Laundry List Item #37: It is most important to run out of scapegoats.

When I get myself into a pickle, noticing that I am spending my time with people I don't want to spend it with, doing things I actually don't want to do, my first reaction is to think of who to blame; who put me in this situation?

And gradually it dawns on me that I am the one that created this situation, this life. I choose to keep living where I live, to do that work I do, to spend my days how I spend them. My family or friends or government do not lock me into this. I am not bound by anything other than what I choose to be bound by.

This humbling thought is also redemption. It means that I can have a say in my own destiny. 

Running out of scapegoats is freedom, because now I take responsibility for my own life, for how I spend each moment. 

Writing Fling #2: Awareness and Action

The second in a series of pieces I wrote in the midst of turmoil last year.

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Let it out. Open the suitcase. Find out what is in there. You cannot change the contents. They are what they are. Looking brings light to the unknown. Once it is seen and know, then you can decide what to do. Without the light there is only guessing, and bad guessing leads to ignorant action.

Knowing what is there may bring fear, discomfort, pain, joy, laughter. It will bring truth though. And it will set you free.

Because it is the way to live - according to what is real; reality. That is the way to good decision making, aligned action. 

Aligned with what?

With nature, the universe, my body. Integrity is the key world. A cohesive whole. Pure. Making sense. Ringing true. Radiating.

Listening to the conscience is opening the suitcase. Aligned action can be taken once the conscience is understood. But it is not necessitated by it. Acting is different to looking, and takes a different type of courage. The courage to trust what you see and hear. To back yourself. To know that it will be okay if you follow your path.

Okay then...what does following your path mean?

It does not mean safe. It does not mean risk. It means acting within yourself; you will be at peace. A peaceful warrior.

I know it is the action I am struggling with at the moment. Feeling okay with disappointing people. Let them down gently, but let them down if that is the aligned action. Let them feel it. Don't butt in and save them. It is not saving. It is denying. And both will suffer as a result. 

Do the thing that needs to be done.

The full handshake

It is said that you can tell a lot about a person from the way they shake hands. I have to say I agree with this, but not in what is the typically criteria assessment.

I don't judge a person based purely on how firm or insipid their handshake is. For me it is more about how open their hand is - are they able and willing to make full and wholehearted contact with their hand into the hand of another.

One of my managers triggered this chain of thinking within me. Whenever he shook my hand it was as if he formed a dome with his fingers, meaning that only the minimal amount of skin contact was permitted. This summed up my relationship with him as well - there were times when we got close to uncovering something deeper in our relationship, only for him to back down and keep things at a certain distance.

The warmest handshakes I have received usually come from warm and wholehearted people - the type of handshake where I feel my hand being lost and hugged by another hand. Not overpowered, but the feeling of open embrace with nothing to hide.

Correct: I am reading way too much into handshakes. Don't get me started on hugs.

Mindful problem creation

I am reading Antifragile at the moment by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

The book is about systems that actually become stronger through adversity and stress. They thrive and grow from it - the opposite of being fragile (and not to be mistaken with being robust or resilient).

In taking a year off during a difficult period of my life, this is one of the things I have learnt. That through difficultly I actually become better and stronger. There is a lot of common wisdom around this, and we hear it in phrases such as 'necessity is the mother of all invention' and 'when life gives you a lemon make lemonade'.

I am so grateful for having been placed in a situation of stress and difficulty, because it woke me up. I was comfortable and safe in my life, my job, my salary. I knew that something was not quite right, but I was not going to do anything about it until I was forced to confront it.

In taking a year off and being forced to be with myself, I managed to find my purpose and the corrections I needed to make.

Which makes me think about how I can practise putting myself into difficultly so that I force myself to grow. As an old manager of mine use to say, create a problem for yourself so that you extend yourself to find a solution.

I recently did this by publishing my podcast before I had all of my ducks in a row for launching. In launching before I was ready, I stopped myself from procrastinating any longer, and had to quickly find ways of learning all the things I needed to do.

I call it mindful problem creation.

Theory of constraints

Through a series of decisions, some made by me and some made for me, I am coming to a clearer realisation that the work I am doing at the moment needs to be within an arrangement where I am equal, or I am working for myself.

Work in general employment is not going to cut it for now (a decision that was made for me). And I need to go at it alone with my podcast instead of joining a podcast network (a decision I have made for myself).

