Life lately is pretty simple and straightforward. I work, spend a lot of time online, started playing guitar again, and hang out with my lover. I quit smoking recently and life feels a million times better than it has in so, so long. That nasty addiction affected so many more things in my life than I realized or even wanted to consider. I feel free now! This will be a great foundation for starting other healthy habits, like exercising more.
I am looking forward to the holiday season, being around those lovely Swedes again and the nearly constant darkness and snow. There are so many stories and ideas I want to write. I also have great plans and hopes for the year that will follow. When I look back on my goals from about this time last year, I achieved a few of them, which is great. So I am going to record my hopes for this coming year, too.
Publish my writing on Amazon and have an income stream from that.
Start a blog on motivation and mind/body/creativity hacks.
Travel to Mexico and South America.
Swim in the ocean a lot more.
Learn a skill like content marketing or SEO.
Spend more time with loved ones.
Spend more time with animals.
Visit a meditation retreat and meditate every day.
Become fluent in Swedish.
Paint a lot more.
Wednesday, December 7, 2016
Friday, April 8, 2016
April 9th, very early morning.
I came upon some information recently about the importance of creative output. You must make a lot of whatever it is you make, and not all of it will be good. This is how masterpieces happen. Not like I'm expecting to form a masterpiece on this blog, but this idea inspired me to start writing more on here.
Recently, I was reading over some journal entries from the past year and was surprised at how interesting some of my ideas were. These were things that I had forgotten all about, that I just jotted down to ease my own mind, to work out some personal conundrums or just to reflect. Often times my journal entries start with, "I have no idea what to write..." and then end up trailing off into something entirely different. Once I get started, I'm often shocked at how much flows out, and when I go over it later, some of it is good stuff.
We don't see it at the time, when we are having these thoughts or ideas, and we especially can't ever see it unless we record it somehow or share it with others. I think I (and people in general) could benefit from recording their thoughts more often, if only to review them later on and never show them to another person.
How many times have you seen someone say something extremely intelligent or make something beautiful and compliment them, only to have them react in a surprised or doubtful way?
We're not aware of our own creativity. We downplay it, or ignore the ideas when they come, not even noticing anything significant about them. I think the truly innovative thinkers are the ones who aren't afraid of saying something dumb or creating something unoriginal.
It's just a matter of having enough self respect to allow your ideas to come to some type of fruition, even if that just means saying or writing them.
Recently, I was reading over some journal entries from the past year and was surprised at how interesting some of my ideas were. These were things that I had forgotten all about, that I just jotted down to ease my own mind, to work out some personal conundrums or just to reflect. Often times my journal entries start with, "I have no idea what to write..." and then end up trailing off into something entirely different. Once I get started, I'm often shocked at how much flows out, and when I go over it later, some of it is good stuff.
We don't see it at the time, when we are having these thoughts or ideas, and we especially can't ever see it unless we record it somehow or share it with others. I think I (and people in general) could benefit from recording their thoughts more often, if only to review them later on and never show them to another person.
How many times have you seen someone say something extremely intelligent or make something beautiful and compliment them, only to have them react in a surprised or doubtful way?
We're not aware of our own creativity. We downplay it, or ignore the ideas when they come, not even noticing anything significant about them. I think the truly innovative thinkers are the ones who aren't afraid of saying something dumb or creating something unoriginal.
It's just a matter of having enough self respect to allow your ideas to come to some type of fruition, even if that just means saying or writing them.
Thursday, April 7, 2016
Thoughts From Last Summer
Today feels like limbo, or purgatory or something. I just need to get the words flowing and the rest will find its way.
Lately I remember my dreams when I wake up. Last night there was something about a car and a really unstable rocky road downhill. Something about driving past a town that had a 50s Elvis-ish theme and thinking of that Stephen King story about the city with all the dead rock stars.
Everything I want to write feels so damn cliche, which is why words aren't always my favorite mode of expression.
I'm having thoughts about 20 years flying by and looking back at this moment, or this time period.
These past 2 months will be something I remember forever.
I am in intense resistance to all of this ending.
I can feel it in my upper back and my neck, it's where all my suppressed tension and anxiety and resistance goes. What is the alternative to this involuntary clenching of my muscles? Maybe just feeling the anxiety instead of ignoring it, maybe taking deep breaths, exploring it thoroughly. It's starting to really hurt and bother me. I've always held tension there but this is a whole new dimension.
