By Kirk Wheeler

We are only given so much time on this earth. We all know this. But it is very hard to place this knowledge in the context of our daily existence. The roles that we have created for ourselves and the checklists that we have made in support of these roles often keep us too busy to pay attention to the moment that we will pass from this world.

In our communities no one really likes to talk about it all that much. Many people find that even the idea of the topic is just too depressing to consider. But what if we did the opposite? What if we focused on death? What if we really considered the moment of our passing and made practicing for it a part of our daily rituals?

This is exactly what Stuart Davis does. He practices what he calls little death exercises. It is a way of looking at the impermanence of all things and making that fact a part of who we are. By integrating the inevitable with the present moment and connecting them, we allow ourselves the gift of seeing things fall away as a natural part of life.

Here is a clip from my recent podcast with Stuart where he talks about this idea:

So while we are busy doing our work, or checking off the next item on our to-do list, we can practice the art of letting go. We all have things entering and exiting our lives at various times and by seeing those things as little rehearsals for death, we remind ourselves of what is essential. We are better able to see what really matters to us. And when we are able to remember what really matters, we can spend our time in the service of those ideals.

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Taco Tuesday is now Freedom Friday. On a Tuesday. You are all now free to build whatever you want.
So instead of taking the time to read any further please sto
 
 
 
Are you still reading this?
Really, you are free to build whatever you want. Taco Tuesday is over. Freedom Friday is here. To stay. We are all the special. So go ahead, my feelings won’t be hurt. Stop reading and star
 
 
 
 
 
 
STILL here???
Start, that’s where we left off right? Well, go on, dive in! Start something, build something, organize something, take away something, put it back, scale it down, dream it bigger and then start all over again and then dream it even bigger than before and when you are done tear it down and leave it in pieces so the next person to come along will have the same freedom that you have now but take some pictures and tell them the story of how you did it so they will have a place to begin, or better yet start building together and you can both create something that no one has ever seen before or would have ever thought possible.

( Oh, one more thing – you can even do this on a Monday)

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“Wisdom is know what to do next, skill is knowing how to do it, and virtue is doing it.”

– David Starr Jordan

BE VIRTUOUS

I came across this quote a few weeks ago and now I have a slightly modified version of it (see below) on my iPhone, and on my desktop. I realized that we are all talking about gaining wisdom and skills and while these are extremely important, the last, and the most important piece of the puzzle is the part that almost  no one is talking about. Virtue.

We are living in a time where there is no shortage of information. No shortage of ideas. There is inspiration everywhere we turn. (I found this stenciled on the trashcan outside of my local Trader Joe’s)

But all of this information and inspiration will not change the world in the slightest if we do not act on it, if we are not virtuous.

In the latest episode of the Discover The Road podcast my friend Joel Martin had this to say:

“Everyday there’s another opportunity to challenge yourself with.”

So the challenge I have given myself is to be virtuous. Everyday. And I know it will not be easy. And I know there are days that I will not succeed. But when I do not live up to my own standards, I will forgive myself and move on.

STEP BY STEP

For example, if we want to get to the top of a very long and steep staircase, how do we do it?

• We know what to do next (Wisdom): Put our foot on the first step and begin to climb.
• We know how to do it (Skill): Steady ourselves and put one foot after the other and do not stop until we reach the top.
• But to get to the top, we must act, we must  place our feet firmly on the steps and physically move our body upwards. (Virtue)

We know what to do. We know how to do it. We just need to do it.

Be virtuous. Step by step.

Dear Developers,

Thank you for your awesomeness.

No really, I meant it. I couldn’t have done any of this without you.
You have given me more than I can ever give back. So I hope that you will accept my humble gratitude for all of the long hours and late nights that you have spent making my creative life easier, more fun, and quite simply, better.

Gratefully,
Kirk

THANK YOU

I have been meaning to write this letter since April. That is about the time I started using all kinds of services on the web to build the platform for Discover The Road. But I have been so busy having creating with all of these amazing resources that the idea for writing this post was just another “get to soon” note in Evernote. (Case in point, Thank you to all of the folks at Evernote for being my digital brain.)

But the more I thought about this over the last month, I began to realize just how frictionless the creation of nearly everything has become. And just how beautiful we can all make things with a few simple tweaks.

And all of this ease is thanks to the incredible of the work of all of the developers who are spending their precious time on this earth working to make the tools that we all use everyday the most effective and yet seemingly effortless tools that the world has ever known.

And it just keeps getting better. Here is a short list of some of the services that I have been using lately. Most of these are free for me, some I pay for, but the cost is so small when you compare it to the enormous benefit that I receive.

• Evernote (As I said, my digital brain)
• WordPress (How I publish)
• Bluehost (Where it all sits)
• Trello (New to this but it has already improved my wordflow)
• Aweber (Nice responsive emails)
• Bitly (How I make the long links better looking and track them)
• Soundcloud (Love the embedding, matching the player to my site)
• Libsyn (Like my own personal radio station)
• Buffer (New to this to but wow is this easy)
• Canva (Making design uber simple)
• Filament (Makes it so easy to share from any post on my site)
• Sumome (love the simple popup with a smart sense)
• Medium (Honestly, where do I start? just beautiful work.)
• Vimeo (The best looking video and embedding tools)
• And of course the entire social web…Youtube, Twitter ,Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest and so on….

And this list does include the programs, the apps, the people at say – Apple or Google. If I was going to make a list of all of the essential tools that I use day in and day out to feed my family, to be creative, to learn more about anything in the whole world that I am curious about in mere moments, I would be here for hours. Let me just say that I am grateful to be alive at what I consider the greatest time in history to be creating anything.
(And thank you to Aleksi Tappura via Unsplash for the photo above!)

