I’ve watched myself time and time again imagining a project, or a blog post, or even drafting a letter to a friend in my head, never to actually manifest in action. And then I can look back on many a day and ask myself: was this time well spent? Too often I can’t answer a full yes.
Why is this? For me, distractions have always been an easy answer. Some amusing video, or some interesting article, or some captivating piece of news takes me off on purposeless tangents. But that answer seems to hover at the symptomatic level. Two deeper answers come to mind: 1) not having a clear intention in the first place, and 2) perfectionism.
The intention is tricky — “What do I want to do? How do I want to spend my time?” These are moment-to-moment back-and-forths within the self; how can there be one static answer? A good general guide, popularized by Joseph Campbell, is “follow your bliss.” In his landmark book, The Power of Myth, he says:
My general formula for my students is ‘follow your bliss.’ Find where it is, and don’t be afraid to follow it.
What does that look like, not being afraid to follow one’s bliss? First word that comes to mind for me is: experimentation. Experiment! When action is a constant experiment there is no success or failure — there are just results! Sounds simple. But I think it takes guts to really experiment. And once a fertile ground of experimentation has been laid, then creativity can arise.
One experiment that inspired me recently was a cross-country walking/biking trip by Iraq military veterans who were transformed by their experiences and wanted to share their stories, and their fundamental realization that the power of love is greater than the power of fear and hate. Appropriately, they named their journey “Contagious Love Experiment.”
Which leads me to perfectionism. The drive to make things ‘perfect’, or to be right, or to look smart — speaking from my own experience I can say that these things stifle the experimenting spirit! If the next step or the next action isn’t perfect either in planning or carrying out, then it will never be completely taken.
To go back to our example, I recently met Josh and Connor, of Contagious Love Experiment, and I asked them about their process of overcoming what must have been considerable barriers to their taking this unusual journey. Connor seemed to resonate with the question and essentially said “Yea, some fears were there … but I knew what I had to do … and actually doing it was the only answer to those fears.”
Liberation Without Identification
March 24, 2009. Early afternoon.
Up until now I have been proud of my affiliations with the Metta Center and with Charityfocus — nonviolence education and experiments in kindness/genorosity…what could be more noble? What could be more benign/non-threatening? What identification could illicit more instant respect and admiration from someone? What affiliation could act more as a peace passport?
I had a series of events happen to me in the last few hours that changed my perspective.
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After dropping my sister off at the train station, I decided to stop at the bank because I was out of cash. On the street ahead of me I saw a middle-aged man selling an independent newspaper. Many people were passing him by without even acknowledgment. Now I’ve purchased this paper before, read it through, and that was enough for me. Since then I have not felt compelled to buy another paper, though I do acknowledge the value of offering an independently-produced paper in return for a donation, as opposed to pan-handling, and I want to acknowledge the existence of other beings, regardless. So I said hello as I walked by.
Hi, would you like to buy a paper. No, thank you. A look of bitterness and disappointment. But I’m coming back this way and I’ll stop and chat. Oh, ok.
How can I serve this person? I decided to try an experiment. I withdrew forty dollars from the bank, in small bills. On my way back I stopped and chatted a bit, then I made the proposal. I was to give him five dollars, for five papers, and together we would offer them freely to people, instead of trying to sell it to them. “Ok, let’s do it.” read more…
You know how we have to think back to remember ages sometimes? Even our own on occasion. “How old am I anyway?” you think to yourself, when asked the question. You know its around, say, mid twenties, but not sure exactly. “Lets see, last year I was 23, and then I remember turning twenty-four..ah, yes, I’m twenty-four,” you think to yourself in about 1.25 seconds.
read more…
I wrote this in response to a note from a friend about the provocative social commentary film Zeitgeist: Addendum [link]. Is technology the answer? No, and yes.
There is much talk of what the problems are, and what we need to solve them. I love Thich Nhat Hanh’s perspective on awareness of a problem. He compares mindfulness of one’s suffering, or problem, to a mother comforting a crying child. It only takes a few minutes of a mother cradling a child to figure out what the problem is and then provide what is needed: love, attention, milk…. And as the closing scene with Krishnamurti says: “To understand, is to transform what is.” I hope our societal discourse can likewise focus compassionately and diligently on our problems.
And once we do have our focus squarely on what the problem is, what will we decide about what we need in order to solve that problem and, just as importantly, how to go about it? The how is what I feel moved to talk about.
Technology is often cited as the solution. At first I recoiled from this; can the answer to our deep human problems really be found in a material invention? But then I reconsidered the meaning of technology. Is not sitting in a sharing circle on a Wednesday night, say, a form of (social) technology (designed to increase participation and group interaction) just as much as using a spoon to eat soup is? Well then, perhaps technology is the part of the solution. read more…
I wrote this in response to an invitation from a friend to join UNKY, an online address book service.
Ya know, this sparked some thoughts for me. I’m going through a radical simplification process in my life currently — for example I’m off facebook, and using the computer much less, etc — so I’m going to pass on UNYK. I did look into a bit and it seems like a good idea, keeping updated on contact info, but I personally have found it to be a myth that organizational tools like computers and social networking sites like facebook or maybe even UNYK or Plaxo (similar service) make our lives easier/better. Two reasons come to mind:
1) Motivation. For as long as I’ve remembered I’ve always looked at actions according to their intentions/motivations. It seems clear that the motivation in the for-profit world — even when the apparent reason is something good like keeping people in touch — is something that doesn’t serve us (all of us) in the long run: money from advertisements, or similar stuffs. And the skinny on ads, now that we’re talkin about em I find summed up nicely in this quote: “Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.” (Ben Okri) I’ve come to realize that ads tell stories, and if we pay attention to them, they can alter our world, our consciousness, our focus.
2) Localism. I’m less clear on this one, as yet, but it seems to me that computers, TVs, cell phones, while being very useful for sure!, can quickly result in taking us…ok, let me speak personally here…they can quickly suck me away from the world around me, as my attention is grabbed by one exciting thing after another, one friend update, or youtube video, or piece of news … and soon I’m lost in this constructed, virtual world which has little connection to my real life around me, which is what gives me joy. And this is ironic, isn’t it?! because these tools were meant to connect us to those around us in the first place!
I think karma and abundance are good concepts to combat this technology suck I just tried to describe … karma because: cause and effect, we bring into our lives what and who we are ready for at the time — so why sweat it? :) Just be ready for what comes up, and then be fully present with it. And abundance because I’ve found that a lot of times, a desire to hold onto something/someone comes from this fear in me like oh, what if I lose this? It’s difficult to describe this one concretely, but it seems to me that the urge to accumulate or store more than necessary comes out of a belief in scarcity, whereas acting from abundance means more letting things pass through us when the need arises.
This all reminds me of an old wall street journal comic. It has this guy talking on a phone, looking bemusedly at his toaster with a sheet of paper in it. “Something’s wrong, I’m receiving a fax on my toaster!” Haha, maybe you had to have been there….
about page and an introduction page to start….
