Entries from December 2007 ↓

It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy…let’s go exploring!
–Calvin to Hobbes

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
–Marcel Proust

2007 was a year of exploration, discovery and adventure for me, so at the moment I’m still celebrating. Oh, sure, there were dark moments, but on the whole they offered contrast rather than being a prevailing mood. So even though New Year’s…making plans for personal growth…is usually my favorite time of year, in 2008 I intend to continue plugging along, doing what I’m already doing.

Mostly what I’ve been doing is spending a lot of time in the flow state, where I’m completely immersed in a project, forgetting about time and everything else. When I come out of it, the world always looks completely different. And what I’m especially noticing is how different today is from the world I grew up in.

For this post I’ll stick to two simple examples that made me smile:

Our printer/copier/fax machine has been acting flakier and flakier, so I ordered a new one as a backup. There was no hurry, but it was supposed to be delivered Thursday. It didn’t come, and when I tracked it that evening it was still in transit. I assumed it would come Friday…I expected UPS to knock when they delivered it and just leave it at the front door. That’s the usual procedure. I looked outside about the time they usually deliver and it still hadn’t come, so I figured they were still having trouble with the Christmas/after-Christmas rush. A couple of hours later I tracked it on Amazon again and received this message:

Sure enough, I looked and there it was, sitting there. That was a first for me…learning about a delivery by going online instead of getting a knock on the door. It’s definitely a different world than I grew up in.

Example #2: Hass and the Clock.

Torben, my daughter’s significant other, is a University of Michigan fan. So one of my presents this year was a Wolverine clock…that alone is an example of the new world. Without the internet there is no way I could have found it from a small town in New Mexico.

Torben likes the clock, and he temporarily stood it up on the floor while he decided where to hang it. Unfortunately Hass, one of the cats, became mesmerized by it and sat there watching the minute hand go around and around. The clock is now sitting on the sofa in the cat’s room so Hass can watch it more easily.

Kaitlin and Torben just had their hardwood floors redone and are still moving back in, so they can’t find their camera to take a picture. But the picture on the left shows Hass watching one of his favorite cat videos on the laptop. He’s a curious, intelligent animal and needs mental stimulation. Being a kindred spirit I think it’s great that he’s getting it.

So my present intention is to continue trying to live my basic philosophy: Stay curious and open to life. No matter what happens keep learning and growing. Find what you love to do and find a way to share it with others. In particular I hope to continuing posting once a week on each of my two blogs, doing the writing in the flow state as much as possible. And when I come out of that state of immersion I want to see today’s world with as much clarity as possible, instead of from the mental pictures I formed when I was growing up. That should be enough to keep me busy. I’ll let you know how it goes.

What about you? What are your intentions for 2008? Please share your thoughts and experience in the comments section.

Dog and cat photo by Lida Rose via Flickr. Used with permission. Owner reserves all rights.
Wolverine clock photo by FansEdge.com

Thanks to Robert, Adebola, Ellen, Life Reflection, Adam, and bikehikebabe for commenting on the last post.
 
New Year’s Day–Thanks to bikehikebabe for catching a typo, which I have duly corrected.

This little light of mine
I’m going to let it shine….

I’m not going to make it shine…
I’m going to let it shine
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.
— Negro Spiritual

One of our favorite Christmas traditions is to drive around the town on Christmas Eve, looking at the lights and listening to Christmas carols, then drive partway up the mountain to look down on the town and up at the stars. I still remember when my daughter was little enough to sit on my lap when we made the trip. I also remember snuggling in bed with her every night, talking for a while before she went to sleep. For about a month or so around Christmas we had a little artificial tree with lights in her room, and we would lie there in the dark together, looking at the lights as we talked. So a big part of Christmas to me is an image of lights radiating in the darkness.

I’m not analyzing it too closely, but in my mind the quiet and darkness are also connected to writing…they’re both ways of connecting to the deepest parts of myself and to something greater than myself. Some people would call that “something greater” God…others would call it the Divine, but for me the words don’t matter, it’s the experience that I care about. And it’s not something outside of us, we’re all a part of it…and it’s a part of us. To me that’s what the lyrics of the spiritual are saying…we all have an inner light that we can let shine. I personally can find mine more easily and see it much better when there’s some darkness for contrast.

What about you? Is darkness any part of your images of Christmas? Am I alone in this? Please share your thoughts and experience in the comment section.

Candle photo by SkyD via Flickr. Creative Commons license.
Picture of girl writing by arkworld. Used by permission. Owner reserves all rights.

 
Thanks to Al, Ellen, Adebola, bikehikebabe, and Albert
for commenting on last week’s post.

This is always a peaceful time of year for us. Our daughter is grown now, but even when she was little our Christmases were low-key and meaningful.

Mostly we only exchange presents with one another and with our daughter and her family, but we share cards, letters, pictures and phone calls with friends and the rest of our families. What about you? Is your holiday season quiet and peaceful? Busy and happy? Overly busy? Please share your experience in the comments section.

