Self Reliance

Self reliance. To believe in oneself. Not necessarily to cast off society and rely entirely upon thyself for sustained life, but to believe thyself hath the wherewithal and capacity to follow thy true North. To have the confidence to hold trust of thy community. To learn, to change. To sear thy fear with clenched teeth, grit, determination, and strength.

Self reliance. Not just a pretty phrase from the lips of sustainability life coaches with a chicken coop, but an indication of insight into thyself and a submission to thy truest path one hath cleared; a forging of thy road upon which a true life lives. Self reliance, a living example of choice, and command of thy trusty steed. Goals that are not means to an end, but means to a life fully experienced and lived. A conscious submission to a god of your choice.

Perhaps this comes at the gate of Mephistopheles, Poseidon, or Zeus. Perhaps it comes at the gates of an orchard, garden, studio, or in the knot delicately wrapped into thy necktie. Perhaps it is blessed by ten thousand adoring fans. Perhaps its ramifications cast you to the outskirts of society like a black sheep. And if it doth so or has been, let it be girth to your determination. But let it not be thy only cause, for Providence nor Karma is yours to administer. No, the cause is inside, in those unspeakable coals keeping the fire of life within. Let and take whatever means necessary to set thy own path, quiver and arrow, aligned with thy true North.

For self reliance means to believe. For self reliance means to trust. And as this insight fuels thy fire within, though your chosen path may be philanthropy or reformation, by design of self reliance one must also learn to identify and respect those whom also believe in their own true North. For no good can come of twisting another’s true North into a submission to your’s, lest self reliance becomes lost and forgotten. Lest self reliance becomes obscured and quietened, indicating the downfall of any society or culture built upon the backs of truth.

Trusting in thyself, trusting in thy neighbour, trusting that thy truth is spoken in clarity, trusting that thou information is shared clearly, trusting thy capacity to quieten vanity, ego, and honour, trusting that even change can exist as self reliance is forged.

ONE – An Intentionally Aware Study

ONE. It’s a concept that’s quite loaded. When I think of that word, I think of a Yoga studio here in Vancouver that I attended the opening of, filled with stylish yogis doing much better down dogs then me and having much longer hair then me. I think of airy hippies floating around a circle with magic beads encouraging us to become one with the world, our thoughts, others, and roar like the lions (or tigresses) we are. I think of Bob Marley bouncing around with his Rastafarians on a stage with big amps, one love man. I think of one more cup of coffee, for the road. I think of the feeling of walking through the forest with something I cannot call by name tingling up my spine like a vine.

You see, I’ve become conflicted with how ONE can be ONE in our current world’s trajectory, a marketed ONE. It seems to me it’s conflicting. We’re encouraged to get more followers on social media, because when we do, we’ll get more people interested in our images, reading our messages, which means we might make it big or get that big sponsor, you know, become ONE, find our ONE truth. Mo’ money cause this hustler is ONE. We’re given slogans reminding us to get out more, explore more, see more of the world, meet more people, connect with more people… all of this shouted loudly and vibrantly and from hip tongues by society’s climbers, and believed – or perhaps regurgitated – by many more. I’ve believed them for so long, reworded them to explain to others. Moreso, I respect the concepts. Continue reading

clear cut near Shawnigan Lake Vancouver Island BC Canada

What is the Big Hurry

I just read a post by a fella who said since loosing his mother he’s been finding it harder and harder to connect with people with their challenges and goals and all that jazz. I can’t help but empathize.

I look at something like this clearcut and I ask myself: “What is the big hurry?”

I used to hike to the top of mountains with the peak in mind, and then hit the peak, slap that peak in the ass, turn around, and head right back down. This no longer makes sense to me really, as every step along the path are peaks of little miracles. Bugs, bark, blossoms… why is a view of a lake I just walked along ignoring to get to the peak better then stopping beside that lake to dip my toes in?

Of course, this is an analogy to life. Us humans have a tendency to nurture the scatter brain, the lizard brain, that encourages us to not be content with the moment, but instead be planning ten thousand things more. Sure ten thousand things are an exciting proposition, but there also exists ten thousand things in looking the person close to you in the eye and saying: “Hello, thank you,” with a smile.

Positive(ly) Love, A Look on Love in a Relationship

Love Like the Movies Make you Want to Love

Movies will make us believe that love is a cruise down easy street, where more flowers show up every day, engraved hearts show up on more of our trees, where hearts grow fonder and each little character nuance become more charming and charming with each moment spent with our lover.

Is this true? Have you ever found this?

I believe this is only one half of the equation of love. These represent the good days when cloud 9 is hitting with a soft, comforting hand, waltzing lazily down the murmuring streets with gaiety.

The truth? Try have a discussion about bank accounts or children or the future or making that sacrifice or having some questionable friends over or downsizing or making conscious changes. See how fuzzy thy heart still beats. Still on cloud nine?

I hope so.

