Tag: flow

The Freedom Of Possibility

The Freedom Of Possibility

It was one of the stupidest decisions I’ve ever made.

Driving home from a late night out in the big city with a few friends. In front of me was a wide open stretch of highway which for some unknown reason inspired me to wonder just how fast my car could actually go. Fueled by a potentially lethal combination of teenage invincibility and alcohol, I pressed the pedal as hard as I could just to see exactly how fast my ’73 Toyota could go.

My experiment was cut short by a rather unsettling noise coming from the rear tires. Apparently the high rate of speed I was traveling at created a great deal of heat causing the retreads on my tires to separate from the tires, which I discovered after stopping to see if I could find where the noise was coming from. I had no idea that was even possible until I held a piece of a tire in my hand. After that experience, I had no intention of ever finding out exactly how fast that car could go.

Things certainly could have easily turned out much differently.

This far more mature and long-sober version of me often ponders a different sort of experiment. What would the outcome be if I pushed myself to my limits. Like, if I gave life all I had to give, Continue reading “The Freedom Of Possibility” →

The Gift Of Spiritual Impatience

The Gift Of Spiritual Impatience

That was the last of them.

The third box of books was loaded into the car, the next stop was the barn behind the old church, the storage point for donated books for their annual used book sale later in the year. 

Perhaps it’s an age thing, but I’ve been downsizing many segments of my life of late. The stuff I’ve collected over a lifetime which I no longer want to hold on to. Stuff. Expectations.

Today, it was the books’ turn to go. 

As I loaded the boxes, I realized that the vast majority of them were books I never fully read, as indicated by the number of bookmarks I found lodged into the first third of the pages of many of them. I guess the enthusiasm which motivated me to initially purchase them greatly waned as I actually started to read them. With so many of these books being not fully read, I realized there was one thing each of these unread books had in common.

Me.

I’ve had an interesting relationship with books. My now-almost-empty bookshelf was filled with the books of a seeker; non-fiction, self-help, self-improvement, spiritual, psychological, and growth-oriented themes. I bought each one for a specific reason, yet at some point early in these books I’d become a bit disillusioned and put them down only to then pick up the next book I had also excitedly purchased, only to abandon it early on just like the others before it. 

Giving up on a bad book seems logical, but when you give up on all the books the books aren’t the problem. 

As someone who has been a lifelong seeker, I was hoping each of these books would bring me closer to that which I really wasn’t sure I was hoping to find. I knew I was looking for something and I would grow increasingly impatient the deeper I got into these books when I felt it was going to be just another dead end on my spiritual journey. 

Each book was a tangent of sorts, a tangent wrapped in the elevated expectation that THIS book was the one which would deliver me the wisdom I demanded to learn. No pressure, right?

One thing I learned on my meandering journey of life is my impatience consistently created elevated levels of frustration, especially towards myself. The pressure of not finding what I wasn’t Continue reading “The Gift Of Spiritual Impatience” →

What Is Forced In Life Will Ultimately Fail

What Is Forced In Life Will Ultimately Fail

I remember my brother’s reaction to my work.

He took my hammer and threw it as far as he could into the distance. His way of making sure I wouldn’t inflict any more damage to the wood I was working with.

Who knew there’d be a life lesson in that?

My brother Steve was one of several extremely talented woodworkers we had in the family, and on this day his patience for my lack of such talent had finally worn to the point where removing the hammer from my hand and throwing it was, in his mind, the best course of action.

No words were necessary nor exchanged.

Steve was like my Uncle Bob. A true craftsman who could build anything out of wood. Seemingly effortlessly, while my endless efforts and best intentions could never come close to replicating his results.

Despite my lack of talent, I’ve always been fascinated with woodworking. Especially when it comes to joinery. The ability to join two different pieces of wood together both structurally and aesthetically was an Uncle Bob specialty. Dovetails, mortise and tenons joints pinned with square pegs in round holes…whatever was needed for the application, his results were flawless.

One particular project I was able to observe (and not actively participate in) required the joining two boards of a table top. As their grains ran perpendicular to each other, the preferred method was to create a groove for the two pieces to interlock with, and to then pin the two pieces together at their intersection. As the round holes were drilled, the square pegs were being prepared. Once properly aligned, the square pegs were forcefully driven into the round holes to hold everything in place.

Forcing those square pegs into those round holes created the friction, resistance, and tension which held both boards together.

Friction, resistance, and tension are quite beneficial when it comes to holding wooden things together.

But is it any way to hold a life together?

I have had situations in my life when I’ve forced my square peg self into round holes that I knew really weren’t for me. In forcing myself in, it created a friction, resistance, and tension which painfully held things together, things which were never intended to be held together in the first place. And with that comes the tendency to try and rationalize and justify why forcing the wrong thing is better than waiting alone for the right thing. The mind will attempt to override the wisdom of our intuition, but ultimately what is forced in life will eventually fail under the pressures of the friction, resistance, and tension inherent with any misaligned creation. Continue reading “What Is Forced In Life Will Ultimately Fail” →

The Surprising Benefits of Thinking Like Water

The Surprising Benefits of Thinking Like Water

I was exhausted. I really wasn’t fully prepared for this 5K trail run. Unlike road running, trails offer potential danger in every stride. The extensive network of exposed tree roots and randomly placed stones, all covered with leaves still wet from the heavy rains from the night before, made a challenging course that much more challenging.

Running, for me, is equal parts physical and mental. Sometimes the body is willing but the mind works to convince it that it’s not. On this particular day my mind, too, was racing. The wet, uneven terrain gave it lots to talk to me about. Lots of inner resistance to work through.

The week prior I had hiked this particular preserve just to get more familiar with the trail. On that hike I unexpectedly came upon a small waterfall, fed from the gentle stream behind it. As I stood on the small wooden bridge the water continued to pass under me and then on down stream, gravity taking the water to wherever it was going to go, it’s flow and path greatly influenced by the obstacles it found on the way.

You can learn a lot from water.

The water and the runner shared something in common. We both met resistance on our paths. But the type of resistance we each faced was dramatically different.

Unlike me, the water wasn’t working against itself.

Water never works against itself. Any resistance water faces is always external, always outside of itself. It’s the stones and branches and boundaries and gravity which determine where the water will go. Water never fearfully looks down stream and worries about where it is going and if it will ever get there. It just goes where it goes, never working against itself.

A stark contrast to my running style, where the mind can greatly influence if I even continue to move forward. Much of my resistance is internal. It’s often me working against me, fearfully looking up a hill and doubting if I’ll be able to run up it without stopping.

How often do we allow our thoughts to work against us? Not just in running up hills but in running our lives? How often does our mind create an inner resistance to our own efforts to keep moving forward, to climb up the hills life can often place before us?

Our greatest resistance is almost always self-inflicted.

When we are not working against ourselves we are better able to work through and around those external obstacles standing between who we are and who we really want to be.

Maybe its time to think like water?

 

Photo by Taylor Leopold on Unsplash