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How we perceive the world is the most basic thing we do. We let in light and sound and smells. We step out onto the hot sand with our bare feet and feel the heat against our skin. But we are always living at the edge of what is actually there. Our minds have the amazing ability to interrupt the world in ways that, while they may not always be accurate, help us get through the day.

If you look at the picture above, the squares marked A and B are the same color but our perception is corrected by the shadow of the cylinder.

Philosophers throughout time have tried to make sense of these faulty mechanisms that we are each living with, and they have given us clues as to how we can best transcend this crack in the pavement of our humanality. One of my favorites is Schopenhauer.

In The World As Will And Representation he says that we can suspend our desires (our willing), for brief moments through aesthetic contemplation. By considering what is beautiful about something, or by contemplating the nature of something, such a transition is possible. We can move: “…from the common knowledge of particular things to knowledge of the idea…” And in these moments we can no longer “…separate the perceiver from the perception.”

So for me it does not matter that our perception is faulty. It still allows for this incredible transition from the knowledge of things, to the knowledge of the idea. And when we get a glimpse of this knowledge, we feel a sense of renewed purpose. We feel a sense that we are not just individuals, but part of a continuum. A deep and integral part of something mysterious that we can only partailly explain by means our our limited tools of perception.

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We are all looking for shortcuts. Hacks. Things that will make a huge difference for a small outpouring of resources. But the simple truth in almost every endeavor is that if we begin with the best ingredients, we will get the best outcome.

It seems like such a simple idea to even propose. But we waste so much time in pursuit of the trick or the tip, trying to make the mediocre amazing. But in the end it will almost always wind up being faster, cheaper, and better, if we would make the prime ingredient our priority.

Yes, necessity is the mother of invention and many times placing constraints on our creativity will yield outsized results, but I am talking about the raw ingredients. By using the ripest fruit it will not matter what kind of knife or blender you are using. Putting an amazing singer in front of a cheap microphone will have little bearing on the impact of their performance for the listener. The examples are endless.

How much better off would we be if we concentrated all of our efforts on finding and using the best ingredients? How much more could we accomplish just by the nature of this one simple choice.

And once we have done this, then we can go after the next weakest link in our chain. Better knives or microphones. But until we have mastered the art of sourcing this element, we are squandering our potential.

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Inside each of us lives a voice, a very calm and quiet voice. And from time to time, when we still ourselves long enough to listen, we can hear the voice. But on most days the voice is drowned out by any number of louder voices. The voice of discontent. The voice of reason. The voice of dogma. The voice of knowledge. And all of the other myriad voices that fill our heads, each with their own outsized megaphone.

But all of these other, louder voices are under our control. We can silence them at will. The quiet voice though, is outside of our control. It will not be silenced. When all of the other voices have faded, we can hear it speak, and it does so with clarity and purpose. It does not speak in riddles or of falsehoods. It simply speaks, megaphoneless, waiting for us to discover the capacity to hear it.

So we must be constantly pruning the weedlike voices that, if left unattended, will grow to cover the one single flower that we are in search of.

So how do we discover this capacity? How do we prune the louder weedy voices? Honestly? It’s something I am still working on. But I know that activities like writing, walking, and swimming help me. I know that spending time in the wilderness always brings me closer. I know that by learning to practice gratitude and mindfulness, the other voices settle and I begin to listen.

So how do we discover the capacity? We find the things that work for us and allow the distractions to fade away, and when the clarity of the quiet voice resonates, we get to listen.

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One of the things that we humans are very uncomfortable with is uncertainty. We will go far out of our way to try and control situations so that we don’t have to face that uncomfortable feeling of not knowing what is coming next. But something is always coming next. So we practice the idea of focusing on what we can control. Our reactions to the external. How we perceive what the situation and see it for what it really is, and not what we hope it will be. Well tonight, I found a great way to practice this art in the most unlikely of places. A bubble bath.

I have a five year old daughter who loves to give people makeovers. So tonight when she asked me if I wanted a bubble makeover, I said sure. But these games have rules. She asked me to sit right at the edge of the tub and lean in and promise not to open my eyes until she was done. So I did.

And then she proceeded to take the bubbles from the bath and put them all over my head and every part of my face. And with my eyes closed I had no idea what was coming next. I could smell the scent of the bath and I could hear the tiny bubbles breaking apart as she ran her hands through the mountain of bubbles and scooped them up, but I could not see them coming. And each time a handful of bubbles landed on my face, my nervous system would react violently. So I practiced breathing. And eventually I was able to react less and accept more. Even when she covered my nose and mouth, I just breathed slower and let the bubbles go in and out and in and out. By the end I was meditative.

I wish I practiced these kinds of things more often. Opportunities like this surround us. We just don’t always take the time to see them. To use them as practice. To feel what it’s like to know that something is coming and when it arrives, we will react less, and accept more.

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When we make something with our own hands and we take the time to do it right, magic happens. It doesn’t matter what the thing itself is.

It could be a chair that you are making out of wood. Or a recipe that you have been wanting to try that requires a commitment of time and a collection of hard to gather ingredients. Or lines of code that bring together the knowledge of many different domains that few outside of your circle understand. But here is the amazing part, the end result does not have to be all that great.

Maybe the chair is a little wobbly. Maybe the meal wasn’t what we hoped or imagined. Maybe the code isn’t as succinct as we would like it to be. But the process still evokes the feeling that we crave. The pride of craftsmanship.

The ageless wonder of creation. The gift in the doing. By getting our hands dirty we embolden our sense of self, we grow. We dance.

We take disparate elements and using whatever alchemy we posses, we bring something new into the world. The form may have existed, a chair, a meal, an app. But not our chair. Our meal. Our app.

The things we craft are imbued with little pieces of us. And the relationship is reciprocal. We are changed in some way, large or small, by all that we craft.

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