by Jamesscotthenson | Jun 6, 2017 | Blog
I shirked and shied away from responsibility for a vast
majority of my life.
I called it different things like laziness, or not giving
a…something. I couched it behind different pale ideologies like resisting the
capitalistic desire to control my life through work or not buying into the
western concept that our lives should be regimented into a functional grind. I
suppose I believed these things at the time, but my dodging responsibility was
something different.
It was really rooted in fear, which is often fueled by selfishness.
I prized what I wanted and how I wanted to spend my time
above all else, thinking this would make me happy. I was unhappy, and no matter
how much more time I shoveled into doing my own thing, the less happy I became.
Today, responsibilities seem to govern my life.
Between running an office and a blog and trying to get other
projects off the ground, and having a family and trying to live a healthy life
and be a good dad and husband and continue to grow as a human being, I don’t
have a lot of time for what I want.
And, I have never been happier.
My life isn’t about me anymore, and I am doing my part (I
think) for my family and my community and my society, and there is something
inside of us that needs to live this way. I am grateful to responsibility for
teaching me this.
How do you feel when you dodge your responsibilities?
How do you feel when you do the things that are required of
you as a human being?
Would it be easier to embrace these things instead of
resisting them?
by Jamesscotthenson | Jun 5, 2017 | Blog
We need pain in life.
That reminds me of the things people sometimes post in
response to a break-up or the cancellation of their favorite show, often with a
Naruto meme. While that kind of pain may be just as real, today we are talking
about physical pain. Maybe we can talk about the the other kind before this
gratitude series is over.
Gratitude for emotional pain is much fuzzier though.
Pain is a universal experience for the most part, something
we can all understand.
It helps connect us to other humans if we let it, and even
gives us a sense of resonance with all life in some way. It is why we have
empathy and understanding for suffering we may not even have a reference point
for, and why we seek to move toward and help others.
Physical pain is a warning light, our body telling us
something is wrong and that it needs care.
The pain of your hand on a hot stove is better than a
life-endangering injury, and breaking your arm doing daredevil stunts causes
enough pain that you are less likely to lose your whole life on something even
more foolish. There are people who do not feel pain, and many do not make it
out of childhood due to the lack of lessons that pain teaches. Pain is there to
keep us alive, to help us learn how to navigate through this world. A child
crying with a busted nose is also a child learning about running through the
house with a bucket on their head.
But what about pain that cannot be fixed, chronic pain that
is not serving the function of warning or teaching us?
There is good here too, as it provides us an opportunity to
lean into something unpleasant, to sit with things not being as we would prefer
them to be. There can be a deep peace in accepting our experience as it is, in
realizing that we are more than the experience of our body and thoughts.
It’s not always easy, but it’s there.
by Jamesscotthenson | Jun 4, 2017 | Blog
It is also a little weird that we have a body when you think
about it.
I make these hands and fingers move as I need them to and my
feet go where I want them to and all that, but I don’t really know how I do
this.
I just do.
As a matter of fact, if I think about it too much I start to
make mistakes, and this sentence winds up with a bunch of typos.
Beyond this is my heart that does its thing with no help
from me and my lungs and my brain and all these other systems and organs that
do their thing with no input from me at all. I can’t even make them stop doing
their job without some sort of radical external intervention, and one that
would really be harmful to my continued existence.
So some of this stuff happens with my control (sort of) and
some without my control, and I call all of it my body and I think it is me so I
am rarely grateful for it.
It gets me up and moving every day, it performs its task
reasonably well, yet I don’t give it much regard. Because of this I have done
some pretty rough things to my body over the years, and I have some fairly
debilitating physical issues as a result, but it keeps going. It not only keeps
going, since I have started treating it well and not drinking or using drugs
and exercising and eating really well and cutting our sugar and getting sleep,
it actually seems to be improving and healing.
It’s really amazing.
Think of all the things your body does for you, are you able
to be grateful for it?
Can recognizing our body’s higher purpose help us change our
relationship to chubby stomachs and balding heads and faces we don’t like all
that much?
Take a moment to be grateful for all the things your body
does right. They vastly outnumber the shortcomings.
Take care.
by Jamesscotthenson | Jun 3, 2017 | Blog
The most basic place for gratitude is in the very fact that
we exist at all.
This gets weird when you think about it too much.
The only reason we can even think about being grateful for
anything at all is because we exist. Whatever it is at the mouth of this river
of consciousness, this awareness, gives us that, and this is the first
place for gratitude.
I often think that no matter what is happening around me, at
least I am here to experience it. This is especially noticeable when death is
near me, either someone I love has passed away or I am helping someone walk
through the death of someone they love. Those moments suck, but at least we are
there to witness them at all.
The alternative to all of this is nothing.
I often hear people say they would rather experience nothing
than what they are experiencing at the moment, but there is even an expression
of awareness in this statement. Sure, nothingness seems nice sometimes, but
when we say that we are, in some way, envisioning ourselves experiencing it. We
are existing in nothingness, which makes almost no sense at all.
Whatever is happening, we have been gifted an awareness
to experience it. At the very least, we have this wide beam of consciousness,
experiencing this world.
That is ground for gratitude.
by Jamesscotthenson | Jun 2, 2017 | Blog
Gratitude is everything.
The happiest people I know are grateful. The unhappiest
people I know are ungrateful. Gratitude takes a sad person and gives them joy,
ingratitude takes a happy person and makes them miserable.
Gratitude is what allows someone to endure all sorts of
injustice and hardship and emerge stronger and more resilient instead of broken
and cynical.
A lack of gratitude is what causes people who have
everything to need more and more and more, creating the cycle of suffering that
is greed and self-absorption. A lack of gratitude is what allows people with
more than enough to be miserable and angry and to seek to inflict their
suffering on others.
I won’t say gratitude can fix everything, but it can
certainly make everything less dismal and more enjoyable.
It is the root of everything good for us.
In many ways, it is at the heart of mindfulness as it allows
us to cultivate a deep appreciation and love for the very simple act of being
in the moment, and for all the simple things the moment offers.
We’ll look at gratitude for the next few (many?) days. I
didn’t feel like putting a specific time limit on it.
Where are you lacking gratitude in your life?
Are there things that you could be grateful for that you are
missing?
What would things be like if gratitude was your first
instinct?
Thanks for reading.
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