Mongooseosophy

My sister and I have birthdays separated by a month and this year we decided to celebrate them by renting a cabin in the mountains. Not just any mountains, but a very special and memorable location for us.

In the 1940’s, our grandfather purchased a hunting cabin on fifty acres of land in north central Pennsylvania. My father was in his early teens and I am sure he spent many happy days of his childhood there. My grandparents would take us for the entire summer in the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s and we would spend them wandering the property, swimming in a dammed up river, fishing for trout, bass and pickerel and shooting small rodents that dared to get into our grandmother’s vegetable garden.

This was in the days of TV by antenna, and since we got no signal, we didn’t watch television, there wasn’t even one in the house. Radio signal was sketchy as well. The only handheld devices we used were utensils for eating and tools for working or crafting. I think today’s child would spontaneously combust at the thought of an entire summer with no electronic devices of any kind. Yet, I never remember being bored, ever. Life was one big adventure every day.

It has been close to forty years since our family sold the property after my grandfather’s death and I haven’t been to that part of the state in more than thirty. It was a real treat to go back and drive around, seeing the sights, visiting the scenic offerings, hiking a waterfall nature trail and reminiscing about old times. It was truly enjoyable to reconnect to a significant part of my past that has nothing but happy memories. We’ve already agreed to go back, and often.

For years, as we’ve talked together about “Fifty Acres” – the well thought out name our grandparents gave the property, and our term for that part of the world – but I have only experienced it through the eyes of my youth. Everything was wonderful, ideal and unsullied. I couldn’t imagine a better place to want to move to and live. Everything that I find to criticize or look down upon in my fast-paced busy daily reality would be resolved and removed if I could only go back there again. In returning, I anticipated going back to that special time of childhood and looked forward to picking up right where I left off.

The reality was different than I had expected! All the good things about country living were what they always were. Yes, things have modernized, there was satellite tv and wi-fi in our rented cabin. I never was much of a television person anyway, so while I appreciated the wi-fi, we never even turned the tv on!

But here’s some things that I didn’t plan on experiencing that took a little shine off of the idyllic setting of my youth:

-Beverage selections are a lot more limited than what I am used to, living in the suburbs. At one restaurant I had to go to beverage choice number four!
-Food preparation choices are not very diverse either in a town with a population of 296!
-The closest “supermarket” is nine miles away and what most of us would think of as a large 7-11.
-The closest hospital is thirty-five miles away, the closest fire station around ten miles and the nearest emergency services of any kind is five miles away. However, there is a State Police barracks just around the corner, so we might not survive an accident, but at least the crime is low!
-With the median income around the $35,000 a year mark there’s not much of a market for the kinds of goods and services we’re accustomed to passing by several times a day as we drive around in suburbia.
-Because land is inexpensive, property sizes are large and a sense of community, as we’re used to it gets lost when you have to drive to visit your “next door” neighbor.

Without question, I experienced all the relaxation I went there to find, enjoyed the beauty of a world unspoiled by human hands, the quietness, the friendliness of the locals, the cleanness of air and all the wonderful joys that we lose sight of in the day-to-day rat race of scurrying from place to place.

But I also came away with something a little more valuable; an appreciation for the daily world I do live in, with all its opportunities and conveniences. Sure, there may be too many people and too much traffic, but that also means an abundance of choices available to us. It’s so easy to complain about the things you actually have until you don’t have them, or the ability to procure them. It’s easy to forget that a large and diverse group of people that make up a huge community like mine means an abundance of entrepreneurs, businesses and corporations. That means for any good or service you want to procure, you not only have options of where to go and who to transact with, but you have the option of how you would like your good or service.

Want Mexican? Tex-Mex or Traditional? Chinese? How about Hunan, Cantonese or Szechuan? Prefer Exxon over Sunoco? Not a problem. Barbershop or hair stylist? Bring your dog to the groomer, or have them stop by in the mobile grooming van? Within three miles of my house, I have four different styles of yoga studio and several disciplines of martial arts.

