Do we have to stay consistently informed about everything? Do we have to focus on every little minute detail about the clashing of society’s impractical cognitive dissonance? We have seemed to have lost not thinking about anything and just sitting in stillness.
Our eyes don’t always have to be glued to some screen of preconceived images. Our ears don’t need to be consistently plugged with plastic technology interlinking manipulating stimuli.
Unplug.
Reconnect with nature and its environment. There is beauty all around us, beauty all around us. Rediscover tranquility and listen to your breath, listen to your breath.
Appreciate the sensation of respiration. Tune into the rhythm of your heartbeat. Gently cascade your fingers across your forehead and soothe your cognitive process.
Read a book. Let your mind’s eye provide the images, colors and emotions from the words, taking you on a spectacular voyage, created by your imagination.
Or just lay down and look at the vastness of the sky.
After working in family business for a decade, I decided one day to pursue a dream of mine and take an acting class at the local community college. I was bitten and started a journey that I am still on today. I loved college and performing.
I graduated with highest honors with an associate’s degree in drama and auditioned for Emerson College in Boston Massachusetts. I was accepted, received a scholarship for half my tuition and continued my journey.
I rented an apartment on Boylston Street right next to Fenway Park. Sold my Harley-Davidson motorcycle to help pay rent and get me situated. Later, I got a full time job at Banana Republic in the Copley Mall. I loved it.
Working full time, in college full time, performing in plays and musicals, I was loving life. Just walking around that beautiful city was a privilege.
I graduated and lived in Riverdale, New York for a minute with a friend and then off to Los Angeles, CA. I’m still here twenty four years later.
My life isn’t what I pictured from my most creative outlook decades ago let alone a year ago. Much to our chagrin, we aren’t in control of what tomorrow will be or whether we will have a tomorrow. So how can one even consider the probability of a year or ten years from now?
It’s all a conundrum of minutiae.
Life’s trajectory can deviate significantly from our expectations while swimming inside our own pool of ignorance. We need to reset the stimuli in our consciousness and be grateful for the moments we get to live more than imagining what may never be. A consequence of our mental conditioning through learned associations and ingrained patterns. Akin to a Pavlovian dog.
It is good to set goals in your journey of life, but remember most goals are made of rice paper. It’s better to understand the resilience of how to skillfully and strategically manage obstacles and challenge adversity in everyday life.
An outcome of mental growth is, what you thought or believed today will most likely change as you grow older. Just the way one thinks about what being older would be like and actually aging and living that experience. I can tell you from my experience, you can’t really know fully as my younger self took walking without pain for granted, until it happened.
The path of one adventure may lead to the beginning of another. So what my wildest imagination may set forth, with allusions of grandeur is just that. After all these many years, I’m happy that I’m alive and healthy today.
Norman Lear was an artist that used the rich tapestry of language, fostering diverse communication and challenging conventional boundaries. Every subject was fair game, regardless of its controversial nature.
Never shying away from challenging preconceived stereotypes while still incorporating those same stereotypes into his characters and writing. Because he was about truth.
He wrote about interesting individuals with a complexity and multifaceted nature using the truthfulness or accuracy of something.
A pioneer in sitcom writing and producing. With his openness of heart and mind, he created some of the most iconic characters and sitcoms of the twentieth century, that even today people watch, talk about and love.
I introduced my children when they were young to these shows and they loved them. Binge watching during 2020 shutdowns.
Even at the age of 101 he seemed like a young soul during interviews. He loved making people laugh and watching people laugh, rolling back and forth.
With Norman Lear’s passing a piece of me is also gone. As he was a significant part of my night time as a child in the 1970’s. I will always remember my family laughing while one of his shows were on the television set. My dad even rolling back and forth until he fell on the floor, still laughing.
I was enthusiastic decades ago to discover that he went to Emerson College. My Alma-mater. I hoped I would one day meet him. Through his writing and interviews, it seems I already have.
In this time of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder that many of us have been unaware of, how many take a moment to look at the moon and meditate on it? Enjoy a sunrise? Melt into a sunset? That’s just a few examples.
Always in a rush to get somewhere and get something done so we can waste our time looking at the magical gadget that has taken over our lives and minds.
The meditation of cooking a meal. The thoughts and memories it ignites. The desire of cutting and preparing food and the knowledge of the spices you embrace. Then eating, tasting and enjoying every bite.
That moment when all things unite to bring an elation. A breeze, a smell, a sound a feeling, a breath of serenity. Slow down and seize the moment by taking a moment and reap the benefits of it.
To bite into a piece of fruit and find it dried out, will shape your expectations of the fruit depending on your experience with the fruit.
However, if you have bitten into that piece of fruit before and it was juicy and delicious, you will have an openness to consuming it again.
But, if it’s the first time you experience this fruit and it was very bitter and dry, you might never want to eat it again and it could make one avoid the fruit altogether. But should it?
Would the willingness to try it again be based on one’s consciousness at the time of eating the fruit or one’s percipience of fruit.
A shade tree in the summer is great, when the sun is shining bright and the temperature is above eighty degrees. The shade alleviates one from the heat of the sun.