So many intense events these past couple months, so much strangeness all the time, crazy characters, drama, pain, laughter, absurdities, the ever changing landscape of life. How it flows, how it overwhelms with sensory data and then bores nearly to tears, and oscillates between the two with ridiculous intensity and suddenness. Another one of those extreme cases of "one or the other" I seem to know so well and find so familiar. What seems to be a characteristic of something that has the quality of constant change. The habit of changing habits. The permanence of impermanence, if you will.
Lately I remember my dreams when I wake up. Last night there was something about a car and a really unstable rocky road downhill. Something about driving past a town that had a 50s Elvis-ish theme and thinking of that Stephen King story about the city with all the dead rock stars.
Everything I want to write feels so damn cliche, which is why words aren't always my favorite mode of expression.
I'm having thoughts about 20 years flying by and looking back at this moment, or this time period.
These past 2 months will be something I remember forever.
I am in intense resistance to all of this ending.
I can feel it in my upper back and my neck, it's where all my suppressed tension and anxiety and resistance goes. What is the alternative to this involuntary clenching of my muscles? Maybe just feeling the anxiety instead of ignoring it, maybe taking deep breaths, exploring it thoroughly. It's starting to really hurt and bother me. I've always held tension there but this is a whole new dimension.
So many intense events these past couple months, so much strangeness all the time, crazy characters, drama, pain, laughter, absurdities, the ever changing landscape of life. How it flows, how it overwhelms with sensory data and then bores nearly to tears, and oscillates between the two with ridiculous intensity and suddenness. Another one of those extreme cases of "one or the other" I seem to know so well and find so familiar. What seems to be a characteristic of something that has the quality of constant change. The habit of changing habits. The permanence of impermanence, if you will.
"The shoot-the-messenger mentality has doomed any number of
military leaders, business leaders, coaches, parents. It's been widely
reported that Saddam Hussein practices this, with much the same
result as Hitler's. Literally shooting bearers of bad news is horrific
enough, but the crime of shooting ourselves rather than rationally
dealing with accurate information is arguably worse!"
-The New Psycho-cybernetics
-The New Psycho-cybernetics
Why are we so hard on ourselves? Why are we so forgiving to friends who confide in us yet ruthless with our own issues? It is indeed a moral issue whether we apply the lessons we've learned. How disrespectful is it to ignore your own wisdom? We learn all these hard lessons, digest them, come to insightful conclusions and then just throw it out the window.
I am inspired to stop being so damn passive, and I mean this in a general, approach-to-life kind of way. I'm always thinking that I'd like to be happy, or successful, or creative, but I just wait around for these things to happen to me. It's like I subconsciously believe that they are a matter of luck. I never consider aggressively seeking them.
Well these are habits that are beginning to take shape. I like these lively ideas. The most inspiring people I've encountered and known have always been the fiery ones. They tend to be quick to anger, quick to ecstatic joy, and just excited in general.
Why are people so afraid of going after they want with everything they have? Is it possible, as the author states in The New Psycho-cybernetics, to approach the subject of acquiring happiness in a cold and systematic way?
I am testing that out.
Tuesday, February 16, 2016
In Motion Again Soon
I am currently in Sweden, and have been here for the past two months.
Tomorrow, my travel partner and I are flying to Britain to stay for two months. We will be living in a hostel in London for the first week. Thankfully, we have ear plugs this time (the best thing you can get for hostel living, as learned through hard earned experience).
Big cities make me a bit nervous, but it will be a cool experience.
Since I started traveling in May of last year, I have visited six countries. They were France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Bulgaria, Greece, and Sweden. I have grown accustomed to hearing the people around me always speaking a different language. It will be surreal to be somewhere where I can hear conversations around me and understand them again. Oddly enough I miss eavesdropping, hearing the funny or interesting stuff people say to each other, and knowing that I can walk up to almost any random stranger and strike up a conversation. It was something I never appreciated until I visited non-English speaking countries.
Hearing different languages around me has been amazing too, and I will definitely miss hearing Swedish every day. I love this language... Still working on learning it but I understand a lot more than I did a couple months ago.
It's been really nice to be somewhere calm for a while, and to take a break from always going from place to place, big cities, and lots of people. I experienced that for a bit when we went to Stockholm (a great place by the way), but for the most part, we've been in a small and very quiet village.
London should be quite a shock, and I'm pretty excited to see it. After London we will be flying to Romania in April, to stay near Transylvania and visit the supposedly haunted forest, Hoia Baciu (which I plan to photograph extensively!) I have seen amazing pictures of the place on the internet here and there for some years now, and it's unbelievable to know that I will actually physically be there not too long from now.
Since I began my adventures last year, it has been a huge goal of mind to find a job I can perform while traveling. In fact it's been my only real concrete goal. I have finally found something! I am officially a freelance writer. This has always been a lofty dream of mine, one that I thought I might have a shot at accomplishing some distant day in the future.
