Make Yourself Obsolete

We all want to feel important and needed, but are we really?

For every profession I look at, I find myself wondering how necessary it really is.

Many of us are not truly working from the deepest, most serious part of our hearts.

Instead, we see it as just a job, just a way to make some money, just a temporary station on the way to something better.

Ask yourself, when something goes wrong with your work, do you care about this deeply? And if you do, is it because you truly care, or just because you worry that others will think less of you? Be honest and sincere here with your thoughts. I am asking you to reflect on these questions, not to feel the need to get defensive.

A few months ago, I spoke with someone in the Education field interested in developing a better curriculum for her students. I told her that she would succeed when the student no longer needed the teacher.

I felt that this was not what she was expecting to hear.

I advised her to make her job unnecessary.

Why would I do that?

I’m not sure it’s a success when students graduate to need another teacher, and another, and another. I’ve often heard that students decided to pursue the next level, whether it’s to a bachelor’s degree, master’s, or even a Ph.D. because they didn’t know what else to do.

Is that worthy? Is that success? Or is it futility?

On the one hand, ongoing learning is honorable. On the other, we keep learning more and more stuff and not having much to show for it.

Is it the contents in our minds that are valuable, or the power we have to make something happen in the real world? Many of us have been led astray or forgotten which of these actually mattered.

No one wants to hear that their job should be made obsolete. No one wants to think that success is in finding a way to make your job unnecessary.

We want to hear that we are essential, that society needs us, that society would crumble without our involvement. But that simply is not the case.

We need doctors so badly, you may say. Sure, but isn’t that because we have neglected our health, to the point that we have outsourced its care rather than taken responsibility for it?

The most common “solutions” offered are medicines, which to some degree, act as poisons with their side effects.

We need teachers so badly, you may say. Sure, but isn’t that because we never taught students to think from the beginning? We led them to become reliant on digesting specific curriculums and memorizing them, only to forget most of it anyway. And the material they remembered would become obsolete in a few years.

The most common “solutions” offered are more degrees and more courses, often with no clear path toward careers. And for the ones that lead to careers, there is no guarantee that such careers will still exist in a few years.

When the “solutions” keep us reliant on needing more and more “solutions” from the same place, are they truly solutions?

I have no problem with doctors or teachers. I have merely used these as examples. I could have used any other profession.

For any career I can think of, the motivation of that job is to keep you locked in. There is never a true solution to any problem. It’s just a treadmill that keeps you running but staying in place at the end of the day.

Whether conscious and done purposely or not, it seems to be a consistent theme across most jobs. The client becomes an eternal source of revenue – always needing to come back for something more.

We never arrive at some desirable end point. There is just this empty feeling of needing more.

I don’t expect anyone to take today’s lesson seriously. I expect you to read this and continue about your job the same way you always have, and I can’t blame you for that either.

You are one piece of a much larger system. If you talk to your boss tomorrow and tell him: “I realized we’re just running our clients in circles here, and I think I know a way to get their problems fully resolved, so they never have to come back,” you’ll probably get fired on the spot.

There is no profit in true solutions.

We fear becoming obsolete the most, but perhaps it was what we needed all along.

Somewhere, in the Amazon rainforest, there was probably a panacea (cure-all) plant that would have cured everything. And it doesn’t matter because it would have made no profit for anyone. The only profit would have been to destroy the plant to avoid competitors, make it into a patentable drug, and then sell it at a high price.

This is where we are.

We are more interested in making people need us rather than truly offering something worthy. The most worthy thing to offer would be that which would make us no longer relevant or needed.

No one wants to hear this.

I don’t even want to say it because I know no one wants to hear it.

No one will hire me to give presentations at a Fortune 500 Company to tell them that they should make themselves obsolete. They would laugh at the idea that they should look for ways to dismantle their job positions and the company they work for.

Instead, they are focused on growth.

But the more a company grows, the more it shows they haven’t solved anything. They have learned to make others reliant on them, is all.

But if [Insert famous product here] is so great, why do we need more of it? Why does it never satisfy us? Why do I need to keep buying it or keep doing it to get that feeling?

Mind you, this is a feeling which is fleeting and illusory anyway.

If it were truly the best product, I think I could buy it once, and I would never need it again.

Those products don’t exist, of course. The products and services we have are the ones that keep us chasing our tails, coming back for more, like strung-out addicts.

The “solutions” we have are those that work for a few minutes, maybe an hour, maybe even a day, but not much more. In a recent post, I said: “The problem with solutions is that they are all temporary fixes. No problem has ever been permanently fixed.”

Our whole lives, nothing ever worked, but we think: “Maybe this new product or service will do the trick.”

I hope my books and Thoughts help someone somewhere, but I don’t want anyone to feel like they need me, my books, or my Thoughts.

My goal is not to keep you on the line, needing more.

Some of the “best” writers out there are actually the worst. If I read someone’s blog post, and it’s so great, why would I feel the need to read all their books and posts? If they were so great, I wouldn’t need to. If they were that good, I could read an article or two, get the message I needed, and never return to them again.

But that is exceedingly rare.

These days, I am writing everything I feel the need to so that it wouldn’t matter if I were to die. Even if I die, you can still access all that I thought was ever worth saying.

There isn’t this sense of “I must write 100 books or 1,000 articles.” That is irrelevant. The point is, did I say everything I needed to say, to the point that if lightning struck me dead one of these days, it wouldn’t matter?

Did I make myself obsolete? If so, then that was a success in my book.

Again: I don’t need you to need me. If you can click away from this site, and never return and be better for it, then I have succeeded.

Here is a quick example of how making oneself obsolete can lead to success:

A friend of mine had a Master or Guide in his life. He provided direction and words of wisdom regularly. One day, that Master decided to move on. My friend had often received good counsel and friendship and was saddened by his departure. But after this, my friend grew immeasurably. He started to realize that he did not need that Master at all. Rather than following or abiding by the lessons taught, he was paving his own way. In being left Masterless, he was now finding the Master within.

The Master, Guide, Parent, or Teacher who can leave and make you something better for it is the truly worthy one. Don’t misunderstand me to condone abandoning anyone. Only you can decide the point where it is better to walk away, or give space, or leave and never come back. But know whether you do this selfishly or selflessly.

Make yourself obsolete. Make it so that even if you vanished, the world would somehow become better for it.

We risk being made (or revealed to be) obsolete by the natural order of things every day. We might as well do it ourselves.

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Today’s post may be a heavy dose of Truth for some of us. If you would like to dig deeper into Your Life’s Truth, you may wish to read a book I just published, Your Personal Truth: A Journey to Discover Your Truth, Become Your True Self, & Live Your Truth.

You can read the book on Amazon and other major retailers.

Remember Who You Are

Today I would like to share an excerpt from my book, Your Personal Truth: A Journey to Discover Your Truth, Become Your True Self, & Live Your Truth.

Remember Yourself

“Remember who you are and where you come from; otherwise, you don’t know where you are going.”
— Karolína Kurková

How can we remember who we are? The best way to do this is to listen to your heart. Now the key is to consider what that means. Essentially, the real you is not what we see, nor all that you have been taught to think and do. There is a deeper part of yourself.

