Daily Ramblings – Wisdom Wednesday – We Know So Little

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Attitudes, Beliefs, Cars, change, Detachment, Homes, Loved ones, Property, wisdom

“True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.” – Socrates

Each of us has an inner voice. Some call it conscience. It is that part of us that truly knows the difference between right and wrong. We all have access to it, but many refuse to listen. It’s that voice that guides us. The more you listen to that voice, the louder it becomes. When you ignore the voice, it dwindles until you can barely hear it.

I believe our conscience is necessary because it comes from a source unaffected by the change that occurs around us. We have adapted to the world we live in using the senses we have. These sense inputs create a map we need to survive. How accurate are they? Not so much. Our internal maps are only as good as the input we have received, which may have changed. People change. Environments change. We change. The internal maps inside us remain the same until we receive new inputs and those inputs cause our brains to adjust the map we use. When things change to quickly or without our knowledge, we are thrown into chaos.

The wisdom we gain over time, accepts that our internal maps are not reality, but a pseudo-reality that we need to make sense of the world. Wisdom tells us that what we think we know, we really don’t. It tells us that change occurs and we must expect it. It tells us that the map we have is inaccurate. This wisdom is comforting because it helps us realize that nothing is permanent in this world and if we are unattached to it, life becomes easier. We no longer fear losing something or losing someone because losing only applies when we are attached to something. Attachment in this case means we have an unhealthy relationship with physical things that will leave us. Attachment only causes suffering. Detachment frees us from wanting or needing. We are happy with what we have at the moment and will be just as happy if something changes in the next moment.

Wisdom tells us that the only things we can keep are those things we have earned inwardly. The love you have in your heart is yours forever. No one can take away your love for God, love for your significant other, love for your pet, love for your family, or love for yourself. The love you have is yours to keep forever.

Your car, your home, your loved ones, your pets, your job, your toys, and your life will all end. When your life ends, none of these things will go with you. The only things you will take with you are the experiences you have and the love you have in your heart.

Detachment is not an easy thing to achieve. Some consider it a heartless state. How can I not care about my husband or wife dying? How can I not care about losing my home in a tornado? The state of detachment is not a state of “not caring”. It is a state of balance. Losses and disappointments will cause the detached person to mourn. It is natural to mourn a negative situation. Detachment allows us to mourn a loss and then move on, without being stuck. It allows us to heal more quickly because the people, things, and experiences we “lost” were never really ours. If we never own something, can we truly be unhappy or sad when they leave us?

 

No. Detachment means we enjoy what we have to the fullest, while we have it. Then, when it comes time for something to leave our lives, we let it go. We move on. We move in a new direction. Detachment is the wisest state to be in when you are dealing with a physical reality in perpetual change.

I hope each of you has a terrific Wednesday! Thank you for reading this today!

Until next time…

Dave

 

 

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Daily Ramblings – Wisdom Wednesday – How to be wiser

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Brainstorming, Changing Viewpoints, decisions, Disassociate, family, Friends, journal, Learning from the past, wisdom

How to Be Wiser

Today’s Wisdom Wednesday post was inspired by an article I read over the weekend. It discusses how all of us can become wiser. Interestingly, it involves a few mind games you can utilize to invoke your inner wisdom.

The first step is to imagine you are advising a friend. Think about that. It is always easier for us to tell a friend what they should do if they ask us for advice. Why? Because we aren’t directly involved.

Another tactic you can use is imagine you are staring down at yourself from above. At the ground level you are blinded, you can only see what you see in front of you and behind you. You can’t see far enough ahead to see if something will actually deliver the best results when you make a decision. Now, imagine you are on top of a mountain and you can see what lies ahead. In this elevated position you can see what is up ahead.

You can also disassociate from yourself and make believe you are a friend giving you advice. When you are giving a friend advice, it is always easier and you will always provide them with better advice, then they could come up with on their own, because you can see their blind spots.

One technique I use is my journal. If you take the time to document what you are thinking about, including the decisions you make, you will find that you will see where you went wrong in the past. You can see the mistakes you made and avoid them in the future. By keeping a journal, you can review what went wrong and think about other solutions that were available at the time. You can ask questions like, why didn’t I do this instead? Or, you could see the options you were weighing at the time and see a better solution you can use in the future.

