by Jamesscotthenson | Jan 11, 2017 | Blog
Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of
one principle: some things are within our control, and some are not.
Epictetus
It is difficult to accept things. Our brains are hardwired
to always be looking for the next cool thing, and to always be comparing. This
is a vestige of our history, when things were scarce and we had to constantly
be on the lookout for resources to keep us alive.
Modern consumer culture uses this against us very
effectively. Just look at where all the junk you don’t need is located in the
supermarket.
I talk to a lot of people who are having trouble reconciling
the idea of acceptance with the idea of change. This is an odd, paradoxical
relationship, but an important one.
You cannot change until you accept yourself where you are,
but accepting yourself where you are is death.
Rejecting yourself and refusing to admit where you are will
strap you down and blind you to the things that need to change, but we wonder
if acknowledging and accepting these things without judgment will keep us from
wanting to change them.
The key lies in the clear discernment of what we can and
what we cannot control.
If we cannot control something, then yes, fully accept it.
What you make per year right now, your current weight, how much you swear
(ahem) and student loan debt are all things you have no immediate control over.
Acknowledge this without reservation. Accept it fully. Embrace these things as
your current state of being.
But then ask yourself if you might be able to make changes
over a longer term. See if that might be in your control. What would your life
look like in a year if you started making the changes required for a second
income or a new job today? What if you started eating well and exercising right
now? There is nothing keeping you from working on being mindful of your
language or sitting down and looking at a plan to deal with your student loans
right now. This is how you will find yourself in a different place down the
road.
Accept where you are.
Refuse to stay there.
You don’t have to accept the things you have control over,
this is never part of the bargain.
Acceptance is not complacency or an excuse to continue
unskillful and unhealthy behavior. It is an acknowledgment of where you are so
you can have a proper understanding of what it takes to move forward.
Aren’t some things truly beyond our control though?
Yes, very much so. For some people, there are things
mentioned in this blog that are beyond their control.
We’ll look at those tomorrow.
Have a great day.
by Jamesscotthenson | Jan 10, 2017 | Blog
A clingy, puking toddler with definite ideas about where he
needs to sit and how unimportant my blog is means we are taking a short look at
gratitude today.
Name ten things you are grateful for in your everyday life.
Be creative, don’t cheat with the normal things people throw
out there.
“I’m thankful for God and my family and for the food I eat.”
Be grateful for these things, but really consider why.
Actually think about it.
I am grateful that my priorities have shifted over the last
few years so that Max being sick and wanting to sit with me is a blessing
instead of something I resent or try to avoid.
I am grateful for the snow and ice outside making quite a
few of my decisions for me today.
I am grateful for a wife who takes an equal share of the
work and responsibilities in our life. I talk to people all week who are saddled
with selfish, lazy partners.
I am grateful for 2016 no matter what everyone else thinks
of it. It was probably the best year of my life.
I am grateful for audiobooks making it possible to learn and
experience great stories almost all the time.
I am grateful that I have the resources to build a small gym
in our garage because it is benefitting both Barbara and I.
I am grateful to Barbara for all the work she has done on
the new office. It looks better than any office I have any business getting to
work out of. She is remarkably talented.
I am grateful Netflix continues to carry all the Curious
George movies.
I am grateful to every client I have, and to everyone who is
willing to use their time and money to work on themselves. I am grateful to be
part of that process every single day (bonus gratitude!)
I am grateful for everyone who takes the time to read this.
I really appreciate your time and feedback. Max appreciates your understanding
with this short blog today.
Anytime we find ourselves tired or frustrated that our plans
are being disrupted, we can stop in that moment and make a list of the things
we are grateful for.
There is always something to be grateful for. If you can’t
see it, be grateful for the opportunity to adjust your perspective.
Have a great day.
by Jamesscotthenson | Jan 9, 2017 | Blog
I am really grateful to everyone who is reading, commenting,
texting, emailing or participating in any way. This has been a great
experience, but only because of y’all. As always, please send me suggestions,
criticisms, questions, or anything else you would like to send.
I am deeply thankful to you.
In discussing mindfulness, we talk a lot about thoughts and
emotions and physical sensations.
I think we are all aware of the things that make up our
experience of the present moment. We may get caught up in it sometimes, but we
can at least see it in retrospect.
Think of the experience of being outside on a nice day.