I believe many of us get used to going against our spirit, and we have to remember who we are. This is easier said than done.

I have come to think that part of our human journey is that we lose ourselves along the way. Many well-meaning people in our lives teach us so much that we may lose our core, authentic self in time. We develop obsessions—whether making money, seeking fame, having a perfect figure, or an addiction to buying stuff or playing games. This is where the world is steering us, away from ourselves.

The modern world is excellent at filling our lives with distractions that do not necessarily lead to a truthful, meaningful place.

Notice that animals have powerful drives, which we call instincts. To me, instinct is just knowing who you are. You know that when something happens, you react in a certain way, and you don’t need to question it because it is a deep drive inside yourself—it is you. Yet, when placed in zoos, animals start to lose their instincts. Animals that may have had a killer instinct can lose it. They can lose who they are, trapped behind bars. This is because the zoo is an artificial environment, holding back their true, wild selves.

Interestingly, I have come to think that humans also have a wild side that has been lost. It makes sense, of course, for society to avoid any part of ourselves that may cause havoc or violence, especially without any good reason. But as all animals have a wild side, and we are animals, perhaps we have this side to ourselves too, and it is neglected.

As part of our domestication on becoming human, we go to school and obey a teacher’s instructions. Then, later on, most of us go to work and obey our boss’s instructions. If we are promoted to management, we continue to follow the lead manager’s instructions. We are taught from the earliest phases in our lives that we must respect order. We are just a tiny puzzle piece in a much bigger puzzle.

If we had a wild side, we tended to lose it. But it’s not a matter of “if.” Just look at young children and how wild and carefree they can be. Perhaps without society to teach them to be civilized humans, they would have grown into wild adults.

Think back: If you stepped out of line in your youth at any time, someone was there to correct you and show you the error of your ways. I can still recall being a child and constantly hearing the words “single-file line.” Of course, in elementary school, teachers said this to remind us to walk in a precise, straight line on the way to the bathroom. They did not want to see disorder.

And so we learned to stay in line, to be orderly, follow instructions, and the wild parts of us were stamped out. Maybe some of this is good, but perhaps not all of it.

If we can learn to appreciate the wild nature in the world, why shouldn’t we enjoy it in ourselves? Why shouldn’t we appreciate the wild side of humanity? Must we follow the rules and instructions perfectly all of the time? You may explore such ideas as you figure out your truth.

Every day we are led along certain paths. Our teachers showed us that we had to follow their instructions as they reminded us to “stay in line.” We are adults now, but perhaps not much has changed. We don’t talk back to superiors, say something that could make someone feel uncomfortable, or laugh at inappropriate times. This is just what adults do (or don’t do).

Consider this: Do you deny parts of who you are just to follow the expected order? Is that order worth it? Or are you making a personal sacrifice?

If you choose to deny your true nature every day, you may eventually find that you do not know who you are anymore. You may have been following the paths others laid out for you for so long. For example, those paths the people around you believed to be good and encouraged you to go on. Perhaps all that this will accomplish is introduce falseness in your life and lead you away from your truth.

Ask yourself: Have I forgotten who I truly am? Have I been masquerading as someone that I am not? Am I an imposter in my own life?

No one can answer such questions except for you. Only you know if you are where you were meant to be. Even if you are not where you wanted to be, then the key question is whether you are doing everything you can to find that path that you were meant to be on.

Are you committed to being your true self? Is this something you are willing to struggle for? To take seriously? Or will you calmly lose the battle for yourself and allow your mind and body to be guided wherever the forces of the world happen to take you?

If you have forgotten who you were, how can you recapture yourself and remember? You may contact childhood friends or family members that you have not seen in a long time. Or you could get in touch with some lost beliefs, values, or desires that you had long ago and had set aside.

When was the last time that you felt completely free to be your true self? Were you a child? A teenager? A young adult? Was it decades ago, a few years ago, or months ago? Is it just on the weekends when you’re alone? Or does it only happen when you are around close friends and family?

Sometimes remembering isn’t enough, and you must get in touch with who you were, at that last point where you can recall having been your true self. Maybe you have lost touch with family—and you must visit them. Perhaps you have lost touch with a topic or activity you loved, and you must do this again. Or maybe you have denied a part of your personality to please someone, and it is time that you go back to being your true self.

Remembering who you are doesn’t just mean revisiting memories. It involves recapturing who you are for yourself. When you remember, you can find your true self inside yourself, in your mind, and then you will know the right path for you.

Key Questions (Remember Yourself)

1. Did you used to be a different person? If so, did you change for better or worse?

2. Do you find that pretending, lying, or exaggerating is a regular part of your life? If so, why are you covering up who you are?

3. When you were a child, what excited you the most? Do you still gain some pleasure in this?

4. Have you stifled a part of yourself that is wild, rebellious, or spontaneous to keep the peace?

5. Do you feel like the true you is different from what you have chosen to show the world?

Take Action Today (Remember Yourself)

Action: Consider the last time that you felt like things were going your way. You were happy, you were loved, or you felt generally fulfilled in life. Embrace this positive feeling that you had at that time in your life. Then, ask why you felt that way. Was it because of the people you had in your life? Was it because of a particular event that happened? Had you just achieved a life goal?

If you struggle to think of such a time, it could help to talk to an old friend to discuss some memories or to look through some old photos.

When you have your memory, relive the experience in your mind. Consider: did you have a positive feeling because you had so much potential then? Was it a simpler time? Were you more sure of what you wanted?

Is there a way to recapture that feeling? Instead of just recalling a memory, can you revisit a location that connects to your heart? Or can you contact people who inspired you or perform an activity you used to love but had given up on?

Reason: The goal here is simply to remember yourself. It’s easy to forget who we are and how we got to the point we are at now. Sometimes, we need to step back and remember when things were going our way and we felt like our true selves.

Tip: Instead of just reconnecting with an experience in your mind, can you recreate it? Can you play the music that reminds you of a time and place? If something inspired you in the past, can you draw from that same source once again?

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If you are interested in reading more of Your Personal Truth, the book is available on Amazon and other major retailers.

The Problem with Solutions

The problem with solutions is that they are all temporary fixes. No problem has ever been permanently fixed.

Don’t think in the span of a year or ten years, or even a human lifetime. Think longer. What has been permanently fixed?

In the end, the “solutions” we come up with lead to more problems. We often hear that “No one could have predicted the new problems that would arise from implementing a given solution.” It’s true, except that there always seem to be some unforeseen issues that arise.

In a paradoxical sense, the unforeseeable is foreseeable. It’s almost certain that some negative effect will come out of resolving a problem. We just don’t know what it will be.

People sometimes ask me for help with their problems. I try to help, but my power is limited.

The issue is that for any solution I may give you to your problem, you will soon come back and tell me it didn’t work. You will need me to help modify the plan for you or help resolve new problems that have arisen due to fixing the prior ones.

You will also become reliant on someone else to resolve your problems for you. You will outsource your thinking and your being, looking for someone else to fix an unfixable problem, which is human life.

Human life, and what to do with this life, or how to fix any human issue, is an unfixable problem, as they all are. There is no permanent solution.

I believe a worthy path is to train the mind, to build it up to be able to handle a variety of situations, but even this does not offer a permanent solution to anything. The stronger your mind is, the more likely you will challenge yourself further and further, until you reach a wall. Then what?