We live in a wonderful time and age where if you can think it, you can create it and someone will likely value your product or service. There are opportunities for anyone who is willing to take a risk and start a business and that’s precisely because there are roughly six million of us here. Heck, we’ve got two professional football teams to root for, two MLB teams, a men’s and women’s professional basketball franchise! If you want it, we’ve got it, and if we don’t some genius will build a start up to meet the demand. Even if you just want to sit on your butt, Doordash will bring it to you, so will Amazon and even Wal-Mart and Safeway will deliver your goods to your door.

It’s common to romanticize the past, the “good old days”, when times were simpler, people were nicer and the world moved slower. It’s easy to look at our fast-paced and over busy society and find fault. It’s easy to blame social media, 24/7 news cycles and partisan politics for the ills and woes of today and look back to the past and say it was better then. To that, I say look at all the opportunities that I’ve just mentioned. Add to that choices in education, child care, elder care, golf courses, community centers, fitness facilities…the list could go on and on. Simpler does not always mean better, and some elements of it were worse when people couldn’t access the good, service or care they needed because it wasn’t readily available.

There is no question that some of the good of those times have been lost as society has gotten faster and more interconnected. It seems to me we’ve stopped seeing the individuals we deal with as we rush off to handle the next crisis in our busy days. To that, I say we can choose to slow down a little and take the time to connect with the people we buy from and sell to. That’s what individuals are, after all. We can purpose to become more human with each other, acting with a little more grace and care for each other. We can, and should, bring together the best of both of these worlds. A smile is easy. So is asking someone’s name or taking just an extra minute to make that human connection. Remember please and thank you? It’s become a lost art, but I’m bringing it back!

It was great to actually get away from it all and just stop for a while and breathe. Not have to be somewhere, see someone, do something and all by five pm. But I ask myself, why do I have to go away to experience the benefits of that? Why can’t I experience it getting back to it all also? No matter how many items I scratch off my to-do list, tomorrow is going to add back just as many. I’m convinced if you don’t have anything on your to-do list, you’re likely dead. Comatose at the very least. Busy-ness and connectedness don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

I’m going to take the positives of the idyllic world of my past and bring those things into today. I’m going to be the change I want to see in my world. It will cost me nothing but a little of my time. I saw a quote today by a lady named Cheryl Strayed. She said we’re all becoming who we are going to be, so we might as well not be jerks.

Right on.

I’ve spent too much of the early part of my life dreaming about and planning to get the rewards that come from hard work. The focus for me was always on the end product. That was the goal, and the only thing that mattered. I’d spend hours and days or longer focused on getting to the finish line. The finish line was not “an” objective, it was “the only” objective. I referred to myself as a “carrot and stick” kind of guy. I needed to have a carrot to chase as my main motivation.

Here’s the thing. It really didn’t motivate me like I’d thought it would or should. The goal or final product was so far off, the work long and arduous and the time! Don’t even start talking to me about the time it was going to take. More than any other thing it was the time that eventually caused me to quit or fall well short of whatever goal I’d had in mind. It got to feel “not worth it”, or not worth it enough to carry on. I’d move from one “goal” to another “goal”. My life was a series of moving from goal to goal with limited actual end results to show for it. I’d start to take pride in half-goals. Partly finished projects, or half-way achieved objectives. I’d look at where I was and sadly, I’d settle. That’s really what it was; settling.

Over time, my creativity fizzled as my goals became less and less ambitious. It was much easier to feel good about a completed task if it could be done quickly. What I gained in achievement by saving time, I lost in creative ability. I’d stopped reaching as high because I’d stopped trying so hard. The big dream because the smaller accepted reality.

There is a Biblical story that illustrates this and also shows the potentially horrifying result of quitting on your own self, your own dreams, your own purpose in life. “Terah took Abram his son…and they went forth together to go from Ur of the Chaldees (modern day Iraq) into the land of Canaan (Israel); but when they got to Haran (in Syria), they settled there…and Terah died in Haran.”

The Bible doesn’t tell us why Terah sought to go to Canaan, whether God led him to do so, or he chose to on his own, but Haran would have been about the half way point. He would have followed the Euphrates River north and east into Syria, left the river and travelled back south and west into Canaan. But he stopped.

