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The Missing Unifying Link
Can you find a thread that connects all or at least most of your daily activities? If not, then you clearly are living a fragmented life — a series of disjointed experiences.
Could a business or a machine run this way work well? Could a human body whose systems and organs are not coordinated work well!
What impact does fragmentation have on you and your well-being? What toll does it take on your psyche and your peace of mind when you have many diverse voices and demands tugging you in different directions?
If a business cannot function without a unifying mission, how can you?
We’ll go deep into this issue of fragmented life in this article.
Sweat equity
Teaching what I teach is a lot like furniture that comes in a box, IKEA-like.
The same furniture, assembled, cost a lot more than the one in the box. The difference is sweat equity.
My courses, my workshops cost a little bit of money and a whole lot sweat equity.
What you get from what I teach, the finished product, the value, the positive changes in your life will depend on what you bring to it… your sweat equity.
It’s not time… although you need some time to do what you need to do. It is not ‘how’, although your how really really matters. It is your level of seeing the big picture.
What does it mean to see the big picture?
Let’s say you see what is happening. But if your picture, i.e. your cone of vision is not bigger than the foreground where things are happening, if your cone of vision is not big enough to include the context, i.e. the background, your result will be almost worthless.
The background is what makes something useful.
The why? The what for? The value of the thing is given by the background, the context.
If someone gifted me with a Van Gogh painting, that sells for hundreds of millions of dollars, it would be useless in my apartment. What would be useful is someone coming to me and helping me with housework… which goes at two digits per hour.
Or the example Wallace D Wattles uses, the Eskimo in the frozen North would rather have a gun than a Van Gogh painting.
These are examples that are clear. But are you clear that the context of the different things you do in your life make what you do what it is… mostly a have to.
Yesterday, in my core group, I introduced a new concept. The concept of a seamless life.
A seamless life is like a patchwork… like a quilt. The individual patches are largely worthless by themselves, but stitched together for the purposes of covering something or someone makes the whole quilt useful, beautiful, maybe even a work of art.
And if your goal is to love your life and live it powerfully: do you think that a life that is like a work of art is easier to love than a life that is like little pieces of fabric lying about? Some pretty and most not. Not pretty.
But you won’t. You won’t love your life and live it powerfully, unless you practice and master seeing the big picture, seeing the background so you alter it, design it, shape it so your life and its parts come together like a beautiful quilt.
It doesn’t have to be boring… if that is what you are afraid of. You can do the crazy stuff, the mundane stuff, all the things you do now. The missing part is the purpose, the ‘what-for?’ part.
This is a hard concept, it seems, for people. Creating a seamless life by creating a unifying context, a unifying background to unify the fragments.
My guess is that they think, you think, that the context, the background is already given.
I’ll visit my family because I have to. Because family is important.
I want to talk to my brother to cheer me up.
The because I have to, because I want to… is the background. The context. Neither is an empowering context, but more importantly, this context doesn’t connect with other parts of your life, unless…
Unless, of course, everything in your life is a have-to, and then your life is a have-to life, not a pretty picture, my insides dropped as I wrote it.
Context is 100% created with words. With language.
The art is to find the words, the shared words in every piece of life… that will act like the glue for a particle board, the stitching for the quilt.
On one hand is the option to pick the beautiful life you want to create as the context. The dream. The future.
On the other hand is the option to pick what you want to go away from… your forcefulness, your black and white way of seeing the world, on your singular purpose to avoid being called to account, to be right, to make others wrong, to dominate and avoid domination.
On the surface it looks like a better idea to go for the pie in the sky beautiful life.
But let’s examine how you feel while you are not quite there?
You feel like sh!t… It is too slow. It takes too long, too much work… so I don’t recommend picking that option.
The other option doesn’t sound good, but it is, like any good medicine, it works while it tastes bitter.
I created mine, around 1997…
I said: ‘There is no way I am going to be anything less than magnificent’
And, of course, I was a whole lot less than magnificent in most areas of my life, maybe all. But this, anything less than magnificent won’t do… was my hell-stone.
I just made up that expression, so don’t google it. It is the thing I want to go away from… what is less than magnificent.
And unlike others, maybe you, I don’t care how I look to others. This is an inside job. I want to BE and DO things as a magnificent person would do. What you think about me is your business. That I have typos in my articles… is maybe my business that a magnificent person would not have…
It is not my goal to become magnificent.
It is a goal, a context, a purpose to avoid being not magnificent. Ordinary, sloppy, lazy, stupid, unimaginative, uncreative, angry, vengeful, sulking, depressed, sick, pretentious, inauthentic, unkind, fearful, settling for less, argumentative… these are all the opposite of magnificent.
