Starting Where You Are

There are many ways to do the right things. Many means to go about accomplishing a certain end. When we seek for help in accomplishing our goals, or in creating a more favorable situation for ourselves, we are faced with a million choices when it comes to  H O W  T O  G E T  T H E R E.

"There" usually being:

• better health
• better living situation
• a more fulfilling career path

Et cetera. There could be a thousand versions of even this list if we're being honest, but here let's just call them General Things to be Better at. That doesn't really work. How about Betterment Goals. I don't like how that sounds either. But this illustrates my point. Words can fail. 

The main focus of whatever journey you take on in getting yourself somewhere better in life, in whatever form "Being Better" would manifest in your imagination, should be 

W H E R E V E R  Y O U  A R E.

 R I G H T  H E R E

R I G H T  N O W.

And this is why many self-betterment guides would start with you listing your own answers to their questions. And yes, I am not here to discount you searching for those guides. In fact, depending on your personality, it might be better to look for more than one "guru" or whatever you want to call it, so that you can curate whatever resonates in your life in particular from many different sources, and make the roadmap you eventually follow your very own.

We like learning from others because we like information already processed and laid out for us to take in. This is easier than having to start from scratch, scrambling to find crumbs that will lead us to the bread, trying to find all the ingredients on our own. This is why we have grocery stores. I think I need to eat soon. I'm getting a little sidetracked.

Anyway, this is not a bad thing. This really does help. What I want to emphasize though, is that we should not be so naive and think that betterment ends in that learning. We take many things in. We make it our own. We share how we made it our own. Maybe more people will find it resonate better. They will take some of it in, just like how we took from others. Then they will make it their own.

Words do not contain the entirety of meaning. Other people can not provide the secrets to your success. Something has to come from you.

And yes, a lot of it relies on luck. But your luck improves when you improve your striving in finding these answers.

So, let me ask you a bunch of questions:

1. Outlook: Do you think you have a positive one? When you think about your day upon waking up in the morning, how do you feel? What causes anxiety in you? What causes joy? Do you notice yourself feeling one more often than the other? Why do you think so? Are you okay with that? (Like I wake up meh most mornings, but I'm cool with it. I think it's just how I am and it's fine) And if you're not, is there anything within your power that you can change?
2. The Good: What's already working out? This is important. What do you like that you don't really want to change in yourself, your living situation, your habits? You don't have to change everything. Maybe you don't even have to change very much. Honestly you don't even have to change at all. Let's be real. Your life your rules.
3. The Bad: But if there are things that aren't working out, maybe take some time to look at them. There are things that don't work out that are too uncomfortable to even acknowledge so we fail to realize that there's something there that we can actually control. But then there are things that we feel we have no power over. For those things, is it possible to tell someone? "Misery loves company" and this isn't just a sadistic urge that humans have for no reason. When we find others with the same problems, we are able to pick each other's brains about possible solutions. There's another one, "Two heads are better than one". Maybe there's something you're not seeing that someone's who's gone through the same thing knows about. That was a long painful sentence to read and I apologize.
4. The Ugly: Let me just talk about that word, Ugly. It has a bad rep. But I love it. I'm part of the niche crowd that uses it with a sense of endearment. Much of my hang-ups in life, I solved by changing my relationship with Ugly. More than my sense of self-worth ceasing to depend on my outward appearance, I see ugly as a sign of progress. Ugly is something that's on its way towards becoming. It's finding one's way. It's not incomplete, it's just in the process, and that's what life is. It's only complete when it ends. And So I Therefore Conclude: Ugliness and Beauty is like Life and Death. Polar opposites that are unalienable from each other. Just like.. well, poles. 

          So. In your life, what's being completed? What's in the middle of the process; something you started but haven't finished? Something you like but isn't "quite there yet"? And maybe, how do we look at it differently? As you being a Real Live Person, in the middle of figuring things out?

So there are questions for today. Maybe we ask them every now and then. This can be a model we use everyday when we meditate in the morning, or this could be just a one time thing. It's a dish I've made from ingredients I've taken from different sources that I have now served to you. Maybe you take something out from it, or maybe you just eat and run, and burn off all of the energy. But that's your process. Make it yours. As for me, I'm done with this one, and hoping to make more in the future.

Now, lunch.

Last Moments of the First Day

New Year's Happiness Guidelines, because I did say the reflecting will come later for me.

Wrote this on my journal. They are not exactly measurable Resolutions in the usual, effective sense but more of a meditation and an emotional compass. There is so much negativity and hung-up-ness that needs shedding, even after years of thinking I was a positive person. Goes to show that it's not about staying happy all the time, but about aiming for wellness, which is to say, you explore your demons and work through them and move on from them, rather than just dousing everything with icing on the surface.