Anxiety about money pushed me to pursue opportunities just for the hell of it, and I started seeking out craigslist writing gigs and sending out lots of applications each day. I honestly did not expect that anything would come from it given the fact that I have almost no experience writing officially.
I've been shocked, in the best way possible, by how well it has worked out. I feel an immense freedom as the result of this opportunity, to the degree of almost being frightened (in a good way) at the possibilities that lie ahead. I am definitely feeling the dizziness of freedom lately.
Tomorrow, my travel partner and I are flying to Britain to stay for two months. We will be living in a hostel in London for the first week. Thankfully, we have ear plugs this time (the best thing you can get for hostel living, as learned through hard earned experience).
Big cities make me a bit nervous, but it will be a cool experience.
Since I started traveling in May of last year, I have visited six countries. They were France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Bulgaria, Greece, and Sweden. I have grown accustomed to hearing the people around me always speaking a different language. It will be surreal to be somewhere where I can hear conversations around me and understand them again. Oddly enough I miss eavesdropping, hearing the funny or interesting stuff people say to each other, and knowing that I can walk up to almost any random stranger and strike up a conversation. It was something I never appreciated until I visited non-English speaking countries.
Hearing different languages around me has been amazing too, and I will definitely miss hearing Swedish every day. I love this language... Still working on learning it but I understand a lot more than I did a couple months ago.
It's been really nice to be somewhere calm for a while, and to take a break from always going from place to place, big cities, and lots of people. I experienced that for a bit when we went to Stockholm (a great place by the way), but for the most part, we've been in a small and very quiet village.
London should be quite a shock, and I'm pretty excited to see it. After London we will be flying to Romania in April, to stay near Transylvania and visit the supposedly haunted forest, Hoia Baciu (which I plan to photograph extensively!) I have seen amazing pictures of the place on the internet here and there for some years now, and it's unbelievable to know that I will actually physically be there not too long from now.
Since I began my adventures last year, it has been a huge goal of mind to find a job I can perform while traveling. In fact it's been my only real concrete goal. I have finally found something! I am officially a freelance writer. This has always been a lofty dream of mine, one that I thought I might have a shot at accomplishing some distant day in the future.
Anxiety about money pushed me to pursue opportunities just for the hell of it, and I started seeking out craigslist writing gigs and sending out lots of applications each day. I honestly did not expect that anything would come from it given the fact that I have almost no experience writing officially.
I've been shocked, in the best way possible, by how well it has worked out. I feel an immense freedom as the result of this opportunity, to the degree of almost being frightened (in a good way) at the possibilities that lie ahead. I am definitely feeling the dizziness of freedom lately.
Saturday, November 28, 2015
History
In my lifetime I have always heard people talk about their ancestry. The history of their own country, who their family lineage descended from, essentially identifying with things that I felt no connection to.
It seems almost blasphemous to admit now, but I never felt that any of that had anything to do with me, or now. I did not feel a connection to the factors that shaped humanity in terms of society or race or anything of that nature. I thought nationalist ideas were silly, and that people exclaiming that they are "Proud to be an American" sounded a bit foolish. They didn't choose to be born there, and being American had nothing to do with them, they had just happened to exist in this place as easily as they could have happened to come into existence somewhere else.
It seems so obvious now, but since traveling Europe I have realized that different places really are different. I always defaulted to the opinion that "we are all human, regardless of where we reside", which is of course true, but there are so many other factors that shape us, and that is nowhere near the whole picture.
Any time I tried to pick up a history book or was in the vicinity of someone talking about periods of the past, my eyes would glaze over. I am currently staying in Greece and there is a book at this house called "The Fingerprints of the Gods". I thought the title sounded interesting so I picked it up and flipped to the first page, which showed a letter from some past military figure discussing features of a map from 1513. I was instantly bored and put the book down.
A week or two later, for some (unremembered now) reason, I picked that book back up. I discovered that the letter on the first page was talking about a map that displayed knowledge of Antarctica, the way it was before the ice age, and that this knowledge was supposedly unknown until the 1900s. Once I deciphered the dry jargon of the letter and realized the implications of this mystery, I was hopelessly intrigued.
I did not put this 500+ book down for the following 3 days, and it shifted my entire perspective on the history of the human race.
For the first time I actually thought deeply into where we came from, what inspired the knowledge we currently take for granted of space, mathematics, agriculture, languages, what ancient mysteries and intelligence have been forever lost either by accident with time, or on purpose by being destroyed.
