Mindfulness &

how to be aware in an unaware world

Author: Josh Avery

  • Reputation

    Reputation

    “Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation, for your character is what you are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.” – Dale Carnegie

    I love this quote for two reasons. The first is that reputation is a heavy-loaded word, surrounded by double meanings, and this simple definition of the word cuts through the bullshit – straight to the point.

    The second reason is more a subtle reminder, that our character is like a tree and our reputation is like its shadow (I believe Abraham Lincoln said that, and boy was his reputation on the line).

    Most of us are generally afraid to say something wrong, do something incorrect, or make an unpopular decision. Luckily, you can please some people some of the time, but you definitely can’t please all the people all of the time (I believe Bob Marley said that one, and boy, there weren’t a lot of people who didn’t like the guy).

    The human condition of fear keeps us from speaking out, tarnishing our reputation, but is it better to have a bad reputation doing the right thing or a good reputation doing nothing?

    This isn’t to say that a bad reputation can’t follow a bad person, it most certainly can. But it can also follow a good person doing the right thing. Sometimes we must make a choice Harry, between doing the right thing and doing the easy thing (I believe Dumbledore said that, and boy did he have his share of fictional but heart-wrenching choices).

    Caring for a reputation is like caring for a dead tree, it will only rot away in the end, our time wasting away with it. Caring for our character is like tending an already strong, capable, and beautiful tree, unconcerned with all the dead trees around us.

    Haters are like crickets. Crickets make a lot of noise, you can hear them but you can’t see them, and then right when you walk by, they go quiet. (Honestly, I have no idea who said that, only that I just remembered it).

    To be more concerned with our character than our reputation is no easy task, but it is only uncomfortable when we listen to the crickets.

    Where does our good counsel come from then? If listening to chirping crickets is a waste of time, then listening to good counsel must be the key.

    Mindfulness teaches us to listen openly and kindly – directing our character towards kindness, compassion, justice, and service.

    Doing the right thing, the hard thing is a matter of observation.

    Observe your friends, family, and members of your community – who stands out? Who is doing the hard things – standing up for what they believe in? Is the core message of kindness 

    Observe yourself – what doesn’t settle right with you? What difficult choices do you have in your life right now? What does your conscious tell you in difficult times?

    Breath deep

    Clear your conscious

    Proudly stand up for yourself – for you are worth it.

    Bodly stand up for others – for they are worth it.

    Dale hit the nail on the head when comparing reputation to thought – he was reminding us of a simple confusion in definition, unfortunately, common today.

    Only we know our character – that part of us that needs no approval. Only we can grow our roots with a clear conscience and good counsel. And only we can determine what is right and what is easy.

  • Small Talk

    Small Talk

    I found this excerpt from a Medium article that I sadly can’t find for some reason. I often save excerpts like this that I find fascinating and then build a blog post around them.

    It helps to have some piece of writing to go off of as if someone provided some insightful bit in a conversation. The author ends this excerpt just as my thoughts begin this post:

    “I particularly enjoy reading works of non-fiction, but any form of good literature is utterly captivating. Keep in mind that whenever you pick up a good book to read, you are taking an extensive journey into the mind of the author. It’s amazing to me that as an ordinary person, I have immediate access to the greatest minds of the past and present, and can absorb years and years of their toiling research in just a matter of days or weeks. This ability to be captivated by the minds of others is also widely available in the form of our loved ones and friends. However, it’s the people closest to us that we often take for granted. We tend to think we know everything there is to know about them, and our inquisitive nature is often reserved for strangers and small talk.”

    Small Talk

    What comes to mind when you hear those words?

    Is small talk a set of pleasant or unpleasant words?

    To me, small talk can be a beautiful, synergistic, and very much so human way of connecting with others (known and unknown).

    I love the result so much that I have inadvertently been practicing the art of small talk since high school. The result is a new connection, a person in a place to visit halfway around the world, or the news that my mother was a badass in the field of speech pathology.

    I can see, however, how many people perceive small talk as a waste of time, and learned much from such people in my very first mini backpacking trip to Boston, New York, and Chicago in January of 2018 (yes it was freezing as shit and yes I absolutely loved it).

    What I learned from these people during that frigid winter, more so in their aversion to my small talk and body language, was that time is a valuable commodity, and most small talk is a waste of that valuable commodity.

    What I learned was that these northern folk weren’t necessarily mean, they were just being cautious with their time (and they were overwhelmed by so many people trying to talk to them all the time).

    Humans are not supposed to live like this, surrounded by masses of other humans, in tight spaces, in busy lives, in mindless routines (but that’s for another post).

    I say, “what I learned” because my time trying so hard to create small talk and learn everything about everyone was a waste of others’ time.

    I learned the opposite of this, the art of small talk, living in Nashville, Tennessee (it sounds better when you add the state). Nashville, one could argue, is the birthplace of small talk. I mean, there is so much small talk that the word got out and became the main reason so many people visit.

    Did you enjoy Nashville? Hell yeah, the people there are so friendly. I met so many awesome folks. Hattie B’s is a godsend. The best bands play in East Nash. LA Jackson used to have the best view of downtown. I digress.

