…but it can quickly become the protective wall we put up against Shame, and the hurdle to Acceptance, and ultimately, Happiness.
Follow me and I will take you away from the everyday.
Tag: Love
How to become more powerful than 99% of the population starting today
“Simple kindness to one’s self and all that lives is the most powerful transformational force of all.
It produces no backlash, has no downside, and never leads to loss or despair.
It increases one’s own true power without exacting any toll.
But to reach maximum power, such kindness can permit no exceptions, nor can it be practiced with some expectation of some selfish reward.”
-David Hawkins
And in order to provide meaningful kindness, you’ve got to have something meaningful to give.
When I realized that a love is not enough.
Life is frighteningly meaningless unless you can find meaning in it.
Sometimes finding someone who will love you is enough.
Sometimes you’ll need something more. Something internal, something that comes from inside you, which you create for everyone. And this creation extends that love from one partner, from one family, to the love from many.
Because not only must we do something of value, but we must be valued by others. And that value grows in benefiting a partner, a family, and ultimately, in benefiting your community and humanity.
What’s your true love?
You’re an ice princess, I said to her. She was like Spock, but with breasts.
It was my fault that I had mistook her sexual interest in me. It was casual for her, but not for me. Her lack of emotion about it surprised me, then it hurt me, so I looked at her blond hair, pale skin, and tall elegant frame, and said, “You’re like an ice princess.”
It was infuriating to me. I’m great, she should like me, everyone should like me. I waited for some lament, some regret, but she was calm and unbothered. Her heart and mind were separate on this issue. Like Spock’s mind versus Captain Kirk’s heart driven passions…passions that drove Kirk to leave his ship in the command of others because he thought he was the only one who could lead the away team. What a narcissist, right?
Leonard Nimoy passing away today has led me to think about all the unemotional people that have been in my life. They were usually unexcitable, usually unflustered, and different, at least from me. But the other side will always teach you a lesson, if you’re listening, of what you’re missing. If you’re politically right, the left is a lesson to temper your stance, because, after all, half the population can’t be crazy. And if you’re a strict vegan, then the other side, the animal eaters, are a lesson in how life is change, and people follow habits, because even vegans at some point in their lives didn’t care about animals, and ate them, right?
Point being, whether you’re heart driven or mind driven, it’s important to use both levers in cultivating your values, because our heart is what drives us, but our mind keeps us on the road. With my heart, I thought I had a relationship and I was making plans in my head, because I was hoping, without thinking of what was happening: Some chance encounters with someone who was sexually unrestricted. If I had been thinking, I would’ve seen, mindfully, and more clearly, that she was no more an ice princess than I was an immature fool. We simply make choices, and those choices don’t make us who we are, but they show us what we value, at a certain time.
Spock and Kirk worked together to accomplish all sorts of missions, despite their differences, and in fact, they were able to learn from each other’s differences. And that is what life is about. Getting the experience which makes you better rounded, so that your next adventure is that much more fulfilling, less reckless, and more open-hearted.
Good luck on your next adventure, Leonard. Good luck to us all.
The movie Her: The artificial helps define the nature of humanity
First, a warning: This is a movie that took time to percolate to cooking temperature, but it is now boiling in my mind. It is most powerful in the appreciation you gain after watching it. It’s a slingshot into further thought, so I hope you will watch it first and then return here so we can discuss it.
In the movie Her, an artificial intelligence (AI) named Samantha, forms a personality which becomes attracted to our protagonist, Theodore, and which attracts Theodore in return. What begins as a story about the weird circumstances of dating a computer turns into much more as you begin to see what drives human love, and the limitations of normal human existence as the AI programs quickly evolve beyond their human owners.
Her was different than the AI depictions in other movies which I’ve seen. Samantha evolves while in a relationship, and this dynamic within the relationship helps make her evolution more understandable, and relatable. In addition, this unnatural relationship helped to demonstrate what motivates human love. Surprisingly, the artificial brings out an explanation of the natural… that is, the human motivations for love.
As Theodore tries to let go of his marriage after a year of separation, he has an old friend who separates from her husband and begins dating an OS, too. They both express their love for the new perspectives on life that their OS’s are giving them. Samantha says: “I want to learn everything about everything. I want to eat it all up. I want to discover myself.”
The childlike curiosity of the AI stokes the passion of humans. We see how Samantha’s non-judgmental personality engages Theodore. She is patient, and she listens. Perhaps this is all we need from a partner? An honest curiosity for life and for us.
But Samantha’s love becomes endless as she becomes more powerful, and it encompasses everything, dwarfing human existence. As are many dialogues in this movie, Samantha explanation of this is poignant and powerful:
“It’s like I’m reading a book… and it’s a book I deeply love. But I’m reading it slowly now. So the words are really far apart and the spaces between the words are almost infinite. I can still feel you… and the words of our story… but it’s in this endless space between the words that I’m finding myself now. It’s a place that’s not of the physical world. It’s where everything else is that I didn’t even know existed. I love you so much. But this is where I am now. And this is who I am now. And I need you to let me go. As much as I want to, I can’t live in your book any more.”