There is something about not being restricted in my curiosity and creativity that I am holding very dear right now. Nor do I want to be restricted in what I do with my time.

I understand that sometimes these constraints are useful in getting work done, even creative work. Right now the work I need to do, as unclear as it may be, needs to come with constraints that are not imposed upon me by others.

Laundry List Item 16: Everyone is, in their own way, vulnerable

I am in the middle of watching the third season of House of Cards. One thing that Frank Underwood does so well is turning to his benefit whatever situation he finds himself in. He does not get stuck in the past for more than a moment before coming up with a plan of how this situation can work for him.

One thing that he also does so well is to exploit the vulnerability of others when working out how to make that situation work for him. He has a memory, an instinct, and a well populated file on all those who he could one day use in this way.

And through the show we also get glimpses of the vulnerability of this man who shows so little vulnerability to others. 

Vulnerability has been getting a good name lately. It is a way for us to show to others what is really going on, and to enable connection at a deeper level. All of us have this vulnerability. At the very least we have bodies that fail us. And more than that, we have emotions that bubble up all the time, informing us of what a particular situation is creating inside us.

We have a choice when confronted with our own vulnerability, or that of others, to use it as a way to connect, or as a way to distance.

Lessons from Zoolander

I watched Zoolander for the first time in 15 years last night. While watching I remembered how intimidated I used to be by the world of fashion and cool. Even though Zoolander is a parody, I still remember thinking that I wished I was as cool as Hansel. 

Watching it again it is easy to see through that world. No doubt I have matured and become more comfortable in my own skin (and clothes). But there is something about looking back on a trend in the superficial, with the perspective of years, that takes away its ability to exclude and intimidate. 

It is a small but sometimes difficult extension to then think about the circumstances within which I feel excluded and intimidated today. Instead of remaining in that moment of paralysis, what would trying to think like my future self do to my agency and approach to that situation?

Dealing when the bad news comes

I may need to wait a few days before publishing this post. I think I need to edit and reread it after I have calmed down a bit. For the minute though I need to write down how I am feeling to help process what is going on.

I have been going through a job interview process, one that started about three months ago, and which today I was informed that my application had not proceeded to the final short list of 3.

An hour after finding out about this I still feel very disappointed. There is definitely a lot of ego tied up in this - I thought I was good enough to do this job, and if there was anybody going to be saying no it was going to be me saying it. 

There is also a sense of wanting to be wanted. This is my first interview process since finishing my gap year, and I have a nagging sense somewhere deep down that I don't have anything of value to offer, or that if I do I want be able to find the place where this can be expressed. Going for a job I thought I should get, and then being told that I am not even in the top three, adds fodder for that nagging sense to make use of.

The drawn-out timeframe and quality of the interview process also adds to my frustration. Communication has been relatively sparse throughout the process, and the actually interviews themselves have left a bit to be desired. For a business that is lean and nimble and all about innovation and new ways of working, the interview process was from a bygone era. I would have expected more of a discussion based, rather than formal/panel based, interview process. One where I was asked to do some homework and present back some findings. I don't mind being put on the spot, but for the type of job they were looking to fill, I was expecting a different approach.

(Okay that last paragraph is me being perhaps justifiably pissed with them, perhaps exaggerating through being angry in this moment. Either way there isn't anything I can do about this. That is their stuff to improve and something for the person who gets the job to deal with. Let me see if I can actually get to what is going on within me...)

The crazy thing is that I actually know that I would not have accepted the job had I been offered it. They have made the correct decision about me despite the clumsiness of it. I am not exactly sure what it is, but there was something inside me that sunk whenever I thought about working there. This is despite it being a great business filled with purposeful people.

I think it is because I know that deep down I want to build my own business, not somebody else's. I have built other people's dreams before, and I don't think doing this again is going to offer me sufficient challenge or satisfaction. Nor would the logistics of that job work for me - it needed a 2-4 year commitment, whereas I don't really know what position I will be in in 12 months. 

In continuing through the interview process despite my sense that the job was not right for me, what I was actually looking for was reassurance that I was still employable. I was looking for some external confirmation that I was enough.

