Author: Ricardo

Today, my son asked me why I’m never happy.

Uh-oh.

I asked him to elaborate. Specifically, he wanted to know why I don’t smile more. “If you don’t smile, then you aren’t happy.”

Of course, the instinct is to explain how his interpretation may not necessarily be my reality. He has to learn that not everyone expresses themselves the same way, that some people are more forthcoming with their emotions than others. I had the urge to validate my behavior: I’m tired a lot…I drive 100 miles to and from work each day…my story is sad…so on.

Isn’t that the way, though? Our ego kicks in, and we seek to justify our behavior before we truly listen? I resisted that urge, and I listened to my son. We talked. He told me how I can make him feel when I don’t look or sound or act happy. In fact, he went on, I sometimes seem precisely the opposite: UNhappy. So, it’s not just the absence of a smile but the presence of a scowl or a frown.

Wow. Did I feel like shit.

And then that urge resurfaced; the urge to explain to him why, to justify. But…why defend what I know is indefensible? After all, he is, in general terms, right. If you don’t smile, you aren’t happy. And I am his father. He doesn’t want excuses from me. He wants to look at me and know that I love him, that I love our family. I do. So, he should feel that. Let “The World” teach him other lessons when he is older. Right now, he is a child. His innocence is precious. It is a Gift. It is worth protecting. More than that, HIS happiness is worth nurturing.

The key here is to not bullshit the kid, though. He’ll see through it. In fact, it’s obvious that he sees through my facades today. Observant, empathetic little bugger. So, that means the key is really to let him see the happiness that I do have inside. Time to walk the talk and stop doing such a half-assed job of it.

In the end, it’s about not obscuring what is inside with cognitive noise. My wife, who is always looking for ways to inspire me, found a great Eckhart Tolle quote for me:

“Unless you know the basic mechanics behind the workings of the ego, you won’t recognize it, and it will trick you into identifying with it again and again. This means it takes you over, an imposter pretending to be you.”

The point is that we generate a lot of cognitive noise that can keep us from letting who we really are from coming to the surface. We use that noise to hide who we are, who we are striving to be. That’s a sad and tragic thing.

I got that quote this week; my son was courageous enough to talk to me today. No coincidence in that.

The message is clear: be more of who you are.

Let the inside out.

Pundits and spin-doctors be damned. Today is a Historic day in the history of the United States of America. If you couldn’t feel it, then I don’t know what to say to you.

If you felt it, then you know what I am talking about.

Regardless, from this point forward, if you love America or, at minimum, have a vested interest in her continued survival as a nation, you should be praying/wishing/hoping for nothing but success for this new President. To wish for anything other than wisdom, compassion, and strength for the man means simply that you are not a friend to America. And that’s OK. It’s your prerogative.

But if you are a friend to America, if you love Her and everything She stands for, then your thoughts and prayers should be with President Barak Obama for the months and years to come. You don’t have to agree with everything he believes in. You don’t have to like all of his decisions. I may sound like an Obama zealot, but I am not. What I am is someone who does not want to see this country crumble. I am someone who wishes for peace, love, and compassion in this world. I may hold a different opinion than the President regarding certain matters, but I wish him nothing but success guiding this nation for the next four years.

As I recently told a friend at work, success is not about luck but about effort, effort and heart. LOTS of heart.

Good fortune to you, Mr. President. My future, the future of my children, and the futures of countless souls across this planet who now believe that…yes, they can…depends on your success.

A very dear friend of mine used to be a Buddhist monk. He has a family now and has worked at more than one Fortune 100 company. Seriously. He’s a former Buddhist monk who manages IT at a Fortune 100 company.

We have this regular debate that goes something like this:

“See that guy who just fell down? That was his Destiny.”
“Or,” I retort, “he just made a bad choice walking on the icy sidewalk.”
“There is only Fate and Destiny.”
“We co-create our existence through the choices we make.”

Details might change, but the conversation is pretty much the same each time. It’s boring to the outside observer, I am sure. For every zinger he shoots my way, I’ve got a one-liner to fling back. He is a pretty good debater, but I am, too. So, neither of us gives. We’re not stubborn. We simply have an opinion, and the rationale of the other, while sound, is fundamentally unconvincing.

Why does this disagreement matter? In the end, it doesn’t. Some day, we’ll both be dead, and the argument will mean nothing to us. Another duo somewhere will undoubtedly have taken up the thread. In my life, what does matter is how I respond to the Universe. Therein lies the real choice that I think matters most. Some people swear by “The Secret” and the “Law of Attraction.” I don’t know how far I would take it, personally, but I believe that I have the power and the ability to, at minimum, heavily influence my future by the choices I make today. From what I wear to how I save for retirement to how I treat the driver of the car trying to merge into traffic in front of me, I believe that my choices shape my tomorrows.

