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, usually, 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….

I’ll Learn

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

Point Out The Good

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

-- Topher Kearby

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.

Get Moving Again

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

-- Twyla Tharp

What You Take In

Ever noticed...that what you take in influences how you see things…including what you even see?

Silence

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. 

-- Mother Teresa

What we need most in order to make progress is to be silent before this great God.

-- St. John of the Cross

3 Observations & A Question

Sleep may be among your better friends.

 

Justice is not a one-way street — if it is…it isn’t justice.

People of faith are often viewed as naïve, while people with faith are not.

Who are you going to reach out to this week?

Prior 3 Observations & A Question….

How People's Lives Are Changed, Con't

Another lingering reflection, on a recent I'm Wondering...:

I'm wondering...about how people's lives are changed.

The thing is, in spite of what we'd like to think, we don’t really know how to change someone else’s life (maybe that's a good thing; after all, we're not God...). This is probably true because we mostly don’t understand very much about how lives are really changed in the first place. This is complicated a bit further because we often too quickly assume that what changed something significant in our own life would (or should!) do the same for someone else. 

But, understanding the real dynamics of how such things work is critical.

My observation is that, more often than not, it isn’t information itself that changes someone. The context of the need and the particular moment that coincides with something meaningful generates the spark of change. In other words, it is highly contextualized and experiential. Information is involved, but often somewhat serendipitously (or, if one believes such things — which I do — providentially). It was already there, in most cases. But, when the context or the need changes, experience of that information can be completely different.

And, this, is rarely orchestratable by someone else. Sure, sometimes it is. For example, people will often say an experience like military service really changed them. That can be orchestrated. There are other situations where circumstantial change is 'forced'. But, more often the kind of change that really happens internally is when someone is ready to change — they need to because they want to.

Practically speaking, I'm thinking these are often among the catalysts for real change:

• INSPIRATION — exposure to something highly captivating to one's sense of being or purpose
• REVELATION — something is revealed that is different from prior working assumptions
• PAIN — it's too painful not to make a change 

What would you add? 

More Than We Think We Can

At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.

-- Frida Kahlo