Haran was an important city, a major trade thoroughfare and would have been an ideal place for a family to make a home. Doubtless, everyone would have been tired from the long journey and there would have been livestock and camels that would have required tending along the way. Food and supply would have been plentiful and what they lacked they could have easily traded for.

In leaving Haran and heading toward Damascus and then into Canaan, Terah would have been leaving the Euphrates and not reaching another significant body of water until he got to the Sea of Galilee, well past Damascus and on the northern most part of Canaan. No doubt, Haran had a lot of good things going for it for an old man with that much family and livestock. I imagine the journey to Haran along the river with all of that was challenging, and I can just see Terah thinking about another journey of the same length with no river. How bright, shining and perfect Haran must have appeared in comparison!

So he settled there, and all the Bible has to say about him after that is that he died. A picture of a life not fully lived because of a dream that was given up on; all because he settled. This story takes place at the end of chapter 11, and in Genesis chapter 12 we have it recorded that God told Abram to leave that place and finish the journey his father had started, which we know that he did. But for valuing the wrong reward, today the Jews could be the Children of Terah, rather than the Children of Abraham.

The work is the reward, not the thing we want the work to produce. The work defines us and more importantly, allows us to define ourselves as we go through the process of doing it. On that path we learn new skills, sharpen and deepen ones we already have, help those who work along side of us by teaching what we know and learning from those who have spent the time to acquire skills we admire and wish to imitate. In my own experience, here are a few of the lessons I have learned as I’ve shifted my focus from the end product as being the reward to letting the work be the reward.

When the end product is the only reward you see, whatever you are doing today just sucks. This is simply because it’s not tomorrow. You’re “not there” yet. It breeds internal dissatisfaction which has the negative consequence of getting our eyes off of the goal and onto whatever we find distasteful in the middle of our process. It naturally leads to a negative attitude which has a spiraling effect of lowering productivity and desire. We go from being joyously consumed by our magnificent objective to dismayed and discouraged at the drudgery of the process. And we usually quit half-way through.

By focusing on the current work, I’ve found joy in challenging myself. When I write pieces such as this one, I’ll both edit as I write, and then do a top to bottom edit. Every editing pass I challenge myself to be more succinct, to economize my words, to be more focused on my point. Now, after a few years of consistent writing, I find those things happen automatically. This allows me to push myself, be more critical of my work and find better ways to communicate on deeper levels that can inspire. I’m less focused on form and hyper focused on content. The work has become the reward because the quality of it has increased, which becomes addictive.

Because of this, I find my confidence to sit down and write has greatly increased. I don’t hope I can put together a good post, I know I can. When we develop confidence in the quality of our craft, the craft itself becomes the focus. It is a joy to create. Certainly, I hope my readers enjoy it, and I believe that they do, but I enjoy it. I enjoy everything about it, from thought, to rough outline, to the work of getting my thoughts down on paper to editing it down to around fifteen hundred words. Every step in the process contains its own reward. One reward leads to the next, and the next and lo and behold the final product is finished and published. I get to enjoy the end goal and more because I enjoyed the work it took to get there.

When work is the reward, there is always something to do, something to go after. Once we have “achieved”, we’re done. There is nothing left. The pages of history are littered with stories of men, women, leaders, businesses and nations who “arrived” and then began the slow descent of decay, fading into irrelevancy. How many college athletic standouts had the life-long dream of playing their sport at the elite level as the goal, then when they got there became satisfied? For many, they had arrived and they stopped working, stopped striving, stopped going for more, next or better. I can think of several off the top of my head that never got another contract after their rookie contract.

Having work as our reward means we always have purpose and direction. As we achieve in one direction, we can shift and challenge ourselves in another. We can go deeper in an area of expertise and become literal subject matter specialists. Or, we can broaden our scope to include related fields and have a wider base of skills from which to attack larger and more complex tasks.

