Tag: impermanence

Ditch the Plan

Introduction

This is a personal story originating from my daily journaling, so bear with me. I retired about a year and a half ago with aspirations of getting back into playing guitar again, doing my yoga and meditation practices, fixing up my house, volunteering at a charity, working on my diet, and writing a book, just to name a few things I hoped to accomplish. I eventually got to the point where I literally scheduled every hour of the day from 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. to fit all these things and more into each day. Inevitably, things would come up, and I would be late getting to the scheduled task for something, or I would skip it completely. The whole thing turned out to be nothing but a disappointment due to not achieving the things on my calendar, and on top of that, it made my life pretty boring.

This whole planning process for every minute of my life had been going on for a long time. When I was working, my primary role was being an IT Project Manager for various companies. I guess being a project manager for so long actually became who I was to a large degree, thus the planning affliction.

Revelation

I woke up one morning very early and told myself to let it all go. You know those pep talks you give yourself in an attempt to deal with this week’s self-imposed suffering, maybe even writing them down in a journal. I thought it would be best to try from time to time to drop the expectations. I wasn’t thinking that I didn’t need to do anything. I still realized I needed to deal with the important things, such as emergencies, appointments, cooking, cleaning, and fixing things, etc., but also to make time for things I enjoyed, which always seemed to come after everything else. I was just attempting a reset to alleviate the pressure of always needing to be productive, always achieving something.

So, with a decision not to be ruled by a calendar, I looked at my numerous goals and did a radical thing, which was to remove the dates. I deleted the start and end dates while keeping the goals, which I felt were still worthwhile. Now, understand the goals still had a priority column, so it wasn’t complete chaos, but it also took the pressure off looking at those dates and thinking Oh, you missed that one or You haven’t achieved this or that. I guess you come to a realization that you only have so much time and so much energy, and some of the things you are looking to do take significant amounts of time to make progress, and some, like playing guitar again, end up permanently on your agenda. So my desire to write a book, learn Spanish, and take up playing guitar again, along with everything else, got to be too much, so I shelved learning Spanish so I could focus on music and writing.

This all boils down to a few overarching guidelines when it comes to goal setting and how it affects what you do each day:

  1. Deal with the basics, those things you must do for your health, family, residence, etc. These are the basics that pretty much everyone needs to deal with. You know, go to the dentist, doctor, do your grocery shopping, pay the bills, do car maintenance, and make sure your family is taken care of. The cautionary tale here is that not all of these things need to be done now, so don’t let this list of the basics monopolize all your time. Here is a stupid example: I had some new decking put in a few years ago, replacing what was there, and it took me 5 years to stain it. Seems kind of negligent, but I was working then, and I could have outsourced it, but chose to just do it later.
  2. This is the most important thing that I decided needed to be the primary influence on how I spend my time, and that is to do the things you enjoy. If you let dealing with the basics consume all your time, or you’re working on goals that really don’t excite you, then you need to ask yourself if you are enjoying what you are doing or just trying to check off something on a task list that supports a goal that doesn’t really enrich your life.
  3. Simplify your life. To make time for doing the things you enjoy, you need to stop doing things that you think should be done, but are not really that important. We have all heard of minimalism, and there is some value in removing things and obligations from your life so you can focus on the things you really enjoy. This is really about the ruthless pursuit of removing material things and obligations that you feel compelled to do from your life. Everything you buy needs a place to occupy in your home, and must be maintained to some degree, then possibly replaced when it is no longer functional. You think you might like a vacation home on a lake so you can go fishing, but when you buy the home, you spend your time fixing up the house, maintaining boats and docks, landscaping, furnishing the home, paying utilities and property taxes, and pretty soon you realize you don’t have any time to go fishing. Instead, renting a cottage for a week, renting a boat, or even buying a boat is a lot less costly and requires less maintenance than owning a piece of property.
  4. Don’t spend your time trying to impress anyone. If you are doing something to impress someone instead of because you enjoy it, then drop it. To have the time to do the things you really enjoy that bring meaning to your life, there needs to be a ruthless culling of the things that, in the scheme of things, don’t enhance your life. Ask yourself, why am I doing things to impress other people? Maybe it’s all about your ego and seeking validation from others. Most of the time, you find that they really don’t care because they have their own problems and their own need for validation.

Conclusion

The Buddha taught us that life is impermanent and that things are impermanent. We will get old and die, regardless of what the tech oligarchs think. Those things that we have will no longer be ours when we are gone. Most of the societies in this world want their people to be productive, to earn, and consume more, for what is more important than economic growth and prosperity? Don’t buy into this myth that has been created, or you will never be free to pursue the things you enjoy. These things will become goals for the future, instead of what you could be doing in the present.