I see myself as more flawed than I've ever seen myself, but at the same time I've never loved myself more.

The Inner Lives of Strangers

A picture I took out my window yesterday while the rain was pouring. I snapped it just as this person was walking by and thought it looked a bit like something off of a Ghibli film.

I enjoy people-watching. And I know many other people who enjoy it too. I think it's natural for people to come into a somewhat voyeuristic trance when doing this, and sort of feel detached from their surroundings, as if they are looking into a glass window. It can be fun to be curious, to wonder about where everyone comes from, how they find the weather, who they love, and if they are happy.

But every so often, there is a risk of this detachment turning into something a bit more cynical, and it's as if we are looking into a glass bowl instead, with puny mindless fish inside. We are tempted to fancy our lives and minds more complex and colorful than theirs, simply because of the context we see them in. I come across posts online that on the surface seem to be helpful and insightful, asking for the reader to keep their eyes off their phones, to rush less and enjoy their surroundings, unlike the zombies in the picture with their eyes glued to their phones (non-verbatim of course). Just because everyone around you is rushing around, or doing common things, doesn't mean you are alone among mindless creatures of passive, mundane existence.

I believe there is a danger to painting with very broad brushes when we look at others in their unguarded moments. Any bitter sentiment stemming from feeling like everybody is dull more likely stems from an issue we have to deal with in ourselves, rather than the actual people around us that trigger these feelings. It reflects our own limited perspective, or perhaps imagination, when it comes to the complexity of life outside of our own immediate awareness.

It can be very helpful to approach thinking about the inner lives of strangers with suspended judgement, and more curiosity instead. Helpful not only for the people in question so that we may be kinder to them, but also, and this is true even if we never even interact with them; to our own peace of mind. Because we then feel less loneliness in being our complicated selves, when we realize that there are so many various interesting lives that we are not living, and we can only witness through being open to others when we interact with them. 

Song Meditation: "Empty Your Hands" by The Weepies

I've been listening to The Weepies since 2009, and because of how consistently great their music is, there is not just a handful that stands out. It's more like their whole discography stands out among most music that I've ever saved on my computer.

I decided to look up the lyrics of one particular song today and found the lyrics so compelling that I decided to write about it. Maybe I should do this more when I come across songs with interesting lyrics.

Empty Your Hands

16 balloons against the blue, 
they're red,they're red like a dream come true 
Sure it was enough to give them to you 
to watch you let them go, let them go 

Empty your hands 
of overheard conversations 
Empty your hands 
static from the big bang 
and dinosaur radio stations 
Empty your hands 
genocides in foreign nations 
Empty your hands and look up 

His eyes are wide and beautiful, 
my own feel dull and old 
They can't recall some buoyancy, 
they’ve had too much to hold, let them go 

Floating past a daytime moon 
transparent as a shell 
Rubies in a well, sixteen apples on a tree 
we never would have seen 
if his fingers weren’t so free 

Our baby learned to run today 
in circles on the grass 
His joyful face it radiates 
These moments go so fast, let them go

*

This song, as I take it, is a picture of a moment, or moments with loved ones*, and the central theme is not attaching oneself to any particular thing in one's mind or in the past, but the beauty and the love that radiates within those precious moments. This becomes increasingly hard to do as we grow older, for we tend to get stuck on our stock of acquired default reactions and impressions to things. Deb and Steve look at the eyes of their child and feel old in comparison, because a child experiences everything as fresh, new, untainted.

The way they go from using "you" in the first verse to the chorus makes me think that they are also wishing this for their child, almost like a parent's prayer, wishing that their child will grow up staying light and free as he is in his present young age.

There may be times in life where thinking and analyzing things have their place, but once every little while, we need to step back and just submit to the present moment in order to enjoy the good things that are abundant in our lives if we only made it a point to take notice. The song beautifully describes the act of letting go of balloons, releasing them to the sky through the eyes of an imaginative child, and this simple act that can even be considered as wasteful if done by accident, becomes almost like magic, and invites metaphors involving apples and rubies.

Let them go, buuuuuuddy..

I don't think they mean to say that we should ignore the bad in the world everyday and stay ignorant of things to be happy, I just think that this song is about zooming in on a moment with a child, having a break from things that weigh us down to enjoy it, for we also will inevitably need to let the good moments go. So instead of holding on to the bad stuff, keeping them with you, letting them get in the way of you enjoying the present like children do, you let go. Like a sponge, you squeeze out all of the muck keeping you heavy. And then you get to soak in every new moment fully, deeply, as if you were new.

*Edit: I forgot to mention that it strikes me that in the story the child mistakenly lets go of the balloons that he was supposed to hold, and instead of seeing this as a bad thing, these awesome adults looked at the beauty of the moment and attributed beautiful accidents to the willingness of a child to let go... and wrote a beautiful song about it.