Category: Uncategorized

Observing the world and creating mental models for how things work is probably one of the oldest human pastimes. One could argue that it is not only a fundamental part of the human experience but a vital part of the process that took humankind from Stone Age to…whatever age we are in today. Our brains are hardwired to take stimulus in through the senses and categorize all of the data coming in. We cannot help but try to make sense of the Universe with every breath, with every heartbeat.

What we know and believe about our Universe is based on observation. Our own observation is important, but the accumulated observations of all of humankind, across all of the ages, are just as important. One of the gifts of humanity is this collective storehouse of information. We don’t have to learn everything for ourselves. We don’t have to observe everything ourselves. There is a certain body of knowledge and understanding that we can tap just by virtue of being a member of the human race. Throughout human history, the volume and accessibility of knowledge, of data and information, has increased to the point that there are few things that require us to actually experience them for ourselves in order to understand them at least a little bit. It’s a double-edged sword, for sure, but it’s a miracle of our modern existence.

And, yet, much of the richness of life comes from firsthand experience. We can take esoteric, conceptual, theoretical knowledge and create our own ideas about what it must be like to experience a wide array of things. Ultimately, though, the Universe gains texture and perspective when we test the models we build in our heads. For example, we know small things make big things. We know that atoms make molecules. Molecules bind together to make…well, everything. The atoms themselves appear to be made of small stuff, and the smaller stuff appears to be made of yet smaller stuff. The big things around us form bigger things, and the bigger things appear to make up yet bigger things. Stuff and things, big and small. And we can observe it all.

Every beat of the heart, every breath drawn into the lungs, represents a small thing that, when strung together with other small things, makes up big things. The small moments of our existence…the loving caress, the tender moments, the connections between people, the heartbreaking tragedies…make up the bigger narrative that is a life. Each seemingly small, insignificant life is woven into a vast, unbreakable tapestry that stretches back to a past we cannot see and forward to a future we cannot fathom. We may be small on our own, but all small things make big things. Together, we are Humanity, capitalized, and we are inextricably, irrevocably, undeniably interconnected.

The atoms in your finger move planets on the other side of the Universe. Your heartbeat fuels the fire in distant stars that no longer exist. To understand our place in this Universe, on this planet, in this moment, we need only embrace the answer to the question of “Why am I here?” The answer is found in small things that make big things.

The question, it turns out, isn’t asked by us. It is asked of us. The answer to the question is ours to build from all the small things at our disposal.

My friend is leaving. My aunt died. More sad stuff will happen in life in the years to come. But it’s all OK because it’s all part of the natural way of things. It hurts, and it aches. It’s the way of things, though. There is no real vacuum. Bubbles do not last forever. You can never go back to what once was. No matter how hard you try, what once was is gone. You are changed, so that old, familiar place isn’t even being experienced by the same individual.

I know this sounds weird, but the ONLY way to get any closure…and with these things I need closure…is to see this all the way through to the gut-punching, heart-wrenching end. I am not going to let this opportunity to feel such deep sadness slip away.

I’ve done it before, let these things slip away. I’ve avoided and masked. I’ve pretended that reality was something other than what it was. I’ve let people…just leave.

It’s awful…never works. I just wind up burning bridges and hurting feelings.

It doesn’t have to take much. Give them a hug and tell them that you’ll never forget them. It’s that simple. That’s good bye between people who care enough about each other to be sad at parting. It’s enough to say good bye to a loved one beyond the reach of life.

It’s funny, but I am having one of the most profound, full-circle moments of my life this week. I believe that most things that haunt us are the spirits of injuries from deep into our childhoods. Through meditation, I’ve figured out that my childhood injury regarding loss and closure was the first death that affected me. When I was a freshman in high school, my grandfather died. Ironically, he was the father of the aunt whose passing I currently mourn. At the time he passed, we lived in Mexico. It was right in the middle of the school year, so my parents had to make the difficult call to travel to the U.S. and leave me and my younger brother at home when they went to the funeral. It must have been such a hard call to make. In the end, I never said good bye, never closed the circle of the relationship. It was the first death that really touched me.