    It’s almost a crime not to engage in small talk on the streets of Demonbruen or Gallatin Avenue, in Honky Tonks or Printer’s Alley. It was a place I thrived.

    Nadiia Mykhalevych describes small talk beautifully:

    “Small talk is not a small thing. It’s like a gateway to the conversation. You just need to knock on this door, wait for the response of the other person, and see whether they’ll invite you in or not.”

    There was a flipside though. A lot of that small talk, as I learned in Central Park and along the Freedom Trail, was a waste of valuable time. Meaningful conversations come from astute observations.

    When observing the Northern attitude, I was taught to find a reason to engage in small talk, not fumble for the reason during small talk. Akin to a quarterback throwing a deliberate pass to one desperately chucking the ball somewhere upfield.

    Small talk is also a strange human mechanism I find myself in all the time. An awkward silence that needs a filling: “Hows it going?”, “The weather is nice today isn’t it?”, “What is your greatest fear and why?”

    That last one was an obvious outlier. A question I think everyone should ask everyone all the time (and not in the job interview way).

    What is my greatest fear and why? Well, for starters, it’s not physical, not something that can kill me, and not a feeling per se.

    What I fear the most is having lived a life that I would regret, and so far that is not the case. So far I’ve lived at least three lives that I can say with confidence are pretty damn good lives.

    But as the human mind does its human thinking, I create this fear that I will die without having fufilled my dreams:

    Writing a book that touches many, many people, acting in a movie that inspires many, many people, and creating an album that helps many, many people find inner peace.

    These are not just dreams cultivated from fear, they are aspirations brought to me over time (but that’s for another post).

    Maybe you consider small talk a waste of time, or maybe you consider it the best waste of time, but either way, we can use mindfulness to approach small talk constructively.

    Strong relationships are the product of the right questions, and we can find out that the right questions are openings to someone else’s world, a portal through which we can learn, grow, and strengthen ourselves. 

    What we learn can then be conveyed to others, down the road, during a different, small, talk.

  • Presence

    Presence

    Last June I went to one of the most incredible music festivals known by many in the electronic music scene, surrounded by the shade and beauty of Michagen’s pine and spruce trees: Electric Forest.

    A month before the festival, over fifty thousand other attendees and I received a welcome package: wristband, stickers, a sunglasses pouch, and a message printed on a card so eloquent, so needed, that it stopped me dead in my tracks.

    This message was from a voice that some artists at Electric Forest, like INZO and LSDream, use in their music to add an extra layer of meaning to the whole shebang. Alan Watts reminds us here, at a poignant time in history, to ditch distractions and remember the presence:

    “We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than the present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality.”

    What I love most about this quote is the direct reminder that any time we overthink about the past or the future, we waste that time not living in the present.

    The present moment, as Alan describes, is the opposite of thinking in the past or the future, it is simply the direct, undiluted seconds passing by right now.

    Undiluted in a real-world context means not watching TV while eating dinner, not looking at your phone while holding a conversation, and yes, not dwelling on the past or planning for the future while preparing for bed.

    The undiluted presence will seem boring at first, but only because we are accustomed to filling every moment with something. In time, the presence of nothing will be a place of comfort and gratitude in itself. In a previous post, I wrote about the surprising benefits of doing nothing: Mindfulness & Nothing

    Do not confuse overthinking with constructive thinking either, because some thinking is good. Constructive thinking helps us learn from our mistakes, taste the sweetness of a good memory or bitterness of a bad one, plan for the future, prepare for rainy days, and feel the excitement of an experience yet to come.

    But Alan Watts is not saying that we shouldn’t plan for our future, he is saying not to live in our future. If “living” is defined as a present state of mind and in the present filled with overthinking about the future, then we are “living” as Alan describes, in a space hypnotized by the illusion of time.

    We are all naturally inclined to overthink the past or the future, I find myself planning a lot in the future, spending a considerable amount of time on Plan A, B, and sometimes C. This is constructive thinking in the beginning but then overflows into overplanning, a place much similar to reminiscing of “better” times in the past.

    The illusion of time includes these spaces: a future better than the present moment (when it sucks), and a past better than the present (when it sucks). There is no difference between the two spaces, only that they are not real.

    Only the present moment (especially when it sucks) is reality, and this space is constantly challenged by our overthinking minds.

    How do we live with presence and mindfulness? It takes a great deal of discipline at first, which then turns into a daily practice, which then turns into a state of flow.

    If you have the availability, take your shoes off and find a patch of Mother Earth to stand on before going through these simple grounding steps:

    Step 1: Close your eyes, cutting off your most distracting sense of vision.

    Step 2: Feel the subtle weight of gravity, grounding you not only to your feet on the ground but also to this moment.

    Step 3: Stay in this place of grounding for as long as you can. Feel the senses activate, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting even.

    Step 4: When it feels right, lower the hands to the ground, bend the knees, and touch your forehead to the ground, thankful for the perfect amount of gravity, stable ground, and the ever presence of this moment in time.

    Thank you so much for joining me and my accompanying thoughts in this post on presence. If you find any value in my work and would like to support me, please share this post with your friends and family. You can also support me by buying me a coffee. Thanks so much in advance!