Waste So Much Time

When we waste so much time with things that numb us—things that keep us from being alive to ourselves and, thereby, to those around us—we have such a false sense of living.

Purposeful Life

Instagram: bobgoff

It's easy to confuse a lot of activity with a purposeful life.

-- Bob Goff

Desperation makes us believe (act) out of a kind of panic about what people think about us, if we:

• Aren't seen as the first one connected to this (idea or person)
• Don't get in front of that (issue or problem)
• Can't be somewhere that is socially (or even spiritually) approved

How often is all our activity really just seeking credibility or respect, not to mention just plain old acceptance?

LT: Controlling vs Engaging

When it comes to leading human-beings, we already tried controlling them—what they want is to be engaged.

Good Friends

I've noticed...good friends are those who remain interested in knowing you well enough to love you by encouraging—even challenging—you to keep growing toward:

• becoming who you really are
• offering who you are to others

Expanded Receptivity

[Contemplative] practices beckon earthbound bodies toward an expanded receptivity to holiness.... Receptivity is not a cognitive exercise but rather the involvement of intellect and senses in a spiritual reunion and oneness with God.... [The] contemplative moment is a spiritual event that kisses the cognitive but will not be enslaved to its rigidities. 

-- Barbara Holmes

Snowglobe

Our 'live' snowglobe is all shook up out there.  An hour of tromping around in the woods' blanket of white-silence was still not enough to satisfy our dog, Fletcher.

Me either.

The Four Mistakes We Make When We Talk About Technology

I think the way we talk about technology is in danger of repeating a mistake. It's a mistake that we made very recently and with catastrophic consequences, so it's particularly poignant that we may make it again.

The mistake we made was in the way we talked about globalisation... It was portrayed as an unstoppable force, something that there was no point trying to object to and you were stuck in the past if you did. "Globalisation is coming, there is no alternative".

Secondly, it was portrayed as something which would have winners and losers, but that there would be more winners than losers. So the losers just need to suck it up, realise they're on the wrong side of history and adapt.

Thirdly, it was argued that globalisation would mean some things that you cared about, like national sovereignty or defending certain industries, these were things you could no longer expect to control. Read on here....

-- Azeem Azhar

Seems to me we talk about other things this way, too. Like theology....

Visual: Contradictions

Visual - "Contradictions"

Winona Lake, IN

Not By Special Exertions

The strength of a man’s virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.

-- Blaise Pascal

Capable

The point isn't what you're not capable of; rather, it is what you are capable of.

Deficiencies are a given, not an indictment—let that settle in.....

The good news is that is not the point. Focus on what you are capable of becoming, rather than what you're not.

LT: Where We're Going

Leadership...is the ability to focus on where we're going, not where we're coming from.

-- Simon Sinek

MLK Day: The Day We Become Silent

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ever noticed how death seems to clarify things? So often, we only seem capable of really listening after the fact, like after someone dies...because of what they lived for.  Then we see it, for what it was.

Contagion

What is the relation of [contemplation] to action? Simply this. He [or she] who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas. There is nothing more tragic in the modern world than the misuse of power and action.

-- Thomas Merton

Mentally Strong

Raising mentally strong kids who are equipped to take on real-world challenges requires parents to give up the unhealthy — yet popular — parenting practices that are robbing kids of mental strength.

Of course, helping kids build mental muscle isn’t easy — it requires parents to be mentally strong as well. Watching kids struggle, pushing them to face their fears, and holding them accountable for their mistakes is tough. But those are the types of experiences kids need to reach their greatest potential.

Parents who train their children’s brains for a life of meaning, happiness, and success, avoid these 13 things:

1. They Don’t Condone A Victim Mentality
2. They Don’t Parent Out Of Guilt
3. They Don’t Make Their Child The Center Of The Universe
4. They Don’t Allow Fear To Dictate Their Choices
5. They Don’t Give Their Child Power Over Them
6. They Don’t Expect Perfection
7. They Don’t Let Their Child Avoid Responsibility
8. They Don’t Shield Their Child From Pain
9. They Don’t Feel Responsible For Their Child’s Emotions
10. They Don’t Prevent Their Child From Making Mistakes
11. They Don’t Confuse Discipline With Punishment
12. They Don’t Take Shortcuts To Avoid Discomfort
13. They Don’t Lose Sight Of Their Values

Continue here....

-- Amy Morin

Mary Oliver: “When Death Comes”

'Poem for the week' -- “When Death Comes”:

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

-- Mary Oliver


Mary Oliver, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work, with its plain language and minute attention to the natural world, drew a wide following while dividing critics, died on Thursday at her home in Hobe Sound, Fla. She was 83.