Notice that people who have the “solutions” will continue to believe that they have them. When you don’t succeed or get the result you wanted, they will just say you didn’t apply the advice correctly. And that may be true. Perhaps you made some mistakes. But even if you apply all the advice correctly, eventually, it will not work. Give it time, and ultimately, you will find that advice disappointing. This is because we live in a changing reality.

The advice of a year ago is probably outdated already. And the advice everyone is following also loses its utility. For example, if a finance guru posts that you should invest in real estate right now, and his millions of followers read that advice and follow it, then the more people follow his advice, the more useless it will be. If everyone rushes to buy real estate, the prices will go up and up, making it a bad investment.

For the next piece of advice you receive, imagine if the whole world took that advice and realize that everything would collapse overnight if that happened. Then understand the futility of advice and the futility of “solutions.”

So when you realize that there is no solution to chase, what do you do then? You probably look for the solutions anyway, right? This is the human way. We won’t sit by and leave a problem alone. If a neighbor comes to me with a broken chair, I may help him fix it. But what if I make a mistake because I am not a professional, then the chair breaks under him, and he hurts his back. Then he goes to the chiropractor, which fixes his back and accidentally causes problems with his neck.

Then maybe he gets tired of the new problems caused by fixing the old ones, and he decides to live with his neck issues. In time, perhaps his neck gets better on its own.

You may say this is a pessimistic view that problems have no solutions. Maybe it is. Or perhaps it’s realistic. We are obsessed with problems and solutions. If someone gives me a problem, I usually know what to do – even if the thing to do is to ask another expert. But all of that problem-solving keeps us spinning our wheels, running in circles.

Today’s generation hopes to solve today’s problems and waits for the next generation to solve the new problems (unforeseeable ones) this generation will cause. This continues until the latest generation faces the current problems on top of problems that all the prior generations caused along the way.

At some point, there are too many problems to deal with.

Everyone that I know is a believer. Whether religious or not, they are believers. They believe in solutions. They think that the solution to the problem will fix something.

But the question isn’t really if the “solution” will work. It’s actually: when will it fail?

Consider that the “Solution” you have found may actually be the biggest problem of your life.

For example, someone prone to stress will resolve one stressor, only to have another one arise. They will find a technique that works to resolve the stress until it no longer works. They will remove themselves from a stressful situation, only to run into another one with new kinds of stresses. Stress is just used as an example here, but the problem could be anything. Given time, the solutions fail, and we chase more and more solutions.

The problem with solutions is that we become fixated on resolving one particular issue, forgetting about the larger context. Any fool can fix a specific problem and create a hundred new ones in the process. And this is what we tend to do.

Humans are masterful problem-solvers but even more skillful at creating problems.

The real problem is that we are conditioned to expect solutions all around us. We expect someone to give us an action plan to resolve everything rather than using the power of the mind. We want rote, formulaic solutions to a dynamic world that doesn’t care about our procedures.

When I talk to people in customer service and come to them with a problem, I find them behaving like robots. I get responses like “That’s not how we were trained,” “This has never happened before,” and “No one has ever asked.” They might as well say “Does not compute,” as perhaps a robot would.

The problem with solutions is that we only tend to have them for easy, direct problems and have forgotten how to seek them out on the challenging problems we face.

The challenging problems were unexpected, unpredictable, unforeseen. Yet, at the same time, it should be quite obvious that things that have never happened in the past sometimes do occur in the future. However, we behave as if that is an impossibility.

Our go-to solutions are designed to handle problems that have happened in the past, not new ones which may occur in the future. This is practical in the short run but leaves us with calamity in the long run.

However, trying to resolve the problems that have never happened and may never happen can also be a loser’s game. You can spend all your life preparing to resolve a perceived problem that may never happen. So that is not the solution either.

I am not saying we should be happy doing nothing, allowing problems to build up, and taking no action to resolve them. I am not saying we should stay on the course of perpetually “solving” problems without actually fixing anything.

I am asking you to be mindful that just because you fixed ten problems in one day, this is nothing to be proud of. For resolving 10, you may have caused 100 new ones.

The story of humanity is that we are excellent at resolving short-term problems, only to create more of them. But if we think deeply, perhaps we have never solved a single problem permanently.

Ask yourself: What problem have human societies truly solved? And what problems have we created?

Consider this: Even if we fixed all human problems, that would still introduce a new problem. What do you do with human life when there is no apparent problem to focus on? Starvation, homelessness, illness, social needs, etc., have all been resolved in this theoretical utopia.

You may see where this is going, but perhaps this utopic vision is a dystopia because no one would have any purpose or any problem to work on. Society would quickly degenerate and crumble, and we would once again have an abundance of problems.

The state of having no problems ultimately results in a plethora of problems.

Again, those are problems with no solution. The solutions would only create more problems.

This post is not about recommending that you try to fix a problem or not do so, or seek help with a problem or not seek it. This is also not about apathy and giving up on everything.

It’s about increasing your awareness and understanding. Stop running in circles, chasing your tail.

The human mind sees a problem and jumps into trying to fix it. Maybe we need to take a step back and ask ourselves if the problem is worth attempting to fix. If doing nothing is just as effective at resolving a problem as doing something, then what are we wasting our time for?

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Some of my best work was published recently - Your Personal Truth: A Journey to Discover Your Truth, Become Your True Self, & Live Your Truth.

You can read the book on Amazon and other major retailers.

To Pursue Truth

What would it mean to pursue Truth?

To pursue truth would mean to see that there is a personal element to Truth, as, in the end, only you can decide whether something is true or not. Someone else can tell you a “truth,” but if it is not true for you, then it is irrelevant. To think of this another way, something may be “true,” but only in a particular context that does not affect you.

To pursue truth would mean to open yourself to the idea that any assumption you begin with has wrongness to it.

Assumptions lead to assumptions. For example: “If I can assume A, then I can assume B, which leads me to assume C.” This is how we often think, which piles assumptions on top of assumptions. Yet, we have an air of certainty behind our words, which is falseness.

To pursue truth would mean to see that what you want to be true and what is indeed true are not the same.

It would mean to see that the ideas you obsess over do not correspond to the reality around us. The past is an illusory story we tell ourselves, rather than fact. Our desires or anxieties are thinking that something good or bad will happen when it has not yet happened and may not happen.

It would mean seeing that who we think we are and who we are is not the same. Are you defined by a set of actions or thoughts which were handed to you? No. Who we think we are is just a story and not the truth.

To pursue the truth would mean that you are willing to go on a path that leads you away from comfort and happiness if that is where it will lead. To feel otherwise will mean resisting truth, which will ultimately lead you away from it.

If you long for the truth, you will lead yourself to it or be led to it. However, your longing for it must be greater than your willingness to give in to distraction, nonsense, and delight.

The pursuit of truth will mean a return to something you once had and have lost along the way. We can aim to retain the aspects of truth that we have not fully lost while seeking to regain the ones that were lost. This would be a starting point.

It will mean perceiving that a tone of voice can ring false, a single word can ring false, and so can an intention. Even an action can be done falsely. We can train ourselves to see such falseness, which will allow us to see truth.

