Consistency

I stopped posting my blog for a few months. I had some setbacks. I could blame it on external events outside my control, like processing 10/7 and the world’s response to it… but isn’t this what I’ve been working on? Isn’t this what I’ve been training for?

Being ready. Calm. Aware.

As my favorite Beatles song goes… “I look at the world and I notice it’s turning, while my guitar gently weeps”

Am I looking? Am I noticing/aware? Am I weeping? Am I playing a sad song? All of the above?

“with every mistake, you must surely be learning”

Why haven’t I felt like sharing? Because I feel like a fraud. I have lost my temper. I have not been calm/strong. I have been weak and angry and all the things I don’t want to be anymore.

But isn’t that point? “Still, my guitar gently weeps.”. Life goes on. There is no perfect me. There is only the present me. Perfect me exists in the past and the future and on social media. It’s a lie. It’s me in a mask. No one can live up to perfect me. Especially me.

So… what have I been up to?

I keep on reading. I keep on writing in my journal. My wife and I attended a “Gottman” marriage workshop. I continued my morning routine. I have not given up on lifelong learning. I spent some time with a dear friend who is a Yogi and leads an incredible wellness and mindfulness practice. It’s amazing what finds me when I’m open to change, open-minded. I joined a men’s group to practice vulnerability in a real way. I paid money for a world class mobility program. I am finding what works for me. None of this have I done with much consistency, but I’m ok with that.

I am re-thinking what I want Calm is Strong to be.

I don’t want it to be a book club so I removed the below words from the “About” section of the website.

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I found Ryan Holiday, Donald Robertson and Stoicism. Except for a 101 class in college, I had never studied philosophy. I asked my friends who were into Buddhism to recommend their favorite books. I read The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. I listened to Jay Shetty’s Think Like a Monk which led me to other spiritual thinkers like Thich Nhat Hanh and Ram Dass. Psychologists like Victor Frankl, Edith Eger, David Hawkins, Mary O’Malley, Susan Cain, Angela Duckworth, and Nicole LePera. Greg McKeown, Cal Newport, Naval Ravikant, Stephen West’s podcast Philosophize This!, Ikagai. Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom has become my daily reader… the world is full of amazing thinkers and healers, past and present.

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I started a Facebook page to go with the Instragram and X/Twitter accounts.

I’m ok with this inconsistency. I’m ideating. More to come.