…And it’d more than probably be a drag.
…Put me at a music festival with banging dance song after banging dance song after banging dance song and friends who match big dance energy?
…And at the end of a 45k step night, you may just find me wanting more. Like it wasn’t enough. Like all I wanted to do was go back and do the 45k steps all over again.
…Something you’d more than probably not catch me saying if I just walked the 45k steps straight up.
Alignment makes everything exponentially easier.
While staying at a friend’s house in Florida, I came to find out that his girlfriend is the president of their Home Owners Association (HOA).
I asked what a day in the life of an HOA President looks like and she said, “Listening to a ton of complaints—even when trying to sit by the pool, devoting a ton of extra time to fixing things—and doing all the hiring of others to fix things, and trying to convince people to budget more money towards the Association (that comes out of their pocket) so they all can have a better living space vs just letting everything go.”
I asked her what the incentive was for her to be doing all of this extra work… and she said, “Welp, somebody had to do it. Because the path they were on wasn’t future focused and things were taking a turn for the worse.”
…And she’s not getting paid a dime.
…Just going above and beyond to make their shared living space—one that supports 300+ people—a better place.
…An example we all might be able to learn from.
What if being in a hurry was your new reminder to breathe and look around?
What if being in a hurry turned into a trigger that slowed you down?
What if being in a hurry was actually a mentality—a perspective—that robbed you of life?
…Because being in a hurry (100% of the time) means you’re not where you are. You’re future focused—because what’s happening right now isn’t as important as what you’re hurrying to.
And while that may be true some of the time… what isn’t true is that you always (finally) mentally arrive.
Do not let confusion scare or intimidate you.
For this is what the first stage of all learning and growing feels like.
Simply reply to confusion with curiosity. Ask information-gathering questions. Flex your problem-solving muscles. Think critically and thoroughly. Be flexible in your approach and open-minded to new ideas. Take long walks.
Life is confusing.
And those who avoid it avoid life herself.
And buried they stay inside a mound of monotony, ease, and trivial. For the only way you’re living a life of complete clarity is if you’re not challenging your mind (or you’re enlightened, but I wouldn’t know anything about that).
So, no. Don’t let confusion scare or intimidate you. In fact, use it as a reverse compass of sorts. Lean into it. Explore it. Wrestle with it.
What results on the other side is something much closer to life than the opposite.
One of my tasks as a writer is to convert experiences into words.
…Share some of the takeaways and insights of life in a way that others can utilize and download into their own worldviews.
And in this way, the tide that raises the boat of my understanding gets shared into the tide that might also raise the boat of their understanding as well.
Because in some ways, takeaways and insights unshared become water held on board the boat. And rather than getting added to the tide that raise the boats of all, it becomes a weight that pulls the level of their boat down.
…Which isn’t to say every takeaway and insight needs to be shared.
It’s simply to say, being the only person around with takeaways and insights becomes a sort of weight rather than achievement.
Takeaways and insights are meant to be shared so that those around can, not only deepen their understanding (and ability to connect more deeply with you), but contribute back takeaways and insights of their own (and add back to the tide you both share).
The tide won’t raise on its own.
I found out yesterday my 90-something year old neighbor passed away a couple weeks ago.
It was apparently of natural causes and while she was asleep.
And while I was just writing about how Lisa Lux was devoting all of her energy towards healing and squeezing every drop of presence out of life with what little time she had left… my 90-something year old neighbor apparently was frequently wondering what was taking so long.
Her husband had apparently passed away in the late 1970s and she eventually got to a point where she would ask her daughter… why do you think I’ve lived as long as I have? Why me? Why not my husband? Why not my grandchild—who died in his 20s? Why not somebody else?
And the truth is: we’ll never know.
What makes this life so very special is that we’ll never know.
And it’s the knowing this… the keeping death close in our minds… and not the opposite… that turns time into memories… energy into experiences… life into legacy…
Yesterday, as I was reflecting on the loss of my friend Lisa Lux, as I meditated closely on the thin line that separates life and death—me from death; her from life; and each of us from the opposite—and carefully allowed myself to enter that empathetic space of feeling what she might’ve felt and what I was surely feeling… I got abruptly interrupted three times.
…And each was by a different co-worker to talk to me about plastic gold coins.
See there was an event we were hosting at our martial arts school where the students could play arcade-style martial arts games to win plastic gold coins that they could turn in for prizes. And we didn’t have enough gold coins for the night. So my co-workers and I were scrambling to find solutions. Long story short, we were checking out and calling every local place that might sell them and keeping each other updated so we didn’t overlap efforts.
In no way was I upset about this.
But I did find it to be such a powerful analogy for the ways in which death hides behind life.
There I was… there we were (all of my co-workers knew Lisa Lux as well)… mourning the loss of our friend… except we weren’t able to because we kept getting ripped back to the urgent reality—the one where death ceases to exist—by one of the most trivial, insignificant, worthless of items here on this earth… plastic gold coins.
And if plastic gold coins can keep us from thinking about our mortality and death… just think about what even slightly more “important,” “significant,” and “worthy” things can do…