Author: Ricardo

It’s funny how life provides you with lessons. Lessons and opportunities to practice what you preach.

Yesterday, I pondered attribution and anger and the choice of how to react to something. Today, I have the opportunity to choose my reaction. How should I react to someone violating my home and taking for themselves what does not belong to them? Well, I guess it belongs to them now, doesn’t it? Yes. It does. So, that in and of itself is a lesson on possession. I am humbled at the reminder.

Then there is the matter of what one human being must be going through in order to take from another without asking. What stories does one tell oneself in order to justify such behavior? I feel sadness contemplating such a thing. And I feel a swelling in my heart that is nothing but compassion for that person. Now, at least. Earlier…not so much.

And that brings me to choice again. I choose how to react to this situation. I can choose to allow this to poison my heart against a fellow human being who experiences the same range of emotions I do, who feels hunger and cold and fatigue like I do, who mostly likely simply wants live their life…like I do. Or, I can take it all into account and choose to let my attribution of her action go. I can choose to accept this as not one but many lessons that the Universe has provided to me and allow myself to learn from it, to hear the message that is being broadcast to me.

What was taken never belonged to you. Possession and ownership are just illusions. Compassion for those who suffer is paramount.

I am grateful for the reminders and for the opportunity to choose how to react to the moments in my life that may not always be precisely as I would like them to be.

Sometimes up, sometimes down. It’s funny how things can change at the drop of the proverbial hat. Not sure where that saying comes from, but it sounds goofy that anything could change at the literal drop of a hat. Hats not withstanding, things can change quickly. It never ceases to astonish me how one moment can be the polar opposite of the next. One moment up, the next moment down.

Of course, it works the other way, too: one moment down, the next moment up. It’s equally as fascinating and seems equally arbitrary. But it’s not really arbitrary at all. In fact, every moment is deliberate. Or, better said, our reaction to every moment is deliberate. Think about that for a moment.

I remember reading about an experiment when I was pursuing my undergraduate degree. This particular experiment had to do with attribution theory, specifically, misattribution of arousal. Sounds dirty, I know. The experiment went like this: a group of people assess the attractiveness of individuals in a set of photos. They then go on a long, seemingly dangerous hike. At the end, they assess the attractiveness of the photos again. Guess what happened? They assessed the attractiveness of the people in the photos more highly after the trek. Why? Because the adrenaline rush from the hike caused them to misattribute the source of their arousal. It wasn’t that the people were any better looking. It was simply that their excited state caused them to experience their surroundings differently.

Anger works the same way. Anger causes misattribution issues, too. Unfortunately, it’s normally not arousal. The key is that a decisions is made, conscious or otherwise, to feel a certain way as a result of a moment of anger. Keep it going or be the “hero” and find a way to behave your way into another state of mind? That’s a great question. It’s just hard maintaining that level of lucidity in the moments that usually require it the most.

Sometimes up, sometimes down, always a choice.

The best thing about cliches is that they immediately evoke a response. They have a history that is, for the most part, instantly recognizable by most people, so cliches are useful. For example, “what makes you tick?” That’s a good one. It has literal connotations…like the ticking of a clock, a sure sign that the timepiece is functioning. Figuratively, it means the same thing, except that timepiece is you. What makes you function? What makes you tick?

There’s value in understanding the answer to that question. If you understand what truly gives you energy, what truly makes you feel alive, then you have something upon which to focus. It gives you a plan for how to fill your days. Why not fill you days with activities that give you life? At some point in our lives, we were lead to believe that life isn’t filled with such activities. Life-giving, energy-producing activities are the exception, not the norm. They are the things that happen to us on vacation or on the weekends. They are the things that we have to look forward to “tomorrow.” If we’re lucky, we get a taste, just enough energy to keep up moving along in what would otherwise be one big energy-suck-fest of a life.

OK, so maybe it’s not that bad, but the truth is that there are forces at work all around us that could otherwise lead us to believe that an unconscious life is what is in store for all of us. That seems a terrible message to teach my children. I would much rather they say me as a person who had life-giving, energy-filled days. To model that behavior, though, I have to actually live that way. Kinda hard if I don’t know what makes me tick.

So, that’s the quest: to understand what makes me tick and do my damnedest to fill my days with whatever that is. I’m not just talking about the smiles of my children or the companionship of my wife. I am talking about the things that come from deep within me that sing to my soul and make me, the individual, feel alive. They are activities and behaviors that are uniquely mine. If I can identify them, then I can take steps to make them a bigger part of my days.