The truth is I am enough. Just as I am, and I have a strong hunch that the direction I am going in is the right one for me. I don't know the details of how things will pan out, how I will earn an income over the next few months while I get my business off the ground.

I trust in the process which has taken me so far so quickly, and for the moment I allow myself to feel disappointed and vulnerable.

The last times

I wonder how often we aware of the last time we do a particular thing, at the time we are doing it. Like the last time we talk to somebody. The last time we change a nappy. The last time we kiss a lover. The last time we hold hands with our dad.  

I was thinking about that tonight after getting frustrated with my kids for not getting out of the bath exactly when I wanted them to; for not being quiet at the moment I asked them to as they went to bed; for asking me to lay down with them until they fell asleep. 

As I was laying next to them as they fell asleep, my three year old was asking me to tell him about memories I had of his life. thinking about all that has passed in his three years reminded me that having the magic of my kids wanting me to hold their hand as they fall asleep will also pass. 

How to embody the magic of each moment when so much conspires to rob away the joy?

When struggling to sleep

Those nights when I am trying to sleep but can't, when my mind is racing and all I want to do is check my phone, these are a few things I do to try and help myself get to sleep:

• I get up out of bed and have a short walk around the house, going to the toilet, having something to drink. This helps get my body moving in a different way, both internally and externally, and I usually feel a least a bit better by the time I am back in bed.

• if I have woken up in the middle of the night and am trying to get back to sleep, I remind myself that it is actually normal to have two blocks of sleep during the night, and this helps clam me down.

• I let my mind wander for a time, and then if I am still buzzing, I bring myself back to something like a meditation practise where I focus on my breath, or the sensations I am feeling on my body. In particular, by controlling and slowing down my breathing and then observing my breath, I am usually able to relax enough to fall asleep.

They are by no means magic tricks for falling to sleep, but they give me a better chance then stewing on the goings on of my mind.

Writing Fling #1: What am I?

I want to publish some pieces of writing from last year, in the midst of upheaval and turmoil. The writing is raw and jumps around, and reflects and important time in my life.

I will put these pieces in the category 'Creative writing'. I hope you enjoy them.

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Red, green, blue, white. What is your favourite colour?

My son asks this everyday. It is his first thought when talking about anything or anyone. He wants to get a vivid picture in his mind of this thing that he is experiencing. But sometimes he knows the colour before he asks. It is like he is not really asking. Instead he is playing, exploring, conversing with the thing in his mind.

What is it?

What am I?

What colour am I?

The bunyip was on a journey of self-acceptance and discovery. And so am I.

I am 38, and feel like and adult more often than I don't, perhaps for the first time. It is more that I feel I have agency, like I have responsibility for my life. And I am taking it. I have to. This is my moment. Of redemption and renewal.

If I don't take this one there may not be another. I need the surgery to cut deep, to remove all that is dead and injured and malignant. I have left it there like a passive for too long. It would have killed me, and perhaps it already had. But that is the thing with the internal world. I can kill and resurrect there with impunity. And I must.

Enter the maze. What dies in there needs to. What survives is gold. I uncover new depth, new understanding. Actually, these words are not enough. It is like my whole view of the universe is shaken, and I am left with what settles. 

But somehow what I am left with is what I already knew. Or perhaps had a hunch about but could not squarely acknowledge.

For me, this is called backing myself. Living with the minimal amount of things. And then I learn about the things I need to work on. Being willing to disappoint others. To feel disappointed.

I want to act. Be on the front foot. Space for my mind. For my will. Penetrate. Exert. Assert. Say. Do. Speak. Don't save.

I love. I sacrifice. I slaughter. I am peace. I am a warrior.

I like war. I like death. Inside me. To the things that don't really matter. The war with these things does matter. That is the stuff of life.

When in doubt, for a moment stop.

I was not good at woodwork at school. I have no idea why this was the case - I am pretty good with my hands, and have even managed to make my own dining room table (still standing after 6 years of hard use). For some reason though, I was always trying to make the thing I was suppose to make, rather than the thing I wanted to make.

Anyway, for all my anguish in woodwork class my teacher did leave me with one pearl of wisdom. He told us students that if, while we were cutting a piece of wood with a saw or plane or chisel, we got a hunch or were worried that we were going off course, that we should tell our hand to stop straight away, and if it failed to listen to us, to take our other hand and force it to stop.

