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Reflections, Relationships
Sometimes, it can just be really hard to appreciate our time. And then we make ourselves guilty for not appreciating our time.

After my Dad died unexpectedly at 60, I’ve really tried to appreciate my time more – but how do you appreciate something that feels like it’s endless and plentiful?

But really, how much time do you have left? With yourself, with your parents, with your friends?

Turns out, that really the wrong question. Although we live in a society focused on calendars, clocks, and hours in the day, that’s not how many of us actually live our lives.

We actually live our lives through experiences. Through seasons. Through evenings with friends, family reunions, annual ski trips, July 4ths, etc.

A great article by WaitButWhy got me thinking about this, especially when it comes to the remaining time with our parents. 

Here’s a handy photo from the WaitButWhy Article:

Imagine you’re 34 and you’ve gone skiing with your family and more specifically, your parents every year since you were 4. Your parents are 30 years older (64) than you, and everyone typically lives to 78. And by age 70, everyone stops skiing because it’s too dangerous.

You absolutely LOVE these trips. And now, all of a sudden, you realize you have 14 more family ski trips with your mom and dad. And you only have 26 more trips before you have to stop because you’re too old.

You have used up nearly 70% of your ski trips with your parents.

How does that change your perspective?

So, the question becomes – are you satisfied with your experiences if it all ended sooner than you thought? Even sooner than the averages?

I know, this is a dumb question. This sounds like some millennial ‘YOLO’ stuff. We can’t just live our lives enjoying every moment right?

Right, life is tough, full of challenges but also ‘opportunities’, you’re born, you pay taxes, and then you die. Sounds awesome. Enjoy that!

I’m not trying to advocate for some euphoric bliss, just simply joy and content with what you have – in this moment, right here, right now.

If you’re feeling dissatisfied and unfulfilled, it’s not just going to magically disappear.

And if you’ve been feeling this way for a while, it’s not just going to change at the blink of an eye, because you quit your job or because you broke up with your SO.

It’s going to come from a change in perspective, a change in being, and a change in environment.

Now, that might sound pretty hard. Who wants to go through all that change?

But seriously…isn’t your life worth it? How much is your life worth to you?

Well that’s the problem – when you’re not enjoying your life and you feel like your just surviving it day by day, you actually come to not value your life. You actually see it as less valuable.

And that’s where the incredible value of coaching comes from. It’s incredibly rare to catapult yourself from just surviving to loving life.

I’ve met countless people who have told me point blank that they hate their life and felt like they were barely surviving. I’ve personally fet that way over the years.

And the only thing that gets you from the depths of despair (or just simply a feeling of boredom and monotony) is a change.

Know your true value and worth. You are an incredible person. Always have been and always will be.

Don’t waste your life. Get back to living and loving with everything you’ve got.
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Empathy, Health and Wellness, Loss and Grief, Reflections, Travel
Let’s get upset….Said no one ever…

When’s the last time you were upset?
 
How was it? A lot of fun right?

We we all have these moments – where we’re immediately triggered by something and it brings out more emotion and feeling in us than we thought we had. If you don’t have these moments, please contact me and share your secret…

What happens for you in these moments? Do you get angry? Sad? Withdrawn? Lonely? Depressed?

Depending upon the situation, you might be lucky enough to experience all of these lovely emotions. Bingo, jackpot, winner winner!

So the question is – why do these moments happen to us? And what could we do to lessen their frequency and intensity?

If you’re like many people, you’ve give up on these questions. You’ve come to accept that these ups and downs are just “a normal part of life”.

If you’re an optimist, then you’ve rationalized it as some sort positive that helps you appreciate the happy moments.
 
Well, let’s pretend we can actually affect them for a moment.

In 2015, a good mentor said to me “we’re only ever upset or disappointed when our expectations aren’t met”.

While that’s interesting and likely true, it’s not very helpful. It’s pretty hard to go through life without any expectations.

I certainly have an expectation to get through the day with a couple of meals and some water don’t you? 
 
As humans, or at least as ‘Westerners’, we certainly seem to think about what we want and the future a lot, and with that, come expectations. Sometimes, a lot of them…

Thanks to another mentor, I attended The Landmark Forum. Crazy enough, they also brought up this idea of upsets and how they’re tied to expectations…but there are more components to it.

Here’s the idea – upsets occur solely inside of us and they are tied to 3 things:
1. Thwarted Intentions
2. Undelivered Communications
3. Unfulfilled Expectations

Take a deep look at the last time you were upset – What was happening? 