When you go back and review your journal, it mimics the suggestions in the article, How to be wiser (Hammond, 2017). When you are reviewing your journal, you can separate from yourself and become more objective.

Finally, you can brainstorm when you are tackling a new problem. You can write down all the potential solutions to a problem you have and weigh each one against the other. You can game out potential results with each solution you come up with. If you’re still stuck, you can take all of your brainstormed ideas and bounce them off a trusted friend or family member. In some cases, they may have already experienced what you have and may have a solution that worked for them.

Wisdom is gained over a lifetime. We can increase our wisdom by separating ourselves from our problems and attempt to view them from a higher vantage point. We can seek out advice from our friends and family. We can review our journal for previous problems we have faced and use the learning gained in our past and apply it to our present difficulties. Each of us has the ability to become wise and make better choices. We just have to become more aware of our circumstances and use all the tools that are available to us to make the best decision we can make with all the information at hand.

I hope all of you have a great Wednesday!

Until next time…

Dave

Reference

Hammond, C. (2017). How to be wiser. Retrieved from: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170124-how-to-be-wiser

Daily Ramblings – Wisdom Wednesday – Making Adjustments

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Adjustments, Learning, Learning from Others, New Plans, Tweaking, Unknown Unknowns, wisdom

Image by yogesh more from Pixabay

When it is obvious that I cannot reach the goals, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.–Confucius

Read more at Brainyquote.com

How many of you have set a goal, laid out the action steps, and found out you would not achieve the goal after beginning the work? (I raise my hand). This will not be a rare occurrence. The reason it will not be rare is that we are doing something we have not done before. We are traveling in uncharted territory. So what do we do? We take the learning that we have gained and re-apply that knowledge to the original plan and try it out. We continue this until we have achieved what we envisioned to be the goal.

Look at any art. Writing a book? Composing music? Painting a picture? If you take any artistic goal, you find that art is a series of improvements. You write the first draft. It’s ok, but needs a lot of work. The work is where the art is. You change a sentence here, move a paragraph there, change the title or order of your chapters to make your work more readable or fluid. This is yet another example of being flexible with your plans, knowing that you will make mistakes as you go. We make mistakes because we don’t know what we don’t know.

How can we avoid mistakes? Well, I think it’s impossible to avoid mistakes entirely. You can minimize mistakes by learning from others. There are many people on this planet and a lot of them who post tutorials, lessons, and other information that worked for them. Heck, right here on WordPress, you can find articles about anything. Some of them are terrific! For others you may have to find something on YouTube, an online course, or your local library.

You could use this as part of your plan to achieve a goal. Learn how to do what you want to do at some point. Let’s say you want to learn how to write a nonfiction book. You can find books, papers, classes all over the internet discussing this very topic. Fiction writing, writing poetry, or writing a short story are waiting for you to read, watch, and learn.

One of my bucket list items is to write a mobile app. I’m taking courses on Codecademy to learn the basics of programming. Then I can look for classes on mobile programming and I’m almost home. Then it’s just a matter of developing what I want to create for my mobile app and then learning the processes involved for submitting my app to the iTunes and Google Play stores. I haven’t looked yet, but know there are courses and tutorials available for this thing.

If you have your goal set in your mind, the pieces of the puzzle you need to complete that picture are waiting for you. Remember that you will make mistakes. That’s ok. It’s all part of learning how to do something. Once you know how to do something you can do the work and bring it home.

Well, that’s it for today, folks. I hope some of you enjoy this. If you have any stories to tell about how you found out how to do something, post a link here.

As always, have a great Wednesday!

Until next time…

Dave

Daily Ramblings – Wisdom Wednesday – Awareness

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Aeschylus, Awareness, Hump Day, Intuition, Learning, Wednesday, wisdom

“He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” — Aeschylus

Credit: Brainyquote

Today’s Wednesday Wisdom is about learning and growth. Look back over your life for a few minutes today. Think about the time you grew the most, learned the most, or made a life-changing decision. I bet these were times of great pain and suffering.

I don’t know why, but these times, although unendurable at the time, are the times we grow the most. The point this quote makes is that it is impossible to grow or learn when things are easy. When things are easy, the human mind likes to live in its repetitiveness. Why change? Everything is wired, and the brain loves repetition. Then–BAM!! You get blindsided.

