By offering our minds only two extremes, we are much more willing to accept a compromise that we would have otherwise rejected outright. When I was a teenager and my friends and I started driving, one of my friends had a trick he would use when he wanted to turn the volume of the music…
Positional Perspective (Change Your Point Of View)
The only way to change our perspective is to change our position. If we want to see the world from a different angle, a different point of view, or a different perspective, we are going to have to change the way we look at it. This is not a mental exercise. It is impossible to…
Passion Makes Us Porous
“I gotcha back, but you best to watch your front ‘cause it’s the people that front, they be pulling stunts.”—Gary E. Grice, aka GZA Proximity does not imply connection. Just because someone stands next to us does not mean that they share our moral, philosophical, or spiritual beliefs, and it certainly does not mean that…
The Brightest Cloud
“When the sun hides, it hides behind the brightest cloud.”—My Daughter Some days, it is difficult to see beyond the ugliness and the darkness in this world. Conflict, fear, anger, and pain are right in our faces with no obvious solution or hope of relief on the horizon. On days like these, it can be…
Managing Space (A Jiu-Jitsu Lesson)
Sometimes the best input is silence and the best proximity is distance. There are more people than ever who want to tell us how to feel, what to believe, and how to act, but there are very few who are actually concerned with how we feel, what we believe, and what we want to do…