lot of help and worked very hard at finding his own social footing in the world in which he lives.  In his own, quiet way, he is a powerful inspiration.

FINAL THOUGHT

It does seem to me that every one of us humans are both unique and “different” as well as “universal” and “generic” at the same time.  All of us are multi-faceted that way.

How well we fit into the world around us can depend on which part of that spectrum of human attitudes and habitual behaviors that is within us we choose to reveal to the people around us.

Trying out different stances and reveals or choosing to move to another place with people who are more accepting of who we really are can help us find the place where we are most able to be true to the self we most want to be, I am thinking.

Here’s a poem:

SEARCHING

Some people, I guess, are searching to find

The Perfect Other

Who will balance them,

Who will bolster them,

Who will compensate for

Their own halting gaits

So they can walk upright in the world.

They get enraged by the imperfections

Of the one they’ve chosen to hold them up.

They are bitter when their needs are not met.

They feel betrayed when the one they looked to for support

Turns out to be a broken reed.

Me, I guess I can walk.

I do not really need a cane

That’s polished all fine and

Decorated with chased gold,

A thing of beauty and opulence,

Turned by some master’s hand

To purest perfection.

I can stand without needing to be

The envy of some faceless crowd,

Hungry for something to fill their own emptiness.

Me, I’d rather fly,

But, flying things need some place to land.

Creatures of the earth are we

With legs and feet that need solidity.

All I need is an arm, I think,

And a warm hand that’s welcoming,

And a soothing voice to talk me down

From the heights I have been exploring,

A voice that calls me back to the world

When I try to go too far,

Caught in the song of the winds

And the allure of wide horizons.

That’s what I am searching for.

By Netta Kanoho

Header Photo credit:  “Being Different” by Lawrence Murray via Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

“Sanctuary” is a word derived from the Latin, “sanctarium,” which means “a container that keeps a cherished or sacred thing safe.”  The word, as used by the Greco-Romans referred to places of holiness or safety.

Even though the word is often traced only as far as the Greek and Roman empires and their temples, the concept of a place of refuge is universal.  It appears in almost all of the cultural and spiritual traditions from all over the world and has been around for thousands of years.

We might provide this space for others in the hope that if, at some point, we are in a bad way there will be someone there to offer us help.  Often, too, the act of providing refuge is an acknowledgement of having received such help when we needed it our own selves.

It occurred to me that if “sanctuary” is a container for the sacred and the cherished, then whatever is put inside a sanctuary is, according to the definition, a sacred, cherished thing.

THINKING, THINKING, THINKING

Here are a couple of harsh truths:  The world can be an uncertain and fearsome place.  All humans are fragile and can break.

And here are another couple of truths that are not so harsh:  All humans are a conduit for the power of the Creative and each one of us helps to build the world in which we live.

Another IPS (Inner Peace Symptom):  an understanding that you can make a sanctuary for yourself that endures.  [The price for that is developing yourself into a person you can trust to meet whatever comes at you the best way you can.]

OH, NO!  NOT ANOTHER SAPPY WOO-WOO INJUNCTION….

Yeah, yeah, I know.  It sounds like that other ubiquitous bit of advice that’s slung around willy-nilly about how you’ve got to love yourself before you can love anybody else.

That’s sort of a truth.  The real is that even though you don’t love yourself very much, it’s likely that you’ll know something about how to connect with other people around you and maybe you’ll love them dearly even if you can’t show it very well.

Saints and other blessed sorts do it all the time.  So do lots of ordinary folks and those who habitually tweet or spend half their time on Facebook doing silly selfies and food snapshots.

Most of us, though, have not been taught how to love ourselves. Often we’ve even been discouraged from doing so.  (It is more than possible that we’ve never even been introduced to our own selves and we don’t even know where to start.)

This 2020 YouTube Video, “Why You Need to Stop Trying to Be Loved But Love Yourself Instead,” was published by English author, nutritionist, hypnotherapist trainer and motivational speaker Marisa Peer to introduce her book, “I AM ENOUGH:  Mark Your Mirror and Change Your Life.”

Peer is the creator of “Rapid Transformational Therapy,” which she developed over her thirty years of working as a life coach and advisor for “royalty, rock stars, actors, professional and Olympic athletes, CEOs and media personalities,” it says here.

I’ve included it in this post because it does give you a good place to start on building your own trust in yourself and appreciating your own self-worth.

Peer does a really good job of delineating the advantages and benefits of embodying the idea that you are “enough.”

If you know that you are actually “enough” and if you can consistently work on learning how to deal with the world on your own terms, then it’s much more likely that you’ll be able to make yourself into that person you know you can trust.

