by Jamesscotthenson | Jul 11, 2017 | Blog
Everyone makes mistakes.
Everyone.
Some are small, like putting salt in your tea instead of
sugar. (I’m convinced that putting sugar in anything is also a mistake, but it
tastes better than salt)
Some are medium sized. You lose a customer at work because
you forgot to fix the mischarged item on their credit card.
Some are big. You leave the stove on and burn half of your
kitchen to charcoal. You forget the cash deposit from your job on a bench at
the bus stop.
Some are massive and life changing and destroy everything.
Getting addicted to pills or hitting someone in your car while intoxicated.
Cheating on your partner or stealing from your job and getting caught.
Life changing mistakes are real and they are terrible and
often leave us feeling alone and hopeless and empty.
They feel irreversible, and they are. Everything is really,
some things are just easier to fix to make them look like they never happened.
But, everything in this world is the same when we get down to it.
We can, at any moment, make choices that work against the
mistakes we’ve made instead of feeding them and making them worse.
The problem is that we get so locked into crying about the
consequences of our mistakes or blaming other people for them that we keep
making choices that prolong the effects (which we then cry and blame others
for, ensuring a very nasty cycle we have to break out of).
What mistakes have you made recently?
How have you dealt with them?
What are doing to correct them?
What are you doing that will prolong the consequences?
by Jamesscotthenson | Jul 10, 2017 | Blog
There are people who will support us no matter what, and
people who will criticize us, no matter what.
It’s in their nature.
It’s what they do.
It rarely has anything to actually do with us.
Cheerleaders and hecklers are useful, and cheerleaders and
hecklers are dangerous.
The cheerleaders give us energy and encourage us to push
forward. They give us the boost we need when we are running out of energy or
thinking about giving up. But, they might also tell us we are doing great when
we are actually phoning it in. They may keep cheering no matter what, because
that’s their job.
Hecklers, on the other hand, will boo and insult us no
matter how well we are doing. They will try to trip us up and push us down and
nothing we do will ever be good enough. This is their nature. They may,
however, also help us see where we can improve. Every once in a while, they may
just be right about what they are saying.
The important thing to remember with both cheerleaders and
hecklers is that what they do is about them.
It is their nature to support or criticize, and it may not
have anything to do with us at all. They are simply sharing their perspective
on how we are doing. They are not necessarily sharing any sort of Truth. This
is important to remember when a cheerleader becomes a heckler or a heckler
starts cheering for us. It tells us that their perspective has changed, nothing
else.
It is also important that we make sure we have cheerleaders
in our lives, and that we listen to the heckler every once in a while.
We need support, but we also need to keep our ego in check.
A life full of cheerleaders breeds fragile people who crumble under the first
hint of criticism. A life full of hecklers breeds broken people who cannot see
their own infinite worth and potential.
Who cheers for you?
Who heckles you?
What does this tell you about them?
by Jamesscotthenson | Jul 9, 2017 | Blog
Nothing makes me think about the nature of my consciousness
more than running water.
We all have this idea that we are a stable identity, that
throughout our lives the same person has been watching. It seems self-evident
that they (whoever they are) have been there in the back of our mind, even when
we were just a moving plant in a diaper.
Watch a river and you will see the same thing.
A constant rushing, shifting process that somehow maintains
the same general shape and structure unless the conditions change. A massive
snow melt or someone building a dam, something catastrophically different. This
alters the river’s course and what it looks like, but the water is the same.
A stable identity is one of the more difficult things to
find, and I often wonder if our attempts to force it freeze us into unhealthy
behaviors.
Why can’t we just be water?
by Jamesscotthenson | Jul 8, 2017 | Blog
There are a lot of things we put a lot of stock in that
don’t exist anywhere outside of human social construction.
Things like fairness, beauty, niceness, charisma, manners,
equality, justice, postmodernism, celebrity.
These are not real in any sense apart from human
understanding of them. I am not saying they are not good things, or that they
are good things, only that they are the result of human construction and
nothing more.
I like to ask myself if something would keep a bear from
eating me to decide if it is real or not.
None of these things fit the bill. Violence or speed or
being better at hiding than the bear is at finding would save me, but these
other concepts would not.
We are humans, living in a complex human world and human
society, so these things are necessary, but we often get them confused with
things that are inherently existent in the world, when they are not.
This makes us think they are going to be more present than
they are, or that they are inherently good things. Maybe some of them are,
others maybe are not, but they are created by us, for us.
That’s it.
by Jamesscotthenson | Jul 7, 2017 | Blog
I like to wonder if the story of the Garden of Eden is a
metaphor (Simile? Allegory? Parable? I never get this right.) for the
development of the ego, and, by extension, the recognition that things we do
affect other beings in negative ways, and, by further extension, the
realization of right and wrong.
I just wonder about it, please don’t send me angry emails.
I like how animals just do what they do.
Dogs eat the same food every single day and they are just
happy to have it. Wolves kill baby deer and ants devour butterflies. There’s no
right or wrong to it, it’s just what they do.
I also like that, as humans, we do think about right and
wrong and, for the most part, try to do the right thing.
No matter what the cynics and doomsayers proclaim, the vast,
vast majority of people you meet do enough of the right thing that they don’t
rob or kill you.
The problem with all of this is that our mind likes to
generalize, and turns all sorts of things that are not matters of right and
wrong into matters of right and wrong.
A lot more is neutral than we like to think.
The rain is just rain, seasons change and sometimes we are
hungrier than we would like to be. It’s part of life. Complaining and focusing
on how we wish things were does not help anything.
Animals understand this.
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