Monthly Archives: January 2015

Separating Meaning From Action

Posted on by kgoodman

A good friend of mine recently wrote a blog post about the distinction between your role and your calling. This is an important distinction and a good read, you can find it here. The post got me thinking about how easy it is to get caught up in the day to day actions we perform, the busyness and the maintenance of our lives, and forget to live.

I have two young children. If you want to talk about being caught up in the moment look to someone with children. Interestingly, being “caught up in the moment” and “living in the moment” are two distinctly different activities. I like the idea of living in the moment, but I can’t resist making plans. I typically have something that I want to be doing. Yet with two children around, with needs and plans of their own, my plans don’t always mesh with what reality has in store for me.

Out of this rises a dissatisfaction with the disconnect between what I want to be doing and the demands that my life puts on me. I suppose part of my frustration and dissatisfaction comes from a separation from what I enjoy versus what I’m doing. I’m not a huge fan of daily maintenance such as diaper changes. Then we get into my role, as primary bread winner for the family, this requires me to make plans regarding how to earn this money and keep that money coming in. Then there is the ego portion of planning, this tells me that what I had planned is much more important that what someone else is trying to do.

The truth is I don’t hate doing diapers that much. Sure I’d like it if my little one didn’t scream when being cleaned up, but where there is a strong willed child there is a future empowered adult, so I’m trying to embrace this. The truth is that I am caught up in the gap between what I feel my mission is in this world and what my daily life demands of me. This gap manifests as a disconnect between my daily actions and what I perceive as my plans in life.

Interestingly one of my plans in life is to have children… Which I now have… And this sometimes leads me to ask “What was I thinking?”… In fact what I was thinking good thoughts, and still am, most of the time. I wanted to enrich my life with the wonder of a child’s lifecycle and learning as they learn and seeing through their eyes. Not to mention that whole underlaying biological drive to reproduce and pass on your ideas to preserve for future generations (my ego digs this). I really wanted to connect in to all these moments of wonder and experiences and growth. I had no idea what I was asking for. Like all things in life, the reality of the thing does not meet the expectation of the thing. Having children is both far worse that I thought it would be and far more wonderful.

So to my point. How do we separate meaning, the why we are here, from the action, what we do while we are here?

How do we make sure we’re living the life we need to, to have the experience we are meant to?

The short and simple answer that helps me sleep at night, is that we don’t.

You don’t need to do anything. You are having exactly the experience you need to be having to enable your life to have the meaning it is meant to have.

So perhaps the greatest lesson you can learn, is the lesson of acceptance that all is as it should be.

For example, it has come to my attention that I am not a patient person. When I’ve decided I need or want something, the need becomes immediate and pressing. I like finding the solution and jumping to the end. Yet life is all about the steps in the middle. My children are a perfect illustration of this. Do I want fully developed 20 year old children that I don’t have to nurture and care for? Do I want to skip the whole experience of watching them grow up and helping them as they do? No, of course not. I should not expect the experience to be any different than it is. And the action of this experience and my reactions to the experience have lead me to the conclusion that I may need to practice a little more patience. The experience is exactly as it should be. It is my rejection of the experience and illusion, that it should be other than it is, that causes the dissatisfaction and tension.

So my main words if wisdom, if I have any at all, would be to not worry about your meaning. Don’t allow your quest for meaning to damage your experience or impede your actions. Your actions will be what is required of you.

Allow these actions to be your meditation.

Take each moment as a lesson. But you won’t always know what lesson it is until years down the road.

Embrace the joy of today, it’s all we have.

Make plans and allow them to fall apart.

Love those around you.

Find peace and share it with those around you. Meaning will come, when it is needed.

Namaste,

Kevin

Tuscany landscape at sunrise, Italy

The Fog

Posted on by kgoodman

Fog is an interesting thing. It can be comforting or it can terrifying. Driving in the fog at high speed is a very bad idea, but if you don’t have anywhere to go, it’s nice to have less of the world revealed to you. You can almost feel like you’re wrapped in a protective blanket apart from the world, at least for a few hours until the fog lifts.

Knowing too much can be overwhelmed. Considering every possible permutation and outcome to a decision, can be immobilizing.

The impetuousness of youth is often guided by ignorance and idealism. Idealism can be driven by a lack of data. It’s easy to assume that everyone is the same as you, that they all want the same things as you, and that the path ahead is common for all.

