SUMMER

Summer reading is one of life’s great pleasures. I remember the stack of books my parents had for me the year between 5th and 6th grade. Most of them classics. (Some not) I am sure I complained about it very loudly at the time. But looking back I don’t remember much of that summer, other than the stack of books in my room and the time stretching out forever as I read them.

My son Wyatt is now 11 and has just completed 6th grade. He reads all the time. Some classics.  (Some not)  But a few months ago his martial arts instructor Mr. Chat suggested that we read The Talent Code. So we both read it. It was one of those books that changed the way I viewed the world (again) and I loved being able to talk to Wyatt about it.

He doesn’t read a lot of non-fiction and since I have been on a hard core non-fiction kick lately, I decided that there were a few books that might just alter his worldview a little bit. And if not now, then maybe when he looks back from some summer far in the future, he will have a sense of what I thought was important for him to learn and remember the days when time stretched out forever and words never stopped.

I have included links to Amazon to purchase if you wish (FYI – These are affiliate links so I get a few cents if you buy from here) and I have included links to the book trailers for those who are visually inclined. All 3 authors have also spoken at Google so I have included links to their talks as well.

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MASTERY

By Robert Greene

This is a book I read last year and it felt like I was reading something that was written just for me. I find that when an author is at the peak of their craft that each word seems be just the right word and the pacing and the content seem to be just the thing that I am supposed to be reading/learning right at that very moment. Sometimes it is because there is a lesson I need to learn and other times it is simply inherent in the text and the voice of the author. This one may be both.

The idea put forth here is that there is a common path to mastery of any subject and you can practice it. It may not be easy and it may not be what you think it is/will be, but the path is laid out here in very clear language. Robert has studied the lives of masters, ranging from boxing coach Freddie Roach to Benjamin Franklin.

There are so many reasons that I think this one is good for my son but the idea of dedicating yourself to excellence in a craft is/has/will be an important ideal to strive for. Here it is on Amazon.

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THE RISE OF SUPERMAN

DECODING THE SCIENCE OF ULTIMATE HUMAN PERFORMANCE

By: Steven Kolter

I read this book earlier this year and loved, loved, loved it. For those of you who do not know, I grew up on a bike. I was an early adopter of flatland tricks and halfpipe building (even though I never got that good on a ramp). So when I learned about this book, I knew I would love it. He tackles the idea of the flow state through he lens of extreme sports.

The idea is that in the last 20 years there has been a huge shift in what is possible for humans to accomplish and we are getting better all the time at learning how to understand why.

The book is also able to break down the parts of the flow state, including the ones that no one really talks about that much – the crash afterwards and how it is as important to the process as the rest (and just as dangerous).

One of my favorites from this one is the story of Danny Way. Also worth a watch is the documentary of his jump over the Great Wall Of China. You can learn more about the film here or watch it on Netflix.

The biggest reason I think this is a solid read for my son it that it gives some insight in the science of what goes on in the body when it is pushed to its limits. And it will  give him a glimpse of what is possible. (As if youtube hasn’t already… I’m looking at you Jessie La Flair). Here it is on Amazon.

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THE OBSTACLE IS THE WAY

By: Ryan Holiday

This is the book I am reading right now. I love Ryan’s blog and his previous work but this seems like the kind of book he is meant to write. You can tell how much he has studied the ideas and principles from history but he has a way of making them available to the moment we are living in.

This is the book I think he will carry with him longer than the others because this a book that I know I personally will be returning to often. The title nearly says it all but so often in life we do not look at obstacles as part of the path, we try everything in our power to ignore them – many times at our own peril.

This book is a great reminder that the way forward is not to ignore the problem, but to embrace it for what it is and use it to our advantage. And this is a lesson that a book can not teach but can give you comfort to know that you are not alone on the journey. Here is is on Amazon.

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

 

That’s my son’s school project up there. He wanted to recreate the Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang. So we ordered a lego mold and bought some clay and he got to work.

One of the most amazing things about the Army is that each soldier is different. And my son wanted to honor that, so he took his time and carved a different face on each one. And different armor. Some went headless. Over 60 tiny soldiers in all! And seeing him deep in the process of creation got me to thinking about what it means to create.

