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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All of the things we learn and discover as we grow up form the core of the people we become. And some of the most basic lessons stay with us for our entire lives. But we would be better off if many of these ideas were challenged more often.

One of the things we do as humans with limited capacity is create heuristics. These are simple mental shortcuts that we use over and over to make sense of the world around us efficiently. But this efficiency comes with a cost. Sometimes we are wrong.

Today I was watching a show on Netflix about a couple who spent their “Honeymoon” in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness for an entire year. On their travels they witness a wounded elk being hunted by a pack of wolves. The heuristic we all jump to is that the elk is doomed to death and that this is just survival of the fittest. But that would be wrong. As the wounded elk comes to the top of a ridge, another elk comes into the frame and stands between his kin and the pack of wolves and fends off the pack. The next morning the two elk are still alive and the wolves are gone.

How many times do we assume the worst and chalk it up the heuristics that have worked for us in the past? Yes, we use heuristics for a reason, the world is simply to complex for us not to be making good use of these shortcuts. But some days we need to question things that have worked for us in the past and be willing to see the best in a situation, even though we may have assumed it could only have been otherwise.

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The first ideas are not always the best, but they are the most important. This is where the spark is. This is where the end result comes from. Even though we may need to weather a tangled maze of a thousand permutations to find what we are after, it is always from this initial burst that dreams are realized.

 It does not matter if it is a does of inspiration that comes from connecting the multitude of seemingly unrelated pieces that we have collected over the course of our lifetime or from a vision board that we created on Pinterest last week.

What matters is that we honor the gift and are grateful for the opportunity to nurture it to fruition. Whatever mountain that stands tall before us did hinder our excitement in the least when we sketched out that first rough idea in some tangible form and we must not let it hinder us as we begin to climb.

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Question: What do you want to be when you grow up?

Answer: Happy.

 

Thank you John Lennon for the reminder that it doesn’t need to be so complicated.

We all have had a hundred other answers for this question but at the top of the list should be this singular word. Doctor? Soccer Player? Writer? Absolutely. But why not make the qualifier the most important ideal of all?

A happy Doctor. Wouldn’t your happiness infect the patients you treat with a genuine sense of wellbeing?

A happy Soccer Player. How many people could you inspire with your spirit – win or lose?

A happy Writer. What would the world be like if the all of the words we read were written by happy people who made us feel alive,  words that made us feel like we could do anything?

Happiness is how we FEEL about our lives while we are doing the things we are doing. Maybe you don’t love your job or you aren’t getting the opportunities you always dreamed of right now, but how are you doing the things in front of you, how are you treating the people beside you?

Maybe being a Lawyer or a Graphic Designer or a Sales Manager isn’t what you thought it would be. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be happy. Happiness is a choice. And each morning when we wake up, we can choose to be the person who says: I grew up to be happy.

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Sometimes we need to stop. Pause. Reset. Each and every moment we are connected we are being drained. Depleted. In the world that we have created we are constantly busy. Our minds are racing. Our hands are fidgeting. We are eagerly awaiting the next whatever is coming. And we are exhausted. But it doesn’t have to be like this.

Remember naptime? I hardly ever slept, but just being forced to slow down I always came back refreshed and new. But I notice now that when I try to slow down my mind only seems capable of racing off as though I were still connected. It is filled with all of the things that I should be doing with time I seem to be “wasting”.

But this time is not wasted. This time is needed to heal. To recover. To rejuvenate. And I have to retrain myself to know this. Retrain myself to play. To wonder.

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Last night I was sitting down to get some writing done and there was a very loud fly buzzing around my head in a wide circular motion, going back and forth from the kitchen to the dining room. I tried to ignore it. It was late at night and everyone was asleep and I didn’t want to disturb them.

Pretty soon I couldn’t take it. I stood up and grabbed a towel and tried to  swat it as quietly as I could. No luck. I turned on the light in the kitchen and then the light in the small hallway that leads to the next room so that I could see better. Still the fly was buzzing around my head and it seemed like it was moving faster and faster. I got frustrated and sat down again, thinking that I could ignore the problem.

That didn’t last that long. I got up again started swatting  in any direction that I could and I wasn’t really worried how loud I was or who it might disturb. The buzzing of the fly felt like it was ten times louder than any noise I was making. No luck. The fly was just too fast. I felt so defeated.

I sat down again. And then it hit me (not the fly-the solution). I stood up and turned out all of the lights but left the laptop open and sat back down. Sure enough the fly landed right on the monitor and I was easily able to wrap it up in the towel and dispose of the noise.

Does any of this sound familiar? Our problems are buzzing around us and we swat as hard as we can and in that moment we don’t care who else it impacts, we just want to get rid of the problem. So we ignore it a little longer. When all the time the easy solution was right in front of us, but we were too focused on the problem to see it.

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