Merry Christmas everyone!!! I hope you’ll forgive me, in my holiday reflective mode, I got a little abstract this week. Hope you enjoy the thought process! 🙂

It’s time for a Christmas confession, I’m a sloppy gift wrapper. Sloppy corners, messy tape lines, no bows, the list goes on and on. My gifts aren’t abysmal, but they could use some work in the aesthetics department.

I have often heard “It’s what’s inside that counts.” And that’s a nice sentiment. But it’s only sometimes true.

What’s inside has tremendous value. What’s inside is the essence and value of anything… However, the outside is the pathway. The outside is the invitation to learn more and discover the inside.

It has also been said “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey that matters.” And so through this analogy, the package is the journey and the present, the contents, are merely the destination.

So by logical inference of applicable cultural wisdom we have reached a standstill. The contents (what’s inside) is the only thing of importance and the contents (the destination) are unimportant.

Therefore I postulate to you. Everything matters and nothing is of consequence.

What I have learned over the years is this. Consider the whole presentation. Content is key, but packaging is prime. The message is important, but so is the mechanism.

Namaste,

Kevin

It is a bit funny, that this season of joy and holiday spirit, can turn into a guilt-fest if you’re not careful.

There are all sorts of reasons to feel guilty, if you look for them. Sometimes people are helpful enough to point them out to you even when you’re not looking.

I feel a little guilty presenting this list to you. But here goes, a holiday list of reasons to feel guilty.

1. Having clothes on your back
2. Having a roof over your head
3. Giving expensive gifts to people that don’t need them
4. Receiving expensive gifts that you don’t need
5. Buying gifts for yourself and them giving them to your wife to wrap and put under the tree to “surprise” you. (editors note: this is too specific and people won’t relate, you should probably remove this one)
6. Having food to eat
7. Eating too Much Food
8. Spending too much
9. Spending too little
10. … The list could go on and on and on …

It is interesting to note that amidst all the Christmas messages of gift giving and consumerism a very strong message has surfaced over the years of anti-consumerism. The message against exploiting Christmas have been going on for so long that they have become a powerful force unto themselves.

Picture the scene with me, a giant protest has broken out. There are two fences. On the left a fence holds back everyone in favor of Christmas buying and gifting and general consumerism. On the right another fence holds back the anti-consumerism crowd. And you walk the narrow path in between. Protestors on both sides banging the fence and waving their signs as you attempt to walk your path down the middle.

It’s hard to walk the path of balance when people are yelling from all directions that you should think a different way. As always, when there are two opposing sides to an argument and people fighting for their side to be right, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

This holiday season, and in your life in general, consider your actions calmly and compassionately, let go of the voices of guilt (no matter which fence they yell at you from) and live in joy, guilt-free.

We are blessed.

Namaste,

Kevin

I was listening to a report on the recent cool down we’ve been experiencing across North America. Winter has blustered in early this year and is even impacting California of all places. We’ve had subfreezing temperatures at night for over a week now in Davis California… And it’s cold!

The report’s discussion shifted to talk of “What ever happened to global warming?” said the interviewer. “Oh, now it’s referred to a climate change. And we may in fact be heading to an ice age”, said the interviewee.

Weather extremes have become the normal in the last 10 years. And the finger has always been pointed back squarely at humans for causing the problem. Except we may not be the problem at all! There is discuss going on currently that climate change may be driven by the Sun, sunspots and solar activity. Human activity may only account for a small fraction of what is driving our climate into chaos.

It occurred to me as I was listening that I was on the edge of my seat. I was trying to figure out how it was my fault, and what I should be angry about. It took me a few minutes to really settle in with what I was thinking, and I realized my subconscious was really saying: “Please tell me what I should feel GUILTY about. There has to be something!”

The Sun is too distant and beyond our control. How can I feel guilty for my sins if they are manifested by a power far beyond my control?

The power of the Sun, while often taken for granted, is truly awesome. Each day we are dependent on it for our lives, so dependent that we take it as a given, like the ground beneath our feet.

Stop to consider the Sun. It is so large that 1,000,000 (one million) earths could fit inside it’s volume. It is so powerful that the same energy that we experience here on earth every day is sent out in all directions regardless of whether there is a planet to benefit, the sun doesn’t only shine on us it shines in all directions, every day! 24 x 7 x 365!!!