You have the things coming in through your senses that let
you know where you are. Maybe you see birds, trees, dead grass (if you are here
in Lubbock), the sky, clouds, a breeze (or a vicious wind slinging dirt and
particles of cow manure into your face if you are in Lubbock). You might smell
flowers or car exhaust or Axe Body Spray or the cow manure (Lubbock again). You
feel the warmth of the sun, the subtle shift in it if a cloud passes over it.
The cooling sensation of the breeze or the stinging pain of the dirt in your
eyes. You can hear cars, planes, birds, children screaming (hopefully with
joy), dogs barking, flies buzzing your face. All of these things.
There are the thoughts associated with all of this. Let’s
pretend we can stay in the moment and focus on those thoughts, rather than the
ones about that day’s plans, the fight we had with our spouse that morning or
how the Cowboys will do that evening. Our thoughts might wonder how long the
good weather will last, or criticize the cow manure or cologne or, if you’re
me, lament the fact that there are people-generated noises no matter where you
are these days.
I am watching myself evolve into a grumpy old man.
We will also have emotions associated with all of this – joy
or peace or frustration or anxiety, whatever arises from the judgments and
assessments that our thoughts are making about it, or from what we are
experiencing on a more subconscious level.
All of this creates our experience of the present moment,
but none of it speaks about being.
None of it speaks about what Heidegger called the essential
“weirdness of being”.
Think about it.
Everything we described above is our experience of the
present through concepts.
Things like birds and grass and the sky are all there, all
on their own, but we have these concepts about them. These are created through
our past experiences and education, our ideologies and beliefs. If we were
living thousands of years ago, the sky might be an embodiment of God or a dome
that covered a flat planet. A bird might be one of our ancestors checking in on
us or a harbinger of evil.
These are all conditioned.
Other things are even more conditioned by our constant
immersion in an extensive and very complicated cultural environment, which
itself is now further complicated by a virtual environment that we have not
evolved to deal with. Things like Austin, Lubbock and cow manure each carry a
particular meaning to us. If they do not mean anything to you, that in itself
tells us something about your culture and environment and experience.
None of this deals with being though, with the primal,
foundational awareness of existence, before all the conditioned, learned
understandings and preconceptions we have.
Being itself is very, very weird, and learning to rest in it
can bring us to a place of peace.
There is no discontentment without concepts, without preconditioned
judgments and expectations. In awareness, everything is as it is, and nothing
more.
I often encourage people to try and view the world like you
are an alien that suddenly appeared on this planet, or a soul suddenly thrust
into existence. What would the world look like if you had no understanding or
education? What would you make of supermarket checkout lines and your show
being preempted and dirty diapers and unbathed people with dreadlocks if you
didn’t have ideas and opinions on these things? Especially if you didn’t even
know what they were?
This is one thing I really like about babies. They are in
this place. They live in the undifferentiated, unbroken being that is our true
state.
I love watching Max learn new things and develop into a
human being, but it also makes me sad to see his awareness fragmented. It’s
necessary, but it is sad that it is necessary.
Being is the most basic thing there is, yet we rarely even
notice it. In fact, because it is so fundamental, we take it for granted. We simply
remain oblivious to it, too caught up in all the other things associated with
being alive.
Take a moment today and just be.
Recognize being.
Watch how fast it disappears into the rush of doing.
What would life be like without all that doing?
Without all the associations and judgments and
preconceptions?
What would it be like to just be?
by Jamesscotthenson | Jan 8, 2017 | Blog
People don’t generally come to see me unless something has
gone wrong, and this often involves someone else having done something terrible
to them.
Outside of my professional life I hear a lot of terrible
things too. I seem to draw that to me. I also read a lot about history, and
history is pretty much a long story about people doing terrible things to each
other.
So is the news.
Despite all of that, I am still amazed by the capacity
for good in every person I meet, apart from a very rare subset of people that
really don’t count in metrics like this. I have people tell me this belief in
the goodness of people doesn’t make sense in the face of so much evil, but I
think it is because of the evil that it makes very good sense.
If we really think about it, evil makes a lot of sense.
If you want to get ahead quickly, just taking what is not
yours is the simplest way. Making sure your needs are met without regard for
anyone else’s is logical. We are hardwired for violence and domination and
making sure we get ours before they get theirs. Some would say that points
toward people not being good, but I think the opposite is true.
