“Whatever your Comfort Zone consists of, you pay a huge price for it. Life provides endless possibilities, but along with them comes pain. If you can’t tolerate pain, you can’t be fully alive. There are many different examples of this. If you’re shy and avoid people, then you lose the vitality that comes with a sense of community. If you’re creative but can’t tolerate criticism, then you avoid selling your ideas to the marketplace. If you’re a leader but you can’t confront people, no one will follow you. The Comfort Zone is supposed to keep your life safe, but what it really does is keep your life small.”
-Phil Stutz & Barry Michels, from their book The Tools
Nice photo here, of me FINALLY passing my dissertation defense. Ed.D., here we come! Should be official by the end of September.
Included in this photo are my three faculty advisors, whom I appreciate very much. They strove to help me make the best, most professional, acceptable, stellar work possible.
I cannot quantify the hours, days, weeks, months, years of time, I put into this doctorate degree. Technically it was about 3.5 years. But the real time and effort is not quantifiable.
One interesting thing, is that during the process over these years, I could not let myself imagine this day, because it was too painful to imagine while I still had so much work to do. I had to stay Present in the work to keep my motivation. Essentially, not really lifting my head up, but keeping the head to the grindstone until the work was done. Otherwise I was afraid of becoming lazy and unmotivated with the weight of all the work that remained.
This video doesn’t do justice to this set of thoughts and feelings I have. But it is a little hard to unravel, I will try a little here:
I write, speak and think a lot about meaning. Creating meaning, living meaningfully. Experiencing meaning. The reason why is because I’ve felt and experienced the opposite, which is a dangerous place to be because without meaning it is difficult to come up with a good reason to stay in this life.
I love this quote: “it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.” – Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning.
Somehow, meaning is tied up in this, in a sort of giving, sacrificing. We are all temporary. Like beautiful pups or tiny plant shoots that spring in the beginning of our lives, we are full of all kinds of potential, time, vigor. Through life, time, and all that, we expend, transmute and propagate energy. We are energy conduits, channels. But every conduit in reality that humans use, endures weathering with usage and time. There is another beautiful quote which I love to try to remember: “We have only the present moment, sparkling like a star in our hands — and melting like a snowflake.” – Marie Beynon Lyons Ray.
When I think of that quote, I think of the snowflake like a burning star in our hand. Alive it once was. Alive it began, full of potential, life, energy. And then it expends these things, giving beauty, giving heat and warmth. Very likely, giving meaning to the observer. In this expulsion and giving, sacrificing of energy, of life, of meaning itself, it creates meaning in whoever or whatever is lucky and blessed to experience these things.
It gives its breath. It gives its mind. It gives its heart, its warmth, its focus, its attention, its Presence, and burns into that palm. And in that experience is beauty, warmth, wonder, tears, love. Meaning.
Is that star asking for anything??? WELL? IS IT??? If you think so, go ahead and tell it that. Tell that star, burning itself to death, but in that process exuding brilliance, light and practicing love of life, that it is asking for something. Maybe it is. Maybe it wants connection. Maybe it wants your attention. Your presence. Your focus. Your kiss.
That is my intro to this video, which comes off slightly different than this intro, but which is trying to get at the same thing, I think.
No matter where you are. Or what is going on. Regardless of the impacts of the past, the future can be very unpredictable.
No matter what we think is going to happen, or how we believe things will turn out, we don’t consciously know it all. We don’t know the details. And so often, wild, crazy things have entered into Life to be a part of reality.
Keep positive. Keep open. And definitely, please, stay real.
Keeping positive doesn’t mean denying the truth of the moment. Positivity that can spark change is about accepting the truth of the moment, being a “Yes” to it, with humility, love, connection, and optimism. Imagine the number of people who have done the worst things, and then turned their lives around. Imagine the many miracles people have experienced with seemingly no rhyme or reason, but which have been saving graces in their lives?
Keep positive my friends. Real to your self, your core, your Soul. And yet, positive. Loving. Accepting. Forgiving. Loving. Loving. Loving.
Referring to Pablo Picasso’s quote “I do not seek. I find” – and how the concept helps me perceive and appreciate the beauty of what is already here, and trying to reduce the ‘chase’.
When I chase certain things, they can be like forms and shapes in a cloud far away – as I get nearer the form disappears and what I thought was there turns out to be an illusion. Instead of chasing / seeking, we can ‘find’ what is here right in front of us, or beside us and around us. Instead of pursuing far away, we can open our senses and experience what we have been brought together with that exist with us right here.
For all our goals and aspirations, sometimes we just feel or think we have done all we could do. Maybe you have. It doesn’t mean the goal or aspiration won’t crystallize. Maybe it just requires the right timing – a timing you may not be aware of, sort of like celestial gears of a universal clock moving along, till at some point, click! The right thing has clicked into the right place, simply because the time required has finally transpired.
Like a fruit tree, or a cannabis plant. We may want the “fruit” of this plant, but we can’t force it to give fruit right after we plant it. Sometimes you have given all the water and light and nutrients it needs, and all that is left to give, is time.
Short video from Meg LeFauve, writer/director for Pixar Animation Studios. Here she seamlessly weaves together faith, determination, belief, vulnerability, courage through fear, and other values, talking about her career.
In other words, act responsibly with the power you wield. This is your chance to perpetuate harmony, or to cause disharmony, in your life. Life will reciprocate to you harmony or disharmony, based on how you handle the power you wield.