So realizing that what I was doing was at least partially aligned with a need to be productive over pursuing what really mattered to me, became the revelation. I also realized that I would need to keep prioritizing my happiness in the present moment and not worrying about how much was accomplished. Do that thing that you enjoy, and you will find that you will accomplish more in the long run, and as you achieve what you set out to, you will allow a little joy into this life.

I’ll wrap this up with a quote from Lao Tzu:

A serene forest scene with lush green trees and a tranquil pathway, featuring a quote by Lao Tzu that reads, 'Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.'

Namaste

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The Power of Acceptance

Introduction

I like this quote by Eckhart Tolle, especially the part “accept it as if you had chosen it” versus accept it because you are forced to. We often say we accept something the way it is, but do we really? It is usually more like I say I accept this, but it still pisses me off every time I think about it. This thing that I accept has tons of emotional baggage that I associate with it. I think it is stupid, I think they are ignorant, and on and on. So much for any real acceptance. In this post, I will outline the power of acceptance and what you can do to bring more acceptance into your life.

Options

To understand real acceptance you might want to look at it as a response to a situation where acceptance is one of three options:

  1. Accept
  2. Change
  3. Avoid

You know you read a lot from the hustle culture crowd and the so-called productivity experts about never quitting. It’s as if you have no options and you are a complete idiot preferring masochistic tendencies to logical thought or maybe even freedom from whatever is tormenting you. Sometimes taking the exit door and “avoiding” the situation makes the most sense regardless of what the productivity geeks think. Then there is the option of embracing the situation but with the caveat that it must change for you to accept it.

What is acceptance?

The act of accepting something or someone : the fact of being accepted : APPROVAL acceptance of responsibility. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/acceptance

When I think about acceptance I normally think about it in terms of accepting a life situation, but one can also think of it as acceptance of one’s self.

Example

There are times when a good example can add a lot of value when trying to delve deep into a concept. I recently went through a 6-month long experience that should help in this regard. This example of the need for acceptance came when I was a consultant for Amazon Web Services (AWS). I won’t mention who the customer was, but suffice to say it was a company in the Financial Services industry. The customer wanted to create a voice bot to handle calls about tax forms and account balances. The engagement was woefully underfunded and got off to a rocky start as the handoff from Sales to professional services was not as thorough as it should have been resulting in AWS professional services staffing the project with resources that did not have the right skill set. A couple weeks into the engagement I was brought in to replace the current Engagement Manager and the project was paused a few days later.

Without going into excruciating details what ensued was just one big shit show with an escalation by the customer every other week. This caused a fire drill with Amazon’s management and basically, I and others on the team were in a reactionary mode, that continued through the end of the project. The stress level was through the roof and it was difficult to maintain a positive attitude as the attack and react situation never ceased. I had considered retiring at the end of 2023, but when they came to me to bail out this engagement I decided to help out. I did my best to accept the situation, doing my best to make things better, but they did not get better. In this situation, acceptance helped me and other team members focus on delivery, while AWS management tried to pacify the customer. Leaning into acceptance was about the only option we had because the only other option for me was to quit my job at AWS. I would be lying if I told you I didn’t consider it, but then my loyalty to my team always prevented me from taking an exit to rid myself of this situation.

Choosing acceptance was really my only option. Fortunately, this was a project and was bound to end at some point, which made things a bit easier. I think if this would have been some more permanent situation, I might have decided to do something else. Accepting that this engagement would be a shit show to the very end helped me get through this situation. However acceptance did not alleviate the stress, but it did cement my resolve to do everything I could to deliver something valuable to the customer. That’s the thing about acceptance, sometimes it is all you have when the situation cannot be avoided. Being willing to say I’m going to go all in and accept the cards I’m dealt, making the best of a bad situation is necessary at times. Conversely, if every time you face some kind of difficulty and refuse to practice acceptance you will forever be running away from your problems or making them more difficult to endure.