The blindside could be a financial problem, a friend or loved one that betrays you, your job goes away, or any number of disasters. Immediately you go into “scramble mode”. At these times of high stress and trouble we become very creative. We reach out to friends, we read, we do Internet searches, anything we can to find potential solutions to our pain. It is these times that we truly grow.

We learn the things we did or didn’t do that caused our problem. Sometimes we learn that the things we just lost weren’t that important to begin with. Maybe the relationship you were in was on its way out months or even years ago and you’ve held onto it, even though in your “heart of hearts” you knew it wasn’t working for you or them and neither of you could drum up the courage to end it. Maybe you lose your job, again, knowing the company was having financial problems and ignoring the signs. You see, we ignore these signals because our brains want things to stay the way we are. As human beings, we just don’t like change, even though some changes are needed. We just let things go to maintain the status quo, only to discover that they will change anyway—normally at the worst time possible.

None of us want pain in our lives. None of us want change, but life tends to have a way of forcing change, even if we don’t want it. We get sick because we don’t want to change our diet or exercise. We get blindsided by a layoff when we knew we should have started looking for a new job months ago. We knew our significant other wasn’t really into us anymore but stuck around, anyway.

The pain we suffer results from our attachment to the status quo. We like things the way they are and we don’t want them to change, even if the change is happening right before our eyes. So why not make the change ahead of time? It’s hard. We are so good at telling ourselves lies and procrastinating. So what do we do?

The only advice I can give is to be decisive, ask the hard questions, learn what the right thing is and do it. You know when you’re putting on weight, your job isn’t working out, or even a relationship that isn’t fulfilling anymore. You feel it in your bones. You just know. We all have this intuition. We also get warning signs in advance of a real disaster.

These warning signs normally start out as gut feelings. Something isn’t right, but you can’t put your finger on it. Then they elevate. They become more blatant. Now you know something isn’t right but you still avoid doing something. Then, it’s a baseball bat to the head or a kick in the gut. You guessed it. You got blindsided again.

Pay attention to these intuitions. They are not crazy or paranoid. We all get them. It’s important to act on these intuitions, even if it is just looking for more information to test them out. Do not ignore them. I’ve learned this hard lesson so many times and it took so many disasters before I woke up and figured it out.

Now I pay attention to all of them. If something happens that doesn’t make sense or I get the feeling that something is going sideways, I immediately begin digging and looking to verify whether this is something real or my imagination is just overactive. More times than not, the intuition is right. By acting on these intuitions we can avoid a lot of pain and suffering. Being blindsided is no fun. It is better to avoid bad situations by circumventing them now instead of letting them fester.

Well, that’s it for today, folks. I hope all of you have a terrific Wednesday.

Until next time…

Dave

Daily Ramblings – Wisdom Wednesday – Special Moments

Tags

Listening, Love, memories, Selflessness, Special Moments, Treasures, wisdom

Image by Candace Hunter from Pixabay 

I often ponder certain periods of my life. How did I end up where I am? Why did I learn the things I did in this life so far? What were the turning points? What moments are the most memorable?

When I think about my life’s most memorable moments I remember my wedding, some of my birthdays, graduating from college, retiring from the Army, and so many other things. The most memorable and important moments are those moments where someone was kind, giving, loving.

I remember the birthday presents and Christmas gifts my family sent to me when I was abroad. I remember the letters my late Grandma wrote. You know a gift from a lady that barely had enough to live on was something I will never forget. It warms my heart to think of those moments.

Then there are the family board games, playing Scrabble with my Mom and Grandma. Thanksgiving dinners. Christmas day. My first surprise birthday party thrown by my wife. The moments that stick with me the most are those that you can’t buy. These moments are the ones that really count.

Our lives are so busy. We work, we run errands; we pay our bills, and on it goes. It’s the little moments when someone shows us kindness or expresses their love for us. It isn’t the words “I love you”, but the acts that show that love. I still tear up when I think of some of these special moments in my life.

Today, even if it’s only a few minutes. Take that time to think about your special moments. The times someone smiled at you, helped you with something, spent time with you and just listened to what you had to say. These moments will carry you through the tough times. They will warm your heart when you lay in bed at night waiting for sleep to arrive. They will make you smile as you do your daily work. These moments when someone gave you their time or did something for you with no expectation or demand. They just did something that touched your heart.

These are the moments that hang on. These are the moments you take with you wherever you go. These are the moments that leave their mark. I love thinking about my special moments. They make me laugh. They make me cry. They make me feel loved.

