adapting

It Takes A Long Time To Change

August 19, 2024

What you are experiencing today is just the aggregate of all the days and experiences you have had up until this moment. Your body is a recorder for every experience, no matter how minute, so nothing is lost. You might think you can avoid, neutralize, or forget the ones you are not sure what to do with, but you have assimilated all of them in some way. You are just a container for all the things that have happened and how you have metabolized them. This might make you feel helpless, but nothing ... Keep reading

The Decentralization of Everything

April 12, 2020

One more thing this pandemic and the resultant changes in our lives have achieved is to help us loosen our grip on many things we have held tightly. Many are shaken at the fragility of our existence and how quickly our lives can change. Many of our modern conveniences have been taken from us or have been significantly restricted. We cannot gather together or freely walk into a store. We are being forced to practice surrender in that we cannot just compulsively attain comfort and convenience – ... Keep reading

Mining Something from These Waiting Periods

April 5, 2020

Waiting periods are uniquely unsettling. It seems the whole world is currently waiting around for things to “go back to normal.” There is only speculation about when this all might end. None of us really knows. For people who value a sense of control, that can be rather unsettling. Maybe this is our new normal. It seems to be, at least for a time. What’s problematic is that we believe we deserve to have ... Keep reading

I’ve Stopped Trying To Be Happy

January 27, 2019

I have stopped trying to be happy. For a while, I thought it might be possible to be happy, but now I believe something different. There was a point three years ago when my grandmother died and I realized the rest of my life was going to be a series of losses leading up to my own death. Then my family and I lost a few more people before their time and a series of other unfortunate events ensued. It was the most difficult time of my life (still is), but I have also found a lot of meaning in it. ... Keep reading

Flex Your Resilience Muscle

April 21, 2018

There are two kinds of people in the world: people who display resilience and people who do not. The thing is you can be one or the other at any given moment. The difference between someone who is resilient and someone who is not is that one displays resilience and the other does not. 🙂 Faced with a challenge, the resilient one pushes herself across the threshold into the unknown. It’s like jumping out of an airplane. Either you launch yourself out or you don’t.

Take addiction for example. ... Keep reading

Continual Rebirths

April 18, 2018

Life done well is the continual process of reinventing yourself. Sometimes this happens in a sad way – as in a mid-life crisis: finding a new wife, a new life and maybe a new car. Sometimes people just take on a new outward appearance. Your outward appearance can be a reflection of an internal process, but recreating yourself is more than just changing how you look. It is undergoing real and thorough transformation. Some people age, but do not really grow. They stay rigidly attached to “the ... Keep reading

Creating Something Beautiful: The Synthesis of Our Pain

January 24, 2018

Creativity is the only thing. We all enter these states of confusion, disrepair and darkness at times. These can be particularly distressing if you don’t know what they’re about – what you can mine from them or what their meaning is in your life. But the secret is in the sauce: making sense of and meaning of your brokendownness. It’s about what beauty you can make from the ugliness, the despair. All beauty emerges from darkness. What else is life about?

I often say the only thing that ... Keep reading

Harnessing the Power of Your ADHD

April 28, 2017

We tend to think of problems with focus and attention as impairments in brain functioning. Forgetting things, losing things and not being able to focus on the task at hand are all problematic, but it is important to understand what is actually going on in our ADHD brains and how we can use them optimally. It is not that we are incapable of focus; we may just need to put in a little extra effort to be able to harness all our brains are capable of doing. The ADHD brain is actually moving too ... Keep reading