"I love you"

Ok, this one is going to be a little difficult for some – that family member you don’t talk to much anymore….your father (for sons), your son (for fathers), that friend who was always there for you…..

Get your phone out and text those words to someone.

That’s it.

Drop the suitcase

“Always take your next shot unburdened by previous failures to hit the target.  Do not be influenced by your successes either.  Stay in the present moment.” – Eugene Harrigel; “Zen in the Art of Archery”

Whether it was good or bad, the past is over.  Drop the suitcase. 

Let this moment be what it is – fresh.  

Pain is inevitable, suffering is a choice

Like you, I have bad days. Things that are important and dear to me seem to be quite out of sorts some days. It hurts.

You read something like the title of this post, and it’s easy to say “yeah, yeah, yeah – whatever.”

But after years of “practice” and observation, I have noticed some things. When I have that bad day and feel the pain of disappointment, frustration or pain, I can easily keep replaying it in my head – feeling the sting again and again – and even magnifying it to be bigger. That’s the suffering part in the above caption.

Someone hits me with the whip, and I say “That hurts…and may I borrow that whip? – because I will use it on myself over and over again so I don’t forget how this feels.”

Do I have to do that to myself?  

So, I catch myself thinking about it and replaying it. I say to myself “No. Stop this.Stop thinking about it. Maybe reinterpret it and maybe not, but move on.” I may move my body – do something, go somewhere, be around people, interact. That helps.

Being more mature than I was, and not as mature as I will be, I understand now. 

Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.

The world will become better….

…when you become better. 

When you improve, so does everyone and everything around you.

You’re in charge.

The Alchemist

Want to read (listen to) a good book? Check out The Alchemist by Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho. I listened to the audio. It’s a great story with lessons for the ages embedded within. Here’s a passage – 

“The story of your life and the story of the universe were written with the same hand.”

Enjoy.

Neuro-Associations

What we associate pain or pleasure to is called “neuro-association.” Maybe we went to a party in Montclair and we were ostracized and had a terrible experience. Now when we even hear the word “Montclair” we have a negative reaction. When we hear someone lives there, we think they are horrible unfriendly people.

Maybe we met some French people who were really super nice and accommodating and they helped us out of a jam when we needed it. Now we feel an affection for anyone when we learn they are French, assuming they are wonderful people.  

It could be a place, a person, a food, a situation, a company, an animal – anything.

Neuro-associations are how we learned and stayed alive thousands of years ago, and are still useful. Don’t go to that area because that’s where the dangerous animals are. Don’t trust a member of that tribe because they ambushed us long ago. It’s still how our brain works.

Neuro-associations can be helpful or paralyzing and limit us. For today, we have to ask ourselves, “Is it true?” Is it true that all people from France are really nice? No, it’s not, but from where I sit, it’s not hurting me to think that way. Is it true that all people from Montclair are snobs? Of course not, and it is not good for my health or my social life to carry around that sentiment. 

Some people are hijacked by unreasonable powerful neuro-associations and walk around limited forever. We can challenge them and overwrite the unuseful ones by making new decisions.

Facing facts

“How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?”

What do you think?

This is a question posed by Abraham Lincoln to his team. His answer to them? “Four. Calling it something it is not, does not change reality.”

Sometimes we want to see an external situation one way so we make a story about it for ourselves that makes us feel better. Sure, we can call it optimism, and there is a positive side to doing that. But when you make important decisions based on your errant views, you make the wrong decisions.

At our School of Entrepreneurship, we say “To set things right, you have to see things right.”

What sticky situation do you have in your life? Before you make a decision about it, are you seeing it right?

Avoiding a crisis

A crisis forces us to pay attention to things that we’d ignore in normal times.  Avoiding one takes a combination of foresight, understanding, caring and self-discipline.

Nothing happens suddenly.  The seeds are planted long before and the cumulative effect of repetitive action builds to finally bloom into results.

To avoid a crisis in your life, what have you ignored that you shouldn’t any longer?

Being the best you can be

Someone asked me something like “Do you like work?” and “Why do you work?” I thought about it for a few seconds and then spontaneously said, “I’m trying to be the best I can be.”

The next morning I read these words by Joseph Conrad (who was one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century) – “I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work – the chance to find yourself.”

By “working” we mean a classic job and/or working for a cause or goal which takes labor of the mind and/or body. What becomes of a person who does not work?

I think work is a path to being the best version of you by finding out what you can do. What do you think?

The Foragers' Secret

Before the agricultural revolution, humans used to forage for food. The foragers’ secret of success, which protected them from starvation and malnutrition, was their varied diet. Farmers tend to eat a very limited and unbalanced diet. Especially in premodern times, most of the calories feeding an agricultural population came from a single crop – such as wheat, potatoes, and rice – that lacks some of the vitamins and minerals and other nutritional materials humans need.  

The typical peasant in China ate rice for breakfast, rice for lunch and rice for dinner. If she were lucky, she could expect to eat the same the following day. By contrast, ancient foragers regularly ate dozens of different foodstuffs. The peasant’s ancient ancestor, the forager, may have eaten berries and mushrooms for breakfast; fruits, snails and a turtle for lunch; and rabbit and onions for dinner. Tomorrow’s menu might have been completely different. This variety ensured that the ancient foragers received all the necessary nutrients.

One unquestionably negative trade-off of the agricultural revolution was the reduction in the variety of foods we eat. Add the industrial revolution and we have a diet that mostly consists of “edible food-like substances” that did not exist 150 years ago.

Maybe we should eat a greater variety of raw real food, ehh?