Belief in choice works for me. I believe, given a chance, it can work for anyone. I am not saying that I have all the answers or that I can choose my way into millions of dollars at the drop of a hat. What I am saying is that I fundamentally believe in my ability to mold my future. If I fail to do so, it is precisely because I fail to do so. I fail to do so. I. I fail. By the choices I make. Even if I sabotage my own happiness, for example, I do it to myself. I meditate on this idea often, almost daily.

I offer this for consideration: what is the harm in opening yourself up to the belief that you can, at minimum, influence the shape of your future. Choose a new attitude. Choose to give others the benefit of the doubt. Choose to believe in yourself. Choose to believe that you deserve to be loved. Choose to give of yourself in a way that does not require you to expect anything in return. Choose to make a change that will alter the path you have taken. All these things around us that we fear disrupting will become disrupted at a moment’s notice, whether we choose or not. My friend the Buddhist Monk would say that Fate chose the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Whether he’s right or wrong, the end result was the same. To me, that’s some heavy stuff. Think about it for a while.

It’s easy to sit here and wax philosophical. It isn’t so easy to apply fanciful philosophy to your actual existence. Try it out; take a baby step. Choose one thing to change and believe in that choice. Have Faith.

Fate or choice: in the end, what difference does it make?

I took my son to a judged piano test. He wasn’t nervous at all. He went in, played his songs, did what he needed to, and walked out. No sweat.

Afterwards, we went to Wal-Mart. We my wife when we were there to see if she needed anything. I stopped in for a new bulb for one of my car’s headlamps. Yeah, she needed a few things. We spent $55 on groceries. In the end, they didn’t have the bulb I needed.

I ate lunch with my sons at around noon.

I cleaned the house.

A new babysitter came over, so my wife and I went on a date. We saw “Defiance” at the movie theater. When the movie was over, we drove to Barnes and Noble to get a book. I bought my wife a peppermint tea and myself a coffee and an asiago pretzel at the Starbucks in the store. We sat down and talked for a little bit. When we got home, the babysitter was waiting for us. My wife drove her home. I played on the Wii. When she got back, we started watching SNL. I told her I had to go write something for my journal before the day ended. That’s what I am doing now.

Some days are filled with things to do. You do them, and you enjoy sharing time with the people you love. Today was one of those days. I had a good day, a simple day, a pleasurable day.

Somedays are made for simple pleasures.

When I was seven years old, my family moved to Mexico City. I was a tall and lanky kid. I wasn’t fond of brushing my hair, so I sported an afro of sorts. I wore glasses that were two sizes too big for my head. My head was two sizes too big for my body. The rims of the glasses were dark black. The lenses were like the bottoms of Coke bottles. Just not green. Did I mention tall? Yeah, I was about two sizes too big, period.

I used to ride the bus to school with my older brother. He’s five years older than me, so, naturally, he took to protecting me. He did a wonderful job of sticking up for his little brother. Looking the way I did, there was a lot of sticking to be done. He got really good at it. There was one kid in particular who decided he wanted to help the new kids, so he made it his mission, for several years, to help my brother become a better stick-up-for-his-Frankenstein-looking-little-brother kinda guy. I grew to hate that kid. He was older than me, older than my brother, and he insisted on…well…just being a pain in the ass. A mean, son-of-a-bitch, pain in the ass. I hated that kid.

When I was about 14, I was riding in the car with my father one day when we came upon some sort of disturbance in the road. We were coming down a hill towards a particularly dangerous “glorieta” (a circular median or roundabout). There were cars stopped there. Underneath one of those cars, there was a bicycle. On the ground, in the street, just to the right of the bike, there was a person. He was hurt. Badly. He jumped to his feet. As my father drove the car around the circular median, I saw the person who had jumped up from the street. He was limping badly yet hoping with pain. I can’t explain what that looked like. All I know is that I could FEEL that kid’s pain. Really FEEL it. Did I say kid? Yeah, it was a kid. At one point, my father’s car was directly across the median from this kid, and the kid looked into our car. His eyes were like dinner plates, and there was such intense fear in them. Thinking about it now tightens my stomach. There was blood running down his face from some gash hidden by his hair. There was blood on his shirt, his arms, one leg. I think he had shorts on. When he looked in the car, I looked at his eyes, at the fear, then I looked at his face. It was that kid from the bus, the one I hated.

The exchange between us lasted maybe a second or two. My dad’s car cruised passed the scene. My dad said something. Maybe it was a “bendito” for the poor kid who’d gotten into that terrible accident. I can’t be sure what he said because my stomach was a knot, and my heart sank deep inside my chest. There was a part of me that wanted to tell my dad to stop the car, to turn around, to back up…to do something. Because when he looked in the car, he recognized me, too. I know he saw me. I think he did. I mean, he did, but I think he saw ME, saw me and knew who I was.

But I said nothing. It made me sick. It makes me sick.

