I wish the real world would just stop bothering me

Getting out into the world is a lot different now then it used to be. I think.

I didn’t really get out into the world much, until I reached adulthood. Sure, my family took me on vacation. I ran screaming from a log cabin (with no bathroom – it was housed in a communal facility down in a common area); went on cruises to the Caribbean and Mexico (and when I was a teenager, drank way too much); saw Niagara Falls (Canada side); and went fishing, clamming and crabbing in Long Island. I did some great family and travel stuff, but it didn’t prepare me for… well, adulthood.

There it is again. Adulting. Something that I think about now, in mid-thirties, much more than I did in my twenties. Life was going along swimmingly, at least until the year I turned 27.

That was the year of two car crashes, one causing anxiety attics that prevented me from driving for a time, and one taking a loved one and leaving me emotionally traumatized for many years. Six months after the second collision, a mysterious illness came on, and over four months I gradually lost mobility at an alarming rate.

January, the following year, it was diagnosed as RA. I drove my ex-girlfriend (very recently broken up) to Boston to live with family, and I returned to be laid off from my job.

I’d call that a low point in my life.

Picking myself up by the bootstraps (or, writing a couple of essays and going heavily into student loan debt), I enrolled in a Master’s program. The Doc put me on all kinds of meds, with some odd side-effects. (Drinking while on the medication resulted in extreme cases of aggression, where I thought it would be good to fight bars full of people. I also had liver enzyme issues, and was often pulled off and placed on new prescriptions.)

I’ve since forgotten what it was to feel in sound body, but at least I’ve not taken medications for over a year and still feel alright enough to move around. I travel now, not just the week-long vacations but month or more-long immersion. I love camping. And that moving around is bringing me to the question of what I should say no to.

Finding this bit of text in Tim Ferriss’s Tribe of Mentors led to this post, and I think I’ll be adapting it for my use:

“…the more clear I am about what my goals are, the more easily I can say no. I have a notebook into which I’ve recorded all sorts of goals, both big and small, over the last ten or so years. When I take the time to articulate what it is that I hope to achieve, it’s simple to refer to the list and see whether saying yes to an opportunity will take me toward or away from achieving that goal.”

-Samin Nosrat

Said another way, “Will this get me closer to my mountain?”

Adulting 101

Had drinks with my friends following a birthday dinner the other night. I think there are things that you talk with lifelong friends about that you don’t talk to anyone else about. At least, not to the fullest extent.

• I shared some issues I was having in my personal life, both emotionally and with a relationship.
• We spoke about issues relating to money, and homeownership.
• We talked about working, and having a business.

There are classes in school that teach so many facts and stats, but where are the principles of adulthood? Where do you learn how to file taxes, or make a budget? Where do they get off saying that student debt is okay, when really it’s the largest portion of debt now in the United States, and it places American students with outstanding debt on uneven footing.

Out of our discussion, we came to the conclusion that schools should have an actual class, and that life lessons in those classes become progressively more challenging each year. Budgeting, taxes, investing, business ownership vs. being employed, college vs. trade school.

No tests would be necessary, but each student must annually present on what they’ve learned, what they hope to accomplish, and a career path that interests them. Not an elective, like home economics or shop, but an actual dedicated curriculum spot for every student.

That is Adulting 101.

Relationships with money

When considering your life style, your finances and living situation, do you feel as if you’re thriving? Or surviving?

If it’s the latter, it may be harder to ever reach a place of thriving.

I’ve been an advocate for the law of attraction for nearly three years now, since I began making life changes that were so drastic that I wouldn’t have believed them possible. Prior to that, I was using reactionary methods of attraction – still creating life, but with little sense of what I was doing.

Even now I sometimes experience the reactionary method (usually around money – major purchases, debt or job issues), and I have to remind myself that what I focus on is what I attract.

So I remind you (and myself) that we live in abundance. This is not a zero-sum game, and we are all capable of winning and achieving our best lives. The trick is to believe that we already are, even if we’ve temporarily stepped out of the abundant circumstances.

Credit where credit is due

We beat ourselves up when we do something stupid. Make a mistake, or fail.