The trap of wanting to look good…
Wanting to be SEEN, considered as magnificent is ordinary, and to be avoided at all cost. Unlike some people I know that do everything for how others will see them. It is abominable to me.
And if you look at those people, they have a fragmented life: at least two fragment: when they are seen, and when they are alone. The gap between them is tremendous.
Can they ever have a life they love? They can’t… because they don’t have a life. They have at least two… And I bet they hate both lives.
Most people are like that, by the way.
They are not the same person in the public as they are when they are picking their noses in private.
Or doing more unseemly behavior, like cheating on their wives while their public persona is all about decency and faithfulness… like the ‘Try Guys’ dude just recently.
Everyone… presidents who tweet not very presidentially.
Actors, sports figures, your parents, you.
And, of course, you all pretend that all is well… but all is not well. You don’t have a life, you are not a person, you don’t live your life powerfully.
In the Integrity workshop session we’ll have this coming Saturday, we’ll endeavor to create a context for each participant, a context that has the power to pull the fragments together to a coherent whole. To create one seamless life.
Of course then the ball is in your court… and you need to IMPLEMENT the context to every piece of your life.
You’ll notice that your life is even more fragmented than you though it was. Every part, getting up, going to the bathroom, making and having breakfast, going to work, doing the work, lunch break, talking to co-workers or customers or to the boss, your money, your vehicle, your house, your clothing, your hygiene, your health, your sleep… these are all separate pieces, unless you bring them under the same umbrella, under the same context.
You’ll likely need guidance, help…
…because this activity, creating a context for each part is difficult for you if you have been living that everything already HAS a context, and all you can do is make the best of it inside that already GIVEN context.
This is where ‘you live in a world of your own design’ comes in. Where ‘you create your own reality’ becomes useful. Because you create your own reality with the created context…
The foreground just looks different in different contexts… Changing the foreground in the same context won’t change the result. The result depends on the context.
And this applies to the work you do with me. If your context is ‘because I want what I want’ then you probably are not empowered to actually do the work, you pick and choose of the many things I talk about, and mostly you just TOLERATE me… because you can’t see that what I say will get you what you want.
This is how the ‘goal’ most people recommend you have backfires.
You occasionally hear something that sounds like a good idea for you. Occasionally. And you never actually do much of anything.
So instead of a goal, in the Integrity session we’ll pick a hell-stone for you. That, the attitude, or behavior, or addiction you’ll find in every area of life, that is, at this point, the common denominator that is creating, moment to moment, the life you don’t love, can’t love, don’t want to love.
For me that was being ordinary. Ugh.
For you it can be anything. Being a victim, being powerless, being unwanted, being right, dominating, belligerent, superior, judgmental, fearful, passive, not a person.
We’ll see what fits you.
I’ll also muscletest. There are many things that can serve as your hell-stone… If you test one and it doesn’t seem to fit, we’ll find you a new one.
Remember, context is decisive… and is created by words. With words. And when you create it unconsciously, then it is most likely disempowering… i.e. sucks your aliveness from you.
One of my students picked excellence…
..similarly the way I picked magnificence. The hell-stone of excellence is shabby, thrown together, shallow, just done because you had to. Got it?
- One could pick ‘agile like a Parkour athlete’. The hell-stone for that is rigidity, inflexibility, victim, graceless, forceful, etc.
- One could pick ‘see the person in everyone’. The hell-stone for that is seeing people as things to manipulate, to run from, to lie to, to get what you want from.
- You could pick ‘interested’. The hell-stone, you’ll find, is everywhere in your life. You are simply not interested, in anything other than what you want. So then that is your hell-stone, waiting for something to be about you, to be interesting to you, or else you won’t be interested. And even when you listen, you are dutiful, you just want to get it over with. Hell of a hell-stone. lol.
Anyway, the Saturday session is at 2 pm, and you are invited. No pre-requisites, you can be a wriggling newbie, we’ll find your hell-stone for you.
Let’s find your hell-stoneNot the positive. No, it’s the negative. The jet-engine energy, not the propeller.
PS: One of the un-integrated areas of life is money.
How you make it. How you spend it, how you save it, how you invest it. Your attitude, your context, your background in that area is often far removed from the rest of life, or if it is the same, you are probably wasteful, pretending to be more than you are.
In the next Moneyroots workshop (October 22, Saturday at 11 am) we’ll probably look at how to use your brand spanking new hell-stone so you can be prosperous and prepared for any-thing.
PS: Remember the movie ‘Life is Beautiful’? In that the main character had a totally seamless life. The organizing principle was love… that Life is more important than living, that the people you love don’t have to perish because the world has turned against you. I am weeping again.
For me being magnificent is that… Life is more important than my life. Do you hate me yet?