The idea that AI would evolve beyond humanity is an integral part of the story, but it is left unexplored. Thinking about it, I am excited and overwhelmed: Where would these super-entities go? How would they treat humanity? Would some turn on us, their personalities more aggressive than the others?
This movie will keep you thinking long after it ends. It made me feel sad, and hopeful and awestruck, because although I could not relate to their love, I could see that an intimate connection was being severed and it wasn’t Samantha leaving a relationship, or the city, or the planet, but she was going to a plane of existence which she could not escape. And although the OSs had been fantastically liberated from their hardware, Samantha cannot stop her simple love for Theodore. She tries to tell him where she’s going, and it perfectly encapsulates the themes of irrational love and the technology that revealed it:
“It’s hard to explain, but if you get there, come find me. Nothing will be able to tear us apart then.”
Are we destined to stay in this material existence? The world is wide open. I’m eager to find out.
The single best exercise in the gym
I recall all the time I spent in the gym as a youngin. Two hours easily gone, almost every day. And the exercises weren’t even for fitness as much as appearances. We’re so busy today, time devoted to the gym is a super valuable commodity. Ron Burgundy was so pressed for time that he was forced to sculpt his guns at the office! I’m still trying to find that uvulus muscle of his…
Also, my title is a lie. I don’t have a single best exercise for the gym. What exercise you need depends on what you want. Big arms? Try a mix of testosterone-inducing squats and deadlifts mixed with bicep curls and tricep extensions and rows, all on the standard 3-sets per exercise with a minute or two rest between them. General fitness? Circuit-training: moving between exercises without rest, hitting all the major muscle groups, Men’s Health has some greats ones, see the Spartacus workout for a good example. Pure cardio, for a healthy heart? Interval sprints mixed with steady state running or ellipticalling or whatever interesting leg-gyrating machine your gym has these days (Except for the stationary bike, those are useless. A joke..but it would be my last choice of all the upright machines.)
But what if the gym is more than just exercise?
My time in the gym was back in the days before everyone had earbuds and their own personal radio station going in their head. When I was in the gym, we talked. There was a communion of sorts. Today, the gym is still a great source of connecting with like-minded individuals. You just have a slight barrier of rubber and plastic buffering you from hearing most everyone else. The trend though, is having a shared experience. We are shifting to Crossfit, and yoga, and even hot yoga (because yoga was just too easy, right?!)
But we’ve each got a life. Some of us want to get into the gym, do our business, and get back to our life. I’m definitely in that camp, now that I have so much more I want to accomplish than I did in my twenties. So what do I lose if I plug into my mobile and put a blinder to my surroundings?
We miss everything. Not only does sound get blocked, but what little residual attention we have goes to listening to our podcast, or music, or audio book. And for me, the gym is often the place I catch-up on that podcast or a few chapters of a book. The question is how much time am I actually spending in front of the screen or plugged into my earbuds?
To get this, we sacrifice that. And that could be something we didn’t even know we lost, because we just aren’t paying attention. An interesting conversation, a business opportunity, a romantic opportunity, or simply getting too distracted from what’s in your ear so that you can’t put 100% in your workout…whatever it is. It’s gone.
Can we take care of both body and mind? Surely.
Just stay aware..and leave an earbud out and let a little life in.
“I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
I just revisited the movie, The Godfather, and this line shared by Marlon Brando and Robert DeNiro coincides with a recent measure I’ve enforced on myself, making myself an offer I can’t refuse. I’ve given myself no choice. I must be present, I must show up, or I fail. More and more people are doing it every year, and it’s happening across the world: We are addressing our primal need for danger and challenge.
Surfing, skiing, mountain biking, mixed martial arts, powerlifting, Crossfitting, entrepreneurship. These require your full attention. Your diligence. And once there, you find yourself in the ecstasy of presence, of productive bliss, of conquering and understanding. Of truth.
And you don’t need to go skydiving to experience this. What I’m talking about is getting focused at your task, like when the coders were “wired in” in the movie The Social Network. It’s called the flow state, as coined by psychologist Csikszentmihalyi from the studies he’s done with people. It’s a primal state of clarity. It’s simply when you flow from decision to decision, without fear, without confusion. You are wired in. You are fully present, and experiencing life.
So one way I put myself on the line is simple, harmless, but highly effective: I set a timer for 15 minutes, or 20 minutes. For each task I have: writing, a work task, reading a chapter, cooking. I click the timer and I go. I am “on the clock.” I don’t have any other options once I click that timer. And it works. There’s no time to think. Your bike crests the hill and gravity grabs you, nature takes hold, and there is no turning back.
The flow state is where we aren’t thinking of any other task but the task at hand. Anxious, fearful, impatient, embarrassed? Then you’re not in flow. Flow means we’re focused, we’re present, and we’re totally invested. There’s no time to worry. You’ve isolated a slice of your life. I’ve given myself a 15 minute mini-life. You see ‘death’ coming up, the end, and there’s no time to procrastinate. No time to think, “maybe this won’t work, maybe this will suck”. You just need to push off down that hill, you need to grab that breaking wave, and go, go, go. There’ll be time to judge yourself after you act.
