Becoming something…

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Fearless Lover Podcast: How Spiritual Grounding Provides What Therapy Can’t | PLAY

When love is of yourself and of the relationship.

There is only one thing you can bring to relationships, yourself. To do this you need to spend time on it but not in the way that common culture defines. Also, to build a relationship that you can bring to everyone else you need to spend specific relationship time too.

What space isn’t:
•  TV
•  Internet
•  Hanging out with a group
•  Even reading a book

This is because you aren’t truly alone, truly taking space. Deliberate effort is required to make room for space for you and your relationships.

A great reality is mentioned in the above podcast, that scientists have discovered that atoms create themselves in a vacuum out of nothing. New things can’t be created if space is stuffed full.

Be a bit more empty, leave room for things to come to you.

Like how Iraq was mission accomplished 5 years today, I too felt accomplished. I was just about to finish high school and I hadn’t even decided on a college. I was though flying high, mission accomplished. I had recently regained trust by my parents and summer “adult” freedom was ripening on my tongue.

I forgive Hilary for voting for the war. If was voting on mis-information too. Grownup had arrived. Today I know I have a lifetime of growing up to do.

So I am reemerging not to fill the spaces of the pages but to fill some parts of me that I too often look elsewhere to. I know that my mission isn’t accomplished and that I’ll consume lots of coffee to get there. The reset button is close by, could you push it? No, just a soft reset. I don’t want to lose everything.

Lets not fault Bush for calling a war or even calling it to a close super early, lets fault him for not listening to the experience and learning from it. Get out of there!

It is hard. It is what defines his stay in office. Victim to simple quick fixes, time is a difficult illusion. The longer you stay in it, the further you fall face first into reality.

I have spent a lot of time recently on MBA applications. It has been a while since I had to so craftily praise myself in front of others; it was never this specific. I am defending passion and my future career plans. In definition, I have gone through a transition. Unlike the addictions of war, I have turned the red tide. What are you surfing on when you need something else to keep the momentum?

We are not alone for a reason. Use your developing intuition and growing heart in sync to determine self-motivation. Look to those you know to be real sensors of your being. At the very least there is a technique that is simple to surf through the rougher and lonelier times.

List accomplishments of your day, w/o your minds side commentary; if any slips in, you are forbidden from making further note of it at all.

Today:
•  Entry to baited blog
•  Made progress on scholarship guidebook at work
•  Speedily organized home office
•  Felt reemergence of China-fondness
•  Large Mexican latte instead of small

Find your coastline and ride…summer is coming whether you want it to or not.

This entry is coming from an interesting experience I had yesterday. Shedding light on my cultural background and growth I realized that your environment can really influence impulses. I found myself wondering why I picked oranges over minorities.

I’d just enjoyed some nice gulps of water, post workout. I was waiting for my fair weather friend to change. I say fair weather because she ditched driving me home because the roads were getting poor and I was left to wait for a fair weather bus that was a cycle late. I digress. While waiting, I looked at a photo representing the writing/academic center for the campus I work on. I noticed something peculiar. What do you notice?

I saw oranges. I was so tickled by my discovery that I asked the same question of miss fair weather. Turns out everyone is white in the photo, this being what she noticed. Stumped, I asked her to look harder. By time the oranges were of mutual discovery, she was antsy to leave and I was fumbling for my own explanation of our differing perspectives.

Was it that I came from a college with beyond Caucasian diversity around 15% (not to mention other missing groups)? Was it that I don’t remember seeing much color in my suburban environment? Why did I choose oranges over minorities?

It hit me though, in one of those I got it before but now I really understand it kind of ways, that our life experiences are unique. Not only unique, but they are the molders of how you see the world. It was important to realize that all the education in the world hadn’t taught me to see, instead I was blind. We will see things differently, all of us. Your boss or supervisor that just doesn’t seem to make sense, probably isn’t doing it on purpose. This experiential intelligence is hard to measure because it has as much to do with how much you experience as it does with the quality and variety of an experience. In the work setting, the ability to recognize this is the biggest step in being able to manage up (7 ways to manage up or Managing Up: An Overlooked Factor in Career Success). In your personal life it can help relationships grow and drama dwindle.

Can we challenge ourselves to see things differently? If you saw white people, begin looking for the oranges, and vice versa. I think too often we find ourselves in conversations where we are more concerned about the other person not seeing the oranges that you did. Instead, why not notice that they saw something different and wonder why you didn’t see it at all.

Life is one big learning opportunity. If you aren’t listening you might just always end up with a bunch of white people or oranges for that matter.

