Difficult Moments

Above all, don't fear difficult moments.  The best come from them.

-- Rita Levi-Montalcini

LT: What, Why, How

A leader is someone who knows what needs to be done and why.

Further, a leader knows how to make it happen and then is persuasive in executing something that incorporates all three.

What, why, and how are critical, but still not enough without execution.

There are leaders who do these things well, and there are those that do them terribly. Nonetheless, all are on the spectrum of leading, for better or worse.

Taboos

Ever noticed...how many things that have been considered taboo throughout history have actually been rooted in health issues (as opposed to social or spiritual issues)?

Good News

Paul’s declaration of the good news found special resonance among people of lower classes, and with slaves, widows, and women. In fact, women proved to be a vital force in the ministry of Paul, serving as apostles, teachers, benefactors, and friends.  

-- Rachel Held Evans

3 Observations & A Question

It is ominous when the only thing that can save you is the law.

Perspective is knowing that seeing is not enough — it needs to be fused with reality (which can get skewed w/o perspective).

There is our experience of something in the moment and then there is our evaluation of that experience, which sometimes turns out to feel quite different.

Have you ever actually listened to even half the people that some people say are dangerous? 

Prior 3 Observations & A Question….

When the Sunrise Won’t Stop

Columbia Falls, MT

You Are Responsible

‘You are responsible’ for most of the things in your life…is often misconstrued.

The further you go, the more apparent it is how little you actually control.  Or, at least, that should be the case.  If it isn’t, I wonder how you have learned to relate to suffering.  Perhaps, you haven’t really learned that at all because other things have left you concluding that you know how to avoid suffering.  But, the wise know that isn’t really possible.  So, the aberration is simply that you think you can. 

It doesn’t take much to detect what all is forfeited by that conclusion.

There is so much that happens in life that has nothing to do with us. So, to think we are also responsible for it is…arrogant, to say the least.

The truth might be closer to we are responsible for how we respond to most of the things in our lives. 

This is no small distinction.

Not everything, for example, is a function of cause and effect.  Somethings just happen.  Randomly.  Or, at the very least, outside of our ability to control it.  Sure many things can cause cancer, but it still happens to people who avoid some or all of the things that do. Accidents happen.  Lightning strikes. Weather exists, often predictably, but obviously not always.  Forces of existence are not all perfectly or completely understood.  

Being responsible is not always being prepared for anything that could happens.  It is crazy sometimes how quickly we resort to the notion that we should have (or even could have) prevented something bad from happening.  Bad things happen either way.  

Perhaps we would be better off if we focused more on learning how to cope than to prevent.  After all, it is our response to the things that happen in life that seems to make the most meaningful difference.

Hold & Break Faith

The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

-- James Baldwin

One You Tell Yourself

Your inner monologue determines your outer actions. The most powerful story in the world is the one you tell yourself. 

-- Shane Parrish

Nature of the Earth

I'm wondering...about the nature of the earth.

Long walks give you time to take things in at a deeper level.  Hikes seem to allow for certain questions to emerge that might not otherwise.

Like, what I am really seeing (and experiencing) here?

We’re hiking in Glacier National Park this week. If you’ve been here, you know why I’m wondering what I’m wondering.

A reading contributing to my pondering...here. 

Grinnell Glacier

Where we're worshipping today:

 

Glacier National Park, MT

Will be adding pics throughout the week...here.

3 Observations & A Question

Worry is a thief of acceptance. 

In the end, you have to help yourself — others can help you only so much.

 

We often say (or think) we will do something IF someone else does it...first.

 

What is your relationship with wisdom like?

Prior 3 Observations & A Question….

Government Corruption

To destroy things he can’t possess or control is his essential nature.

-- George Conway, on Trump

Trump Has Made More Trades Than All Of Congress Combined

Speaker Johnson recesses the House early as Rep. Thomas Massie pushes Hegseth impeachment 

 

GALLUP - Front Page

The Emperor Has No Clothes

Feedback

The Question

The question we start with is rarely the question we end with. 

But, a question is a start because the question we start with will inevitably lead to a whole different question, in fact a different kind of question. And, one closer to the ones we really need to be asking.

While, conceptually, the question is the same for all of us, it also is unique to each of us. 

We often don't ask questions because we don't really want to know. Among other things, we're afraid of the work it may require of us. But, at the same time, we risk forfeiting something too significant, if we don't ever ask our question.

Usually, the question surfaces from some kind of hardship. It comes because of something difficult happening to us or to someone we deeply love. 

So, what is the question anyway?

Why?

That's often the leading question; why?

Why is this happening to me? Why is this happening to them?

Why pries open the fact that we still care. We may organize things to avoid caring a lot of the time. But, the fact is we still care. And, when it hurts bad enough, we show it.

'Why?' leads us forward, often into uncharted waters of our experience. Our experience, so far, is not all there is. There is more. And, 'why?' forces us into it.

Many times (usually after the fact), we are grateful for what we discover in this new terrain. We know we wouldn't have gone there, if the pain of 'why?' didn't drag us into it. 'Why?' brings us to a new place. It is often one that moves us past thinking mostly only about ourselves.  It expands the version of itself to include something bigger, a larger question.

