This is the time to be slow…
Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.
~ John O’Donohue, in “To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings”
Notes: Poem via MindfulBalance. Photo: “I am curious” by Olafur Eliasson (via thisisnthappiness)
Threat Update @threat_update Monitoring trends and crunching key metrics to evaluate existential risk. Powered by science. Patents applied for.
Second train of the morning.
Arrive at Grand Central Station.
Traders, Bankers, Morning Hawks gather at the exit.
Car door slides open and the throng spills out.
I pick up the pace. Heart’s pumping. I’m passing Suits. And accelerating.
I Pass Harvard.
I Pass Yale.
I Pass MIT.
I Pass Lori’s Princeton.
I Pass Stanford.
I Pass Prep School boys from Choate, Exeter. Deerfield Academy.
I’m in front now, shoes tapping on the marble floors, Exit 500 feet ahead.
Boy from a 1 room, 3-grade public classroom in Ootischenia. Graduate of Northern Michigan University.
I step through the double doors to exit Grand Central onto Madison.
20° F wind gust roars down 47th street, eyes flood with water.
New York City! The Big Apple. You made it!
Cold bites, tears flow, and flow. And flow.
Cross walk sign turns.
I’m alone.
In front now.
Not done yet.
Not far enough ahead.
Not yet.
Photo: The city never sleeps, Atelier Olschinsky (via this isn’t happiness)
She’s a fellow blogger. She struggles with some ferocious demons. Here’s her story. I urge you to listen to the finish.
“A Reflection: Flickers in the Dark…How do you make a life out of ash? How do you move from the whole of the doily into the thread? For me, it started with flickers of light in my darkness…”
Moved…
Source: Sandy’s Blog @ A Mind Divided: “Flickers in the Dark” Reflection
Take 7.
Yep, 7th attempt to produce something, Anything, Something, Anything, that’s worthy.
I’m walking across Manhattan on 47th street and the weight bears down. Tuesday morning after a long weekend. Shoes feel heavy. Shoulders slouched. A Sherpa hauling a full load.
It’s 9 days and counting. I’ve run out of puppy pictures. I’ve finished Will Schwalbe’s Books for a Living and I’m finished with my quotidian shares of his wisdom.
So, I conduct an autopsy of the prior six attempts on partially completed blog posts:
You’ve been doing stand-up since the late ‘80s. Do you remember your worst night?
Oh, there are so many of them. In the beginning, there are endless amounts of worst nights. But there was one, after “Everybody Loves Raymond” had been on for a year, out at the University of Florida’s Gator Growl. It’s in the stadium, like, 30,000 people, Dave Chappelle, Larry the Cable Guy and me. Five minutes in, I heard a woman yell out, “You better start getting funny.”
Anything you miss about those early days?
There was something gratifying about going up onstage in front of a room full of total strangers. They’ve never seen you in their life, and they’re kind of like, who is this guy? And then you win that crowd over. That will never happen again, only because somebody in the audience has seen me. Seinfeld said, they give you the first 10 minutes if you’re well known. But you still gotta be funny.
When you first started taking on dramatic roles, what was your biggest worry?
You wonder, are you any good? It’s just doubt, that’s the biggest thing. The desire is there. But then I also want to be a pro golfer, and that’s never gonna happen.
You still have worries like that?
Oh yeah. No matter how successful you are. I hear that from other comedians all the time. You’re just waiting for the funny police to come and arrest you as an impostor.
~ Robert Ito, excerpts from his interview with Ray Romano in “Ray Romano Still Fears the ‘Funny Police’” (NY Times, June 30, 2017)
Photo of Ray Romano: Aces Comedy
Rich: I want to talk about this idea that is super important, the stories that we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and how we get caught up in these narratives that don’t serve you. Where do these stories come from and how we can decouple that narrative and begin the process of telling ourselves a new story.
