We primarily tend to think of relationships as romantic ones, but we have them with everyone we meet. Some of them last and some of them don’t. It seems to me that the one common thread to any successful relationship is work.

Relationships take work.

You may consider yourself blessed to be in a relationship that just seems to run under its own steam and doesn’t need any work. WARNING: Rocks ahead!

If you get in a relationship and “set and forget” it, you can forget about it lasting.

Life, for most, is busier today than it’s been in the past. For example, you may work multiple jobs. NOTE: if you are a working parent, you are working multiple jobs even if you only have one. Your time is not your time as much as it used to be and you may take for granted the wonderful relationship you built and watch it crumble before your eyes.

If you are too busy to work on your relationships, you will have less people to relate to in your life.

I suspect we can all plead guilty to the practice of taking some relationships for granted. We will pay a price for doing so.

For those rebuilding relationships, the work doesn’t need to double; you just have to recognize that work is a constant. Once you get back on track, work is still required. Work is a small price to pay for something that pays so many dividends.

If you are unwilling to put in the work, it may be a sign that you don’t want to be in that relationship any longer. That’s also a valuable thing to know. But before it gets to that point, you have a choice to either put on your work clothes or sit on the couch. One action suggests you’re ready for relationships; the other makes you an unrelatable slouch.

All the best,

John

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I was struck by this phrase from out of the blue yesterday: “You remind me of a time I can’t remember” – A Grasshopper moment for sure.

I’m not sure what it means or the stimulus that made it pop in. I just know that it has more essence than a random thought.

I did have a conversation with a friend the day before Thanksgiving about his father who’s suffering the onset of Dementia/Alzheimer’s. I also was asking questions of another old friend on Saturday about someone’s well being – someone I haven’t seen in over a decade.

Perhaps those people and their stories got me to wondering about times that have faded past memory.

I’m sensing there’s a deeper application of the phrase and I’m fishing for it as I write this blog.

We all have a time we can’t remember and I sense there is a part of us that we get reminded of from time to time that we can’t remember either.

We have become so conditioned to associate our thoughts to who we are, that it makes sense to pause and reflect on who we were before we had thoughts. We were the same essence – just without thoughts.

The time we can’t consciously remember is the time before thought. We may revisit that time briefly in a moment of reverie or reflection, when we only experience something without the aid of thought. Think of a time when your breath was literally taken away by something of beauty. Your thoughts were as absent as your breath at that moment.

There is a part of us that doesn’t lend itself to thought filled memories, but only to the experience of those memories. That’s the part that we’ve lost touch with. It gets crowded out by thought.

There is a place of knowing without knowing what it knows. We inhabited that place before we could think, and visit there now only when our thinking pauses.

I believe we would all benefit by more pauses so that we can experience the absolute serenity and beauty of a time we can’t remember.

All the best,

John

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“Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things when they are small,” said Lao Tzu.

When we overlook small, we look past our present into a future that will likely never be, because we discounted the building blocks of ABC.

It makes sense that when the foundation is solid and properly laid that our chances for success increase. If I asked “why” questions, I would want to know why we close our eyes when pouring the foundation.

Rather than ask why, I just recognize that we do, over and over again.

We often lament that XYZ is for other people not us. I submit that if you looked at the bulk of possessors of XYZ, you would find ABC as their base.

There’s a reason old axioms hang around; they’re based in basics.

Measure twice, cut once.

Garbage in, garbage, out.

And my personal favorite . . . If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.

“But I already know all that stuff” is what we invariably say as we look towards the future and ignore today.

The tool most suited for growth is the one we most often leave in the toolbox – Recognition.

Recognize that small is worth paying attention to. Recognize that this moment is the only one that will take you to the next, so don’t ignore it or you make your future a Xerox copy of your past.

Moments are small but when they are maximized with recognition, they take us even farther than XYZ – “To infinity and beyond.”

Your creative future is encased in the current moment. To release it, you have to pay attention to the moment.

When you look past ABC, your future is spelled out for you. It’s a jumbled mess.

All the best,

John

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On first blush, there doesn’t seem to be a difference between being “taken care of” and being “tended to.”

I submit it’s the difference between a Lamborghini and a Yugo.

Pretend you are at a restaurant and your server is “tending to you.” Now imagine you are at that same restaurant and that same server is “taking care of you.” Which scenario feels better?

To me, “tended to” feels like something is missing; “taken care of” feels complete.

This isn’t a critique on waiters and waitresses; it’s an observation on how we experience parts of ourselves.

Are you tending to your needs or are you being take care of?

I had an awakening experience over the summer that convinced me once and for all that there is a part of us that takes complete care of us. The feeling is indescribable and the experience is unmistakable. Everything is taken care of and nothing is missing.