You’ll probably be better able to accept whatever help you might receive along the way as well.

THE TRICKY THING ABOUT TRUST

Trust is all about knowing that somebody’s got your back.  It is earned, that trust.  A trustworthy person will consistently act in a certain way that works for you.

You can’t trust someone you don’t know or someone who you have not seen being tested by challenging circumstances.

If you get blindsided by your own shadows and demons every time you step out and try something new or different, it is unlikely you’ll even WANT to step outside your own comfort zone.  And if you never do anything new or different, that comfort zone is going to be mighty small.

Trusting yourself is actually a prerequisite for being a person who knows what they really want.

Trusting yourself also means giving yourself permission (and the desire to develop the ability) to go towards the dream you want even if nobody else believes in it.

FINAL THOUGHT

This 2018 YouTube video, “You Are Who You Are Looking For” features motivational speaker and spoken word poet Adam Roa.  It was uploaded by Goalcast.

You can learn more about Roa’s work by clicking the button below.

Here’s a poem:

TIGER EYES

There are tiger eyes in the mirror

Staring back at me,

Calm, alert to all around them,

Wells of warm placidity.

There are tiger eyes in the mirror

And I just have to smile.

They tell me now I’m strong enough

To deal with this world’s guile.

There are tiger eyes in the mirror,

Loving and serene.

Trusting the beast once hated

Seems to be transforming me.

Created by Netta Kanoho

Header photo credit:  “Sunrise: Life at 10,000 feet” by Mattie B via Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.0]

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

Journal-keeping and diary writing – tracking daily events and happenings in some sort of record book – has been going on for centuries.

Except for wanna-be smarty-pants and wise guys (i.e., the “intelligentsia”), poets and writers and Creatives of every stripe, and young girls teetering on the brink of woman-ness, the keepers of these journals mostly recorded daily events and happenings with an exterior point of view.

People with a visual orientation did sketchbooks.

Most everyday journalers used their ledgers, record books and such to document and track their doings in the world, stay on top of their obligations, commitments and schedules, and note the progress made and the results of the actions taken.  

By the mid-1960’s the good doctor had figured out a system to help his patients literally read their own minds by writing down their thoughts, perceptions, and reactions to the events in their lives.  This helped them achieve a deeper clarity about how they were walking in the world and insights into the why of it all.

Progoff shared his findings and the techniques he developed by offering workshops and classes for “journal consultants” in the use of what he called the Intensive Journal method.

He also wrote two books (among many others), AT A JOURNAL WORKSHOP:  Writing to Access the Power of the Unconscious and Evoke Creative Ability and THE PRACTICE OF PROCESS MEDITATION:  Internal Journal Way to Spiritual Experience, in which he detailed his process and gave do-it-yourself instructions that regular people could use to look at and ponder on the life-stories they were making their own selves.

The idea caught on.  More people wrote about the idea and it spread out wider and wider.  For over four decades now journaling for self-discovery and self-exploration has been an accepted part of the postmodern Way of personal growth and emotional wellness.

Click the button below to read her thoughts and the results of her own extensive explorations about the subject.

NOT JUST WOO-WOO

Award-winning Netflix cinematographer and vlogger Matt D’Avella, of the documentary “Minimalism” fame, decided to make a 30-day challenge of daily journal writing.

His candid YouTube video, “What I Learned from Journaling for 30 Days” was published in 2019 and details his experience with trying to develop journaling as another of his entrepreneurial-type, self-development routines/habits.

For him, the experience was not particularly enjoyable, but he did find it very useful.  It is one more tool of the many in his life toolbox.

Motivational speaker and self-development author Mel Robbins developed what she calls “The 5-Second Journal” as an adjunct of her 2017 international bestseller book, THE 5-SECOND RULE:  Transform Your Life, Work and Confidence With Everyday Courage.  She did a YouTube video about it, “The Science Behind the 5 Second Journal” in 2018.

Robbins is a master at making the time and the space that can allow for effective use of a proven tool for making your dream come real.  Her method works and doesn’t take a heck of a lot of time.

ADVANCED JOURNALING FOR THE WRITERS AMONG US

Okay.  I get it.  Not everybody gets off on the power of words.  Not everybody enjoys the process of making words march and dance.  Not everybody needs a pen in hand to figure out what they are thinking.

• Journaling is especially useful for people who drive themselves crazy running loops on themselves that never go anywhere. Journals can turn your recurring mind-loops into wheels that help you move forward.

