Archive for the ‘thriving’ Category

Not Growing Beyond Who You Are

Posted: December 31, 2014 in becoming, journey, thriving
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The ficus tree in my backyard is huge, and it provides good shade for my whole yard, my pond and my house.

It can get bigger, and I can trim it, I can even cut it too the ground, but as long as it lives it can never go back to being a seed, a first sprout, a simple sapling, a young tree again. It’s roots go deep and spread wide now. At the base the trunk is thick and scared. Such is nature. Once organisms grow, they may reproduce, but they themselves don’t return to their original state and size.

And so too it is with humans. We are physically age-size specific. This also seems to go for our emotional, psychological and spiritual development also. When we have grown out of an immature view of life, then we see with experienced, shaded eyes. When we have surpassed simplistic views, then our concepts will become deep and complex.

This seems to make sense, but it isn’t necessarily alway so.

The other day I was looking through some old journals, the records of my thoughts fifteen years ago.

Fifteen years ago I wrote in a journal that it is “important to take a gentle look in one’s own direction. We are greatly in need of a tolerant, gracious, forgiving attitude toward ourselves. To be able to overlook others imperfections, we must be able to overlook our own.”

Odd, or not, but I have spoken and written the exact same thing, even recently. This idea concerning the importance of self-love is part of my tree, and it has been so for some time. Perhaps, I apply this idea now just a little better than when I first wrote it, but I don’t know. It is still something I am working on, and what began in me has grown to be me, and is still part of the me I am becoming.

Like the trees, we change, we enlarged, we scar, but for the healthy, some things remain the same. We are, when we age well, a compilation of the truths we have gathered along the way. We don’t grow past them, and they don’t necessarily expand on us. With true things, with the best things, “was” tends to be “is,” and “will be.”

I’m not done, not fully grown yet, and I am looking these days to keep changing, to provide more shade for other people, but I want, I plan, and I think it extremely important, to keep my roots, my trunk, my core, my simple, young, beautiful truths always about me.

A mature person — that person shelters within themselves the incipient, pure, stable essence of all they once were that makes them who they are becoming.

Of the best things I have learned this is one — not to let go of gentleness toward myself and others.

Skip The Schoolboy Pools

Posted: September 11, 2014 in thriving
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“There is a sharp bank there leading down to the river, with big gravel bars at the bottom.”

“Yeah, I know the place,” said Rod. “You park on the left side of the road.”

“That’s right,” said Chuck. “It’s a good spot. People don’t want to go down that bank, but it’s not bad if you’re careful. If you hike on in, then cross the river and fish the pools around the bend, you’ll do well.”

“Sounds good,” I said looking a Rod. This was good information.

I wandered over and looked over Chuck’s tie flying table. It was a mess, of fun stuff — a fly tying vice, spools of different colored thread, feathers, hides, dubbing, hooks, a can of lacquer, a pair of glasses. It was an artist’s studio.

Rod and Chuck were talking flies. “Black ants, number 14 will work, and Brindleshoots,,” said Chuck.

We bought some.

On the way out we patted the dog. In the parking lot there was a rabbit, hunched down under a pickup truck.

“Maybe he is trying to stay warm,” said Rod. It was a good interpretation, but who knew — a rabbit warming himself on a cooling engine? Odd, or maybe not.

It’s hard to tell exactly why creatures do what they do.

As we left Chuck added one bit of advice. “I’d skip the school boy pools at the bottom of the bank,” he said.

We did.

We hiked on in, to what Chuck called the “feeding trough.”

There, along some deep water banks, big Montana clouds overhead, big pine trees leaking their sweet fragrance, we both hooked some nice cutthroat trout.

There is an odd kind of art to living. It comes down to not doing the first things that comes to mind, finding warmth any place that you can, tying flies when you could just buy them, hiking down steep banks, taking advice where you can find it, not settling for the easiest thing, skipping the school boy pools, and fishing the feeding troughs, wherever you can.