CREATING

To paraphrase Darwin: Creativity comes in endless forms most beautiful. Life is creative. We are beings that create. Out of the chaos we assemble some humble arrangement from the constant motion and swirl of the multitudinous building blocks of the universe. We tremble at the power that is ours, but when we are brave and we reach out and grab a tiny bit of that universal clay and begin to mold it, something magical happens.

WHAT DO YOU CREATE?

What does that even mean? Create? Does it mean that if you are not actively engaged in the creation of some kind of pure art that this does not apply to you?

Of course not. We all create things everyday. We are the architects of our own reality. If you look deep into the inner workings of the world as both science and religion have tried to do, a picture of the universe arises that is at once very simple and beautiful and yet frightening and chaotic. We create the world that surrounds us through the choices we make. We create each and every day by stepping out into that next moment and spreading our being far across the field of existence where it mingles with all of the other potentiality that lies there.

This is what life is. Creation. This is what life does. Create. This is how life imagines itself. Through creative play.

It takes creativity to learn how to become ourselves. It takes creativity to remember who we are. So what do you create is a question laced with innumerable possibilities and one that I hope touches a place deep inside of you and resonates outward.

WHAT DO YOU CREATE?

A home? A garden? Good people? Photographs? A business? A table? A website? A book? A shirt? A connection? A song? A boat? An engine? A scene? A hybrid? AI? Energy? Love?

I like to think of myself as creating any number of things. Creating is the lens through which I view the world and its workings. Some days I am better at constructing than others. Some days I am focused and true with my aim. Other days I wander without direction and wonder if what I have created has any value at all. Some days I am sure of myself and some days I am not.

What I am sure of is that only in the process of creating will we find purpose and meaning. We do not find meaning in the idleness of consumption. Yes, we all need downtime and rest and there are many ways that we can spend that time and none is better or worse than another but when we find ourselves too comfortable, the motor running idle for too long, we stagnate. We lose that sense of becoming, we either feel as though we already are or we will never be.

But we neither already are or will never be. We simply are. Everything that you need to create is present within you right now. Whatever clay you feel the need to shape can be acquired. But the creative part, that sacred part that lies within your core/center/heart and resonates beyond your own self is there waiting for you right now in this moment. So breathe and exhale. Close your eyes and allow the full expression of your true nature.

It is all too easy to let the external forces of the world that we imagine are holding us back to become a wall that separates us from our creative genius. But that wall is only an illusion. It is only a construct of our unwillingness to do the work that matters.

And no one outside of ourselves can tell us what that work is. Each of us is called to walk our own path and use our own special and unique talents that are a wild mixture of everything we have ever known or experienced all bundled up and waiting to be expressed.

WHAT WILL YOU CREATE?

First, at the very core of your being, you must listen to the voice that already knows what you want to create. One of the things at the top of my list is good people. I want to teach my children to be good people of the world. Kind and giving. Fun and loving. And I try to do that by example. Yet there are days when I do not live up to the creator I wish to be. Creation is a messy business. But I know that each day is another chance to do better and so I reach back out into the void and summon all that I know is within me and jump off the cliff again and develop my wings.

TOOLS

I am creating these words through an amazing array of tools that have been created by others over time and now these creations are allowing me to reach out over any number of miles and create a feeling inside of you. What am I using to create? Language, letters and symbols. My hands, a keyboard and a computer. Zeros and ones. WordPress. Email. Facebook. Twitter. The Internet. Your eyes and our imagination.

We are creating this experience together. There is a commonality to the world that can not be overstated. We are creating this together. This is the eternal dance of creation – that you and I will create together the world that we inhabit. Still, we view ourselves as separate beings living in separate houses. But without each other we would have nothing. Without community there would be no continuation. We all create for any number of reasons, but they all involve a deep and profound realization of our connectedness.

When we share something that we have created with another human being there is a connection that goes beyond the idea or thing that we have shared. There is a connection that reminds us that we are not alone. We are on this journey together and we all have a place. And we all have a purpose.

WHAT WILL YOU CREATE?

Imagine you are someone who makes clothes. What are you creating? Are you only creating a pair of pants? Or are you creating confidence in the person who wears them?
Or maybe your are a teacher. Are you creating tests and quizzes or are you creating wonder and possibilities?

We are not all the same. We all come from different places and have different gifts to offer, but we all share the same building blocks of creation. We all have the same capabilities to create amazing things that have never been witnessed before.

