skills and tools for developing mastery and fostering creativity
It occurred to me that the Chaos-Beast we call Time has probably been around as long as humans have been on this planet. How not? We made it up! In this River series of mine, I’ve been trying to get a handle on the whole amorphous conglomeration of our human ways and means of dealing with Time. (It’s been a head-twister!) One thing I’ve discovered is that because of our very long relationship with the temporal, we humans have developed…
This post is part of a series exploring how we humans interact with time. So far we’ve figured out that our latest iteration of strategies for dealing with time, Clock Time, is starting to wear down a lot of us post-moderns into frazzles. The whole purpose of Clock Time is to enable us to get more and more things done. The Achievement Junkies among us are having a field day. The rest of us are finding that if we are…
Poet John O’Donohue once beautifully said, “I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.” After about 300 years or so of living on clock time, I think we humans have gotten a pretty good idea of where that mode of moving can take us. It is not where O’Donohue would want to go. Clock time tends to turn off the wonder-noticing parts of our brain, it seems. This is not a…
Elon Musk is probably right. Remote work (formerly known as “telecommuting” or “working from home”) is a challenge…for corporations and other organizational entities. It can cause massive headaches for managers and human resource people trying to round up and ride herd on all the “wild” spirits who want to do their own kind of different and were given an opportunity to try it when the world got hit by a massive pandemic that made the corporate culture standards of behavior…
We humans may be the only animals on this planet that are aware of time. In fact, humans are more than a little freaky about time. We have been fascinated and even obsessed with it for a good long while now. There’s archaeological evidence that the Babylonians and Egyptians began to measure time about 5,000 years ago. That development in human thought-constructing was probably built on a long, long line of other previously thunk thoughts and concepts. Some people say…
Okay, listen up all you Achievement Junkies: Measurement matters! Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ve heard it all before: “Measurement drives improvement,” it says here, and we’ve got an array of metrics that can measure just about anything…. We can measure how far, how long, how big, how high, how wide, how deep, how many and on and on and on. We can measure anything and everything and we’ve got the numbers and comparisons and indicators to prove it. Yup! Insights on…
Hawaiians have a saying: “In the word, is life; in the word, is death.” As a poet and a writer, I believe in the power of words. It’s a part of the nature of the scribblers in the world, that. We believe our words make a difference. No, I lie. Real writers and poets believe we are magicians who remake the world. When all is said and done, it seems to me, all of us humans are little more than…
Another IPS (Inner Peace Symptom): an understanding that what you already have is the starting point for building the space where you want to be. [Gather your resources and see what you’ve got. What you choose to use and how you choose to use them breathes life and form and definition into the Why you are already living.] The Light of My Light (LOML) and I made some “What-Get Soup” again the other day. The soup is a throwback to…
Despite assorted life-coach advisories and dictums, I have never actually found the search for and contemplation of my own self particularly interesting. When you’re adept at making (and living) in stories and poems, searching for your one “true” self seems like a waste of time. Delphic pronouncements about the importance of “knowing thyself” are fine, but then there’s that New Age-y corollary that says you have to also embrace and love that self unconditionally or something. This last bit is…
The thing about living your life as a poem or a story or any other kind of art is that there’s got to be a theme to the thing. (It’s one of the rules, according to grade school English and art teachers when it comes to analyzing some bit of self-expression.) This online dictionary I am looking at tells me that a theme is “an idea that recurs or pervades a work of art or literature.” It’s how you make…