After you start noticing that you are thinking the same go-nowhere useless thought for the 27^th time, you can snort at yourself, dump the thing on the side of the road and keep on going — maybe finding other, more effective thoughts to think on.

• Journaling is a very cool way to explore core values when you are called to resolve problems that you encounter in your life.

Examining the crises that you face and checking out how you think and move as indications of the values/things you hold most dear is really valuable.  It can be a way to pinpoint and clarify how you actually feel about a situation.

Journaling can help you pin down all those scooting thoughts of yours until you can figure out which ones are truest for you.

• Journaling about a situation acknowledges the experience you are having and can be used to see what you bring to a problem, how you might be contributing to it, and what you can do about it. You can make judgments for yourself about whether what you did was effective and why or why not.

It can help you see the resources you bring with you to meet the situation as well as show you how you might be exacerbating a bad situation because of your own biases, assumptions and pre-judgments.

Journaling can be used to shine a spotlight on your own shadows that contribute to the brambles of a situation.

IF YOU ARE A PART OF THE PROBLEM, IT GETS REALLY HARD FOR YOU TO BE AN EFFECTIVE PART OF THE SOLUTION unless you can see what you are doing that makes the thing worse and you can work on changing that.

As you work towards a resolution of a problem, you’ll be able to look at how you feel about the moves you make, the actions you take and the results you get.

This is a good way to develop a sense of control about a situation.  (You don’t get to control the circumstances.  You don’t get to control other people.  You do get to control yourself.)

• Journaling is valuable as a one-on-one with yourself. It helps you see the pathways through the labyrinth of your mind and you can find different ways and opportunities to get yourself unstuck from the tangles and weird loops in there.

Journaling is a most effective antidote for boredom and for lonely.  You make friends with you.

Maybe, if you keep on doing it, you can even learn to trust yourself enough that standing in ambiguity and facing uncertainty won’t faze you so much because you will know and trust that you can meet whatever comes at you the best way you know how and you will know that your best is pretty durned good!

At the very least, you will begin to recognize your signature moves and you will be able to figure out whether the things work or not.

• You can use your journal to record other, different mindsets you encounter in the world – from other people, from books and the various social media platforms.  Questions you might want to ask are these:

1. How do these mindsets fit in with your life now and your life as you want it to be?
2. How are those mindsets working for the people who use them?
3. How do you feel about these mindsets and about the people who use them?

• Over time journals can become a resource – like an encyclopedia or book of maps. They can become encapsulations and snapshots of sections of your mindset (at a particular time, in a particular circumstance) as well as a record of what you did and how it turned out – what worked, what did not.

FINAL THOUGHT

Journaling is not the whole of life.  For one thing, you have to go out into the world and live your life in order to have something interesting to write about.

Here’s a poem:

ONLY THE GOOD GIRLS….

Maybe Tallulah-baby was right.

“Only the good girls keep diaries,” she said.

Good girls spazz over their smallish days

And go ballistic over slights and slurs,

Turning soap-eratic about the static,

Making trauma-dramas out of

All the miniscule foothills unconquered,

The infinitesimal creeks unforded.

Good girls agonize over poignant situations

Fraught with the he-said/she-said

(Or even worse) the what-they-did-and-why.

They enumerate and iterate

The perfect words left unspoken,

The telling phrases that languish behind locked lips,

Stretched into nicey-nice vanilla smiles.

Tallulah-baby pointed out

That bad girls don’t have the time

(To keep diaries, I mean).

She was probably right about that one too.

(Ummmm…are “journals” the same thing as “diaries,” do ya think?)

created by Netta Kanoho

Header photo: “some writer” by martathegoodone via Flickr [CC BY-ND 2.0]

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

I bet you’ve heard it more than a time or two, from moms, dads, assorted other relatives, besties, advisers and counselors of all sorts.

“Be yourself,” we’re urged, and the person telling us this stuff usually has a kind of self-righteous look on their face, as if they’ve imparted some grand wisdom saying or other.

You’ve probably even given out this specious piece of advice your own self – usually to someone who has been plucking at the one single nerve you’ve got left, after you’ve been all empathetic and compassionate and caring in the face of all of their self-doubts and whining and moaning about how unsure they are about getting on with walking through some social situation or other that is new to them. 

You’ve already run through every good and practical suggestion you could think of, been subjected to every “yes-but” under the sun, and listened (yet again) to the same interminable loop-de-loop until the words run all together and you just can’t help yourself.

It sounds so simple, that advice.  Too bad it’s not.

YOU’VE GOT MORE THAN ONE SELF, YA KNOW….

The problem is you’ve actually got more than one “self.”  All the ancient wise guys and the guys and gals in the white lab coats have told us this or something similar as they slice and dice the human psyche six ways from Sunday.

