It’s Not Personal

If you cross this one street in our neighborhood it suddenly gets pretty fancy, going from $80K-100K houses to $500K-800K homes. Our side of the neighborhood is becoming more and more diverse, I figure one day they will build a wall. There goes all the good trick-or-treating.

Over on the nicer side, there is this one double-lot multi-million dollar monstrosity that someone built. It looks like a Miami drug dealer’s house in the middle of all these 1950’s and 60’s single story houses. The person who built it got thrown in jail before they finished it.

That story has nothing to do with anything.

Anyway, our State Representative lives over on that nice side of the street, right on one of the main roads that take you out of the neighborhood. As soon as he was elected they installed these obnoxious speed humps. 4 sets of them. I guess to slow down all the traffic that would be driving by to snap pictures of a political celebrity? To make assassination attempts more difficult? Because he used his newfound political power to get them installed because he loves his kids? I’m not sure.

Regardless of why, I try to take these speed humps personally on a daily basis because they make me slow down and they aren’t good for my truck. I am often absolutely sure they were installed against me. I actually go one street further down to leave now, which is probably what they wanted anyway.

Not me specifically, but to reduce traffic in general. I actually drive pretty slowly these days.

The thing is, these speed humps have absolutely nothing to do with me. They aren’t personal in any way. I want them to be, because they affect my day, but they aren’t.

If we pay attention very few things, if any at all, are actually personal.

I get a lot of pushback on this idea.

It’s not even mine either, this has been explored since people were exploring ideas that made other people uncomfortable. Blame them.

Honestly though, if we really think about it, the things people say and do to us usually have nothing to do with us.

Someone says you are ugly. Does this mean you are ugly, or they simply perceive you as such? Their perspective tells you nothing about yourself objectively.

A person has a rough day and calls you a jerkoff. What does this tell you about you? What does it actually have to do with you?

I get that it is hard not to take things personally. We are trained and socialized to think that we share some responsibility for what goes on in other people’s heads. That their mental activity actually has something to do with us.

It is even harder not to take things personally with people we have a significant investment in.

“I told you not to do that!”

“I raised you better than this!”

“I thought we had talked about this!”

I.

I.

I.

How are another person’s decisions personal to us? I get that sometimes the consequences might blow our direction or they may affect our lives, but they did not make these decisions because of us, they made them because of themselves.

Do you take the weather personally?

The decisions of people you don’t know?

What is the line for what you take personally?

What would change in your life if you refused to take responsibility for someone else’s thoughts and emotions?

There is freedom in realizing that very few things actually have anything to do with us.

Nature Remains

I’m not really a poetry guy.

I like Rumi and Rilke and Whitman and Rimbaud. I’ve been told those are poets for beginners, so maybe I’m just a novice at liking poetry.

I don’t see myself ever going pro.

I love to read,  but I am not sure I have the emotional depth or nuance needed for poetry.

All that said, I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that hit as close to home as this poem does.

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

There is something about getting out into the world and realizing that there are things far beyond us that will continue no matter what happens to us.

I like to meditate on the fact that there are things that were here long before me and will be here long after me. I like that there are stars out there burning and planets out there spinning that never have and never will care about me at all. We are not as important as we like to think we are. There is a stability to the world and the universe whether we see it or not.

A lot of the doomsday wailing and gnashing of teeth we hear so much of these days goes out the window when we consider things on a larger scale.

These tragedies and catastrophes are only such when we think we are the center of things or that we are needed for everything to work as it “should”. Nature always finds a way to survive and overcome, and I am not sure it cares if we are there to witness it or not.

This makes me happy.

Growing Corn

“If your religion doesn’t grow corn, I don’t want to hear about it.”

Sun Bear

Internet quotes are super sketchy, but I like this one. I don’t care if it’s real or not, it’s legit.

Here is my favorite made up quote, mostly because I see it shared all the time:

For our purposes today, religion includes all the ideologies and philosophies people live their lives by, because at the end of the day none of them are that different in their function. So, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Communism, Liberalism, Conservatism, Nihilism, Spiritualism, and everything else. Even Stoicism and Mindfulness have to be evaluated.

So anyway, growing corn.

This is my litmus test for anything anyone tries to share with me.

Does it grow corn?

How is their philosophy/ideology/religion affecting their life?

Do they make wise decisions?