So bringing this all back around to me. After all, it is all about me. I live in a culture of control and accountability. I have the ability, or rather have been offered the illusion of it, to control my environment. By corollary everything that happens in my environment is my fault. The media plays it up. Churches play it up. Advertisers capitalize on it. Everybody at one time or another tugs on our guilt strings, pointing the finger of shame directly at us.

Now don’t get me wrong.

I’m not saying we are victims of fate. And I’m not saying that we can just stop caring cause it’s all out of our hands. There are choices we make every day that can have impact and make the world a better place.

But I am saying that we can give guilt a rest. I am saying that there are great many things so powerful that they are simply outside of our control.

I am saying that when the climate drops to 20 degrees cooler than your average temperature for the season. Don’t feel guilty for driving a car. Instead find a homeless person and buy them a cup of coffee, or give them an extra shirt.

Focusing our energy on problems beyond our control is a waste of energy and a distraction from problems we can actually do something about. Today try to find someone that needs your help, and avoid the people or situations that only ask for your guilt. You can make a positive difference in the world.

Namaste,

Kevin

For my work, I commute in to San Francisco once a week. It’s a long commute on the train, and it takes me about 2 hours. I’ve been doing the commute for about 6 months now, and it’s become pretty routine. I know how to make my stops, I know the feel of the train going over rough or wavy track, and the scenery has become pretty wrote. The last leg of my Journey takes me into San Francisco by Bus, and that is where I saw this man.

As we traveled over the Bay Bridge into San Francisco I saw an elderly man riding the bus in the row ahead of me. He wore a red baseball cap with Einstein like gray hairs shooting out the side. His face bore the wrinkles the come with time and his long gray beard was thinning with age. He also bore a camera strap over his neck and kept picking up his camera to take snapshots through the bus windows. He would pick the camera up for the most mundane things and snap photos as we crossed over the bridge. A tugboat below, a tunnel ahead, road signs… Lastly, but most importantly, he wore a satisfied smile on his face, and I knew I was viewing a tourist.

My routine commute was his trip if a lifetime.

It gave me a moment of pause as I considered what the world would be like, if we treated every day as if we were tourists. What if we approached the world with the wonder and marvel of seeing everything for the first time?

I love this time of year. Sure, thanksgiving is nice. And Christmas with family around is wonderful. But one of my favorite parts of this season is all the Christmas lights. Even the most rundown home can look magical at night with a few strands of multicolored lights. It’s makes the boring look magical again. But it’s not really about what it does for the houses, it’s about what it does for me. It brings back my wonder and reminds me of the magic all around.

It is indeed a challenge to approach the world with the wonder of a tourist. Our minds operate in a very novel focused way, when something becomes known it begins to fall into categories. Instead of triggering our wonder it falls into our world of known labels.

Today take on the challenge of wonder. See if you can walk around your home like you’ve never been there before. See if you can visit your usual haunts like they are the Seven Wonders Of The World. Most importantly, appreciate that everything around you is a gift and something to marvel at!

Namaste,

Kevin

Elinor saw a boat. We were a few miles from the river and surrounded by trees. How could she possibly see a boat? She has good eyes, but I don’t believe she has x-ray vision.

Not wanting to discourage her by simply stating she was wrong, I tried to explain why she could not possibly see a boat. I explained that boats need water so they can move around properly. Satisfied with my explanation the exchange ended and we both moved on.

Later, as I reflected on the exchange, I realized that I had offered an incomplete truth. It is true that boats need water to work best, but they are not always on water. Boats can be washed ashore, boats can be hauled around on a trailer, and of course boats can be seen in our imaginations.

Being okay with incompleteness has always been a challenge for me. I like easy to understand, hard facts, that I can sink my mental teeth into. I like it when something is clearly and fully explained. And I continue to seek it in all things.

It is this search that has lead me into philosophy, and this search that has occasionally lead me to madness. All of the most interesting things in life are incomplete. Furthermore, they will likely always be incomplete.

When it comes to the human body, mind and spirit our explanations are often incompletely. And there in lays the challenge and what appears to be the lies. The overlooked assumption of completeness. When someone offers you their theory on the meaning of life it encompasses what they have considered and excludes what they have ignored. We tend to operate this way because truly encompassing the ‘all’ of these great mysteries is daunting at best and impossible at worst.

