by Jamesscotthenson | Oct 11, 2016 | Blog
“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati:
that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all
eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it… but love
it.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
One guess where I am writing this from.
Nope, not the mountains.
Still in Lubbock.
Texas.
Where I live.
Not where I was going to vacation.
Sometimes it is about accepting what is in front of you. An
hour into my trip yesterday the only thing in front of me was how tired I was.
It would have been easier if I would have admitted this before I almost made it
to the New Mexico border, but I do what I do.
So, I turned around. I came home, and I went to bed.
There are very few things that have changed my life as much
as learning to accept things. I spent my whole life doing what I was told not
to do, for no other reason than someone told me not to do it. I used to think
it was a way to express my freedom or choice, but I’ve realized it never was.
In reacting against what people told me to do, I was actually controlled by
them indirectly. Well applied reverse psychology would have been the end of me.
I thought acceptance was the ultimate goal, but it turns out
there is something beyond accepting what you cannot change.
You can embrace it. Accepting your fate is one thing, but
embracing it is something else entirely. It’s about doing more than just
passively accepting things, but understanding that they are as they must be,
and sprinting toward them.
My trip.
Resistance would have meant pushing through, going anyway,
most likely not enjoying being there, and coming back more tired than I went.
Acceptance would have been turning around, coming home and trying not to have a
bad attitude about it.
Embracing it is a little different. It meant coming home and
resting, but also making the most of the time. I stayed home with Max so B
could go wrestle. He and I hung out all night, and today I am putting some work
into my new office. I am going to do some reading and prepare to speak at LCU
and TTU later this month. I am going to catch up on some blogs I read, and I
may re-build my fence. I may ride my bike. I would like to go shoot my bow in
the backyard. And I will rest and take a nap so that all of this doesn’t carry
into the week.
But, if it does, I will embrace that, and it will be fine.
by Jamesscotthenson | Oct 10, 2016 | Blog
It infuriated me when my dad would tell me to count my
blessings in response to my being down or being angry or just being a jerk,
which was about 75% of the time. I think I could have hit 100 if I hadn’t had
to sleep.
As it often turns out, there was a lot of wisdom in what he
said, and if I had listened I might have had a little easier go of it, and
possibly even managed to end my teenage years on time instead of letting them
last well into my twenties.
He reads this blog everyday now, so this counts as
acknowledging he was right.
I have not been sleeping lately. When I do sleep, I wake up
tired and angry and just generally rough. I am watching the façade of keeping
my shit together slip just a little, and everything and everyone seems a little
sinister.
This isn’t real, and it will pass when I get things back in
line, but today, this is what is present. I embrace it and I move on. I try to
act decently to people, I fail, and I make apologies where I need to.
I already have a few lined up.
I wrote earlier this week about all the things that point
out how friendly my world is, using only what was within reach of me. Let’s
expand that out a little. Count my blessings.
I am sitting inside a house that protects me from the
elements. I didn’t build it, but someone else did, and they did a great job.
Everything in it comes from the planet around us in one way or another. I’m
pretty sure electricity is magic, but we’ll say it’s natural for the sake of
this blog. Water goes down drains and outlets do not catch on fire. A
refrigerator lets me keep things cold and an oven lets me make other things
hot. The roof keeps water out and, so far, the doors have kept unwanted people
out.
My wife and son are sleeping about 20 feet away, both safe
and protected. They both love me and I love them. My wife is everything I am
not. She loves being involved in things and feels her emotions very strongly.
She gets excited about things and sad about things and she is fun, which is a
good balance to my rather restricted range of emotion. She is loving and she
puts up with me, which is a lot.
Max is a toddler and he is healthy and fun and caring and
says please and thank you and you’re welcome. He also says shut up and be quiet
and I can’t when you tell him do something, but I don’t trust a kid who doesn’t
have an oppositional streak in them. He loves being with his family and he
loves getting hugs and he makes me laugh every single day.
Twenty feet in the other direction is my teenage son’s room.
He is smart and does his own thing instead of following the herd. At the age of
15 he still likes to do things with me. He likes to hang out with us in the
living room instead of locking himself away in his room, he values time with
his family. He is an awesome older brother. He is everything I wish I had been
as a teenager, but, as I said, I was a jerk.
Out in the driveway I have a truck that will drive me to the
mountains later today, where I hope to get my head straight. It always runs
without a problem, and if it were to break down I have the money to fix it,
which has not always been the case in my life. If I don’t for some reason, I
have parents who will help me, and they always have, even though I have always
been a jerk.
I live a charmed life, surrounded by people who are better
than me but still want to be around me for some reason. Just acknowledging this
has helped make this false darkness a little easier to see through. I try to do
this daily, but a lot of times I forget or just don’t want to, but it always
helps.
I hate it when my dad is right.
by Jamesscotthenson | Oct 9, 2016 | Blog
This will be a short one. There should be a lot more
quotation marks, but I think they look obnoxious when you aren’t actually
quoting someone so I left them out.
I do what I want.
Supposed to and should are dangerous. They tell us something
is wrong, that something needs to be different from what it is, often without
any sort of actual foundation.
I am writing this from my living room in the Texas desert,
when I am supposed to be writing from the mountains in New Mexico. By the time
I got everything wrapped up yesterday I was too tired to feel comfortable
driving out, so I stayed.
I struggled with the decision, I have been looking forward
to this trip. I came really close to pushing through and hitting the road, but
I could not shake the feeling that it was a bad idea.