Ah, these special moments that we carry with us. They are like the patchwork of a quilt, each one unique and contributing to the whole. Hold on to these special moments. They are a treasure that continues to hold its sparkle.

Until next time…

Dave

Daily Ramblings – Spiritual Saturday – Experience

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Albert Einstein, Experience, Getting out there, Learning, Living, Spiritual, wisdom

“The only source of knowledge is experience.” – Albert Einstein

Quote provided by: Brainyquote.com

Read about any sport. Now go play the sport you read about. Huge difference right? This is what Albert is referring to. Albert Einstein is well known for his thought experiments but also for his prowess in Math and Physics.

Look at anyone who is gifted in a particular area. All of them practice. All of them do. They gain knowledge of their sport, their gift, or their talent by learning how to do it themselves. Look at any sports hero you admire. Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan started out just as ignorant as the rest of the folks who ever picked up a baseball bat or basketball.

I don’t care what field of study or endeavor you look at. Every person has to start out as a beginner and work there way to expert. Some read about what they need to know to accomplish something, others learn from a coach or mentor, some just grit through it and learn on their own.

Think back to a time you learned to ride a bike, drive a car, or learned how to operate a cash register in your first job. Someone told you how to do it, then they showed you how to do it, and then they let you do it. It took a little time, but you learned. With time, you can now ride a bike, drive a car, and operate a computer or some other complicated machine with ease.

We learn all kinds of things through experience. We learn how to ask a girl out on a date. We learn what it means to be nice or polite. We learn how important it is to keep our commitments to other people. Some of this learning is through trial and error. We ask a girl out on a date and totally flub it up. Then we ask out another girl and it goes a little better. We learn what to say. We learn how to react to the responses a girl gives.

Sometimes experience isn’t so nice. Think about a time you committed to something and couldn’t keep your promise. The person we made the commitment to is upset with us and we feel guilty. We learn that we need to be more careful when committing to something because breaking that commitment hurts worse than the disappointment someone expresses when we tell them we can’t do this or that.

There are so many experiences in a lifetime. All of them teach us something about ourselves and other people. We learn all the time if we pay attention. We learn more if we are willing to get out there and do something. Life is about gaining experience. We need experience to grow. We need to learn what to do and what not to do. Through experience we gain wisdom.

I hope each of you has a great Saturday! The weatherman predicts thunderstorms today. Today will be a day of reading, writing, gaming, and catching a series or movie in the den with Dad. What are you doing today?

Until next time…

Dave

Daily Ramblings – Wisdom Wednesday – Adjusting to a New Home

Tags

Adjusting, change, Improvising, Learning, Overcoming, Solving Problems, wisdom

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay 

Today’s image is a great segue into my topic for today. Sometimes we wake up and realize the tools we are using to negotiate our lives are no longer effective. We are literally trying to fix our watch with a crescent wrench. This is a sign that something has changed internally.

Have you ever woken up feeling like you are in a different place, confused, and disoriented? I have been in this state for a good few weeks. It’s like the feeling you have when you move to a new city or state. You new surroundings excite you, but you still feel you are in limbo. You have yet to make new friends and still depending on your phone to get you to the grocer, the gas station, the post office, and many places commonplace in your previous home.

When these changes occur internally, they can be disconcerting. You feel you need to do something different or more. You feel out of place in your own home, neighborhood, and town. It’s hard to describe.

I was doing some research on this and found my answer. The answer is to just be. Changes occur around us all the time. We get nudged to change our routine, change our diet, change our workouts. We get nudged to change jobs, change locales, and change our associations. This is all about the mission you have in this lifetime.

My religion discusses this phenomenon in great detail. Soul, the real you, decides what it wants to learn in this lifetime before it arrives here and takes a human body. It decides what experiences it will have in this lifetime. Sometimes soul needs to experience poverty or riches, health and sickness, ecstasy and horror. These make up the fabric of the life it chooses.

The best solution to the feelings I have been having is to reexamine my goals, set up new ones, get a good plan together to accomplish these things, and execute. By doing this, you can adjust to the internal changes that have taken place and help the physical catch up with the spiritual. This happens all the time.

There is a quote from Jewish scripture that is appropriate here. The quote is: “As above, so below.” This suggests that we have an internal or spiritual life with a physical life in the human body. When soul makes a gain spiritually, the physical or human body has to play catch up. The way to do this is to reexamine how you are doing things and make adjustments to them to be in alignment with the new home soul has found for itself.

