Month: May 2022

The reason we can eat a hotdog is that at the moment we forget how a hotdog is made. When you must make it yourself, you are more aware of the process to produce a piece of food.

And we are more likely to eat the vegetables going bad in the crisper drawer when again, we know the time someone spent to get that piece of cabbage there.

Awareness. That is all we miss. Awareness is the key to decision-making. Without it, how could we know what is going on?

Are we grateful for all the hands that prepared this food?

There is nothing quite like it.

It’s a light flipping on in the dark. Prajna. Clarity.

The thing is, the older we get, the harder it is to learn something new.

We think we know everything there is to know about the world we create.

And when you are master of the universe, what then?

You must become incompetent, at least temporarily, to accept the wisdom of a teacher.

(As they say: When the student is ready the teacher will appear.)

Except it really is difficult to admit, “I don’t know what I am doing” in our connected world. I mean, who wants to look incompetent?

Hence, it is more difficult to move a full-grown tree than it is to influence a sapling.

We only grow up when we decide to quit learning.

Indeed, the reason we never forget to ride a bike is that we never forget the feeling of learning something new.

70,000 years ago, human beings created language, launching us into what has been called the cognitive revolution.

The invention of language is perhaps the most important event in our human existence. “Intelligence”, as we like to call it, is what separates us from the “animals”.

The letters on this screen mean nothing except when we assign meaning to them. Until we agree on 2+2=4, we can’t develop the mathematics to build a bridge.

Imagined order is nothing without cooperation. Because when human beings can agree, we can accomplish great things. These imagined rules, boundaries and worlds, however, only survive in our minds. We cannot touch it, but we can point to it.

After the success of The Sandman comic, author Neal Gaiman was approached by Stephen King who told him to simply, “Enjoy this.”

Entrepreneurs, artists, and ruckus makers are focused on the next thing, to “make it”, and sometimes we forget to celebrate the win.

We worry so much about hitting the ideal that we forget how far we have come to get here.

Enjoy it because the next moment is here.

At least I think it is.

Because I have never heard about a ship falling off the end of the ocean.

And there are horizons.

And I have seen photos from space.

But I have never been to space. So, I have to trust that someone has been up there. To accept what I see as true. We all have to rely on experts that the assertion they have made of the world is true.

It’s the same for car mechanics and climate scientists.

Is built upon the idea that we can trick ourselves into believing things that contradict each other. This is different from pluralism in that we can create space for opposing ideas. No, what we are talking about is the tension created when we believe something is true and not true at the same time.

For instance, do you believe everything happens for a reason, and do you believe you have control over your fate? Do you believe we are in the fight for climate change but still eat meat? That’s cognitive dissonance.

Since our minds need to have to resolve instead of critically examining these beliefs, to hold up our worldview, we believe in the impossible, the untested, and the unseen. Indeed, this is the realm where dogmas and conspiracy theories thrive.

Human beings are made to misbehave. Of course, we are going to contradict ourselves. After all, we know junk food is poor for our health and still eat it. We want consitiency. The struggle is to suspend the need for resolution long enough to examine our snap judgments of the world around us. The massive hole we keep digging to prove we are right is why we feel stuck.

Is a switch controlling the supply of energy to an entire system.

There is nothing I can say that hasn’t been written in a book.

If you are not reading, you are missing your opportunity to really learn something about the world.

If you don’t understand the world, how can you possibly change it for the better?

“I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ’em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures …” – Jack Kerouac, The Dharm Bums

Karouac published this book in 1958. It’s more relevant now more than ever. With phones and social media highjacking our very lives, it is time for a revolution. To go back to the old selves. One where we experienced the now without the fanfare of what others might think. To dance as if no one is watching. Life is indeed short but it is also long enough to live it at least once.

Go.

Do.

Do!

If you don’t need to spend time learning how to drive a stick, it frees us to learn something else.

This is great since our culture is more complicated than it ever has been.

200 years ago, you needed to learn the ways of the land and now there are jobs that are built in a digital world of 1s and 0s.

You have more free time and more space to learn something new. What are you spending time doing? Surfing the web? Netflix? Or something else–more important and more productive?

Our world will continue to be more automated, and as a result, create more free space to do something daring and great. If you choose.

Governor Cox asked Utahns again to conserve water in an effort to minimize the damage of a decade of drought we have faced in Utah.

The requests are reasonable. Fill up your dishwasher before you run it. Water your lawn in the evenings. Perhaps find an alternative to water games. After all, we do live in the desert. The way we have used water for a century cannot continue.

But what the Governor is not asking is for people to omit showers altogether. Why? Because as a collective we value hygiene. We value showing up to work clean. We like the feeling.

Collectively when we work together and do our part change can happen. We saved billions of gallons last year because it was on the mind of many. It’s difficult to see at the moment until something happens that requires us to dramatically change our lifestyle. Like not showering or flushing toilets.

Instead, he is asking to make small changes now to avoid large changes in the future. This isn’t rock science. We all understand this. Yet, we continue to misbehave. It’s easier to appeal to neighbors and water shame those around us but avoid the hard conversation with growers and industry. (Elections matter!)

Ultimately, we will have to address our mindset of water consumption in the desert. The way change is most effective is when we have to dramatically alter how we live or when we see someone we know is affected. In the coming decade, don’t be surprised when more is required because enough of us still haven’t changed the story we tell ourselves of water. We are so used to turning on the tap and having clean water appear. That is indeed one of the greatest solutions to one of the greatest problems humans faced for tens of thousands of years. Let’s not forget. Clean water when it is abundant is not valuable. Humans don’t know how good something is until it is gone.