by Jamesscotthenson | Apr 30, 2017 | Blog
“I understand now that we are not what we think, feel etc.
And I am beginning to understand that our reality is filtered by such things.
And it’s making me better understand forgiveness … but here’s where I’m at: is
there a true reality if it’s always filtered? And where does responsibility
come in … when we choose to act on feeling or thoughts in a situation?”
Responsibility is a tough one.
Keep this quote in mind:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that
space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and
our freedom.”
Victor Frankl
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you know I’m a
fan of responsibility.
I think that it helps us recognize our power in life, it
helps us grow and it forces us to actively engage with our decisions.
It gets fuzzier when we dig down into why we do what we do
though.
Yesterday we talked about how reality is always filtered
through layer after layer of distorting experiences and beliefs, and this
process certainly has an effect on the decisions we make, and so it has to be
factored into responsibility. There are also times that we simply react to
something, the space between the stimulus and our response is so small that we
don’t really have a choice in the response.
It is hard for me to blame or assign responsibility to
someone when they react in a way that is so quick that there is almost no
conscious thought involved.
Now, I am really, really hard on myself when I react this
way, but that’s a different story. If I am being fair to myself, I have to ask
whether or not I had a choice in the reaction that came out of me.
Sometimes things happen so quickly it is hard to say that we
made a decision at all.
Does this mean we don’t have responsibility for the things
we do?
Since everything comes in through layers and layers of
accumulated bullshit, are we just automatons wandering through life?
I don’t think so.
We have a responsibility to train our minds and expand that
space between stimulus and response so that we can make our decisions with
intentionality and rationality and compassion and grace and all the other
things that make humans so cool.
We have a responsibility to enable ourselves to act out of
our best selves as often as possible.
This is important.
This is why we should all learn to observe our own mind, to
be aware of our emotions and what is going on in our body.
We cannot take an action back once it is done, but we can
prepare ourselves to do better next time.
And that is our responsibility.
by Jamesscotthenson | Apr 30, 2017 | Blog
I remember reading an article when I was kid that called
Hulk Hogan (my hero at the time) a “shameless self-promoter”.
Hulk has since gone on to do a few things that hurt me even
worse than that article, but I have never been able to shake the idea that
self-promotion is a bad thing.
This is a grey area for these days.
Running a business requires a certain degree of
self-promotion if you want to survive, and a blog and podcast require even
more.
I find the people I come across on Twitter and Instagram who
are only following people to promote themselves distasteful. I try to only
follow people I know and who I am genuinely interested in what they have to
post. I don’t sign up for blogs or make comments on things with the sole intent
of promoting my work. It just feels disingenuous to me.
I get it though.
If you are freelancing or trying to create something and
keep it alive, you have to find a way to get it in front of people.
But I wonder if there are more ethical ways of doing this
than trying to hijack the work someone else has done or turning into a
relentless self-promotion machine. I love seeing people hustle and work, but
sometimes I start to avoid people selling things for those pyramidy-type
organizations because every interaction with them has turned into a sales
pitch. I like that you believe in your product, but it doesn’t have to be
personal when someone doesn’t want to buy the seaweed and birdshit capsules. It
makes me super-appreciative of the people I know who sell this stuff and don’t
let it infect their entire lives.
So that’s what I am trying to balance: working to promote
and boost the things I am doing, without imposing on other people’s patience
and goodwill.
I don’t want to become a shameless self-promoter, but I want
to build something that is useful to people. It already feels like I
am spamming everyone with the daily post on Facebook, so it is hard for me
to envision pushing it further.
I don’t even want to consider starting to engage with people
with the sole intent of pushing my content.
If you enjoy my blog or podcast, I would appreciate you
signing up for the email list, or telling someone else you think might find it
useful. If you don’t enjoy them (and are still reading this for some weird
reason), I would appreciate knowing why. If I post too much or not enough, I
would appreciate knowing that.
Thank you for reading my blog and listening to my podcast
(the new one is up on Libsyn
and SoundCloud).
I really enjoy hearing back from people and creating something that is useful.
I am grateful for every click I see, every new subscriber and every comment or
message I get, except maybe from the online advertising agency that wanted me
to promote a cheating website because I had a few posts with that word in the
title. I feel like they didn’t actually read either
one of
them.
Thank you all very much, this blogging and podcasting thing
has been fun because of you.
by Jamesscotthenson | Apr 29, 2017 | Blog
I actually think reality is awesome, but I also think the Gen X police would arrest me if I didn’t use that title.
A tough question today:
“I understand now that we are not what we think, feel etc.
And I am beginning to understand that our reality is filtered by such things.
And it’s making me better understand forgiveness … but here’s where I’m at: is
there a true reality if it’s always filtered? And where does responsibility
come in … when we choose to act on feeling or thoughts in a situation?”
This might get divided into two days.
There are so many different perspectives on the idea of
whether or not there is a true reality “out there”.
The increasingly hostile fight for ideological supremacy in
our society is very much a result of this question being unanswered. Different
schools of philosophy and different religious ideologies will all give you a
different answer.
I am not sure if there is an objective reality out there or
not. I suppose I lean toward the idea that there is because I am constantly
working to clean or remove my filters so I can see things more clearly.
Culture, religion, ideology, illness, mental illness, abuse,
lack of abuse, the narratives of our parents, gut bacteria and thousands
(probably millions) of other things all have their say in interpreting how the
information makes it through to “us”.
This is further complicated by the limitations of our
senses, and the fact that things like color and taste and everything coming in
through them are processed by the brain and translated into a format we can
use. Everything is really just different energy fields (there is probably a
more precise term for this) that our brain finds a way to interpret in a way
that allows us to navigate and survive in the world. This is limited, and there
are all sorts of things we cannot detect, so we hear about people dying from
carbon monoxide poisoning.