We forget that we are miraculous creatures. Able to think, design, build and imagine.

In the animal kingdom, failure means death. Starvation, or becoming a predator’s meal. Unable to find food. Not being able to mate.

Humanity has an amazing propensity for failure, for everything we think of can have a corollary error. Miss your goal? Failure. Not a passing grade? Screw up. Under target for sales? Blew it.

But we get to come back at it. We get to take those failures, and incorporate them into the knowledge of who we are and what we do. Failure is not death, not for us.

Failure is just one step on the path to success.

Poetry’s resurgence

I just finished writing about a life post-poetry, and was in Target browsing the meager book section. A book section with some shelf space devoted to books of poetry. Poetry! (Also, the Spanish language Cat in the Hat, which I very nearly purchased because… why not?)

Given my meager Spanish, I doubt I could even understand it…

So, poetry. At Target. And thus I’m reminded of the growing poetry sections at Barnes & Noble. That poetry is still relevant has never been in question. But that poetry is seeing new consumption, that is the wonderful element to the story.

 

Sipping on gin and…

I was clearing out some old files last night. I hard drive used for backups, old documents, scrambled writings, a ton of music, and pictures.

Some pictures made me happy. Some nostalgic. Others brought tears to my eyes.

Pictures are snapshots of a moment. Pictures may tell a thousand words, but they hide ten times as many. Because those snapshots of moments aren’t the moment themselves. They are representations. The moment was ephemeral, the snapshot a forgery.

In You Are A Badass, Jennifer Sincero says something like, “Focusing on the past is depression. Focusing on the future is anxiety. Focusing on the present is peace.” (Looking it up, she was quoting Lao Tzu.)

Though wonderful reminders, photos are the past. Even the ones your friends (and occasionally I) post on Facebook and Instagram. Lingering on them will only cause depression.

(The title comes from The Botanist Gin that I was drinking while clearing out folders. If you like gin, I recommend it.)

Circadian living

Been conducting a personal experiment of sorts. First, I’ve taken what Dr. Satchin Panda said in his TED Talk (you can also hear more on the Bulletproof Radio podcast), and have been eating within a ten-twelve hour period during the day, no longer snacking later than that window.

Second, I’m being more mindful of the light that inhabits my senses. I try and wake at sunrise (to an extent), and shut down blue lights at sundown. I’ve been slowly adjusting into this experiment, and am finding a better night’s sleep.

(One exception to my better sleep were the two nights following my viewing of the film Hereditary. Honestly, that last ten-minute sequence – or however long it was – has been playing in my mind every time I shut the lights off. Didn’t care for the movie on the whole, but that sequence was enough to give me pause before crawling into bed.

Post-poetry

Have we moved past the age of poetry?
The verse that speaks most to us
is from an age gone by,
and as our language escapes us,
it seems less likely for us
to make use of the words
in the ways that the poets had.

We speak now in limited vocabularies,
forever adding words
To our dictionaries
but removing so many others
from our usage.
We stagger through life hindered
By our shrinking lexicons,
so suddenly incapable of
conveyance and appreciation
of language.

That it would be Gutenberg’s folly
To propel us in the ages of technology
While the actual inventions of his genius
Wither and rot to our consciousness.

Books no longer bound by conventions,
Electronic, delivered to illumined screens
and forgotten.
Words, too, sit unused, unheard,
Save for ramblings of intellectuals and
Essays, long-formed and mostly unread.

Where do unspoken words go?
What graves guard the deceased syllables
of prose and poetry?
When the world reduces its collective rhetoric
to mere utterances, what remains?

Learning to play

My great-grandfather George Heron was a professional golfer. My grandmother was an avid golfer most of her life, and my grandfather was a golf course superintendent. My father as well played, though hasn’t for some time.

I shoot like I’m swinging a baseball bat. It’s rather jarring how bad I am at the sport. However, it wasn’t something I was raised in. I didn’t learn about George H. until I was a teenager, at least. By that point, not ever having held a club, it’s easy to ascertain why it would be so difficult for me now. I haven’t played in a year, and that was just once in 2017.