We are always creating something, whether we are aware of it or not. The ripples flow in all directions. But in order to create what is authentically ours, it takes conscious effort and a willing heart. It takes a fearless leap off of a cliff, knowing that we have the power to create wings on the way down.

 

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

– George Orwell, 1984

 

I have always believed in the power of words. I have spent countless hours carefully choosing the right words to use. In lyrics. In novels. I love people who use words creatively. (See Tom Robbins) I love people who use words I do not understand. ( See Cormac McCarthy) But as much as I love words, I am not always as careful with my choices when it comes to speaking.

Quite simply – I have said some really dumbass things.

Many times I have said them to the people I care about most in the world. And on top of that, I still have to fight my own  negative self talk.

So in an effort to improve this part of my life, I have been trying to talk less and listen more. Sounds easy enough –  but very hard to practice. And in my quest to listen to the way people voice their ideas in print or in speech, I keep hearing one word come up a lot. Failure.

When I started working on the list of ideas for this site, one of the Rules of the Road I came up with early on was: There is no failure, only feedback. I still think this is true. And since I have been hearing the word failure a lot, I got to wondering how it came to be that we use that word so much in our culture. So of course I headed over to Google. The Ngram viewer to be specific.

Ngram is a fascinating tool. With it, you are able to create a graph of how many times a word or phrase has occurred in a selection of books over a chosen amount of time. You can learn more about it here.

I can’t speak at all to how accurate it actually is and this obviously doesn’t include how often people are using the word while speaking, but I do think it can show some interesting data and the two curves below amazed me.

I could not have imagined it would look this clear. All I did was simply put in the two words that I was interested in and mapped their usage over the longest amount of time it would allow me to select.

Failure and Success. Here is the result:

What I thought was really inspiring was the curve at the end. It’s also a little strange. It appears that as a culture we are starting to use the word success more and the word failure less and the crossover happens almost exactly at 1984. Weird.

But this is what I am trying to do for myself. Trying to reverse the trend. For my own self talk I am focusing on words like success. I am trying to think more in terms of feedback than failure.

Maybe this is a little thing. Maybe the word failure doesn’t bother other people as much as it does me. But I believe that words can have a strange voodoo about them. And research backs this up. We know that words can change your brain.  So if I can use positive words more, and negative words less, then I think my actions will change too.

Those around me will hear less negativity. They will hear more positive thoughts and it will be those ideas that enter the collective stream of our imagination.

This does not mean that things will not be hard or that I will not have to deal with crappy people or that I will not, well….fail. But the meaning I give those experiences through the power of choice and the story I tell myself and others through the power of words will be different. Hopefully, more successful.

With gratitude,

“You’re always you, and that don’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

-Neil Gaiman

 

Change is hard. Change is scary. Change is constant.

CHANGE IS HOW WE LEARN WHO WE ARE

The cute little lizard you see up there belongs to my son. Her name is Pippin. Sometimes she has a hard time shedding her old skin and when it gets to the point that we know it will hurt her to keep it on, we do our best to help her out and take it off.

Life is like that. When we see change as hard or scary, life knows that we are stuck and the old skin needs to come off, so it helps us out.

Change does not have to be hard. Change does not have to be scary. But change will always be constant.

CHANGE IS HOW WE REMEMBER WHO WE ARE

Suddenly, surprisingly, automagicly, when the old skin is gone, Pippin looks just like the old Pippin we knew and loved and yet she is different somehow, she has a bit more spring in her step and she moves with a swagger we have never seen before.

We are like that too. When the old skin is gone, we look like newer, better versions of who we really are and we shine a little brighter.

The old mask has been removed and until the layers of that mask are ready to come off, we can look in the mirror and smile and know that right now we are seeing the very person we are supposed to be and when the time is right we will shed this skin too and become who we are meant to be again.

CHANGE IS HOW WE KNOW WHO WE ARE

(Or What Would I Do If It Was The Last Thing I Did)

I wish I had been writing more over the last 6 months. I wish that I could recall with more clarity exactly how I felt when the doctor called and told me that the very small remote possibility we had talked about was indeed my fate. I wish I didn’t have a brain tumor.

Lots of wishes. But if wishes were horses… so as I have said recently… I am moving from the wish to the willing. Today, I am willing to write 1000 words. Today, I am willing to get up and live my life with the understanding that I do have a brain tumor.