That same shade tree is avoided in the winter when the sun is shining just as bright and the temperature is below fifty degrees. The sun’s warmth is welcomed and needed.
It’s the same sun.
Who you are should never be taken lightly, by you. It takes decades of adulthood to become who you are, and even then you’re not done. Every day is a new opportunity to learn and experience life.
Right and wrong has never changed unless it’s being pushed through a lense of hypocrisy or a groupthink narrative. Then the line becomes blurred through propaganda. There is good and bad in every situation. You must be able to understand it as it all comes down to one’s perception and perspective.
Being open-minded and recognizing the influence of context can lead to a more nuanced understanding of the world. It’s optimal for personal growth and understanding.
However, one needs to strike a balance between striving for personal growth and putting oneself in personal peril. The answer is using common sense in your life’s journey.
Common sense allows for exploration and learning without compromising safety or well-being. Common sense acts as a practical guide, helping individuals navigate their life’s journey with a sensible and balanced approach away from harm’s way.
To open one’s mind means to be receptive to new ideas, perspectives, and experiences, allowing for a broader understanding of the world. It involves a willingness to consider alternative viewpoints, question assumptions, and embrace diversity in thought.
What it doesn’t mean is to accept what is popular just because it is the trendy narrative push of what the fashionable group collective holds to be true.
Truth doesn’t need to be popular. It’s independent. It represents an accurate and honest reflection of a situation. No emotional fantasies or chaotic illusions. To stray away from truth eventually leads to dismality.
Be wary of dubious claims from the Snake Oil Peddlers, that don’t make sense or seem too good to be true.
Trust your own intuition by following your common sense.
Genius a word thrown around like pollen in the wind. A word once uttered indiscriminately, occasionally, infrequently from time to time when it actually meant something, a creative mind and intelligence. One who spent a career accomplishing something profound and significant. The relativity of gravity, the creation of electricity, flight, transportation and on.
People just doing what was intrinsically inherently because of passion without context of praise and glory. Just the satisfaction derived from the activity itself.
Now it’s a word used in propaganda to push a political narrative. Marketing and promoting ignorance to the increasingly growing masses of unintelligent who eat it up like oxygen from a splintered wooden bucket.
A word that would take one years and decades to be considered after an incredible accomplishment is now designated to a composer of a pop song, an actor, or a social media influencer by the younger generation.
The concept of genius usually involves a broader and deeper impact across various aspects of knowledge, intellect and creativity. An accomplishment that has made the advancement of life better for the masses.
Some may say language evolves and shifts with societal norms and cultural changes. Grunting was once the norm thousands of years ago. However, we have evolved into linguistic richness, that’s being tossed asides for asinine objectives.
Babies speak gibberish to communicate and continue to advance and push themselves towards betterment in semantics. Over a short time they strive to refine their lexical skills innately. The synapses are firing. Learning and intelligence continues to improve when challenged.
Facing challenges often stimulates cognitive growth, problem-solving skills, and adaptability, contributing to ongoing improvement in one’s capacity to learn and display intelligence. The footing and foundation of creating genius.
I remember in acting class we were assigned a role to perform with two or more people. In the beginning, I noticed people highlighting only their parts with a highlighter. Just memorizing what they are going to say.
I worked with a director once who discouraged this process of memorization in a play and for good reason. When one memorizes only what they need to say, the other actors and audience members are being cheated.
When cueing up to the last couple of words of the other person dialogue, you truly are not responding by listening. The process becomes robotic. A sound bite to recite.
This has recently been going on in society also. People just don’t listen anymore. They are looking at you while preoccupied in an abyss of narcissistic chaos and drifting away mentally.
They just want to talk and then talk over you.
Once in a while during a conversation, throw in a made up word or phrase to see if the person you are speaking with stops you to explain that word or phrase.
Is it because the smart phones have been covertly rewiring our brains? The looking glass skewing our perspectives and perceptions. Destroying our patience and creating a turbulent impatience to our attention spans.
Digital devices have become digital babysitters for parents, offering entertainment and distraction for their children while they do the same. Communication as a family unit is diminishing since the inception of digital literacy. This is how the young are learning to communicate.
Human connections and experiences are being lost. Communication is slowly disintegrating as texting and messaging are taking over and semantics are suffering the repercussions. Acronyms and abbreviated words are become commonplace in language.
To focus and look into the eyes of the person you are speaking with is the key to communicating. Listening and recognizing the vocal patterns and reciprocating in kind.
Listen closely, learn, understand and focus on the what is being said. Write the whole word out in a text, it doesn’t take any longer.
Put down the gadgets and communicate in person. Look at the person your speaking with. It’s so much better for you to see laughter than a laughing emoji or lol.
Mother Nature you are indeed a remarkable force, what more can one ask of you?
You have created the trees and seas so that we could breathe fresh air while providing us pleasant water for nourishment.
You originated a climate we can live, move freely and prosper from.
You sprinkled assorted minerals into the dirt and atmosphere to fertilize so we can have substance and material to construct shelter from the vagaries of weather.
Everything essential for life and survival in our intricate balance of an ecosystem has generously been donated by you.