But with age, wisdom, and experience you learn that our paths are not all similar and that destinations, goals and motivations are not all the same. So the abundance of information can in fact lead to inaction due to uncertainty of the best solution. Considering everything in your conclusions will not always lead to the triumph, sometimes it will lead to inaction.

We live in a world of abundant information. Details of every possible consideration. News stories of the bizarre and extreme circulate through all mediums. If you take it all in, you have an abundance of biased data to consider and you find yourself in a position of lack. Instead of gaining the global perspective you hoped for you find yourself overwhelmed with information and lost in a sea of sensation. There is no rudder to guide you in the tsunami of stories, you are simply washed away with the overwhelming current.

We are not meant to take in the whole of human experience and see life through the eyes of the everyone in the world. We are meant to experience our own life.

I’m not advocating denial, though I would sometimes encourage it. I’m not advocating ignorance, though there is a great benefit to it. I’m advocating caution and individuality. Don’t give up on your experience in order to process someone else’s. If you allow the weight of the world experience to bare down on your shoulders you are in fact becoming a victim of someone else’s crime.

And this is why I’m advocating fog. This is why I’m suggesting that you shroud yourself in a protective layer of the unknown. Allow yourself to be enveloped in a substance that prevent you from seeing beyond your own back yard. Enable your world to shrink and stabilize as a single home in the middle of nowhere with no connection to anything but your own life. Enabling yourself to slow down and experience your own world one moment at a time. This is your world, your life, your own experience. Don’t rob yourself of it by trying to take in the lives of everyone else.

Namaste,

Kevin

Frosty Fence In The Fog

Become a Creative Force

Posted on by kgoodman

What is art? What is novel? What is creativity?

Usually, when I come up with a neat idea for something new, I talk myself out of doing it. There is a little voice of ‘reason’ in my head that guide me through the thought process.

It starts with an idea, (bing) the lightbulb in my mind clicks on.

Then the nerd chorus in my head jumps in, “That would be so cool!”

Then the lawyer kicks in, “That’s really just derived from this other idea, so you’d have an intellectual property issue and would get sued.”

Then my politician kicks in, “Everything is really just derived creation. All new ideas come from variations on a theme.”

Then my critic kicks in, “That’s really not creative. It wouldn’t benefit anyone. No one would (read it/buy it/like it/engage with it). You really shouldn’t bother.”

Slowly my beautiful, bright lightbulb begins to fade, word by word. My enthusiasm drains as my lightbulb dims and my excitement withers and disappears.

By the time I’m done with this mental board meeting I’m usually pretty tired. And I’m usually ready to just move on. Once again, no actions have been performed. No creation has happened. Nothing comes out of this but me spinning my wheels…

The voices in my head are all right. They are also all wrong. Or maybe a better way of saying it is, that they are right, after a fashion, but that I also need to start ignoring them. I need to just create, because creation brings life, joy and wonder. It doesn’t really matter in the end if you are doing something never seen before, or if you are doing something that 100 people have already created in the past. You bring something entirely unique to your creation, you.

The other day I was preparing some carrots and dates for my daughter for a snack. I had a few out for her that she was already eating, and as I started looking at the carrots left on the cutting board, an idea popped in my head. I could make a train out of carrots and dates. So I started carving up the carrots into axels and cutting a steamer box. I made a little cable with an upright carrot stump, for the driver and used date circles for the wheels. My daughter was delighted! She said in an excited voice, “Mommy, Daddy made me a car!” Okay, I was a little deflated that she didn’t think it resembled a train, but just a little. I had actually had fun creating something for my daughter and she had responded with delight.

There are a couple key points I took away from this:

1) Share your art

Your creation is yours till you share it. When you share it the interpretation grows. It may become something you never thought it was. The act of sharing enhances the value, so don’t keep your creativity to yourself, it is selfish to not share.

2) Expect delight from your 5 year old audience

Okay, not everyone will react to your creation like a 5 year old getting a car made of carrots. But there is an audience out there for your creation. An audience that will react like a 5 year old getting a carrot car. Find that audience and dazzle them.

I’ve come to the conclusion that creativity acts like a muscle, if you use it the creativity muscle will strengthen. Practice your creativity. Come up with ideas. Execute those ideas. Share those ideas. Follow through.

