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Life

Indoor Insanity – Part 1 – Meet the Family

Do you ever wonder why we, as adults, are so miserable and unhappy, while our children happily frolic around, oblivious to the stress and challenges of the world?

If you do, then please, read on to see my take on this phenomenon.

Let’s perform an experiment

Look at any young child, and just observe.

You will see that if you put a blank page in front of them – they will immediately begin to create.  In fact, they never stop creating.

Creating noise, creating mess, creating trouble, the list goes on and on.

As “grown-ups”, or wannabe perfectionists, we often don’t see eye to eye with them regarding their aforementioned “creativity”.

When they draw, they don’t make straight lines with a ruler, or make all their shapes symmetrical.

However, they don’t look down upon those imperfections.  They likely do not even see them as being imperfections.

A drawing is not meant to be perfect, nor should they expect it to be.  The beauty of art lies in its imperfection.

They do what they can, and that is enough.

Enough to make them smile.

Enough to make them wake up happy – every single day.  No matter what they went through the day before.  No matter how many times they were told to STOP being imperfect.

Hello World

To help put this into perspective – let’s go back to the start.

We are born warm, open, malleable. 

We are ready for positive ideas. 

Ready to be accepted for who and what we are. 

Ready to be taught and gain knowledge.

Sensitivity, patience, and the acceptance of our imperfect selves are the foundational vehicles that allow us to transition from the tranquil state in the womb to the harsh reality of this world.

Enter Reality

Let’s visualize that our metaphysical selves, our physche, our emotions, personality, everything that essentially sums up “who we are” is packaged and built into a vehicle.

Our journey starts off in the womb.  Our vehicle is in the process of being built.

Then we are born, and we begin driving our vehicle. 

The road is smooth, clear of any obstacles.

Then one day, our vehicle hits an obstacle.  It starts off small, at first.

Small cracks in the pavement.

 “Don’t worry, they’ll just cry themselves to sleep.”

I have been left alone.  
It hurts more than that needle I was poked with last week.  
Oh, how I miss my old, warm home.

When we get a little older: Pot holes.

“Oh, hey little guy.  Nice artwork – but your lines are all crooked.  Here, let me show you how to make straight lines with this ruler.”

We are now increasingly told that the “way we are” is unacceptable.

Signs and other roadblocks are put in our way.

Breaking away the body of our vehicles:  side mirrors, bumpers, headlights, doors, tires. 

We begin to steer into sidewalks and fire hydrants.

“No – not like that. No, not like that either! Forget it, here let me do it for you.”

“You’re doing it all wrong! Aren’t you listening to me?”

“Why do you keep crying all the time? You need to stop being so sensitive.”

Eventually the impacts begin to reach the internal workings of the vehicle:  transmission, braking system, the engine. 

Breaking down and crushing everything that got us here in the first place. 

Sensitivity has turned against us.

Patience has never hurt so bad.

Rejection of who we are, of who we will ever be.

Concrete walls

“Why are you crying again?!”

“Stop crying!”

“STOP IT!”

Broken, with every blow, every teardrop, every crash, every sob, every dismissal, every rejection, every hurtful reprimand.

Walls of steel and plastic, shards of glass, ice cold steel, soft tissue.

Now ask the parent

Do you wake up smiling, every single day?

Do you wake up with a clean slate – no enmity or bad feelings against anyone or anything from the day before?

Uh – who needs to learn from who here again?

As parents, we are in such a hurry to have our children grow up that we sometimes forget to let them live.

We also forgot, or nobody told us, how to activate that long lost part of us.  The part of us that will help us understand ourselves, so that we can better understand our children.  Our inner child.


Suggested Reading

Categories
Life

How to protect yourself against the Coronavirus (COVID-19) – Part 2

In reading the news today, it became apparent to me that there are an overwhelming amount of Coronavirus articles in mainstream news that focus on information that is, essentially, useless.

Breaking news

X new cases of Coronavirus in city Y

  Okay – so, uh, a lot more people are testing positive.

What do you want me to do now, besides feel more scared? 

Lock my windows and doors even tighter?

Wash my hands some more?

Usefulness rating

Another example:

“I am going to the gym today and am going to do 50 push-ups there.”

Yes, you’ve gotten information on my whereabouts and what I’m going to do, but that’s about it. 

What would be its ‘usefulness’ rating on a scale from 1 to 10?  Probably a 1, or 2, tops.

How about:

“I’m going to the gym today and am going to focus on exercises that build my core, such as push-ups and planks.  Here’s the source that I’m following for these exercises ..”

That is a bit more useful, wouldn’t you say?  That probably has a usefulness rating of 5.  But wait, a comparable article on COVID-19 might be too useful to post, perhaps. People can’t handle all that usefulness, remember?

That being said, let’s actually look at some articles that don’t just focus on washing your hands or sanitizing everything and your dog:

The headline for these would probably read something like:

Breaking news:

Here’s what you can REALLY do to protect yourself against the Coronavirus

Here’s what you can do to help yourself so much that these breaking news articles will stop because not only will confirmed cases stop rising, but you will feel better than you ever have in your entire life.

I’ll let you know once I find this.  In the meantime, the above links will hopefully get you closer to that goal.

Categories
Life

How to protect yourself against the Coronavirus (COVID-19) – Part 1

Disclaimer:

Lucky for you, I am not a “medical professional”. 