Despite everything, despite it seeming so much easier to do
evil, the vast majority of us do good, and this has held throughout history.
There was never a point where the majority of humanity was
doing terrible things to each other. There has always been cooperation and love
and self-sacrifice, and not just between family members and friends, but
between strangers and even enemies.
I really believe the average person has much more capacity
for good than for evil.
I know there are competing explanations for this, but I am
not really concerned about which one is right. I am fascinated by them, but do
not see them as important in the face of the fact that most people are good.
That being said, one explanation I do not see as viable is
the idea that people are only good because of laws and social pressure and fear
of hell. We have this inherent thing inside of us that tells us when we are out
of line, and it often starts ringing when we are treating others poorly for our
own benefit. I have people tell me things they’ve done all the time, they feel
terrible and want to do better, and they do this outside of any chance of
getting caught. It is inherent, inside of them.
The entire premise of those Purge movies is moronic.
I am aware of the evolutionary explanations for good
behavior, and if these are true I do not think that it compromises my belief
that people are inherently good. Yes, there may be something inside of us that
rewards good and cooperative behavior, but that doesn’t change the fact that
these are then the things that drive people. I think we all want to believe we
have some independent, un-influenced reason for doing what we do, but
everything has an initial motivating force. It all grinds down to some
foundation that doesn’t have much to do with “you”.
I need to do a blog on that “you” now that I think about it.
It is a lot harder to find that you think.
So, yes, I believe that evil being so logical and useful
shines light on just how good people are, and on the limitless capacity for
goodness that nearly everybody has within them.
I think that most people want to pursue and express this
capacity, but, for a variety of underlying reasons and causes, simply don’t
know how.
I still think the world is getting better, even though it
often scares me and makes me very aware that I am aging and falling out of
step.
Evil is easy, yet so many people choose good.
This means something.
by Jamesscotthenson | Jan 7, 2017 | Blog
Let’s look at two scenarios.
Feel free to swap Disney World out for wherever you would
love to go.
The first scenario.
Pretend you just got to Disney World. You saved up your
money, but you only have a week there. This is probably a once in a lifetime
trip for you. How do you spend the time there? How many days do you spend in
your room watching TV? Do you sleep until noon? Do you miss the buses that take
you to the parks? Do you take a day and just do nothing?
The second scenario.
Disney World again, but this time you get to stay as long as
long as you want. You have an unlimited park pass, and you never have to go
home unless you want to. How many days do you waste now?
My guess is that, if you were honest, you would waste some
time in the second scenario. You would be all diligent and time-conscious the
first few days, maybe even weeks, but human apathy would catch up with you and
before long you’d be laying on the bed at 1 in the afternoon watching Judge
Judy. I think this would happen to any of us if we were not conscious and
intentional with how we spent our time.
For some reason, even though we know we will die, we treat
life as if it will last forever. We know there is a checkout date, but we act
like there isn’t.
We act like we will be here as long as we want to be, that
every day is the same as the last and that we have time to waste. We take being
alive for granted and act like it is nothing special.
Life is awesome, it’s better than Disney World or Peru or
Alaska or Japan or Ireland or Beverly Hills or Antarctica. It’s even better
than Mars. It’s better than all of these things because our ability to even
have an awareness of these things exists within life.
Life itself outstrips any cool thing we can do within life,
yet we waste so much of it.
Life is inherently superior to death, because we do not
truly know what death will bring us.
One can have faith, but belief in anything beyond this is
exactly that: faith.
This right here, right now, is for sure, and it is good and
it is amazing and it is all you have.
Maybe there is a heaven, enjoy that when you get there.
Right now, this is want you have. Enjoy that.
I don’t focus on death because I am morbid or dark or Hot
Topic-y at all.
I maintain an awareness of death for the same reason I would
want to remember that I have to leave Disney World in a few days.
I want to make the most of the time and see and do what I
can in a limited time span. It’s even more important to do this with life
because we only know that we have to leave at some point, we don’t even get the
courtesy of being told when. It could be today or tomorrow or in 30 years.
Since you don’t know, get moving.
Life is a good thing, it’s all you have.
Any judgments or criticisms or thoughts about life you may
have exist only because you have life in the first place.
Everything you have springs from being alive.
Don’t forget that.
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