It is not an uncommon thing at all to wish for a future that is yet to come or a past that is long gone. Humans have the blessing and the curse to be able to mentally exist in the past and future while ignoring the present. It is a blessing because it allows us the freedom to live in the most useful plane. The curse is the propensity to relive or project the worst of experiences or possibilities. At all times, the mind has the capability of transporting the self elsewhere. With this ultimate power to determine much of our existence, surprisingly most people defer control to the moment or to their “monkey mind”. Imagine if you will driving a car with no steering wheel. The gas and the brakes are great tools but without the ability to steer, one is at the mercy of the terrain and the tires.
So the key to moving forward in a direction of your own desire means developing a steering mechanism. How long would you drive that car without a steering wheel? Not long at all before you or someone else added that key component. The key to your mental steering comes down to practice. Pulling your mind in the direction of your choosing on a regular basis. When it wanders, you must take control again. Under no circumstances is this easy. It’s easy to be swayed by right now. It’s easy to run the patterns that you’ve been running for years or decades. Those are the paths of least resistance but I assure you that they will not get you to your destination in a timely or comfortable manner.
So take this moment to decide. Decide who you are now and who you want to be in the future (you can’t fix the past but you can change its meaning). Once you have those in mind, start with a half hour each day where you think and act only in line with that vision. If your mind wanders, bring it back! As you get better and better at completing that half hour, it will begin to dump over into the other hours of the day. Eventually the you from the vision and your reality will be one in the same. The only question for now is, are you willing to take control?
Bon Voyage!
Pete
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the old school gods and their importance in the lives of our ancestors. Although we have so many technological and societal advantages, there are some aspects to their belief structure that could be helpful if implemented. I’ve joked several times that I may start worshiping Zeus and the other Greek gods because of their idiosyncrasies. You’re less likely to beat yourself up over work snafu when your god is regularly cheating on his wife. Despite the possible comedy arising from this, I don’t know that there’s much to it. The main area that most of the ancient religions have in common is the concept of “sacrifice”. I will be focusing on the non-human variety.
Imagine it. A soldier walking through a jungle in a foreign land just as the rain stops. In the distance there is a rainbow. All of the sudden there is an attack from the enemy. The attack is repelled and the soldier marches on. The next day the rain stops, rainbow, surprise attack. This pattern continues for a week. On the eighth day, the soldier comes upon a beautiful waterfall. With the water plummeting from a height of over fifty feet, a mist above the surface of the water forms a miniature rainbow and soldier discharges his weapon several times into the falling water. There is no attack, so the soldier is sure that the enemy is dead. It is ridiculous, isn’t it? The soldier believing that the rainbow somehow caused or could help the prediction of the attacks. The truth is that we all do it at one point or another.
It’s one of my favorite lines from a song by one of my favorite bands “Your actions speak so loud, I can’t hear a word your saying!” The song is called “I want to conquer the world” and it juxtaposes the idealism and the reality of people. It’s a punk rock song and due to soccer’s historical underground following in the US, I usually equate the two on a few levels. At the moment, the youth soccer world is caught in an almost Jekyll and Hyde scenario. Many of the positives of the sport that is loved by millions are regularly mangled and deranged in the pursuit of momentary glory. In each paragraph, I will start with the ideal and follow it with the real.
Before Amazon, there was (at least in my world) the Sears Catalog. It was a huge “magazine” that had just about every product in the Sears store. It was a place that my brothers and I would peruse some time before Christmas to find things we wanted. I remember that I always focused in on the guitars. They weren’t overly expensive at the time and I fancied myself as a future guitarist. Despite my desire, I never told my parents nor did I save up money to purchase one. In hindsight, I really didn’t want the guitar. I liked the idea of the guitar but if I had truly wanted it, I’d have found a way.
With summer almost here, it almost time cotton candy, hot dogs, games and fun. Unfortunately fair’s not coming to town. The trucks, the rides and treats might all show up for a few days but there will be kids and adults alike expecting fair. Johnny whose cotton candy is smaller than his sister’s cries about fair. The father who remembers when the ticket for a ride was a quarter, not a dollar will complain about fair. The Scrambler operator will hear about the pay that his friends get at their jobs and wish for fair. Fair is not coming to town because it’s usually a one sided proposition.
For most of my life, I’ve had a portion of Teddy Roosevelt’s speech at the Sorbonne memorized. “It is not the critic who counts… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.” It’s moving. It moves me in the sense that I actually take action when I think of it, hear it in my head or in my heart. The issue is at the moment, the critics have such a large megaphone that it becomes hard to hear our heads and our hearts. The echo of other people’s point of view tends to linger, burn and even cut the ones who are actually in the arena. The credit may belong to the man in the arena but that credit is hard earned because people want you to lose and never let you forget it.
Do me a favor and breath deeply. Pull it in and then release it. The air is incidental, isn’t it? It’s the breathing that you noticed. You probably gave little thought to the air itself. That’s because air is all around and it feels pliable and weak. It is only when air is marshaled into a formidable force, like a hurricane, that it gets the respect that it deserves. We need the air that we breath, it a building block with the potential to give life or take it away. It is a resource of infinite importance that is invisible because we only see it when it smacks us in the face like in a hurricane.
Each week in fourth grade, we had a folder that contained all of our work. On Friday, if you had everything done, the word ‘Complete’ was written on your folder and you got to do some craft or game. If you didn’t have everything done, you received a note of ‘Incomplete’ and you needed to finish your work before getting any free time. In the entire school year, I think that I was ‘Complete’ only twice. It took me most of the year to finish my macrame owl due to my limited free time. I’m quite certain that I only passed fourth grade by the skin of my teeth. Perhaps I should have (or continue) to feel badly about my incomplete track record or tendency. The fact of the matter is that I don’t.
The world is filled with things that cut. Like walking through a patch of thorn bushes with exposed skin, injury is an almost certainty. In the short term, bandaging the cuts is the right strategy. In time, the wounds will heal. If too many cuts pile up, the bandages become wrappings. You become a mummy. Movements constrained by the bandages on wounds that never healed. Avoiding cuts completely is an impossibility but choosing a new path and learning how to wield a machete are both options. Band aids are not a long term solution, they are a short term fix. This concept is obvious when thinking about real wounds but with metaphorical wounds, this is a common strategy.
Huryk Unlimited 