For her abiding communion with nature, Ms. Oliver was often compared to Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. For her quiet, measured observations, and for her fiercely private personal mien (she gave many readings but few interviews, saying she wanted her work to speak for itself), she was likened to Emily Dickinson.

Ms. Oliver often described her vocation as the observation of life, and it is clear from her texts that she considered the vocation a quasi-religious one.

Given its seeming contradiction — shallow and profound, uplifting and elegiac — Ms. Oliver’s verse is perhaps best read as poetic portmanteau, one that binds up both the primal joy and the primal melancholy of being alive. Continue here....

-- Margalit Fox


Here are a couple of perspectives about Mary Oliver from other traditions:

Mary Oliver, our devotional poet

Hidden pencils, urgent warnings and instructions Mary Oliver left the Church

Most Perfectly

​Love is most perfectly displayed when we give goodness to those who disregard us, especially to those who hate us.

More Eager

Instagram: bobgoff

You'll be able to spot people who are becoming love because they want to build kingdoms, not castles.  They fill their lives with people who don't look like them or act like them or even believe the same things as them.  They treat them with love and respect and are more eager to learn from them than presume they have something to teach.

-- Bob Goff

LT: Only Hear What You Do

After a while, people only hear what you do, not what you say.

Power

Ever noticed...that those with perceived power do not seem as capable of listening to others as those who are truly powerful because they listen to others and respond with action?

Good power is used for more than protection and perpetuation of what is (fear), it is used for liberation and discovery of what could be (freedom).

Simultaneous Discovery

The genius of Jesus’ ministry is that he reveals that God uses tragedy, suffering, pain, betrayal, and death itself (all of which are normally inevitable), not to punish us but, in fact, to bring us to God and to our True Self, which are frequently a simultaneous discovery.

-- Richard Rohr

Is this not true or what?  It certainly is descriptive both of my experience and a mode and mood of God that I am so grateful for.

Snow-Happy

Snow makes me happy.

I wonder why.  At some level, it doesn't matter.  But, at another, I wonder what snow triggers within me.  I have to go out into it...not just to see it, but also to feel it.  Is this a clue to my question about it?

One of the unique beauties of snow for me is knowing that it will both leave and return—like something that can only be enjoyed in the moment, that will also come again.

Guess you know where I'll be in a few minutes....

Intellectual Humility: the importance of knowing you might be wrong

Our ignorance is invisible to us.

-- David Dunning


For every sense and every component of human judgment, there are illusions and ambiguities we interpret arbitrarily.

Some are gravely serious. White people often perceive black men to be bigger, taller, and more muscular (and therefore more threatening) than they really are. That’s racial bias — but it’s also a socially constructed illusion. When we’re taught or learn to fear other people, our brains distort their potential threat. They seem more menacing, and we want to build walls around them. When we learn or are taught that other people are less than human, we’re less likely to look upon them kindly and more likely to be okay when violence is committed against them.

Not only are our interpretations of the world often arbitrary, but we’re often overconfident in them.

Chabris says. “We’re not all-knowing and all-seeing and perfect at our jobs, so we put [the data] out there for other people to check out, to improve upon it, come up with new ideas from and so on.” To be more intellectually humble, we need to be more transparent about our knowledge. We need to show others what we know and what we don’t.

And two, there needs to be more celebration of failure, and a culture that accepts it. That includes building safe places for people to admit they were wrong.

For a democracy to flourish, Lynch argues, we need a balance between convictions — our firmly held beliefs — and humility. We need convictions, because “an apathetic electorate is no electorate at all,” he says. And we need humility because we need to listen to one another. Those two things will always be in tension.

To be intellectually humble doesn’t mean giving up on the ideas we love and believe in. It just means we need to be thoughtful in choosing our convictions, be open to adjusting them, seek out their flaws, and never stop being curious about why we believe what we believe.
​
-- Brian Resnick

This one is packed with good stuff to consider...continue here.

A prayer for the New Year

'Poem for the week' -- "A prayer for the New Year":

Grant that I may pass through
the coming year with a faithful heart.
There will be much to test me and
make weak my strength before the year ends.
In my confusion I shall often say the word that is not true and do the thing of which I am ashamed.
There will be errors in the mind
and great inaccuracies of judgment…
In seeking the light,
I shall again and again find myself
walking in the darkness.
I shall mistake my light for Your light
and I shall drink from the responsibility of the choice I make.
Nevertheless, grant that I may pass through the coming year with a faithful heart.
May I never give the approval of my heart to error, to falseness, to vanity, to sin.
Though my days be marked
with failures, stumblings, fallings,
let my spirit be free
so that You may take it
and redeem my moments
in all the ways my needs reveal.
Give me the quiet assurance
of Your Love and Presence.
Grant that I may pass through
the coming year with a faithful heart.
​
-- Howard Thurman

