Balance is an intriguing concept to me. I’m always desiring balance, always intending to be balanced, but sometimes my quest for balance is unbalanced. It’s an interesting paradox to seek balance to the point of creating tension in ones life in an effort to reach it.

For example, I am an introvert. I love people and interacting with people, but it takes energy from me. So I need down time, time away from people, to recover my energies. My family, interestingly enough, is comprised primarily of people. People who need me, people who love me, people who want me around. So you have a man that’s seeking balance between work, family and recovery time. My effort to squeeze 30 hours of activity into a 24 hour day often leaves me spent and frayed.  If I give all the time to all the people in my life that request/demand my time, I’m left with little for myself. I end up getting cranky and overstimulated because I haven’t taken the time I need to regroup on my own. Conversely, if I take all the time I need for myself and my job, my family starts to miss me and it negatively impacts their well being (I miss them too).

It’s interesting when you consider the idea of balance. Balance is frequently pictured as a seesaw. The implication is that you have two things to balance against each other. You must seek the right position of the objects on each side based on their weight. Or deal with objects of equal weight. But the reality of life is that you’re dealing with a very complex system.

I’ve already described three things I’m trying to balance together. For something like that you’d need a disc or maybe a plate on a stick.

What if the balance I seek requires additional dynamic motion?

If you’re trying to balance a plate on a stick, it simply falls if when you just set it there. To help a plate balance you have to spin it. This motion causes the system to stabilize and the plate will balance… However this is where my analogy starts to fall over. Because when you spin the plate, everything on the plate will fly off.

Hmmm, maybe that’s good too. Maybe the act of spinning your balance plate, is really what you need to clear away the clutter. Anything that sticks on the plate is important and the things that fly off aren’t as important as they first appeared.

Maybe a good spin is what my life needs to shake off the debris and help me focus on what’s really left on my plate that matters. Maybe I’ve been focused too much on the clutter.

Of course this is only an analogy. The reality of my life is far more complex. And analogies are only powerful when you can tie them in to practical meanings. This gives the analogy the power to transform and open eyes to situations that were too difficult to see past, because they were not clearly understood.

So this leads me to my next natural question. How do I spin my life?

How do you spin your life?

I’d love to hear from you with your ideas.

Namaste,

Kevin

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

Have you ever heard the saying, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.”?

Metaphor aside, as a handyman, you pull together a set of tools. You expand as you take on new jobs and find a need for new tools. But at some point you have a lot of tools and you start to think, “I’ve got this”. Sometimes it’s because the toolbox gets full. Sometimes it’s because the specialized tools are too expensive. But you can reach a point where you just make things work with what you have.

Back to the metaphor, when solving problems we develop a certain set of skills, and we tend to apply those solutions to every problems we come across. We treat every problem like it’s a nail, when all we have is a hammer.

We run into the same problem when we’re trying to judge another person.

We are contrast machines, we establish a baseline of behavior, appearance, character, and then look for differences by viewing the contrast between the known (our baseline) and the new (the person you just met). When the only measuring stick is ‘you’, you tend to measure everyone against yourself. For example, I think that everyone should be more or less one Kevin tall, anything else is just too tall, or too short.

There are really 3 primary groups when you look at judgement:

The average person would fall into the personal measuring stick, where everyone is judged against themselves. Where likeness is found it is considered normal and difference are considered abnormalities or failings of the person being reviewed. The reviewer is the baseline, the measuring stick, and the person under review is considered outside of acceptable bounds.

Closed minded people can have a twisted standard. Instead of judging against baseline, or against themselves, they judge against who they think they are, or who they think they should be. Essentially you’re being judged against a standard that they don’t even live up to. Their illusion leads to a judgement of failure on your part. Oddly with this mindset this illusion also leads to dissatisfaction with themselves.