The pursuit of truth is actually to learn to see the falseness within and all around us.

In the pursuit of truth, we will learn to say to ourselves, “that is false” so many times per day that we will be surprised to see that there are few human moments where the truth is present.

To pursue truth would mean to let go of such notions: ideas present us with reality, people are valuable sources of insight, and the material world is what it seems to be.

To pursue the truth will mean to see that anything less than entirely true cannot be said to be true.

It would mean to let go of the idea that the masses, your neighbors, your family, or friends have grasped truth.

It would mean to look inward, to stop looking for someone to follow, and start on your path that no one else could have guided you toward.

In your pursuit of truth, you will find that your thoughts have led you astray – the thinking that you have used all your life was not conducive to revealing truth. Instead, it set you up for self-deception.

From the beginning, we were set up to fail in the pursuit of truth.

In seeking truth, you will find that you must be sincere, as anything else would be a lie. If you acknowledge the challenge of being sincere, then that is the beginning of sincerity.

The above ideas cannot lead us to truth, shine a light on the path, nor do anything for us unless we are ready to let the truth in.

But if we are ready, awareness of the truths stated will help us steer ourselves more toward truth and away from falseness.

Even if we become aware that we have been unable to grasp these ideas fully and have been led astray in our lives, this can be the beginning of our journey toward truth.

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If you are ready to pursue your unique path to truth and understanding, you may wish to read Your Personal Truth: A Journey to Discover Your Truth, Become Your True Self, & Live Your Truth.

You can read the book on Amazon and other major retailers.

Dance with the Present Moment and Experience Real Life

“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life. ― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

In my life, as I try to grasp the present, I’ve found that many triggers jolt us away from the Now.

The triggers are omnipresent, forever invading. We don’t even notice them. Life can quickly become one trigger after another, dragging us away from what life was supposed to be.

Then, when real life happens, we tend to see life itself as a distraction. When really, we couldn’t be more wrong. The things we focused on were typically not real life at all. And the things that distracted us were real life, calling to us.

Real life was the rare human moment that someone wanted to share with us. But when it finally happened, we failed to realize it and shrugged it off.

It was the birds singing, but we were too busy to notice. It was the stranger on the street who was having a bad day and needed help. Real life was the sunrise, sunset, and the stars above. Or the face of your loved one that you hadn’t bothered to truly look at.

But when these things happened, we thought they were the distraction, not real life itself.

The distractions from real life were in the job that we do, where if we ceased to exist, someone else would fill the slot within 48 hours. It was the negative and judgmental words that we yell at ourselves in our minds. It was the worries about the stock market going up or down. It was the concern over the most negative news story of the day.

We thought we were living real life in these times, but we were not in the present moment here. Instead, we were upset about the past or worried about the future or focused on our made-up problems. Or perhaps, we were just distracted by nonsense.

As we become so-called mature and modern adults, we get to a point where whatever it is pulling us into the Now becomes the thing that we wish to avoid. The Now falls into the background. We somehow manage to escape the unescapable.

Adults have escaped from the present as if it were a disaster to be averted. But we weren’t meant to escape the Now. It’s like trying to outrun your shadow. Humans today are disjointed from their own shadow, living in a world of illusion when they become disconnected from the Now.

So why do we seek to escape it if this cannot be done?

The present may be too powerful for us to handle. It is a zone where anything could happen. The plans you had may work, or they may come crashing down. Your feelings may be validated or dismissed. A revolutionary idea may help you find success, cause you to have a massive failure or even both.

But rather than give in to the power of the present moment, we often wish to take power back for ourselves.

Our inflated egos make us want to hold on to the need to control, plan, achieve, and predict.

Some mysterious Now couldn’t possibly be at the reins of this life – no, we mortal and temporal humans feel that we are the ones in power. This is the illusion that we work on maintaining all our lives. Our lives become not life but rather the illusion of one.

I was once driving to work, and I saw a disheveled man with a chaotic, long beard. He was swaying his hands almost like a musical conductor. He seemed to be guiding traffic and buses to go where they were going. This man did not work for the city. He had a wild smile as if he was having the time of his life. Somehow, I understood what was happening. In this man’s mind, he was controlling the universe. He directed the traffic, the pedestrians, and perhaps even the animals. In his mind, he had orchestrated it all.

But of course, they were all doing what they wanted to do, and he was pretending to have made it happen that way. He felt the power and the control but had none.

Sometimes, that feels like the analogy for what humanity has become. We insist on maintaining control over that which is actually out of our hands. We are happy to take the credit when it works in our favor, but any time something goes wrong, it was out of our hands.

Yet, just maybe, things were always out of our hands. I can’t force my heart to beat, but it continues to happen. Until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, it’s because it was never in my control, to begin with.

Maybe we are trying to control a universe that is actually out of our hands.

We find it difficult to let the Now be whatever it will be, to give us whatever it has to give, or to take from us whatever it wishes to take. And so, every day, we are resisting that present moment, as we have made it into the enemy.

We are not in the present moment because we have made it the enemy of our lives. We have succumbed to the triggers all around us.

Someone could spend a lifetime documenting these triggers that lead us away from the present, away from the Now.

When we have scheduled our lives away, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have plans and perceive nothing beyond them, we have resisted the present moment.

When we convince ourselves that we are failures and get stuck in self-pity, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have rejected a chance occurrence just because we did not expect it, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have labeled with language that which words cannot confine, we have resisted the present moment.

When we needed the security of knowing the outcomes of everything we may do, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have insisted on living by the patterns we have always lived by, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have denied our wild, spontaneous, and free side, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have failed to see the beauty in the beautiful, the sadness in the sad, and the wonder in the wonderful, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have gotten lost in thoughts rather than lost in the experience that is life, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have been convinced by false thoughts and ideas that do not stand up to reality, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have confused our temporary selves, emotions, and problems with being more important than the universe, we have resisted the present moment.

We do these things. I do them, you do them, and perhaps everyone I have ever known does them.

Seeing these triggers for what they are can take us even further away from the present, strangely enough. In seeing them, we start to notice them, label them, think about them, and interpret them, and all of this takes us further away from life.

But if we give ourselves to the Now, then there is nothing left to resist, and we become a part of that Now.

We don’t need to put much effort into this, as effort often works against the now. Going with the tides of now is effortless, but because we have resisted this for so long, it may appear to take effort to get there.

The Now is happening to us, whether or not we are ready to take it in and accept that. The power is more in the present than it is in us. We are predicting it, reacting to it, and explaining it, but are we experiencing it fully and living it? That is another matter.

Rather than grasping at the present, which cannot be grasped, it makes more sense to dance with it. We can focus on becoming aware and in sync with real life and strive to find a piece of that now. Even if we can’t have all of it, we can find some of it for ourselves.

The alternative is to live a life outside of the now. What kind of life is that?

Living longer is a focus for many, but it doesn’t mean much if we didn’t actually live those years. What percent of our lives took place in sync with the Now? That may be a more interesting metric to shoot for.

I’m not sure that being in the present is a skill or practice. It may be as simple as letting go of our ego, of our need to control and direct this thing called life. Rather than living the illusion of life, we can let it go and truly live.

