Change

Daring to Soar

Two New Years ago, I set an intention to write 100 blog posts that year. In retrospect, I see that the goal was ambitious. I do not want what I write to simply be stream of consciousness or quantity unpolished, unreflected upon. Still, there are ways with writing that I hold back that don’t help me.

 

I wrestle with blogging. There is a perfectionist in me that wants everything to be, well, perfect. That is not simply spelling, grammar, paragraphing. That is the easy part. It is more in striking the right balance between relevant and entertaining, serious and playful, logical and beautiful, pedagogical and vulnerable.

 

I realize in thinking about this that I am seeing blogging as more about appearance than essence. That is philosophy speak in my world for caring more about how it comes across to you than how it is for me. No wonder I was so struck in Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic when she entreats us to create for the sake of creating. She decries that we have been socialized to see creativity as instrumental (Am I talented? Will people like it?) instead of expressive (How is it an expression of myself? How does it make me feel?). Gilbert believes we all have a human need to create and part of us atrophies when we shut that down. She laments that we need to stop thinking about the audience (or lack thereof) and start believing in the benefits for ourselves.

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My Year of Blogging Personally: Part One

One thing I have come to see in the short time I have been writing this blog is that I have to show up and be responsible for the discipline of writing: etch out a time, sit myself down (preferably at Starbucks with a chai tea latté), set myself up to go and write down some of the ideas that have been whirling around in my head. Those are the basics. Most days the discipline also includes things like resist the internet and ignore the to do list–things that weren’t even on my mind until I sat down to write. Okay, I check my emails more than I need to. But I usually bring myself back.

 

I hate it at the beginning of each post. I hate it because at that moment I don’t know what I am going to write. Sure I have some orienting ideas. But I’ve come to realize that it is a process that I start but don’t necessarily know where it will go. That is the grace part-the part I do not control. It is the gift—the unmerited favour or goodwill from the universe. Yes, and thank-you.

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Don’t Let Your Mind Get in Your Way

By Sam Harris
Mindfulness is often taught as though it were a glorified version of an executive stress ball. But that actually undervalues what mindfulness really is and its true potential. It’s more like the large Hadron collider in that it is a real tool for making some fundamental discoveries about the nature of the mind. One of these discoveries is that the sense of self we all carry around from day to day is an illusion. Most of us spend every moment of our waking lives thinking without knowing that we’re thinking: a kind of scrim thrown over the present moment through which we view everything. And it’s distorting of our lives. It’s distorting of our emotions. It engineers our unhappiness in every moment because most of what we think is quite unpleasant. We’re judging ourselves; we judging we’re judging others. We’re worrying about the future; we’re regretting the past. We’re at war with our experience in subtle or coarse ways. Meditation is a tool for cutting through that.
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