Enjoying work as the reward organically reproduces itself. As we work with others and are constantly learning, we’re also constantly teaching. Joyful enthusiasm is infectious. The best leaders are the ones who get their hands dirty doing the work, not those who order others to do what they will not. As we discover new or better ways of doing things, we readily pass those on to our colleagues, and this truth goes both ways. By fostering an environment where discovery is prized, others’ creativity is allowed to bloom and we learn from them in turn. We challenge each other to higher heights and bigger accomplishments.

In 1954 Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile. Doctors and scientists had been in agreement that the limitations of the human heart would make it physically impossible. With in ten years, over three hundred others accomplished the same feat. It took one man who found joy in doing the work to achieve it to inspire hundreds and then thousands to work toward the same. Today, a four minute mile would not even be a qualifying time, and the current mile record is below 3:45.

I’m finding joy in the journey because I’ve allowed the work to be rewarding. There is something new around every corner. It’s fun to do the work I do know how to do, and discover skills that will help me do it better. As I add skill to skill and task to task, along the way I discover I’m creating all kinds of things that “the big dream” kept me from noticing were even possible. You can’t stop and smell the roses in fifth gear. I’ve spent plenty of time living at warp speed, and it had its pleasures, but I have to say; dang these roses sure do smell good.

What comes to mind when you see the word ‘stillness’? It’s not a word much talked about in our busy and fast-paced society. There’s simply not a lot of time for it, with all we’ve got to get done. There was a time in my life when I used to tell people ‘I suck at sitting still,’ and I meant it and lived it.

Most people I know attempt stillness when they go on vacation, but fail to achieve it. Between the planning, the packing, the getting there, the unpacking, the sightseeing and day trips, by the time we get back to the hotel we’re wiped out. But we faithfully get up the next day and do it all over again. A week of this kind of ‘relaxation’ and we’re ready to go back to work where things can quiet down again! This isn’t rest and it’s rarely relaxing. The last thing it could be called is stillness.

The dictionary defines stillness as ‘the absence of movement or sound.’ This certainly doesn’t happen on vacation, and in my opinion is a very poor definition of the type of stillness I am referring to. The dictionary definition is more appropriate to a quiet night or a windless afternoon.

No, the stillness I am talking about and have been in the habit of practicing comes in two forms. The first is physical stillness. For me the most effective place for this practice is outdoors, in a quiet natural setting. My preference is a forest or wooded area, but in a boat on a pond, by the ocean, even in a comfy chair with a pleasant view are great places also.

I like to sit and watch the life of the outdoors happen. Mostly, I spend time on my deck in my backyard. I watch the birds flit back and forth and listen to the call and response of their song. I watch the little birds, like sparrows chase off bigger birds, like crows which strikes me as comical. Those crows look like they could take a sparrow apart with a swipe of a talon, or the dart of a beak, but they’re scared of those little guys! I love watching the hawks spiraling slowly higher on the thermal updrafts, scouting the land below for their next meal. I imagine what the sheer joy of that kind of flight must feel like.

I watch the squirrels run, jump and even leap from tree to tree via a network of interconnected branches that act like a highway system. They drive my dog nuts running along the fence line, never teetering, confident in their ‘high-wire’ abilities and probably laughing at the crazy mutt yelling his head off while they remain inaccessible in their lofty position.

I’ve seen hordes of bugs seemingly dancing in the rays of evening sunlight, circling each other in a complex, yet recognizable pattern. I’ve discovered that these patterns are forms of communication mostly regarding reproductive interest and availability.

I’ve noticed that there are specific ways animals and insects behave in differing types of weather. Birds, for instance apparently know the rain is coming well in advance, and tend to hunker down in their nests or perch on a branch, under a good leaf canopy. Fortunately, I have radar, but as I watch the weather cell on my phone approaching, I notice the birds stop flying and quiet down. Who needs the weatherman?

This physical stillness, combined with attentiveness to my surroundings leads me naturally into the second type, which is mental stillness. Stilling my mind, quieting my active thoughts. It’s not something that’s easy to do in the bustle of the day. In times of emotional strain or pressures of life that are mentally taxing, I find it challenging to still my thoughts and calm my mind. I’ve found starting with physical stillness can lead to a calmer, more peaceful mental state, which is the ultimate goal, the benefits of which I’ll delve deeper into momentarily.