Were you stuck in traffic? Running late to meet a friend? Did you drop your phone? Did your SO not show you as much love or attention as you were hoping for?

Seriously, take a moment and see if you can discover these 3 components in it. What were they?

Now notice your emotions and feelings around the upset – have they lessened? Do you feel like you finally understand why it bothered you so much?

To the extent we can interrupt these upsets and examine them to find those 3 components, we can ‘short circuit’ them from frying our brain into an unwanted and often uncomfortable reaction.

For me, what I came to learn was that while traveling, living simply, and focusing on the bare necessities of life, I all of a sudden had:
– few and uncomplicated intentions 
– more honest and simple communications
– low expectations

An example:
When I was traveling and living out of a backpack for super cheap, my intentions were to live cheaply, meet people, make a few connections, be outside, and see the world. 

All easily accomplished…well most of the time…

Take a look at your life right now – do you have complicated, extremely lofty, and sometimes unrealistic expectations?

If so, consider your options:
1. Reset your levels to something more realistic 
2. Set completely new levels or objectives
3. Re-commit yourself to accomplishing and achieving them
4. Face a huge upset when life gets in the way and something goes off the tracks

Being upset is no way to live your life. Everyone wants to be enjoying life and not experiencing these intense downturns.

The decision is now yours – let your upsets control you or decide now to control your upsets.
 
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Love
1. Eros Eros is sexual or passionate love, and is the type most akin to our modern construct of romantic love. In Greek myth, it is a form of madness brought about by one of Cupid’s arrows. The arrow breaches us and we ‘fall’ in love, as did Paris with Helen, leading to the Trojan War and the downfall of Troy and much of the assembled Greek army. In modern times, eros has been amalgamated with the broader life force, something akin to Schopenhauer’s will, a fundamentally blind process of striving for survival and reproduction. Eros has also been contrasted with Logos, or Reason, and Cupid painted as a blindfolded child.

2. Philia The hallmark of philia, or friendship, is shared goodwill. Aristotle believed that a person can bear goodwill to another for one of three reasons: that he is useful; that he is pleasant; and, above all, that he is good, that is, rational and virtuous. Friendships founded on goodness are associated not only with mutual benefit but also with companionship, dependability, and trust. For Plato, the best kind of friendship is that which lovers have for each other. It is a philia born out of eros, and that in turn feeds back into eros to strengthen and develop it, transforming it from a lust for possession into a shared desire for a higher level of understanding of the self, the other, and the world. In short, philia transforms eros from a lust for possession into an impulse for philosophy. Real friends seek together to live truer, fuller lives by relating to each other authentically and teaching each other about the limitations of their beliefs and the defects in their character, which are a far greater source of error than mere rational confusion: they are, in effect, each other’s therapist—and in that much it helps to find a friend with some degree of openness, articulacy, and insight, both to change and to be changed.

3. Storge Storge (‘store-gae’), or familial love, is a kind of philia pertaining to the love between parents and their children. It differs from most philia in that it tends, especially with younger children, to be unilateral or asymmetrical. More broadly, storge is the fondness born out of familiarity or dependency and, unlike eros or philia, does not hang on our personal qualities. People in the early stages of a romantic relationship often expect unconditional storge, but find only the need and dependency of eros, and, if they are lucky, the maturity and fertility of philia. Given enough time, eros tends to mutate into storge.

4. Agape Agape is universal love, such as the love for strangers, nature, or God. Unlike storge, it does not depend on filiation or familiarity. Also called charity by Christian thinkers, agape can be said to encompass the modern concept of altruism, defined as unselfish concern for the welfare of others. Recent studies link altruism with a number of benefits. In the short term, altruism leaves us with a euphoric feeling—the so-called ‘helper’s high’. In the longer term, it is associated with better mental and physical health, as well as longevity.

Credit: Psychology Today
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Languages, Travel


If you’ve done much traveling in the last 20 years, you’ve probably noticed that English is just about everywhere. Out of the world’s 7.5 billion people, 1.5 billion speak English — that’s 20% of the Earth’s population. In 2015, out of the total 195 countries in the world, 67 nations have English as the primary language of ‘official status’. Plus there are also 27 countries where English is spoken as a secondary ‘official’ language.

There are 6,909 distinct languages in the world (according to SIL Intl). What are your chances of speaking English? Wow….Now if you’re lucky enough to be one of the 350 million native speakers of English, you really have no idea how fortunate and privileged you are that much of the world has conformed to this one language.