This is even true on science and physics. When describing large bodies from a baseball to a planet there is a theory that works for that, newton’s laws of motion. You can calculate gravitational pull and other factors with his equation and laws… But they are incomplete. And when you travel down to the molecular level they completely fall apart and we’ve developed additional models to try to explain how they operate. But they don’t work when you scale up again. They are all incomplete.

So while it is frustrating for me to struggle with the great mysteries and their incompleteness. My struggle for completeness is also part of the driving force that keeps me searching and seeking.  And with that thought in mind I am aware of the blessing of incompleteness. If everything was explained and correctly understood there would be no joy left in the search. So I make peace with incompleteness while at the same time embracing the drive that it provides.

The important things in life are all incomplete…

As time passes friends gather around and greet each other with friendly and quiet joy. Elated but respectful to the man in the gray wool cap with the long gray goatee. He sits to the side of the cafe like a minstrel of old, guitar in hand and singing out stories of love gone awry or moments of insanity (crazy for loving you). People talk gently, sharing thoughts of compassion and connection, always with one ear to the music reverberating through the room.

Rain falls outside in it’s relentless assault on the dirt and grime lining the streets of San Francisco. A frequent reminder sounds outside as the rolling tires of passing cars rip the water from it’s resting place throwing up rooster tails into the air behind them.

I sit in my chosen corner. Observing, thinking, reflecting, applauding. What a charmed life I lead. How gifted I feel when I have a moment of reprieve to reflect on the situation that is my life and can be aware of it’s content and not it’s crisis.

Thank you to the universe for my situation and shift. The blessing of the moment of awareness. The gratitude I have in this moment compensates for so many moments of feeling lost and abandoned. The chance to see the world as it is, and not as it was perceived.

I am certain I will lose prospective once more when I leave my moment of reflection and return to my life of immersion. I can only hope that as I document this I can use this to remind myself that I am truly blessed.

Namaste,

Kevin

When I was a young man I didn’t care much for history. It didn’t have much value for me. Why do we have to remember all these names and dates? Why do we remember this person, and not another?

I always appreciate the warnings about not forgetting history to avoid repeating it… But it seems like bogus wisdom. No matter how much history we remember the cycles always repeat. Good and evil always play their game of tug-o-war with the average folk caught in the middle.

As I age and become more familiar with my mortality, I am starting to get it. Slowly. And I have come to appreciate more the stories from our past. (Though I’m still not clicking with geneology, sorry mom).

As I walked to the bus in San Francisco on Monday, a walrus caught my eye. There is a mural along the side of a bank building with a string of walruses (or is that walri?)

In my youth I would have walked by and ignored it. But my mind, building on the value of memorial, triggered me to go back and investigate.

There is a placard to the bottom right that tells about the building and it’s walrus string. It turns out the building is over 100 years old, built after the 1906 quake destroyed the original. And before the original was built there this was probably a short area of sand. This location was a block from the beach before landfill projects filled in and stretched the land another 1/2 mile into the water. That project traces back to the 1850s. Imagine, gold money from the 49ers probably funded the landfill!

Found history is much more fun than forced history. This felt like a discovery instead of a requirement. And I was delighted to realize as I continued my walk to the bus that I would have been under water 160 years ago (give or take a few).

History is random in its remembrances. When the artists carved these walrus heads did they have any idea that they would still stand over 100 years later? The names of the carvers are long forgotten. But today, I took notice and my world was impacted more than 100 years later.

There is no way to guarantee your legacy. There is no way to know what you will be remembered for, or if you will be forgotten. But remember that the work and interactions you perform today, may, be around for another 100 years. Your name may be forgotten, but your impact will not.

Namaste,

Kevin

around:

200 Battery St
San Francisco, CA  94111
United States

Let me start by saying, you are all leaders. It’s not that this blog is elitist. And it’s not that you are each CEO’s and leaders of industry. It comes from the fact that you all care about the direction the world is going, and you’re conscientiously making an effort to understand and improve yourself to be the change that you want to see in the world.

That is leadership.

When you set out to find your own path, you are leading, simply because, you are no longer following.

When you lead in this manner you won’t always see your followers. You won’t always see your impact. But it is there and it is powerful. As surely as a wake of air ripples out behind a jumbo jet, it is very hard so see, but when the wind hits you, it’s impossible to deny.

So it is in this spirit of speaking to leaders that I share my quote of the week:

Our job as leaders isn’t always to teach something new. But it is mainly to remind people of something they already know.

