I spent most of my pre-teen and teenage years terrified of people. I was very shy. I stayed at home on Friday and Saturday nights while I was in high school. And don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed my time. I played a lot of video games on my Commodore 64 computer. I learned to play guitar. I read cool books like the Carlos Castaneda series. I enjoyed my life. But I didn’t interact with…
For the past twenty-some Episodes, I have been trying to figure out how to formulate my current question of interest. Generally, I am trying to make the case that Nature provides a wealth of information. Further, I am pleading with humankind to CONSULT nature when making decisions. Especially decisions that affect our species’ or planets’ health. I have used evolution and natural selection (with DNA being the mechanism) as filters, of sorts, that approve or…
While this is not a definitive treatise on Systems Thinking, I wanted to talk a bit about this topic as it is relevant to many of my posts. People tell me that out-of-the-box thinking is atypical. Most people seem to think of the world in simplified, or at least minimized relationships. For example, you might think your job sucks. When thinking about how to change that or do something about it, you might think about…
I’m revisiting some of my favorite concepts in this episode. Awareness. Intent. Attention. Consciousness. Will. And how these things work together and facilitate growth. Being human. Underneath all of this, I believe that growing to be a ‘better’ human is a critical requirement of being alive. Or, if it is not a requirement, it is a meaningful element whose absence is a shame if not a failure. We are all humans, subject to the distractions…
Most of us are not perfect. I certainly am not. In fact,lately I have been replaying several moments from my life where I behaved poorly. But when I do this nowadays, I don’t beat myself up. I have learned to find self-compassion for the person I used to be and to recognize I am no longer him. Integrity is the alignment of our values or beliefs with our actions or behavior. Even though I know…
Have you heard people say that you can’t control what happens to you, but you CAN control how you react to what happens to you? It’s so true, but it isn’t easy. We all want some degree of control in our lives. Or wish for it. Long for it. But control is an illusion. I’m not saying life is 100% chaotic and unpredictable, but being attached to controlling things really only wears you out. I…
It’s taken me over a decade of therapy and introspection to arrive at this Episode. I don’t know what took me so long, but ‘getting’ self-compassion has been a real struggle for me. In the past few weeks a few things have clicked. First, some Miriam-Webster informed verbiage: Self: ha. dare we even try to define that? Even with the help of the dictionary? Hell, why not (only relevant entries included): Phew. And, Compassion: And,…
Many KEW episodes and posts refer to things I learned in the past that maybe don’t help us any more, are outdated, or were simply wrong to begin with. From thinking Competition actually regulates our markets (Episode 6), wondering how Old Beliefs (Episode 9) hold us back, to the idea that we all feel different, but that actually makes us the same (Episode 21). Under all of this there is a theme of having to…
For years I was stuck trying to THINK my way into changing my behaviors, beliefs, habits, actions. Not that I was all that bad or needed massive changes, but there were things I wanted to be different. I would get anxious a lot. I would get defensive sometimes. I would say no to social invitations. I would be afraid to try some new things. You know, just some things I wanted to change. So, I…
“We went from modifying our behavior to suit the Earth, to modifying the Earth to suit our behavior” I’m sure I didn’t make that phrase up, but it does describe what I think is a critical flaw in human evolution. Starting maybe 12,000 years ago, we changed the way we live. In the beginning, the alterations to our ways of living were subtle and had mostly beneficial consequences. In the past few hundred years, however,…