in the center of the wave
Ever since I was first introduced to the ocean as a child, I’ve loved the forceful push and pull of its tide. The momentum behind a crushing wave delivering me to the shore. The satisfaction of my boogie-board effortlessly gliding into a small child, while his Italian-American mother scolds me for not watching out.
The swell of the ocean, the push-and-pull that I mentioned, is a constant metaphor I use to help me understand my life and my season.
“Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.”
― Hermann Broch
Ever since I was first introduced to the ocean as a child, I’ve loved the forceful push and pull of its tide. The momentum behind a crushing wave delivering me to the shore. The satisfaction of my boogie-board effortlessly gliding into a small child, while his Italian-American mother scolds me for not watching out.
The swell of the ocean, the push-and-pull that I mentioned, is a constant metaphor I use to help me understand my life and my season.
There are times in life where momentum feels inevitable, or inescapable. As if you are riding on an invisible wave of sheer opportunity. It’s a time with an elevated perspective, increased focus, and overall exhilaration at the prospect of life. The answers to life’s problems become unlimited as well as the pace of growth and transition.
So often in life, we praise and adore these seasons of being in the center of the wave, but do we understand how we got there?
If you love boogie-boarding as much as I do, you know it takes patience to find the right wave. A sense of intuition, guided by past-experience tells you your odds of success before pushing off.
Patience in the midst of trial is something we talk about a lot, but patience in the midst of nothingness, calm or stagnancy, is something I never hear mentioned. Oftentimes we sit in wait for so long, our purpose for being out in the ocean erodes and we miss our opportunity. The small tug at our feet towards the abyss becomes a stronger pull than we were ready for and we’re left behind, watching our golden opportunity rush towards the shore.
How does this metaphor connect?
In our calm seasons, when we’re growing seemingly slow, or under the surface, we must remain attentive and vigilant to the opportunities ahead of us. Pay close attention to the small bits of momentum in your life (the small tug), dig your toes into the sand (trust in your foundation) and leap forward in stride with the force of the wave (commit yourself to giving your full effort to this opportunity).
Right now, I’m on the top of my wave, and it’s amazing. I’m beyond words at this point. The beauty of the convergence of my prayers and my reality have left me speechless. It all started with my December blog called ‘Surround Yourself With The Answer’, where I began pulling in this momentum through prayer, meditation, visualization, or whatever you’d like to label it. It works people ;)
I hope if anything, this message encourages you to be aware of the next wave that could bring you closer to a complete sense of fulfillment in your life. That’s all I’m after at the end of the day, becoming fulfilled, and helping others find their own sense of purpose and contentment. Here’s to bigger and better things! 🍻
rainy sunday thoughts
Is Groundhog’s Day over yet?
As we move ever so slowly through this time, the days begin to blend their lines and obscure their boundaries. Saturday and Sundays begin to look and feel like a Wednesday without our normal structure.
How are people coping without their mandated days of rest? Are they finding themselves restless, knowing the day will again repeat itself once night breaks?
This all sounds a bit dramatic, but the philosopher in me wonders why our life feels so unusually strange at this moment. Perhaps, we’re too set in our ways. Humans have a huge advantage on the rest of our planetary neighbors. It is the ability to consciously adapt and overcome. We have the power to will things into existence. The power to demand an imagined reality into fruition. This is no power to take lightly!
In this moment of collective realization, I wonder what we should set our sights on as humanity. Imagine, we could all talk and understand each other simultaneously. Imagine that we could collectively discuss what we want for our world without the presumption of government. My curiosity burns at the question: what would we all agree on? Where would we agree to go?
I know these types of thoughts seem so far off from reality, but it’s important to consider. For if we never imagine these outcomes, we’ll never obtain them. Everyone who knows of destiny knows that it cannot be achieved if it is not imagined first. World peace will not happen by accident.
Turning hearts back to Go(o)d, means we have to turn people away from the (d)Evil
quarantine: a lesson for humanity
2020 seems to be stuck at 33% on the loading screen. Our lives, and everything within them, have been slowed or even halted. My biggest question: where do we go from here?
Eric Weinstein, a Modern-Day Philosopher, said it best when he said ‘we are waking up from a 75-year nap.’ That’s how long it’s been since something connected the globe through shared experience.
Those shared experiences that we now have with our almost 8 billion brothers and sisters are not only experiences of fear and sickness. They’re also experiences of reconnection; to family, nature, and the human spirit.
As we move through these times, be very conscious of what defines this season for you.
Will you look back on this season and realize that you’re life, your job, your path, wasn’t as good as you thought? Do you feel the need to break new ground? Are you rediscovering anything about yourself that you’d lost your fire for?