Figure out what makes me tick, then tick away all day long. That sounds like a good idea to me.

I wouldn’t exactly recommend “7 Pounds,” Will Smith’s current feature film. I wouldn’t exactly recommend “The Bucket List” with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, either. For different reasons, they aren’t films that I would list among my favorites. That said, I watched both within the past few days, and each offered something that made me think.

The whole premise of “The Bucket List” is this: two terminally ill strangers decide to embark on a journey to cross off as many items as possible from a “bucket list,” a list of things each would like to accomplish before they die. The concept got me thinking, as was obviously the intent of the film: why wait until death approaches before creating your own bucket list? My oldest son has such a list in his head. It’s the list of things he wants to do and places he’d like to go. I think we all create those lists as kids. We just tuck them away in a corner of our spiritual attics as we get older. Time to dust mine off.

In “7 Pounds,” Will Smith plays a character who is obviously haunted by something that happened in his past, and, as the film unfolds, he plays “guardian angel” to complete strangers. One of those is a character played by Rosario Dawson. During a conversation, she asks him to play a game with her. She calls it “What if…?” The intent was for the two characters to share wild, far-fetched dreams with one another. This scene, too, got me thinking” why not play that game with myself, with my wife, with my children? Why not find out their dreams and share mine? When we share our innermost thoughts and feelings with others, there is a certain accountability that comes from that reveal. When we speak the dream, we own it. It immediately shifts from fantasy to possibility…even though it was a possibility all along. Time to own some of my dreams.

So, I offer up a game for consideration: The What-If Bucket List Game. The purpose of this game is to create a list of dreams that you want to see come true. Share the list. Reveal those dreams. Own them. Be outrageous. Be creative. Dare yourself to be precisely the person you dream that you can be. Along the way, someone might take notice and have the courage to play the game themselves. What if…?

There is nothing but potential today. There are 364 glorious days ahead of us in 2009, and each is simply brimming with the promise of so many wonderful possibilities. There is nothing but hope.

This lasts for a time. Everything feels new and fresh. We stick to our promises, keep our goals in sight, and remember what motivated us to make this year the best year yet.

Then, the grind begins. What we label “reality” sets in. We forget about ourselves and the things we told ourselves we would do just for us. This year was going to be different. But it turns out not to be so different.

It doesn’t have to play out like that. This year really CAN be different. The difference starts in recognizing that today isn’t any different than yesterday. Sure, the label has changed: 2008 has become 2009. That label, though, is meaningless. It is arbitrary. It does nothing for us. The Earth is not affected by it. Our circadian rhythms aren’t affected by it. The label is wholly a construct of the human mind, put in place simply to allow us to go about the business of neatly categorizing the Universe around us. That’s what we do. We categorize to help us feel grounded in the Universe. So, like I said, today is no different than yesterday.

If that’s the case, then it stands to reason that the optimism that we feel today should be with us again tomorrow. Tomorrow and the day after that. And the day after that. And the day after that. Each day. Every day for the rest of our lives. So what if the label has changed? Who cares that it’s 2009? What matters is the realization that is it TODAY and that TODAY is all we have in this moment. Yesterday already came and went. Tomorrow is not guaranteed. What exists is today, right here, right now. Everything that I think will be better tomorrow, everything I think I will do better tomorrow, can happen today. It should happen today. It can ONLY happen today.

Hope can only live in the moment. You cannot promise yourself that you will have hope tomorrow. That is utterly ridiculous. True hope…hope for peace and love and compassion…can only be created by you right now. In this moment, we create reality. Tomorrow…well, that’s another construct of the human mind. Focus on today. Focus on the moment. Focus on hope and peace and love and whatever else it is that you feel the world needs from you.

There is nothing but potential in this moment. Feel it. Tap it. Release it. Here’s to hoping that I can sustain this clarity as time goes on. Here’s to hoping that you can, too.

What is the price of freedom? We hear about and read about all kinds of nasty stuff that goes on in this world and how there’s a price for freedom. So, what exactly is that price? Who pays it? Is there a monetary cost? A human cost? What? I want to know how that whole concept works.