Buy Something Red For The Turtle

Posted: June 18, 2014 in thriving
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As I left the house today for the grocery store, my wife called out, “Buy something red for the turtle.”

“Really,” I thought, “for the turtle!” It didn’t make sense. Then I realized she wanted me to get Celine some thing red to eat. I imagined strawberries and thought, “I’m not wasting our money on strawberries for a turtle.”

Then it occurred to me that the turtle might be hungry and really enjoy some red, juicy watermelon, and watermelon is cheap, and so I dropped the stinginess in my heart and went out gladly, questing for the good of the turtle. I came home with a small watermelon.

I sensed no gratitude on the part of the turtle and was tempted to eat most of it myself.

I’m naturally like this, begrudgingly generous, with turtles. I’m working on it.

I have, in a reformative spirit, taken to refusing money — sometimes. I used to charge for the public speaking skills I brought to weddings and funerals. I don’t anymore. I no longer have a stomach for profiting from other people’s grief — or joy. As a result, my rhetoric has improved. Since no one is paying, I only aim to please myself with my remarks, and as a result, I am more pleased. My not-for-sale humor makes me laugh, and my nonprofit pathos keeps me emotionally congruent. I like myself better — serving others — for free.

This is needed. My first instincts have almost always been greedy. I’m learning to go more now with my second and third instincts. Recently I paid people more than they asked for to do work on my house. I knew them. I didn’t want them to think I was cheap, and I truly wanted to benefit them.

I’m no saint. My motives about all kinds of things fluctuate from benevolent to self-interested, and everything in between. I am, like most of us, complex, bi-motivated, tri-motived, quadra-inspired. Even when I do something good, there is often, lurking just on the other side of love — which is the best motive in the universe — a less noble instigator. I am motivated by love, but also by others’ expectations, by their appreciation, by guilt, obligation and gain.

What I am learning is that my motives warrant examination. Why do I do what I do? What is in my heart? I want to know. I want to be more honest about this. Because if I can at least name these co-conspirators, then I can put them to the side, mitigate them, even refuse their influence. What I can name I can defeat.

I can defeat selfishness. I can choose to be generous. I can choose to not use people for my gain. I can choose to say no, or yes or later or never or, “I’ll do whatever you need me to do,” with no praise, profit or power-grubbing motive dragging along like dead and dying weight behind us.

I can choose, to buy the turtle something red, and not eat it myself.

Did You Think You Weren’t Supposed to Be Strong?

Posted: April 7, 2014 in thriving
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I woke up this morning with a choice. We all do —  ambivalent or focused, bifurcated or fired up for a kind of single-minded success.

I chose, just what I wanted to, and not what I didn’t. I finished the book of Proverbs along with my chai tea latte and steel cut oatmeal. Super-cool wise stuff is found in Proverbs, like, “The wise prevail through great power, and those who have knowledge muster their strength.”  Proverbs 24:4-5

Kathy Korman Frey, Harvard MBA, a kind of confidence guardian, has posited that successful women benefit from their experiences of mastery, choosing to find things they do well that build confidence to do other things well.

Tea, oats, proverbs — it’s is smart to choose to grow in power. The use of power, the mustering of  strength — this is not merely the heady stuff of tyrants and despots but also the way of the godly wise. The godly wise proceed with things that build up their strength; they move forward in ways that build up their confidence.

After my reading, I went out back to my lily pond and mucked it out. I threw my aluminum ladder across the pond, crawled out on it, lay down and began pulling the last year’s cattails out.

The long webbed, fleshy roots came out with a sucking sound. The water was cold, but the day was hot and under the gaze of a gorgeous Santa Anna wind and a cornflower blue sky I mucked and tucked and chucked out my pond. Monet-like, I gently lifted my lily pads, gave them space to thrive, flipped them back upright, left just enough cattails to grace the water with height again this spring.

