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Slow Down and Play in the Dirt

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I didn’t think it was possible to get sunburned in February in the Pacific Northwest. And I hear the weather is awful on the East Coast right now. Something about minus forty? Ninety inches of snow? Winterpocalypse?

I just spent the day working on a friend’s farm on the outskirts of town in Portland. We were digging, hoeing, broad-forking (I can’t believe I had never seen this before — basically a two-foot wide, full-body pitchfork) the beds that are going to be enclosed in hoop houses this season. It was 60 and sunny. Sorry East Coast friends. I got sunburned.

It felt so good to be out working in a field (Did you hear about the scarecrow who won the award? He was out standing in his field). I haven’t done this for too long. I farmed in Italy for a half-year way back when, and I was part of a super rad collective garden in Seattle. I also grew up on a family farm in Vermont, but that mostly consisted of chasing goats and chewing on sticks.

So, I miss the dirt. Don’t get me wrong, the city is great. But there is something so natural and healthy about being on a farm. Being near animals, being away from technology, getting dirt under my fingernails, doing some hard work. Finding worms! And snakes! We brought the cat out to where we were working, and in less than fifteen minutes he had caught a mouse. How right is that?

Yeah okay, so I was out there for like a half-day. Six hours or something. I can’t really talk about how slow it felt, or how great farm life is, or any of that. It was a nice one day activity, not a lifestyle I went and tried out. I’ve done things like that before, though, and it reminded me of the wonderful slowness of life out of the city. Stimulation underload. Things can only happen as fast as our bodies can make them happen. And don’t think that I’m saying slow is easy — part of why the work is slow is because it is so hard.

Did I mention that they have goats? Maybe this is from my early childhood nostalgia, or maybe it’s a more universal thing, but goats are just the best. Oh man. They’re so funny. Smarter than sheep, who are friendly but not very interactive. Dumber than pigs, who are too smart for their own good and know something is fishy with the fact that they’re fenced off and you’re not. Goats are just right. Silly and playful, but without making you question your livelihood.

It also felt really wonderful, after doing so much solo work on my laptop recently, to be doing physical labor in a group. Teamwork is the best. So much more gets done. Being in a situation that’s either a bit stressful or a bit difficult for everybody makes group bonding happen that much faster. This is also why group backpacking adventures are so wonderful.

And there will be vegetables! Let’s not forget about the eventual rewards of all this work. I’ve been reading “A Slight Edge” recently, which talks all about doing small positive disciplines over time to reap a reward in the future. This applies to all aspects of our lives, from health and exercise to relationships, work, and skill acquisition. Plant, cultivate, harvest. In our day-to-day live, we’re always wanting to jump straight from planting to harvesting, skipping over the long intermediate period of getting good at something and developing a relationship with it.

Getting into the soil forces the “cultivate” on us. No matter how much work we put into those fields, nothing is going to make there be vegetables tomorrow, or next week. It locks us into the natural rhythm of things, which we’ve otherwise eliminated from our normal lives. Most things happen slowly, seasonally, and only with continued effort. There is a long period of working without results before they start to trickle in. 

This life demands patience. It is a beautiful thing. If we can simultaneously cultivate both patience and determined effort, we can achieve anything. One without the other will either leave us stressed and pushing too hard or complacent and waiting for life to happen to us. But sometimes we’ve just got to get out to play in the dirt.

Small Steps to Big Changes

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We live in a world where information is available at the click of a button, where the news cycle is 24/7, and where we can get any kind of entertainment we want at the speed of Comcast. How cool is that? (Except for the Comcast thing, those guys suck.)

The more we experience it, the more instant gratification becomes expected. In 2015, it is the norm. If something doesn’t happen right away, we get pissed. Even the microwave seems to take too long.

Here’s the thing (there’s always a thing): this is all consumption. We are ravenous consumers. We can devour intricately designed movies, glance at a painting in a gallery for a few seconds and think we know what it’s about, eat a fully-prepared meal in five minutes or less.

Creation, as opposed to consumption, works on a completely different time scale. I’ve written this before, but good work takes time. Almost anything worth actually making requires patience and persistence.