When I got home, I think I went to my room and cried. Maybe I didn’t. I can’t really remember for sure. It’s been a long time. All I know is that I thought about that kid that I hated. I thought about him and how much of a wretched human being I thought he was. I thought about how miserable he had made me. I thought about all the times I wished I could beat the crap out of him. I thought about how much I hated him.

Except I didn’t hate him anymore.

That moment is burned in my mind. I see his face right now. I can see the accident, the glorieta. I could take you there now. More than anything, at that moment, my childish, selfish, unenlightened need to hate that kid disappeared. He went from being some monster in my head to a human being.

Just. Like. Me.

That moment change my life forever. It was the moment that I came to a simple yet profound realization:

We are all just people; people with the same range of emotions, of feelings.

We all feel pain. We all feel fear. We all suffer. We all feel relief. We all feel joy. We all…feel.

That was the last time I hated someone.

Be bold and be brave. Crawl out of your cave. You built it to shelter you from yourself, anyway. Dare to be seen in the light. Nobody will see you until you stand up to be seen.

Turn your head to the sky. Don’t turn a blind eye to the endless sky above you. Prepare yourself now to give flight. The time to travel to another place is now.

Power comes from within. You will never find it outside of you. You may rely on others to help you along your path, but the energy to move your muscles comes from some unseen place past your flesh and deep inside of you being. Call it what you will, but it is simply the Source of it all.

Shake it off…shake off the fear, the trepidation, the uncertainty. Most importantly, shed off whatever it is that makes you fall back to the comfortable, unproductive rhythm that got you into that cave to begin with.

Be bold and be brave.

Do something different.

When I was in elementary school, my father caught me breaking up with a girl on behalf of her boyfriend, one of my best friends. I was dumping by proxy. He told me something I never forgot: “Don’t do anyone’s dirty work for them; make them soil their own hands. And let THEM live with what happens next.” He waited a moment, and, more gently said, “Son, sometimes what you say is just as important as HOW you say it.” Superficially, I didn’t quite understand what he meant, but there was a much deeper part of me that hung tight to that nugget of wisdom.

At the age of 36, I completely get what my father wanted me to understand. He wanted me to understand that we must own our thoughts, own our expression of those thoughts, and own the consequences. I think that latter part is the most compelling: own the consequences of your words and your actions. Be accountable…no, TAKE accountability. Actively take accountability for what you say and what you do. And take accountability for how you deliver your message. In the end, that will most often be what stays with others.

So, for me there is only one answer. I do not believe that the circumstances matter. I do not believe that emotions matter. I do not believe that the story I craft to justify my very bad behavior matters. These are all matters of the ego, not of the soul. I believe that when I speak, I should be giving voice to what is in my soul. And in my soul there is nothing but oneness with the Universe. To me, the message should always come from that place, and there is only one way to get that message across:

Say It with Love.

The other day I posted a comment about not living up to my potential. This comment elicited a response from my parents. They said that none of us really live up to our full potential. That reply to my post struck me. Perhaps it’s true. We all fall short of fully becoming the most supreme “us” that we can be. That shouldn’t be surprising. It makes sense, really. I can’t believe I hadn’t perceived it this way before.

Years ago, a wise person I knew told me, “As you get older, your have to become more mentally healthy. Life only gets trickier, so what you do to get by today probably won’t cut it tomorrow. You have to get better at it.” Most people you meet only grow at a rate that allows them to keep pace with the increasing complexity of their lives. It takes deep, personal growth and the cultivation of an increasingly healthy mental and emotional state to actually make progress in life. Without energy focused on personal growth, we are bound to be overwhelmed by the tidal wave of mounting pressures that face us as adulthood and responsibility expand. All it takes to ride that wave to shore, however, is one thing: focus. Focus, my friends. Focus.

And what does focus look like? Well, that depends. Focus is a very personal thing. It will and should be something that speaks to us all individual. It’s a personal revelation about where we need our energy to be channeled. It is “strength” the way someone like Marcus Buckingham describes it: that which gives you power, energy, to exist throughout the day. For instance, focus can mean a commitment to self-reflection, to self-analysis. It can mean a commitment to taking the fruits of that meditation and putting it into words, for the benefit of that individual and the benefit of those who may read those words. Kind of like someone would do with a journal or a blog. For example.

Focus can bring us one step closer to enlightenment. If the goal is something less lofty, then focus can at least lead to progress. And progress is a satisfying thing. If my friend was right, then progress means getting better at dealing with Life, with a capital. With progress, then, we can expect a greater degree of mental and spiritual health. As we get healthier, our ability to positively influence the world should increase. So, the bar continually gets raised.

It is true that none of us live up to our true potential because our true potential will grow as we grow. It should be a moving target. Our aspirations, by definition, will always exceed our abilities. And that is as it should be. From the day we are born until the day we die, every one of us will have that to wake up to.

Potential.