People don’t always need to hear the new and novel. All too often, in this modern world, everybody has heard everything that the world offers to them. But they haven’t thought through it all. There are ideas in their minds that have been seeded, but not fertilized. There are thoughts that have not yet been processed. And in that, lays the value of a repeated message.

One of my favorite movie quotes comes from the movie ‘Twelve Monkeys’ with Bruce Willis. This movie involves time travel, and at one point in the movie Bruce Willis’ character (James Cole) finds himself sitting in the same theatre movie as he watched as a young boy. After watching part of the movie he looks at his companion and says ” The movie never changes — it can’t change — but everytime you see it, it seems to be different because you’re different — you notice different things.” I often paraphrase this when sharing with others “The movie hasn’t changed, but I have…”

And in this concept comes the value of repeated lessons. Each time a story or an idea is repeated to us we can process some subtle input that eluded us before. This can be the result of concentration or perhaps a side benefit of life experience. But whatever the reason, as we change so does our ability to learn and process different aspects of the lessons around us.

So approaching the world as leaders, don’t be afraid to repeat yourself. Don’t feel like the slowest person in the class when you approach an old book and read it for the 3rd or 10th time. Don’t be surprised if the mundane world that you walk through today, where nothing ever seems to change, offers you a new exciting lesson that you never saw before.

Namaste,

Kevin

I got to see one of my favorite bands perform last week. The band ‘Cake’ performed for a small group of one thousand people at a conference I was attending in San Francisco. To be at the front stage when a favorite band is play, is just amazing. There is nothing else in the world like it.

The lead singer knows how to work a crowd. Once everybody was having a good time he started to work the crowd through sarcasm and self deprecation. It’s not a technique I would choose myself, but the crowd and I were eating it up. We would yell back in response and sing along as he commanded.

In that situation, with the music blasting out of the speakers a few feet to my left, individuals without a amplification are background noise at best. I yelled myself hoarse and still could only barely be heard (but that didn’t stop me from trying). But when the lead singer organized us, when he set up the rhythm and instructed us to sing along. It was magical. A sea of tiny imperceptible voice joined into a chorus of singers and we became a tidal wave. Individually we could contribute nothing. Together we rivaled the band.

I love seeing this small demonstration of the power of the crowd. Together we can do so much more than we can as a lone small voice. Individually we can complain, together we can change the world.

This power can be used for good or evil. Once it has begun moving it is often unstoppable. It reminds me of a quote from a favorite Science Fiction show, Babylon 5: The avalanche has already started; It is too late for the pebbles to vote..

I encourage you this week to mindfully find a cause that you believe in, and add your voice to the chorus. It could be as simple as commenting on a blog to let others know you were there and you had a feeling to share. It could be as complex as writing a letter to your government representative about an issue on your mind. Or perhaps, you’re feeling called to be the metaphorical lead singer, find your amplifier and move the crowd to sing along.

Namaste,

Kevin

We have a special guest blogger this week. Heather Isaacs works with hospice patients and people that are nearing the end of their journey. She posted a facebook update recently that struck a cord with me and touched my heart, and I just wanted to share it with Chakra Community.

Heather’s update:

Once again, I am amazed by the the mysteries of the mind. I sat with a patient who has advanced dementia today. Often, she goes for days without saying more than a few words and she sleeps much of the time now. Always she is peaceful. Always she radiates warmth and kindness and humor. But there are spectacular and bizarre moments with her that take my breath away. In the same way that the sun will break through a cloudy day, she can become downright eloquent. And in those moments I feel like I am sitting at the foot of an oracle.

 

Today, she talked about how we are all parts of the whole and though we don’t know what role we are playing that we don’t have to worry about it because in the end it’s all going to be okay. She said that she’d forgotten what she had come here to do but wasn’t worried, either. Looking at her own body like it was a piece of clothing, she said “I could be almost anything now. And they could throw me away.” And though the words were strange, even sad, she laughed at the absurdity of it all. And I laughed with her. She said, “Whatever I am, I will be.” Over and over again, she talked about waiting, how we simply need to wait. She told me, “Take a breath. Relax. And wait to see what happens.” And looking at a plush toy bird hanging above her bed, she said, “I wish it could spread its wings and fly away. But it is waiting, too.”

I hope you find something in this gem to enlighten your day.

Namaste,

Kevin

About Heather:

Heather has her own blog to and loves hearing from visitors. She can be found at http://oddbygod.wordpress.com/.