Remembering someone’s name and being present during a conversation means you are doing better that 99% of the people out there.
Break from the pack
Month: August 2020
Make a move
Sometimes in life you’ve got to fire yourself.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Born on May 7, 1861, Rabindranath Tagore’s poem is inspiring in 2020 and beyond. He could be writing about overcoming this dreadful pandemic.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
Rabindranath Tagore
Busy work versus deep work
One of the blessings from the 2020 lockdowns it that they let me see how much of my day was full of wasted time and fluff.
I confused busy work with high output deep work. They are different.
That which is said of men
“Although this detail has no connection whatever with the real substance of what we are about to relate, it will not be superfluous, if merely for the sake of exactness in all points, to mention here the various rumors and remarks which had been in circulation about him from the very moment when he arrived in the diocese. True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do.”
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Chapter One.
Write every day
Sometimes I will write a post on here that gets a good bit of traction via Facebook shares, Twitter, or old fashioned email forwarding, and other times a post won’t resonate as all.
I’ve also stopped predicting what will resonate and what won’t. There will be days when I’m excited to press the publish button and share a message, but it lands with a plop and quietly disappears.
I have also noticed that people dig through my archives, and sometimes a post has a second life.
The real visitor juice kicks in when the search engines index a post. It’s like an evergreen flow of free traffic to my site via Google and Baidu.
On some days when I’m swamped, I might release a photo or a small quote I’ve found; on other days, I can dig deep and write about something that’s been percolating.
I write about things I know about.
The best posts are authentic, from the heart and about something I’ve experienced first hand,
Writing every day builds the muscle. Start now.
You only know when you stop
Sometimes you don’t realize how hard it is until you stop doing it.
Time is moving slowly
Time is moving slowly to spring in the southern hemisphere.
If you listen closely you will hear the bird calls increasing in the morning and the evening.
The days are getting longer, the ocean temperature is going up.
Mother nature is testing her wing flaps and preparing for take off.
Morning has broken like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird
Praise for the singing
Praise for the morning
Praise for them springing fresh from the WordSweet the rain’s new fall, sunlit from heaven
Like the first dew fall on the first grass
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden
Sprung in completeness where His feet passMine is the sunlight
Mine is the morning
Born of the One Light Eden saw play
Praise with elation, praise every morning
God’s recreation of the new dayMorning has broken like the first morning
Cat Stevens
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird
Praise for the singing
Praise for the morning
Praise for them springing fresh from the Word
Ocean brain waves
Go for a swim in the ocean and take a hike along a coastal trail like Lands End in San Francisco or somewhere in the Marin Headlands.
Staring at the sea, alters your brain waves and transforms you into a mediative state and boosts inspiration and creativity.
Along with exercise, it’s the best medicine out there.
A little bit of trouble
A strong rip current and big swell always gets my blood pumping. There were two swimmers ahead of me who took the corner wide, while I ran the gauntlet and hugged the reef where the current was weaker. Luckily I caught a wave in and avoided a few scrapes on the shallow reef. As I waded out of the water I circled up in the shallows with the other swimmers. We had a laugh and a chat about how sketchy it was out there. We realized we had been watching each other.
Sport with a little bit of trouble bonds people together.
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