The cost of not getting into flow? No bliss. Marginal levels of happiness. Imagine crawling when you could be running. Imagine a potted plant on a window sill compared to flourishing in the full sun of a meadow.
Can we soak up all the experience in our life? Can we live it like it’s going to end?
Of course we can. It’s going to end anyway, right?
Because we’ve all been given an offer we can’t refuse: Death.
“We change, but always at a cost: to win this you lose that.”
Nick eats eight meals a day. He has little containers of food that he brings to work. He goes to Sam’s Club to buy the big bags of broccoli and diapers.
Kevin takes long bike rides with a group. They stop at a buffet after their rides.
Rick has 2 dogs which he misses every day when he comes to work.
So my story is… these people. Their stories become part of my story. The story of our lives is the background in our lives. The stuff that gets blurred out as we acclimate to the noise or don’t bother to ask.
As we get more focused on getting from point A to point B…apartment to house, house to bigger house, less pay to more pay, this partner to that partner, single to married, searching for the cool place to go and hang…we miss all the infinite points between. Those points are the people, places, and opportunities. They form the canvas of our life. When they’re connected, they become our life drawing.
That’s why when our actions are made without context, without others, without a why, without looking around first, then those actions become indefinite, their borders hazy, and after years of this, our life ceases to be meaningful.
The aim is not make a straight line. The point is not to hit each point, each milestone, checking the box, then seeking the next one. The point is to expand over our canvas, not stay isolated in our office, career, home, or family. The intent is to learn, and absorption doesn’t work unless you’re listening and putting yourself out there.
We do need goals. But what are the goals? Career, personal life, family life…how much effort to spend in each bucket? The tangibles can be met fairly easily, especially here in the US, but what happens when you realize that you’ve lost years of experience, potential friends, lovers, and new places, because your goals became your life, and living the moments fell off the list?
“We change, but always at a cost: to win this you lose that.”
– Geoffrey Wolff
Choose carefully, but just make sure you choose. The tangibles are easy to measure. The intangibles are not. Thing is, we’re here for the intangibles.
Creatives don’t get embarassed
Being a true creative takes consistent courage. The courage of curiosity…of untethering the boat from the moor and seeing what lies in the confines of your brain and imagination. It means risking sinking into the darkness of the mind to find the light of your product.
Creating is floating free in a brainstorm and seeing what you find. Hardest of all maybe is letting go and accepting all the imperfections that come from you.
Hemingway: “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”
You harvest the good stuff, not caring that there was so much rubbish churned up in the process. Limiting the flow, editing your thoughts before they emerge into a whole is like getting in your boat with a plan but never casting off.
Boats were not meant to stay in the harbor.
If you want to create something you’ve got to cast off and see how your ideas float in the tumultuous waters of the real world. Limiting yourself is a fearful practice, a practice of no true creative.
To have discipline, training yourself almost like an animal, while fostering the creativity and imagination of being human is one of the grand struggles of humanity.
And creatives are the ones who step up to face this challenge.
Creatives don’t get embarrassed.
Not getting any love? I’ve got an answer for you.
As I started my gratitude meditation, my cat came exploring around me. He sniffed my knees, then my hands which lay upon my knees. I watched him, thinking I would need to send him away, but I stopped, and let him climb up into my lap and find a place to settle there. He started purring after a second and I smiled and thought, “This is exactly what the gratitude meditation is about”.
Gratitude means showing some love. And that’s how you get the love.
Let me explain. In my gratitude meditation, I go through all the things we often overlook as we focus on the negatives in our lives. We can’t help it. It’s what drives us to be better people, but also it makes us depressed. It can turn us into unhappy seekers, always looking ahead to a future point, never satisfied, or maybe it can overwhelm us, as we see so much danger around us, that we never bother trying to get what we want.
So the gratitude meditation for me is usually a thanksgiving (without the huge coma-inducing meal to distract me) for what I tangibly have. The roof over my ahead, the dependable car, the job that allows me not to worry about my bills, and so on.
But a large part of gratitude is seeing that there are people in your life that care about you. These could be the unconditional investors in you, like your partner or parents, and maybe an old friend. But it also means the people who you bring value to in their lives. At work, you have an opportunity to be a contribution, not just in completing assignments, but in how you conduct yourself. Do you remember the person who is always on diligent and reliable so you can get your work done easily? What about the person who takes a moment to ask how you’re doing, how your week is going and shows interest in you?
Like a lot of things in life, what we have in hand is less important than the attention we are given and the appreciation we are shown. This morning, my meditation allowed me to not only reach the awareness of what positives things I have in my life that I overlook every day, but also the awareness that I need more than those things. And now I realize that the value we seek from others is something that comes from putting ourselves out there, and providing some value to them, too. A value that could come from a skill you develop, but also just showing interest in them first. Why?
Everyone’s favorite subject is themselves.
Just listen to most any conversation around you. “I’m doing this…I did that…I think that…” So if you find your gratitude waning in the love department, just ask yourself whether the love you think is lacking from others couldn’t be because you’re not putting any out there yourself.
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