I never got over that pain, that sorrow. I used to lose myself something terrible when I visited his grave. The hurt returned each time.  Except this past April, when I took my wife and kids to visit my grandparents at the cemetery, that intense grief was gone. Instead, I just felt happy to have my family with me, to share a part of our family history with my sons and my wife. I couldn’t figure out what was different. Maybe it just took decades to heal. I didn’t know.

But now I’m realizing that I’ve been reliving that moment of injury my whole life…over and over again…for nearly 30 years. I’ve been looking for a way to get over abrupt loss left wide open, unclosed, by recreating it at every moment of parting, at every moment of loss in my life. I relive the moment…and run. I run away from it. I don’t say good bye. I don’t close the loop. I don’t see friends off when they leave.  I don’t fully mourn family members when they pass.  

At least that what I used to do. It dawned on me that I’ve been doing it all wrong. I have been so, so wrong.

You don’t turn your back on loss. You turn to face it. You close the loop. You grab hold of grief. You say the difficult good bye. You give the hugs. You dry the tears. You do all that, and you put the loss to rest. You do it for both you and, in the case of friends moving on, you do it for them. You do it because you care. You do it because you want peace. You do it because it is right.

You can just give me a fist-bump instead, too, if you like. That’s cool. Just don’t pretend that what’s there isn’t there, that grief and loss will just go away. They do not. You have to release them.

This is the truth I have learned from a circle 30 years in the making.

I remain convinced that learning to navigate transitions is one of the most important skills that we can learn. And it’s one of the most important skills that we can teach.

What good is learning if we use it only for ourselves? What is the value in experimenting and risking and observing the world around us if we are not sharing the continued sum of our many and varied experiences? There isn’t a person on the planet who cannot at once be both student and teacher. I approach every interaction, every relationship that I establish, be it short or long-term, as an opportunity to both teach and learn. Not every one unfolds equitably, but I can guarantee you that a day doesn’t pass during which I either learn or teach. More often than not, we can easily do both!

In transition, we learn things about ourselves and the world in which we operate. For years now, we hear talk about change and how change is constant. I’ve come to the conclusion that this thought process puts the focus on the wrong things.

First, change is not constant. Change is guaranteed. Change is inevitable. Change is a regular part of this healthy, balanced, functional universe in which we live. But change is not constant. Change is an event. It represents a moment in time. It is the marker that represents when something shifted from one state to another. That is change. In most cases, it is nearly instantaneous. It is the thing that happens that sparks the need to adapt ourselves to whatever is new in our lives. Changes will never stop coming. They’ve always occurred. The idea that change is constant is more a reflection of how we feel about change versus the actual rate of change.

Second, change is not, in and of itself, good or bad. Change is neutral. Change simply is. How we react to that change is cause for judgment. Our reaction is the thing to which we hang our emotion-based thinking. Reaction judges whether change is good or bad. It provides the filter and the context by which we evaluate the merits of a moment of change. Good or bad…these things come from our minds, from our judgment. They are not things inherent in the nature of the change itself. The idea that change can be positive or negative comes very much from the mind of the observer.

Finally, change is not the hard part. The hard part is the transition that comes from change. After the change has occurred, after the moment has past, after the catalyst has kicked off the reaction, the impact of the change is felt in the universe. Whether it be large or small, the impact is the part of the equation that elicits the response in the observer and the other elements of the environment that have been affected. For human beings, it is this period after, this period of transition, that causes the emotional response we use to judge whether the change was positive or negative. The idea that change is hard is far less relevant than how we navigate and manage the period of transition.

The gift of change is not the change itself but the transition. From transition, new things are born. From transition, we learn. We may find great challenges or hardships during transition, but, once endured, transitions can often be the source of great things and new opportunities. There are transitions, of course, that lead to heartache, struggle, and even death. I don’t seek to minimize the suffering of others or unexpected and tragic outcomes. However, change is viewed so negatively in our society because there is such fear of transition. This is why I believe developing the skill to navigate and manage transition is so important. It is important for the individual. It is important for good health. It is important to happiness. Once the transition is managed and the lessons learned, it is important to teach and to share so that others might benefit and struggle less.

Do not fear change. Do not fear transition. Instead, fear never learning enough in your own transitions to help yourself and teach others.

