Reflecting Inward

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A Real Happy and Healthy 2022

I hope you all had a great New Year. Omicron certainly wreaked havoc on most of humanity. Plans were disrupted in more ways than we could have imagined. And the disappointment must have been significant. After all, togetherness was dearly anticipated after so much time apart.

In my own life, we were lucky enough to manage to get all of our kids, spouses, and grandkids together. A few delays and cancellations here and there but nothing major. And it felt a bit like some type of awakening for all of us to share the same space for a prolonged period of time. That is to say, it was a very clear departure from the past 2 years of too much non-togetherness. We were all a bit unfamiliar and unacquainted with the noise levels, the chaos, and the rapid need to adjust our habits to fit into a much larger group.

But it was also a much-needed reconnection. And most importantly, a reminder of why family is so special and how lucky Jessica and I are to witness our children blossom in their own beautiful families with their own unique character, but yet bound together by common values, traditions, and a shared sense of belonging.

I did write the past few weeks about how much I enjoy this time of reflection. And it is not over. I am not alone in sharing my reflections and I find that reading the words of others continues to provide inspiration and food for thought. Many people I admire and follow often share their own reflections around what they expect moving forward. Given that I was on a break, I have not yet digested or even read most of them.

So, I thought I'd share a few pieces that resonated with where I find myself at this very moment. The first two installments are very much on pointing towards what I guess one could call is the raison d'être of these weekly musings (or missives, as my friend Rob, calls them). To inspire myself and hopefully some of you to look for answers within ourselves rather than outside ourselves. A simple yet powerful insight that "what lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." (often attributed to Emerson...and many others!).

So much of our culture is "other-directing" vs "self-directing," and I think humanity would be better off if we all looked inside rather than outside before making most choices.

I watched a great short video with the Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh where he so beautifully addressed a question around suffering. There were two main ideas that grabbed hold of me. The first was the story around the "second arrow". The notion that we often amplify pain by exaggerating it or, at least, by not letting go. It makes our pain worse than it has to be. And if we are to be of service to the world, we first have to be at peace with ourselves.

The second idea was centered around how a pine tree can make the world a better place. That might sound kind of silly, right? But when you consider how small each of us truly are relative to the magnitude of our world, it seems perhaps less crazy. And the only thing a pine tree can do is to be the best pine tree it can be. And the same is, of course, true for us.

The second was a piece recently published by Shane Parrish which was a reminder of the great work by the psychologist Carol Dweck. I have read most of Carol's work and consider the idea of a "growth mindset" to be central to my own personal beliefs. So many people, knowingly or unknowingly, subscribe to a fixed, finite, or zero-sum type of mindset. No wonder – most of the archetypes and narratves that are celebrated in our movies, series, and books are all about winning or losing some type of game defined by set rules. But life actually works quite differently. Humans are much more elastic, flexible, and adaptable than that.

I think much of our current environment is plagued by two sides having a fixed mindset. And both are wrong. We need more humility, more openness, and more willingness to examine new solutions for a new world.

Lastly, I watched a sensational New Year’s Poem by the remarkable young poet Amanda Gorman. Her opening moved me.

“May this be the day
We come together.
Mourning, we come to mend,
Withered, we come to weather,
Torn, we come to tend,
Battered, we come to better.
Tethered by this year of yearning,
We are learning
That though we weren’t ready for this,
We have been readied by it.
We steadily vow that no matter
How we are weighed down,
We must always pave a way forward.”

I think I will leave it right there. Many more reflections coming your way each Sunday.

Here is a link to Farnam Street's summary on Carol Dweck's Growth and Fixed mindsets. And below are the two videos referenced above.

A 9.45 minute answer by Thich Nhat Hanh on how we can carry less burdens

Amanda Gorman's recently released poem