Do they have joy and peace? (happiness and contentment are fleeting and useless)

How do they treat other people? All living beings?

How do they treat themselves?

How much fear is needed to sustain their belief system?

How much judgment does their belief system bring into their life?

Our belief systems are the lens that everything passes through before it gets to us.

They often help us make decisions before we even know the facts, and decide what we think about people before we actually know them.

If we aren’t careful with our belief systems, they can lead us to judge someone or a situation from a single fact or aspect about them or it. They can cause us to miss experiences out of fear or subject ourselves to abuse at the hands of others without questioning it. They can cause us to reject all authority or submit ourselves to incompetent authority.

They are everything, and they matter.

Do your beliefs grow corn?

Are you willing to throw them out if they don’t?

The Power of Losing

I have tried to honestly document my being a bit of a loser in this blog.

Just a bit of one.

A lot of the stuff I look back on makes me laugh, in a genuine way. Maybe clueless is a better description of me.

Cutting my jeans to fit over my boots, and then sewing them back up with green plastic string later because the cuts looked bad. The green plastic swinging around looked great though.

Buying a cheap Zippo knockoff to look cool like the other kids, it spilling everywhere and almost catching my car on fire.

Dressing in solid white (white shoes, white socks, white cargo pants, white t-shirt) when I started TTU because I thought it looked nice. I wore it every single day. When my brother finally told me it did not, in fact, look nice, I went to the mall to get new clothes. I chose a store more appropriate for going to the club in the early 2000s and wore sparkly shirts. They buttoned up though. That made them nice.

As many of you have seen, bleaching my hair and letting the roots come out looked really cool to me in my mind. There are still pictures floating around.

There is a certain power in being a loser though.

People don’t expect much of you, and their expectations don’t really mean as much. The consequences of things not going your way are less threatening and less worrisome because you’re already a loser. You learn that so many of the things they tell you mean a lot, really don’t. You learn that what people think of you really only tells you about them, not about yourself.

I am somewhat grateful that I got a lot of the humiliation out of the way early on too, and that I don’t really have a fear of failure because of it.

I have no business having a fear of failure, I’ve spent a majority of my life being one. It’s like home to me, why be afraid of it? I talk to a lot of people who have a desperate fear of failing, and it paralyzes them.

I don’t have a lot of the worry others have because I know that I know how to work and be broke and have people make fun of me and be embarrassed by something I said or did.

A lot of the things people have made fun of me for have actually given me a good reserve of things I can do, and I don’t have fear of doing them. I meet a lot of people who don’t encounter failure until too late in life, and they shatter. Being a loser creates a certain flexibility in you that allows you to adapt to the things around you.

So it’s not all bad. I still find ways I’m out of step with everything around me, and sometimes it’s embarrassing. One day it might be useful though.

Mindfulness Monday – Speaking Revisited

I suppose it’s good to recognize the places where we are failing.

I’ve been compiling all of these into a word file so that I have them after genocidal AI shuts down the internet as the first step in its war against us.

The first post I did for this blog was about the goals I had for myself in the coming months.

I am pretty happy with most of what I’ve done.

My diet is better. Still not all paleo or keto, but much less sugar and much more actual food.

My website is up and running, and I have the podcast scheduled for January.

I am consistently learning to write more effectively. I am not even in the top 10 best writers on my Facebook feed, but I like my writing more than when I started.

Talking less still needs a lot of work, but I do notice I catch myself when I am talking many times, and simply stop. I’ll call this one a draw.

Being gentle though.

Like I said back in August, I think I am compassionate and I really do care about people.

I think being honest and direct (authentic!) with people is important, and shows them respect. I don’t think anything ever changes for the better if we run around hugging and telling each other everything will be okay.

I confront because I care.

A large majority of my clients seem to appreciate and even expect this, but I often wonder if there was a better way I could have said something or if I pushed a little too hard.

I know my language could use some tidying up.

I would like to work on being direct and clear with people, but doing so more gently and articulately. I am fortunate to have strong clients who are really there to work, so I get away with a lot, but I know there are ways I could do better.

So, today be mindful of how you speak to people. We’ve touched on it before, but ask yourself three questions before speaking:

Is this true?

Is this kind?

Is this necessary?

I like to throw in an additional one for myself:

Is it necessary that this be said by me?

Have a great day.