This one is simple: everyone wants to be heard.

I have found no exceptions to this rule over the years.  Everyone has a story. Everyone wants to tell their story. Everyone wants their story to be heard. Whether in a crowded room or in the most intimate, quiet moments between two people, we all yearn to use our voice and be heard for who we are and what we have to say.

I could elaborate and try to make a better case.  I just don’t think it’s necessary to do so.  

Everyone wants to be heard.

The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways of the United States of America was authorized in 1956 by then-President Eisenhower.  The system, as originally designed, was declared complete in 1992.  It currently encompasses 47,856 miles of paved highway.  It is second in the world only to China’s network.

Interstate 80 (I-80) is a transcontinental portion of the Eisenhower Interstate System.  It run from downtown San Francisco, CA, on the West Coast of the United States to Teaneck, NJ, in the New York City Metro Area.  I-80 encompasses 2,899 miles, making it the second longest highway in the system following I-90 (3,020 miles).  I-80 rolls through 11 states: California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.  Over the course of the past nine years, I have driven every mile of it.  

Of course, the drive itself didn’t take me nine years.  I-80 reduced what was a two-month journey at the beginning of the 1900’s to a reasonable 5-day journey, coast to coast, if driven straight through.  My journey on I-80 began nine years ago when I first drove from Illinois to California.  To be more precise, it started in the San Francisco Bay Area on the return journey home to Illinois.  I covered most of I-80 from San Francisco to the Chicago area, skipping a section as I diverted to Denver.  Several years later, as I drove to California again, I covered that section of I-80.  By about 2010, I’d covered every mile from Chicago to California, as well as every mile from Chicago east to the intersection of I-80 and State Highway 8 just north of Akron, OH.  Over the course of the next several years, I slid back and forth from Chicago to the East Coast States of the US along 80 countless times, always inching closer, but never quite reaching, Teaneck, NJ.  It would take 5 more years until I would reach the eastern terminus of I-80, connecting to I-95 north and the George Washington Bridge into New York City. 

Every one of the 2,899 miles that make up I-80, from California to New Jersey, passed beneath me, my hands on the wheels of about four or five different vehicles.  I have seen America, up close, from one coast to the other.  I’ve watched the urban jungle of New York City sublime into the suburbs of New Jersey.  I’ve watched those suburbs turn into the Smoky Mountains of Pennsylvania.  The woods mountains turned into rolling hills that made way to the field of the Midwest.  For hundreds of miles, I followed those fields as they again turned to hills and grasslands, the grasslands making way to desert and a Great Salt Lake.  The desert hills turned into mountains, and those mountains kept growing into the Great Rocky Mountains.  I drove over those mountains, through the legendary Donner Pass, then down into the valleys and flatlands of California, onward until the Great Road disappears somewhere along the western end of the Bay Area Bridge and into the very city of San Francisco.  I’ve seen it all, driven it all.  Every last mile.

Our planet is small.  We forget this.  We are tiny in comparison, so it seems so huge at times.  But if a man like me, without even trying, can traverse the entirety of a continent within their lifetime, then the smallness of this rocky orb should be evident.  I could jump on an airplane right now, on Monday, head out to Seattle, WA, and begin the trek across I-90, the longest US highway, tomorrow.  I’d be in Boston, MA, by the end of the weekend.  I’d see some pretty amazing things along the way, too.  3020 miles, the total length of I-90, is 12% of the total circumference of the Earth herself.  The planet is small, my friend.  Very small.  Just 24,901 miles around.  I’ve owned cars long enough to be nearly 300,000 miles.  That’s 12 laps around the planet.  Again, not very big.

I feel humbled, honored, and very, very grateful as I sit here and contemplate my journey across my America along Interstate 80.  I do not take her for granted.  I do not take the liberty and freedom I enjoy, the very things that make such a journey possible, for granted, either.  I am fortunate, beyond words and beyond measure.  It has been a great trip, and now it is over.  2899 miles is a long way to travel.  I think I will rest now.

For tomorrow, the next journey begins…

This is a realization that I had the other day: when you commit to not “giving them your best” you are, in fact, giving them the best you have to offer.