Unfortunately, it’s not super clear or obvious how English has become so dominant. The simple answer you’ll often hear is that English is the language of commerce. Let’s dig a bit deeper and take a look at some of the different theories and explanations from around the internet that make a bit more sense:

1) Its original Germanic base has been mixed with the Roman vocabulary, giving it “the best of both worlds”–an extremely rich dual arsenal of expression unprecedented in history. English has a long and fascinating history that spans wars, invasions and influences from around the globe. Cultures that have helped shape modern English include Romans, Vikings and the French. For this reason it’s a hybrid language comprised of Latin, Germanic and Romance elements. English (in fact more than 95 % of words are mixture of Latin + Greek + French)

2) It’s extremely laconic (succinct). Sentenced translated from English into other languages take up at least 30% more space. English words are concise and so are its sentences.

3) Absence of a sophisticated grammar system (present in other languages, such as Slavic ones) makes it not only efficient but adaptable to new concepts and technologies. It’s one of the most adaptive languages on earth. A noun can be easily turned into an adjective or a verb, and vice-versa, without sacrificing expressiveness or literary beauty.

4) It’s spoken by the most influential and powerful countries on earth, the USA and the UK. But this is no accident: I actually believe that the privileged status of these Anglo nations is in large part *due to* speaking a language as elegant and adaptive as English, as strange as it sounds. When you have a language as remarkable as English, it’s really no surprise that it would become a potent tool both for Shakespeare and for Bill Gates. Whether we’re talking about movies, art, literature, IT, technical stuff, or science, English is always at the forefront of expression. This proves that, apart from the political status of its speakers, the language itself has certain remarkable properties that make it, objectively, the best language in the world.

5) It’s really flexible – Non-native English speakers who learn it as a second language often comment on how many ways there are to say things. That’s because English doesn’t discriminate – you can use it however you like. Countries like Singapore have taken this concept to heart, inventing an entirely new type of English called ‘Singlish’ that has absorbed facets of other languages like Chinese and Malay. 6) It continues to change – Selfie. Bae. Smasual. All these words are new to the English language but have already become valued members of the lexicon. More than any other language, English continues to evolve and absorb new words that branch out – often untranslated – into other languages. English is definitely a language that knows where the party’s at.