But chances are, at least one of those things will strike an angry, emotional, or tempered chord that will far outbalance all the other happy lovey things you’ve been doing up there on cloud 9.

The-Truth-of-Love-Solidified-with-Physical-Actions-of-Life

The Truth of Love

The truth is that love requires positivity and respect and an unceasing willingness and effort to dive off the deep end, even though you’re scared out of your shivvies of what lurks beneath. And further, not only does love require this of you, it requires you to have an ongoing awareness of this so that you begin to check yourself before a new habit of dis-respect or dis-trust forms.

Truth is, its going to hurt sometimes. Love is not easy. Nothing worth having ever comes easy.  and the reason it hurts is because when you fall off of cloud 9 it’s not pleasant.

No, the truth of love should not be built upon fuzzy dreams of leisure. The truth of love should be solidified with the physical actions of life.

It’s Not Just Loving Yourself

Love in a relationship is more then just how much you can sacrifice, how much you can turn a blind eye, how much you can keep the faith. That’s one sided blind love that’s more fit for your favorite band or pair of shoes: even though your favorite band may try to explore a new direction you’re not so sure about, you got to love them so much that you’re going to join them on that journey.

That’s what favorites are, and sure, love in a relationship should have a bit of this in it. After all, you did pick that partner because they’re your favorite, didn’t you?

The unexplainable happens sometimes as growth naturally progresses, and this almost always, unchecked, creates animosity in relationships. Nostalgia, it’s a thing. As humans, it’s inevitable that we grow at different rates. This is our uniqueness, our special secret code of humanness. To steal the old yogic wisdom: There are many paths, there is only one way.

The problem here is that self love works. Self love works because we make a habit of loving ourselves more and more and more until we love ourselves so much we can’t help but feel happy and excited to be alive. However, self love is not partnership love, though it is very related. Showering our partner with more and more love without first off having a discussion about the growing discontent will nurture guilt, resent, self disrespect, and blindness.

You got to listen to that lover!

Think of this analogy. Think of yourself standing at bat, waiting to hit the ball coming at you. You swing and miss. So, you wait again for the next ball, except this time you swing harder and quicker and with much more energy invested. Swing – miss. Sure, try investing more violent passion in the next strike, you only get one more!

“We are deceiving ourselves if we think that only the violent passions, such as ambition and love, can conquer the others. Laziness, sluggish though it is, often manages to dominate them; it wrests from us all of life’s plans and deeds, where it imperceptibly destroys and devours the passions and virtues alike.” ~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld

“We are deceiving ourselves if we think that only the violent passions, such as ambition and love, can conquer the others. Laziness, sluggish though it is, often manages to dominate them; it wrests from us all of life’s plans and deeds, where it imperceptibly destroys and devours the passions and virtues alike.” ~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld

What I’m trying to point out here is that in a relationship, love isn’t just about loving yourself, or about how much your partner loves themselves, or about how much confidence you can build up in your partner – all very important things in themselves. No, love in a relationship is about how much love is flowing back and forth between you and your partner.

Are you listening? You got to listen to that lover of yours. They’re speaking.

(and yes, this means that if you’re partner is telling you they’re listening, you’ve got to speak to them with the honesty of that deep end.)

What Employees are Doing Instead of Working

It’s a little bit shocking – but totally understandable – to see how many people are actually not doing work at work. Of course this is nothing new, there has always been procrastinators, there have always been slackers, there will always be motivated people, there is always comfort zones.

How do you work?

What employees actually do while at work infographic

source: http://www.stopprocrastinatingapp.com/wasting-time-at-work/

Who Are We Speaking To?

Who are you speaking to?

It is important to stress the benefits of identifying your target market. You’ve probably heard this time and time again with any business 101 book you’ve read.

But no matter what you’re doing; conversation, show business, marketing, exposure, proposals, shopping.. all of our life necessitates the importance of identifying who we are speaking to. Not only is it important to identify who we’re speaking to, it’s also important to think about who we would like to speak to. If we don’t know who we’re wanting to speak to, we can never know how to speak.

Social Media. The power of Facebook is that we’re assuming that we’re talking to our friends, like-minded people, people doing the same things as us. The power of Facebook is that many people believe in what you’re doing at the same time as we’re our own leads in a frame by frame super show, showcasing mostly only the good.

This means that kind of by proxy, Facebook identifies and targets your customers for you. This means that it’s never been more important to be aware of the image you’re presenting on any medium or site out there, because it’s in the sites best interest and you’re best interest to match you with like minded people!

The more advanced our algorithms get in computing, the more effective this matching will become.

The whole thing is a lot like engineering. You can engineer for good, or you can engineer for bad. What I mean is that it is important to be aware of what you’re doing. If you’re working on a nuclear bomb, don’t try and kid yourself about the moral implications. If you’re engineering a social profile, make your decision and go full beans.

If you know who you want to speak to, you know the tone and actions that will enable you to speak to the crowd you wish to speak to. If you don’t know who you want to speak to, speaking into thin air you will find quickly suffocating.