That movie you watched for two hours, then forgot about? Look at how many people are in the credits. That thing took forever to make. The painting you glanced at in the gallery? It probably took dozens or hundreds of hours to create. The old masters would spend months perfecting a painting. That meal you scarfed down? It might have shown up quickly on your plate, but it is the product of a long line delicate processes, not to mention having actually grown from the ground (we hope). 

Okay, so we all should appreciate the things around us more. Big deal. What I am trying to point to here is that these things only exist because people are willing to put long hours into making them, and that is a worthy endeavor.

But it can be so daunting to try to create something big. Writing a book? That’s 50,000 words! If you think about how long it takes to write 500 or 1,000 words, you’ll come up with a large number of hours to write the whole thing. That number will stare you in the face, paralyze you, and keep you from even getting started. The medusa of creativity.

Nothing is created overnight, especially not books or paintings or fresh vegetables. They are created over a long period of time through consistent, dedicated effort. There is nothing that requires being a genius or having superhuman traits to make this happen. Sure, maybe being a genius means you can write the book in a medium period of time through consistent, dedicated effort. But still not overnight.

I’ve been experiencing this whole-hog the last few months. I’ve been gradually chipping away at some big projects, with practically nothing tangible to show for it. I was working on my book, which is currently tucked away in my computer. I’m working on my book proposal, which is how you find an agent to sell the book. I’ve been working on my business teaching meditation to offices in Portland. I’ve been building two websites, one for the business, and this one. I’ve been learning how to do all these things, because I’m not an expert in any of them.

And even since finishing the book, I’ve been writing every day. I’ve put up a few new blog posts in the last couple weeks, but mostly I’ve been working on longer pieces to publish on my website as e-guides. None of them are finished. I still don’t have anything tangible to show for it.

But that’s okay. I’m getting close. All these projects are slowly becoming more and more real. They are all a small step closer to completion each day. Each one is a big project on its own, and doing them all together means they all take longer. I’m okay with that. My writing will be on slow burn for the rest of my life. If I continue to write 1,000 words a day, and maybe half of them are usable, that’s the equivalent of writing thirty books in the next ten years. THIRTY BOOKS.

Of course there are reasons I almost definitely won’t have thirty books published in the next ten years, but that’s not the point. I never knew whether I’d be able to write one or two books in my lifetime. Now I know exactly how to write as many as I want.

It doesn’t have to be writing. This can be anything we love. Art, music, fitness, building furniture, reading, knitting, anything. The reason we don’t get really good at things or produce vast quantities of high-quality material is that we don’t stick with them long enough. We get distracted or bored. We find something else to do. Anything we make into a daily practice is something we can perfect and make special in our lives. Here is a guy who played ping-pong every day for a year.

It doesn’t have to be something we’re already good at. It doesn’t have to be something we have already been taught. It can be something we never thought we could do. I never considered myself a writer. I was always into science and math, not English. Now that I’m writing every day, it doesn’t make sense to call myself anything but a writer. If I keep up the practice and continue to strive and improve, eventually I’ll even make a living doing it. But that won’t happen until most of the hard, slow, dedicated work is already done. Until I’ve been writing every day for ages, and it seems like second nature.

What do you dream of accomplishing? What do you wish you could do, but never thought you could? Well, that dream is not going to come true overnight. But it absolutely, one-hundred percent, can come true with slow, consistent practice. The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is today. Better get started!

Great housemates!

Six House Rules To Live By

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At my old house in Seattle, my roommates and I decided to make some house rules to help us build community and live intentionally. At first, these were straight-forward, kind of silly things. No Facebook. No internet at home (easy, because we didn’t have internet). No drunk texting/emailing exes (we had elaborate rationale about how calling was fine, just not the passive-ness and permanent-ness of texting). Eat a lot of beans. Okay, this might not have been an actual rule, but it was a fundamental principle the house was built on.

Needless to say, we had a good time with it. Breaking a rule meant a dollar in the jar, to be spent at some future date on something fun for the house. We gradually acquired more and more rules, but eventually started to realize that while these highly-specific stipulations were fun and good for building community, they weren’t helping us to do better or live more fully (except No Internet at Home – that rule was the best!). Instead, we decided to set positive intentions for how we ought to live our lives.