For those of you who may not know, it has been just over six months since I found out that I have a small (1 cm ) acoustic neurmoa inside my IAC (inner auditory canal ) on the right side. I am about to have a follow up MRI to see if there has been any change. Is it the same size? Bigger? Smaller? What has my little friend been up to? We shall see.

But setting aside all of the things I do not remember, I did have a moment of clear thought about one thing. I remember thinking that I could die. Holy #$%&, this could kill me. Even just going in to have the MRI, I was freaking out about the kind of contrast agent (gadolinium) that they had to inject into my bloodstream to be able to get a clear scan. I had to sign a waiver saying that I understood the odds of dying from the injection were roughly 1 in 200,000. (.000005%) Pretty slim chances of anything happening really. But about 3,000 people in the US a year are diagnosed with an acoustic neuroma so with around 313 million people my odds there were 1 in 100,000ish (or.000009%) and that happened. So anything is possible.

Here are some other things I googled:

Odds of winning the lottery: 1 in 175 million
Odds of being killed by a shark : 1 in 3.7 million
Odds of a dying from the flu: 1 in 63

Like I said I was freaking out. But looking at those numbers now, I think maybe we should all spend more money on our getting our health dialed in and less money on lottery tickets.

But honestly, I was thinking about the fact that I might die. I began to think about the idea of having brain surgery. I started thinking that I could die in the operating room. (I think there is a 2-5% risk there?).

And still, I constantly have the Mark Twain quote running around my head….There are lies. damned lies, and statistics….so who knows what our chances are of anything really?

What I am really saying is I was scared.

And that brought me around to considering the idea that this could actually be my last year on earth and I thought about what I would do if it was the last thing I did. And what came to me wasn’t some long bucket list. It wasn’t some trip or experience. It was a gift. It was my ideas about life and all of the things that I can’t yet express to a 5 year old girl. Or an 11 year old boy. At least not in any real terms that they would understand.

Now maybe all of this sounds very irrational. After all, many people have had brain surgery and they are doing all right. I have spoken with some of them. But today I was reminded that it is never the things that we can prepare for that change our lives forever.

We have a friend of our family who just gave birth to a beautiful baby boy a few weeks ago and only a few days later she suffered a brain aneurism and went into a coma. She passed away a few days ago. My heart broke when I first hear the story and my whole being hurts for their family right now. Holy #$%&. YOU NEVER KNOW.

Yes, I had to allow myself to think that that this could kill me as a way to cope. Yes, I will die someday. But it could be for another reason entirely. We never know. But I can say that finding out about the tumor only accelerated my thinking about what I would leaved behind for my children. And then I remembered something Will Durant phrased very clearly that I have carried with me ever since I first read it:

“If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children.”

I realized that the idea I had stored in Evernote over the last year or so could become that thing for me. That is why I sat down and wrote the Rules of the Road. I wanted to give my children a roadmap to help them navigate the chaos of the world. A map to follow when they need it and a way to help them how to build their own roads when the way is not clear. A torch that they can pick up and carry with them when the unseen future is darker than they ever thought it could be. A foundation to build on and pass onto the next generation that will follow. Inspiration to encourage them to create anything that they can imagine.

Yes, I am very aware that they have their own wills and their own destinies to explore. And I think that each one of us already has everything we need stored inside the cells of our being , but we also all need reminders from time to time and if I can share just a little bit of what I have learned on my own journey and it reminds them of what they already know deep down and it allows them to know that I struggled too and we are all connected and here is what got me through the tough times, that these were the things that helped me see my own true self, then it will be an endeavor worth everything I can put into it.

But as I have been working on DTR it has also struck me that I might live longer than a year, and I have realized that I could use this same idea in the here and now to inspire others to create the amazing things that are as yet unborn. Unbuilt. Undreamed.

So this year I am dedicating myself to the craft of storytelling. My own and others. And in that spirit, I am beginning to develop a podcast to be able share the inspiring stories of others. I hope the stories will inspire us all to live our lives now and not wait.

To dream it and to do it.

Our time here is short and every moment is precious. Every inhale and every exhale. Every smile and every tear. We can all start with one small thing. We can all take one small step. Write one thing down. That’s how DTR was born. I wrote down an idea and now it is in the stages of becoming. What can you do today that will put you one step further along the road you have been dreaming about? It doesn’t need to be perfect. I am learning to strive for awareness not perfection. So in the new year may we all go, do, be. And then become.

Good luck.

With gratitude,