Just Be And You Are

This well-constructed, crescendoed post by John Halamka really strikes a chord. Stress Acceleration is worth reading start to finish for the writing quality as well as the content. A few snippets below:

Does this acceleration of stress bother me? Over the years of medical training and leading large complex organizations I’ve learned to adapt to just about anything. For every issue there is a process to resolve it.

Is it sustainable for society? I don’t think so.

…Can we sit and enjoy a meal without thinking about work or checking email? Can we go to a movie or concert for an evening without needing to stay connected? Can we turn off our social networks for a week without suffering withdrawal?

The level of stress I see around me is leading humanity to increase consumption of pharmaceuticals (have a problem – take a pill), eat poorly, and reduce the baseline of human kindness (driven in Boston lately?).

As attention becomes more of a scarce resource, does it become a commodity for sale?

Marketing agencies must view attention in this way at times. The signals we’re bombarded with day-to-day are endless; tv, music, books, ads, and magazines are just a start. Everyone has an opinion too and they aren’t afraid to express it, the blogosphere being a great example.

Attention spans are only going to get thinner. Multi-tasking has a limit, so do you a) choose to scale back and unitask, b) limit the scope of what you pay attention to, c) don’t do anything and let yourself swim in the sea of messages?

It’s a tough choice, but no matter which path you choose, you are paying out something of yourself. Something much more valuable than the dollar in your pocket. If attention is the next scarce resource, buy-in is gold.

The hyperlink is amazing. It’s pay-it-forward in action. It reduces the six degrees of separation. It connects us to people and ideas we may never have heard of simply because we stumbled upon a site.

It also contributes to trends and groupthink. Hyperlinks sometimes remind me of the buzz and gossip of the overvalued blue chips that ultimately bubbled out at the start of the century. The value of what you’re being linked is your own judgment call, but so often we empower the person that’s linking us with that judgment. Take it to the extreme. If Al Gore – as opposed to Joe Schmo – recommended a green company, you’d check it out. Al Gore certainly has the credentials, but is he becoming outdated? Maybe his personal branding campaign has started outweighing his community service message? Your call.

Too often we allow others to make judgment calls for us. The blogosphere is ruled by professional marketers and those that already have celebrity value (think Ashton Kutcher vying for 1,000,000 followers on twitter). It’s not a collusive atmosphere, but there’s a “club” mentality emerging with friends linking to friends. I still click on hyperlinks, but just like I look for conflicts of interest and financial disclosures when reading scholarly articles, I evaluate the information trail of the link itself. It’s really easy to do with any generic rss aggregator (i.e. google reader).

Why bother? Because when you open your mouth to talk about the cool thing you read or saw on the net, you’re voicing your support of it. You become a representative. Your word-of-mouth sponsorship is as much a hyperlink as the digital url hiding behind the attractive text. The value of the link is up to you.

I sometimes wonder whether this question deserves thinking time or whether it takes time away from actually doing things. Considering the sinusoidal nature of life, if there’s a question worth thinking about in the down periods, this takes priority. And DailyOM (the inspiring catalyst) provides the recipe for thinking about it. Read the whole thing, but the last sentence is my favorite part.

“Who am I?” is a timeless mantra, a Zen koan ultimately designed to lead us home, into the part of our minds that finally lets go of questions and answers and finds instead the ability to simply be.

November 13th, 2009
The Heart of Unknowing
Who am I?
At some point in our lives, or perhaps at many points in our lives, we ask the question, “Who am I?” At times like these, we are looking beyond the obvious, beyond our names and the names of the cities and states we came from, into the layers beneath our surface identities. We may feel the need for a deeper sense of purpose in our lives, or we may be ready to accommodate a more complex understanding of the situation in which we find ourselves. Whatever the case, the question of who we are is a seed that can bear much fruit.

It can send us on an exploration of our ancestry, or the past lives of our soul. It can call us to take up journaling in order to discover that voice deep within us that seems to know the answers to a multitude of questions. It can draw our attention so deeply inward that we find the spark of spirit that connects us to every living thing in the universe. One Hindu tradition counsels its practitioners to ask the question over and over, using it as a mantra to lead them inevitably into the heart of the divine.

While there are people who seem to come into the world knowing who they are and why they are here, for the most part the human journey appears to be very much about asking this question and allowing its answers to guide us on our paths. So when we find ourselves in the heart of unknowing, we can have faith that we are in a very human place, as well as a very divine one. “Who am I?” is a timeless mantra, a Zen koan ultimately designed to lead us home, into the part of our minds that finally lets go of questions and answers and finds instead the ability to simply be.

Writing in a blog that doesn’t have much of a readership sometimes feels like beating your head against a wall. No matter what anyone says, it takes time to compose these posts and most of that time is mental; the energy you spend thinking about the kind of message you want to send streaming across the web. Each post is like an essay you would write for an English class, the difference being the whole class gets the chance to read it. You expose yourself in your writing and that’s what make the process so rewarding.

This is my fourth blog and in my hiatus between the last blog and this one I even wrote a treatise called, “The Case Against Blogging”, which I wanted to send to the uberblogger, Ben Casnocha. I chickened out. Not that I wasn’t ready for Ben’s counterargument, I wasn’t really that sure about my own. It mainly had to do with opportunity cost of time and spending that time wisely pursuing hobbies (which a blog can be one of) or starting businesses (which a blog can turn into) or just relaxing (again, something a blog can provide). I convinced myself out of my own treatise.

The greatest beneficiary of any blog is oneself. When you press the “Publish” button, it’s as if it’s final. Your word – a part of your inner thinking in that moment in time – is out there in the open, never to be reclaimed (though it technically can be, but again you’re the only one who has to answer to you). Seeing one’s stream of thought over time reveals an honesty that’s sometimes difficult to bear. “I thought that!”, you wonder, and move on because you think differently now because you thought that back then.

