Today, I’m writing about something that’s been bouncing around in my head for years: how to begin leveraging this multi-year project of blog posts to be even more useful for me and for others. Of course, contained in that is my assumption that it’s useful. I need to work out the technical challenges, but I envision this project eventually being an interconnected web of ideas, so that it doesn’t matter where you enter it; it just helps you go from one thought to another. It’s sort of like the way those books did when we were kids—those “choose the end” or “choose the adventure” books, whatever they were called. You came to a question, and if you answered yes, then you go to page X, and if you answered no, you go to page Y. Whether you were depressed or anxious or hopeful or curious or whatever that day, whatever you needed or wanted help with it would help you find it.
To that point, I’m just going back and looking at some of the titles of things I’ve written over the past, I gather, seven or eight years, and how many of them I still need to learn and relearn over and over again. Let’s start with the very first one: There is not a best path. There truly is not! And if I could just remember that and have that as an automatic, reflexive disposition or orientation to the world, I would make my life so much easier, happier, and useful for me and others. Maybe my front yard does need to look like a disaster right now; we’ll see where that takes me and the world!
Don’t judge. Another really useful idea. If only I could just stop judging. Because judging is just so rife with false beliefs, and a gateway drug to non-presence. And just the very next post: It’s all in our mind. Everything’s an illusion. Nothing exists. A lot of high-powered math and physics seems to suggest this. We instinctively know it’s true. We know that the big Douglas fir I’m looking at right now out my bedroom window is not what we call a tree. It’s not the word “tree.” It simply “is”, to the degree that anything “is”. Trying to convey it distorts it. We cannot observe or interact with something without disturbing it. And it is just a ripple the cosmic wave function, ever moving and changing. It is me. I am it.
Maybe my early posts were just better than what I have produced since then. It is no coincidence that my favorite albums by my favorite artists are nearly always found in their early catalog. I’m just a band I guess. And of course there are no new ideas, no answers, and really no questions. Yada yada yada other than I truly believe this. But I gots ta distract my monkey brain somehow.
After those last two I followed up with is this serving me, Fair does not exist, and People are basically good. So much growth and healing can flow from their meditation and internalization. The first says stop digging. It says look at what we are doing…is it making us happier or less so? Oh how I need to re-learn this lesson. Then the reminder that fair does not exist. So many of us get hung-up on this one. It isn’t fair! So what? No doubt! Fair is an adult fairy tale. But of course unfair doesn’t exist either! And never forget that People are basically good. They are. You are basically good. I am basically good. We are all stressed (just be kind). Now go live that! Be kind to someone. But remember to first put on your own mask before assisting others!