Examples of what I had to accept during this engagement:

  • Critique – The customer criticized just about everything our team did and would not compromise or adopt any of the processes that we wanted to use during the engagement. We had to accept that this would be the case until the end of the engagement.
  • Escalation – As I mentioned the customer had a real knack for escalating to AWS upper management on Friday nights. This always created a fire drill as AWS management was in a hurry to craft some kind of response as quickly as possible. After a while, I just began to expect it and at least for me I became less reactive and emotional about it.
  • Help from Management – As this customer was thought to be a high-value account I was getting a lot more help from our leadership, which I wasn’t used to or really wanting. Rather than making a big deal about it and resisting their help I just smiled and accepted it.
  • Culture – I would say 2 or 3 months into this engagement I figured out that the customer would use leverage to get what they wanted through intimidation by threatening to cancel the engagement. They would not accept AWS as a partner but instead viewed us as a vendor to be berated. The customer culture was one of getting what they wanted via the stick versus the carrot. For a company that had been around for more than 100 years, I accepted that this aspect of their culture would be impossible to change.
  • The End – This was the end of my career at AWS. As this engagement unfolded I saw this as a sign from the universe or maybe a lesson learned. While I had accepted my fate during this engagement I learned that acceptance is not the only option. Even the strong finish on this engagement still left me feeling that there would be repercussions career-wise for the way this had all played out, and I didn’t want to stay around and find out if that was true or not. So not only had I accepted my fate during the engagement, but I accepted that this would be the end of my consulting career.

Road to Acceptance

There are certain things that are enablers of acceptance. I mention a few of these below that I think about when making a choice to accept a situation in my life. These include but are not limited to timing, expectations, self-acceptance, accepting others, and not accepting.

Timing

The timing of embracing acceptance is crucial. In my example above I struggled during the first couple of months to accept the situation. I complained to management about the customer, made numerous attempts to create relationships with them, and suffered from my lack of acceptance. It was kind of a pity party in my head. Why me? Why did I accept this assignment? I had numerous reasons that would not allow me to walk away from this situation but I failed to accept it early on. It would have been much easier to as Eckhart Tolle stated “accept it as if you had chosen it”. The lesson learned here is that if you decide to do something accepting the situation early on will save you untold amounts of pain and suffering. Making the decision to accept your situation the good, bad, and ugly can bring you closer to peace and mindfulness than non-acceptance.

Expectations

While the timing of when you embrace acceptance is an important aspect, equally is your expectations. You know those things we play out in our head, conversations, reactions, and outcomes. These are our expectations that set the stage for how we think about our situation or others. The thing with expectations is that sometimes we think a project will result in a certain outcome, but the reality is when things don’t go as planned we are disappointed because we had different expectations. You can apply expectations to how you think people will react or behave and then when what they do and say deviates from your expectations more disappointment sinks in. You can also have very negative expectations of certain people and when they come through you think well I expected that asshole to act that way. Understanding how expectations play into your situation goes a long way toward successfully accepting a situation. The truth is if you have a positive expectation and the results are negative you are upset and if you expect a negative outcome and you still get a negative outcome well you may not be surprised, but you won’t be happy. Maybe the answer is to tamp down your expectations, hope for the best, and accept whatever happens. Remember accepting your situation means managing your expectations and dealing with them.

Impermanence

When I think about impermanence as it applies to acceptance I see it as an enabler or detractor. The fact that everything is impermanent can make accepting a situation easier, knowing that as difficult as something is it will end. On the other hand, impermanence also applies to the time you spend on this earth, and accepting something intolerable such as an abusive relationship comes at the expense of the finite life you have. In either case acceptance and impermanence are linked together. Did impermanence play a role in Viktor Frankl surviving Nazi Concentration Camps or John McCain being a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for 5 and half years? Sometimes when you are in a battle you have accepted at work, service to your country, or watching a loved one slowly die over a period of months all you can hang on to is that it is impermanent.

Accepting yourself

The power of acceptance does not apply only to situations but starts with accepting yourself. You may have determined by now that you or any of us are not perfect. Accepting yourself with all your quirks and faults can help you in accepting situations you are going through. Many of us live our lives going forward from the past. Memories of failures to achieve something, and failure to cultivate key relationships with family and friends all inhibit what we do today. None of this bodes well for creating the life we desire, but we continue on from the past to the future. Accepting what we have been through is an important step in moving forward with the life we want. Face it we have all fucked up, not once but many times. Accept this fact and forgive yourself for the past mistakes and accept the fact that you will fuck up in the future. If you can come to terms with yourself, accepting who you are will grant yourself the space to accept situations as they are.

Accepting others

How can we accept situations without accepting others? I’m not saying you need to condone their actions or even forgive them. However, you need to accept that their behavior is not under your control, and letting what they do upset you over and over again will just make it almost impossible to accept the situation you are dealing with. The majority of the situations I mentioned in my little example above had at its core dealing with the behavior of people. When you can accept other people the way they are with all their irrational beliefs and faults you become capable of dealing with almost any situation.