Just like a picture, a blog is a snapshot of your mental framework at a specific period in time. The bottomline is some people don’t like taking pictures, some don’t see the value in taking them, and a lot of others just couldn’t live without them. I’m in all those camps when it comes to blogging, and all I know right now is that I like taking pictures. And that works for me.

I’m really catching onto a certain style of blogging that’s not theme-based and reads like free streaming thought. Examples include Seth Godin, Ben Casnocha and Jay Parkinson.

I’ve decided to use this approach blogging here. Pulse of Care is my business site about health care, which for reasons I don’t even understand, has always been a strong passion of mine. I’m all over the place though and health care need only define me to the degree I let it. If you’re interested in what I have to say about health care, check out http://pulseofcare.com

I’m just going to be here.

The simplicity of the article below belies its depth and meaning. Very akin to the last gun to your head post about waffling, this line echoes the theme the best:

Should you feel indecisive, you might consider what your life would be like if you didn’t act on any difficult choices and simply played it safe.

August 12, 2009
Decisions Help Us Grow
Libra Daily Horoscope

You could find it difficult to commit to a firm decision today. Feeling uncertain about what to do might mean that you have a fear about failing if should you make the wrong choice. Instead of avoiding making decisions, you might allow yourself to think that things can work out. Letting yourself know that any decision you make could lead to greater insights about yourself and your life could make this process easier for you today. Should you feel indecisive, you might consider what your life would be like if you didn’t act on any difficult choices and simply played it safe. You may want to think back to a time when you regretted not taking any action and try to remember the feelings you had. Reflecting on the past in this way could make it easier for you to gain a greater sense of certainty about your future.

Releasing our fear of the future by looking to the experiences of our past helps us be more decisive. Even though our past may have a hold on us that prevents us from acting in the present, if we think about when we didn’t take any chances we will most likely feel a tinge of regret. Sometimes this sense of regret is more immobilizing than our fear. By looking at your experiences as lessons and realizing that any decision you have made only leads to a greater understanding of yourself, however, you will be able to let go of your fear today and see everything you do as an opportunity for growth.

July 10, 2009
Exercising Flexibility
Mind Stretching
Flexibility is the capacity to bend without breaking, as well as a continual willingness to change or be changed in order to accommodate new circumstances. People with flexible minds are open to shifting their course when necessary or useful; they are not overly attached to things going the way they had planned. This enables them to take advantage of opportunities that a more rigid person would miss out on. It can also make life a lot more fun. When we are flexible, we allow for situations we could not have planned, and so the world continues to surprise and delight us.

Since reality is in a constant state of flux, it doesn’t make sense to be rigid or to cling to any one idea of what is happening or what is going to happen. We are more in tune with reality when we are flexible. Being in tune enables us to adjust to the external environment and other people as they change and grow. When we are rigid or stuck in our ways, instead of adjusting to the world around us we hunker down, clinging to a concept of reality rather than reality itself. When we do this, we cut ourselves off from life, and we miss out on valuable opportunities, as well as a lot of joy.

Just as we create flexibility in our bodies by stretching physically, we can create limberness in our minds by stretching mentally. Every day we have the opportunity to exercise our flexibility. We can do this in small ways such as taking a different route home from work or changing our exercise routine. On a larger scale, we can rearrange the furniture or redo a room in our house. If these are things we already do regularly, we can stretch our minds by imagining several different possibilities for how the next year will unfold. As we do this, our minds become more supple and open, and when changes come our way, we are able to accommodate and flow with the new reality.

It’s not about losing yourself to busyness, it’s about awareness that lets you be a part of the world and treat others as equal.

We all do that in our own way. Intention is the key to life. When we take care of one, do we lose out on another? I don’t have that answer. So should we take care of others? I believe it comes naturally. A woman who trips over her heel and needs a hand to get up, the old man having trouble with his groceries, the little child who needs a boost to jump up on the chair, the colleague who needs extra eyes to proofread a report, the depressed who need an ear, the person seeking attention who needs a smile and nod from a stranger, the acknowledgment we all afford each other as human beings. These things happen as life happens. We can’t force ourselves to be healers and helpers, but we can be aware of our surroundings and notice the moments we can contribute.

We rarely know we’re happy when we are. It might be any of the circumstances above that makes us feel good or it could be a simple dinner conversation with a friend. We’ll cherish the moment later in our minds. In hindsight, we’ll see it as happy. Instead of seeking that happiness, maybe we need to flow more with the currents around us or create a current of our own. Just like in the ocean, we get pushed one way or another in the wave of life. And there’s nothing wrong with that. That can be a community working together. When we react negatively to those currents, we feel the need to create waves of our own. That’s up to you or your context.

Think about how a surfer catches waves. For every 30 minutes you wade around, you catch a 30 second break and fade into it. It’s a beautiful thing. Addictive beyond belief and hence the birth of surf culture. Those 30 minutes mean the world. As with life, you’re still floating on a moving current, but you’re not fighting it, you’re flowing along, feeling it out, timing the waves, getting to know the lay of the land (water). Then you see an opportunity and launch! You talk about the rush after the fact. If it weren’t for those 30 minutes, you’d never catch the break. The best surfers adapt the quickest, they develop a sixth sense for the waves, the current, and the flow.

Take your own 30 minutes. Or an hour. Or a year. Fighting against your surroundings will only push you back further and hurt those around you. Remember that just being isn’t just about doing whatever you want, it’s about knowing and respecting the moment you’re in, from one to the next. You can’t understand yourself – you can’t catch that break – unless you feel out the current life is taking you on.