07.17.08
Posted in Spiritual Journey
at 12:15 am
Normally I try to focus on mistakes I have made and the lessons I learn from them. Tonight, though, I almost made a mistake, realized it, and made a different choice. That was such an unexpected wisdom, I had to mention it. Also, I fear that it is not the first time I have tried to make a mistake like this.
I went to the gym tonight to hire a personal trainer. It’s been a to-do item for a long time and today seemed like a good day since I am starting a weight-loss competition at the office today. The salesman and I sit across from one another and we haggle the price on a solution that I could not afford this month or next month or any of the months for the one year term to which I was agreeing. I kept thinking how foolish this was. I am trying to save money - not pay more than my car payment for someone to make sure I show up and work out.
So I finally stepped back while he tried to get his manager to accept my offer and asked myself why I was going to do this. And I screamed my answer back to myself, “Because I am Furious!”
I already was aware that I was angry. I noticed it on the drive and there were a number of reasons for it - not the least of which was the need for joining this weight-loss competition. But what made me stop and think was the fact that there was such a sense of entitlement attached to that answer. Like doing something that will cause me a year of financial stress and potentially damage me and my family is a reasonable thing to do just because I am angry.
It was just so matter-of-fact. I am angry, therefore I will go do something stupid and risk harming myself because that is a good and right solution. And it felt like an argument that had worked many times before….
I did not buy anything. I took a price sheet and a card and left. And I thought about healthier solutions. Better alternatives. And so instead, I went to the local massage place (where I had a credit for a massage) and found I was early enough to get a one-hour massage. I even had enough time to sit in their “relaxation room” and just feel my feelings and breathe and start to let it all go before the massage.
This was a victory for me. I don’t always see my way out of my anger - usually I just get lost in it. But tonight I chose a healthier path. And so in following the wisdom of “Celebrate every Victory” I share this with you all….
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05.07.08
Posted in Life as it is, Spiritual Journey, family
at 12:15 am
Quite a few weekends ago, I assembled what I thought were all of the right elements to get some work done and to have some fun with friends in the process. The fun didn’t really happen like I thought it would, so I reviewed the day with another friend. She listened and then saw immediately the problem.
“You were being rigid and inflexible.”
I didn’t like how that was going, so I changed subjects and discussed an issue about my daughter, and what might have caused things to blow up like the did. Again she saw an answer.
“You were being Rigid and Inflexible.”
Damn it, I think she might be right. And that isn’t a good thing. It used to be how I lived - this rigid inflexibility about what I planned, what I expected or what I wanted. But I also know of times where instead of being so rigid, i was flexible and able to adapt to circumstances. So what was putting me back into a rigid shell?
As i wandered, I looked on the ‘Net and found this quote in an essay by John Cleese (of Monty Python fame):
We all operate in two contrasting modes, which we call open and closed. The open mode is more relaxed, more receptive, more exploratory, more democratic, more playful and more humorous. The closed mode is the tighter, more rigid, more hierarchical, more tunnel-visioned mode that we find ourselves in so much of the time. When is this closed, tight, solemn mode helpful?
Only when action is urgently required, it seems. If you want a decision in two minutes, don’t open up the discussion. If you’re leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time for considering alternative strategies. When you charge the enemy machine-gun post, don’t waste energy trying to see the funny side of it. Act, narrow-mindedly.
But the moment the action is over, we need to return to the open mode; to open our minds again to all the feedback from our action that enables us to tell whether the action has been successful, or whether further action is needed to improve on what we’ve done. In other words, we must return to the open mode, because in that mode we are most aware, most receptive, most creative, and therefore at our most intelligent.
And this fit my situation well. I was, metaphorically speaking, charging multiple machine gun posts in the internal urgency and importance of the work to be done. “It had to be done,” I remembered saying again and again when people wanted to quit.
I was armored in a rigid suit like Iron Man and doing battle.
Sometimes I really like the suit, and I like the narrow-minded approach of, “there is only the next mission, and the mission after that.” But the suit also isolates me from others I care about.
So how then to live outside the armor? I started doing two things. I started just taking the time to meditate and be still and remind myself there is no battle needing to be fought at that moment. I also sought laughter - to see the humor in my own actions, and also to rent some comedies to watch with my son.
How did I take off the armor?
I started playing again.
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04.24.08
Posted in Life as it is, Mistakes, Twitter
at 3:36 pm
I have been busy lately. Lots of things have been happening, and so of course I have been making mistakes and learning from them.
- My photography class on wildflower photography was a success, but an uncalibrated monitor taught me a lot more about post processing than I ever imagined.
- I won a $1 bet with a friend of mine about redecorating and designing my home computer room. What I learned about 10-year old dirt in the corners is not sharable on a family-rated blog. (My teens read this, I fear.) I also got a crash course in vacuum maintenance.