What is the impact of 8 billion people slowing down? Hopefully, it means society gains some perspective on day to day life. I think there are a lot of dads at home with families realizing how much they love spending more time with their kids. I bet there’s a lot of young people realizing they really should visit their grandparents more. I’m sure there are teachers who miss teaching students and coaches who miss having practice. At the same time, most of the world is wondering how they’ll pay their bills this month. What I’m getting at, is all of these things lead up to gratitude.
(PS It’s impossible to feel grateful and fearful simultaneously, prove me wrong)
When we step back, we can see all that we have in front of us. The bounty, the blessings, the burdens, all of it. When we have this line of view it’s much easier to weigh out the balance of our lives and truly see how blessed we are. Or, how out of balance, depending on the person.
On a global level, I think we had already begun waking up and we’re just now realizing it. One thing I’ve noticed is how the Great Awakening is always coming, but never here. I’m here to say, that another Great Awakening is here among us. Humans are waking up to the beauty of life, and the stark contrast of our world that our media displays. We are seeing our world for what it truly is, the bounty, the blessing, and the burdens.
My prediction: This graduation of our collective consciousness will be ultimately marked by us becoming a more empathic and empathetic people, however long that may take. The noblest mission we can take up as a species is the act of imagining ourselves in our adversary’s shoes. If we don’t choose this path, we will continue to live at war with each other. Not just every four years, but for eternity.
surround yourself with the answer
What makes the human different? Among many other things, it’s the deep desire for ‘something more’ that tugs at the heart of every man and woman.
Your heart is a complicated machine. It yearns for what it does not know of yet. It anticipates the unseen. It understands and reacts to your imaginary fantasies, whether they’re negative or positive. Do you ever imagine getting into a fight or an argument? Your heart rate rises, you might fidget, or show other signs of distress. It’s because your body, your (metaphysical) heart included, cannot distinguish what we call ‘reality’ from your imagination. I find this interesting tie between body and imagination to be a curious thread into what keys our imagination holds.
It’s age-old knowledge, but to some it may not be; we are the result of what we focus on. Your attention is like water to a flower. Whether that flower is poisonous or not, it will thrive when you give it attention (water).
We are the results of our past imagination. The outcomes of hopes that survived, or disappointments that we trudge through. We are the conclusions and beliefs that we cement ourselves into as we grow older. Yet sometimes, the conclusions we come to aren’t always correct, healthy, or built on enough evidence. How do we change the pieces of ourselves that are unsightly?
I definitely do not have the fix-all to the problems of the world here, but I’ve found something that works for me. When faced with a problem, I engage my imagination (thought), and then my heart (feeling). I sort of, send out a call for a solution. For some people, that’s prayer, meditation, there’s a lot of words for it. Surprisingly, the solution is actually the easy part, once you’ve gotten good at throwing off limitations. Nothing is impossible after all, right?
When I have the solution I need, I imagine myself in the very moment that the solution comes to its breakthrough point. I try to feel every drop of emotion in that imaginary moment. The ecstatic moment of a doctor telling you your loved one is cancer-free. The top-of-the-world feeling of a project taking off successfully without error, or the weight of financial burdens lifted as you become provided for. This is called surrounding yourself with the answer.
Maybe you also have a deep desire in your heart that is not labeled. And by that I mean, you want more out of life and you aren’t sure how to get it. That’s what your imagination is for as well! You can dream of yourself in different careers and how you’d spend your day, how much money you’d have, or how you’d spend your time differently. Maybe some of your dreams won’t be as fun as you originally thought, or is it possible you’ll catch an even more fiery passion for them? Maybe you’ll realize you can change things about your current life that you hadn’t even considered before.
As you sit in your imagination, you become a magnet for that moment to come into reality. Like a slow and steady pull on a fishing line. The longer you stay in that place, and the stronger your spiritual energy, the faster you pull it in. Now, if you don’t believe in prayer then I will not try to convince you, other than encouraging you to take your own journey and seek truth. The prayer I’m speaking of doesn’t take place with eyes closed and hands-clasped, alone and in solitude. These prayers are like a breath in and a breath out, remembering to focus in on my feeling of breakthrough and the feeling of joy attached to it. The message of surrounding yourself with the answer is a lesson I’ve learned from the teachings of Jesus, not only in the New Testament but also in the non-canon Book of Thomas. It also comes across in many other teachings in different ways such as ‘The Law of Attraction’. That’s not a specific book I’m referencing, rather than a general concept.