Like a strong dialect, we speak different languages within the same. “I don’t understand those kids,” from the g-rents telling us more about the language we speak than our peers. My friends have trouble speaking the language of relationship, a topic to cover later. It appears as though that as we get older the WEs and the USs enter our vocabulary more smoothly than the I and ME of independent youth.

Are there intergenerational dialects? Songs speak different and cultures can be worlds apart, that sounds like grounds for a different language. Thinking of ourselves, is the youth that different? I still don’t think I have the vocabulary for my relationship and my friends still leave out the WE and US when referring to it.

I was recently told that this is the time of life to think of ourselves. It can be hard to really look at life beyond the simple sphere of ME.

So we aren’t alone and we can’t ALWAYS focus on ourselves. So heres some tips on acting and speaking in a healthy selfish head space while acknowledging the US and WE in those around ourselves.

1) Take pause because sometimes when you feel extended, taking some time to pause and center yourself can actually enlighten yourself to others around you. I think in a time of when we are supposed to be focusing on ourselves we need to remember to do just that. We’ll get the language and get the awareness of the spaces around us through this openness to others. This openness which comes through recognizing and appreciating ourselves first.

2) Don’t hide from what you do and don’t know. Age brings experience, not always knowledge. Experience will build off of knowledge, one depends on the other. The fear of letting someone know that you don’t know something really says I’m not open to learning. It’s called being real, in our language, or honest in theirs.

3) One IS the loneliest number. Thinking only of yourself, just yourself and no one else, isn’t expansive. I encourage a focus on a group of people but not at the expense of forgetting that you are more through others. To look at this from a selfish angle, people can and will enhance you. Interact and learn from everything around you. Feed yourself.

Live to learn because that will help you to learn to live. Know that time and space won’t stop for you so the best way to “grow up” is to move with the times and the spaces. WE will get through it, even if I am using you to do it.

Am I casual in my use of others? Can being selfish be a good thing?

What a waste of time?

or was it?

Years seem to fly by these days and with each year coming the transition into the next also seems to have much more philosophical baggage with it. I’m holding onto a lot, happy about a lot, and getting over a bunch of things. The new year allows for a big sigh of relief and a chance to motion, with a toast, everything into “that was last year”. It honestly feels like one of the only moments each year where it’s relatively easy to live in the moment. A few drinks down and a count down away from closing a book and opening a new one at the same time.

What is next?
Are we sad it’s over or happy for what is next?

Maybe, most importantly, this is a time to reflect. Treasure the space you have to yourself or the friends that are surrounding you. Time can slow for a moment as bubbles from your bubbly tickle your nose. Nothing else can be a greater lesson in learning how to live from book to book, year to year, and day to day. It’s a great chance to understand how to find joy, or live in the tough reality of a lifetime of transitions.

Is someone not there or something missing?
Who IS there? What did you get out of this past year?

Stop comparing yourself to dreams and actually work towards them. If you are the type to set out some resolutions, let your one resolution be to have none.

Look at your hands.
Look at your eyes in the mirror.
Tell yourself, this is the new year and I have already accomplished what I’m setting out to do.

DICEWARS

We all know the board game RISK© and it’s glorious multi-hour world domination adventure. Often, multiple hours are hard to come by, but the urge to dominate the world and exercise your strategic muscle doesn’t fade. It could just be the geeky strategy game player speaking, but DICEWARS has filled a growing need since the gay-RISK nights during college, a useful creation, have since ended. Dice become your armies but continuity of land ownership is still apart of the strategy in this smaller map and up to eight “players,” computer(s) and yourself, take on the classic board game.

It isn’t the multi-player amazingness that you can play with your friends but it will provide for a simple five minute to half an hour distraction amidst your workday, study for finals, or crazy unemployed livelihood.

Check it out, play it, and share what it kept you from doing/completing during your day. I owe the absence of a log of student volunteer hours and probably a blog entry or two to the joys of this dice rolling battle on my computer screen.

Lets take a moment to define “going with the flow.” First, this statement acknowledges that there is a flow and a direction to things. Also, it is important to note that if you just sit there and do nothing, the flow, like in a river, will take you somewhere. While that journey may be interesting, chances are it may not be what will make us the happiest. So I think “going with the flow” is effective as a mantra only if we swim with the flow and help guide it. Just make sure you aren’t trying to avoid or swim around the unavoidable. You might just need to fall over a few waterfalls, hit a few rocks, and swallow a few gulps of water on your way.

Use the momentum of life to engage yourself and invest in opportunities. And, for those seeking all the options in the world or holding onto too much, a valiant futile attempt to swim against the flow is just a waste of energy.