- I found an unexpected sunset hour to photograph birds in Brazos Bend State Park, and learned not to look away from alligators that are within six feet of me
But there has been another learning mistake as well. I mentioned previously the White Bread Warning, that if I use the same recipe, I will get the same bread. And I am finding that to be absolutely true in regards to this blog and my Twitter feed.
Time and again, I think of something interesting to write, and decide instead that it can wait a day because at least my Twitter entries, or tweets, are still being posted for that day. And then days become weeks, and the weeks start to stretch on as well. Pretty soon, I have the same result of empty blogging - a blog made up of tweet entries. And my main thoughts and ideas that I want to share being put off again and again.
So it is time to take the bull by the horns and turn off the feature that took tweets and made them blog entries. It’s a neat feature, but I am falling into the same trap I fell into previously. I will still keep the Twitter sidebar up of what I am recently doing, but those tweets just won’t become posts.
This forces me to write and to write regularly. And trust me, I need the practice! And well, I always have some wisdom to share that I learned from some recent mistake.
This way, when I next want to share with you how I learned that sandals offer zero toe protection from “stubbing impact” because of my error in not looking where I am going - well, now I will have to really blog about it and not rely on the tweets catching it anyway….
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04.11.08
Posted in Life as it is, photography
at 11:45 pm
I am a nature photographer. And I have observed myself with insects when I go out. Somewhere near the beginning of my arrival “in the wild” I am hyper aware of anything crawling or landing on me or mosquitoes or bees nearby. But 20to 30 minutes later, i could care less. I am bigger than them and they pose no real risk to me - I may itch later, but for now I can’t be bothered.
I believe this is a veneer of the modern, sterile-seeming world I like to believe I am a part of when I am working my day job in a controlled environment like my home or my office. It takes a bit of effort to throw that veneer off and be an animal in the woods - but I do it - and I love it.
But it rolls back so quickly. The morning after spending a day in the swamps shooting, while driving to the office, I see antennae pop out from behind my driver’s-side visor. Interesting…. Then there are more antennas - lots more. And do I handle it like the nature photographer that I am? No, I handle it like a city boy who is driving to work and is strapped into his chair with unknown creepy-crawlies emerging inches from his face.
Which is to say that I nearly wrecked, stopping in the middle of the street and bailing from my car.
It turns out to be a mess of young caterpillars - I don’t know what sort they were. I recovered and moved them out of my car - and after finding more near my car, I took it for a carwash. I didn’t get any photos, even though my camera was in the car with me - that should tell you how rattled I am.
So tomorrow I am off to shoot wildflowers. And I know it will take a while to let that veneer of expected sterility fall away. But may I be open to the wonders of the natural world as it does - and also maybe come home with only an itch or two.
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04.10.08
Posted in Life as it is, Spiritual Journey, photography
at 11:59 pm
I love to learn. Sometimes, though, I forget how little I know, and in so doing I lose my chance to learn something. This is a character defect of mine, this arrogant pride of my intelligence, and it can lead me into being an arrogant know-it-all if I let it get away from me.
But how to do so? That’s a real question….
I’ve worked against this a long time - and not always with success. If the opposite of being proud is to be humble, then I needed to work on being humble, i thought. I tried this and it never worked for me. CS Lewis had it right when he wrote as Screwtape, a senior demon in hell, to Wormwood, Screwtape’s nephew - an apprentice demon on his first assignment in the field. Screwtape warned that humility was fatal to demon-kind, but easily defeated as his advice went.
“Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to this fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware he has them, but this is specially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, ‘By jove! I’m being humble,’ and almost immediately pride - pride at his own humility - will appear”
So how to defeat this, when to try by will alone is to create some sort of proud false-modesty? Yuck! That’s even worse than being a know-it-all in my book. It’s true that the only thing worse than false pride is false modesty.
The answer is in something simple - it is in not trying to be humble. It is in trying to simply stay teachable. In fact, if i can stay teachable in all situations, and with all people then i am coming closer to something good - something close enough to being humble that the difference doesn’t matter.
“Every man you meet is your superior in some way. In that you should learn from him”
Abraham Lincoln
Tonight was the classroom discussion for a wildflower photography class I decided to take. I took it because I recognize the instructor as a master at nature photography, and every time I have gone to one of his workshops, I am amazed at how little I know and how much he can teach me.
So once again tonight, I arrived and since it was a lecture, I found myself skeptical as to what I could learn and couldn’t i skip this lecture - after all, I have already heard several of his lectures. But I could be teachable, so I took out my notebook, and started writing notes on his ideas and the structure of his lecture and anything else I could learn and be taught. And as I opened myself up to being teachable, I found myself learning about topics of which I knew nothing, and seeing the results of ideas I had read about but never seen attempted. This being teachable stuff works!
May we all become teachable a little more today than we were yesterday.
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