I just ran across a TEDxTalk published in 2013 that features Caroline McHugh, the founder and CEO of IDology.  It seems to be her one contribution to the Internet world.  (I figure she’s too busy getting on with her real work of helping other people figure out how to manage and develop themselves better.)

It’s a bit long – 26+ minutes – and is the best free-ranging, spot-on exploration of the concept of Self (or rather, Selves) that I’ve ever heard by a witty, warm woman who, with her team, has spent more than a couple of decades now helping business leaders and organizations from Mastercard to MTV to “embrace the idea of being original versions of themselves.”

In the YouTube video, McHugh introduces us to the different parts of us.

• There’s the Self you show to other people, how you impinge on another person’s consciousness. How other people see you depends on the contexts of the situations you’ve experienced together.  Your moves and behaviors that shape their perceptions of you very often are the result of the circumstances in which you are with them.

• There’s the Self that is your “wish image” – how you would like other people to see you. If you do it right, you can actually become that self and keep on growing and becoming better and better at what you already are, McHugh says.

• There’s the Self that reflects what you really think of you.  This one depends, from one day to the next, on how you are feeling about yourself, your actions and the life you are building.  Some days you’ve got your Inner Top Sergeant stomping all over your head.  Other days it’s all rainbows, unicorns and Living the Dream.

• Then there’s the real, unchanging you – the Self that came into the world trailing clouds of glory, the you with all of your core values and your likes and dislikes, the you with a message for the world.

You can click on the button below to watch the TEDxTalk by McHugh.

AND THEN THERE’S THE MAD POET

Edward Estin Cummings (1894 – 1962), often styled as “e e cummings,” in many of his published works, was considered by his contemporaries to be an American master of avant-garde experimental poetry.  He was also a painter, essayist, author and a playwright.

The man wrote an estimated 2,900 poems, among other things, many of them surprisingly popular with regular folks even though they were not traditional poems by any means.

Cummings’ experiments with poetic form and language, juggling syntax, grammar and diction, and even coining words when the regular ones couldn’t do the job he wanted them to do, made his work dance and soar and sing.

I fell in love with the guy right away, back in the day when I was a teenager and susceptible to crushes.

His themes were traditional, and perhaps even somewhat passé.  He explored love and childhood and flowers.  He revisited the ordinary, the clichéd, and the goopy stuff, making them somehow extraordinary, reveling in the joy, growth, and transcendence that he felt was a large part of being human.

He also spent a lot of time attacking mass mind, conventional patterns of thought, and society’s restrictions and limitations on free expression.  Group conformity, herd mentality, and commercialism were favorite targets of his derision.

Starting in 1952, Harvard University asked Cummings to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at the university.  It was a way to honor one of their famous alumni.

After he’d delivered six, very personal “nonlectures” over a two-year period, Cummings published them in a book, I: SIX NONLECTURES, that was probably his only formal attempt at an artistic autobiography.

The 1953 book was reissued in 1991 by Harvard University Press.

I have to confess that the guy has had a great influence on me.  In my younger days, my guiding star was a quote of his:

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”

That one became my own “Good Fight,” the one that overrode all of the others for me through the years.  Those words spoke to me at a young age and they gave me what became the foundation for my own search for the meaning I wanted to make with my life.

I was pleased to find the words again on this YouTube video, “A Poet’s Advice to Students,” (1955), which is a part of the collected readings by the poet included on a two-vinyl LP by Caedmon Records, “E. E. Cummings Reads His Collected Poetry 1920 – 1940 and Prose,” that is a part of the online DisCogs collection.  The video was uploaded to YouTube in 2018 by Franklin Alexander.

In the video, cummings also shares his thoughts on how and why someone might even want to become a poet.  He is not particularly encouraging about the whole enterprise.

FINAL THOUGHTS

My own thought on all of this is that self-awareness is a lot more complicated than you’d think.  No wonder the assorted explanations from all the wise guys and smarty pants in the world who look at these explorations of Self then hand out advice of one sort or another tend to get us ordinary sorts all tangled up and confused.

I figure that last part is probably easier.  After all, us humans are just like snowflakes.  No two of us are alike, but (unlike snowflakes) we can make it all up as we go along.

And isn’t that a cool thing?

Here’s a poem:

AUNTY LAYS IT OUT FOR BABY GIRL

Did you get that, Baby Girl?

Jump into the dragon’s mouth and you will get bitten

(Comes with a lifetime guarantee).

Jump-Chomp!  Jump-Chomp!

