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Automatic Growth

(1 min read)

How’s this for irony? I skipped my morning routine to write a book on the importance of having a morning routine.

Doh!

It’s so easy to slip up.

Even when we know exactly what we need to do to stay on course, we very simply just don’t do it – a universal flaw coded into our DNA.

Perhaps, as humans, we’re hard-wired to survive more than to grow. Perhaps, SURVIVAL is a necessity and GROWTH is a luxury – an antiquated blueprint, for sure, that may have been good for amoebas and monkeys but not so much for the thinking person. Not for us.

A note to the Original Architect: Survival is not enough.

Growth must be interlinked with Survival because in seeking to better ourselves, we enrich our minds, bodies, and souls. We think ahead to who we need to be. We strive, we struggle, and we become.

I wish the drive for Growth was automatic. I really do.

Sure, I’d have to get a new job – who needs a coach when you’re movin’ and groovin’ on your own! – but I could look around and see people self-actualizing all around me, like flowers blooming in fast forward, beauty manifesting in double time.

So much progress! So many smiles, people satisfied with their bodies, keeping company with their own mind, building incredible things, no longer threatened, no longer fearful, no longer critical, because every day is a step forward, which makes tomorrow exciting and worth sticking around for…

Alas, Growth is not automatic. We got Free Will instead.

Womp womp.

It’s a constant struggle. We have to set the stage for Growth, lay down the topsoil, drop the seeds, water the ground. The flowers don’t come on their own. Maybe that’s why we think they’re so beautiful.

And with that, if you’ll excuse me, I have something I need to get to.

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Nice Things

(2 min read)

Within a few minutes of my daughters being back together in the same space after 2 weeks apart, every room in the house has earned a bit of dishevelment: the drapes awry, a scrunchie discarded on the floor, a lollipop licked once and left exposed on the bureau, the ruffled bedspread, throw pillows in a pile, a balled-up sweater in the corner…

All this resulting from a game of ‘samurai hide and seek’ inspired by the 2-foot plastic sword Evaline brought back from Japan.

The bags aren’t even all the way unpacked yet, the stories aren’t all the way told, but the fun is in full swing. And I have to join in, so I yank back the covers that I made that morning. I climb into the bathtub and knock over the neatly arranged shampoo bottles. I disrupt my nice vacuum lines in the rug and put a deep footprint in the freshly laundered and folded blankets, which tip and tumble as I search the room for 2 little Samurais.

We scream through the house slashing each other with anything longer than it is wide, and I, of course, let them take me down.

As I lay fallen on the dining room floor and they run off into the living room to see what they can hide behind next, I notice that a picture has been made crooked by the swinging door and every single chair in the dining room has been pulled out of from the table. As I get up, I step in something wet.

Tis’ true. With kids, you can’t have nice things. Or, at least, you can’t keep your nice things nice.

But you do get something back in the trade.

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Staying Home with Hazel

(2 min read)

These past 2 weeks have been totally different. Molly’s out traveling through the jungles of Japan with Evaline, our oldest, and I’ve been single-parenting Hazel, our youngest. I stayed home so that Molly and Evs could travel without a clock, without having to draw lines around the day, which seems to be a requirement when you have a toddler who needs naps, snacks, and attention, attention, attention.

So it’s been up at 5:30, write some good stuff, find the beautiful place, then on to daddyhood – pull the babe out of the crib, out of the pajamas, tell the right jokes, ward off the tears, eat cereal, play the where-are-my-shoes game (but not for too long), and all the other stuff a daddy must do if he’s to be a dad on a normal day before work.

And while you may feel this is an effort to get some sympathy from you, to get a pat on the back for a job well done, for being a good dad… well, I guess that’s what I may have been looking for when it started… but something has happened in these 2 weeks.

We ate yogurt on our cereal instead of milk. We didn’t watch TV in the mornings. We discovered the fun of laying on our backs and keeping a balloon in the air. We broke out her old plastic car-stroller and zoomed around corners on 2 wheels. We ate slowly and we danced with friends in the basement.

I noticed just how much she likes to sit back and observe the world. In her tantrums, I watched stubbornness turn to perseverance. Through her play, I saw into her mind.

There is a burning truth that sears into you when you spend hours and hours and hours with another person, uninterrupted. It’s like prayer, like holding humanity against a flame and distilling it down to a single molecule.

And in this shared time, replete with the full spectrum of emotions, pressed down by the weight of two sparring routines trying to fit into each other, there is an irreversible fusion that occurs which defies Science and common sense, where each person comes away with a little more of the other and a little more of themselves.