Then I set on the papyrus growing at both ends, cutting back the dead brown stalks, leaving the bright green new shoots to poke out of the water like exclamation points with fireworks at the ends.

Then, there, thus — I set back and soaked in, my pond, lake, sea; my strength, my chosen yard of life, my several meters of canvass to paint, my long, limned, lovely, lined, lipped, lopped confidence.

And thus it is so that this and that and those like these will lead to more and more and more of that — power! Exploding! Like papyrus in the Nile, and lily pads in my backyard pond.

I know this about myself: it makes me strong to fix things, and it really fires me up when I create beauty — a backyard pond, a school in Southeast San Diego, a school in Tijuana, a community center in Nicaragua, a church in South Africa, a church in Brazil, a church in Chula Vista.

This afternoon I write on my iPad, under the same sun that I labored under this morning, the same sun the pharaohs built the pyramids under, the sun filtered through the shade in the window at a Starbucks near my house.

I’m here because ponds and pages and the music and the smell of coffee just do it perfectly for me. Mucking out lily ponds and jungles and schools and writing blog posts — these are my mastery experiences. So too are my sermons, and my modern proverbs, my fables and modern soliloquies too.

This is what builds up my confidence — what about you?

I suggest you do things that fill you up inside.

Go grow — in strength!

By doing things!

That build mastery!

Things that decrease ambivalence.

Things that increase confidence.

Did you think that you weren’t supposed to be strong?

 

The Real Trick is Paying Attention — and Not Worrying!

Posted: March 8, 2014 in thriving, wonders
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Just before we left the house I remembered my binoculars. “What the heck?”

That was the whole point of the thing — the swirling, milky Andromeda galaxy; the flaming red Ocotillo against the cornflower blue sky; a crisp, white quarter moon; a perfectly pink, finely needled pincushion cactus — and not thinking about my dental appointment next week.

Sometimes it is so freakin’ deliciously and precisely, so fix-brainedly, knob-focusedly, fine-tunedly all about paying attention, which means not remembering and not imagining.

Sitting around the fire that evening I assembled Dale’s telescope on my lap. It was operating-room team work.

“Mount.”

“Diagonal.”

“Finder.”

“20 mm lens — no not the 9mm — too much for the optics.”

I honored each piece of technology with nomenclature, a moments-techno-touch, a loving-looking-pause.

We know the names of what we take the time to see.

We flipped a lawn chair on its side and made a table for the telescope.

Boom — there were the mountains and craters of our mad-circling moon, in crisp, blazing white — always there, seldom wooed, never won.

And then later, after we had talked the dry dust, desert wind and gas fire into oblivion — sighting the scope off the car hood — we ogled the moons of Jupiter, glittering in a row next to the giant planet, posing there for us in a way we could take in, the size of an @ in an email address.

Gorgeous — drop-dead-come-back-alive gorgeous!

Awareness is the thing, conscious, woken-up, fix-eyed, mind-sighted, calibrated awareness, in the moment — not tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

As we sat over dinner earlier in the evening, I made a conscious decision to take in the moment — the pianist, hunched over his swirling, finger-tipped atmosphere, the mushroom crusted scallop posing on my fork, our friends all holding knives while spinning stories of the children we have named, of calving glaciers and orca whales.

We weren’t thinking about the possibility of any of us getting cancer.

The other day I noticed that when I post a set of my freshly crafted modern proverbs on my website, I do so by touching the screen of my iPad, copying them from my “notes” program with my finger tip and then springing them — again from the tip of my finger — into a new post! Bam! — my finger-wand casts word-wisdom into the waiting world.

I reach out, riding on a cloud, finger extended — and living in that moment and no other possible one — I create, my world!

This morning my wife and I sat outside our room and watched the sun come up on the mountains in the Anza Borrego desert. Bright light flooded the alluvials and tipped the peaks.

