Developing a Better You

Tag: personal development (Page 1 of 77)

Reflections from a Park Bench in Paris

Bonjour from Paris.

I write this while sitting on a park bench, having just finished a ham and cheese baguette with hot chocolate. The Louvre art museum with its hoards of Saturday visitors are in the distance. I wandered the grounds earlier, but I had no desire to fight the crowds for a return trip inside. 

The autumn afternoon is cool and gray, a welcome change from a summer spent baking in the Phoenix sunshine. A young man in a leather jacket sits on a bench to my left, reading a book. Further on, a girl rests her head on her father’s shoulder. Aside from the cawing of crows, the park is quiet, and I’m alone with my thoughts.

Me in the park as I write this post

My wife and I are intentional nomads, having no permanent address, living in different places for varying lengths of time. In the four months since our nomadic journey began, we’ve stayed in hotels, AirBnbs, with my dad, her sister, our daughter, and friends, including several pet sitting gigs. 

Not always knowing where you’re going to lay your head is an odd feeling, but one we’re acclimating to. While we plan in advance, we’re trying not to lock ourselves in too much and lose the spontaneity this lifestyle affords.

Being natural planners, spontaneity is a challenge. As we sat eating our breakfast crepes this morning, Lisa remarked on how our walk to the cafe had been closer to a march than a stroll, more like a mission to be accomplished than a saunter to be savored. 

I’m taking her observation to heart during my afternoon alone in Paris. I’ve been wandering in a general direction, then veering toward whatever catches my eye. So far it’s led me to walk along the Seine River, peruse art and magazines for sale on sidewalk carts, and to this lovely park. I grabbed lunch when I was hungry at a nearby food stand without dithering or checking its Yelp reviews. 

The writing of this post is itself an act of spontaneity. I had no plans to do so, but finding myself in this beautiful, quiet place led me to take out my phone and start typing. Is it helpful? Is it interesting or worthwhile to anyone else? I can’t answer that. All I know is that it felt right. I followed the urge to write, and this is what came out. 

So what’s my point in this missive? I’m not sure I have one. Maybe my example of spontaneity encourages you to be more spontaneous. Maybe my wife and I making the leap to live our nomadic dream gives you motivation to make a leap yourself. Maybe my reflections in a Parisian park inspire you to take time for your quiet pondering (you never know what may bubble up).

Whomever you are, whatever obstacles you face, wherever you’re at on your journey, be a little spontaneous. Take a leap toward living a dream. Do some quiet reflecting. If you do, you’ll find new color and a fresh breeze enter your life as you take another step toward Becoming Yourself. 

The US Election Will Soon Be Over—Then What?

I’m guessing you’re as tired of it as I am.

The texts. The robocalls. The yard signs. The commercials. The mailers. The ads that clutter your social media feeds. In the US, the election season feels endless.

It’s almost over (election day at least—who knows how long the objections, recounts, and lawsuits will last). But when the dust settles, we’ll all still be here. How will we act if “our side” wins? Loses? How can we move forward with grace and unity (hopefully assuming that’s our goal)?

I resonated with the following perspective from Sikh activist and author Valarie Kaur. It helped me prepare for living in a post-election world. I hope it does the same for you as you take another step toward Becoming Yourself. 

What does it mean to return to a kind of wholeness where the way that we love informs what we do in the world and what we do in the world deepens our love?….

What I want to remind us all is that as much as we must fight for our convictions and stand for what is just, remember that all those people who vote against you are not disappearing after Election Day or Inauguration Day. We have to find a way to live together still. The only way we will birth a multiracial democracy is if we hold up a vision of a future that leaves no one behind, not even our worst opponents. So you might be in the position to have that conversation with the neighbor down the street or the uncle at the family table or the teenager who doesn’t want to vote because she’s too cynical. What might happen if you leave them alone? [Philosopher] Hannah Arendt says isolation breeds radicalization. [1] You might be the person to puncture the [social media] algorithm, to sit in spaces of deep listening—and deep listening is an act of surrender. You risk being changed by what you hear. 