This is your tribe. Both who and how.

It’s important to identify who you’re speaking to, and who you want to speak to.

You’ll know when it’s aligned.

From Passion Projects to Stress Projects

It will forever confuse me when a passion project is turned into a stress project.

(sidenote: shouldn’t all projects be passion projects?)

Yes, I understand that a lot of time has been poured into this project. Yes, I understand that the rest of life’s path is dictated by the outcome of this project. Yes, I know this is a passion. Yes, I also know somebody had to give birth to this baby.

I know it’s hard to let a project out of our hand, and delegate some tasks to others that have maybe more skill, knowledge, or experience in the necessary areas. But I also know that it does absolutely no good when we continue to grasp at that project like it’s a bag of falling beans.

Absolutely there are critical points in the next phase of this projects development that we should have input on, like the color scheme of a new book cover, or the photograph used in our bio or front page of new website.

However, when the we start telling the delegated (the SEO expert, the typist, the designer, the publisher, the artist, etc.) they’re not doing it right, it’s us who’s not doing it right.

Here’s an idea.

Delegate the stress.

 

Social Revolution

Whether we like it or not, we are in the midst of a social revolution. Gone are the days when we communicate with telegrams or letter mail. Gone are the days where a Like button meant nothing. Gone are the days when avatars and handles and 140 characters and posts were things found primarily in the farm yard.

Gone are the days when this exact moment was shared only between you and those directly around you, not broadcast to friends far and wide on Instagram. Gone are the days of journeying into a new land and having only a hand written letter of introduction (and maybe an advanced telegram) to take you on your journey.

We find ourselves spearheading this social revolution and becoming champions of this new frontier, reorganizing social and society in an entirely new way that has the possibility of connecting the world through infinite little wires once and for all where we are able to gain so much more insight into each others lives to allows us to connect, understand, and share in a more direct way we’ve never been able to before.

In fact, the basis of empathy – identifying and understanding another’s situation or feelings – is entirely rooted in this, to wear somebody else’s shoes for a day.

Understanding this, I have two immediate questions. The first is how much then do we share in our new social society? Do we allow ourselves to be a social innovator, pushing the comfort zones and the boundaries many have erected before us?

And if we do, does this make us more social? It’s easy to see how sharing like this could quickly transition into being used as a soapbox, rather than hypertextual wires; lifelines.

It’s up to you if and how you respond. It’s also up to you how you choose to use this new tool.

 

Thank-God vs. Not That Way Clients

Dealing with clients is a very tricky business, and I classify them into two main categories.

1. Thank-God Client: The client that worships you and your work, believes what you say, and appreciates all the work you do for them.

2. Not That Way Client: And then there’s the client who fights you ever step of the way, who knows how to do it better and demands you change everything to align with their superior knowledge.

One is a pleasure to work with and builds your self esteem greatly with spontaneous bouts of magic. The other frustrates you, leaves you pulling your hair wondering: “is this person for real?”, and will try and suck all of your time for relatively minute things.

Which type are you? Which type are you chasing?

Simplify Your Life, is it a Myth?

we think we need so many useless things when all we really need is time to breathe

Simplify. Simplify your life. Simply your product. Simplify your mind.

I am feeling overwhelmed with information on how to live a better life. And to compound this feeling, I’m feeling rather mis-aligned with this knowledge I now have. I’ve read the books, I’ve taken the notes, had the conversation, identified directions and milestones, but… I’m still not feeling aligned. Action is much louder than figments of my imagination.

This is a contradiction and a paradox of our modern [digital] life, and I really do want to strip down the barriers and align with the simplicity.

I think what gets me anxious is my sense of urgency, or simply put: my instant desire and my inability to accept change takes time. I am reminded daily by infographs or inspirational quotes that tell me it’s just a step away, that today is the day, that change happens now.

In all sincerity though, I believe this is a romantic idea of what a happy life really looks like. There’s something logical and calculated that I believe holds me back from immediately taking that step towards this romantic idea, and I think it’s this that becomes overwhelming.

Am I distracted? Perhaps it’s getting to that point.

I’m currently reading The Art of Happiness where the Dalai Lama puts it bluntly about his thoughts on romance. Now, this may just be because as a monk he’s sworn to celibacy, but he believe that the whole idea of romance isn’t healthy for a human to believe in as it leads us up to false ideals and misconceptions built upon commercialized concepts and unattainable, unrealistic lies we’ve been fed. One that plays on one of our most primal instinct as an animal in finding a life partner.

I’ve been thinking that perhaps the Dalai Lama is right, that the infomercials that look really nice and pretty that I’m trying to believe in are not really that attainable and it’s leading me straight down a path of disappointment.

Perhaps it’s this fact compounded with the fact that this path is never supposed to end, not dissimilar to the path to enlightenment.

What do you think? Are you also feeling overwhelmed?

I would gladly live out of a suitcase if it meant I could see the world