What is this all about anyway? That informs both our question and the one we all are facing.  The mere fact that we recognize something we all are facing is evidence of the journey questions take us on.

We can spend a lot of time in our lives on this one.

But, beckoning us further is yet another question, how? 

'Why?' leads us to 'What?'. 'What?' leads us to 'How?'

How then (with this now much wider point-of-view), do we want to live this life?

How we do things is what matters. It is what impacts the whys and whats for everyone.

So, let questions lead us to where we need to go. 

Who You Believe

Maybe happiness isn't what you believe, but who you believe.

-- Phoebe Waller-Bridge

Point Out The Good

Point out the good when you see it. In life, in others, in yourself.

-- Topher Kearby

More Than

I’ve noticed…nature is more than just instructive.

It’ll Tell You Everything

The world can overwhelm. But if you slow down, and sit under a tree long enough, it’ll tell you everything. And if you forget who you are, draw something. Or go hike alone. Nature remembers you.

-- Robert Redford

3 Observations & A Question

We all see certain patterns in life and often only certain ones.

 

We live largely unaware of how our past is influencing our present. 

 

Every once in a while, you should consider the things that have become habits in your life.

 

What if you are being given the very thing you want, but just in a way you completely don’t recognize?

Prior 3 Observations & A Question….

Life Changing

Switching your mindset from “I can’t” to “I’ll learn” is life changing. 

-- Unknown

Dilemma With Donuts

Most certainly a first world problem, I have a dilemma with donuts. 

As I’ve observed some of the patterns in my life, I’ve noticed that nearly every time I have a doughnut for breakfast my total calorie intake for the day ends up much higher (not just because of that donut). There is probably a simple explanation. 

Eating sugar makes me want to eat more sugar. Invariably, if I start things off with a donut, by the middle of the day – and then again in the evening – I am craving something sweet (again). If I can catch it, by recognizing it, I can redirect myself and end up just eating something else. However, even then, the eating-something-else strategy is still staring at me toward the end of the day. For whatever reason, it seems, my willpower to resist by the end of the day is rather low.

In simple tactical terms, it seems like the best thing I can do to try to head things off…is simply not eating a doughnut at the beginning of the day.

Here’s the thing, while wanting to avoid some of the more obvious consequences (weight gain, rising cholesterol, etc.) are sometimes yet effective, denial is a short-term tactic at best. Because on any subsequent day, I’m faced with the dilemma all over again.

So, this got me thinking — when do I address the situation in a completely different way? The day to day challenge is both tedious and wearisome. It feels like a waste of energy. And since, as I age, energy is moving up the scale for my attention, I’ve begun to consider what all else may be going on that I can work with more effectively.

I’ve been in several conversations over the years, and again lately, about the role of desire in our lives. What is it that we want? This almost inevitably leads to the next version of the question; which is, what is it that we really want? To be sure, there is a collective version of these questions. And, there is a highly personalized version, too — what do I really want?

We seem to be hardwired to want things. Many things influence what that is. Our DNA seems to set the default and then what we experience, especially in the earlier years of our lives, adds its weight to the shape of the things we want.

At this point in my life, I’ve noticed that overall health is higher on my list of things I want than it used to be. The earlier version of it was that I wanted to feel good. At that stage, wanting to feel good was often confined to things like food that tasted good. After a few too many experiences, where eating too much food that tasted good, I discovered that I often ended up not feeling good. So, then, I had to balance something out. The desire to feel good, but also to not feel bad.

After a few years of discovering this dynamic, I moved towards wanting to actually feel good, as opposed to simply enjoying things like what tasted good. And, so, it was somewhere along this point of the journey that I realized I needed to incorporate physical activity into my life intentionally because doing so made me feel good.

Fast forward a few more iterations, I got closer to the reality that while feeling good overall was important, there are other dimensions to being healthy that needed to be considered. So, now, I will actually eat things that, in my opinion, don’t taste particularly good simply because they are good for me — they contribute to my health.

I work out nearly every day now; mostly because I know it is good for me (not because I always feel like doing it). And, even as I work out, I vary things day to day because I know it is good for me to do it that way.

I do these things because of what I want. In other words, I want more than the quick savory hit I get from donuts. I still want them (and I still eat them). But, I want to be healthy even more. So, whatever combination of these things that I want works its way through what I do, I am subconsciously balancing multiple things that I want. In laymans terms, I want a doughnut. In theoretical terms, I want to be healthy. Somewhere in the middle, they meet.

So, at least for now, this is my working conclusion, I have faced a dilemma with donuts (OK, and ice cream…). But, the nature of that dilemma is shifting, even to the point where dilemma is a bit of an overstatement. sugar

Always Do Right

Always do right.  This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.

-- Mark Twain

Get Moving Again

After we terrorize ourselves with self-doubt, our only relief is to get moving again.

-- Twyla Tharp

HISTORY: Labor Day

Each culture has a telling relationship with work.  Ours is no exception.  If nothing else, we need to know how ours has been shaped in order to effectively relate to it going forward. 