I realize that today’s post may be a little “out there”, but my spiritual path has never steered me wrong, just like your religion of Christianity, Buddhism, or Islam has never steered you wrong. Each of us is in the religious path we need to achieve what we need to achieve in this lifetime.

For now, I need to be patient, remain cognizant of any inner nudges that come my way, and be patient. Everything is in its rightful place in the worlds of God and God never gives us a problem we cannot solve.

To summarize. If you ever get the “feeling” like your out of place or something is not right, realize that Soul has found a new home or place to explore in the inner worlds. This feeling is a sign that you are growing. Rejoice. This is a good thing. We need to grow and experience and learn. The process of improvement and getting better never ceases. You may rest awhile here and there but the drive to improve our circumstances never stops.

I hope each of you has a terrific Wednesday! I’m off to do some chores around the house and get in a workout later today.

Until next time…

Dave

Daily Ramblings – Wisdom Wednesday – Arthur Ashe

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Arthur Ashe, Learning, Making Mistakes, moving forward, Perfecting, Self-doubt, The Journey, wisdom

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” – Arthur Ashe

I don’t know about you, but I am always doubting what I do. Is it good enough? Is it right? Will people like it?

When I was younger, I played Dungeons and Dragons with my friends. If you are not familiar with the game, it allows players to create their own fantasy worlds where players go on adventures, rescue damsels in distress, fight dragons, and other creatures commonly found in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. For the game to work, you need a Dungeon Master (DM) who creates a world, the adventures the players will embark on, and acts like a judge when game play needs an outside advocate. I enjoyed writing the stories and creating these worlds. It was great fun getting the feedback from the players that were part of my game and watching them enjoy spending time in my world.

Jump ahead 30 years and I am in a doctoral program specializing in Information Technology. In the 13 years I was in the program I was writing 10-25 page papers every week. Needless to say, writing has been something I figured I would be good at, since I finished my doctoral program with a 4.0 grade average. I also realize that at some point I will be too old to work any type of job that requires manual labor or something as physically taxing as my service in the military. So, here I am, writing on this blog, working on books, and starting to figure out how to publish various essays I come up with to Medium.

The point I am trying to make is that regardless of what or who you want to be, what goals you want to achieve, or where you want to go in life, you have to start somewhere. Like the quote says, you have to begin with whatever you have at the time. This is wise advice because you will never be good at anything you try until you begin doing it. If you pay attention, you will run across people who will give you feedback. You will learn from other people who have already done what you are trying to do.

So you start doing and learning and doing some more. Then one day you figure out that you really don’t want to pay the price that this “thing” requires of you. That’s ok. Set your sails for a different shore. Try something else. It is the doing in life that brings rewards, not just the winning. Once you’ve won, it’s over. Once you accomplish a goal, it’s done. Now it’s off to the next adventure.

Every person you can think of that has made a big dent in this world, started somewhere. They either didn’t know what to do or doubted themselves. They started. They committed. They gave it their best shot. If you never start or take a risk you will never accomplish anything worth accomplishing. Keep plodding forward. It will be worth every step.

Until next time…

Dave

Daily Ramblings – Wednesday Wisdom – Attached to Suffering

Tags

Advertising, Attachment, Buddha, Marketing, News, social media, Suffering, wisdom

“Attachment is the source of all suffering” – The Buddha

Is there something in your life that you do not like? Does your job suck? Are you not making enough money? Are your relationships toxic? Are you unsatisfied with your image in the mirror? Final question: Why?

In most cases we have what we need. We may not have what we want, but we have what we need. We have a place to lay our heads at night; we have enough food to eat, and we have some means of making a living. Why are so many people suffering?

We suffer because we are resisting change. We resist changes to our body as we age. We resist changes to our employment when it’s time to move on. We resist changes in our relationships (i.e. it’s time to move on or accept that we weren’t right for the person who left us).

I used to suffer. I used to suffer from want and need. Then, I ran across this quote above and decided that I should change my mindset. I took a few times to understand this. Greed caused my two bankruptcies. I wanted things I could not afford and borrowed more than I should have to get the things I wanted, which today, I don’t even own.

