by Jamesscotthenson | May 21, 2017 | Blog
I don’t have a lot of friends, I think this comes with age
and having a family and a business and all of that.
Or maybe I am just not that likeable.
Let’s go with me being busy.
My wife is my best friend, I have a few others.
I was not a good friend for most of my life.
Everything was about me, and conversations were just a game
of grab the ball and run the other direction, as Calvin and Hobbes so aptly
describe it. I often viewed other people as a means to an end in creating an
image or a persona for myself.
I thought of myself first, and everyone else was a distant
second.
This doesn’t work in friendship, or in any relationship.
It’s self-absorbed and rude, and it feeds the illusion of
the ego. The more that we do that, the more we suffer. The more we feed this
separateness the more real it seems, and the further we are from reality.
Being mindful in friendship means maintaining an awareness
of what the other person or people are saying, and what they need from us. It’s
about allowing relationship to be actual relationship, a synthesis of what
more-than-one person is experiencing instead of warping everything to fit what
we want it to be.
Mindfulness means it’s not about us.
by Jamesscotthenson | May 20, 2017 | Blog
We all fear death to some degree, no matter how much we tell
ourselves we don’t, or that we know what happens after we die.
We can have tremendous faith, but to say we know anything
about what happens after that impenetrable wall of death is a misuse of the
word “know”.
I am not saying anyone is wrong about what they believe,
only that it is a belief.
That’s not the point though.
We see this fear of death manifest every time someone we
know dies, especially famous people because they are far enough removed that we
can say whatever we want without any real repercussions.
“Well, that’s what happens when you use drugs.”
“I can’t believe a father would commit suicide.”
“Morons and Porsches just don’t mix.”
“It just goes to show that all the money in the world can’t
make you happy.”
While insensitive, these people aren’t just being assholes
or “saying what everyone is thinking” as they like to claim. Just like the rest
of us, they are scared of the dark that follows death and they are waving
around a torch made of false bravado ad judgment.
This is really just a way of avoiding the deep existential
fear we all carry in our hearts.
I do it, this isn’t a high and mighty thing.
We all do in one form or another.
It is a way of seeking answers and certainty in a place
where there are no real answers or certainty.
What would happen if we sat with the fear, with that uncertainty?
What would it be like if we chose to dive into it instead of
trying to power through it with broad exclamations and judgments?
What if we just admitted that we are scared?
by Jamesscotthenson | May 19, 2017 | Blog
Work is only a problem if we are comparing.
Break your job down into its constituent elements.
Which of them are not oaky in and of themselves?
Which of them are objectively bad?
I can get caught up in the parts of my job that aren’t real
if I’m not careful.
Notes and appointments and malpractice insurance and rent
and office supplies and furniture and all of that.
These things are necessary, but they are not what I do.
We can’t confuse the blueprints with the house.
My job is having intentional, constructive conversations
with people as they try to create a better life for themselves and the people
they love. That’s a good gig.
Every job offers an opportunity to do more. To do things
that matter.
What is the truth of your job?
What do you really offer society?
Could things be different if you invested in that?
by Jamesscotthenson | May 18, 2017 | Blog
I wrote about silence a few weeks back.
I posted a bunch of quotes.
An increased desire for silence has affected my life in
numerous ways.
If I am home alone, the TV is usually off.
I mentioned driving in silence.
I find fewer things worth having an opinion on. Even fewer
worth talking about.
This isn’t just an external silence though, there is all
kinds of noise in our modern world.
Without our thoughts about things, everything is pretty
okay.
Take a few moments in silence and see what arises.
What things bother you?
What are the things that push you to fill in the silence?
What are you uncomfortable with?
These are the things can teach us the most, the places we
can grow.
Fewer words and less noise is a good thing.
What keeps you from being able to tolerate silence?
by Jamesscotthenson | May 17, 2017 | Blog
Everything comes to an end.
Nothing in this life escapes this, if something has a
beginning it has an end.
The saddest and happiest fact of life is that this
too shall pass.
We tend to focus on the ends of things we enjoy and the
beginning of things we do not enjoy, but we can flip this without much effort.
All wonderful things have a beginning.
All difficult things have an end.
The beginning of anything is the end of something else.
The end of anything is the beginning of something new.
It’s one big constant flow, not a series of distinct
moments, our mind just has a hard time seeing this because it defies
categorization. The mind likes to organize things. This is useful, but it also
distorts reality and can cause us to focus on the negative.
The end of one thing is the beginning of another, every exit
is an entrance.
It all runs together.
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