And we had a really fun night. I hung out with Barbara and
Max and we watched The Nice Guys, which I really enjoyed. Max was wild and
goofy and wouldn’t quit trying to lick my face. We had a blast.
But, if I had gotten focused on supposed to or should, I
would not have enjoyed it. I could not have enjoyed it because it would have
been wrong in my mind from the outset.
“I should be on the road right now.”
“I am supposed to be sleeping in the mountains tonight.”
A fun night with my family would have been poisoned from the
very start.
I work with people a lot on cataloging and questioning their
shoulds, because they often rule us with a sort of ghost authority. We believe
we should be doing this and should not be doing that, but we rarely question
why. They are often taught to us by our upbringing, culture, religion,
worldview – all the things that provide us easy, seemingly unquestionable
answers.
They do make decisions easy, but they also ruin a lot of things
in life.
I am not saying we shouldn’t have principles or beliefs.
I am saying we should be free to question them and see if
they are useful or not. We should be able to examine them and see what they are
making us say and do to ourselves and others. We should try to see how many
neutral or good things they are keeping us from enjoying.
I wonder where I got those shoulds from though. I should
think about that.
by Jamesscotthenson | Oct 8, 2016 | Blog
This daily blogging thing has an odd secondary effect where
I often get to the end of a piece and realize I feel better, or that I’ve
worked something out for myself. Maybe this whole project is just me telling
myself to shape up.
I wonder if I will develop the oppositional streak I have
toward other people telling me what to do toward myself, causing this blog to
end in flames.
Selfishness is the root of most of the things I see people
struggle with. I believe it is the root of the things I have and still struggle
with. If, at any time, I am feeling unhappy or discontent, I can pretty much
always trace it back to selfishness or self-centeredness on my part or,
sometimes, someone else’s. When it is due to someone else’s selfishness, it is
my responsibility to change my reaction, because I have no control over other
people.
In working with clients, I encourage them to re-evaluate
their relationship with selfish people, especially close friendships or
romantic relationships. Selfishness requires a person to put their needs above
yours, and cultivates manipulation, stonewalling, contempt and even physical
violence in them as they are driven to get what they want.
We are all, of course, selfish from time to time. This isn’t
to say that we sever our relationship with someone when, in a moment of fear or
anger or exhaustion, they are selfish. There are times that selfishness is
useful and even necessary. In saying that we need to reevaluate our
relationship with selfish people, I am referring to people who have developed
an inability to see outside of their own wants and desires, and are wiling to
pursue them regardless of their impact on others.
In my own life, I try to see where my self-interest is
driving me, especially in places that affect the people around me. I look for
places where I have developed tunnel vision and I am trying to warp everything
around whatever is at the end of that tunnel. If I am doing this, it means that
I am most likely neglecting things outside of that tunnel. It can also mean that
it is something that is very important to me, which means I need to examine
what is missing or lacking in my life to spark that need, but I am not allowed
to become driven by it and force it on people around me.
It is important that we ask ourselves if we are pushing for
what we want at the expense of others, and how far we are willing to go in
this. If we are hurting those that we care about, we need to let go of what we
want. It is also important to ask ourselves if this is being done to us by
others, and how far we are willing to let them go. If we cannot accept a
person’s selfishness, then we need to change the relationship. Complaining
about it will not accomplish anything.
At least, these are the things I am telling myself today.
by Jamesscotthenson | Oct 7, 2016 | Blog
Man, I just blew right through what was supposed to be a
thing with Mindful Monday. Not very mindful of me.
We’ll do aWareness Wednesday instead.
The more we pay attention, the more we realize that the
present is made up of all sorts of sensory inputs, little parcels of
information that tell me something, either consciously or unconsciously, and
our thoughts about them.
Right now:
I am aware of the softness of my chair, the warmth from the
heating pad on my neck, an itch on my calf, the stiffness in my legs from doing
squats yesterday. I can hear something clinking in the dishwasher, probably two
plates bumping against each other, which annoys me for some reason.
The feeling of annoyance triggers thoughts, wondering if I
should go open the dishwasher and rearrange some things, but then another
thought about not wanting to interrupt the cycle.
Anxiety as I remember I need to go to Costco later, relief
when thoughts rush in to tell me I can get a sandwich there to make it more
fun. They also have a giant hotdog and a coke for $1.59. Thoughts also remind
me that I don’t dislike Costco, and wonder about the anxiety. (I wound up going
to Walmart, the ultimate test of acceptance and non-judgment ).
Anxiety has been constantly present for a week now, my mind
searches for reasons for this because it believes it can make it better by
explaining it.
I hear my dog snoring, I can taste the coffee I drank a
while back, my throat itches. My body is tired, which brings up anxiety in
relation to everything I have to do today. My mind explains that it will be
okay. My mind counters with an assertion that I am overcommitted.
This is the cycle we all find ourselves in most of the time.
Something triggers our senses, and this produces an emotion, and thoughts rush
in to either explain it away or try to hang on to if it is pleasant.
This happens with physical sensations as well. Often,
something in the environment triggers a feeling in us and our thoughts try to
explain it. They have negative bias because we have evolved this to keep us
alive.
I say it a lot, but it bears repeating: a vast majority of
the thoughts, feelings, sights, sounds, smells, tastes, body sensations and
situations that constantly create our present are neutral, but we have
preferences and opinions that paint them one way or another.
When we can view them all mindfully, it opens space for us
to accept them as they are, and we find that everything is pretty okay.
Be aWare this Wednesday. Ignore the poor job I did with
Mindful Monday. Embrace aWareness.
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