Emotions Return

I'm angry.

It's been a long time since I have felt this way, and I'm sure it was probably having to do with some girl or other self serving reason.  This time, I'm angry for and at the world.  This time, it's more than just me.

I've said this a million times to the people in my life, but I feel like I need to clarify on here as well. We are not mad the Hilary lost the election, we are not making up reasons to be upset, we do not accept this result.  We are mad that our president elect is sexist and racist, among other things, children really were affected by the things our future president said, it is a democratic nation's responsibility to standup and speak out.

One time tested truth about civil unrest is that high emotion leads to exceptional art. For me, I'm no longer worried about whether or not I'm going to remember to write; I spend more time trying to figure out what website I want to write to.

I'm excited.

It's been a long time since I have felt this way, and I'm sure it was probably having to do with some girl or other self serving reason. This time, I'm excited for and at the world.  This time, we need a revolution, or nothing will ever change.

This is what I believe.

     Yesterday, when I said that it didn't matter who was a elected, I may have been full of shit.  All of those other reasons for anxiety were still real, and maybe I thought that it didn't matter to me at the time, but I can definitely feel how much it matters today.  Our fellow Americans have elected both a president and a congress that do not represent any of my values.  It's a gut punch.
     Thinking about this sudden bit of total disillusionment has me feeling like giving outspoken communication a try.  I'm not sure what people think that I feel about any worthwhile topic, but I think it might be time for me to tell them.  Could I?  Would I? Put my beliefs in a Facebook post for all to read?  Maybe.  The first step is writing said thing, and so that shall happen here.

______

     For most of my social media life, I've tried to veer safely away from anything that's not family, fun, or friend related.  For me, social media has always been about entertainment and staying in touch.  People who are my friends or followers already know how I feel about certain topics, don't they?  Maybe, Maybe not.  In any case, I would like to share my beliefs.

I understand that not everybody believes what I believe, but that's one of the awesome parts about living in this country and serving in it's military, especially on this Veteran's day.  We happily serve(d) side-by-side each other, regardless of whether or not we agree(d) with the other person's beliefs.


I believe that any sentence beginning with the words "I believe" is nothing more than an opinion, and opinions are often wrong.

I believe that it's possible to simultaneously both "support the troops" and disagree with the war they are fighting.

I believe that the USA was founded on hard work, immigration, and innovation.  Innovation is fostered by education and collaboration.

I believe that everyone should have access to higher education without the burden of a house payment sized loan.

I believe that hard work does does not guarantee a high quality finish nor does it necessarily deserve a high volume of payment.

I believe in equality.  Everyone should be treated with the same amount of human dignity, respect, and opportunity, regardless of their sex, race, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs.

I believe that regardless of whether or not Global Climate Change is real, we are polluting our planet and destroying it's biodiversity.

I believe that Americans are exceptional consumers, myself included.

I believe in social programs that support members of our society that are in need of support, even if that means higher taxes.

I believe that many Americans value their 2nd Amendment rights more than any other right.

I believe that the NRA (National Rifle Association) is very good at what it does.

I believe that due process is nearly impossible when proper legal representation is largely decided by how much money you have to spend on it.

I believe that our Justice system is far too broken to allow the death penalty in any state.

I believe that the correctional system assists with creating a cycle of repeat offenders.

I believe that Gerrymandering is real and that it's a problem.

I believe in the separation of church and state, but I also understand how difficult that truly is.

I believe in what the Bible teaches, not what the words say.

I believe that the ends do not always justify the means and that the means are just as important, if not more so, than the ends.

I believe that any sentence beginning with the words "I believe" is nothing more than an opinion, and opinions are often wrong.