Another history: this time from a prior post about Labor Day.

Some things seem as necessary as ever. 

Prices

 
MORNING BREW

 
AXIOS

Truth & Freedom

Do we really believe the truth will set us free?

Like, all truth? 

Or, only the truth that (we think) benefits us?

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for the truth; and truth rewarded me.

-- Simone de Beauvoir

The Long Way Back to Christianity

4 Observations (from Others)

What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.

-- Ursula K. Le Guin

 

Is it possible you could live your whole life and die without ever having met the person that lived your life? 

-- Thomas Merton

There is no one formula for any of us at any point in our lives. Keep being open to adapting, learning, and listening to yourself.

-- Jason Brown 

 

Be the reason someone believes in goodness again.

-- Chris Bharnes

Prior 4 Observations (from Others).

I Study Successful People. They Have One Habit in Common.

 

I was once stranded with my 86-year-old mother in the Atlantic Ocean. We were on a snorkeling excursion off the coast of Miami, and the two of us were quickly swept behind our boat, my mother overtaken by the current. In her panic, she’d inhaled water into both lungs and lost consciousness. Attempting to tug her to safety, I thrashed and kicked with all my might, but the ocean swallowed my efforts whole. Lungs burning, legs heavy, I changed tactics. I used one hand to keep her head above water and waved the other wildly in the air, shouting for help as I did. 

Ultimately, what saved my mother’s life that day, and mine, too, was not fighting the current on my own. It was calling for help. Continue...here. 

-- Angela Duckworth

Real Peace

Where I live, if you were just walking around most times of the day, you would hardly ever have the feeling that anything was in jeopardy. It seems just about as peaceful as things can get. So much so, in fact, it’s a bit counter-intuitive to contemplate the notion that things are more precarious than they appear.

For one thing, in society at large, it is fairly well documented that people are riddled with all kinds of anxiety. And among these kinds of anxiety are not just the imagined fears that people can tend to have. In too many cases, they are literal and real for many people. And, we know it isn't just them. It is you and me, too. Mostly, this implies a reality that goes on behind the scenes, in hidden places. And, it seems, it is often in places where such realities cannot be contained as easily that you see it manifest itself. 

People, in general, are a fearful bunch of creatures. This is not news. But, in our society, there is a strange relationship between everything that looks fine and well, and all that really isn’t.

Social media is a prime repository demonstrating this contrast. Fraught with fabrications, it also reflects many common realities. Books extensively articulate the simmering nature of the anxiousness of our generation. And, to be sure, this is not confined to just our generation. If we’re honest, there have been existential threats all along the way (look at all the TV shows we love to watch...about such things in other times). If anything is substantively different in our times, it may be the proliferation of information regarding our realities (and which invariably contribute to them). 

As a group, we human-beings often try to build systems of protection that allay these types of concerns. Civically, this is most obvious in the forms of government we create (police, fire, regulations, voting protections, military, etc.). So, accentuating our vulnerability is the breakdown of trust in the ability of such institutions to protect us. On any given day, numerous headlines underscore these breakdowns, as they reveal the trust or the places or things that we have entrusted the protections we seek to. Now, as much as ever, we see significant (if not horrifying) gaps in the human leaders we have put in place to administrate them:

Here are the military and civilian leaders who've been fired, forced out or resigned since Hegseth became defense secretary / Hegseth Must Go

Why Foodborne Illness Is Surging / Revealed: inside the US military's plan to tap huge sums from the NIH

Trump Administration Begins Blitz to Find Elusive Voter Fraud Ahead of Midterms / Election analyst Charlie Cook told Republicans today to “brace themselves” for the midterms

In the protections we seek, there is a fine line, of course, between trusting and abdicating. And, it has become painfully obvious that the sweeping characterization that we have abdicated our trust to failing leadership is true.

The opportunity we are awkwardly (to put it mildly — many would say, existentially...) presented with is to identify both what it is that we need protection from and the institutions we have come to believe are necessary to do so.

Fear often operates at undetected levels. There are, of course, manifest exceptions — like the palpable things we probably fear. But, it’s the underlying things that we ruminate over that indicate that the problem is much more pervasive.

Remedies are complex, to be sure. But, in other ways, they are also alarmingly simple. For one thing, we just have to be more honest. The system of electing people to “take care of things“ for us has become far to convenient (abdication) and burned by the influence of money for us to continue the same approach. 

Further, we need to get back involved in our shared, high endeavor of pursuing the common good. It is no longer sustainable (never really was either) to operate exclusively from a “what's good for me“ mentality.

We are tipping over at so many different levels. We have to re-engage, dispose of the buzzword-enemy-labeling strategies, and do the hard work of putting each of our shoulders to the wheel of actually working together at making things good and addressing the things that compromise doing so

...to have real peace.

Wendell Berry, 1934-2026

I'm not sure how many other men would rank above Wendell Berry as influencing my adult perspective on many valuable things in life.  I've linked several observations from him that I've collected over the years...here.

Trust Ourselves

We have to trust ourselves before we can ask others to trust us.

-- Simon Sinek