Humans do have great power. But how great is that power when our lives are temporary, and every loved one will die? How great is it when everything built will fall, most of our predictions are wrong, and much of our lives occur in the imaginary world of ideas?

Our true power was in our ability to acknowledge the power of the present and to become one with it.

Join me in a never-ending dance with the present moment. That is the goal of this life if there ever was one.

If you are interested in learning more about the Present Moment, you may wish to read 7 Thoughts to Live Your Life By: A Guide to the Happy, Peaceful, & Meaningful Life.

Real Learning Comes Through Transformation

“Learning—real learning, wisdom—comes only when you are transformed. It is not an additive process—you cannot just go on adding knowledge to yourself. You will have to go through a transmutation that is hard.” – The Buddha Said… by Osho

I am only on the fifth chapter (out of 22) of The Buddha Said… and already I can see that this book carries great wisdom. It will be worth reading carefully, applying, and rereading, and reapplying. That is what I plan to do. The knowledge in this book could take time and effort to master, as it seems to guide us toward enlightenment.

The passage quoted above was insightful to me, yet it may appear quite obvious on its surface. I have found that most worthy wisdom is just that. It seems obvious and straightforward and often even easy to apply, yet very few of us do.

For example, I can tell you that getting impatient is bad. The next time someone is irritating you or provoking you, ignore it. Let it be. Take a breath and pay attention to something worthwhile in life.

Yet, for someone with the habit of impatience, will they listen and change?

Or I can tell you that to be lazy is bad. Do not waste this life. Go out and have the courage to find something that truly matters to you and that will make a difference in this world. Stop doing the bare minimum to get by and increase the standard you expect from yourself.

Yet, for someone with the habit of laziness, will they listen and change?

Or I can tell you that to be vengeful is bad. Stop wishing to get payback on all those that commit wrongs against you. In some cases, they are poisoned from having been wronged, making them want to wrong others. And in other cases, they don’t know the wrongs they commit and do so through a lack of awareness. Lastly, as we have all heard, “An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind,” so is this something we want to give energy to?

Yet, for someone with the habit of vengeance, will they listen and change?

As you may guess, I find it unlikely that the person with a habit of something will suddenly change their life from being exposed to mere words.

Despite that I work as a writer and earn my living this way, it is painful to admit that the words themselves are empty if they don’t cause personal transformation. The learning, the knowledge, the wisdom, the teachings—all of it is empty, useless, and fruitless if we do not change from within.

Yet I have seen, as you have seen, that most of us know the right things to do, to be, to say, and yet fail to do them. Perhaps we need to come to the awareness more deeply that the only worthwhile learning was not in the accumulation of knowledge, facts, or even the pursuit of higher understanding.

Rather, the only worthwhile learning was in whether we could become aware, change who we are, and perform new and better actions. Awareness is not enough—to be aware is to see that something is happening. But to see it and do nothing seems to be a massive failure, worse than not having seen it at all.

If you see a wall and walk into it, isn’t that somehow worse than someone who never saw the wall and walked into it accidentally?

We must become aware, change who we are, and perform new and better actions.

The point is to do something with all the accumulation of knowledge and facts. Otherwise, the learning was useless. This is not something we hear often.

I am a big believer in education and learning. But what we often forget is that as humans, what we learn should be causing some change within us. And that change within us should cause some change in the real world.

In a similar vein, Mahatma Gandhi said:

“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him.”

If I read the tragic history of a people, and then I live my life normally, without my heart having grown, giving to charity, or learning more about their present-day struggles, then what have I truly learned?

If I “learn” by acquiring facts, and change nothing, then isn’t that a personal failing?

Yet, the point of this post is not to make us all feel guilty for anything we ever learned, where we failed to convert it into some positive action. The point is to see that we need to be brave and encourage these personal changes to happen.

I have seen many highly educated people increase their learning and awareness while failing to grow at all. I’ve been guilty of this too.

How much time do we spend reading the news versus actually doing something about the world's tragedies?

How much time do we spend educating our children about “the real world” while denying them the ability actually to participate in it?

And how much do we consume books or media while not producing something worthy in return?

Having written this post up to here, I believe you probably already knew everything I just stated. So if we already knew, why haven’t we committed to acquiring more helpful ideas and performing more actions that could help us change more profoundly?

The reason is that we fear change. Even for those who want progress, it still can feel scary or overwhelming to make a significant change.

But we don’t need to make massive changes in every area of our lives, suddenly.

We can decide on certain things that we find to be important and then invest ourselves into them.

I use the word invest because when you invest, you risk losing something. Your risk may be that you hope to help improve something, and in the end, you don’t make much of an impact. Then you may be let down or upset. But of course, we have to be willing to risk losing something to make our impact.

The outcomes we desire are never guaranteed. There is always a risk. We need to choose which risks are worth taking, where we can hope to gain a worthy experience that transforms us.

I think we fear changes because we tend to fear death. Change is the death of something old and the birth of something new. However, why should we fear it? We can guide the change in our lives by moving away from those things that do not work, which are not fruitful, and moving toward the ones that are.

We may find that the greatest life lessons come from the most significant changes within us or around us. Yet great changes imply some form of loss, which again is what we fear. We must become comfortable with the idea of losing something (or someone) if we ever wish to gain anything that truly matters.

We cling even to the things that don’t do us much good because they are familiar. They make us feel at home. But sometimes, that home is worth letting go of, to introduce something that compels us to grow.

In the end, we will lose our lives and everything we ever gained. All of that was temporary. But if we work on transforming ourselves, we will leave a permanent impact on the people around us and on the universe itself.

The universe is not static—it is ever-evolving and changing. Perhaps we could learn something from that.

The key lesson of the day is that we should continue to learn. But for that learning to be worth something, we should be ready and willing to change from within. This can mean seeing the world in a new way, feeling in a new way, and then deciding to stop doing something we used to do—and doing something in a way that we never did before.

We have not truly learned unless we have been transformed from the inside.

As a practical tip, after you read something or learn something, ask yourself:

What has truly changed?

If nothing, then ask:

What can I change, and should I change, given what I just learned?

“Don’t Walk in My Head with Your Dirty Feet”

“Don't walk in my head with your dirty feet.”
― Leo Buscaglia, Living, Loving & Learning

I just finished reading Living, Loving, & Learning by Leo Buscaglia, who was a professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Southern California. I enjoyed the book very much, and I think it would greatly benefit society if we could all read it and apply the teachings inside.

In the book, Leo Buscaglia tells the story of traveling to Japan and meeting with his “marvelous Japanese teacher” in a garden of giant bamboo. Buscaglia had learned many things in his travels and search for wisdom, and so he was excitedly sharing all of this with his teacher. He kept going on and on, wanting to impress his teacher with all that he knew.

Suddenly, the normally very peaceful teacher struck Buscaglia in the mouth, and he said:

“Don’t walk in my head with your dirty feet.”

I have had the experience of the Japanese teacher many, many times, where I felt like someone was introducing unhelpful and unnecessary, and perhaps even hurtful thoughts to me. And sometimes, these people go on and on. And I can’t really get away, not tactfully, anyway. I may feel stuck, at the mercy of this person’s wandering and untrained mind.