(Simple as a-b-c, easy as 1-2-3.)

Don’t jump and you stand on pointed toe,

Twirling ’round and ’round,

Little ballerina, all sparkly pink tutu and attitude.

Smiling through the pain…nothing gets YOU down!

What a choice!

It ain’t fair!

You can be lizard-food

Or you can have gorgeous hair,

Tap dance on the monster’s tongue

Or get all dizzy ’til the music box spring gets sprung.

So, tell me, Aunty….

Is there, maybe, some OTHER choice?

By Netta Kanoho

Header photo credit:  “The Laws of Ion’s Transcendence – The Third Law – Twin Souls” by Daniel Arrhakis via Flickr [CC BY-NC 2.0]

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts

Does it seem to you, as it does to me, that every human in the world has at least one thing in common:  We, all of us, struggle.  No matter who we are, struggle seems to be a fact of life.

Some of us have great obstacles to overcome and some of us have more massive ambitions than others do, but, every one of us does have some sort of difficulty making it from where we are now to where we really want to be.

Sometimes we’re struggling with other people walking through our worlds.  Their ideas or life views might not mesh with our own and there will be bumping and grappling involved when we try to get to a meeting of the minds.

STRUGGLE MAKES THE STORY

Struggle seems to be a built-in component of every purposeful, well-lived life. The struggles seem to be even worse for those who are neither purposeful nor living their lives particularly well.

(Maybe, except for a very few highly evolved mystically oriented folks and the guys who are looking very hard for a heck of a lot of easy, we humans tend to expect to meet with some sort of struggle or other as we go through our days.)

There’s no story if there’s no struggle, after all. Tales about leapfrogging from triumph to triumph and floating along through joy after joy after joy with no push-back, no missteps, no disappointments, and no junk parts just don’t seem real, somehow.

More importantly, the tales just don’t feel heroic.  Heroes are not heroes if they don’t face some sort of struggle.

All the wise guys and smarty pants tell us that struggle makes us strong and shapes our way of being.  Just scroll around in a good online quote collection like the one you can access by clicking on the button below.  You’ll find a plethora of examples.

It is not such a big leap to believe (especially after all that meandering around through smart-guy thoughts) that if struggle helps to shape your way of being, then you can influence the way your life goes by choosing what you’re going to struggle for or struggle against.

Perhaps all you need to do is choose your own “good fight” and work on getting that one right.  Your life will develop meaning and mana as you work on through the struggle and fight your own good fight.

WHAT’S A “GOOD FIGHT”?

The term “good fight” is actually Biblical in origin.  In the King James version of The Good Book, 2 Timothy 4:7 says, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”

This, it seems to me, is a powerfully triumphant statement at the end of one’s life.

Evangelists use this scripture as a rallying cry for being good and faithful Christians, but it can also be used more generally as an admonition to do your best to support what you feel is right and good and true.

A question you might want to consider as you’re making your way through the world, is this one:

What do YOU feel is worth fighting for?

When that question is asked of many people, the answers will be as varied as the people involved.  Perhaps there will be one “good fight” that resonates with you, one you can claim for your own.

It is possible that pursuing that one may be what will add a profound sense of meaning and mana to the life you are living.

If you do find the one “good fight” that matters most to you, you may want to ask yourself:

What am I doing to fight my good fight?

Can I do more?

How?

And then you go on from there.

THE FLY IN THE OINTMENT

As always, with all these mind-games, there is a kicker in the mix.  The thing about being “down for the struggle” is that you do, eventually, take ownership of the massive, chronic, big old problem or the very good thing you have either committed yourself to whittling down or to building up strong.

Throwing yourself against the conundrums and battering your way through obstacles and all that can create a momentum that takes you farther than you ever thought you’d go.

It is probably inevitable that at some point your struggle is likely to become the end-all and be-all of your way of walking.

Is my “good fight” taking me where I want to go?

And that one might be the hardest and most important question of them all.  It’s the one that only you can answer and your answers will help you choose the direction in which you want to continue on this walk of yours.

Hint:  Is there joy for you in it?  Is the joy in the doing worth all of the pain of your struggle?

A GOOD FIGHT SONG

Every good fight needs an anthem, I say.  I ran across a lovely YouTube video that was uploaded and shared by The Piano Guys in 2015.  It’s a mash-up of Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song” and Joh Newton’s “Amazing Grace.”

The setting for the video is the beautiful Eilean Donan Castle in Dornie, Scotland.

The Piano guys are pianist-songwriter Jon Schmidt, cellist-songwriter Steven Sharp Nelson, producer-videographer Paul Anderson and music producer-songwriter Al van der Beek.  They make music and they make cool videos which they share.