I think the price for freedom is…nothing. It’s free. Freedom is free. Isn’t that the essence of freedom? To be free of something? How about free of cost? If we pay any price it’s for the opposite of freedom…whatever that one word might be. The opposite of freedom can be described in many ways. We pay for slavery; always have, always will. In the United States of America, we still pay the cost of slavery. We also pay for imprisonment, don’t we? We pay for racisim and other forms of discrimination. We pay for indifference to those around us in need of compassion, of kindness, of simple attention. All of humanity pays these costs. We also pay for oppression and repression. We pay for the pursuit of material wealth and intellectual superiority. We pay for all of these things because all of these things have a definite financial cost that you can directly tie back to them. Yes, they do. None of them are free.

Only freedom is free.

Freedom works at the micro and macro levels. There is the freedom of humanity as a whole, a freedom that so many fight for. That freedom is physical, though, and it is nearly meaningless without the freedom that is created at the individual level. A few years ago, the Dalai Lama was in Chicago, and I was blessed with the opportunity to hear him and see him speak. Among the many precious, priceless jewels he shared with us was the story of a fellow Buddhist monk who had recently been released from Chinese imprisonment. The Dalai Lama asked the monk if he had known fear. “Yes,” replied the old monk. “As the years passed, I feared losing my compassion for my captors.” That was his fear: losing compassion for the people who kept him imprisoned for over 20 years of his life.

If that is not freedom, then I do not know what is.

I do not diminish the sacrifices others make so that I can sit here and write this. I do not mean to diminish the suffering of those who have been imprisoned, who have been tortured, who have been brutalized in ways we cannot even begin to imagine. There are as many stories of sacrifice as there are stars in the sky. These stories are told the world over and have been told for centuries. I honor those who put themselves in harm’s way to liberate others. I know and love many who have either served in the military in the past or are serving, at this moment, in far away lands. Their sacrifices, though, are not for the freedom that eludes so many of us. Spiritual freedom cannot be granted to you by another. It must be discovered by each of us individually.

In the end, I seek only to find true, spiritual freedom for myself and, if so honored, to help others find a foothold on their own path to freedom. I wish this for my family, for my friends, and for any human being who walks this Earth. We all desire security and the right to pursue our own futures. We also all seek to belong, to grow, to feel the interconnectedness at work in the Universe.

This is the essence of true, spiritual freedom.

Time to get started…

Sometimes it’s hard for me to get straight to the point, so if you want to get to the meat and potatoes, here it is: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008642.html. It’s a speech by Charles Stross about the social implication of Moore’s Law and the impact of networking on the future of humankind. It’s pretty long. If you’re not the patient type, about 1/3 of the way down, look for “Putting it all together.” That’s where he takes his discourse places that will twist your brain…and should get you thinking about the life insurance and the technology implications for a company that sells life insurance. If you have a few minutes…

Charles Stross is a Science Fiction writer. I don’t know much about him. Sadly, I cannot say that I was familiar with the man until now. I used to be a Sci-Fi fiend, devouring books at a gluttonous pace. Then, I got a “real” job, had kids…that kind of thing. These days, I read more about Winnie the Pooh’s take on the principles of Taoism and how to build a better me with the help of Marcus Buckingham. Still, I occasionally sneak off to some secluded corner to indulge myself in some Sci-Fi book. Why? Because I enjoy them and because I find that they are relevant to life.

I have always loved technology and the implications of technology on human culture. Why? Because I am a big, huge geek. A nerd. A dork. Always have been, always will be. I am a nerd who has an undergraduate degree in anthropology. Yes, a BA in anthropology. There, I said it. I’m out. Tell everyone you know. They won’t care. So, now that YOU know, I will unleash the geek.

There’s more to my fascination with Sci-Fi than robots, space travel, and alien worlds. There’s the tech. Technology, by it’s anthropological definition, is the suite of tools humans use to survive. Modern technology, things that run on batteries and have chips and processors, is no different: stuff to help us survive. And technology is one of the key components of culture. So, as a culture experiences changes in technology, the very culture itself transforms. That’s where Charlie’s speech comes in. It’s about the social implications of Moore’s law.

It’s a fascinating speech. He meanders and gets nerdy-technical at times, but it’s awesome. Awesome. Worth the read, if I do say so myself. I’m warning you: it’s long. However, he paints a picture that’s compelling. And it has implications for IS, specifically, IDP: can we anticipate how changes in technology will impact the business of insurance, and, in turn, how those changes in our business will impact the technology we will need to offer?

It’s a circular, Moebius strip of a question, but searching for those implications will make all the difference in the world.