Experience New Things

Well, this seems obvious. Except that a lot of the time it’s not. Often when we’re deep in our routine, we need special impetus to go out and experience something new. Whether it’s an art walk, a basketball game, joining a kickball team (this is a popular thing in the Northwest), or just going for a walk in a new neighborhood, we need to keep it fresh. One of the major advantages of living in a city is that there are more new things to do than can be done in a lifetime. Not to mention getting out of the city, which is wonderful. But even in a smaller place, there is always new experience to be had. This goes hand-in-hand with always learning and generally being a curious, creative person.

Meet New People

Along the lines on experiencing new things, we can always be meeting new people. We don’t have to become best friends with everyone we meet, but we need to keep putting ourselves out there and seeing what kinds of connections arise. As we grow and change, we often find that some of the friendships and connections we’ve had have become stale. Sometimes, this is the perfect opportunity to reconnect and reinvigorate those relationships. Other times, we need to recognize that we can’t be friends with everybody all the time, and that people drift apart. This is a natural part of the mobile society we live in. Slowly, we may find our tribe of people who support and inspire us. Even then, that tribe may evolve and shift as we continue to grow and explore.

Be Mobile

Winter in Seattle is dark. Portland, too, although not quite as much. It’s not freezing cold or blustery like the northeast or midwest. But it’s dark. Cool and wet. Getting out into the world can be a serious challenge to even the most optimistic person’s psyche. The other thing about Seattle is that it’s a city of neighborhoods, and while each one contains everything you’d ever need, there are whole parts of town you never go to. The geography of the city makes it tough to go from one to another. Hence our third rule: be mobile. Get out there and do it! Bike around! Get wet! Play sports! Visit people! Try new parts of town! We basically decided that it was not acceptable to decide to skip an event because of its location. This was one of the hardest rules to follow, but it paid off. As a transplant in a city, being mobile is the only way to get to know an area and meet people outside our immediate circle of friends.

Don’t Hold Back

Do you feel like you’re holding back? This could be in any sphere of life: in physicality, in love, in friendship, in work. There is often a nagging feeling of “I could have done more,” or “I could have been more committed, more present.” Don’t hold back! Just don’t do it. We need to put ourselves out there, be vulnerable, make mistakes. This is how we learn. This is how we build up experience and wisdom. Not by reading about it on the web. By actually going out and experiencing it, by giving ourselves completely to our endeavors. Also, it’s a great thing to yell down the stairs when your friend is walking out the door to go on a date.

Be Generous

Generosity is one of the most magical character traits. It is so wonderful to be around generous people. People who are generous with their time, money, and attention are the ones we like the most. The positivity generous people create comes back to reward them, too. Life is all about abundance and sharing, not scarcity or greed. Sharing whatever we can with people close to us (and people not so close to us, but in greater need) is one of the best feelings. We tried to make generosity a built-in practice in our house, usually by sharing food and making an effort to bring people together however our means would allow.

Practice Gratitude

If generosity is the most magical outward-facing trait, gratitude is the most magical inward-facing trait. Developing a deep sense of gratitude fills us with love for life and appreciation for all the people around us, while diminishing any negativity that comes our way. We have so much to be grateful for. Just the fact that we are alive and here on this planet is astounding. That we live in an affluent and free country? Almost unbelievable. Not to mention a good education, our strong networks of friends and family, our clean drinking water, our relative peace and security. Practicing gratitude every day makes us fall in love with the world. It makes us want to give back, and to make it better for everyone else. It makes us calm, kind, and compassionate. It’s the best.

What are your house rules? What do you live by? What do you like to yell down the stairs to your friends to get them excited about life?

For a Lost Friend

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Every so often, the simple fact that life is short comes into stark relief, and did so for me recently with the death of a friend. We say “life is short” often, but I don’t strictly believe that to be true. It is hard to know how long life is, or how long it feels, as our perception of it changes all the time. Childhood feels a lifetime away, and even my college days are a faint memory, despite only being a decade past. In that sense, life feels long. I could live another sixty years, which would certainly make the feeling of these days small and perhaps insignificant.

What this sentiment is really trying to get at, I think, is that life could end any moment. We are used to continuity of consciousness. It’s the only thing we’ve ever always had. And still, everybody dies. At some point that continuity will come screeching to a halt. It could be in sixty years, it could be in a decade, it could be next week, or it could be in five minutes. We often take for granted that we will live long, relatively healthy lives. And I hope we do, I truly do.