The trick in getting to this experience is to stop tending to things.

That’s another way of saying, “Stop trying to figure everything out and discover the place where all the figuring has been done.”

When we “tend to things” we are attempting to exert conscious control over all possible contingencies. “We will figure it out” is our battle cry. That approach involves a lot of head noise that crowds out solutions.

We experience the part of us that takes care of us when we cede conscious control. In the religious world, this practice is commonly referred to as “Let go and let God.”

When we let go of the noise, we not only bathe in a sea of creativity, but also experience being totally taken care of. It’s a blissfully, reassuring experience that returns us to our conscious world with more ability to tend to things.

You don’t need more tending to; you have enough of that already. You need to be taken care of and that experience is closer than your next thought.

All the best,

John

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A good story has an arc – a beginning, a middle point and an ending. So it is with life.

I read somewhere that we all check out (die) in the middle of some story.

Reminds me of a story . . .

It was late September 2002. I was having a telephone conversation with my father and we were talking football. He was a lifelong Philadelphia Eagles fan and I’ve been a New England Patriots fan since the early 80s. I told him my team was going to the Superbowl that year and he scoffed. “How can you be so sure this early in the season?” I said, “It’s just a feeling.” He said he thought the Eagles would make the playoffs but thought they were a year or two away from the Superbowl.

The Patriots did go to the Superbowl that year and two years later the Eagles went too and, as luck would have it, so did the Patriots.

My Dad died less than a month after we had that conversation. He didn’t live to see either of our predictions come true. He died in the middle of an arc.

That didn’t prevent him from enjoying wherever he was on the arc. He was involved with something mentally and physically right up until he left us.

The arc is our life story. Within that story, we can choose where to focus – backward, forward or wherever we are right now. It’s the focus on our current position that brings us the most juice. Going backward and forward drains our energy and our joie de vivre goes down the drain.

If you’re watching a movie that has really captured your interest you know what it’s like to be absorbed in the moment. If, on the other hand, you stop to look at your watch and determine that the movie has been running for an hour and 50 minutes and it’s only 2 hours long, you suddenly discover that there are only 10 minutes left. You have checked out of the moment by putting your focus elsewhere and have ruined the experience.

Outside of death row residents, hardly anyone knows precisely how much time they have left. It seems a shame that too often we focus on where we’re not, bringing tension and pain to whatever time we do have left.

It’s true that we will leave this plane of existence in the middle of some arc. Doesn’t it make sense to forget about the time line and enjoy the only time we have – now?

I enjoyed that conversation with my father and he did too. Little did either of us know that soon his time would be through.

All the best,

John

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I’ve written and read enough about gratefulness that I wasn’t sure there was anything new to say, until this morning.

As we approach Thanksgiving in the U.S., we will express our thanks and gratitude in our traditional way. It got me to wondering about an incentive to do it with regularity past this one day.

We’ve heard all the benefits of being grateful, but I think one of them gets overlooked. It makes us feel good.

How many other ways are we attempting to feel good that have side effects? The list is long and getting longer.

Expressing gratitude makes us feel good every time and there aren’t any heebie-jeebies or hangovers attached.

If for no other reason, entertain gratitude because it makes you feel good. You can be selfish about it without any guilt.

The more gratitude you express, the better you feel.

Don’t be grateful for any esoteric reason, do it because it makes you feel good. “Be Selfish, Be Grateful” may not show up on a bumper sticker, but maybe it should, because it makes you feel good.

Entertain making gratitude a daily ritual. It can take less than a minute and the feel good results are instantly measurable.

Please pretend that I’m making this up and don’t take my word for it. Do this experiment: Quickly assess your current mental state, then bring to mind the things you are grateful for (little things, middle things and Mama & Papa Bear things). Do it for a minute or two. Then when you’re done, assess your mental state again. You will be able to directly measure how much better you feel.

If you need to feel good, interrupt the thing you normally do that has downside effects and practice being grateful. The result is this: You arrive at the same place without falling on your face.

All the best,

John

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“You’re not accountable for your thoughts, only accountable for your actions,” so said The Grasshopper this morning.

It’s amusing to me that we hold ourselves accountable over that which we have no control and avoid accountability over that which we do.

How often do you beat yourself up over thoughts you are having? That is a huge waste of energy and primes the pump of guilt.

I don’t know about you but I have all sorts of thoughts from A to Z run through my head – Appropriate to Zany, and everything in between. If I take time to castigate myself for having a thought, I keep that thought in place. The best remedy I’ve found for letting go of a thought before it attempts to make me accountable is this phrase: “I had that thought, now I’m having this one.”

This little mantra lets me focus on the process of thoughts rather than get bogged down with any undeserved guilt or shame.

There is no shame in having a thought; it can only become shameful if you act on it.