Enjoy!

The lyrics of American singer and songwriter Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song” took the world by storm in 2015 when it was released as a single by Columbia records.

It topped the charts in the United Kingdom and Poland.  It peaked within the top ten singles in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Ireland and the top twenty in Slovakia, even. In the United States it sold over six million copies.  Wo!

It was one of the inspirations for the Piano Guys’ video.

Click on the button below for a look at the lyrics to the song, that was uploaded to YouTube in 2020 by AweLyrics.

Here’s a poem:

BALANCING ACT

The Mundanities are three:

People, money, time.

If you understand those things,

Then, the world begins to rhyme.

The Celestials, too, are three:

Spirit, heart and mind.

If you figure those things out,

Heaven’s what you’re bound to find.

Here’s the thing, though….

If the Celestial’s your main focus

The mundanities make you fall.

Too much of the mundane

And you can’t see up at all.

The only answer’s balance

And that’s not easy to do.

There really is no recipe

For this ever-changing stew.

You do the best you can.

You give the best you’ve got.

You’ll rise up and you’ll fall,

And, for sure, you’ll hurt a lot.

And when there are no answers,

When you can’t see what to do,

You can only trust the simple truth

Residing inside of you:

That the universe keeps changing

Moving first this way, then that,

And if you follow where it leads you,

You might make it through intact.

By Netta Kanoho

Photo credit:  “Road to Nowhere” by Enot91 via Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

I just stumbled over a quote from the amazing Maya Angelou that resonates with me enormously, especially during this time of lockdowns and disconnection:

“Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art.”

The lady knew.  To become fully human, we have to go out and play.  Then we need to come back inside and tell each other our stories.

Poet laureate, mother, dancer, sex worker, best-selling author, daughter, singer, street car conductor, sister, political activist, actress, film maker, scholar, and wife, Angelou embraced and emphatically owned her life.  She learned her lessons and she used them to help the rest of us learn and accept our own.

Angelou imbued the experiences of her life with meaning to such a degree that she became a beloved internationally-known icon and a lasting, powerful voice for heartfulness and connection.

Even now, she remains as a testament that our identity, our sense of self, is made up of the stories we tell ourselves and each other.

As a result of her accomplishments the lady received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. Her words shine on even after her death in 2014.

The following YouTube video, “The Evolution of Maya Angelou” was published in 2019 by Now This Entertainment.  It gives a short overview of the long and multi-faceted life of one who embraced all that Life had to offer, turning it all into a magnificent poem.

A NUTS-AND-BOLTS GUIDE TO SELF RE-INVENTION

I came across a book, PERSONALITY ISN’T PERMAMENT:  Break Free From Self-Limiting Beliefs and Rewrite Your Story by Benjamin Hardy, PhD.  It was published in 2020.  It will probably have a place on my bookshelf for a while.

In the book, the good doctor, best-selling author and blogger starts from the premise that every personality test ever devised is basically B.S.

Things like the Color Code, the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator, the DISC (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Conscientiousness) assessment, the Enneagram, the Winslow Personality test, the NEO (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness) Personality Inventory and the HEXACO (Honesty, Humility, Emotionality, eXtroversion, Agreeableness, Conscientious and Openness to experience) personality framework as well as all the off-the-cuff personality quizzes in magazines and online apps that say they can tell you who you are lie, he says.  Period.

He does have a point.  Most personality quiz things and assessment tools are flawed, but people do like to play with them.  Sometimes they use these quizzes (or the quizzes and assessment tools are used by other people) to make decisions that can affect their lives adversely.

The personality quiz fetish got so bad that in 2019 Facebook had to ban the things from the platform…after 87 million people had given away their personal information in exchange for answers to a personality quiz.

Every personality quiz that ever was, according to Hardy, is based on a cognitive bias (a systemic error in thinking) held by schools of psychology that “places a great deal of emphasis and value on the past.”

At one point Hardy tells us, “This is how successful people live:  They become who they want to be by orienting their life toward their goals, not as a repeat of the past; by acting bravely as their future selves, not by perpetuating who they formerly were.”

As promised, Hardy tells us how — replete with assorted exercises and head games as well as role models galore.  His musings are summarized and categorized in the chapter headings:

• Transform your trauma. (CAVEAT ALERT:  This book is not a substitute for good psychotherapy if you are suffering from post-traumatic stress or other extreme anxiety or mental health issues.  It seems to me to be mostly about “little-t” traumas.)
• Shift your story. (There’s some really good stuff about how to play with your stories and create your own meanings.)
• Enhance your subconscious. (These are mostly common-sense things about taking care of yourself.)
• Redesign your environment. (These, too, are pretty standard stuff about building a support system and an environment that helps you stay focused on your desired outcomes and making your goals become real.)