We don’t see those spaces modeled in the world around us. We have to create them in the spaces between us. Oftentimes it means listening over time, being in relationship. Human beings mirror each other, so if you come with daggers out, they’ll come out daggers out. If you come out and you really wonder “Why?,” beneath the slogans and the soundbites, you’ll hear the person’s story and you’ll see their wound. You’ll see their grief. You’ll see their rage. You might not agree with it, but I’ve come to understand that there are no such things as monsters in this world, only human beings who are wounded, who act out of their fear or insecurity or rage. That does not make them any less dangerous, but once we see their wound, they lose their power over us. And we get to ask ourselves: How do we want to take that information into what we do next? 

I invite people to take their wounds [and] their opponents’ wounds into spaces of re-imagination—of imagining an outcome, a policy, a relationship that leaves no one outside of our circle of care, not even “them.” This kind of labor, this kind of revolutionary love, it’s not the sacrifice of an individual, it’s a practice of a community.  

When we invite people to practice revolutionary love, we always ask, “What is your role in this season of your life?”…. Whatever you choose, it can be a vital practice of love, of revolutionary love. And if all of us are playing our role—not more, not less—then together we’re creating the culture shift that we so desperately need.

[1] See Hannah Arendt, “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government,” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1976). Adapted from Valarie Kaur, “Becoming a Sage Warrior,” Daily Meditations, October 28, 2024, Center for Action and Contemplation, video, 38:13. 

What a 3-Year-Old Taught Me About Riding Life’s Waves

As I finish my October author tour, here’s a painful lesson I learned during a previous book tour, originally published Oct 14, 2023.

“This is too scary!”

The cry came from a three-year-old in the second row. Other than his parents, the rows of chairs in the bookstore were painfully empty.

I’d been invited by the store to do a talk and reading from my spooky monster mystery series Monsterious, geared for 8 to 12 year olds. Knowing the event was on a Sunday morning and I didn’t have the opportunity to do school visits to promote it, I expected the turnout to be small. How right I was.

The well-intentioned parents obviously didn’t realize that the age level and spooky factor of my books were not appropriate for their three-year-old. I was halfway through the first of three planned readings from my books when the child let his unhappy opinion be known. I immediately stopped and asked the bookseller to find me a Halloween picture book, which I then read to the child. When I finished, the dad bought one of my books out of pity.

On this fall tour, I’ve had 2 1/2 hour signing lines that snaked through large stores, selling hundreds of books in a night. And I’ve had a crowd of three where I read some other author’s book to a toddler. Such are the ups and downs of being an author. 

But that’s not just author life. That’s life. We all experience that roller coaster in our careers, health, relationships, finances, you name it. The question is not “Will we face storms?” but “How will we ride the waves?”

When things are good, it’s easy to become arrogant, to credit my success to my own genius, and to think it will always be this way. When things go south, it’s easy to become depressed, to believe I’m a failure, and to feel the bad times will go on forever. Neither perspective is true. My successes are a combination of hard work and talent, but also luck and the help of others. My failures are usually a mixed bag too, partly due to my own poor choices and mistakes, and partly from things completely out of my control. 

There’s a wise expression that says, “Don’t believe your own press.” Hold both the good and the bad lightly, enjoying your successes, learning from your failures, and letting them both roll off your back. Don’t take the opinions of others or your own internal self-judgements too seriously.

As you ride life’s waves, anchor your identity and self-worth on something that doesn’t rise and fall, that is as steady as a fixed point on the horizon. For me, that’s my identity as God’s child, believing that God’s love for and view of me is independent of my ever-changing feelings or the outward results of my efforts. For you, that might be another relationship or something else. Whatever it is, find something worthy of the wonderful person you are. If you do, you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.

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