Playin’ The Edge

Start living now. Stop saving the good china for that special occasion. Stop withholding your love until that special person materializes. Every day you are alive is a special occasion. Every minute, every breath, is a gift from God.

Mary Manin Morrissey

I find lately that my life is crazy enough that I need to do 3 things regularly to keep my cool and my sanity.   I need to exercise with some regularity.  I need to sit and follow my breath for 10 minutes every a.m. while the house is quiet, and these days, dark.  And i need to listen to good stuff while i drive to work.

Good stuff recently has been Pema Chodron CDs that were recorded during a weekend workshop that she gave called Going to the Places That Scare You.   She went through a ton of material but thankfully repeated the purpose often enough that I can recite it here – it’s about abiding with the feelings without believing your own thoughts and beliefs about them.

I love the word “abiding”.  It means lasting for a long time.  Becoming a permanent fixture.  Just hanging out rather than freaking out and pushing back against every yucky thing that happens.

Now that’s good stuff.  And exactly what i need when life is on the verge of being overwhelming at any moment. Here was something she said at the end of one CD that really struck me:

It’s not about getting it right, it’s about becoming more connected with your life and other people

Don’t believe the bullshit that you’re a failure or helpless or be embarassed about yourself.

Always realize that anything you’re feeling is a doorway to enlightenment.

When I read this bit of Born to Run I thought about how many millions of ways it’s applicable to my life – patterns I’d love to put a stop too, habits I’d love to kiss good-bye.  The more we resist them, the more they persist, at some point you gotta let them be, accept them, and even love ‘em to death.

Strictly by accident, Scott stumbled upno the most advanced weapon in the ultrarunner’s arsenal: instead of cringing from fatigue, you embrace it.  You refuse to let it go.  You get to know it so well, you’re not afraid of it anymore.  Lisa Smith-Batchen, the amazingly sunny and pixie-tailed ultrarunner from Idaho who trained through blizzards to win a six-day race in the Sahara, talk about exhaustion as if it’s a playful pet.  “I love the Beast,” she say, “I actually look forward to the Beash showing up, because every time he does, I handle him better.  I get him more under control.”  Once the Beast arrives, Lisa knows what she has to deal with and can get down to work.  And isn’t that the reason she’s running through the desert in the first place — to put her training to work?  To have a friendly little tussle with the Beast and show it who’s boss?  You can’t meet the Beast and expect to beat it; the only way to truly conquer something, as every great philospher and geneticist will tell you, is to love it.

Christopher McDougall

Born To Run

I thought that if i grew up, did my best, and made everyone proud of me, it would be enough.  I thought if i got a good job, got a better job, made money, and then made even more money, it would be enough.  I thought if i could lose ten pounds, get a better haircut, get the right jeans, then lose the same ten pounds, it would be enough.  I thought if i could understand, explain, and expresss my feelings well enough, it would be enough.  I thought if I wished, hoped, dared, or dreamed enough, then it would finally be enough.

Then I thought: enough.

I practice being enough.  When i do that, everything is already enough and this is the day I’ve been saving for.

Karen Maezen Miller

Hand Wash Cold: Care Instructions for An Ordinary Life

I heard a recording from a talk that Danna gave at Kripalu and it was perfect.  She’s thoughtful and grounded and her poetry is amazing.  I really need to get her books, but until then I’ll  share a single poem.

Allow

There is no controlling life.
Try corralling a lightning bolt,
containing a tornado.  Dam a
stream and it will create a new
channel.  Resist, and the tide
will sweep you off your feet.
Allow, and grace will carry
you to higher ground.  The only
safety lies in letting it all in –
the wild and the weak; fear,
fantasies, failures and success.
When loss rips off the doors of
the heart, or sadness veils your
vision with despair, practice
becomes simply bearing the truth.
In the choice to let go of your
known way of being, the whole
world is revealed to your new eyes.

Danna Faulds

Everything in the universe has a purpose.  There are no misfits, there are no freaks, there are no accidents.  There are only things we don’t understand.

Marlo Morgan, Mutant Message Down Under

let it go – the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise – let it go it
was sworn to
go

let them go – the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neithers – you must let them go they
were born
to go

let all go – the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things – let all go
dear

so comes love

~ e. e. cummings ~

I read this blog post today about bouncing back.  The writer talks about a group of young MBA students he was working with who were developing a presentation and working and working on it – basically they were going to iterate it to death.  He discovered that they were afraid of failure.  They wanted to make it perfect so they didn’t have to deal with any potential “bad stuff”.  Even if it meant not delivering it.