Not accepting

I sometimes get really pissed off when I see motivational speakers say “Never Quit”. In my example above there was a pivotal point where I had to decide if I was going to accept my situation or remove myself from it. I chose acceptance, but there are many situations where not accepting your current situation makes sense. Here are a few examples:

  • I don’t accept staying at this shitty job
  • I don’t accept that one of my goals is unattainable
  • I don’t accept how someone close to me treats me badly
  • I don’t accept that I inherently have limitations that prevent me from living the life I desire

Sometimes not accepting your current situation is a choice that expands your world and opens you up to new possibilities.

Conclusion

You can’t go through life complaining and bitching about your current situation. At some point, you need to come to terms with your choices and accept what is as if you had chosen it. Choosing acceptance is not some weak act of submission, but instead a sign of wisdom and self-care. There is a saying nothing ventured, nothing gained. When you accept your current situation, and embrace the challenge, you become unstoppable. Life will always be challenging, painful, exciting, and filled with opportunity. When you embrace acceptance you choose to make things a bit easier. Let us face it we don’t know what tomorrow will bring, but I can guarantee that it will have its challenges.

People who live without accepting their current situation will forever be doomed to a life of pain and suffering. There is a quote from Gary John Bishop that I like:

“I expect nothing and accept everything.”

Make acceptance part of your philosophy and watch how your life begins to flow with less resistance and more satisfaction.

Namaste

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Something to Think About: The Easy Life

This is the first in a series of shorter blog posts created to explore a concept or idea briefly, so “Something to Think About”. I realize that sometimes you don’t have time to read 10 or 20 pages and this is my way of providing a more frequent stream of ideas to provide something to think about. I hope you enjoy, and please post a comment and we can have a dialog..

The ironic thing about life is that as we age we think life will be easier. We can retire and do whatever we want, living a life of leisure. Several things get in our our way:

  • Our expectation that our problems will go away. As human beings we think too much and set expectations that don’t coincide with reality on this earth. The over active mind will help create new problems for you, real or perceived.
  • The fact that we are physical beings and will have to experience a decline in our body. This results in increasing issues with our health and pain. Now you can slow down this decline to some degree with exercise and nutrition, but you cannot totally avoid it.
  • The very idea that I will wake up every morning seeking some form of leisure may end up getting old after a while. If this is your sole purpose, then you will soon find that you can only play so much golf, eat, sleep, walk, read, or whatever your thing is.

So you go from struggling everyday with all those normal responsibilities like making a living, paying your bills, dealing with difficult people, all the time waiting for retirement to simplify your life. In essence we are looking to the future to alleviate our stress and problems, so we can live the easy life. The reality is that if the purpose of our life is seeking pleasure then we are likely to end up disappointed and maybe worse depressed.

I’m going to be blunt here and I hope I don’t offend anyone. I really fucking hate the word retirement when used in the context of the attainment of the of easy life. As the Buddha taught life is not easy in fact it is filled with dukkha “pain and suffering”, much of it imposed on us by our perceptions. Often in life, a change in circumstances is just trading one problem for another. Maybe you will have less stressful problems when you retire, but they will be traded for an increasing awareness of your own impermanence. This increasing awareness of impermanence brought to light by declining health and your friends and family leaving this world, is an opportunity for great wisdom and appreciation for your own life.

I did mention this would be short exploration of the “Easy Life”, so let me summarize and bid you au revoir. Don’t spend your life wishing you could do less, seeking some hedonistic existence. Instead look at your new found freedom as the opportunity to double down on your purpose. Remember you woke up today, so you can spend time learning something, helping someone else, and doing something useful. Time to pay it back, to your family, to your community, to the world at large.

I would love your thoughts on retirement and the so called easy life. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Namaste

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The end of suffering

Random Thoughts / Poetry

The End Of Suffering

You know everything is impermanent

Yet you choose to suffer

Only change is certain

Yet you choose to suffer

You are aging day by day

Yet you choose to suffer

Life and death is ever-present

Yet you choose to suffer

Love and joy surround you

Yet you choose to suffer

You have no direction

You can find no end to suffering

The end to your suffering is a walk down the Eightfold Path

 

Namaste

 

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Love Impermanence

We live our lives seeking situations or things that are permanent. This might include a relationship, a profession, investments, our bodies, or beliefs. It is human nature to plan for the future seeking a sense of certainty as if we had control over the present or the future. Here is one of my favorite quotes by Thich Nhat Hanh:

Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist, founder of the Plum Village Tradition. One of the primary tenants of Buddhism is impermanence. Impermanence is the lack of permanence, or the fact that everything is changing, thus nothing is really permanent or even certain. I guess if there is any certainty it would be that nothing is permanent. As you are reading this your body is changing, the weather is changing, even our own most strongly held beliefs are under siege. Because of impermanence our plans for the future are at best a wish and in reality are extremely uncertain.

