19 posts tagged “life”

I do my thing and you do your thing.

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,

And you are not in this world to live up to mine.

You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.

If not, it can't be helped.

you can read more about this at Wikipedia

Hurricane Hetta has tagged me to write eight random things about myself.  I will go as fast as I can...

1. I have been to many schools since I graduated from High School, including DeVry, Musician's Institute, multiple community colleges, and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where I finally got a degree.
2. I went through a phase where I loved epic poems.  I read everything I could get my hands on, including the Iliad, Beowulf, Icelandic literature, the Kalevala, Nibelungenlied, The Song of Roland, and many, many more.  They gave me a great sense of what it means to be human, and to struggle.
3. Current favorite video game: Dance Dance Revolution, Mario Mix.  Favorite dance in that game: Always Smiling.
4. I am on the Atkins diet.  The first three days of no sugar and no caffeine had me weak and shaking and convinced me that I had an addiction, not a habit.  The snack I spoil myself with now is apples with peanut butter.
5. As soon as I know I want to watch a movie or read a particular book (for example, if somebody I trust recommends it), I don't want to know a single bit about what it's about--not even if it's a comedy or a drama.  I like to come in completely blind and let the storyteller bring me into the world.
6. I have lived in 10 different states in the U.S. and even more cities.
   
7. I wrote a computer program in Java that generates moves on a Rubik's Cube and checks to see if they did anything interesting (for example, swap only two corners).  I used the output of that program to create a solution where you only have to learn four moves to solve the cube.
8. I have a HAM radio license.
   

Lakshmi has tagged me.  The challenge is to define my life in 6 words, and then to tag 6 others.

Unaccustomed as I am to following directions as given, I will describe my life in 4 words (reserving two for future use) and tag two others.

OK...I pass this meme on to The Educated Fool and Hurricane Hetta.

From the foreword to The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
"Douglas Adams did not enjoy writing, and he enjoyed it less as time went on.  He was a bestselling, acclaimed, and much-loved novelist who had not set out to be a novelist, and who took little joy in the process of crafting novels."

From Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, regarding Robert Towne (who wrote classics such as Chinatown):
"Towne had two weaknesses.  He was poor at structure, a serious problem for a writer who would become notorious for his windy, 250-page scripts.  And for all his facility with words, he was not a born storyteller.  He had difficulty imagining the simplest plots, the most rudimentary sequence of events.  He was anguished over what he felt was his poverty of imagination."

You know, one of the ways I stop myself on some of my side projects is by thinking I don't have a grip on what I'm doing yet.  I imagine other successful people as knowing exactly what they're doing, not as people who are struggling. 

However, as artists, as creators, we must all be on the edge of human experience, right?  Working in the unknown.  Creating something nobody has seen.  It's going to be a struggle.  Only later might others look and go, yeah, that makes sense.

As always, it takes a ton of persistence, which is another word for being stubborn.

Imagine yourself in the following scenarios....what's your first step?

1. Just as you're starting to get on top of your financial situation, both your cars need repairs and your home's heater  breaks, for a multi-thousand-dollar tab.

2. You build a website and you are having trouble getting traffic.  Just as it is starting to get any kind of visitors at all, a hacker from Turkey takes it down.

3. Your boss tells you that your recent work is terrible and she wonders (in a staff meeting, in front of the whole team) how you ever got this job in the first place.

What's your first step?

I believe the first step is that, like it or not, your brain (or heart) assigns a meaning to the event.  One of the first things we learn in this world is cause and effect, and it's natural for our brains to try to determine causes for the effects that are happening to us.

I believe you can exercise your ability to assign successful meanings to anything that happens to you.  You get the option: you can choose meanings that wear you down, or choose ones that build you up.  If it's not natural the first time you do it, it will become more natural with practice.  And whenever you would normally feel the sting of what went wrong, you can replace it with the power of how you see it.

It's not denial--it's a matter of a valid opinion that you are successful!

So--multiple choice time.  Two options for each scenario.  Which meaning do you assign to the event?  (Of course you will have your own, but you get the idea...)

1A: Nothing I do will ever change my situation.  I'm doomed to financial disaster.
1B. I've overcome challenges to get this far.  I'm going to get over this, too.

