Category: Thoughts

Easter

by MAÔ, posted in Holidays

This year, especially, it seems that families will be close for the holiday. We’re in lockdown across the country, restaurants are predominantly closed, and we’re able to be with each other in ways that seemed impossible just last year.

It used to be that most places closed on holidays. Until they figured out that there was a market for shopping on holidays. For eating out. Then, as one or two started opening, others followed suit. Pretty soon, the holidays were just another set of days.

But this year, that’s not possible. We’re inside. If lucky, we have the outdoors to wander about in. And if we’re lucky, we have our family. Someone to spend this time with. To grow closer with. To drive crazy, as families tend to do when cooped up together.

Still, view this time together as an opportunity.

Be Excellent To Each Other | Keanu reeves, Funny pictures, Ted

What do you want?

by MAÔ, posted in Thoughts

I keep asking myself that question. Continually, at times. A month of relative seclusion has let the question bounce around significantly more than usual, what with only self-imposed distractions.

And that’s the unique situation we’re in. We can tune out the inner voice – with Netflix, or news, or some other distraction.

Or, we embrace the inner voice. Find meaning in extraordinary circumstances, and move the needle forward on life.

So, what do you want?

Disconnected

by MAÔ, posted in Thoughts

There’s an element of misunderstanding for many of us during this time of crisis. Most of us, I expect, would rather be working, if we are among the millions now unemployed, furloughed, or stranded somewhere. If the work is front line work, in the hospitals, for instance, it’s scary work. Scary, but meaningful. Life-saving is always meaningful.

Then there are others, fortunate to work from home, or less fortunate but still required to work – delivery-service who may run the risk of infection from the job,

There’s information, there’s misinformation, and there’s fear. The fear is what gets at the heart of it. A fear that’s been creeping into the Country long before the virus emerged. A fear that life, as it was before, will never be seen again.

It’s the fear of men and women who don’t know what the new normal looks like, and the fear of younger generations who don’t know what the new ‘new normal’ will look like. We’ve been heading down this path for a while, with shifting populations, immigration ebbing and flowing, social preferences and liberalities altering on a seemingly daily basis.

What all of this should tell us is that: There is no certainty. We could fight so hard for the  America we remember as children, to restore it to what we view as its former glory, only to have even that which we’ve come to know replaced by an unexpected epidemic.

New normals will inevitably come, to be again replaced by something newer. We shouldn’t grip so tightly onto the past that we don’t savor the present. Because something could be waiting around the corner to shake the present loose, and we might like what comes after even less.

Quite a month

by MAÔ, posted in Thoughts

March was, without a doubt, the strangest month that I’ve ever been privy to. It had ups, and it had downs. Mostly downs.

We’re still waiting for answers to questions over the health and wellness of the US, and the world at large. The financial sector continues to be in an uproar, and unemployment claims are skyrocketing. And all anyone can really ask is, “When will it end?”

The best news in times like these is to remember that it will end. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to move near-fast enough towards its resolution. But we don’t always get to control the speed. All we get to control is how we respond to it.

Some are better prepared. Some are less affected. Some are struggling to get by. Yet, we’re all a part of the new landscape, and its unclear still what the new normal will be.

Hitting bottom

by MAÔ, posted in Thoughts

So Dalio’s book caused me more introspection. This, coupled with my seclusion in Alaska, has brought some things to the forefront.

“Embracing your failures – and confronting the pain they cause you and others – is the first step toward genuine improvement; it is why confession precedes forgiveness in many societies. Psychologists call this ‘hitting bottom.’ If you keep doing this you will convert the pain of facing your mistakes and weaknesses into pleasure and ‘get to the other side’…”

If you were to rate days on a scale of 1-5 with 1 being the worst and 5 being the best, in my 12,000 or so days I’ve had twenty (estimate) days I would rate as a 1. That’s less than one bad day a year. But the fact is, those days tend to stand out more than any others. Those days rank higher in my internal auditing systems than any of the other days.

Richard Michael Hui wrote this enlightening piece on mistakes, and of those twenty or so days, I’d wager that 75% were from mistakes I had made. Maybe not specifically in that moment, but at least in the moments leading up to them. And if you’re able to learn from those mistakes – to accept and forgive yourself – you’re vastly ahead of the curve.

Opposing views

by MAÔ, posted in Advice

I was making my way through Dalio’s book Principles, and a passage stuck out to me:

When two people believe opposite things, chances are that one of them is wrong.

Principles, Ray Dalio, pg. 190

This led me down a rabbit hole of thought, and I’m not convinced of the premise. For every belief I have, there is someone who will disagree with me. But it’s because belief isn’t a statement of factual information, and maybe I’m just caught up in the wording.

Facts can be proved and disproved. Beliefs are much harder to handle in that regard, and while Dalio suggests a doctrine of thoughtful disagreement to get to the bottom of a problem, to “find out which view is true”, I can’t help but think that every belief is true, while at the same time it may not be.

This duality of truth/untruth in belief causes many disagreements. The book is about business principles, and I can see where this methodology of thoughtful disagreement can work exceptionally well for deciding matters where differing viewpoints may crop up – marketing practices, manufacturing, product development, and investment strategies. Beliefs in that sense will have some form of comparable quantitative data to support or contradict them.

But beliefs that revolve around more fundamental human conditions – religion, politics, life purpose, etc. – these are much more difficult to quantify. Likely that Dalio intended to avoid that train of thought in this section, but I felt like getting my head around it anyway.

 

Letting go of disappointment

by MAÔ, posted in Inspiration

Sometimes it won’t go the way you intend it. Sometimes you’ll make a mistake (or three). You’ll miss a deadline, you’re overestimate or under-deliver. There are a thousand-and-one ways to screw up. And at some point you’ll make that misstep.

But, it’s okay. It happens. More often than not it’s a revoverable misstep, and if it isn’t – it’s not the end of the world. No one has screwed up so badly that the world ceased to exist, because we are still here.

So let it go. Move on. It’s okay. There’s always tomorrow.

What we don’t understand

by MAÔ, posted in Inspiration

In the early stages of a panic fear takes over. A fear from not knowing much, of anything, for sure. The more information we have regarding a thing, the less fearful we become.

It comes from being huddled together in the dark, not seeing what happens just beyond the tree line. Once fire illuminated the shadows we were able to conquer those fears.

But as we are the ancestors of those early fire-starters, so too are our fears ancestors of those early shadows. It is important to light the night, and shine upon the unknown, to diminish our fears.