It’s all put together in one place as a system and way of doing things, and it at least gets you to look at what you’re doing from a perspective that might help you break away from the limiting beliefs and thought patterns that keep you spinning in circles.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once pointed out that, “Life isn’t about finding yourself.  Life is about creating yourself.”  (Hardy even uses the quote in his book.)

Angelou’s stance seemed to start from seeing all of the experiences of her life as gifts.  The lessons she gained were ones that she could use to enhance her sense of the worthiness of her own self and to help us see her in that way too.

Angelou danced directly and honestly with Life-Its-Own-Self and with the rest of us as well.  And maybe that is the real difference.

CAULDRON

You are sitting in the middle

Of the cauldron now.

The perfume of your sacrifice

Rising all around you,

Reaching up towards Heaven

As you ripen, as you mellow,

Giving up the old,

Letting go, letting be.

Others crowd around you

Wanting, needing, demanding juicy bits,

Scraping, bowing flatteringly,

Trying to get you to notice

That they are there waiting

For you to pick them up and carry them.

After all, you are so very strong

And they need you, don’t you know?

But Heaven’s there, up above

That cauldron where you sit,

Marinating in the juices of the world.

It opens wide to swallow you up,

If you’ll just release this need you have

For being needed, being noticed.

There will be no thunder if you turn aside.

There will be no hallelujah chorus if you don’t.

The only thing that happens is,

Eventually, once you’ve steeped

As much as you can stand,

You’ll climb back out and wander

Down the eternal road again,

Maybe doubling back or maybe going on,

Dancing or drooping, weighed-down or floating.

The ripe scent of you wafts upward,

Tickling the nostrils of the ancients.

You are being helped,

Even though it feels

As though all that has been

Is in disarray and disorder,

It means little…

Only that what is flying apart now

Will join again in splendid new arrangements.

Press on….

By Netta Kanoho

Header photo credit: “Adventure shoes” by Ardelean Samuel via Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

For years now, I’ve heard about the “Slow Movement.”  The ideals of keeping to a human pace, puzzling out and enjoying inherent creative processes, caring about human interactions and needs, and savoring life’s little moments one by one have always resonated with me.

But, hey…I’ve been busy!  As the consensus-world kept picking up speed and going hyper, all kinds of interesting things were popping.  The razzle-dazzle got brighter, and the pyrotechnics were grand.

Busy, busy, busy was the order of the day.  I felt like the littlest cousin again, chasing after the big kids yelling, “Hey, guys!  Wait for me!”

All that running was getting exhausting and I noticed that we were all turning a bit whiny and irritable.

Perhaps the Universe is telling us what actor Eddie Cantor once advised, “Slow down and enjoy life.  It’s not only the scenery you miss by going too fast – you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.”

IT AIN’T JUST ABOUT SPEED

That name – “The Slow Movement” — is deceptive.  For one thing, the ideas behind this so-called movement have very little to do with speed and a great deal to do with how we get things done and why.

The word “slow” in that label is actually an acronym for “Sustainable, Local, Organic and Whole.”  Knowing that one factoid turns the thing into a whole other movie.

Chroniclers of the S.L.O.W. like to point to the year 1986 as the start of it all. They credit Carlo Petrini, a Leftist Italian journalist, as the leading light in this reiteration of an older way of walking.

Petrini initiated “Slow Food” as a protest against the planting of the McDonald’s Golden Arches above a restaurant doorway at the foot of the Spanish Steps in the Piazza di Spagma, the most famous square in Rome.

The invasion of cheap American fast food into the heart of an extraordinary foodie culture provoked a big push-back.  Petrini and other like-minded lovers of good food raised the banners for mangia bene, “eating well.”

(You can get an overview of the history and growth of the Slow Food organization by clicking on the button below.  It is remarkable.)

-click-

IS IT EVEN A “MOVEMENT”?

This so-called movement is sort of amorphous.  There isn’t actually some organization or association overseeing the development of this S.L.O.W. thing.  Slow Food had many, many sprouts and off-shoots all over the place.

Maybe it should be called an “up-welling” instead.  Maybe it is just another way to “Just Say No.”

Slow living, its proponents are quick to point out, is NOT about being lazy, good-for-nothing so-and-so’s.  It’s not about living like a sloth or turning into some dazzled lotus-eater wandering around in a daze.