2A: Yeah, I knew it.  I can't get these kinds of things to work.  I shouldn't have tried.
2B: Hey, I'm in the big leagues now.  I'm gonna get this thing up again, make it safer, back it up more frequently, and get more traffic.

3A: I am falling behind in this field and my career is basically over.
3B: I evaluate my own work and I am a success.

3B (alternate):

When you complain about a situation, you ensure your victim position with each utterance.  The instinctual goal--which I've engaged in many many times--is to take a vote; to surround yourself with so many people who agree that you have been wronged that, just maybe, you might start to believe it yourself.

My new approach is more proactive, and it applies both to situations that are working and those that are not.  For every relationship I'm involved in, every project I'm working on, I ask myself two questions:

1. What do I want?
2. How am I going to get it?

The first question involves being honest with myself and with my feelings.  I ask the question with no limits.  If everything went the way I wanted it to go, what would I be getting out of this?

The second question is where the reality of the situation comes in.  The world doesn't just hand you every thing you want on a silver platter (and I wanted a platinum platter anyway).  So: I know where I am.  I know where I want to be.  What steps do I take to get me one step closer to the goal?

Abraham Lincoln was a master of this.  You may think that, as President of the United States, that he would finally be in a position where everybody would just go ahead and do what he said.  But of course that is not the reality of it.  He had to work even harder to maintain the trust and loyalty of those working for him.  He had to continually find new ways to motivate and align his staff and his generals.

He could have continually maligned a lot of these people, and be justified in doing so.  Instead he encourages those who failed to carry out his orders, and even those who worked against him.

I'm listening to his letters and speeches through books on tape as I commute.  As I listen to each track, I ask myself: what did he want?  How was he going about getting it?

I find that he wants more than just having people do the jobs he needed completed.  He wanted to build working relationships with people, and to maximize the productivity that comes from walking together down that portion of the two life paths that overlap.

Abraham Lincoln on the Civil War:

"The will of God prevails.  In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God.  Both may be--and one must be--wrong.  God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.  In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party--and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect his purpose.

"I am almost ready to say this is probably true: that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.  By His mere quiet power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest.  Yet the contest began.  And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day.  Yet the contest proceeds."

I am learning something new this week.  Sometimes it's about the contest.  Sometimes the best way to work out a situation is to work it out. 

In the recent years of my life I've tried to avoid conflict.  But now I think it's not helping anything.  The conflict gets internalized and battles its way inside my head, until I'm frustrated with the whole thing.  What is this fear I have? Of letting people down.  Of upsetting people.  Of hurting people.  Yet it can still all happen.  You can't avoid this.

It's best to be honest.  To be direct.  If I'm going to let people down, then let them down by being myself.  Upset them when they understand my true intent.  Hurt as part of the contest that must exist.  I can't keep hurting myself, putting my dreams and desires in the back to avoid the pain others might feel.  That's part of their contest as well.

"What would you do if you had a million dollars?"

Good question.

A better question:

"What does you heart tell you you MUST do, regardless of your circumstances?"

I am alive.

Every day is a gift.

My guide is my heart, which burns with passion.  Resolutions recoil before it and commitments collapse.

Life is gooooooooood.

For the last few days I've been suffering from a cold.  One of the symptoms is that I am very tired.  I spent most of yesterday afternoon on the couch, alternating between watching a movie and dozing.

And I noticed something interesting.

About the whole time I was laying on the couch, I had a voice inside my head saying: "You should be doing something."

"You should be doing something"
"You should be doing something"
"You should be doing something"

I'm starting to notice this voice more and more as I cut down on my commitments and find myself with free time here and there (a new situation for me...).

I do really enjoy working on projects and side projects but I'm determined to ignore this voice until I feel that I want to work on a particular project.  I'm not thrilled about this word "should" and I'd kind of like to know in whose opinion I "should" be doing this "something."  I think it is far from this calm center that I am convinced I have deep down in there somewhere.

And actually, I was doing something.  I was soaking in a very beautiful movie (Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura).  There was a time that I didn't need to justify to myself the enjoyment of art and beauty.  I wonder what's changed....