Historical Reasoning: After World War I, Belgian, French and British scientists organized a boycott of scientists from Germany and Austria. They were blocked from conferences and weren’t able to publish in Western European journals. “Increasingly, you have two scientific communities, one German, which functions in the defeated [Central Powers] of Germany and Austria, and another that functions in Western Europe, which is mostly English and French,” Gordin explained. It’s that moment in history, he added, when international organizations to govern science, like the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, were established. And those newly established organizations begin to function in English and French. German, which was the dominant language of chemistry was written out. The second effect of World War I took places across the Atlantic in the United States. Starting in 1917 when the US entered the war, there was a wave of anti-German hysteria that swept the country. “At this moment something that’s often hard to keep in mind is that large portions of the US still speak German,” Gordin said. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Minnesota there were many, many German speakers. World War I changed all that. “German is criminalized in 23 states. You’re not allowed to speak it in public, you’re not allowed to use it in the radio, you’re not allowed to teach it to a child under the age 10,” Gordin explained. The Supreme Court overturned those anti-German laws in 1923, but for years that was the law of the land. What that effectively did, according to Gordin, was decimate foreign language learning in the US. “In 1915, Americans were teaching foreign languages and learning foreign languages about the same level as Europeans were,” Gordin said. “After these laws go into effect, foreign language education drops massively. Isolationism kicks in in the 1920s, even after the laws are overturned and that means people don’t think they need to pay attention to what happens in French or in German.” This results in a generation of future scientists who come of age in the 1920s with limited exposure to foreign languages. That was also the moment, according to Gordin, when the American scientific establishment started to take over dominance in the world. “And you have a set of people who don’t speak foreign languages,” said Gordin, “They’re comfortable in English, they read English, they can get by in English because the most exciting stuff in their mind is happening in English. So you end up with a very American-centric, and therefore very English-centric community of science after World War II.” You can see evidence of this world history embedded into scientific terms themselves, Gordin said. Take for example the word “oxygen.” The term was born in the 1770s as French chemists are developing a new theory of burning. In their scientific experiments, they needed a new term for a new notion of an element they were constructing. “They pick the term ‘oxygen’ from Greek for ‘acid’ and ‘maker’ because they have a theory that oxygen is the substance that makes up acids. They’re wrong about that, but the word acid-maker is what they create and they create it from Greek. That tells you that French scientists and European scientists of that period would have a good classical education,” Gordin said. The English adopted the word “oxygen” wholesale from the French. But the Germans didn’t, instead they made up their own version of the word by translating each part of the word into “sauerstoff” or acid substance. “So you can see how at a certain moments, certain words get formed and the tendency was for Germans, in particular, to take French and English terms and translate them. Not true for English. Now terms like online, transistor, microchip, that stuff is just brought over in English as a whole word. So you see different fashions about how people feel about the productive capacity of their own language versus borrowing a term wholesale from another,” Gordin said.
Sources: https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-10-06/how-did-english-become-language-science http://www.antimoon.com/forum/t14010.htm https://www.lingualearnenglish.com/blog/tips-to-learn-english/10-reasons-english-important-language/ https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/how-many-languages-are-there-world http://www.stgeorges.co.uk/blog/learn-english/how-many-people-in-the-world-speak-english
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Travel
Without planning it, we somehow spent Constitution Day at the Denmark National History Museum. Located in the old Royal Palace, the Denmark National History Museum, albeit impressive and grandiose, leaves you wondering what kind of history you’re learning about. After walking around for nearly 2 hours, reading the literature and listening to the guided audio tour, it seems the national history is almost solely focused on the lives and conquests of the royal family. If you’re interested in the history of life in the country or how regular Danes (regular folk like you or I) have lived, good luck. Supposedly this extremely ornate castle burnt down 1 or 2 times – and yet somehow the royal family was able to rebuild it perfectly multiple times (along with maintaining and occasionally rebuilding the other 8 palaces exclusively for their use). At some point in the 1800s, the country decided that a democratically elected body that gave the common citizen some voice in how their country was spending their taxes or who they were warring with next (probably Sweden again….) Even more interesting is that when talking to Danes in Copenhagen, many of them are unfamiliar with their country’s history and haven’t been to these museums. Funny and sad that on their national holiday, there are more foreigners at the national museum than Danes.
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Travel
“Beer, Coke, or Water – as you wish!” This is a common phrase you’ll hear all around Cartagena (the expensive coastal Caribbean city in the north of Colombia) especially if you look like a gringo (white foreigner, or more honestly…Americano). It has been said that people love choices. Especially the freedom of choice. Seems like the street salesforce of Cartagena follows the same logic. But what does freedom of choice really mean? Are you truly free to choose whatever your heart desires? Or perhaps your choices are a reflection of what is available to you in your environment. How do our lives change when the available options, and thus our choices, are changed? For example, we often hear people say things like “I don’t really like to exercise that much. The gym and the healthy food market is so far away and after work I’m just too tired to go. I know I should lose weight and eat better and I even have friends and family that do just that, but I guess I’m just not that kind of person.” Our protagonist, let’s call her Jane, may have no other choice but to work and commute long hours, while also living in an affordable part of town that may not have a gym or healthy market nearby. Jane certainly has a problem on her hands. Over 70% of Americans are overweight – so we can assume by her comments that she too is struggling to control her weight. If she doesn’t do something, she could end up with a whole host of health issues, from increased blood pressure, inflammation, self-image and esteem issues, and even premature mortality. Unfortunately, to make matters worse, Jane has taken what should be classified as a problem with her environment, and instead placed a negative