With woodwork, once the wood is cut away it is very difficult to get back into place. Taking a moment to assess the situation before proceeding is the best way to minimise damage.

I am a big fan of the lean way of working - test and learn, progress in small steps with a tight feedback loop, experiment. I am not writing to counter this wisdom.

I am writing to say that sometimes the best course of action is to stop experimenting, to stop testing and progressing, and to pause. Remove as much sound as possible from our environment. Remove all distractions. Make a cup of tea. Sit down. And allow ourselves a moment to come back to earth and remember what it is we actually care about.

Today is one of those days for me. There are so many things I think I need to be doing, and I seem to be doing none of them. Time to stop trying to do any of them. Time to sit and allow myself to calm down.

Questions for mindfulness, not guilt

I have started to ask myself a series of questions each morning. They could easily be questions that elicit guilt within me. Part of the exercise is to remind myself that I ask myself these questions to encourage mindful decision making throughout my day. They are not to make me feel guilty.

These are the questions:

• What am I going to eat today?
• Who am I going to talk with today?
• What am I going to contribute today?
• What am I going to feed my brain with today?
• How am I going to move today?
• What time am I going to go to sleep tonight?

They seem like rhetorical questions, but I do not take them this way. When I answer 'pizza and chips' to the question 'what am I going to eat today?', I do not feel bad about this. I feel that I have made a deliberate decision to eat in that way, aware of what the impact will be on my body, and that tomorrow my body will need something different, and probably more nutritious.

Judge not, lest ye be judged

On Sunday night I was at an Italian restaurant for my mum's birthday. There were about eleven of us there, including my two young boys are their cousin of a similar age. The three boys love hanging out together, which is great for them and often difficult for the parents, especially at a restaurant.

We were surviving pretty well thanks to a early order and delivery of pizza and chips. The adults had ordered their pizza, and just as they were being placed on our table I noticed a couple of lemon lime and bitters drinks sitting in front of the boys. I was commenting on this being strange as I did not remember ordering them, when all of a sudden my eldest son reached out to get some chips and knocked the full glass over on one of the freshly placed pizzas.

I was just about to launch into a lesson and lecture for my son on being aware of oneself at the table when I caught myself - perhaps 2 days of silence helped me to be aware of the situation. People were laughing, and there was no real harm done. I was probably the one who was most embarrassed, and even the pizza ended up being salvageable. 

One day later, yesterday, I had made my way into the city for a job interview. After taking a year off work and only now just getting back into interviewing, what is usually a nervous situation was even more so for me.

I was sitting down with one of the two people who was going to interview me, waiting for the second person to arrive. When she did arrive she reached out to shake my hand - I never know in these moments whether to stay seated and shake hands, or to stand. It always feels better to have stood up, but it also seems overly formal. With this running through my head, I managed a half sitting half standing hybrid approach to shaking hands, and in the process managed to forget that I had a full glass of water right in front of me. Not even making it to the handshake, I managed to knock the entire full glass all over the table. 

Somewhere in the background I faintly heard a rooster crow three times.

The last time I went on a silent meditation

This weekend I am going on a silent meditation. It is much shorter than the first time I did this, which was for 10 days, and felt like I had entered a hard core martial arts training camp. This time I think the process will be more gentle, and I wonder if the result will be less profound as a result.

I had some key moments the first time I did this:

• seeing my body as it is, and accepting it as it is in this moment;
• awareness of the different sensations within and on my body, and how I feel different emotions in different parts of my body; and
• an experience that no matter what I am feeling, whether it is a beautiful buzz or a painful ache, it is all temporary and will pass in its time. There is no benefit in holding onto the buzz, or hating on the ache. Accept and allow both to flow.

A silent meditation is something I want to do at the start of each year as a way to focus on my entire being, detox myself from some of the many ways I distract myself from what my being is telling me, and to listen to what I need.

I look forward to writing about what I discovered this time.

Implicit questions when asking for advice

Yesterday I put together a business equity structure for the business that I am working on which has two other cofounders. I think the model is really solid and fair, and puts reward and incentives where they need to be.

Before I took my cofounders through the structure I wanted to get some external reassurance that the structure was as fair as I thought it was. So I rang two close friends to see what they thought.

Both thought that the model was good - they gave me some valid things for me to consider when presenting it to my cofounders, and reflected back to me how the model may play out over the first year of operation.

