Monday mindfulness Minute: "Has It ever Occurred to You That You Might Be Wrong?"

Five years ago, I would have been insulted if you had asked me this question or even insinuated that I could be wrong about anything. The double whammy of growing up as an only child and being Valedictorian in high school firmly lodged the belief that I was always right deep into my psyche. As it turns out, the "skill" of memorizing and regurgitating information is far from the insanity of trying to predict the future, which is what the mind seems most preoccupied with these days.

The more I watch, the more I see that my mind is consistently and predictably wrong about the weather, what others will do, why they do what they do, whether the plan is going to work out, how long traffic is going to take, how people are going to react, whether there will be rotissere chickens left at the grocery story, whether it's going to rain 4 and a half weeks from now when I'm on vacation, why that person did what they did 3 years ago, where I would be now if I had done something different 2 years ago, how a friendship will turn out, whether the sore throat will turn out to be the first signs of a debilitating disease, and on and on and on and on.

To be fair to the mind, it's doing the best with what it has, which is a limited set of data comprised of our past experiences. It then takes this data, which is statistically insignificant in the grand scheme of everything that is happening everywhere, and comes up with an "educated" guess about what's going to happen next. The issue is not that the mind thinks, as this abstract thinking serves as the foundation for some of our greatest human discoveries, but that we take these guesses and turn them into convictions about ourselves, our lives, and (most dangerously) others. We become convicts trapped inside the limited confines of our minds when we automatically believe the first thing that comes to mind.

It turns out that “Has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong?” is not an insult but a lifeline. Asking ourselves this question, repeatedly and especially when we are convinced we are right, might be the leverage we need to crack the prison of our mind open to find our freedom beyond the endless thoughts of assumption that leave us closed to learning anything new.

I think the boy in "The Boy, The Mole, The Fox, and The Horse" is onto something when he asks, "Is there a school of unlearning?" The classroom of unlearning is in session each day. If we dare to show up, we will learn to pause for a second to consider that we don't know and to embrace curiosity over certainty, asking over telling, and love over judgement.

Monday Mindfulness Minute: Welp, back to Reality...

“That was an awesome trip! I can’t believe we rode 17 dolphins, drank 96 pina coladas, and saw a man blow up a condom to put on his head during a magic show.”

“Same, I just felt so alive and happy the whole time. I’m so glad we took time to get away.”

“Me too! But it's back to reality now (heavy, dramatic sigh).”

We have all been there. We experience an exciting “get away” where we seem to unplug from the world and find the peace, happiness, and contentment that somehow elude us day to day, and we dread returning to the grind of work that seems to be the exact opposite of what we want to do. On a smaller scale, this is something most of us experience every Monday morning as the number of "welp, it's back to reality" and "the weekend just wasn't long enough" pile up because of the internal monologue that convinces us we would be happy if we were doing something different somewhere else.

Our current reality has somehow morphed into a cycle of working 5 days of reality to get 2 days of "peace" and working 49 weeks a year to get 3 weeks of PTO. I'm not a math major, but that math doesn't add up. And I've lived this type of "life." Except for me, my reality was that I only enjoyed a few hours each week on Friday Night when I was in the sweet spot of being glad the weekend had arrived but was also far enough from it being over (which I immediately started fretting come Saturday morning - "Only a few more hours of freedom before it's back to the grind"). It's not a fun reality.

The reality is that the average person will experience (really dread) 4,004 Mondays in their lifetime. It's time for us to reclaim Monday as a day of celebration, where we return to reality and focus not on what the mind tells us should be different, but on learning to appreciate the joy of everything real in the here and now (yes, this even includes the less-than-ideal Mondays). As Neal Allen says in his book "Better Days Ahead,"

"Check yourself right now. Do you need anything? I mean right now, in your chair or on your bed as you read this sentence. Not in an hour, right now. I can promise you the answer is no, you don't need anything this second... Right this moment you are protected from the weather, you aren't starving, and you aren't being mugged at gunpoint. Your needs are being met. For everybody in civilized society, this fact of not needing anything is true for about 99.9% of the conscious moments of our lives. And yet instead of recognizing that we're 99.9% satisfied, we complain that life is constantly letting us down." p. 65-66

The good news is that if we slow down, we'll see that the happiness, contentment, ease, peace, joy, and excitement that we think are only found on Saturday and Sunday or during vacation on some exotic island, aren't outside things at all. These are all emotions that are alive inside of us and that we can cultivate moment to moment. Does this mean that we'll never again have an awful Monday where nothing goes right, we're tired, and we want to be anywhere other than the office? No! But it does mean that even on those days we will be invited back to reality that even on our worst days, there is still 99.9% of satisfaction that we can look for. Find it!

Monday mindfulness Minute: Sharpen Your Axe

Once upon a time, there was a blacksmith who spent his days sharpening axes in a small village. This blacksmith was fortunate because he not only sharpened axes for sale, but he also spent any extra time he had sharpening a special axe that had been passed down through his family. But the more he sharpened, the worse he felt. He reached a point where he hated sharpening axes.

So one day, after months of throwing the idea around, he decides to go off on his own with nothing but a few items and his sharpened axe.

After wandering for a few days, he happens upon a band of tree cutters who make their living harvesting trees. They ask if he wants to join in, and he says, “Sure, but I’ve never done anything like this.” So they say step right up and offer him an axe.

As he steps up, he starts to hear a few folks in the crowd murmuring that he has no shot at this. “How could he possibly cut a tree down if he’s never done it before?” they all say. Hearing their doubts, he second-guesses himself and says, “You’re right, I’ve never cut down a tree, so how could I possibly do it?”

Hearing this, and sensing his self-doubt, one of the elders of the group walks over and says, “Just give it a shot. What’s the worst that can happen? You aren’t able to cut it down? Once you know this, you’ll have crossed one more thing off your list on your way to discovering your purpose here.”

The blacksmith contemplates this for a second and feels a strange energy inside. The elder says, “Somebody get this man an axe,” but the man explains how he already has one. “So which tree am I cutting down?” the blacksmith asks. The elder points to a tree that appears to the man to be 30 feet tall and 10 feet around. Trying to control his nerves, the man steps up to the tree.

He lifts the axe, and with the first swing, the axe glides through the timber, and the tree falls. The sound of the tree hitting the earth isn’t loud enough to overcome the gasps from the crowd.

Amazed, the man slowly backs away into the waiting arms of the astonished crowd. “So how did you manage to do that?” one person shouts. Another shouts, “We’ve found the messiah! A true superhero right here on earth.” The man tries to tell him the story of the axe being passed down and his days of sharpening when no one was looking but the crowd excitedly ignored that part of the legend. They wanted to see another “miracle.”