Anxious Goals

     Writing about life in terms of goals is fun, and this season of our podcast(http://disasterdigital.com/) has given me the reason to do so.  Goals are both a piece of analogous gold, true to so many different parts of life.  Today I find myself in the midst of another goal stopping event: anxiety.
     It doesn't matter what goals you have slatted for the day or however many plans you've made for grandiose endeavors, when it comes, anxiety stops everything.  It's a form of paralyzation unlike anything I have experienced in my life.  I've been close to dying and close to death on several occasions and that experience is quite the opposite of an anxiety attack.  Being close to death slows everything down; a million thoughts in 60 seconds, impossible strength and speed.  Anxiety freezes your world, limits your mind to very specific thoughts, it traps you.
     Anxiety is one of those experiences that cannot be truly appreciated until you've experienced and accepted it's existence yourself, firsthand.  Before one of my best friends died, Aaron, he had been speaking of anxiety attacks for more years than I can properly remember.  It wasn't until I experienced my own first bout with anxiety that I was able to properly empathize with him, hell, I hadn't even really believed him.  As painful as it is to admit, in my head, I was thinking that he just needs to suck it up and deal with his shit like the rest of us have to.  Those thoughts were in error.  I should have been a better friend, more understanding, I should have believed what my best friend was telling me.
     I'm not sure if ironic is the correct word here, but Aaron is gone and now I'm the one with regular visits from the anxiety fairy.  Maybe people believe me, maybe they don't, my experience with Aaron and my own memories of how I reacted to it, or lack of appropriate action to it, limits how many people I feel should hear about my inner struggle.  I don't want people in my life to worry, and I definitely don't want to give them a chance to do to me what I did to Aaron, or didn't do for him.
     My anxiety comes from the world and our places in it.  I'm anxious about how selfishly driven we are towards things that we don't need or use.  The pollution of our planet and our lack of drive to explore the greater universe, it makes me anxious.  Our inability as humans to agree on much of anything, well, you get where I'm going.  These are just the macro anxieties, there are many micro-anxiety elements that branch out beneath each macro-anxiety trees.  I'll save the micro-anxiety branches for another day, they will do nothing but further illustrate problems that I'm not 100% ready to share yet.
    Today is election day, which as it turns out is a major source of anxiety (for me and a lot of people in the US & World).  At times, it seems as though I can feel the emotions of the world, if I try.  When those emotions run high, it feels like I can't turn them off, no matter how hard I try.  Believe me when I say that I know how crazy that sounds, I'm even willing to admit that there is a high probability that my empathicness is nothing more than self-delusion.  Just know that, self-delusion or no, I'm feeling a lot of something and I haven't found a way to control it.
     Personally, who wins doesn't get to me so much, it's that we as a people have allowed and accepted this point in time to happen.  It's that all of the important macro issues I mentioned above are not even on people's minds or coming out of people's mouths.  I don't think that there is anything I can do, but it also feels like doing nothing is not an acceptable option.  I don't know where I am and I don't know where to go.
     "Freedom isn't free" Is a line I've been thinking a lot about today.  I used to think that it was referring to the price that is paid in order to keep our freedom alive.  Now, it seems to be speaking to the idea that none of us is truly free.  Hmmmm another topic, another day.  Let's talk again soon.

Dangerous & Presumptuous

     One of the first things that people on the brink of goal failure say, including myself, is something along the lines of, "If reaching this goal is preventing me from doing the things that make me happy in life, then what's the point of living like this?"  That is a dangerous and presumptuous statement.  Dangerous because you're beginning to accept your own failure and presumptuous because your acceptance of this failure is based on bold assumptions.

Assumption #1: The activities or consumerisms that you're missing out on actually make you happy.

Assumption #2: You understand what actually makes you happy.