MAYBE IT’S JUST ANOTHER, OLDER WAY OF DANCING

In the more than three decades since the Italian protestors took to the streets, the whole S.L.O.W. cultural meme sparked international interest in a more humane, alternative way of walking through the world.

For real, guys, as we all know, the Hustle can get tiresome.

People all around the world questioned the modern-day perceived need to force ourselves to keep up with the mechanically measured nanosecond pacing of the techy paradigms that have spawned and spread since the Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain in the 18^th century.

They questioned the whole paradigm of people viewed as “human resources.”  They keenly examined how the quality of our lives are being affected by these kinds of mind-constructs.

Taking care of yourself, and treating all of the other people involved in the transactions of your days equitably and empathetically as well as making the effort to take care of the places where you are living your life are just a part of their How.

Hmmm….

Maybe I never officially joined the “Slow Movement” because I never felt the need to stick a label on my forehead, buttons on my lapels and bumper stickers on my vehicles.   I just never stopped trying to live in the Hawaiian real old style.

Each of the ways of moving in malama-mode requires deep thought, quiet consideration, an intense attentiveness and a sharp focus that just are not possible when you’re in the middle of a roller-coaster ride.

“Slowness is the forgotten dimension to time.  Unlike chronological time, it is nonlinear, time here and now, time that works for you, extraordinary time.  So why be fast when you can be slow?  Slowness is also about balance, so if you must hurry, then hurry slowly.”

GETTING THE RHYTHM BACK

The various tenets of the slow living mindset have been applied to all kinds of different human endeavors. Among the “Slows” (besides Food) that have emerged are things like:

• Slow Architecture
• Slow Art
• Slow Beauty
• Slow Church
• Slow Cities
• Slow Communication
• Slow Consumption
• Slow Counseling
• Slow Dance
• Slow Design
• Slow Exercise
• Slow Fashion
• Slow Gaming
• Slow Gardening
• Slow Goods
• Slow Investment
• Slow Marketing
• Slow Media
• Slow Medicine
• Slow Money
• Slow Parenting
• Slow Photography
• Slow Reading
• Slow Sex
• Slow Schools
• Slow Scholarship
• Slow Science
• Slow Technology
• Slow Television
• Slow Thought (Philosophy)
• Slow Travel
• Slow Urbanism
• Slow Work

Well…you get the idea.  Like the Slow Food model, many of these were grassroots initiatives, started by one or more persons who believed passionately in an idea and practiced it and talked it up until they got a whole bunch of other people behind it.

Some of the explorations have come and gone.  Others keep on going.  Some of it might just be authentic and genuine expressions of Being while the rest of it might just be posturing and matters of Style.

Perhaps it is just the change of pace that affects us so deeply.

Another possibility might be that we really do need to get into better sync with our own natural visceral life-rhythms.

One of my favorite YouTube videos is “FOLI (There Is No Movement Without Rhythm),” a short film by Thomas Roebers and Floris Leeuwenberg.  This version is the original, uploaded in 2010 by Thomas Roebers for sharing with the world.  It is dedicated to the people of Baro who appear in the video.

LAST THOUGHTS

It occurs to me that, as a group, we have a heck of a lot of experience – good and bad — at being human.  Maybe the only thing we actually need to do is to stop trying to mimic the machines we created to help us make our human lives better.

Maybe all we need to do is learn more appropriate ways to fit our new tech into our older and more appropriate ways of walking.

Hey!  Here’s a good idea:  let’s stick our tools back into our toolboxes and pull them out when we need them, letting them just sit there when they are not necessary.

Here’s a poem:

MECHANICAL POEM

I AM … I WONDER … I HEAR …

I SEE … I WANT … I AM …

I KNOW … I SAY … I DREAM …

I TRY … I HOPE … I AM …

[Hmmm…  How ’bout marching in two-by-two?]

I AM/I WONDER

I HEAR/I WANT

I SEE/I AM

I KNOW/I SAY

I DREAM/I TRY

I HOPE/I AM

[Oh, cool!  How ’bout a do-see-do?]

I AM/I KNOW

I WONDER/I SAY

I HEAR/I DREAM

I SEE/I TRY

I WANT/I HOPE

I AM/I AM

[Then there’s breakdancing (on its head)….]

I TRY…

I KNOW/I SEE/I AM

I… WONDER

I HEAR/I AM

…I WANT

I DREAM/I SAY/I HOPE

I AM, AM, AM, AM, AM….

[Hmmm…echoes, even!

So few words.

The power’s in the ‘I’.]

By Netta Kanoho

Header Photo credit:  “In Praise of Slow” by saoriweaver via Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

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