Invocation

'Poem for the week' -- "Invocation":

Let us try what it is to be true to gravity,
to grace, to the given, faithful to our own voices,
to lines making the map of our furrowed tongue.
Turned toward the root of a single word, refusing
solemnity and slogans, let us honor what hides
and does not come easy to speech. The pebbles
we hold in our mouths help us to practice song,
and we sing to the sea. May the things of this world
be preserved to us, their beautiful secret
vocabularies. We are dreaming it over and new,
the language of our tribe, music we hear
we can only acknowledge. May the naming powers
be granted. Our words are feathers that fly
on our breath. Let them go in a holy direction.

-- Jeanne Lohmann

Don't Think Anybody Can Grow

I don’t think anybody can grow unless he is accepted exactly as he is.

-- Fred Rogers

Wealth

As much as anything else, wealth in our society seems to be a function of public policy.

On a related note (OK, not really...), I'm super-excited about the cold & snow today—beautiful!

LT: People You Serve

When the people we serve present themselves, when they offer us their attention and their trust, we need to work to see two things:

1. Who they are. What do they fear, what do they believe, what do they need?
2. Who they can become. Which doors can we open, how can we support them, what will they leave behind?

-- Seth Godin

Development

I've noticed...you really can’t orchestrate someone else's development.

A non-formulaic mixture of external encouragement, attention-getting circumstances, and internal desire seem to shape when and how someone grows.  Respecting this mystery in others is important.

Sin

Sin is a refusal to keep growing.

-- St. Gregory of Nyssa

I would love to have talked to this guy—I think he is really on to something.

"Let's Take This Outside"

...a beautiful winter evening of hockey at Notre Dame stadium - ND vs UM.

Ten Habits Of Incredibly Happy People

We’re always chasing something—be it a promotion, a new car, or a significant other. This leads to the belief that, “When (blank) happens, I’ll finally be happy.”

While these major events do make us happy at first, research shows this happiness doesn’t last. A study from Northwestern University measured the happiness levels of regular people against those who had won large lottery prizes the year prior. The researchers were surprised to discover that the happiness ratings of both groups were practically identical.

The mistaken notion that major life events dictate your happiness and sadness is so prevalent that psychologists have a name for it: impact bias. The reality is, event-based happiness is fleeting.

Happiness is synthetic—you either create it, or you don’t. Happiness that lasts is earned through your habits. Supremely happy people have honed habits that maintain their happiness day in, day out. Try out their habits, and see what they do for you:

1. They slow down to appreciate life’s little pleasures.
2. They exercise.
3. They spend money on other people.
4. They surround themselves with the right people.
5. They stay positive.
6. They get enough sleep.
7. They have deep conversations.
8. They help others.
9. They make an effort to be happy.
10. They have a growth mindset.

Continue here...

-- Travis Bradberry

Collectively

We don’t wake up until we do it collectively.

-- Unknown

I heard this recently, but didn't get the name of the author of it.  It struck me as innately true, since so much of our of sensibilities are conditioned by the social fabric we happen to live in.

Far Greater

We are members of one another. What binds us together is far greater than what separates us... because of our inter-connectivity, what happens to the least of us happens to all of us. Whatever you do for the least of us, you do for all of us.

-- Bennet Omalu

Being Held Down

There's nothing quite like the motivation that arises from being held down.

Saturday Mornings 2.0 - Generosity of Spirit

Like last year, I am anticipating what a new year may bring.  I feel aware of my desire for the following Generosity of Spirit:

Growing my awareness and understanding,
to expand my capacity 
for wisdom and love.

From its onset, Saturday Mornings has become a way of noting a bit of this process for me.

When I first started doing Saturday Mornings, the following seemed to capture its essence for me (I think this still holds true, so I don't want to forget it):

"I've been drinking (coffee)...and writing on Saturday mornings. I don't claim much, but am willing to share some of the stuff I encounter in this wonderfully, mysterious life. I appreciate more and more simple words from an old hymn, "Strength for Today, Bright Hope for Tomorrow". What more could I really ask for than these two things? Perhaps some of my thread can be a part of our tapestry."

The next phase (2.0), it seems to me, captures the natural expansion of what this has been saying.  More than just observation, reflection, and self-discovery, I want to grow further by extending it to others, increasing my capacity for love -- something that often seems to require wisdom.

Perhaps, as each day unfolds this year, it will continue to reveal God's Spirit in me and whatever this means for what I offer the world around me.