Open minded people  can expand this to allow for variations within a control group. Instead of just judging new people against themselves, solely, they judge within a group of people they consider as “within acceptable parameters”. The grace and success of this method is dependent upon the size of the group you have allowed in to be “Acceptable”. This can be a good means of judgement but it’s fallible when you run into a person outside of your accepted experiences.

Now the goal, as I see it, is to be in a 4th category, let’s call this the “Really Open Minded” group. This is the group that looks at someone and accepts them as they are. There is no judgement of value based on what they can do and cannot do. There is no consideration of lesser or greater. There is only awe at the person in front of them. A sense of wonder that you even got to interact with a person so unique and amazing.

I have been learning more about myself recently through the mirror of my kids. It turns out I’m not quite the person I thought I was. It doesn’t make me a bad person, it doesn’t make me a good person, I’m still just a person. I’m reminded of the scene from the matrix where the bad guy snort derisively at Neo during a fight “Only Human”. I snorted that derisively at myself this morning during a moment of abject humanity.

I am “only human”. I am also “delightfully human”.

The me that I am, and the me that I believe I should be, are still only a fraction of the spectrum of all that humanity has to offer. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. All is acceptable because we are all made perfectly as we are meant to be.

Namaste,

Kevin

We learn the label for a thing before we actually learn about the thing. Once we hear a label, we assume the label is the thing. So we encircle the thing without knowing the thing. The label is not the thing, it is just a label, by definition.

My daughter knows what the moon is. She can look up in the sky and say “look the moon”. But she is 3 and her depth of understanding of the moon is very limited. I can only imagine what she has constructed in her head to make sense of the moon. A flashlight in the sky that moves around? A big bright mirror? Where is the moon located in her mind? What is it made of?

Her understanding of celestial mechanics is limited. She doesn’t understand Newtonian motion. She doesn’t even comprehend how far away the moon is.

But she can point at the moon with joy and still enjoy it.

It gives me pause, as I consider with superiority my understanding of the moon. I know what the moon is, I know the path it takes through the sky, I even understand a bit about Newtonian physics describing it’s motion. But to be fair, in the end, I mostly know a set of labels.

The moon is, on average, 240,000 miles away. I know this, but to say I comprehend is a strong statement. 240,000 miles! How do you wrap your head around that?

Also, I’ve never been to the moon. I’ve never even touched a moon rock. So to say I know what the moon is made of is presumptuous rather trusting on my part.

Yet, relative to my daughter, I feel I have a pretty strong grasp on this moon thing. But I really just know a lot of labels and concepts related to the moon. I don’t really know the moon.

Certainly not in the biblical sense.

Familiarity breeds false understanding. The more you use a label, the more your mind registers that label. It becomes mundane and “known”. But it can actually lead to a superficial level of understand that prevents us from reaching deeper understanding. We stop trying to learn about something, because we thing we already know. We’ve settled for a label.

In some ways this is a defense mechanism. The world is so large and complex. There are many things that are beyond our comprehension. Or in many cases they are beyond our need or desire to comprehend them. Everybody has an engine in their car, but they don’t all need to know how it works and how to repair it in order to benefit from it. So we label it “My Engine” and move on with life.

This is all fine and good when it comes to the trivial and the mundane. But what about when it impacts somebody else?

We apply labels that we don’t fully understand to people. We judge and think we understand why we are judging, because they have been labeled. But the label is not the person.

Some of these labels are “Gay”, “Retarded”, “Weird”, “Strange”. We tend to label people without understanding that they are people and they need love, compassion and true understanding, the same as you do.

I believe this is why ancient theistic culture forbade the speaking and writing if God’s name. For one could not know God or the mind of God and speaking his name caused the brain to register familiarity. Over time this lead to a person thinking perhaps they did know God. I think that is one of the problems with religion today, a lot of people in positions of power thinking they know God, and dictating to their followers what God wants.

The next time you think negatively about another person and judge them. Pause for a moment and consider, are you judging the person? Or are you labeling them and dismissing them because of what you think you know?

Namaste,

Kevin