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How well do you know yourself? And do you like yourself?
When I was about 20, still a full time student, I had a guy. He wasn’t even a boy friend, just a guy I liked. We had casual sex. Then he met a girl who he said was a nymphomaniac, and he never had anything to do with me again.
Fast forward 30 years…
I was living with this dude, who would spend whole nights with this other woman… come home only to change clothes for work.
I left him.
Looking back I can see the pattern: I wasn’t into sex. It was more like a vanity thing for me than a need…
I like other things… mostly brain things…
My mother was like that too… We are both empaths… better said: she was. I still am.
Relationships are a funny thing… people meet and make decisions on their temporary emotions.
People hope to get everything they need from a spouse… but that is a prescription for disaster.
I am insatiable intellectually. one man could never give it all to me. Ideal relationship, for me, requires NO TIME spent in physical proximity. People can really bore me. Not because they are boring, but because they are interested in a lot of stuff I am not. like themselves, how they feel, how they are treated. I.am.not.interested in that.
I am most fulfilled when I have a core group to talk to, and when I have enough time to pursue my interests.
So I am not a relationship person. And I am OK with how I am.
This is what we call in this work ‘complete’: nothing missing, nothing too much. I am OK. With my life, with my health, with my money, with even this long drawn out winter up here in Syracuse, NY.
I am OK not talking to my brothers. I am OK…
So what allows me to be OK, and not you?
My nights are instructional, I know, but it is hard for me to see what they are trying to say.
Although last night I think, every dream was about squeezing meaning into a too small vessel. So I woke up more often than usual, and went back to sleep hoping that I can get some rest.
Because all in-dream attempts to squeeze some meaning to that small vessel failed.
Squeezing meaning into a too small vessel
So what is the vessel?
It’s you. And your life together with what you do, what you are up to, who you are with. everything.
And if you pay attention: all of your life is about you or about yours. The people, the stuff, the emotions.
The eight billion’s view.
No meaning.
Two decades ago I had a friend who was stumbling in life. In everything. I have written about her before.
She never gave anything enough practice to get good in… so she had to spend her life pretending to be able to make a living.
I had the good idea of what could lift her out of that horrid place: meaning.
So I suggested that she sets her life in the context: I am becoming a winner as a beacon for my brothers and sisters, to show that we can do it.
She was Black.
She completely didn’t hear me. She didn’t think she could give a f…ing hoot about other Black people, or being inspiring, of being a beacon.
She died of cancer a few years later.
Looking back I can see that she was NEVER willing to tell the truth about herself. That she didn’t put any effort to developing skills, even though she put a lot of effort into her public profile, which was, of course, fake.
That gap she maintained with a lot of energy became home to those behaving like a virus cells that make up the tumors.
A virus is only interested in itself. To propagate itself. If needed, propagate itself at the expense of anything or anyone.
It’s not an accident that humanity has been called a viral infection on Planet Earth.
In my neighborhood wildlife has more than doubled since the beginning of the Pandemic. Why? People, it seems, have been cut down to size?
I see new kinds of birds. The deer population is now triple, even though the new babies haven’t been born for the season. The protected raccoons,. if my observation is anywhere accurate: there is a population explosion there.
So yeah… I do see the humanity virus, at least in my neighborhood, is pulling back.
At the same time cancer is becoming an epidemic…
Here is another example:
I have two clients who always try to gain weight. They have stick-figure-like bodies: no muscles. Just skin, fat, and bones.
Rich kids…
They need to develop muscles by using their bodies for something other than sitting around peeing into buckets while they play computer games.
Back to my dreams last night:
The eight billion, all the human population minus about one thousand people, have no room for meaning. Their lives are so small, that there is no room there for meaning.
Not even for a larger context, a type of meaning…
I use my life FOR something. They use their lives to survive.
If and when I ask they say: I don’t have enough to give!
It is all about getting, having, more, better, and different for them. Nothing about being.
Context is a being distinction. No extra effort, just a tiny bit wider cone of vision, to include the idea of OTHERS.
If everything is still about you then you are still in survival. In scarcity.
People consider scarcity and abundance a HAVING distinction, but they are both BEING distinctions.
And as long as you live inside the beingness of scarcity, not having enough, not having what you wanted, your chances of doing what would get you enough and what you wanted is almost none.
Without expanding your beingness to include the ‘not about you’ you are a virus, plain and simple.
In my challenges (Reality, Reframing, Completion) the result, so far: 75% have made SOME room for the ‘not about you’, while 25% have remained a virus. None of them have made room for a meaning yet. But tiny signs of compassion are bubbling up. Compassion is a ‘not about you’ phenomenon.
What is scarcity, the beingness?
Scarcity is the conclusion of a fear-based way of being. You hope having would cure it, but the interesting thing is: the fear, the foundation, grows to accommodate the having more, so scarcity remains.
All the very rich people who want more and more live in scarcity. It’s mostly unconscious.
At some point in their lives they had ‘room’ to develop some skills, thinking, that makes them stand out from other people who think they don’t need any skills because they are already talented? Smart? Taken care of? Good looking? Special? Superior? lol.
As you can see, I don’t have an answer to all my questions. And I probably have too many questions anyway for your tastes…
What is most missing
What is most missing is the consciousness that can look at reality and look at the delusion, and say: reality doesn’t agree with what you think. so you better buckle up and start learning some skills dude, or else…
Skills that you NEED. So you can do well what you already do. to weed out the pretense, the delusion, the arrogance.
It is amazing to me what I find when I muscletest to what degree someone does what they do for a living. Doctors, coaches, consultants, accountants, nurses, engineers, musicians, teachers, product creators, technicians, marketers… everyone. Even drivers.
You need to increase your self-awareness and tell the truth.
Most people perform at the thing that makes them a living at a quality under 3%. Seriously.
100% is excellence. 50% is doing it well. Their level is less than 3%.
If your number is at 10%: you can be considered a star in today’s world.
A few years ago I had a skill building challenge. Everyone who applied took on something they didn’t need, and could never learn well enough in the three weeks of the challenge. What a waste of time!
So this time I am going to do something different in the new Skill-Building-Challenge: you are only allowed to build on what you have, and only what makes you a living. And the challenge is ENDLESS. Not three weeks, not three days. lol.
So, for example, if you have private students to teach a foreign language: get better at teaching by creating a lesson plan, or learn different ways to teach.
Something you can practice to do better, while you are earning a living.
The format is the same as my newer challenges: one-on-one email… daily. You report: I plan to get better at… this is the action I took today… Simple. Just a few lines of text. DAILY.
I could call it ‘get better at it’ challenge. But I am not that interested in more amateurs at let’s say salsa-dancing, or bouncing a golf ball on a rubber mallet. I am interested in you being good at what you do, so you can start loving yourself.
If you are rich and don’t have to make a living: you know who you are, then building muscles is an accepted challenge.
I am interested in you having breakthroughs…
That is how I have become who I have become: someone who can love myself and my life…
One of those breakthroughs was when, still an architect for hire, I decided to bring excellence to my job. Did I become a better architect? I don’t think so. But I became a better employee by taking ownership of my job…
It is a skill. I never became a better architect. Soon thereafter I left architecture: I was never going to love it… so why spend all my energies there?!
Anyway, if you want to do the challenge, I’d love to have you. You may want to spend the ‘free week’ period deciding what goal to set for yourself, something, an aspect that you can get better at. Your attitude, your attention, at being complete and thorough, looking before you leap, etc.
I have been practicing looking before I leap, and have taken it from 1% to 70%. What a difference!
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