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The Arena

Powerful people are unfaithful commentators. The story they tell is bound together by the desire to retain their pedestal. Who would give up a VIP box seat to sit in the bleachers? No one wants to do that and so power begets power – sometimes intentional, sometimes not.

So, us truth-seekers, we look to the powerless, the oppressed, the ones who have nothing to lose and everything to gain, the ones sitting in the bleachers, the ones whose chanting chorus in the arena is drowned out by the carefully engineered and expensive sound system piped into the VIP box.

But the vision of the oppressed is skewed too.

It’s tethered to a need to vindicate each other, which usually means vilifying the other, in other words, storming the VIP box and stealing the microphone. However, more voices in the arena don’t make for easy harmony, and coming into power is not, in and of itself, a qualification to lead.

As the voices conflict with each other and the words become unintelligible, some of us long for the simpler days of the singular voice, some of us love the din, and some of us wish to leave. But what we all have in common is that we’re fearful of what may happen next.

We can feel the roar of the voices crescendoing and splitting farther apart, the walls of the arena wavering, hands pushing on our backs and necks, as we look around for an exit and a savior, while clambering to hold our space, arms locked with the people we came with.

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Trapeze Act

Transitions are hard.

Like a trapeze artist suspended in the air, immediately after letting go of one bar and reaching for another, it’s a matter of time before we start to fall.

It’s scary. Take away that second bar and it becomes downright terrifying, which is often what it feels like when we’re leaving ourselves open to something new: like a freefall.

It’s easy to want to leave our body at this point, to abandon our pursuits and long for the safety and security of the platform, back there, before we leapt.

Jumping is hard, but letting go the second time is harder because we’ve already learned how it makes our stomach feel. It’s Science. Gravity is non-negotiable. We have to fall a little if we want to move on.

Some of us can make falling feel like flying, but that’s a less important skill than staying present.

Arms extended, eyes open. Remember that timing is more influential on the outcome than talent. The bars are already in motion. Falling and flying are in your future. The only way you can fail is to keep holding on.

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Never Lost

When we leave a job or a partner, or a residence after so many years, that feeling of being lost is bound to surface. Options overwhelm. Distance suffocates.

The mistake we often make is in where we look to reorient ourselves. We tend to look out into the woods for a marker or the right path. We look for another person, a so-called expert, and make them our guide.

This is dangerous. There are plenty of ways into the forest and they all lead to different places. The guides will lead you to their favorite place, not necessarily yours.

The key is to stop looking out at the jungle and instead look inward. Don’t worry about what’s out there for you, pay attention to what you want to do next and who you want to become. Figure out your frustrated wishes, your interests inside and outside of the old routine, the talents you want to continue using, and the skills that you want to develop

This is your map. It doesn’t matter how deep the woods go, once you find direction, the spark of hope will swell within you.

Always, look in, not out, to discard the illusion of being lost.

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How To Get Smarter

The smartest person in the room is the one who is talking the least.

It’s a simple calculus:

Listening is how you gain knowledge. If you’re talking, you’re not listening, therefore, as the math plays out, those who choose to listen collect more knowledge than those who choose to speak.

We should view speaking as the absence of listening as if you’re switching the vacuum from suck to blow. And, once you choose the blow setting, the absence of knowledge begins!

It starts before you open your mouth. It starts once you make the decision in your mind to speak because often you’re preparing your speech while others are talking.

We’ve all been there, refining our great lecture underneath someone else’ words, planning our opening, picturing the mic drop. Meanwhile, great insights and new knowledge are floating by above our heads and seeping into some else’ mind, not ours.

It’s fine to talk. It’s important to contribute, but shutting up and listening is the smartest thing you can do.

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Powder Blue

We go through such great lengths to paint the inside of our rooms… It takes all day, we risk destroying furniture and floors. Taping’s a bitch. It gets much worse before it gets better, and it always takes longer than first envisioned.

But it’s worth it, don’t ya think?

Color is a catalyst. It has great influence over whether we play, work, chill, or sleep. Sure, you can relax in a bright red room, but it’s much easier to achieve the same result in a powder blue one. Blue symbolizes confidence, calm, depth, and stability. These are the traits we want around us when we’re seeking relaxation and productivity.

So we corral the furniture into the center of the room like farm animals and lay out the tarps. We’re willing to disrupt our lives for that color, and ultimately for the feeling it evokes.

Remember this the next time you lose your shit, when you drop into that red state of mind, when the walls go red and your tongue is fire, and your mind boils. The first thing you should think to do is not to force your way out, not to hunt for a solution, and not to deconstruct the problem; it is to figure out how to make the room blue again.

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Accelerators

My toddler twirls in front of the TV.

“Look at me, daddy. Look at me.”

A refrain we carry into adulthood in both actions and words. When we cry, when we march, when we tweet, when we design, when we present…

Much like entrepreneurs pitching investors, everything important that we do eventually leads to seeking validation from others. We’re all building our masterpieces and looking for funding. The creating part we’re all very conscious about, but I think we forget that we’re investors too.

We have the power to accelerate the things we love and believe in, simply by looking at them.

Your partner, your friend, your neighbor is more likely to dig deeper if you comment on the ditch they’re digging and revel in what they’re uncovering deep inside. Our positive words, thin and slight, stack up like dollars to encourage more work and more commitment.

Love calls ingenuity. Attention fosters progress.

Just as startups pivot their way into greatness, my daughter’s dance gets more intricate each time she spins around and sees me watching.

“Look at me, daddy. Look at me.”