If you keep “your best” to yourself, then you are living, consciously, a life of unrealized potential.  That is one of the saddest, most wasteful things that you can do to yourself.  You are robbing the world of you.  You are robbing us of your greatest impact just to spite a handful of others who probably don’t really even care.  If you feel the need to rob them, then they certainly don’t matter to your best outcomes, do they?  The haters will smirk, content that they boxed you in and defeated you.  The people who do care, those who you don’t even know yet and who could potentially benefit most from what you have to offer, are the ones you actually wind up robbing.  They are the ones who you wind up hurting.  You’re giving them the best of the worst you.

Pretty selfish, huh?  Even if you don’t care enough about yourself to honor the best “you” that you can be, perhaps some compassion and caring for others might spur you on to action.

Posted this elsewhere last month but thought it worth bringing home to this blog:

If you hesitate, if you blink too long, postpone too much, you become the person you swore you’d never be.

Remember that dinosaur you met when you first started working? The one who always told you stories of how it used to be? The one who longed for the return to “the good ol’ days”? The one who took really long breaks, opposed every new idea, and, frankly, often seemed a little scared of tomorrow? Blink too long, and you’ll be staring at that person in the mirror. Not because they are standing behind you like in a horror movie but because you’ve become that person. That’s now you…and that’s a different kind of horror movie.

Dinosaurs end up as fossils or fossil fuel. Or they never leave a trace at all. Don’t become a dinosaur. Age, by the way, has nothing to do with it. Believe it or not, age changes. Trust me.

Decide your own fate.

Passion.  Another loaded word.  I believe that part of the reluctance people tend to have about listen to others go on about their passion is that we feel like we’ve heard these inspiring reels before but without a lot of result.  As my friend the Buddhist monk used to say, “I hear a lot of noise coming from the kitchen…pots and pans and all that…but I don’t smell any cooking.”

Let’s be honest: we’ve all experienced both sides.  On the one hand, we’ve rolled our eyes (perhaps subtly or internally) when listening to someone talking about their passion.  On the other hand, we’ve been fired up and passionate about something to the point that we need to tell everyone we know about it…and then sorta faded back into the comfy impression we’ve made on the Couch of Life.

The thing about the idea of being passionate about something, about being totally jazzed and fired up, is that it sparks the tiniest little fire inside of us that, in turn, wells up into that horrible 4-letter word that gets us all in trouble:

HOPE.

Acknowledging passion inspires hope.  It’s the hope of the ignorant and optimistic and idealistic and inexperienced.  Then some bad things happen in life, hopes begins to falter, and…we’re back on the couch.  This vicious, demoralizing cycle happens over and over again as we navigate our existence, and our hearts are broken more times than we can count.

Then it happens again.  HOPE.

Sustainable passion requires hope that will not go away.  As my friend Jeff recounted during a recent conversation we had (that we recorded for your listening pleasure), passion is “what we’re made for.”  Not his words, mind you, but the words of an 11-year-old.  Passion is hope, and hope is flammable.  That’s what gets us in trouble.  The fire of hope can get so out of control that we get burned in the process.  That risk is enough to assume that seat on the couch again.

My remedy: don’t call it passion.  Call it something else if doing so moves you to action.  Otherwise, stick with passion.  It’s not a bad word.  The important thing is to feel the burn deep inside.  EVERYONE needs fire inside to get the engine running.  Internal combustion.  Another sound concept.  Some of us need more fire than others, but we all need it.  We all find ways to get it.  When we get enough, it inspires us.  It forces us to move, to take action.  Heaven forbid we get the intended results.  Then momentum kicks in.  It can all get pretty scary pretty quick.  Before the scare moves in, though, we get that sublime feeling of awesomeness.

That, my friend, is passion.

The art of applied passion is something I like to call Boomcraft.

In Trueness, all great things are found. They are great because they are the thing that move us to do more, to be more, to aspire to more than we did the day before.

When people connect to their Trueness, what they do with their time cannot help but have profound and connected meaning.

What the heck is Trueness? Funny you should ask. My friend Jeff and I talk about it over at his site, JeffBrunson.com. Come on over and have a listen.