Sharon: If you have a prevalent, frequent critical voice, your inner critic, sometimes what’s good is giving it a persona, give it a name. Give it a wardrobe. I have named my inner critic Lucy after the character in the Peanuts comic strip…I see this cartoon where Lucy is in the first frame talking to Charlie Brown and she says: “You know Charlie Brown, the problem with you is that you are you.” And then in the second frame poor Charlie Brown says: “Well, what in the world can I do about that?” Then in the third and final frame Lucy says: “I don’t pretend to give advice, I merely point out the problem.”
And I would keep coming back to the line: “The problem with you is that you are you.” Because that Lucy voice had been so dominant in my early life, I really credit my meditation training for basically having a different relationship to Lucy. Instead of on the one hand believing her completely, you are right Lucy, you are always right. Where on the other hand hating her, and fearing her and being shamed and all that. I realized that I had two ways of approaching her. One was, Hi Lucy, I see you and the other was to Chill out Lucy.
Rich: Packed into that is the idea of becoming the Observer as opposed to identifying with that voice as being part and parcel of who you are, like wrapping it up in your identity.
Sharon: Very soon after I saw the cartoon, something great happened for me and my first thought was: “This is never going to happen again.”
Rich: It’s the negative bias. We’re hard wired, we’re predisposed to identify these negative things that occur to us and then choose to string these together and create this story of who we are, how we got here and what’s going to happen to us in the future.
Sharon: …we are conditioned usually towards negativity – – – you are thinking about your day, evaluating yourself on how well did I do today. It’s not uncommon to only think about the mistakes and what you didn’t do that well, and where you didn’t show up that well, and it takes intentionality to say anything else happened today. It’s not hypocrisy. It’s not denying that there were issues. But it’s not all that happened. To get to a truer, bigger picture, we have to actually move our attention consciously towards the good. Anything good happened today? Anything good within me? And that kind of elasticity reflects the ability of attention and part of the meditative process. But it begins with seeing the story…
Rich: I think about the story I tell myself, about myself. But also the story I tell about the other people that I encounter throughout my day, and that story is generally reflective of my own state of mind and how I feel about myself. If I feel good about myself, I’m probably going to tell a more flattering version…But when you really analyze it, you realize over the course of your life, billions of things have happened to you. Billions! And we extract out these 10 things that happen over the course of our life and we identify with them so deeply, so thoroughly that they infect and invade how we see ourselves and every decision we make. How we interact with other people. What words that come out of our mouth…Its amazing how pervasive it is. Its so cemented that the idea of even looking at that or being critical of the veracity of that, let alone reframing it, is something that I think that most people don’t even begin to engage in.
Sharon: That’s true. Absolutely true. Which is why I think seeing the story is the first and most critical step because a lot of people don’t even believe that…we don’t realize how impacted we are by all those views, our Lucy coming at us…
~ Rich Roll, Interview with Meditation Master Sharon Salzberg on Real Love & The Art of Mindful Connection (Podcast, June 25, 2017)
Related Posts: It’s been a long day
I just keep taking the next step knowing there’s no call for standing in the crowd and recounting my failures, there’s no retribution that demands I shrug off the notice of the works of my hands. There’s no need to deny or lessen the good by stepping back into my wanderings to tell of the bad. There’s grace in the ordinary life I live that just needs to live, knowing it’s all miracle, all of this beautiful stuff every morning. All the days long.
~ Lisa Tindal, from “The Essence of Days”
(By one of our very own WordPress bloggers at the handle: Quiet Confidence)
Notes:
I relish those spontaneous times when I decide to stroll with my wife and dog through the park near our home in Amsterdam. Or when I take time to read a novel for fun. Or when I stop for a lovely glass of wine along an outdoor cafe along the canal because it seems like the thing to do. How about just taking time to take time?
Ah, the infinite moments to enjoy, presented to us on the conveyor belt of our existence….
There are times when making no sense makes sense. Just being, hanging out, following the whim, the momentary inclination. How long can you indulge yourself, though, purely, without hesitation, doubt, or a troubled thought about what it should be troubled about…?
Stop! Do something else. Do nothing. Try it. Anything. It’s not about our doing.
~ David Allen, from Indulging in Easy
Note: Photo via Mennyfox55