And while the feedback was pretty good, my feeling at the end of both conversations was not what I expected or wanted it to be. I started by feeling very good about the model, but ended feeling a bit hollow about it.

This got me thinking about what I was really asking from my two friends. I actually don't think I really wanted them to feedback or critique the model I had put together. What I wanted was for them to reflect back to me how brilliant it was, and how brilliant therefore I was. Not exactly that useful for anything except my ego.

I thank my friends for giving me the feedback that was actually useful and will help to set the business up for long term success, not the feedback I was implicitly asking for.

Laundry List Item 15: No one is any stronger or any weaker than anyone else.

It is without doubt true that physically some people are stronger than others, and some people are weaker than others.

What Kopp seems to be hinting at is that on the inside we all have access to the same amount of strength and weakness, because we are all connected, are all made of the same substance, and we are all conscious beings.

This brings out the essence of Metta/Loving Kindness meditation, which reminds us that at our essence all beings want the same thing: to be well, to be happy, to be safe, to be peaceful and at ease. 

Of course there are things that get in the way of this truth, that mean we feel stronger than others, or weaker than others, or make us want things that actually do not make us happy or safe or well.

For me, I find it helpful to remember the equality of our strength of weakness in two key moments:

The first is when I feel weaker than somebody else - diminished in their presence. The truth is, I have as much strength and worth as that person, and I can embody it in that moment because of that truth.

The second is when I feel stronger and dominating somebody else - proud in their presence. The truth is they have as much strength and worth as me, and I can help them to embody that, and I can remember that the weakness I see in them is also in me.

Laundry List Item 14: You can't make anyone love you.

Sheldon Kopp's laundry list of items provides with ideas for blog posts for those days when I am not sure what to write about. The next item I am up to on his list is one that I have painfully learnt.

No matter what you do or say, it is so true and frustrating that you can't make anybody love you. Therefore there is no point in even trying.

As one of my podcast interviewees (to be release in the next few weeks!) said, the thing to focus on is self love, because you can learn to love yourself. And it is in loving yourself, in understanding what you need, and having the courage to give it to yourself, that we attract people along the way who will love us for who we are, and whom we can wholeheartedly love in return.

The dark, sleepless night of the soul

Last night was my third dark night of the soul. It could be that you are only suppose to have one of these in your lifetime, but I have distinct memories of three occasions where my world was rocked to its core, and my body needed time to process what was going on, and did not have what sleep needed.

I have 'woken' up in pretty good shape considering a night without sleep. The night itself was long and painful. My heart rate was high. My mind raced. I felt too hot to sleep. I was running through every single scenario of what this piece of news would mean for me over the coming days and years.

This morning I spoke with my dad, such a source of stability in the times of deep crisis in my life. I grieved. And then I followed my usual morning routine. After shedding some tears, I managed to look myself in the mirror and realise that I loved myself. That I would be okay. That while this was incredibly painful, it was actually good.

Today my intention is to talk and write about how I feel, without any expectations of getting anything else done. I allow myself to feel and process in the way my being is indicating it needs to. 

Right now it is saying it needs a coffee. 

Days of wondering and wandering

It is a lightness and weightlessness in my chest. A feeling of vulnerability; a feeling that I am not sure what to do next.

It has been great to stop what I am doing, to take stock and allow new ideas to bubble up. Days like today though are difficult. Like I am waiting for something new to happen which I cannot do any more to progress right now.

And more than anything it is the feeling of being unplugged from a network I was once so easily part of. I am in the early stages of creating new networks and finding a new tribe, and in the mean time there are long periods where I am by myself and thinking of ways to make my life work for me given the new constraints and context I find myself in. 

When I had a partner I always had somebody to talk with and bounce ideas off. I am struggling to find an alternative for this, and it sometimes means sitting wondering what to do and who I could talk with. Friends have been great for this, but it is not the same. I don't have somebody I call everyday - it just does not seem the way of my guy friends. The girl friends I have found seem to make this easier, but there are complications with girls that I am not quite ready to confront, and I am certainly not yet ready for anything resembling a relationship.

So in the interim I will write, and sit with the discomfort, and remind myself that one day I will have others who will sit with me and allow me the space and time I need with my discomfort.