Just someone who believes in optimizing the healing power of the bodies we have been given – by following things like common sense and the wisdom passed down from our ancestors.

The list before the list

  1. If you believe that the only source of healing comes from a pill, then this may be the perfect opportunity for you to regain trust in yourself, in your body, in what you think is best, rather than what someone else thinks is best.
  2. The beauty of following natural methods is that you have nothing to lose.  There are no side effects, no major consequences – just potential improvement. 
  3. You try things, and if they don’t work, then you haven’t lost anything.  At the very least, you gained knowledge in knowing what doesn’t work for you.  So you don’t waste your time in the future.  So you can focus on figuring something else out that WILL eventually work.
  4. That being said, the idea is to not only protect yourself from “trending” illnesses such as the Coronavirus, but to just generally optimize your well-being.

The list

  1. Eating close to how your ancestors did, assuming science backs it up.
    i. This doesn’t mean following any specific or trending diet. This is just doing what makes sense to do and what other healthy people did before you.
    ii. For example, if you know that men in your lineage ate a lot of bread and they were generally healthy, then maybe that’s OK for you. However, don’t forget the context. The bread of old is not the bread of today. The bread of the past was not made in a factory and was not made for mass production. It was not made as quickly and cheaply as possible. It was made in a way that made sense. In a way that they found others before them doing, which was using slow fermentation / sourdough.
    iii. So use that knowledge and prepare foods in a way that science has proven to make them more digestible. More information here: https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/food-features/be-kind-to-your-grains-and-your-grains-will-be-kind-to-you/
  2. Putting yourself in an environment that your ancestors were in, which science will back up.
    i. Were your grandfathers of old locked up in a house and looking at a blue-light emitting screen all day?
    ii. No, that’s right, they were probably doing something outside. You do remember outside, don’t you?
    iii. I can appreciate how difficult this is, and am finding the same myself.
    iv. The closest thing I’ve found these days is getting into gardening or sports. These are just simulations, of course. They are not the same as actually being outside and doing things because you HAVE to do them. That is a very important point that we will touch on later.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more.

UPDATE (2020/04/06): Continue reading here:

References:

Categories
Life

Uncommon courtesy

(Un)common courtesy

Whatever happened to thanking people?

Whatever happened to raising your hand when somebody lets you in (when driving)?

The common courtesy of simply raising your hand to both acknowledge and be a gesture of kindness?

Showing somebody that you appreciate what they’ve done for you.

How about the most basic, fundamental, communication of just putting on your turn signal before you change lanes?

It seems like even that is a luxury these days.

If you get turn signals AND get the hand after, you’re like “Whoa!  This guy is really overdoing it now!  He’s communicating too much!”

Whereas, like 30+ years ago, that would have been just normal.  Would have been expected.  Looked forward to, in a way.

How does it feel?

How does it feel when someone tells you that they are changing into your lane?

How about when you see that someone has an urgent need to go into your lane, possibly due to their own error, but you let them in anyway, and they thank you after?

Now, how does it feel when someone purposefully tries to cause harm to you, for trying to drive safely? 

This is inherently what they are doing when they change into your lane without notice and without the space required.

Why?

How do we explain such a breakdown?  A breakdown of concern.  Of empathy.

I’d like to examine this from 3 perspectives: 

1. Respect

What makes you respect somebody?

If you were driving and knew that your brothers and sisters were also among the sea of cars, would that make you want to turn on your turn signals?

Would that still make you cut them off?

Potentially causing an accident, but guaranteed to illicit negative emotional reactions in both yourself and the offended party.

But alas, they are not your brothers and sisters, right?

They are just strangers.

And since they are just strangers, then “I’m not going to signal”.

2. Communication

I’m not going to communicate.

I’m not going to care if my actions will harm them, whether that harm is emotional or physical.

It’s all about perspective

Now let’s look at this from another point of view: 

Let’s say the person who was cutting off people and not signalling was somehow aware of the pain they were causing. 

If they actually felt this pain for themselves.  Not just having empathy, but experiencing it.

Would they then still do what they do?

I believe the answer is:  No, they would not.

3. Compulsion

People do what they are compelled to do.

Turning the table

If I could feel the loss of respect, the feeling of being put down, the feeling of not being cared for, caused when I aggressively slide the car I am driving directly in front of another.

If I could feel the shame, or the attempt to be nonchalant, caused when I see someone (myself) mouthing curse words and glaring at me with what appears to be vile hatred.

If I could, then I wouldn’t do it.

Or maybe I feel that others are already making me feel like that, so I’m just paying back the favor?

I feel disrespected every day, and that nobody cares about me, so why should I care about them?  They deserve to feel the way I feel.

One of the most commonly said phrases these days is based on this pattern:

“<negative verb and/or profanity> <targeted noun or verb>”

For example: 

“<profanity> you!”

“I don’t give a <profanity> about what he thinks!”

This vibe, train of thought, or mindset, is propagated, accentuated, and promoted by popular media.

Can’t nobody tell me nothing

-your child’s favorite song from 2019

It’ll be interesting to see the demographics of people who do not signal or do not communicate on the road.

To find patterns in them.  Are they young, or old? How often are they on their computers (all of them, including “phones”)?

Then with that data, we can triangulate and discover wisdom within the data.

Then we’ll know the truth.

Then we’ll know what’s really going on.