And it struck me because my niece said a while back something about, what’s the point of getting a university education, you graduate with $50k in debt and no guarantee of the decent job you might need to pay the debt off.

And I get that, it’s a tough decision to make.  I was the first person to get a degree in my family, there was absolutely no assumption that I was going to take that road, it was all my choice.  And while it’s worked out ok for me, I know it’s not simple.  I have kids and understand that there will be some tough decisions ahead, mostly theirs with plenty of my unwanted advice thrown in.

I’m reading The Outliers and although i’m only on Chapter 4, I can see that he chips away at our belief that successful people are just naturally good at stuff.  He points out the importance of people’s birthdays and 10,00 hours of practice to get good at things.  He looks at the timing of trends and the backgrounds people had and their good people skills or social intelligence.  All things that help us down the road to success, or make us become janitors.  But I think his point is that we do have innate abilities or interests.

That’s why the challenge is to know ourselves.  Sure you can look at occupations and decide you want to be a tax auditor or a welder.  But it’s kind of ass backwards.   

It’s a better start to know things like whether we like a structured or loose environment.  Whether we want to work with our hands or our heads.  Whether we want to work with people or put our head down and git ‘er done.  And if you want to work with people, is it as equals on a team or as an authority figure like a teacher? 

We need to know if we are Type A or B.  Do we prefer to work with Words or Numbers or Things? What are we motivated by – things like money or time off?  We should know if our career is a means to an end (pay the bills, get a retirement plan), or an end in itself (you love it enough that the pay is almost secondary, almost).

Once you know that kind of stuff, then you can look at an occupation and understand the “fit”.  Or talk to someone who does the job and at least ask the right questions.

Because a university education can go beyond giving you the potential qualifications for the job you think you want.  For me, I took five years to do a degree.  That’s because I took a semester off to work at the CBC, I also worked at the student paper and had a boyfriend and multiple part-time jobs.  I was too busy to ever take a full course load. But the university experience gave me the time to grow up and learn some skills around organizations, people and getting the work done.

I also learned to write, the skill that got me my first real job.  I was temping to make money before a trip to Europe.  I was at a software company and the woman I worked with couldn’t write her way out of a paper bag (2 year certificate from college) and when my boss (Masters in Creative Writing) found out that I could, he made me an offer and I took the job.

But it was more than that.  High tech companies tend to be a bit more free-wheeling, forward thinking and less conservative and that fits my personality.  Often they’re meritocracies and that fits my “get it done” mentality and my single university degree.  They also move fast and I like that, I never get bored, I surf on the changes with the best of them.  So it was a “fit” in ways that I would never have known before I got into one. 

It helps to see your path as more than just book learning.  You have so many more options in life if you develop more savvy than just regurgitating stuff you’ve read.  And when you can expand your view and see the process more creatively (ie, try stuff and see if it fits) it can help reduce the fear of failure that kept the MBAs from actually delivering their presentation.  You can take the stance that “I’m just trying stuff”.  And then your skills go beyond getting a good mark on a test.  At least that’s what I’ll tell my kids when it comes time to make the hard, and expensive decision.

Discerning intelligence knows that happiness as a concept related to the future.  similiarly unhappiness is an idea.  To test this, make a simple experiement.  When you are experiencing suffering — mental suffering — notice that your attention is fixed on an image or a series of thoughts, a story.  Notice how the thoughts and images are dependent on a central idea, the idea of somebody– that is me– and the problem.  The suffering exists in the story, not in reality.  What is the suffering without the idea of me and the problem?

When we release the image of the central character on whom the problems depend, the problems naturally disappear.  The Buddha, upon awakening, is said to have remarked, “O, housebuilder, I have seen you; your ridge pole is broken.”  (A ridge pole is the main beam that attaches all other rafters to the roof of a house).  Seeing through the illusion of the central character breaks the ridge pole of the entire house of suffering.

Passionate Presence, Catherine Ingram

Read an article on happiness today, here’s a good bit:

In fact, happiness is the single greatest competitive advantage in the modern economy. Only 25% of your job successes are predicted based upon intelligence and technical skills, though we spend most of our education and most companies hire based upon this category. The “silent 75%” of long-term job success is based upon your ability to positively adapt to the world: optimism, social support creation, and viewing stress as a challenge instead of as a threat…. when we are negative, our brains resort to “fight or flight” thinking about the world. But when we are positive, our brains “broaden and build” allowing us to create new patterns of success and widen the amount of possibilities our brains can process.