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The Power We Have

(2.5 min read)

Our local Safeway lines are the worst. Doesn’t matter how busy the store is, you will always have to wait.

My daughter and I were playing that game where you guess which line will go more quickly. She stood in one and I stood in the other. She started winning. The checker in front of me had a pile of produce to go through. Produce takes forever, so I slipped into line with her.

“Just great,” a man behind us said, barely audible but with an emphatic arm-cross and an eye-roll.

I know that energy. It’s the kind that can escalate into a fight real quick, the kind of energy that righteousness and ego feed off of. It’s an incubator for all the bad things, setting ugliness on a conveyor belt. It will just keep going unless you actively stop it.

Although he barely spoke, he wanted us to see him. He was smaller than me, older than me. He had just about the same amount of groceries as me. Tons of salad dressing strangely enough.

“You seem like you’d like to go in front of us,” I said, stepping back. My daughter followed my lead, choosing to look at the tabloids to avoid the awkwardness her dad just created.

“I really don’t care,” he said, clearly caring A LOT.

Of course, we had the attention of the rest of the line in front and behind us and the neighboring lines flanking us as well. The onlookers: they can escalate things too.

I smiled. I tried to loosen my posture. I took another step back.

“Go ahead,” I gestured.

I could see he was thinking about it but he was still too committed to his first thing to allow our interaction to shift.

I had some shifting to do too. I had the upper hand – my height, my youth, my dad status, my position in line, even my smile was working against us.

But most importantly, I wasn’t fully committed yet. I was still righteous. I had to get fully committed to beating the beast. Eventually, I came across the right thing to say, the thing that would allow him to see that the beast was beatable and that I wasn’t feeding it anymore:

“I can see how you’d be frustrated about what just happened. You should go first.”

I meant it. It was a like turning a key in a lock. For me and for him. He moved forward.

After about 10 seconds, it happened.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve just had a really bad day.”

And we were free.

“I thought that might be the case,” I said with a big smile. “I hope things are starting to look up.”

“Well, I’m off work,” he said, searching for something universal for us to gather around.

I jumped on board.

“I hear that,” I said. “That’s why I’m making guacamole.”

The checker moved the man’s bottles of salad dressing forward, my daughter stopped pretending to read tabloids, the onlookers lost interest, and we shared the kind of banter that two strangers who just got off work tend to have in a checkout line.

Maybe it was even a little bit better than that.

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Meaningful Change

(1 min read)

Becoming is incremental.

You don’t wake up one day and – BAM – you’re lost. Or – VOILA – enlightenment.

Meaningful change takes time and happens so slowly you can’t witness any one piece of it, like leaves turning from green to gold.

It takes faith and ritualized commitment. What’s more, with the most important of goals, such as moral fulfillment, inner peace, career wholeness, and spiritual connection, the short-term results are invisible and no one is watching.

To get where you’re going, you have to believe every day, indeed every moment, is an opportunity to move in the right direction. And then you have to follow that belief, often with no earthly reward, no applause, no carrot.

It’s a lot easier to walk aimlessly and take what comes, gathering the shiniest and heaviest of rocks, but then there’s no path and, over time, you will get tired of walking and acquiring and you will want to have a nice, simple place to rest with a great, wide view of your footprints marking the land.

That takes time, tiny little footsteps, and great intention.

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Digging in the Sand

(1 min read)

Let me know if this sounds familiar:

You have big ideas. You want to find more ways to reach more people, you want to introduce something new that will make things easier, you want to go in a different direction…

But then you have a job to do…

And you see this daily workload as an obstacle in the way of your own self-actualization. Whether you love it or not, it makes you feel like you’re digging in the sand.

I get it. I’m with you. Like you, I have more ideas than I have time for.

But the ‘Diggin in the Sand” metaphor will surely put you in a hole, which is not a good place to be when you need to see the sky.

This is how most of us work:

We promise ourselves to do the growth things after the sustenance things but there just never seems to be enough time (or energy) to get to the growth things after doing all of the sustenance things. And so the days and weeks go by.

We have to flip this thing on its head.

The first thing to do, ALWAYS, is the growth stuff. Only after you’ve hit at least a few minutes of looking forward, should you launch into your “day-to-day.” This way, no matter what happens with your day, you’re covered. You’re growing.

It’s a beautiful cycle: with the growth stuff done, you can be more present for the sustenance stuff, and in turn, get more of that sustenance stuff done, which often leaves you time and energy to accomplish more growth stuff.