Then there are the questions of objective right and wrong
and good and bad.
I have my personal moral compass, but I find that many of the
things I want to define as good or bad or right or wrong are really just
inconvenient to me or don’t fit with my model of how things should be. These
are, of course, determined by my filters, so we are back to that.
Since I don’t have access to the information that would let
me know if there is a real reality out there, or what the correct reality looks
like, I do my best to remove filters, or at least be aware of them.
My ultimate aim in this is always to improve how I treat
other people, and to lessen my attachment to the self that causes all of my
self-centered behavior.
These things make me think I do believe in an objective
Truth, and that it says how we treat other people matters. This is no doubt
informed by all of the conditioning factors mentioned above, but it is
reinforced by the reward I get from following this path, which is increased
peace and contentment in my life.
We’ll look at responsibility tomorrow, thanks for the
questions!
by Jamesscotthenson | Apr 28, 2017 | Blog
I mentioned finding a bunch of old journals yesterday, and
how overwhelmingly self-absorbed and self-obsessed it all was.
It was odd to be reminded of how much strife and struggle
and conflict and misery I lived in for so long, and how all of it was the
result of my own thoughts and a deep belief in the importance of my self.
I think this same emphasis on the self underpins a majority
of the suffering I see in people around me and in my work.
When we are focuses on this self, we are in a state of
constant agitation and fear because the mind is working overtime to ensure that
everything goes our way. We slip away from investing in the moment and in
others because we are obsessed with taking care of ourselves and making sure
everything is the way we want it to be.
This forces us into close relationship with everything we
cannot control, while simultaneously walling us off from the best parts of our
nature as selfishness takes the reins. There is no way we will be at peace in
this state, not with ourselves and certainly not with others.
There is a further problem here too. When we really begin to
search for this thing we are protecting so obsessively, we cannot find it.
When we really look, this self that takes up so much of our
mental and emotional energy isn’t there.
This really bothered me when I first start realizing it. I
was very attached to my self, everything I did was for it.
Then I realized that it was a central part of the problem.
The struggles and conflict and misery were all because I believed in and worked
very hard to maintain the integrity of this self, and the less and less
attached to it I became, the less and less misery and struggle and conflict I
had.
Realizing there isn’t really anything there to fight for
freed me up in a lot of ways.
Try it.
Recognize everything coming in through the five senses.
Are you what you see?
Are you what you smell?
Are you the sensory recognition of the skin?
Are you what you taste?
Are you what you hear?
Emotions make this al a little more difficult, because we
feel them, right? But can you not step back from them and recognize them as
emotions? Can you not observe what you are feeling?
Then, the biggest culprit: our thoughts.
Are you what you think?
I, for one, certainly think in terms of “I”.
I definitely love thinking. I love my thoughts. They make me
smart and give me something to do. Right?
But, I can step back and observe my thoughts as well. I can
let them come and go, and not be affected or attached to them. They are not
me.
With a little bit of work, we can recognize than none of
this is “us”, and things start to get a lot easier.
The line between me and everyone else fades, and conflict
becomes a little bit harder to get involved in. The distinctions of good and
bad get fuzzier and fuzzier, and the relentless push to get ahead and be
comfortable disappears. What I want becomes less and less important.
As Pema Chodron says, you are the sky, everything else is
just weather.
Have a great day.
by Jamesscotthenson | Apr 27, 2017 | Blog
I am writing this in Lubbock, while Barbara is eating
breakfast at a hotel in Norman, Oklahoma.
We were all supposed to go see her wrestle there, but Max
has been so sick this week that we didn’t feel right about putting him in the
car for 10 hours and keeping him up late at a show, so I am here. It was
disappointing to miss the trip, but he and I had a fun day hanging out in the
sunroom and watching Totoro 3 times.
One shift I’ve noticed in myself as I get older and less
selfish is that I really value time with my family.
In the past, I was obsessed with making sure I got “my
time”. I felt I really needed the time alone, and fought to have it. I
still need time alone, but not near as much as I thought.
Self-absorption has been a prime character trait for most of
my life.
I don’t think I even started to get past the normal
teenage self-obsessiveness until I was in my late twenties, and it was
still hard. I was cleaning out old papers yesterday and found mountains of
journals and writing I did when I was younger. It is all really poorly written,
and really self-obsessed.
It’s a feat in itself that I was able to write so much and
still not be a better writer than I am. Maybe it is because I am just now
seeing it as a craft.
Much of the advice I am finding in Zinsser’s “On Writing
Well” would have helped me as a writer and a person when I was younger (it
still does).
Use fewer words.
Eliminate clutter in what you say.
Be authentic.
Don’t try to please others.
I doubt younger James could have heard it though, he already
knew everything.
How could he have cut words when everything he had to say
was amazing?
It is funny that this self I was so obsessed with when I was
younger is something I have an increasingly difficult time even believing
in now. I have certainly never been able to find it.
I watched The Last Samurai for the thousandth time this
week.
I think people who hate it didn’t fully pay attention. Tom
Cruise isn’t the last samurai. He doesn’t get to die with them. If he were the
last samurai his life would be one of dishonor until he cut his own stomach
open. Just an observation.
No bitching about spoilers in movies that are 14 years old,
btw.
I am going to continue to work on cutting words and
eliminating clutter from the daily posts. I am working to bring a genuine voice
to every one of them. I don’t really have any topics prepared for this week
yet. With luck, they will arise all on their own.
I have the third podcast recorded, but have to get to the
work of rearranging and editing and all of that. I will post a guided mediation
later today though. Feedback on these is all appreciated.
Check out the Moving Art series on Netflix, it will make
your life better. The one with forests, predictably, is my favorite.
Have a great day.
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