judgment on herself. It’s not that most jobs or transportation options force her into a sedentary lifestyle or that there isn’t enough nature, parks, and gyms available in her neighborhood, it’s that she come to believe she’s just not that kind of person. Depending upon how long she thinks this and how many people she tells this to, she might fully cement this idea in her mind – self fulfilling prophecy that isn’t true. Ideas are contagious, even if they aren’t true. Jane does have an opportunity to reframe the situation and ask herself why – why does she fail to exercise when her friends and family members are able to? What is it about her life and her situation (instead of a quick and judgmental critique on her character) that might cause this? Unfortunately, Jane has little control over her environment. It’s not necessarily easy for her to change to a more active job or move neighborhoods. She certainly will struggle to build her own gym or petition for more active areas in her part of town. There’s a good chance that Jane hasn’t failed herself. Her community leaders have a responsibility to Jane to improve her environment – so that it works with her to lead a better life and doesn’t cause her to struggle and blame herself for things outside her control. Improved commuting options, from dedicated bike lanes to efficient mass transportation would allow Jane to spend less time sitting and even allow her to exercise while she commutes. Health-focused grocery stores that don’t tempt Jane with intentional unhealthy options along the standard shopping path and at check-out would immediately and positively change her options and thus her choices. Jane has a variety of options for change but here are two obvious options: 1. Move to a different area (and find a new job) where the civic and community leaders are make decisions in their people’s best interest. 2. Organize with her neighbors and fellow citizens, who likely are struggling with the same challenges, to demand change. Jane can choose to not act and think poorly of herself, but this is still a choice Let’s hope for Jane (and the community’s sake) that she chooses the water and not the beer or coke.
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Travel
Ever wonder why everyone seems to love small towns? Why is it that small towns are often able to self regulate without the need for endless laws, regulations, and policies? What allows them to function without most of the complexities of “advanced” metropolitan mega cities? It’s not even just that they seem to function smoothly with less crime, less liter, and more happiness – have you witnessed how visitors from big cities almost immediately profess how cute, nice, and peaceful they are. This feeling doesn’t seem to transfer well in the inverse. People from big cities are often relieved to head out of town and dread coming back. Smaller communities seem to fit well with the following social psychology theories broken windows theory, bystander effect, tragedy of the commons, and lastly behavior normalization. Power (political and economic) ends up being decentralized as the community self regulates and dulls extreme behaviors. The average citizen and the “decision makers” are also much more likely to come into contact. The downsides are few from what I’ve witnessed but for a balanced perspective, I list them below: – tradition will often trump new ideas and innovation – fewer niche/speciality services and product available – claustrophobic feelings – bad for profit – quality of life ends up being moderate instead of at the extremes (unlikely to produce many Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or homeless camps) We’re left to wonder if people would even want to live in big cities if it weren’t one of the few places they could earn an income (aka sell their labor).
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Travel
Learn -> Earn -> Give During a training session at my first job, the guest facilitator (lawyer in his 50s) spoke about his philosophy on the different phases of life. He saw 3 distinct phases, each taking up roughly one 3rd of 90 years – learning, earning, and giving. Learn – developing yourself is absolutely crucial. Avoid experiences that are focused on “grinding” for making money. Earn – focus on earning a (moral and sustainable) livelihood, so that you can support giving/mentoring phase. Give – focus on mentoring, giving back, and ideally making the world a better place, not just for yourself, but for those that come after. To be honest, something about this never sat right with me. While the simplicity is appealing for comprehension and integration into life, I haven’t really been satisfied with the fragmented nature of this phased approach. Ideally, you should be able to establish a way to do all 3 at the same time. Learning should be a worthy endeavor for it’s own sake (interesting, fun), not because it allows you to generate more income. What happens to our ability to improve when we stop learning? When we think what we know or what we’re doing is good enough?
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Travel
It’s shocking that the 3 weeks I took to visit and stay with friends is more vacation than most people get per year (in the USA). When are we to reflect on what’s happening in our lives if not for relaxed time with friends and family? People whom we can trust to be open and vulnerable and reciprocate such things. Our ability to do this has significantly decreased over the years. Due to the increased time demands placed on workers by organizations, as well as the fact that many people don’t live near to family or change jobs/residences often, we are losing something that is critical to our growth and development – a safe space to think and speak openly. Taking time to see friends and family in their “Business as Usual” mode enlightens us to their experience. Often we have glimpses of this through pre-planned vacations and holidays but it is often a momentary reprieve from their true experience – an out of body experience from what is more constant. What do we gain from this time with them in such an environment? We’re often left baffled as to why people behave in certain ways. Why they make certain choices when we believe we would do things differently. For unless we truly understand their existence, past and present, we simply cannot understand the individual or their behavior. If we don’t understand their experience, how can we get along? Cooperate? Strive together towards improvement of not only our own existence, but theirs as well. We have reached this point as a species because we’ve been able to set aside whatever our differences and work together towards something we all care about. Simply put, without shared experiences, there won’t be empathy; without empathy, there will be no cooperation; without cooperation, there will be conflict and little improvement.
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Travel
There’s something fundamental about humans and our desire to make improvements. Whether it’s to their health, relationships, circumstances, or quality of life, humans instinctually take note of the things they aren’t happy with and make attempts to change those things. It is this innate pursuit for better that has allowed us to become the dominant species on the planet. In recent years, it seems like we’re actually sliding backwards with countless problems plaguing not only individuals, but communities and society at large. Where do we go from here?
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