So, instead of seeing your days like digging in the sand, start the day with the treasure chest in your lap. And when you’re done polishing your gold coins, try combing the beach instead of digging holes.

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Tell Me About Yourself

(30 sec read)

“Tell me about yourself.”

A lot of people mess up answering this question in the interview (or at a cocktail party for that matter).

By reflex and at the urging of the questionner, we tend to tell our life story, starting with our first days out of school.

Not good.

You’re probably boring YOURSELF with this story seeing as you’ve told it so many times. And when you’re bored telling a story, you can bet the listener is going to follow suit. So do yourself a favor…

Instead of starting from the beginning, start from the end. Start with where you’re at now. Go to the places that energize you and share those stories. After all, that is who you are, and people want to know you as you are NOW, not by who you used to be.

Employers (and cocktail party-goers) are like any shopper looking for something shiny and new: they seek things that are recent and relevant.

Rest assured, your current exploits, in all their wonder and chaos, are going to be a lot more effective in describing you, than your first gig right out the chute.

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Not Worth It

(1 min read)

When people rub us the wrong way whether in person or via social media we may decide to shut down the relationship – taking the position that “they’re not worth it,” meaning this particular person is not worth the energy it takes to engage them. Strong words.

This may well be true, but it’s hard to disappear a person completely. Friends of friends may bring them up, happenstance can happen upon you, your privacy settings may fail you… not to mention the times this person shows up in your head unannounced and kicks off an imaginary argument, which you then carry with you into the shower or the car ride home.

In fact, we do expend energy on the people we dislike or disagree with, perhaps moreso than on the people we like and agree with.

We’re suckers for unfinished business, for needing to put the period (or exclamation point!) at the end of a conversation.

And so we keep this person alive in us, and though they may be deserving of our ire, we’re the ones who feel the recoil, we’re the ones who get tired from clenching our fists.

So many of us, walking around with the wrong people in our heads, unwilling to do the thing that frees us because we don’t want to let them off the hook. We are right. We are right.

So we carry the burden and add another body to the pile.

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One Final To-Do

(1 min read)

To-do lists are crucial to getting things, done, particularly new things that we aren’t used to having in our brains. Those that use to-do lists know how it good it feels to make that cross-out or check that box. I’m one of them.

I made a daily to-do list for my mornings to remind me to do a series of things before I even sit down at the keyboard and then a few more things by the end of the workday. I require myself to have 8 out of 8 X’s on the dry erase board by 3:30 pm (that’s the end of my workday). That’s all there is to it. So easy and so effective.

So good.

But there’s something even better than crossing off these to-do’s… one final luscious to-do that tells me I’m really making progress.

And that’s eliminating the daily to-do list completely.

At first, the daily Xs were energizing. I’m doing it! I’m getting there! But after a while, those X’s became boring. They weren’t doing anything for me anymore, not like they used to anyway. There was no pride in them. it was just a motion I was going through.

That’s when I knew I’d really succeeded.

Those 8 things became so ingrained in me, they became a part of me. I just do them. No big deal.

And when I miss one on an off day, it’s not a catastrophe – there is no need to kick myself or build another list.

I don’t need a list.

I do it for me now.

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So Many Todays

(1 min read)

I was trying to explain a calendar to my 3-year old who keeps asking when her momma and sissy are coming home from Japan.

I drew out rows of smiley faces – seven across and four down.

“See,” I pointed with my finger. “We count 1-2-3-4-5-6-7… and then we start over again at the beginning of the next week and go 1-2-3-4-5-6-7… and then…”

She looked up at me dumbfounded. She wasn’t getting it.

Okay, maybe my explanation wasn’t elementary enough but her lack of getting it got my mind going and it wasn’t long before I stopped trying to teach her. Not out of frustration, but out of admiration.

How wonderful to believe that there are no weeks in the world, no starting over, no counting down the days. There is only today and then after that… hooray! It’s today again!

The todays are endless and they run in a single line off the page, out into the hallway, down the stairs, out the door, and right off the edge of the horizon.

There are so many todays you get to do everything you want, play with every toy you own, make every kind of face you can think of.

So, I had her color in the smiley face for today and then I put the paper away.

There is plenty of time for her to learn how to multiply by sevens like the rest of us, to ponder the earth’s rotation and its monotonous dance with Sun. Yes, there will be Science up ahead. We’ll do Science and Math and Astronomy and Philosophy.

But not today. Today is for everything else. Today is special.