Different ways that people may walk in my head with their dirty feet are if they go on and on in a way that is angry, hateful, bitter, negative, boastful, worried, obnoxious, overly dramatic, self-obsessed, and so on.

In my life, my mind does sometimes experience negativity, and I may discuss that and introduce it to the world at times, but either I aim to keep it concise and be done with it, or I aim to teach others how to overcome those negative thoughts and experiences. Of course, no one is perfect, but I feel that this is better than rambling on with negativity and introducing it to others around me without any purpose behind it.

Of course, even if someone does “walk in my head with their dirty feet,” I would not strike them because of that. But I suppose the teacher in the story above wanted to make the emphatic point that if Buscaglia thought he knew so much, he should know better than to brag and ramble, especially when they were surrounded by beautiful scenery and a peaceful environment. And the teacher himself must know more than the student in this case, so perhaps Buscaglia should have been open and listening, rather than imposing his own thoughts.

This month I’ve been thinking of how we often let people walk in our head with their dirty feet. I think we invite it in. On the ride to my wife’s workplace, I often turn on the radio. And either it’s music that I don’t even like, or it’s about car crashes that have clogged the roadways, or some other bad news about how things are getting worse. Otherwise, if I get on social media or check the news, I seem to be inviting people or ideas into my head as well, often with their dirty feet.

Lately, instead of dealing with the radio, we sometimes ride our bikes together (with no radios), or I turn off the radio, and we either talk or sit in silence. It’s not so bad.

I’m making an effort to be more at ease with the silence. It seems most of us find the silence undesirable and prefer to have an endless chatter in the background, whether it may come from the TV, social media, or even the people we surround ourselves with. The reality is that often, these are not providing us with helpful and positive messages. They are the dirty feet of today. Ultimately, we tend to invite it in because we find the silence unbearable.

We seem to prefer dirty feet in our heads, over the silence. But it should be the other way around.

The silence may remind us of our own feet, which are often dirtier than anything else. By this, I mean that in silence, our mind wanders negatively, self-destructively, perhaps. This is especially true for the untrained mind (I discuss how we can train our mind in many ways in this post.). And so, in efforts to avoid our own feet or untrained thoughts in all their dirtiness, we tend to invite others to walk in our heads with their own dirtiness.

Books are a great resource for me because if they introduce ideas that I think have a dirtiness, where they are unnecessary, hurtful, irrational, wrong, or charged with negative emotions, I can close the book and move on.  

If I’m online and start reading negative comments on a social media page, I sometimes feel compelled to keep going and keep inviting more of these dirty feet into my mind. I don’t know why, I can’t explain it, but it happens. Once I get started, it’s hard to quit. I find it’s best to avoid it altogether.

Instead of getting sucked into all the unnecessary negativity, I believe it is important to stay positive.

And none of this even accounts for the advertisements that find us everywhere we go. They instill fear, worry, anxiety, depression, whereas they claim to be fixing these things.

Sometimes on the radio, I hear something like this in an overly concerned tone. “Have you been suffering from A and B symptoms? (Imagine any common symptom such as headaches or stomachaches.) Then they claim that it could be more serious than you think. Then they go on about how they can save you from your chronic illness with a particular medication they are selling.

Talk about “dirty feet.”

One day when that happened, I told my wife – “I really have to change the station at this point. There is plenty to worry about in this world, without me needing to think that a minor and common symptom could be a chronic and serious illness. Obviously, if we feel unwell, we see a doctor. I do not need a commercial to make me worried about my health.”

As another example, often politicians focus on all the ways that the “other party” is ruining the world, which provides us with a stampede of dirty feet. I often hear of the idea that either this party or that party, or this country or that country, or these people or those people, or this idea or the other idea, or this belief or the other are ruining the world. This is on such a regular occurrence that it seems normal. Certainly, these are dirty feet that have invaded our minds.

So, how can we wash our feet, metaphorically speaking? How can we wash ourselves of this emotional pain, harm, and negativity that we tend to spread onto others?

Maybe it’s a phrase worth stating more often – “Don’t walk in my head with your dirty feet.” Maybe that can help us to stay cleaner and teach people to be more cautious with the thoughts and words that they choose to share.

I’m retraining myself to say things in my mind like, “It’s no big deal.”

Sometimes I have this sense of urgency of needing to check my emails over and over because someone might send me a message. And I need to remember, “It’s no big deal.”

Do I really need an inbox of 20-30 messages per day? It’s like dust building up in my home. Now, I find that I respond less often. I mark more messages as spam if they are indeed spam. I unsubscribe from lists more often if I don’t really care about the messages. I used to get back to people on the same day. Now, I tend to take 4-5 days or sometimes more. It’s not because I don’t have the time. It’s because nothing is that urgent. The vast majority of the time, nothing is “that big of a deal.”

The world somehow finds the way to keep orbiting the sun, regardless of what we do.

I can’t think of a single email I’ve received in the last 5 years where it truly needed to be answered within 24 hours. Sure, in some cases, not answering quickly enough could have cost me a bit of money or inconvenienced someone, but it would never have led to some great catastrophe. It would never have really mattered in the grand scheme.

Even in the few times, someone may have contacted me about a dire problem in their life, often people resolve those problems on their own, or new problems arise and they forget about the old ones. I wouldn’t be so egocentric as to think that someone truly needed my advice at a particular moment to save them. I may have helped, but I imagine their lives would have continued without me. If nothing else, they would have found someone else to give them advice if they truly needed it at that moment.

Today, think of how you can wash your feet and how you can keep them clean.

It may be as simple as holding back a bit and questioning whether you really need to state everything on your mind. Will some of those things add needless worry, fear, desperation, or sadness to the people around you?

To make a true, long-lasting change, it may help to meditate, self-reflect, or otherwise look to make a positive change in your life. These can be changes that you work on implementing gradually if that is easier for you.

And also, think of how you can keep other people’s dirty feet out of your head.

Can you leave an environment, or if this often happens with someone, can you tactfully tell him that he is not helping with his comments? And perhaps, he is making things worse.

Today, let’s keep our feet clean so that we do not dirty the minds of the people around us. And let’s encourage others to keep their feet clean, so they do not dirty our minds.

Make Value Instead of Just Taking It

As tax season is here, I’ve been thinking about money and finances. I am in a new tax situation since I moved back to the US last year, so I searched for the most effective CPA (Certified Public Accountant) for my needs, and that offered the lowest rate.

I’ve made some mistakes when it comes to hiring companies in the past. I repeated a pattern many times of looking for the one with the best reviews. Unfortunately, I’ve come to find that reviews are often bought and paid for. Many businesses like myself do things the right way, but unfortunately, the ones that do not end up casting doubt on all of us.

One time, I spoke with the marketing consultant of a car shop. She gave me a ride home while my car was being repaired. On that ride, she offered me $50 to write a positive review for the car shop. I ended up declining, as it didn’t feel right. She had so little faith in the business she worked for. If she had just asked me, I probably would have done it for free. The business did provide a good service, after all.

Lately, whenever I buy anything from Amazon, the manufacturer sends a note to my address asking for a review. One even had the gall to send me a link that would automatically fill in a 5-star rating for them. I quickly unclicked the 5-star rating and left the site. As an author, I know the dire need for reviews. We must get noticed, or we are destined to fail. But there is no need to trick people into leaving a positive review.