Back to accountability . . . How often do we justify our shameful actions? Just listen to any politician caught with his or her pants down or hand in the cookie jar. The accountability for their actions turns into a dance of denial. We do the same thing. We don’t want to be held accountable for our actions.

This approach goes against nature. Paraphrasing Newton, “For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction.” Or as the musical poet Smokey Robinson wrote, “No matter what you do or say, there is gonna’ come a day, ain’t nobody get away – dues got to pay some dues.”

You are paying dues to a union that doesn’t represent you if you’re holding yourself accountable for your thoughts. If you are avoiding accountability for your actions, the universe will collect your dues one way or the other.

Final thought: Before a thought turns into an action, we have the opportunity to choose. That’s accountability in action.

All the best,

John

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I have yet to become an aficionado of numerology but I can’t deny the power of numbers.

We, as a society, seem fixated on them.

12 shopping days ’til Christmas

2 minute warning

7 steps to (fill in the blank)

It seems we play some sort of numbers game until our number is up.

Conversely, I doubt a dog considers that he only has two Milk Bones left; numbers are a human phenomenon.

I will admit that numbers have the ability to get us to focus – “Sale ends in 1 hour.” But what escapes our focus is that we made numbers up. We created them, as we did language, to explain our experience.

There aren’t any words or numbers capable of explaining our experience, yet we make the effort every day. That’s being human.

There is a place where words and numbers don’t exist. It’s a sacred place where they are not allowed. In fact, if you think or utter a word or number there, you are immediately tossed out.

This place cannot be quantified or described. All efforts to do so are cheap gift shop replicas.

I’m going to use a word to describe this place – Quiet.

The land of Quiet has no measurable land mass, so we describe its terrain by another word – Infinity.

This infinitely quiet place is the birthplace of all new ideas that we inadequately use words and numbers to describe.

The moral of the story is we need not describe this place but only experience it. It’s the experience that we truly want, yet we keep it at arm’s length by attempting to describe and quantify.

If you forever stand on the side of a pool wondering what it feels like to be immersed in its thousands of gallons of wetness, you’ll talk about it but you’ll never own the experience.

I wish I could tell you that you’d feel 10 times greater if you jump in, but I can’t quantify an experience. I can only use feeble words to entice you towards your own experience of quiet.

I’d write more but the water slide is calling me.

All the best,

John

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I want to recommend something to you which is absolutely FREE.

The funny thing about this recommendation is: I rarely recommend something someone else has to offer. But this is an exception for an exceptional person and a transformational book that will change your life and it’s FREE.

The book is written by Jerry Stocking who’s been referred to as a modern day Thoreau and one of the few people I would entrust my mind to. He is the teacher’s teacher and his book will teach you how to fall in love with your mind.

The FREE E-book is called The Mind Relief Manuscript and you can find it at this link:

http://www.selfexploratorytools.com/MRM

You can read this book in less than a day and can practice its simple exercises in an eye blink. You will bring relief to your mind and a sense of well being to your body when you read The Mind Relief Manuscript.

I request that you download your FREE copy now at:

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Quoting Jerry, “The Mind Relief Manuscript is a bit like The Secret, except that it actually works.”

There is not a day that passes that I don’t use something I learned from Jerry. You can learn all about you when you read The
Mind Relief Manuscript.

Oh, by the way, did I mention it was FREE?

All the best

John

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The phrase “Know thyself” has been a guiding light since it was first uttered by Socrates. It serves as a reminder to discover more about ourselves, but which self?

Let’s pretend there are two selves – Thimble and Ocean.

Thimble is the one we spend the most time getting to know, and Ocean is the one that knows us.

Thimble has a small capacity; Ocean is unfathomable.

Thimble is the content of our head. We spend most of our time with very limited content expecting to make huge discoveries. The arithmetic doesn’t work. Staying inside our thimble is a time management problem. The more time we spend there, the fewer results we get.

Then when we can’t get results with our head, we may seek help from another and let them poke around our thimble. This, as you may expect, also has limited results.

We spend just about all our time attempting to know our thimble without exploring our depth.

It’s valuable to know our personality, preferences and patterns, but you can only go so deep in the inflatable pool known as our thimble.

Exploring the ocean will let us know more about the unknowable – ourselves.

You are deeper than a thimble, but you have to get out of your head to know this for sure.

One swim in the ocean may bring you back a thimbleful of information, but a daily dip will have you swimming in knowledge about you.

Here’s the rub: You can’t swim in the ocean if your thimble is full.

Here’s the answer to know more about you: Find a way to empty your thimble.

There are as many mind quieting practices as there are different styles of bathing suits; find one that fits you and start swimming in the ocean of self discovery.

All the best,

John

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