The real trick is paying attention — and not worrying.

Get On Down The Road

Posted: February 18, 2014 in thriving
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Life can be a bit of a slog.

I counted my calories again today on my iPhone app, MyFitnessPal. My pal allows me 1620 per day. I treasure everyone of them.

My Healthy Choice Premium fudge bars were helpful in keeping the numbers down (100 calories), and my Laughing Cow cheese came to my rescue, (35) and my popsicles (20) and all my lovely veggie friends pitched in too.

I got a few calories added back to my account by going to the gym this morning. MyPal gave me 105 for that. She’s kind of stingy.

The water heater broke this morning. Perry Plumbing wanted $1275 for a new one — installed. Yikes! I went to Lowes. They wanted $1025 to put in a new one; so I bought one myself for $529, stuffed it in the back of my Juke, and brought it home. A plumber friend agreed to put it in tomorrow for $200. Cool!

It’s interesting how it goes along.

I have three pounds to go to reach my weight goal, and I have a few hundred dollars to go to restore the amount spent out of my savings.

Slog, slog slog; choose, choose, choose; lose, lose, lose; restore, restore, restore and you kind of get there.

I watched the cross country skiers at the Olympics recently. They plod, slog, plough, and thump along a lot, and they pound through the snow up hill for a long time. It’s a lot of the same thing, over and over.

And that is pretty much the way most of reality gets along, time and space and the whole merry continuum — hopping along one nanosecond after another, one fresh birthed star after another and one dandelion seed after another too.

By just this kind of cosmic stuttering, this rampantly boring echoing, this gonging metronomic inanity — the world gets on down the road.

And so do I.

By each good food choice my body is healthier. By each thing fixed at the house I don’t live in a ruin. By each weight lifted at the gym and each step run on the elliptical I ward off weakness and loss.

To keep going, to make healthy choices, to not spend all we make, to step, bite, lift, slide, spend, save, run and choose carefully — by just this kind of inane, brute, slogified redundancy, we live and thrive!

Why I Want To Keep Cleaning My Own Bathroom

Posted: December 9, 2013 in thriving
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Of all the desultory tenderness of life to love, the household intimacies stand out.

This morning I cleaned my master bathroom. My wife cleaned the downstairs bathroom. My daughter cleaned her bathroom. I liked it. My cleaning time was a happy spraying, scrubbing and rinsing, a kind of putter-headed hum and buzz and calm that comes amid the keeping, caring circular motions of washing things. 

The ho-hum, assign-and-be-done, domestic particularities,  the dirty dishes, the tubs of laundry, the vacuuming , the dusting — chorish and dutified as they be thought — they rank, crank and bank sweet, sane, solid satisfaction.

It’s not the little things in life that drive us crazy; it’s the little things that keep us sane — a clean toilet, an uncluttered counter, a folded stack of clothes.

What we do to order the borders of our rooms and homes and yards  and offices make up the warp and woof of wondrous, wellish, woofish world.

Cleaning is craft.

This morning, with a spray bottle and a rag I humanized my most intimate space, my master bathroom, turning spotted, stained, dust-covered counters and toilets into gleaming, clean, smooth surfaces for my most intimate preparation rituals — those everyday, private motions of cleaning, brushing, trimming, washing, combing, moisturizing and scenting my own body.

The art and trade of cleaning and of organizing is the art and trade of personalizing our most sacred spaces.

Last week I emptied a drawer in a cupboard, threw out all the faded, fossilized flotsam that had piled up there over several years  —  old phone chargers, abandon power cords, beat up photo frames, a stray dice —  and put back in order those things I still want and need to keep on hand.

Life is just this —  the fiddling though detail, the categorization of the personal particular, the cleaning, placing and keeping of our stuff, and the tossing of the dice. It is a decision, to live as orderly or as messy as we choose, to ignore the voices of our mothers telling us to clean our rooms, and to heed our own soft, non-judgmental voices, telling us what degree of mess, muss or made-bed we want.