Why do we buy things? Because we are unsatisfied. We are missing something. Both feelings come from being bombarded by marketers who are fighting for our attention and money. They show us pictures and videos of things we should have, places we should go, the diet we should be on, the food we should eat, the supplements we should take, the deals we’re missing out on. All this advertising has a huge effect on our psyches. It is constant, persistent, and all-encompassing. If you think this does not impact you, think again.

How do we avoid it? We can avoid social media, we can avoid the news, and we can avoid mindless surfing of the web. We can choose the sources of information we use and get rid of the rest. I enjoy social media but only spurts. I’m literally on social media for a few minutes in the morning and the evening. The same goes for the news. I scan the news for about 10 minutes in the morning while I enjoy my first cup of coffee. The rest of the day I am spending my time on the tasks that are important to me: Reading, Writing, Programming, Meditation, and Exercise. These are my Big 5. Everything else is secondary.

We can also develop a sense of gratitude and thankfulness. It takes time to develop this habit because we are told constantly that we don’t have enough and told we aren’t enough. We are missing something that the couple in an advertisement has. That couple by the way aren’t a couple, their bodies aren’t that perfect but photo-shopped, and that sailboat they are on is not theirs. It’s all made up. It’s all designed to make you feel you are missing something. If they convince you that you are, you just bought what they are selling or something like it to fill in this “make believe” gap in your life. A gap that isn’t even real. Do you understand how insidious this is?

Look, don’t get me wrong. I understand that marketing and advertising is needed. They tell us what is out there in case we are looking. What I’m describing is the effect these advertisements have on us and why they are so harmful. They create the suffering the Buddha talks about. We become attached to the idea that we don’t have enough; we aren’t enough, and the only way to fix us is to pursue more money, more things, which require us to work harder and harder to pay off the bills we keep adding to. It is a vicious cycle that most people never, ever get out of.

If you are tired of feeling crappy all the time, tired of running subconsciously on a rodent’s exercise wheel, take charge of yourself and your life. Take time to take inventory of what you have and express thanks for your life, your health, your family, your place of residence, and the job you have. None of them are perfect, but they are yours. You really don’t need another pair of shoes, a brand-new car, a new sound system for your home, or yet another bottle of protein or some powdered meal that will sit in your cupboard for the next year and gather dust.

Life is good. Be grateful for all you have. End your suffering by detaching from ideas and things, realizing that it will all change. It will change because everything in this life does. We change, our things change, our attitudes change, our ideas change, our relationships change. If you become detached, change is variety. Change is refreshing. Change is exciting.

Until next time…

Dave

Daily Ramblings – Wisdom Wednesday – The Simple Things

Tags

Peace, Reading, rituals, Simple Things, solitude, Tranquility, wisdom, Writing

“The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.”―Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

I took quite a few years to realize the wisdom Paulo Coelho refers to in this quote. Like, all young men, I sought fame, glory, and riches. I had a terrific military career in the Army, spanning 20 years. When I retired, I transitioned into technical recruiting, my second career. This career was very lucrative and set me up for an early retirement. Now I am pursuing a third career in writing, teaching, and writing programs for the web and mobile devices.

I enjoyed making a lot of money but discovered it was empty, at least for me. When my Dad’s illness kicked in, I returned home to help my folks. My days are simple, yet productive. I work through my daily routine, enjoy a few cups of coffee and good meals (I love to cook), and really enjoy the solitude and peacefulness that accompany my morning journaling. During the winter months it is even more special because the warmth of my coffee is a stark contrast to the cold on the other side of my living room window.

I used to use a desktop computer only for my work. Now I find my laptop to be a better companion. It allows me to enjoy different parts of my home as I work through my daily rituals. My core activities are exercise, meditation, journaling, working on my book projects, and working through various online courses, pursuing my varied areas of interest. I take my laptop everywhere, especially the coffee shops I enjoy going to.

My life is simple but rich. I take comfort in my routines and my little joys. I enjoy a warm cup of coffee in the morning. I enjoy the peace that accompanies my writing. I am engaged when I am learning new coding techniques and other topics. One of my greatest joys is relaxing while I read. Reading is a true joy, particularly when I am learning something new, or engrossed in a story.

When you slow down, you notice the little things that make life a grand experience. Petting the family dog, eating a meal with your family, conversations in the morning over coffee, looking at the snow, and enjoying those moments you realize how terrific life is. The simple things in life are the things that make life worth living.

Until next time…

Dave