Photo by Sister72 via Flickr. Creative Commons license.

Thanks to everyone who commented this past week: Ellen, bikhikebabe, Peter, Tracey and Adebola.

So you see, imagination needs moodling — long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
–Brenda Ueland

All of man’s troubles come from his inability to sit alone, quietly, in a room, for any length of time.
–Blaise Paschal

To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.
–Robert Louis Stevenson

Find your creative/thinking time. Defend it ruthlessly, spend it alone….
—Randy Pausch

How much moodling/reflection time do you need? I learned long ago that I need to schedule it into my day, otherwise my mind takes it in the middle of the night. My particular organism demands that I spend time processing what is going on in my life. If I want to sleep, I need to honor that fact….it’s that simple. For me it’s sacred time. The moodling..playing with ideas…”doing nothing”…hanging out with myself or loved ones is how I feed my soul. No amount of worldly achievement could take its place.

Oh, I do set goals and get things done, and I always have a challenging problem or two for my mind to play with. But accomplishment is secondary to me. That’s not a fashionable attitude in our current society, and that’s fine, too. Whenever I start to feel pressured by what I “should” be doing, I think of a study done of first graders years ago. It found that the happiest and most creative children were the ones who spent the most time just sitting quietly, seemingly staring at the walls. I also think of Robert Frost sitting on his porch. One of his New England neighbors called him the “laziest man I’ve ever known.” Imagine, just sitting on a porch “doing nothing.” And I think of a colleague I knew at Cornell. He was the brightest fellow in the Physical Chemistry group. He tended to work late at night and come to work in the afternoon. He would go into his office, put on some classical music, sit down and smoke his pipe, and quietly ponder the problem he was working on at the moment. Recalling these images makes it easy for me to avoid being caught up in the busyness valued by our current culture. The images remind me to stay connected to something deeper and more nourishing.

So, what about you? We’re all different. Do you have a balance between activity and reflection that works for you? Do you feel you’re doing too little and need to motivate yourself more? Or do you treasure the periods of stillness in your life, spending just the right amount of time “doing nothing”? Please share your thoughts and experience in the comments section.

Photo by danellesheree via Flickr. Creative Commons license.

Thanks to everyone who commented this past week: Albert, Ellen, Tracey, Shirley, Truthteller and bikhikebabe.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.
—Albert Einstein

As usual, this post is presented as food for thought. The deeper we go into personal transformation, the more unique our experiences will be. We each have to become an expert on our own life, so I believe the best thing we can do for one another is to try to see our own experience clearly and share what we’ve learned.

In Staying In Tune we talked about how we know when we’re on the right path. I wrote then, “During my adult life I’ve been mostly able to tell. When I’m on the right track something resonates deep in my being. It feels right. When I’m on the wrong track it doesn’t feel right and I have to try something different.” I realized at the time that was just the beginning of the conversation…my answer wasn’t much help for people who couldn’t already tune in to that feeling.

Love and Curiosity
I developed that deep connection with myself by being loving and curious. It seems to me the curiosity comes naturally because when you love someone/something you want to know more about them/it. You’re willing to devote your time. You’re doing it for its own sake, not for some external reward. Einstein directed his attention to the physical world, and in personal transformation we explore the inner world.

Free-Association Journal Writing
The technique I’ve used most is free-association journal writing. I love that technique because all you need is paper and a pencil or pen. And once you get started you can easily integrate it into the day. When something comes up you can take a brief writing break and reconnect with yourself. My journal is my best friend, always there when I need it, day or night. I get a thrill every time I pass by the spiral notebook section in stores. My face lights up the way it does when I see any dear friend.

Focusing
I’ve also had fun learning Psychosynthesis, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Enneagram and Neuro-linguistic programming. But if I were to recommend one technique for people who want to develop that feeling of resonance as quickly as possible, it would be Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing. Gendlin developed the technique after trying to understand what made a successful therapist. He and his group listened to tapes of sessions from both successful and unsuccessful courses of therapy. The researchers discovered they could predict the ultimate results in the first two sessions. And it wasn’t anything the therapists were doing, it was what the clients did. “At some point in the session the client would slow down their talk, become less articulate, and begin to grope for words to describe something they were feeling in the moment.”

So Gendlin developed Focusing as a way to teach anyone how to do this for themselves. To see what the technique is like look at the comments on Gendlin’s book. In particular, scroll down to Kye Nelson’s review for a taste of how it works in practice. If the method appeals to you, I would recommend Ann Weiser Cornell’s The Power of Focusing. Cornell includes examples and suggestions based on her 15 years of teaching the technique. It’s a reasonably short, well-written guide for connecting with the deepest parts of yourself.

What About You?
What techniques work for you? Please share your experience in the comments section.

Picture of elephant by Picture Taker 2 via Flickr.Creative Commons license.

 
Thanks to everyone who commented this past week: Albert, Ellen, Tracey, Shirley, Truthteller and bikhikebabe.