     I'd love to blame assumption #1 on the media, and yes they certainly play their part, but conditioning is also a large part of the equation as well.  The road of life is long, but it also has many circles, loops, roundabouts, and repeated streets.  Many of the things that "make us happy" are many of the things that feel comfortable.  And yes, there is happiness to be found in these activities, but it's often happiness via the path of least resistance or a happiness much less than we could achieve if we only tried harder.
     To revisit the road of life analogy: we drive the same road so often that our tires wear deep grooves into the pavement.  The road begins to control the vehicle so much so that we don't even have to keep our hands on the wheel anymore, life just goes.  Creating goals is all about putting our hands back on the wheel and jerking the tires out of the well worn grooves.
     Imagine all of the different kinds of happiness that might be found, if you would just give yourself the chance to experience them.  No, scratch that, don't even try to imagine such a thing, it will always fall short of the real feeling.  Drinking that Mountain Dew may give you some sense of pleasure, but I guarantee that a glass of water is much closer to happiness.
     Let's talk about assumption #2 for a minute.  I don't think that human happiness means what it once did.  Listening to people describe happiness, with how they are saying it and what they are saying it about, makes me feel like happiness is more commonly used to describe a lack of something negative.
     If I ask you, "What makes you happy?", what things come to mind?  Most people will rattle off the same first few, like family, friends, and pets.  I'm willing to bend the knee on those three, the nouns, but let's talk about what comes next.  For me, the next set of answers are things that I want to do more, but for one reason or another happen less frequently than other activities in my life.  How can that be... I'm a generally happy person, how can I be a happy person yet not do the things that I feel make me the most happy?  It doesn't make any sense.  Either I'm not as happy of a person as I think that I am or I'm using the same word, "Happy", in two completely different ways... and truthfully, it's probably a little bit of both.
     No, I do not believe that happiness means what we think that it does when we say it.  You'll know when someone experienced happiness when they use phrases like "I was really happy" or "It filled me with Pure Joy." The actual wording is less important than the emotion in their voices and language of their bodies as they say it.
     I'm not trying to talk down to you.  All I'm proposing is that you probably don't know yourself as well as you think that you do(again, I am not the exception to this rule either).  Close your eyes and listen to your body.  Happiness, like every emotion, is chemical based feeling with roots that draw liquid from everything we see, hear, and do.

  "Though many would seek shortcuts to the truth, there is no way around the simplest of tenets: hardship begets achievement and achievement begets joy, true joy, and the since of accomplishment that defines who we are as human beings...

The path to joy is paved in a sense of confidence and self-worth, a feeling that we have made the world a little better, perhaps, or that we fought on for our beliefs despite adversity."

"Drizzt" - In the Novel Sea of Swords


     I understand that not everyone wants to impact the world, just as not all beliefs are worth fighting through adversity for.  In fact, some beliefs are just flat wrong.  However, these are topics for another day, let's talk again soon.

Well, I'm not an artist, and I'm not a salesman. So what would you call it?

     Nowadays, when I think about goal successes and failures, I'm often reminded of a scene from "The Office" TV show.  Pam is the new Office Administrator and is having trouble dealing with Dwight, who has recently purchased their office building.  Pam and Jim are on the stairwell talking when she says:

Pam: I needed leverage so I pulled those pictures off the internet. It's just this Office Administrator thing, I don't wanna...
Jim: What?
Pam: Fail. I don't want to fail... again.
Jim: But you didn't fail.
Pam: And that's what you said about Art School, and that's what you said about sales.
Jim: And you didn't fail those things either.
Pam: Well, I'm not an artist, and I'm not a salesman. So what would you call it?

That conversation sums up my feelings on past and present goals pretty well, especially considering that most of my present goals are the same as they were in the past.  In my personal bubble that is an idealist's world, I haven't failed at learning to speak French or play the piano... but the reality of the situation is that I can neither speak French nor play the piano much better than I could 5 years ago.

     Over the weekend, while we hosted our annual Halloween party, I realized something quite embarrassing.  The sheet music on my piano stand is on the same song, "Alouette", as it was at the Halloween party 3 years ago.  Don't get me wrong, I've been very aware for a long time of how much piano progress I have not been making.  Perspective can be a bitch.  And the thing is, sometimes a punch in the gut is just a punch in the gut; thinking about my piano failures in this context does not motivate me, it just hurts and knocks the wind out my lungs.

     Maybe I'm not a failure, but I am also not an artist, pianist, or many of the other things I'm goaling towards at the moment.

     I need to think more before we continue down this road, let's talk again soon.