So, out I go again. What I last wrote about frequency applies to golf as well, and there may be times when I ask clients out for a morning on the links. Though it’s okay for them to beat me, I don’t need to spend my paychecks on replacing all the golf balls I lost.

Delinquent Reading Lists

Books Bought:

• The 4-Hour Workweek – Timothy Ferriss
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck – Mark Manson
• Awaken The Giant Within  – Tony Robbins
• Winter – Karl Ove Knausgaard
• Noir – Christopher Moore
• The Buddhism of Tibet: Or, Lamaism, with Its Mystic Cults, Symbolism and Mythology, and in Its Relation to Indian Buddhism – L.A. Waddell
• Daring Greatly – Brene Brown
• Go Set a Watchman – Harper Lee
• The Collected Letters of Alan Watts – Edited by Joan Watts & Anne Watts
• The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares: The Haunted City – Edited by Jason Blum
• Bushcraft 101: A Field Guide to the Art of Wilderness Survival – Dave Canterbury
• The Han Solo Adventures (Han Solo at Stars’ End / Han Solo’s Revenge / Han Solo and the Lost Legacy) – Brian Daley
• Letters from a Stoic – Seneca
• Zen: The Supreme Experience (The Newly Discovered Scripts – Alan Watts; Edited by Mark Watts
• Beat Spirit: The Way of the Beat Writers as a Living Experience – Mel Ash
• Unlimited Power – Anthony Robbins
• The Haunted Mansion: Imagineering a Disney Classic – Jason Surrell

Books Read:

• Later Essays – Susan Sontag (unfinished)
• The 4-Hour Workweek – Timothy Ferriss
• Oklahoma! – Richard Rogers & Oscar Hammerstein
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck – Mark Manson (unfinished)
• The Collected Letters of Alan Watts – Edited by Joan Watts & Anne Watts (unfinished)
• Awaken The Giant Within  – Tony Robbins
• Homeland – R.A. Salvatore (unfinished)
• Magic The Gathering: Arena – William R. Forstchen
• The Way of the Superior Man – David Deida (unfinished)
• Death Warmed Over – Kevin J. Anderson
• Blame – Jeff Abbott
• The Last Minute – Jeff Abbott
• Braving the Wilderness – Brene Brown
• Small Favor – Jim Butcher
• Six of Crows – Leigh Bardugo (unfinished)
• The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More with Less – Richard Koch (unfinished)
• You Are a Badass – Jen Sincero (unfinished)

Well, here is basically March through June of this year. I’m hoping this is comprehensive, but I know I picked up a few other books here and there. March was a slow month for reading. I had been thinking about the new job, a show opening, etc., it seemed like I just had a lot on my plate. April didn’t seem to go much better in that regard. May I did a little more reading, even revisiting some books I had read previously.

To start, I can’t say enough positive things about 4-Hour Workweek. It was both an enjoyable read as well as highly motivational. Something about the freedom to travel while working has led me to revamping my spending habits as well as my work habits.

The new job is mostly from my home office, though I take a lot of meetings. My plan is that after the first three months, the face-to-face meetings will be condensable into “office days”, where I can batch all my meetings into one or two days for the week. That will free up my time to make those travel arrangements.

I’ve even traded in the Prius for a Rav4, so that I can get a tow-along camper and hit some camp grounds.

That’s some of the effect the book had on me. I listened to the audio book and mostly it was on two business trips, Daytona to Naples and Back, that I was able to listen to it. I recommend getting the physical copy (in addition to the audio book, if need be) so that you can have access to the materials in it. I believe that they are all online at Tim.blog, along with his weekly podcast and other resources. Again, I highly recommend checking it out.

Fresh off the motivational bandwagon that is 4-Hour Workweek, I tried Subtle Art. I liked it, but I haven’t been able to finish it. This one speaks more to changing mindsets, and honestly, my mindset of not giving a f*ck is pretty well established. I’m able to let things go and move with the flow, and this book did not resonate with me as much. I will finish it though, and there are certainly some wonderful highlights in it.

