On Tapping Into WHY

You know that part of Dead Poet’s Society where Robin Williams goes on a tirade against the word ‘very’ as a lazy person’s way to avoid richer, more descriptive words?

I realize I feel a pretty similar way about people doing things just because they’re “cool things to do.”

Travel’s a great example. There are so many great reasons to want to see places- to gain understanding, to satisfy curiosity, to recharge, to connect or reconnect, to serve others, to discover one’s self. But going places just as a status symbol is far less interesting.

Of course, everybody does stuff because it looks cool, just like everybody uses the word ‘very.’ But I think it’s worth encouraging ourselves to go beyond that. When we tap into the WHY behind the things we do, they come to life.

On Everybody Having a Struggle

What are you learning lately?

What I’ve been learning is that:

a) At any given moment, everybody’s got some kind of struggle

b) Those struggles are usually kept hidden

c) Those hidden struggles actually have a better ability to connect us to each other than anything else

This lines up so well with what Kevin Love recently wrote on an article I retweeted. It should be required reading for everybody. "Everyone is going through something we can’t see."

“The reality is that we probably have a lot in common with what our friends and colleagues and neighbors are dealing with. So I’m not saying everyone should share all their deepest secrets – not everything should be public and it’s every person’s choice. But creating a better environment for talking about mental health… that’s where we need to get to.”

The past month hasn’t exactly been the easiest, but I’ve also heard things that other people are going through that remind me that there’s no room to be bitter, and so much need for compassion.

On Presence Over Problem-Solving

What are you learning right now?

I’m learning- probably re-learning- that you can’t always solve everybody’s problems or remove their suffering the way you wish you could. If you have a strong impulse to help others, it can be really frustrating to just have to be a witness to their pain without being able to remove it.

I’m learning, that in spite of that, you can still look for ways to serve compassionately. You might not be able to remove someone’s pain, but you can go above and beyond when it comes to adding joy, love, and presence. Being a problem-solver is a good thing, but it isn’t everything. 

On Undivided Attention

Doing things with undivided attention doesn’t come natural to me. I like to think steps ahead. I like to get a lot done, often trying to squeeze in even more by making things overlap.

It’s a skill I hope to keep working on, that’ll I’ll probably always be working on to be honest.

The past few years have been good to me. But as I get older and a little more settled into a life I spent most of this decade building and working towards, I’m realizing that it’s actually easy to be so future oriented that you forget to enjoy things right in front of you that you used to dream about.

As we get deeper into the year, I hope to see it less as a race against calendars and clocks in order to check boxes, but more like a package of moments, each with its own scents and sounds and intricacies to get to know.