See Clear

I chimed in on a friend's Facebook post regarding some grief that he was catching for maintaining his exercise regimen on a holiday and his commitment to stay the course, which, personally, I applaud, subject to the following: The most elite athletes train every day all day, but part of their training entails recovery and relaxation. They cast *everything* as training, so there is always perfect perceptual alignment. This is as opposed to seeing exercise as training and everything else as not-training, thereby creating a conflict. To that end, I came up with an acronym to capture the precedence of things in my life: SEE CLeaR. Sleep, Eat, Exercise, Career, Love and Recovery (e.g. relax, recharge, etc). Love, the most important thing in life, is 5th in line, because without its predecessors, it cannot be enjoyed. One should not feel guilty for doing what one needs to do to enjoy the rest of their life, but should also take care to leave room for the rest of their life. Anyone who takes care of others to the detriment of their own self-care should remember this, as should anyone who takes care of themselves to the detriment of others.

Mind Your Hydrodynamics

Like a ship that leaves the shore, even the slightest tilt of the rudder upon departure can lead one to a significantly different destination than one was otherwise destined to reach. The doubt that we are capable of actually doing what we love, as children, students or working adults. The hope that we are the best at what we do, again, as children, students or working adults. This is partly self-doubt, partly self-confidence, and partly external influence. As we are passengers on each other's ships, it is incumbent upon us to mind each other's tillers, taking care not to cast dispersion on an inner most dream, or taking care to steer the ship against adverse waves when the people we love are adrift in the inevitable challenges that accompany chasing a dream. It is this essential, mutual support that inspires me, and makes me chuckle a bit whenever I hear about the 'self-made' man or woman. No one is self-made. Even the strongest mind can be cut down by a cruel teacher, or built up by a mindful parent. So... Mind your hydrodynamics!

Enlightened Living

So simple? A pupil asks an elder monk who was thought to be enlightened, "what does an enlightened being do?" The elder responded, "I wake, I eat, I work, I play and I sleep." The pupil was surprised by this answer, and said "but I wake, eat, work, play and sleep too." ... "Yes", said the elder, "but when I eat, I eat; when I work, I work; when I play, I play; and when I sleep, I sleep." Insofar as meditation is practice for life, life can and should be practice for meditation. With sufficiently narrow attention, even 30 minutes on the treadmill can be truly liberating. Try it!

The Astronomy of Relationships

It is not often that astronomy offers salient analogies for relationships, probably half as often for anyone to even notice, but, in reading about solar systems in our galaxy and beyond, I found a few: More than four-fifths of the single points of light we observe in the night sky are actually two or more stars orbiting together. The most common of the multiple star systems are binary stars, systems of two companion stars. Some people even think that our sun is part of a binary system, with an as yet to be observed companion. There are 'wide binaries', consisting of two stars whose orbits are spread apart from one another, leaving them to evolve separately; 'close binaries', consisting of two stars that orbit one another so closely that one might actually transfer mass to the other or be pulled into the other completely; and everything in between, including categorizations that have more to do with how we perceive these stars: 'visual binaries', which can be distinguished visually through a telescope; 'spectroscopic binaries', which can only be distinguished by the wavelengths of the light that each one emits; 'eclipsing binaries', whose angle with the earth and our line of sight, so to speak, makes it so that we see these stars in alternating eclipses; 'astrometric binaries', where a visible star appears to be dancing around empty space, when, in reality, it is dancing with an unobservable companion; and 'double stars', which are two stars that appear to be binary stars, based on our angle of observation, but, in reality, are nowhere near one another. I think that we can all attest to either living through or observing relationships that align with these categorizations, and, perhaps, some of us are clear about how we want our heart to orbit another heart. The beautiful break from these analogies is that we create our own gravity. You can pull the heart you love straight to yours, if you choose to, or you can tether it at a distance and risk it being pulled away by other gravitational fields. My take, pull with everything you have, and don't be afraid to spin so closely as to become one, bright, shiny star. 

The Simpler-Better Past

Plato (428-346 BC) criticized the practice of writing (i.e. the written word) as something that would erode one's mental faculties (he called it a recipe for reminder not memory) and depersonalize human interaction, as the need for face-to-face communication would no longer be required to exchange ideas. Although we can all speak to the benefits of the written word, we can also acknowledge that Plato's assertions were still, for the most part, correct. Between Plato's time and our time, there have been many generations, each with its own introduction and adoption of new technologies and practices, with pros and cons relative to both generations past and generations future, and too much complexity and variability in how things will evolve to say for sure what will be beneficial or detrimental. As one generation longs for a simpler-better past, we can be sure that the generation before longed for the same, and we can be sure that, to a varying degree, each generation was partially right and partially wrong. My point is, if Plato's nostalgia for a simpler-better past (i.e. one without the written word) prompted the next generation to forgo the written word, then we would likely not even know who he was or what he thought, as surely as I would not be able to recount it here. The next time you find yourself feeling nostalgic about the past and perplexed by the next generation, you might want to reflect on how you perplexed the generation that preceded yours!

Love in Action

Two people in love. When one says to the other, “I love you”, they mean “I want to enjoy every moment of life with you; I want to grow up and grow old with you; I want to make a life with you; I will take care of you when you are sick; I will sit with you if you are dying”. In short, they mean “you will never be unloved or alone”. When the other responds in kind, what does he or she mean? There is no shared definition for the term “love”. I have heard stories of one person trading in their life to save the one they love. I have heard stories of one person leaving the one they love upon learning of a terminal cancer diagnosis. And yet, each person uttered the words: “I love you”. To the extent that, even if you ask, you cannot necessarily rely on the words behind the word, you can only rely on the love you are shown, as surely someone else can only rely on the love you show them in kind. Love defined is love in action, so… act now <3

Warranted Intolerance

In 'The Open Society and It's Enemies', Karl Popper asserted that we are warranted in refusing to tolerate intolerance. Just think about it. What if a society was 100% tolerant? The intolerant would be tolerated. They would act accordingly, marginalizing others and accruing power, until, finally, tolerance itself would be obliterated under their reign. Justice itself relies on intolerance: murder is illegal, because we are not tolerant of it, for good reason. It is only when we pass the threshold of clear, negative externalities (i.e. one person's actions causing material harm to another person) that the question of tolerance vs warranted intolerance becomes more difficult, and I can see how large the struggle looms in the minds of Americans, as we seek to embrace fellow Americans whose beliefs have been erroneously conflated with evil, with a seemingly endless supply of recruits willing to reinforce this bias by committing acts of evil. Aside from exacting huge, asymmetric financial costs on the U.S. economy, I think that part of the goal of terrorism is to skew our collective minds towards unwarranted intolerance and drive a wedge between us. That is what we have to counter at every turn, or else play right into this goal.