But it is worth mentioning that while this is my preferred method, another common way that many people have found of getting to this mental stillness place is by activity – but specific types of activity. Ryan Holiday, the author of Stillness Is The Key likes to mend fences on his Texas ranch. Winston Churchill would spend time bricklaying. He was a qualified member of the Amalgamated Union of Bricklayers and at Chartwell, his home in Kent, he laid a brick wall around his vegetable garden. He also built a swimming pool and a goldfish pond. Einstein played the violin, countless men and women go fishing. The Japanese have a term – shinrin roku – which, translated, means ‘Forest Bathing’ – going for a walk in the woods. Other types of physical activity that can lead to stillness are painting and drawing, sewing, knitting, woodworking and other kinds of crafting – repetitious activities with our extremities that require focused intense concentration on the activity at hand.

In either case, neuroscience tells us that when we engage in these kinds of activities, be they active or passive, it has the effect of shutting down the part of our brain that gets restless with the news of the day, the pressures of life, the emotion of relationships, the worries of deadlines, etc. Making the time and purposing to bring myself into this state of stillness has brought immense benefits to me in several ways.

First, it has helped me prioritize my to-do list. I’m weighed down, like any of us are, by the endless list of things that clamor for my time, attention and money. By having a clear and still mind, I’m better able to look at those things objectively. This allows me to consider consequences – both of action and inaction – and make better judgements on what is a must, what is important, what would be nice and what can be delayed. As things get done, more things pile on and I’ve found it incredibly useful to regularly take time out to re-organize my priorities. This also has had the side-benefit of enabling me to accomplish my tasks a lot more effectively since I am not worrying about things on the list. I know they’re sorted and prioritized, and I can begin the work of checking them off the list.

Secondly, stillness has enabled me to see solutions to problems I had not even considered. It has brought an objectivity to my very subjective life! By stilling my mind and my emotional state, I allow myself to dream and visualize. In that ‘dreamy’ utopian line of thinking, I’ve opened my mind up to options I’d never have normally considered. I’ve envisioned what could be or how I’d like it to be. I’ve considered possibilities, no matter how outlandish. In the stream of consciousness that meanders like a quiet brook moving ever slowly down hill to the river, one idea connects to another idea, one possibility to another and suddenly, the spark of inspiration produces the idea that leads to the solution to an issue I’ve been wrestling with, sometimes for months.

Third, stillness has enabled me to more rapidly receive direction in situations where I’ve had multiple options to choose from. When my mind is cluttered with information and alternatives, everything is a jumble and how to best judge between them becomes confusing to evaluate and process. I’ve discovered when I get still, comparisons and contrasts become more evident. I see angles to choices I’d not seen in the noise of my mind. Similar to priorities, certain options become obviously irrelevant now that I am able to see more clearly, while others shine like the noon-day sun. My path suddenly becomes clearer, my options become narrower and I am better able to not just make a choice, but a confident choice. There’s a massive difference between hoping your plan will work and knowing it will.

The last one I will mention – though there are many more – is getting to a place of stillness enables me to reconnect to myself; to my values. It brings me back to my integrity and my priorities as a human being. In my deliberations, it allows me to factor in what kind of a person do I want to be as I assess my priorities, action plans and directional focus. It allows me to consider the pros and cons of my choices and actions. It resets my decision tree along ethical lines that will speak to my character and reputation in the months and years ahead. Stillness has taught me that identity should produce my actions, and actions will produce right feelings. When I have attempted to allow my feelings to produce my actions in the hopes of garnering an identity, rarely have I landed in a place of satisfaction.

I’m learning to stop letting circumstances, expectations, stress and the busyness of life dictate the flow and direction of my life. I’ve stopped running on auto-pilot. Incorporating stillness into my daily routine has proven to have benefits far beyond what I would have expected, and has shown to be a critical part of the pathway to success in the ways in which I measure and value success. I’ve found there is no substitute for peace of mind and the confidence and self-esteem that come with the clarity that stillness brings.