It is a way of life, of approaching all situations from the calmest to most chaotic.
We talk about relaxation as something we do at set times and in particular ways. Taking ten minutes to grab a coffee. A short walk to clear our heads. A weekend away to unwind and recharge. A full vacation to leave it all behind and experience something new. Or we enhance and elevate the concept giving it a somewhat spiritual intimation and dub it ‘meditation’. The truth is these are all examples of methods for training and developing a skill we can use in…
Barely even existing a decade ago, now they are prominent forms of media.
On its face the idea of spending time watching someone else do their make-up, prank their neighbors, editorialize their lives, play video games, or simply react to other content can seem rather silly. To those currently over the age of 55 it can sound downright ridiculous. But the needs being fulfilled are natural and extremely important. These are just some new ways of doing so.
There is no denying the online world has all but consumed just about every aspect of our everyday lives. Even before a…
It can also become an isolating island.
We all like the idea of being someone who can handle anything, who is always able to find a solution, who remains unwavering and steady as a rock in the face of any challenge or crisis. There is an admirable nobility to being able to solve our own problems without being dependent on anyone else and those blessed with the affinity and resources for self-reliance very often become the ones others turn to when they need guidance or support.
It makes sense. Self-reliant people always seem to have their affairs sorted out which…
It can feel seductively more productive than it actually is.
If we have things we believe in, there will be times those beliefs are challenged. If we have people or things we value, there will be times we are in danger of loosing them and times they will in fact be lost. These times will occur because the world and our lives are always changing. As the saying goes, ‘change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.’
Change is always a difficult thing and our instinctive apprehension about it is a natural reaction. When things change a known status quo…
Knowing who we are, acknowledging what is, choosing what we do, and understanding our reasons.
When we hear the term self-mastery we envision someone calm, confident, and disciplined. They know what they are doing, they believe in what they are doing, but they are also measured and steady in their approach to it. They are hard to provoke and just as difficult to sway or influence without sufficient evidence and persistence. We picture someone capable of self-mastery as being peacefully forceful who probably meditates a lot.
While meditation practices are always helpful to life in general to pursue mastery of…
We have to work through we are to reach what comes next.
It may sound like a deceptively simple thing. Thanks to gravity we need something below us to support us, to brace us up off of the ground. Whatever that entity may be, legs numbering anywhere from one to seven hundred and fifty or wheels or hovering technologies, its first job is to prop us up into some position other than lying flat on the floor. Its second job is to facilitate our movement from one location to the next.
The directions and qualities of that movement can vary…
#5 : Anything other than full agreement or flattery is an attack.
We all wind up encountering people in our lives who feel their goals and ambitions should not be hampered by such a minor obstacle as the truth. Those who feel entitled, for whatever reason, to have everything they want without being bogged down by the boring, time-consuming, and potentially exhausting process of trying to earn them legitimately. …
Who lit the match doesn’t really matter when the house is still on fire.
Figuring out the source of a problem is an important ingredient in generating solutions. To prevent a problem from happening again we need to understand where it came from in the first place. There is a time and a place in the process for that kind of analysis. …
To be certain is to close the eyes, ears, and mind.
Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.
Voltaire
There will always be things in our lives we feel confident in our knowledge of. The sun will rise tomorrow, all living things require water to survive, whichever line we join will immediately become the slowest moving. There are many things in our lives which have a great deal of evidence, both anecdotal as well as resulting from dedicated and detailed study, supporting our assumptions and assertions about them.
But the truth is the more we examine…
It is not an excuse. Nor is it a trivial afterthought.
No action or event ever happens in a vacuum. There are always multiple contributing factors which influence our choices at any given moment, a great many of which are shaped by the world around us and beyond our direct control. Decisions and actions which make perfect sense in one context can seem drastically different in another. One of the side effects of having access to everything at the same time is that it tends to strip away the context which is critical to genuine understanding.
An online post by…
