Have you noticed how people tend to describe themselves as either “a creative person,” or “not a creative person?” The ones who believe they’re creative tend to be people whose reason for being is to create art, music, writing, or some tangible creative product. Those of us who have no specific output of creative “product” are more likely to assume we’re not creative. Both groups can easily overlook this simple truth: everything you or I ever do is an act of creation. Every breath, every thought, every sentence, every chore, every meal made, every conversation, every act of kindness, every mistake, or to sum it up, everything. Right up to the instant before

A Brilliant Adaptation The other day I was reading an interesting article in the New York Times about the British adventurer/explorer Alastair Humphries. In it, he spoke about how his highly ambitious globetrotting habits had been reined in, first by the needs of his young family, and then by the pandemic. Rather than give up exploring, he made a brilliant adaptation. He decided to explore places he’d never been that were within a mile of his home. I loved the way he put it: “I decided to treat everything as interesting.” When I read that line, I thought my head might explode. The sheer brilliance of it was like an

Seeing Beyond Your Personal Story We all have stories about ourselves, and many of us have one particular story that seems to explain to us who we are, and how we got to be that way. Stories are the way humans make sense of life, so it follows that we would create stories about our own journeys through life. Let’s focus on the story you have about yourself that feels most true to you; the one that attempts to explain who you are, and how you came to be that way. It’s likely that this particular story feels so completely true to you, you may not even consider it a

Trying to Know the Unknowable, Trying to Control the Uncontrollable I’ve come to realize that when I try to know what’s essentially unknowable, I’ll get myself tied in knots, with absolutely no benefit, and nothing useful learned. The same is true when I try to control what is essentially uncontrollable. It gets me nowhere and tends to leave a mess of some sort in my wake. I know I’m not the only person who tries to do these things. It’s tempting for humans to believe that with just a little more thinking, they’ll crack some code and manage to know the unknowable. The same is true with controlling the uncontrollable.

Who Do You See When You Look at Yourself? When you look at a reflection of yourself in a mirror or watch a video of yourself, who do you see? Who’s looking back at you? After working as a presentation coach for many years, it became clear to me that when I sat with my clients and watched video recordings of presentations they had given, it was like we were watching two different videos. What I looked for was how much-uncensored aliveness appeared in their eyes and on their faces. What they saw was something completely different. Almost to a person, what they saw was who they thought they weren’t.

Next time you feel self-conscious, you might want to reflect on this: just who is this self I seem to be conscious of? We live in a world of appearances, and when we believe what appears to be real, is real, we tend to get ourselves in trouble. Self-consciousness is the perfect example of an appearance we mistake for something real. In truth, self-consciousness is an illusion within a misconception.  As a reminder, an illusion is real; it’s just not what it appears to be. This particular illusion suggests that the self is actually a person. But what we think of as “myself” is simply a collection of our ideas, thoughts, memories, and

Life Knows What You Need All through this morning, I seemed to be having a difficult time getting to the work I had committed to doing. Other, seemingly unrelated ideas kept presenting themselves. I’ve learned to listen to that signal and obey the impulse to capture a thought when it first comes to me. They all had a particular tone I’ve come to recognize, and that tone can be best characterized by the feeling, “I’d better write that down. There’s something there I can use.” I’ve learned to listen to that signal and obey the impulse to capture a thought when it first comes to me. I started to berate

How Much Alike Are We? For most of my life, when I encountered someone, the first thing I noticed was how different they seemed from me. By doing that, I instantly made them into an “other.” This focus on how they differed from me made it impossible for me to see the being that person and I shared. We’re all part of one infinite being. it; we’re all localizations of that one consciousness. When we lose sight of that simple truth, we’re losing sight of both the divine nature of the person we have “other-ized” as well as our own divine nature. When you’ve lost sight of the divine nature

Everywhere you look, you’ll find people who are angry.
This isn’t the kind of anger that comes and goes, the kind that’s always been around.