At the same time, always believing that we’ll live long, relatively healthy lives may make us complacent. “There will be time for that.” Will there? Maybe. Maybe not. For the absolute most important things, it is not worth taking the risk that there will be time for that later. This includes visiting loved ones, reminding them how much we love them, hugging, making eye contact, and generally having a lot of close human connection. The things we do have time for later probably include: working, running errands, checking our email, watching TV, and cruising the web.

This past week has made this especially clear for me. Our community has been struggling to come to terms with the tragedy of our lost friend. We haven’t been working (much, at least). It just hasn’t felt possible. We have been visiting each other, bonding, talking about what happened, trying to figure out life, and taking solace in our connections with each other. We’ve been meeting up in groups of various shapes and sizes, grieving collectively and individually.

One piece of this which has been especially troubling is the fact that our friend took his own life. There is a constant nagging of “What could have been done? What could I have done?” We tell ourselves “nothing,” or “I’ll be more vigilant with my friends in the future,” but that doesn’t make the feeling go away. Ultimately, we have to live our lives as fully and as lovingly as we can. We have to spread compassion and joy, and empower others to do the same. We can’t change the past, but we create our own future by deciding how we act in the present.

Alan Watts has an idea of “living as if you’re already dead.” This is not about being fatalistic or nihilistic. It is about living with the knowledge that we could be dead at any moment, and that in a relatively short time we, and everyone we know, and everyone who knows them, will be dead. Not too much longer after that, nobody will even know we existed. The experience of this brief continuity of consciousness is fully ours to create and embody. We have no reason to hold back. We have every reason to live whole-heartedly, to speak boldly, and to share as much love and compassion as we can muster.

We can say life is short. Or we can say it is long. In a sense it is both. And in a way that aspect of it doesn’t matter at all. What matters is how we live, how we connect with others, how we express ourselves, and how we love. In a better world, we would not have to lose a friend to be reminded of this.

Beautiful Stehekin

Fight Club Rules for Writing a Book

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Rule #1: Do not write the book.

Rule #2: You are a marketer just as much as a writer.

Rule #3: You need a platform, and to know what your following wants.

Rule #4: The book proposal comes first. This might be harder than writing the book.

Rule #5: Wait, wait, and wait some more.

Rule #6: Once your expectations have bottomed out, write the book. Make it great.

I finished the first draft of my first book a couple weeks ago, and I’ve been taking the first steps to find an agent and get involved in the publishing process. It turns out I did this backwards. Oops. The thing is, with the possible exception of literary fiction, writing a book is much more about who you are and how you connect with people than it is about putting words on a page.

This makes sense, kind of. The publisher is in this to make money selling a book, not to give you publicity for being an expert or inspiring wordsmith. It also means that you should already have a solid platform and marketing pitch before you start to think about the book itself. It means I probably should have written a book about cats.

Oh well, the book is already mostly written. Doing that was a wonderful and illuminating process. Maybe worth more than actually getting the words out into the world will be. I wrote 1,000+ words every day for seven weeks, and Boom!, the first draft was done. I realized that I am serious about being a writer, and that I have everything I need to make that a reality. Actually, let’s go ahead and start saying that it already is a reality. I’ve written a book, after all.

Time to build a following. I’ve been working my way through “The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published” and cruising around all sorts of writing/publishing/entrepreneur blogs. Fellow Portlander Chris Guillebeau has a great guide on making a creative, entrepreneurial life work in practice. There’s a huge amount of terrific advice out there. Also a lot of obvious stuff, and not-so-awesome stuff. So, like anything on the internet, or in real life for that matter.

The plan? Well, you’ll probably be hearing a lot more from me. I hope that this means I’ll be providing a lot of valuable content to you and to the world. If you like it, please do share it with other people you think would enjoy it or gain something from it. If you don’t like it, that’s cool, too. Ignore me with a passion. I’ll be getting going on Twitter, coordinating my online presence, revamping my website (super pumped about this one – it turns out building a website is about 1000% easier than it was three years ago), posting more often to my blog, and (maybe the most exciting?) really getting going on my new business venture in Portland. More on that one later.

It also means I’m more open to feedback and conversation than ever before. I’d love to hear your thoughts on what I’m doing, what I write about, and what you’d like to read more on.

As always, take care. And come visit me in Portland some time.