The Voices In Your Head

I think back over my own processes and wonder why I made certain choices. Or I watch others and wonder why in the world they chose certain paths.

We have those moments of inspired clarity when we see who we are and want to be, and the life we desire to live. And then real life starts happening again! What if those visions you see about yourself and your life in those flashes of lucidity were your real life?

via Jim Palmer » Blog Archive » That conversation in your head is stealing your life..

Read the whole article. I especially like Jim’s take on “because you’re human” feelings, which should have an amount of negativity from the human experience; contrasting those with “life-sabotaging” feelings, where the negativity goes so far off course as to really look inhumanly off-kilter. We all make decisions based on the baggage we bring to the table: mistakes, successes, experiences good and bad. And sometimes we let some of those things throw us over the cliff of reality with nary a whimper… Jim goes on to write:

How do you change this? You have to transform that conversation in your head about yourself, others, life, and God.

Are you changing the conversation today? Are you asking better questions, seeking better answers, living out better actions today?

Argue This

photo © 1948 Florida Memory | more info (via: Wylio)

And that’s when it hit me: arguing was a waste of my time.

Not just in that situation with that police officer. I’m talking about arguing with anyone, anywhere, any time. It’s a guaranteed losing move.

Think about it. You and someone have an opposing view and you argue. You pretend to listen to what she’s saying but what you’re really doing is thinking about the weakness in her argument so you can disprove it. Or perhaps, if she’s debunked a previous point, you’re thinking of new counter-arguments. Or, maybe, you’ve made it personal: it’s not just her argument that’s the problem. It’s her. And everyone who agrees with her.

- from Arguing Is Pointless | Harvard Business Review

Conversations

My favorite conversations are simple. There’s some small talk, some catching up over old times and what’s happened since and have you heard from whomever. There’s a meal, or coffee for after dinner. And there’s a willingness on both sides of the table to share, to learn, to grow, and to want the best for the other.

Front corner table, Jamestown Coffee Co.

This isn’t a time for argument. There might be disagreements, but nothing disagreeable (there’s a difference). The discussion gets deep, but only as deep as needed. We’re encouraged to be real, but only as real as comfortable. There’s no steering, no agenda, no coercion, no campaigning. Just talk, just the facts, just stories of meaningful and important things. What book are you reading? What’s happening at work? How’s that dream working out? Where is faith leading you these days?

The shared table, the shared victuals, the shared stories and deep hearts – that’s what makes for good conversations.

[ht: Scott Adams, @sclegislator]

Don’t forget the “social” in “social media” – and I’m a bit biased towards coffee. Just saying.

embracing mondays

Conversation on Twitter with Otis Taylor, 03/28/2010:

Me: Anyone else ready for Monday? Yeah, me neither…
9:40 PM Mar 28th via Tweetie

OT: @RickCaffeinated Mondays are my most productive days. Looking forward to it.

9:44 PM Mar 28th via TweetDeck in reply to RickCaffeinated

Me: @otisatthestate – agreed. The anticipation of Monday is often worse than it actually turns out. Bring it on.
9:49 PM Mar 28th via Tweetie in reply to otisatthestate

OT: @RickCaffeinated I’ve fortunately wired myself to embrace Mondays-and to work on the weekend. Got so much done today.
11:13 PM Mar 28th via Echofon in reply to RickCaffeinated

Just a short exchange, but it impacted me. Why did I have to look at Monday and see doom, despair and agony on me? Why did Sunday afternoon have to be a ramp up for something painful and unavoidable? So, with this mindset starting to shift in me, for the past two weeks I’ve been intentionally changing my focus towards Monday to something more positive, more in line with who I am, more about what I want to accomplish in a given workweek. Starting with Sunday, I’ve tried to not see oh-no-it’s-the-end-of-the-weekend, and instead have been focusing on oh-boy-I-get-to-work-on-something-new-doing-work-I-enjoy-with-the-best-people-on-the-planet.

Or at least, trying to keep it positive and reward-focused on if-I-at-least-get-through-the-week-I’ll-get-another-of-these-weekend-things-soon-enough-along-with-a-paycheck-and-food-on-the-table. (Next I need to work on using-too-many-hyphenated-italicized-sentences, I think.)