Treading Water

   There comes a time in every goal oriented journey where you are neither succeeding or failing.  The easy wins have been won, longer wins feel less fun, and the failures make you feel like everything you've tried to do is nothing but bullshit posturing.  In the business, we call this goal stage: Treading Water.
    Treading water is a worst phase of working towards goals because it truly feels as if you're doing nothing more than swimming in place.  Notice that the metaphor isn't "standing in place" or "sitting still", no it's called treading water because you're not just going nowhere, you're expending a shit ton of energy to get there... or not there... to get where you are, which is not where you want to be.  To tread water is to fatigue and fatigue is the precipice of defeat.
     How did we get here?  And why are we always surprised to have arrived when we've been here O'so many times before?   The lazy brain adds up how much time and energy we are expending to get nowhere.  Then, very quietly, the lazy brain whispers a not so subtle reminder to the motivated brain that we could get just as much accomplished sitting in a chair, in front of the television, with a controller in our hands, for hours on end.
     I find these gut check moments to be both intriguing and infuriating.  I don't get mad that they exist, but I can't help but be angry with myself for letting them get this far, so repeatedly and predictably.  Going to the gym 3 times a week, as well as swimming, biking, and running, is easy for me, but I'm unable to stop from stuffing face fulls of candy into my mouth after a long day of work? Are you fucking kidding me?
     I know, I know, if lack of self control in regards to candy eating is my biggest problem, then I should be thankful.  Well maybe that's the way you look at it, but that is not the way I look at it.  Firstly, candy is just the example I choose to share and I happen to think that it's an honestly good one.  My inability to stop myself from not just eating candy, but overeating candy, speaks to an underlining and very American thing that je deteste pour moi!  We can't be respectful of the world that we live in if that respect only happens when we're fully sated.  This is important to me, I do not want to be that person anymore.
     Did you hear that?  I just doggy paddled, even if only for a minute.
This was good, let's talk again soon.

Neither Can Live While the Other Survives

     With the Disaster Digital podcast season of "Self-Improvement" well under way, I've been spending a good amount of time thinking about goals and goal related things.  What does it mean to have a goal, to reach for a goal, to fail or to succeed.  Some might say that I spend far too much of my time thinking on abstract thoughts for the sake of abstract thought thinking, and those people might be right.  However, I've never had and never will I have a goal to spend less time deep in thought.
    Back to the point... One of the things that I have in common with a lot of other people out there is that I've both set goals and failed at goals.  Few things are as frustrating as wanting to do something, knowing it's within your abilities to succeed at, yet failing to do so.  Not just failing once even, many of us quickly dust ourselves off after the first fail and jump feet first directly into the next fail.  Why? Not why do we try again, giving up without reason is the ultimate fail, but why do we keep failing?  What are the differences between a successful goal campaign and a failed one?  I think I have a few ideas.
     Imagine your life is a puzzle.  Not one of those 25-piece easy-to-complete puzzles, but a 2000-piece get ready to blurt out a bunch of cuss words type puzzle.  As we grow up, the edge pieces find their way together and form the basis of whatever human being we can be.  Whether or not those edge pieces stay in the same spots, there always exists a frame of who were think that we are.  Globs of connected puzzle pieces take shape as we continue putting things together.  The globs sit inside the frame, sometimes independently, sometimes connected to other globs, but they sit there because we put them there, because we think that is where they belong.  Eventually, all we have left are a few small gaps in the puzzle as it nears closer and closer to completion.  The puzzle of life, however, is never complete, such is our struggle.
     In terms of this whole life puzzle thing, what is a goal have to do with any of it?  Essentially, each goal that we create for ourselves has to fit within the frames that we've created for ourselves.  Small goals can fit fairly easily into the holes around the globs, sometimes even connecting and becoming a part of the globs themselves.  The failure causing problems begin to pop-up when the size of our goals out grow the available space from which to put them in.  "This puzzle is only 2000 pieces, how did I get 500 extra pieces on the table!?"

     Here is my point, the title of this blog post that I've been working towards for 5 paragraphs and counting, "Neither can live while the other survives", it's not just an awesome Harry Potter quote.  The fact of what I'm methaporing about is this:  If you have desires for big change in your life, then the you that you want to be cannot exist while the you that you are survives.  Might be a mouthful, but it's just that easy.  The frame of our puzzle is non-negotiable, it doesn't get any larger, because it is  time.  Imagine trying to fit a new 200 piece glob of you into a puzzle that already appears as though it's 1750 pieces complete.  You might think that it fits, at least for a little while, but it doesn't, and that's goal failure.

     If you want to be something, if I want to be something other than what I am, then there is part of me that must... go away, change, or for lack of a better word - die.  Mull that one over in your brain for a minute.  Let's talk again soon.