Have a bit of patience. If your product or service is truly that good, people will notice.

So if not reviews, how do we decide on who to hire? Well, I have twice hired big roofing companies to do some repair work. In both cases, I realized that all these companies did was hire independent workers to get the job done. I’ve noticed this pattern with other big companies I’ve hired. They end up hiring people who will do the work cheaply. And often, much of the rest goes to advertising or potentially even paying for reviews to ensure they have a steady stream of customers willing to pay the big bucks.

One of these roofing companies failed to complete much of the work properly. I noticed mistake after mistake and called them back so they would finish the job properly. Even if you pay a lot of money to a company, you should still check their work. Sometimes receiving their pay is the primary concern, rather than doing a good job.

Recently, when I hired my CPA, I avoided big companies or firms with a variety of CPAs and tax advisors working for them. Instead, I looked for an independent worker. The one I ended up going with only had one review on Google, but I figured maybe his rates would actually be reasonable. When I gave him a call, he immediately found a deduction I can take that will actually more than cover the fee I end up paying him. I did call some bigger companies to see what would happen. They charged twice as much as him, and none of them mentioned this large deduction I was eligible for. He has spent at least an hour of his time just on phone calls with me and will not charge me for this. A big company either won’t offer that at all or will charge for such consultations.

The real topic I want to discuss today is making value. What does that mean? The way society works now, many of us want to funnel as much money into our own bank accounts as possible. Realistically, who wouldn’t like to have more money? And who wouldn’t like to get it without having to work more for it? The problem is that this mindset isn’t about making value. It’s about taking it.

The “taking value” mindset at its worst becomes about putting in the minimum effort, shifting blame onto others when things go wrong, taking credit when things go right, charging for every possible thing you can charge for even if it burdens the client, and generally putting your income first and the client last.

When we do this, who are we shortcutting, exactly? If significant chunks of the population work this way, then society itself is being robbed.

If someone pays $1,000 for a CPA that will have his assistant do the taxes cheaply, for a true value of about $200, then that CPA is just considered smart in our society. If he does this and it works, and clients continue to pay him, it seems no one is really losing here. But what if that CPA goes to the market, and he buys some apples that are on sale. They’re half price. But when he gets home, half of them have worms in them. The other half are fine. So it turns out he paid full price for these apples because half had gone bad. And if it were me, I’d throw them all out, as I would have lost faith in them.

You may think that these two scenarios demonstrate the same idea, but one involves much more money.

But it’s not the same thing at all. In the scenario above, the CPA who charged $1,000 for a $200 service got away with taking value. No one really noticed that he sucked $800 into his pockets without doing the work.

With the market scenario, a business that sold apples on sale with worms in them would probably lose customers quite fast. I would certainly doubt the quality of my market if that ever happened to me. So, the value hasn’t been taken there. Not in the long-term, anyway. The market owner may have made extra money on a transaction but lost a customer for the long haul.

But lately, I wonder how many people in society have successfully found ways to take value from us? They take value from society, but of course, it is legal because clients have willingly paid up. In some cases, this taking of value may be seen in what we call “hidden fees,” where you sign a 20-page contract with a company and then are surprised at all of the fees you unknowingly agreed to pay. Another example may be with companies that take your money upfront for a service, then they do not provide the promised service, and they refuse to give a refund. And, of course, some companies try to hook you on recurring fees, then if you stop using the service, they still happily keep charging you.

The above cases are clear cut and involve taking value. But unfortunately, sometimes, it can be difficult to know when value is taken and how much of it is taken. The simple argument I always hear is that if someone is willing to pay a certain amount for a service, then that is what it is worth. Well, sure, but it’s not always that simple. If you are an expert, you are supposed to know what your service is truly worth. A naïve client with a lack of experience in a field will have difficulty knowing whether he is truly getting what he paid for. Sometimes, a naïve client will pay more than a service is worth, but he would never have paid it if he had known that.

I would urge us to look for more ways to make value, rather than always needing to take it. This is an odd thing to even think about because phrased another way, I’m asking you if you can find a way to make less money.

Most people I know, especially business people, are focused on earning more, which becomes a key motivator. But to make sure we are making value rather than just taking it, sometimes we should ask if we could earn less money and if that would still be okay. Or, to view this a different way, can you provide more value than what you are getting paid for, and is that still okay?

I’m sure that my proposal of “making value” can become frustrating for those paid at the lower ends. Perhaps you have a boss that already pays you low wages. To go the extra mile and provide more value seems practically foolish. Why would you do this? Well, in that situation, I wouldn’t think about your boss as much as I would think about the clients involved. The clients are real people who need your help, presumably.

Set aside thoughts about whether you are being paid properly, and be a real person for the clients that you are there to help. Perhaps you don’t work with clients directly – that is fine too. If you work with products, those products will eventually make their way to clients. Then focus on making the best products that you can.

We are in a pandemic right now. I hate to see that some of us will lose our humanity, striving to take value rather than make it. People need our humanity to shine through now, more than ever.

One of my insurance providers connects me with the same real individual every time I have any concern or question. And this person, Trevor, treats me like a real human being. He is there to help me with anything and make me feel comfortable and happy with the service. The service he provides extends beyond just being about the insurance itself. It is about being a real person and providing a positive and valuable experience. Sometimes when I call him, it feels like I’m chatting with an old friend who happens to work in insurance.

I have gotten about 10 messages from competitors telling me that I qualify for a lower rate than what this insurance provider is giving me. But I decided that I trust Trevor and the service he provides. I’m convinced that Trevor and his company are about making value and not just taking it away. And by the way, Trevor works at a very large company, so it’s not impossible for big companies to make value. Unfortunately, it’s just rare.

Ask yourself if you’re making value or just taking it away. Generally, those who earn less money are making more value. Those who we find the need to thank for their work are often making more value than they are paid for. If this is you, keep looking for ways to make value.

Those who make more money should consider if they are making as much value as they can. Are you more focused on billing for everything that you possibly can, perhaps with hidden fees, or are you focused on actually providing a service that makes clients happy and feeling good about the work you provided?

Something intriguing to me about our society is that often the ones making the most value for all of us will be the ones who receive the least compensation for their efforts. And the ones who focus all their energy on taking value at every step of the way are often rewarded for this, earning more and more. But that pattern does not make it right. We should consider if we can make a change, somehow.

As we are in a pandemic, one way to make value is to consider if some people cannot afford your service due to their personal hardships. In such cases, can you offer a lower rate to some people who are in need? Can you afford to work for free in a few rare cases? If you work at a company and cannot work for free, can you offer free guidance or help on the weekends? Even if you do this occasionally, it is still a way to make value.

Every day, I aim to put my dollars in places that focus more on making value, not just taking it. I would urge you to spend your money on givers, not just takers. When you see a business that does not seem to care about the customers and wants to make a lot of money without caring how they do it, start looking for another place to spend your money.

Forgive the Past. It is Over.

“Forgive the past. It is over. Learn from it and let go. People are constantly changing and growing. Do not cling to a limited, disconnected, negative image of a person in the past. See that person now. Your relationship is always alive and changing.” - Messages from the Masters by Brian Weiss

I have a friend, Elizabeth, who never forgave her father. When the topic of dads would come up, she would state something she didn’t like about this man.