Life is a sorting, a chucking and a storing business that takes place within the vertical and horizontal props and privacies of our favorite walls and floors and ceilings. There we hunker down, do our own work, make our own domestic map, live as we choose.

I love it.

I’m not for maids or house keepers, or yard guys either.  I’d rather clean up after myself, or not, as I choose.

I am my own standard of order, I vibrate to my own cleaning chord — and sometimes my wife’s. I  live as I choose on my own steamed-cleaned carpet, mown lawn, within my own flower garden, my own lily pond, my own patio, in the cubicles of my own closet organizer, in my own self-painted, self-decorated bedroom.

I wish to keep it this way, to do my own household tasks, to live close to my own humanity, to make my own bed, clean my own toilet, say my own household prayers, wash my own dishes, mow my own yard, shave my own face, take out my own trash.

It’s sanity, this happy, soothing looking after oneself and ones family.

I want to keep cleaning my own bathroom, not because it’s humbling, but because it is intimate.

Was Is!

Posted: September 14, 2013 in thriving
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She believes that God has punished her with a heart attack for her wrong sexual thoughts.

His father brutally rejected him, it was never resolved. He now believes that you can’t work through conflict with anyone.

She thinks she can’t leave her philandering, alcoholic, abusive husband because some religious people have told her she shouldn’t.

Each of these people think things that aren’t true. They need truth, the kind of truth that sets frees.

Truth spoken to us is particularly powerful. A person, really any person, speaking truth, modeling truth, being truth is super powerful in freeing other people. Rules and doctrines don’t free people; truth incarnate, truth living in another person, that frees us. A person can say to another person,”I don’t believe that your stroke is a punishment from God,” and that can set in motion a new and healing movement of the heart.

A person can say to another harmed person, “Your father was wrong to reject you. Your father had a problem. He did the wrong thing. He should have loved you. You are worthy of being loved.”

A person can say to an abused wife, “Leave him. Leave your husband. He has rejected you for other women, and you need to set up boundaries and protect yourself from any more harm.”

A person, really any person, can judge a particular situation and give freedom-making counsel. Therapists, pastors, parents, friends do this all the time, and it makes a universe of difference. Therapy is nothing less than truth that unslaves. Counseling is nothing less than an empowering relationship that helps us see ourselves more accurately.

Here is the deal. We all have something to overcome. It is this: Was is! What was, the past, dominates what is, the present.

The past is a despot over the present. Past addiction, failures and broken relationship tend to rule our present ones. Too many of us live with one eye spun to the back of our heads, cycloptic we go forward ever peering past-ward. We crash through the present staring wildly into the past from one ever back-gazing, was-dominant, memory tortured eye. Like this we stumble.

Such deep compassion is needed for we us. We all need truth. We need help reinterpreting our pasts so that that they don’t wreck the present.

We can, as we ourselves learn and change, provide counsel to others, and we can seek out trained therapists, to help us make much needed identity shifts. We can be taught to tell ourselves: “I am not what other people have said I am. I am not the sum of my past decisions. I am not the past. I can be, I am now free to be who I decide to be, who God, who loves me, can help me be.”

Was may be is, but is can also change was, and is is what we help people determine it to be by their present moment choices. Is, with truth in it, actually can change how we see was. The truth can free us from was.

This is powerful stuff, good stuff; truth sets free, and if we become free, then we really can live radically, beautifully and amazingly free lives.

Makeover

Posted: July 22, 2013 in thriving
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If we owned a cat, and it wouldn’t play, we wouldn’t yell at it and threaten it. We would gently win it with a string, an open paper bag, the soft coaxing sounds we use to woo our animals.

If we owned an apple tree, and it wouldn’t apple, we wouldn’t hack on it with ax or saw. We would fertilize and water it, and mulch the soil at its base, humming perhaps as we worked, soothing it with horticulture’s gentle art.