And I invest.

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Against the World

Sometimes, I resent the world for spinning.

I look around and I see people getting dizzy, falling down, and being crushed. I see them tumbling into the valleys so they can’t see over the mountains anymore, arms reaching up as the clouds move over them and plates shift under them.

With an ear to the ground, I can hear all the heartbeats, speeding up and slowing down, and so I plant my feet in the sand and push back against the mountains. I turn around and put my back into it, feet slipping in the dust.

“Can’t you see us?” I yell up into the sky, unable to keep my footing. “Can’t you see what’s happening?”

But the earth’s slow spin stays painfully consistent, like a low note vibrating under an orchestra that’s never played together before.

So I dig in harder, rocks against my back, sweat, tears, and sand making their design on my face. And, though there’s beauty that’s been placed all around me, I hate the rocks and the plates and the clouds, the grass that grows up and over everything that remains still, the wind and the sun whispering in conspiracy.

I turn to face the rocks that make up the mountain, wondering whether they’re innocent, trying to see that beauty. And then I tuck my shoulder, lower my head, and ram the mountain with everything I have, over and over, taking on an eerie rhythm that fits right in with rest of nature. And the mountains and the grass and the sun and the wind seem pleased as I look back over my shoulder into the valley for any sort of movement.

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Rain, Spiders, & Mosquitoes

Upon realizing it was raining on the way down to take out the trash, my daughter asked me, “Why do we have the rain… and mosquitoes and spiders and all that? Why can’t it just be ladybugs and humans?”

Answering a child’s questions helps us tackle profound topics with simple logic so I took the bait…

“Well, this world isn’t just about humans. It’s not just about you. Some people like spiders. Rain feeds the ground. Mosquitoes… I’m not sure about mosquitoes.”

The truth is my daughter is smart enough to realize all of these things. In fact, she’s a Science geek but that doesn’t stop her from wishing things weren’t as they are when it’s inconvenient or uncomfortable for her. She pushes away facts for feeling, like the rest of us.

So what if it means insects take over the world! Or all the plants dry up and turn to dust, or someone you don’t know loses a love.

By the bottom step, my daughter was back to reality, appreciating gravity as she dumped out our recyclables.

She held out her hand to catch a few droplets and then ran back upstairs.

When it comes to comfort and progress, we can be selfish beings, pulling the blanket off our partner in the middle of the night, eating the last bowl of cereal, wishing away the rain as we start our day.

I could just start to feel my slippers soaking through on the bottom.

And then a door slammed shut a few houses down, yanking me out of my head. I watched as a little girl broke free from her mama’s grip, ran for the curb, and jumped with both feet into a pothole filled with muddy water. Mom wasn’t happy.

Our desires are innocent enough, part of being human.

But, if you can pull away from yourself for a moment, you who resents the weather, you who dislikes the dampness in your shoes… you will see the girl down the street, or across town, or in another city, splashing with both feet in the puddles. You will see the plants turning green. You will see the spider eating the mosquito.

And your soggy slippers won’t matter as much.

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Sharing Space

Touch is easily the most underutilized of the senses…

I learned this from a colleague when I was doing Admissions for a private vocational college. One of the programs was massage therapy and whenever I had a question for the program director, she would roll her chair across the short expanse of the cubicle hallway and put 2 fingertips on my knee before answering. If she was standing next to me, it would be my elbow instead of my knee, and as we got to know each other, it was my shoulder or lower back. It was an extremely light touch, almost like it wasn’t there at all. She wasn’t using me for support, rather just the opposite.

I asked her about those 2 fingertips.

“Touch is powerful,” she said. She always spoke like that. “I want you to know that I’m sharing space with you.”

She didn’t do this with everyone. She had a sense of who could handle it. (Touch is indeed powerful enough to harm a relationship as well as reinforce it.)

I noticed that no matter how hectic her day when she came over to answer my question with her palm flat on her own knee and her outstretched fingers reaching silently across the divide to make contact, she not only gave me her full attention but I gave her mine. Her touch placed us inside a bubble that blocked out sound and blurred the background.

We got so much done in that bubble.

I don’t know the science of 2 fingers on a knee but over time our connection grew extremely strong. We became allies. We braved many storms in that place. We made the space our own.

I never outstretched my own fingers. I guess offering the knee was enough.

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A Secret Among the Self-Actualized

Even for the ones with the jobs so many others wish they had- the actors, the entrepreneurs, the authors, the working artists, the travel journalists, the spiritual guides, the 4-hour-work-week day traders, the tropical-island scuba instructors, the yogis, the CEOs, the coaches, and all of those people who proclaim love for their work… The truth is they’d still prefer to not be working.

Even the best job in the world can’t deliver absolute openness.

No one, not even the most self-actualized among us, desire obligation more than free time. It’s like being in a gorgeous building. No matter how vast the rooms or ornate the ceiling detail or wonderfully cool the air conditioning, eventually you want to get outside where there are no walls, to walk in the woods or lay on a hill and look up at the sky.

But the light doesn’t last long out there either.

However memorable the sunset, the weather cools down, the bugs come out and, eventually, it gets dark, so you return to your building. Now, whether it’s a beach house or a shack is irrelevant. It’s serving some sort of purpose in your life. But don’t try to figure that out, just know that it’s true and instead of comparing your work life to your leisure life, try to seek solace in the coming and going between the two.

Work… free… work… free… If you look for it, there’s a balance in this back-and-forth. There has to be. That equilibrium can sustain you. And it will lead you to appreciate the weight on both sides of the scale.