If your idea seems derivative or already done, do it anyhow. Practice doing the same thing as other people have already done. It’s okay to rehash the past. It’s okay to reinvent the wheel. Build the same mousetrap. Maybe the world won’t beat a path to your door. But your life will blossom and your creativity will strengthen.

Any time something becomes hugely popular people criticize it as derivative. I’ve often found it interesting that Harry Potter, one of the best selling book series of all time, is criticized as being derivative. It has been viewed, by some, as a rehash of classic fantasy literature from the past 100 years and deriving from ancient mythology. But at the end of the day, fans don’t care. People love Harry Potter, myself included. Its classic themes enable the story to be compelling and engaging. At the end of the day J.K. Rowling has had a huge impact on the world and her creativity has benefited many millions of people. She wasn’t concerned with using derivative ideas or where her sources of inspiration came from. She focused her energy on executing her creation and wrote her story.

Write your story. Build your wheel. Share your idea. Create.

Namaste, Kevin

bigstock-bursting-with-ideas

How Big Are Your Legos?

Posted on by kgoodman

I was thinking about legos this week… More specifically I was thinking about building blocks.

Imagine this hierarchy.

City

Buildings

Blocks

Limestone, Ash and Water with an Oven (or kiln)

This is a gross over simplification. But in many ways that’s feeds my point. We all tend to stand on the shoulders of those that came before us. Not everyone can make bricks. But many people train on how to lay bricks. Not everybody designs buildings, but a few people may be experts at planning cities. We have to work at becoming professionals in the context in which we practice most, but it doesn’t mean we become experts in all levels from chemistry to city planning. There are levels where we let our expertise shine and levels where we trust to the skills and efficiency of those that make it their trade. It does not mean we can not do it. It means we should consider whether we should do it.

There are master craftsman who can do it all. But they have spend years crafting their skills and learning each aspect. At some point they were a beginner and knew nothing. All they had was aptitude and desire to learn. So when you take on something new, but look at the expert who knows it all, it can be very daunting to expect yourself to know it all as well. You have to take off chunks at a time and allow others knowledge to fill in the gaps. Even experts focus their energies within a core area of passion. The keys are focus and patience.

Let’s look at another example:

Book

Chapters

Paragraph

Sentence

Words

Letters

English

Here is an example where the person doing the heavy lifting is master of most of the components in the hierarchy. When you write a book it is built of chapters. Those chapters are built up from individual sentences forming paragraphs. These sentences are all based off of words that are formed from letters. Then you have the abstract concept outside of this heirarchy of ideas for the book and translating those ideas into words. With all this skill and knowledge it’s still being based on the standing on the shoulders of the english language and of course the alphabet, concepts and ideas created long before us.

So what’s my point?

Well, when you consider being creative, it’s easy to get blocked by one level or another of the creative process. You don’t even realize that this is the thing holding you back, because you’re trying to do something new. You are in uncharted territory and uncertain how to proceed. Often the reaction is to give up and assume you can’t do it. When you may in fact need to determine the size of the building block that you’re willing to work with. Sometimes this means breaking the problem down and chewing off small chunks, this is often called reinventing the wheel. If someone else has solved the problem previously, you can benefit from their knowledge and utilize their existing ‘wheel’. Sometimes this means switching out your problem with someone else’s solution, eg: using their wheel.

Let’s say you’re trying to build a house and you start mixing dirt and water together and stacking slabs of mud to build your walls. For some reason instead of getting tall straight walls you end up getting low arched puddles. Your walls are really just mounds of wet dirt. What’s the next solution? You could re-evaluate your approach to using mud, research how dirt can be made into bricks, refine your knowledge on baking bricks, and start a kiln up to produce bricks for your walls. Then just produce enough bricks to build your house. Or, you could go the store and buy a load of bricks. Maybe brick building from scratch isn’t your forte, but stacking bricks is your thing. If you remove the hurdle in your path of having to build your own bricks you could find you build houses really well. You just kinda stink at making bricks.

So when you try to take on something new, be gracious and try to focus on the fun. Determine if you’re goal is to make your own wheel, or if what you really want is a better cart, but you can leverage someone else’s wheels. The problems you face can be less daunting when you learn to lean on others where needed. This doesn’t make you less creative, it makes you part of a community.

Namaste,

Kevin

Time for new house