He was too distant, not helpful enough, didn’t have his priorities straight, or he was never there when she actually needed him. That is what she would say.

Sometimes people around her would get uncomfortable because if they happened to mention something positive about their own father, she would make it a point to say that her Dad did not have that quality. Many people enjoy talking up their fathers and showing them in their best light. She would talk hers down.

I’ve never met her father, so I don’t know his side of the story, but I know that she virtually never sees this man. Yet, she does talk about him, even if what she has to say is often negative. He occupies her mind, but there is something about him that she never let go of. She never forgave him for something.

Clearly, Elizabeth never let go of something that happened in the past.

Or maybe it was something that didn’t happen. I understand that her father was a truck driver, and so perhaps when she was growing up, he wasn’t as available for her as he would have liked or as she would have liked. Perhaps she needed more from him, and he was not there to give it.

Yet Elizabeth is now an adult, in her 40s. I can tell that she has still not forgiven her father. She has not even sought a real connection with him, as in her adulthood, it seems she has turned the tables on him. She perceived him as distant in her childhood. Now, she is the one who is distant toward him. When he has tried to reach out to her, she told me that she would sometimes purposely ignore his calls. If he invited her to meet, sometimes she would decline.

This is a man who she very rarely even sees or hears from. Yet she doesn’t let him close – she keeps him away as if he were a stranger.

No one ever tells us this, but forgiveness is hard work. We have to work to see a perception we have built of someone as just that, a perception. It is a temporary way of seeing someone at a point in time.

But consider this:

We are all in flux, changing, growing, evolving, and time can make us stronger or wither us away. If we hold onto our perception of someone from the past too stubbornly, we permanently grasp at a temporal event.

And this is as ludicrous as it sounds, like grasping at fog and hoping to catch some of it in our hands.

Keep in mind that forgiveness is something we choose to do on our own. Often, we are the only ones in control of this. No one else can induce you to forgive.

In the 10th grade, Jeffrey, a friend of mine, asked me, “Why were you so mean to me in the 7th grade?”

I had vague memories of this by then. But I could grasp just enough of the memories to see that, yes, I had been a terrible person to this friend of mine. My other friends and I had often made Jeffrey the butt of our jokes. I don’t think we were purposely malicious toward him, but upon reflection, I could see that we had indeed been mean to him, without any reason.

By the 10th grade, even after Jeffrey discussed his issues with me about our past, he remained friends with me. It must have been true, hard work for him to contend with what we had put him through. And I doubt it was of much consolation to him that I didn’t recall what we had done very well, whereas the details must have been seared into his memories. He held onto what happened, but at the same time, he was willing to forgive and let it go.

Personally, I lean toward letting things go, moving on, and working on building up friendships and kinships. We should strive to forgive. But of course, we all have a breaking point. Perhaps some things cannot be forgiven when someone has gone too far, and then we must all ask ourselves what that point is.

What is the point of no return?

My friend Dr. Bob Rich (found at Bobbing Around - a wonderful resource on improving our lives and the world), a clinical psychologist, has said that “Normal is the walking wounded.” Here, I understand him to mean that most people are holding onto emotional pain in their lives. Of course, there is physical pain too. But one way or another, most of us are suffering in some way. And if not suffering presently, we are often subjected to memories of a prior suffering that we went through – yet, this is suffering too, even if self-imposed. There are countless ways that someone may suffer, unfortunately.

When you struggle to forgive someone, I will urge you to remember that we all have our personal pain points. We have all been through our personal suffering, which is probably not known publicly to the world around us. Even those who choose “bad paths” in life have suffered their share.

I’ve made it a point in my life to forgive people, and I hope you do too.

Consider this: A dear friend of mine was kidnapped last year and robbed. At first, of course, I was upset. But upon reflection, I decided to forgive the perpetrators for what they had done, as I saw great pains and suffering in the past’s of these criminals, and likely for that to continue in their future. What person with a good life would commit such a crime? They wouldn’t. These were broken, disturbed people. They were clear examples of the “walking wounded.”

I forgave them from afar, in my heart, as I don’t know who they are.

Forgiveness isn’t easy. It is hard work. But this is something worth working on, especially with the relations that truly matter in our lives.

Today I ask: Is there someone worth forgiving in your life? If that person is no longer with us, you can still forgive them in your heart.

Strive for Loving Relationships, and Avoid the Toxic Ones

Today’s post is an excerpt from my book, 7 Thoughts to Live Your Life By: A Guide to the Happy, Peaceful, & Meaningful Life.

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Generally, relationships should be based on love, acceptance, and understanding, which is good and healthy. However, they can sometimes be based on distrust, dissatisfaction, and a lack of understanding, which is not good and healthy. We have to learn to attract good kinds of relationships and to avoid bad ones.

Think about who is in your life the most, from day to day. This will probably include people you live with, whether your parents, spouse, children, or possibly roommates. Some of your close relationships may also be with your coworkers or with superiors at work. These relationships tend to be very important because we spend a lot of time with these people, meaning that they can have a greater influence over us.

Be cautious if you find yourself surrounded by people who are insensitive to your needs. They may belittle you, be sarcastic, attack you verbally or even physically, actively get in the way of your pursuits, start intense arguments with you, and so forth. Depending on the frequency and intensity of these, they can create a toxic environment for you.

Something to be aware of is that healthy relationships have issues too. Don’t worry that if you have an intense argument with someone, this automatically means the relationship is toxic. This isn’t necessarily the case. The problem is when you feel drained and agonize over interactions with certain people. Keep in mind that in some families or some relationships, arguments may be a normal part of life, and it can be an effect of personalities that clash but who still care for each other. In fact, some people may have a way of bonding through their arguments. The issue is if someone becomes distraught through chronic arguments. If such a thing occurs often, we may have a toxic relationship that needs repair.

If you have found yourself holding all of your thoughts inside and becoming resentful to keep the peace, you should realize that this isn’t the best path either. In some cases, it is reasonable to disagree with someone and possibly even to argue. I will ask that you consider the middle path. Do not always argue, and do not always hold in your feelings and keep them to yourself. Perhaps the best option is to state how you feel without needing to argue about it. Be who you are and hold your own viewpoints, and allow others to be who they are. Some people get intensely argumentative because they ultimately wish to control others, and people, of course, cannot be controlled so easily.

Note that if you find yourself in an overly toxic environment that harms you, you should consider leaving that environment if possible. This may involve stopping an activity, changing your workplace, or even changing homes. The more drastic the choice would be, the more deeply you should consider if it is truly worth it to leave the environment or if there is another way to repair the situation. For instance, if you have an issue with a sibling, discussing the matter with another family member could help. Or, if you have an issue with a fellow worker, discussing this with your employer could help.

Even if you are not contributing to the toxicity in any way, you will suffer through everyday exposure to it. For this reason, you may consider leaving such environments even when it is not your fault.

Remember this: Allow others to be who they are, and be who you are. You do not need to agree with everyone, and everyone does not need to agree with you.

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7 Thoughts to Live Your Life By is available on Amazon, Google Play, Apple, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble, and other retailers.