There’s something to be said for the power of positive thinking. That’s a catchphrase, a buzzword that maybe has been rendered powerless to bring about any real meaning and change. But there’s truth there, standing on the understanding that most of what passes through me in my day is of my own doing. My responses and reactions to external stimuli come from the overflow of who I think I am, of what I think about this world, of my thoughts on God and the people around me and the interactions that take place in this block of time and space.

Or taken another way, if I look at Monday with fear or angst or melancholy, then that’s how my perception of Monday will treat me back. If I can have a more positive, more energizing, more imaginative outlook on the whole enterprise, however, then there’s a chance Monday will look back on me with some favor and progress as well.

Notice it’s not Monday that’s having the problem. It’s not Monday trying to be all big and bad. That’s just an arbitrary day in a relatively arbitrary set of days. Letting it have control over me anymore than that has been a losing proposition for too long. It would be like being mad at the color Yellow – it can’t change, so it’s more likely that if it ever gets better, I’d better be the one stepping up to the plate to do something about it.

[confession: I'm writing this early Monday morning 04/12, setting it to post this evening after 6pm or so. If Monday sucks, I reserve the right to take all this crap back. Deal?]

hypocrisy & apology

I should apologize for being a hypocrite. There is a part of me that is as involved as I want to be at church – which is to say, not much, and that’s working out okay for me at this point in the process. But then there are times, like this afternoon, like an online conversation over the weekend, that I get excited about church through someone else’s excitement, through someone else’s questions and search.

An online friend asked about services at our church. I admit, we take for granted that Seacoast-Irmo is a cool place to gather with Christians from so many different backgrounds and persuasions. I love questions about where we go to church, what’s the service like, I hear it’s casual, what time does everything start… It feels good to hear people search things out, and it feels good to point them in what I think is a positive moving-forward direction.

This afternoon on the way home, George told me how cool he thought the online service was yesterday morning. His first thoughts were that “online church” would be like our grandmothers watching First Baptist on TV, or shut-ins catching Sunday services after Meet The Press. But he was pleasantly surprised that the service was so well put together, that the message was on point for him – sounded like it was an unexpectedly cool experience. I love that, too – both seeing the thrill of surprise and feeling like I have some small part in fanning that flame. Hated to end the conversation.

Searching, seeking, questioning, surprise, thrill, hopeful joy – honestly, I could live off that stuff.

So I apologize. I’m a hypocrite. I don’t find myself searching so much, seeking so much, questioning so much. I don’t see myself surprised, thrilled. I’m not normally full of hopeful joy. At least not all the time. These days, not much of the time. But I know its power, and I remember how it feels, how it tastes. I’m not far, but “apart” is often far enough. Having stopped makes it that much harder to kickstart with any real meaning or enthusiasm.

Hmm. Maybe. But the other side of that is that I have still recognized it in others. So maybe there’s hope in there somewhere after all.

Surprise.

the dinner party

To say that things had changed since the dinner plans had been made would be an understatement. A week ago, the world was a different place. The birds were singing. Autumn was taking over from summer. Network TV was kicking off the new fall line-ups of shows that would be cancelled in a month’s time anyway. Baseball was winding down as football was hitting its weekly stride. There were no warnings of alien invasion.

A week later, and the thing you noticed most was that the birds were gone. No singing, not flitting around, no Canadian geese crossing the road up by the subdivision’s pond, nothing. No birds. They had been the first planetwide casualties. We’re still not sure ecologically what that will mean for the future, or why they all succumbed so suddenly, so early in the week. Autumn was still happening – even freakish cataclysmic war can’t stop seasonal change; at least we didn’t think it had, not yet anyway. Network TV was a different beast today, mostly news from what was left, from who was left. Baseball would not end this season. Quite frankly football was not high on anyone’s agenda, though there was talk of re-grouping and reorganizing something with fewer professional teams later, but that was months if not a few years down the road.

Tonight’s dinner party had been synced on google calendars last week, just a night for our group of friends to get together at our house. There were six of us, two couples and one single who was bringing his new friend for everyone to meet. It had grown to three couples and five singles, eleven in all, and that was the way these things typically worked out. It’s one of the things I’ve grown to love about our little scheduled/spontaneous get-togethers over the years. But in a week’s time, the world can change. And our eleven friends and acquaintances getting together for nachos and dinner and a ballgame had morphed into five survivors wondering if the calendar event on their iphones would still be on or not.

Of course it was still on. It had to be, right? Coffee was on, even if the ballgame wouldn’t be. And everyone had something to talk about.