If you can accept that everything is impermanent you will begin to free yourself from worrying about your problems. If everything is impermanent than so is your pain and suffering. That situation that is causing you so much grief is likely to change and you will inherent a new problem to worry about. Flip the coin and the joy you feel today may be replaced by pain tomorrow, or by some other form of happiness. You might be thinking well all this in not very comforting and what am I to do about this impermanent life of mine? The answer is that there is nothing for you to do. If you need to do anything it would be to simply accept impermanence and live in the present moment.

Listen, I’m not saying you should not make plans, but any plan you make must include some flexibility due to the fact that whatever you have planned will likely need to change. Working towards a goal you have can be a wonderful thing, but then impermanence steps in and what you are working for may no longer be possible to achieve. Remember impermanence does not equate to something negative and in fact it often will result in new opportunities that avail themselves if you are willing to embrace uncertainty and drop your bullshit adherence to the plan you have in your head.

Let’s say you have this job working for some corporation and your plan is to work there for the next 5 years and then retire. However your company begins losing market share and they have to eliminate your high paid position. You could be angry, start blaming the company or yourself, and have a nice pity party and this might be something you decide to keep doing for the foreseeable future. For someone who embraces impermanence this kind of reaction to the situation would be impossible. The person that accepts uncertainty would say Fuck it and move on. The plan you had is no longer valid, but you think well let’s take a look at this world of possibilities and act upon some other interests you have. I have personally been in similar situations and every time a door closed, another one opened and the change only enhanced my life. This is why I love impermanence because when you embrace it you learn and grow as a person, you become unstuck. Here is another quote from Thich Nhat Hanh:

Learn to love impermanence and all will be well with you.

Namaste

 

Casting off attachments

Casting off attachments

One of the primary concepts in Buddhism is that impermanence is an undeniable fact of human existence.  For each of us this means that nothing in our lives is permanent, not our job, not our health, not our relationships, not even our state of mind. If we can accept that nothing lasts forever and that it will inevitably change then we are more capable of understanding attachment.

Many of us are attached to who we think we are because of what we do for a living. We secretly know that whatever it is we do will not last, but we still place great emphasis on this role. We often use this role in society to attach some value to ourselves, and yes whatever we do is often in exchange for money, so it does have value. It strokes our ego to be paid for some form of expertise and we attach ourselves to this title be it a Doctor, Lawyer, Teacher, Judge, Accountant, CEO, CIO, Director, or whatever it might be. We scheme and plan for the next role using our expertise to acquire more money, a higher position, or some other ego enhancing attribute. We have attached our self to this persona and we find comfort in the fact that others find value in utilizing our skills.

Yet this attachment goes beyond the role we have chosen for ourselves that generates income. We start to attach ourselves to political parties, calling ourselves a Republican, Democrat, or Libertarian. Our attachments are strong, as you have often heard people say I’m a lifelong Republican or Democrat. If this were not enough we attach ourselves to things such as cars, homes, boats, jewelry, stocks, bonds, gold or some other material thing. We attach ourselves to other people like a family member, a spouse, co-worker, or a friend. We also attach ourselves to a self image of the way we look and our health good or bad.

With all these attachments we become very reliant on our role, organizations, health, things, and people for defining our identity. All of this is a house of cards, we will not escape the reality of impermanence, for every one of these things that we think defines our life are constantly changing. These attachments ultimately lead to one disappointment after another, as they unravel before our eyes and I assure you they will.

There is nothing wrong with enjoying what you do for a living, but remember at some point it will change. Even the most successful Doctor finds a time when he or she can no longer practice medicine, or no longer wants to. Strong attachments will create pain as they are broken and this is what this post is about. I’m not advocating that you live a life where you don’t care about anything or anyone, but you must let loose of the attachment to these things. Accept the fact that your life will change and that you will change physically, mentally, and spiritually. Do you really want your self worth tied to some profession? When you were born were you predestined to be a doctor, lawyer, executive, or factory worker? You made choices to pursue various lines of work and became what you pursued. Drop that attachment, you are not what you do for a living, and it does not define you, and as sure as it started it will end or change.

Start thinking about what you are attached to and how you can be open to things beyond your attachments. Can you find it in yourself to be less dependent on what you do for a living, organizations, people, and things. If you can, I assure you that you will become more care free; you will still care but you will not let these attachments dictate your happiness. To free yourself from attachments is a key step to following the way. I will see you on the path.

Namaste