If we had a child who was shy, and she was afraid to promote from preschool to first grade, we wouldn’t harshly command her to do this, but instead we would reason gently with her, take her by the hand to visit her new school before the start of the year and calm her with our softness and our care.

So when we don’t do well, when we break down, when we yell or cry, when we are an emotional mess, when we don’t play or fruit or advance according to the plan, we must not hack at sobbing selves, scold the mess, beat the soul, demand a change. An inner loveliness, the fruit of a healthy spirit, the soul’s own playfulness, none of this will ever be won with threats and punishments and demands unreasonable.

Found in the primer of life, in the preschool’s first lesson of living is the simple wisdom: First learn to be kind to your self.

The famed fruits of the inner life — patience, love, gentleness and kindness — these must first be practiced on our own selves. We are the first ones in need of patience with our own impatience and kindness with our own unkindness. We can never hope to authentically and consistently visit on others what we haven’t first visited upon ourselves.

Woo your own shy soul with tenderness. Gentilize your own degentled self with gentleness. Patience your own depatienced soul with the soft, soothing hum of the seasoned gardener.

What virtue ever flowered that didn’t flower first within, nurtured from seed to bloom by kindness — not force.

A Template for Living Well

Posted: May 29, 2013 in thriving
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None of us perfectly fit someone else’s template for living. We are unique, and here in the Unuted States we love to claim that. Each person is unique; it’s our folk wisdom National Anthem.

Maybe each person is unique, and each country is unique, but none of us should ignore a wise template for living. The good life looks surprisingly similar here in the US, and we who are older should tell younger people this. We should show them this, with our lives.

Look now, this is child’s play; no it isn’t, but we shouldn’t ignore life smart.

Those who marry when between the ages of 20 to 24 are nearly twice as likely to get divorced as those who get married between the ages of 25 to 29 years old.

Personal maturity matters when it comes to marriage. When it comes to being single too!

In our culture, people with more education tend to make more money. There are exceptions. Not that many.

  • High school drop outs: $18,734
  • High school graduates: $27,915
  • College grads (with a bachelor’s degree): $51,206
  • Advanced degree holders: $74,602

Does this matter? Well, people with higher incomes tend to live substantially longer than those without.

What doesn’t work?

Heavy drinking and drug use doesn’t work.

Research has identified subtle but important brain changes occurring among adolescents with Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), resulting in a decreased ability in problem solving, verbal and non-verbal retrieval, visuospatial skills, and working memory.

Men who get divorced, and stay divorced, that doesn’t work so well either. They are at really high risk for premature mortality. It would have been better for their health had they not married at all.

Conscientious people tend to stay healthier and live longer. Striving to accomplish your goals, setting new aims when milestones are reached, and staying engaged and productive generally prolongs life.

There isn’t a need to go on and on here. Point made; some ways to live are better than others.

Solomon wrote:

Nothing is better for a man
than that he should eat and
drink, and that his soul should
enjoy good in his labor.

This also, I saw, was from the hand of God.

It matters that we make decisions that move us toward maturity, toward stability, toward lasting relationships, toward meaningful work, toward being responsible, toward enjoying the life God intended for us to enjoy.

The good life has always looked pretty much the same. It is responsible, it isn’t drug and alcohol dependent, it involves having been trained in something, it is not too rushed. It takes work, it involves loving, close relationships, (whether married or single) and it includes God!

College isn’t for everyone, marriage isn’t always the good life, money isn’t a panacea, some can’t work in regular jobs. I’m not trying to promote a middle-class, materialistic ethic, but maturity, training, hard work and having enough to take care of yourself and others matters.

Here is the deal. Unique is often not that unique; noncomformity and irresponsibility may be kind of fun for a time, kicking back can be a kick, falling in love young is an awesome feeling, but ignoring a smart, responsible, proven template for living — it can be a disaster.

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