And then I had to try a Tony Robbins book. I had never read anything by him, or listened to anything that was recorded, but I had heard about him for many years so I thought I would try it out. I got the audio book of Awaken the Giant.

I enjoyed it. This was a quick read, and had a lot to do with changing your mindset. But again, having been a convert to the mindset changing your reality, much of the content was not useful in an applicable way, but rather more informational. Found another Tony Robbins book in the library sale bin, so I picked up Unlimited Power. It’s in a stack right now to read, which I’ll get around to.

The rockiness of 2016 taught me how amazing the power of thought, intention and mindset could be. After such a heavy nonfiction motivational slant, I wanted to lean in to some lighter reads. Arena and Small Favor were both books I had read previously (Arena I first read 20 years ago, and have likely read it a half dozen times since). Both are about wizards, each facing great odds too balance the scales of good and evil. Quick reads, mind-easing in their straightforward approaches. I love them both.

I read a few other books in the Magic the Gathering series, tied in to the card game, but found Arena to by far be my favorite. I’ve actually read all the Harry Dresden books Butcher has written, and am eagerly awaiting the new novel. I probably saw the television show, which only lasted one season, but enjoyed it enough to entice my getting into the series.

Early on I had been delving into Susan Sontag’s essays, but it got pushed to the side when I discovered the letters of Alan Watts. As I’ve written before, I find the faith, culture, and language of Asian nations to be extremely interesting. Alan Watts devoted much of his life to understanding Zen Buddhism, and brought that understanding to Western audiences.

I’m only into the 1930s with his letters, reading about his concern for his parents back in England with the coming war, and his newborn daughter with her curiosities.

The idea of letter writing makes me think of how we use language – how when we email, or text, we’re not crafting the sentences as we used to do when letter writing. I believe that’s part of the reason the mailing of letters is gaining some popularity again. I prefer handwriting notes, and pen my journal pages every morning.

Watts’s letters are my before bed ritual, and I usually read three or four before putting the book down and going to sleep. (In my quest for better rhythms, turning lights off, etc, I’d been trying to figure out how best to read before bed. I just purchased a little clip light on sale, something made by French Bull. It’s cute, and seems to do the job.)

Audio books from the library for my daily commutes included 80/20 Principle, Braving the Wilderness, Death Warmed Over, The Last Minute, Blame, and Six of Crows. I’ve read a few Abbot books, mostly about former-CIA special operative Sam Capra. I’ve read them out of order, though, and am still playing catch up. Last Minute is number three in the series. (Start with Adrenaline.)

Blame was an interesting one, a standalone about a young woman with amnesia, resulting from a car crash where her passenger, a boy about her age, died. Starting up two years after the crash, some weird things start to happen, making her question what happened the night of the crash.

I remained pretty riveted, waiting to see what was going to happen. A couple plot points that I may have disagreed with, but the characters were fleshed out and it was easy to follow, even when jumping through three separate timelines (pre-crash, immediately following the crash, and two years later).

Put in 80/20, listened for a disc, decided I needed more attention to it. I’m planning on picking it up again once I finish You Are a Badass. I enjoy Badass. There are many elements I recognize, partially from my self-help book exploration, and partially from my own journey over the past two-and-a-half years.

Six of Crows also was another non-starter for me. I think I need to read the other two books in the Grisha trilogy, then maybe I’ll revisit Crows. 

Then there was Brene Brown. Daring Greatly has been on my reading list for many years. I hadn’t picked up a copy. I checked out Braving the Wilderness, and gave it a listen. Holy shit. I remember listening, nodding my head yes, laughing. It’s great. She’s got a wonderful conversational tone, and some good insights. I also listened to her on Super Soul Saturdays with Oprah, both episodes. And bought Daring Greatly.

As you can see, I did some book shopping. I like getting books when life seems to be overwhelming, but I also like getting books on discount. So, used books and remaindered are my go-tos. Or the library. It’s like a book store, only free.

I think I’ll try and be a little more consistent with these lists, so that I’m not cramming four months into one post. Until next time!