Your brain is an insanely powerful computer that we barely understand. Although, we have figured out that it works on problems while you’re not actively thinking about them, or even actively conscious for that matter! The moral of the story here: there’s a lot we don’t understand about the give and take of the karmic awe-inspiring universe we live in. Yet, we’ve caught on to patterns about these spiritual things that tend to work well for the major majority. This is one of those tools that work, IMHO.
Signing off!
changing seasons
It’s been raining, and that makes me sad… but this isn’t that type of blog.
There are so many reasons to love rain. It makes all of the plants I love grow, it provides fresh water to our lakes and rivers, cleans our streets and cars for free. Yet, I can’t shake these rainy winter blues sometimes. Every year I forget how real the phenomenon of ‘cabin-fever’ is. I’m itching to get out of my house with nowhere to go sometimes.
Living internally ‘dressed-up with nowhere to go’ is kind of like running your car at 2000 RPMs in park. It’s annoying and you’re probably pissing off whoever you live with. Yet, this fall/winter I plan on taking a different approach.
Much like in my first post, I’m putting myself into action. I’m shifting the car out of park and into the world, even if it’s just the world of YouTube. I’ve been choosing to take these rainy nights to re-educate myself. It’s been almost ten years since any kind of formal schooling, so it’s very fun to come back to education with a completely different perspective. One that places curiosity over the curriculum.
In the last few weeks here are some of the topics I’ve learned about from books, podcasts, and smart friends.
Prominent Historical Native Americans
Native American Rituals and Spirituality
Options Trading, How to Place Call/Put Orders
The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla
How to Identify Different Types of Trees
Early Christian History (0-500 AD)
How To Think Creatively and Outside The Box
Modernizing The Insurance Industry (Flirting with the Uninterested)
That every part of a caribou is edible (except for the poop) (yes, even the antlers).
Scientists gave mice a vaccine that altered their microbiome/biota to protect them from inflammatory diseases like obesity and diabetes, and it worked.
There’s so much more but that’s what I was able to recall off the top of my head. It makes perfect sense to me now that a book is the perfect companion on a rainy day! I think we all have an unending charge of curiosity deep within us. If you haven’t experienced that in a while, I’d encourage you to do some self-dialogue and ask why. I heard an old man say the other day: “If we would’ve had Google at my age, we would have never stopped Googling and reading about things”, now whether this is true or not, it resonated with me. The truth is, many of us have become fully spoiled with information.
We have so much access, that we seek for nothing.
There is no thrill or mystery of hidden knowledge anymore. Instead, we’ve become a collective that is satisfied with 8-second answers from Google AI. For me, part of the battle was just remembering that I had the capacity to understand complex subjects and that is something that is probably good for me to keep exercised. Having knowledge of complex structures and ideas will always give you an upper hand, in comparison to just holding trivial knowledge. For instance, someone with only trivial knowledge of mechanics and engineering can answer “What makes a car run?”. Easy, gas. But, they may have a more difficult time with “How does gas make a car run?” or “Why…”.
You see, we often are only getting a fraction of the answer we are seeking when we don’t engage our curiosity by researching and educating ourselves. When you know concepts, like how an engine works, you can apply that concept in a myriad of ways. Maybe you think of a new way to innovate, or you apply your knowledge to a field that hasn’t incorporated it yet. Whereas, simple factual information does not usually prove as useful. It’s past midnight now, so I’ll be done rambling.
Hopefully, the blues stay away, but until the sun comes back I’ll be studying for fun.
An Ode To Beginning
Somewhere, is where every man or woman must start.
Your dreams, whether they are currently squashed or brimming with life, only come to fruition when actions are taken. The perfect, raw, unfiltered, creativity and talent that is bottled up in you can never reach the surface until you turn up the path, and begin.
I’m a thinker. I think so much, and so vigorously, that I often over-think. Personally, the idea of scrutiny and misrepresentation of my creative endeavors is sometimes crippling. Internally, I become a stuttering child in front of a classroom of peers. Can you think of a time when all of the joy got sucked out of the room? Maybe someone bringing up politics in an awkward environment. Unwelcomed tension. I feel that feeling when I try to turn my hopeful imaginations into reality. My fear of what the world will think of me, and how I’ll be perceived sucks the joy right out of an idea.
An idea that could help me achieve my part in being a driving force of good in this world.
I’ve never let this fear keep me down substantially. My awareness of it that keeps me in check. I can’t succumb to a life of internalizing thoughts and wisdom and lessons that never go anywhere. There is no point to any knowledge or wisdom if it isn’t shared, in my opinion.
My hope, my goal, my wish, intention, and plan is to leave my thoughts on this blog. Whether they collect digital dust, change a billion lives, or somewhere in between, I know I’ll be happy that I did it. Here’s to something!