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Living In The Head
I’ve found that the best way for me to maintain a modicum of a healthy state of mind is to dwell as much as I can in the present moment, not withstanding the stage 4 cancer diagnosis and the coronavirus siege. A.k.a. “living in the now” as opposed to “living in the head“.
If I’m not diligent at monitoring and detecting which time frame my thoughts are dwelling within, I’ll find myself spending too much time speculating about a fearful future or spending too much time regretting bad decisions that I’ve made in the past. When I’m living in the present moment, life feels “lighter”. I’m more able to appreciate the sights, sounds, smells, touches, and tastes that are right in front of me… right now. Everything is much more vivid and alive. There is pure joy in indulging the sensations that permeate my being!
My Katy Kahuna massage chair, cannabis edibles, and meditation practices (Balance and Headspace apps) are great tools. I employ them to nudge me me back into the present moment from my wild and scary mental transgressions into the (scary) future and (regretful) past.
Harvesting Your Dots
I never liked Dots. Every time I popped one into my mouth, I thought it might pull out a filling. But artistic dots, now they’re a whole ‘nother story.
In “The Art Of Asking“, Amanda Palmer movingly writes about collecting, connecting, and especially, sharing personalized dot-connected products as follows:
Collecting the dots. Then connecting them. And then sharing the connections with those around you. This is how a creative human works. Collecting, connecting, sharing. This impulse to connect the dots—and to share what you’ve connected—is the urge that makes you an artist. If you’re using words or symbols to connect the dots, whether you’re a “professional artist” or not, you are an artistic force in the world. You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected. – Amanda Palmer
If you think mining and connecting seemingly random dots is difficult, exposing the resultant products for all to see can be downright scary. The fear of rejection is always lurking in the background.
Amanda’s dotty insight reminds me of the greatest commencement address I ever heard – Steve Jobs’s speech to Stanford grads in 2005. In that inspirational talk, Steve chronicled how he unknowingly collected his dots over the years and then serendipitously connected them together into the idea that led to the birth of the world-changing Macintosh computer.
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life – Steve Jobs
I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’m full of… dots. I’ve got a boatload of dots hiding out in the deep recesses of my mind that are just waiting to be internally connected and externally shared. This blog is one catalyst for coaxing some of those cleverly concealed dots out of hiding, connecting them together, and sharing the result.
If you haven’t yet discovered the joy of mining, connecting, and sharing your personal dot collection, isn’t it about time that you made an attempt to do so?
Intellectual Understanding And Spiritual Realization
According to the late Sydney Banks and his “3 Principles” theory, the key to serenity and graceful living begins with an intellectual understanding and spiritual realization of the inseparable BIG THREE:
Graphic credits: Poached from Judy Sedgeman’s 3P web site
I can confidently say that I’ve acquired an intellectual understanding of the 3 principles, but I feel like some force is preventing me from realizing their spiritual power. I suspect that it’s BD00 working covertly behind the scenes to block that realization.
To further explore the elegant simplicity and potential transformative power of the 3P trinity, surf on over to the Three Principles Global Community web site and check out some of the videos and articles.
Banking On A Solution
This may be one of the main reasons why I’m skeptical of analytical experts and fascinated by the seemingly intractable coupling between complexity and simplicity:
Photo credit: Judy Sedgeman’s 3P web site
Collapsing The Wavefunction
Wedded Or Divorced?
So, which do you prefer? A wedding or a divorce? If you prefer the latter but are stuck in the former 24 X 7 (like BD00), what’s your strategy for achieving the transition, even if only temporarily? AFAIK, the practice of meditation is one healthy approach for distancing oneself from one’s thoughts. Is it the only way?
Ing-ing My Way Through Life
My twitter bio reads: “Fumbling, bumbling, stumbling, exploring, discovering, and being. So many ings!“. As that “ing-ful” first sentence implies, I’m always poking around for new ideas and alternative ways of looking at various aspects of the world. To BD00, ing–ing one’s way through life is a big part of really living life itself. Life is too short to stop ing–ing. But hey, it’s just badass BD00’s opinion; it doesn’t have to be yours.
When I first discover some novel and interesting work from someone I never heard of before, my levels of excitement and curiosity rise. I then dive a little deeper into the work in an honest attempt at ferreting out and understanding the real foundational substance of the work. If (heaven forbid!) I judge a newly discovered work as “meh“, then I move my attention onward toward the next adventurous expedition. There’s no sense in wasting time on something that doesn’t tingle my nerve endings with new meaning. Again, life is too short, no?
If (heaven forbid!) I judge that a newly discovered work is “good” or “bad“, then I get hooked and my current mental models of the world get rattled to an extent proportional to the work’s influence over me. Hell, my mental model(s) may even move off their concrete foundations a bit. In the areas of systems thinking and institutional behaving, the brilliant works of people like Deming, Ackoff, Argyris, MacGregor, Livingston, Warfield, Powers, Starkermann, Forrester, Meadows, Bateson, and Wheatley have considerably shaped my foundational views.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve decided to share with you below the relatively benign (compared to this people-oriented, blasphemous model) state transition diagram model of what I suppose goes on inside BD00’s forever ing–ing mind. As you can surmise, the external behaviors (speaking, writing) that I manifest while dwelling in the “sharing” state are bound to piss some people off. Also notice that, in homage to my man Shakespeare, I have inserted a “pausing” state in the model. It’s purpose, which doesn’t always get fulfilled, is to inhibit “the rush to judgment” malady that we all to some extent exhibit(?).
Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful – George Box
What does your thinking model look like? I’m especially interested in hearing from those of you who “think” you have transcended the innate human trait of judging objects – the set of which includes people. What would a world without judging look like? Would it be worth striving toward a world without any judging at all? Is it realistic to think there can be a world where people only judge “non-people” objects? BD00 doesn’t “think” so. D’oh!
Grateful For Gratitude
For today’s post, I felt the need to lock BD00 away for just a bit and share this twitversation with y’all. I may have to delete it when the bastard breaks the lock and sees what I’ve done to his blasphemous blog. D’oh!
The title of this post somehow reminds me of the old cereal commercial: “Cuckoo For Cocoa Puffs!“.
From Without
There comes into every life a time when the inner self can no longer be reached by things from without, when the soul craves that which it can supply to itself alone. – William Zinsser
What a wonderful quote from “Writing To Learn“, no? It resonates with me because it fits me like a glove. Despite the fact that societies expect their members to want, and actively strive for so-called “success“, I’m so over that.
For a long time, I beat myself up for not being more ambitious and not wanting to prove to the world how great I am. But at some point in my life, and I don’t know when or what triggered the change in behavior, I stopped trying to conform to the societal expectation of attempting to “reach my soul by things from without“. And I’m grateful for that.
How about you, dear reader? Are you constantly attempting to reach your immaterial soul by feeding it with material from without?
Distance From The “Source”
As you can see, BD00 is waaay disconnected from “The Source“. How far away are you?
Why am I here?
WTF?
Meh!
D'oh!
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