I finally understood the fascination so many people around me have for history, the things we "know" and the other, considerably more numerous unknowns about this period referred to as pre-history.
I thought scientists had a pretty good idea of how humanity has come to be. I am not so sure now.
The book presents convincing evidence that advanced humans (on par with, or possibly beyond our level of technology and intelligence now) have existed on earth way longer ago than is commonly proclaimed. For some reason this really struck me. It gave me a burning, and unique form of frustration, of wanting (and possibly needing) to know more about this.
Legends exist in seemingly completely separate, ancient cultures that have shared characteristics, leading one to wonder if there was not a common denominator that engendered their similar spontaneous advancements. There are stories of "gods" coming to undeveloped tribes, in some cases consisting of savages, and bringing them the gift of civilization, teaching them not to cannibalize one another, sharing knowledge of language, science, medicine, and more. It seems to me as though there was a civilization far more advanced than the rest of the world at that time (enough to make them seem immortal beings by comparison) that made it a point to share their knowledge for the advancement and prosperity of humanity.
I am unbelievably inspired and mystified by this stuff, and no longer feel disconnected from the history of humanity.
It seems almost blasphemous to admit now, but I never felt that any of that had anything to do with me, or now. I did not feel a connection to the factors that shaped humanity in terms of society or race or anything of that nature. I thought nationalist ideas were silly, and that people exclaiming that they are "Proud to be an American" sounded a bit foolish. They didn't choose to be born there, and being American had nothing to do with them, they had just happened to exist in this place as easily as they could have happened to come into existence somewhere else.
It seems so obvious now, but since traveling Europe I have realized that different places really are different. I always defaulted to the opinion that "we are all human, regardless of where we reside", which is of course true, but there are so many other factors that shape us, and that is nowhere near the whole picture.
Any time I tried to pick up a history book or was in the vicinity of someone talking about periods of the past, my eyes would glaze over. I am currently staying in Greece and there is a book at this house called "The Fingerprints of the Gods". I thought the title sounded interesting so I picked it up and flipped to the first page, which showed a letter from some past military figure discussing features of a map from 1513. I was instantly bored and put the book down.
A week or two later, for some (unremembered now) reason, I picked that book back up. I discovered that the letter on the first page was talking about a map that displayed knowledge of Antarctica, the way it was before the ice age, and that this knowledge was supposedly unknown until the 1900s. Once I deciphered the dry jargon of the letter and realized the implications of this mystery, I was hopelessly intrigued.
I did not put this 500+ book down for the following 3 days, and it shifted my entire perspective on the history of the human race.
For the first time I actually thought deeply into where we came from, what inspired the knowledge we currently take for granted of space, mathematics, agriculture, languages, what ancient mysteries and intelligence have been forever lost either by accident with time, or on purpose by being destroyed.
I finally understood the fascination so many people around me have for history, the things we "know" and the other, considerably more numerous unknowns about this period referred to as pre-history.
I thought scientists had a pretty good idea of how humanity has come to be. I am not so sure now.
The book presents convincing evidence that advanced humans (on par with, or possibly beyond our level of technology and intelligence now) have existed on earth way longer ago than is commonly proclaimed. For some reason this really struck me. It gave me a burning, and unique form of frustration, of wanting (and possibly needing) to know more about this.
Legends exist in seemingly completely separate, ancient cultures that have shared characteristics, leading one to wonder if there was not a common denominator that engendered their similar spontaneous advancements. There are stories of "gods" coming to undeveloped tribes, in some cases consisting of savages, and bringing them the gift of civilization, teaching them not to cannibalize one another, sharing knowledge of language, science, medicine, and more. It seems to me as though there was a civilization far more advanced than the rest of the world at that time (enough to make them seem immortal beings by comparison) that made it a point to share their knowledge for the advancement and prosperity of humanity.
I am unbelievably inspired and mystified by this stuff, and no longer feel disconnected from the history of humanity.
Monday, October 26, 2015
Goals, long and short term.
Become fluent in at least 2 foreign languages (or more).
Get a lot better at chess.
Go to Germany and the Czech Republic.
Long camp trip (a month or 2) where I live almost completely off the land.
Visit Transylvania and the "haunted" Hoia-Baciu forest, perhaps camp there.
Take the Transyberian railway through Russia into SE Asia.
Buy and renovate a house (to sell or live in).
Get a lot better at hooping and possibly make it into a performance art.
Finish the book I already started or start a completely new one.
Find a reliable and location independent source of income.
Read a lot more, write a lot more.
Attempt to sell my art at a festival(s).
Have a really awesome pet companion.
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