Habit

We are creatures of habit.  Most of what we do everyday is part of a routine that we have created and is supported mentally by learned responses to our environment. This is generally a good thing as it frees our mind from being consumed by making conscious decisions about everything we do that would burden us and take away from our ability to be creative and innovate.

Habits can be both positive and negative in getting to where we want to go with our lives.  The importance of habit is that when we choose to repeat an activity often enough and over a long enough period of time we become “good” at it.  As mentioned in an earlier blog posting, this is the essence of the 10,000 hours, suggested by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outlier, required to be an expert.

In the book The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, he explores what in our mind supports habit formation and how we change habits. Habits are supported by the most primitive part of our brain, the basal ganglia located in the core of the brain where it meets the spinal column. This is the part of our brain most similar to that of a fish, reptile and other mammals. It’s our ancient brain. It is the part of our brain that controls automatic behaviors such a breathing and also learned behaviors like driving a car or brushing our teeth.  Without the basal ganglia our brains would work very very hard to manage and navigate our daily activities.

As we all know our habits can affect us both positively and negatively. Certainly, I have a number of habits that I enjoy and feel reward me in positive ways.  I also have habits that are of questionable merit (a “waste” of time) and others that are simply not “good” for me. Also, some of what I could achieve in life alludes me because I have not worked hard enough to make it a habit. Some of my habits are relatively new, post retirement, but many are longstanding, and even the “new ones” have some foundation.

Its hard to change our habits as it often requires a great deal of will power and continual effort. In my experience the best way to change a habit, or better yet to strengthen an existing one, is to use the new or more dominate habit to replace or “crowd out” an old one. After all, there is just so much time in a day. This change may be easiest to achieve when the opportunity presents itself in the form of a life change such as a new job, moving, a new significant relationship, a new family member, a significant health concern, etc.  For me, retirement presented an opportunity to create and strengthen some habits that would fill time spent in what was a very significant old habit – my job. Exercise, painting, connecting with family and friends, investing and travel are some of the habits I have strengthened to fill my new-found free time. As an aside, I often tell friends that the essence of a successful retirement is doing things you would never have done before and doing them more thoroughly (e.g., slowly).

In closing I want to quote from The Power of Habit; “If you believe you can change – if you make it a habit – the change becomes real.  This is the real power of habit, the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be. Once that choice occurs – and becomes automatic – it’s not only real, it starts to seem inevitable…. moving us irresistibly toward our destiny”.

Discomfort

Being comfortable is important to me and I believe all of us.  My comfortable chair, comfortable surroundings, comfort food, comfort with the people I am with – you name it and comfort is high on my list and I believe high on the list of what we all want and seek. My Dad said of all the things he loved, sleep was high on the list, but he often found that “he could not get close enough to the bed”; besides being Irish and prone to exaggeration for humor sake, he was looking for a more comfortable night’s sleep.

So I think we can all agree on the importance of being comfortable; but how important is being uncomfortable?  Better yet, taking on a challenge and seeking something even though we know it is not going to be comfortable?

Seeking discomfort by stretching ourselves beyond what is known, easily achievable, relaxing, and currently comfortable maybe the essence of achieving, growing and finding ourselves. Thinking back I can find numerous examples of where I have learned and grown because I did something new and uncomfortable, where the result was unknown and potentially bad. Often this was because I was in some sort of need, longing or even pain that pushed me to change course. But not always, sometimes it was because I knew that being comfortable was not what I needed. More on this later.

I am not young and most would say that achieving a comfortable retirement is the essence of retirement success.  But recently I experienced moving outside my comfort zone in a new way. I have been painting landscape and still-life paintings for over 20 years and in the past 4 years of retirement working harder to better my skills and the quality of my work by painting more often and sometimes under instruction.  Recently, I was asked by my instructor to paint an abstract painting; something I have never done and not been interested in, using nothing as a subject but my imagination.  I was uncomfortable with this assignment but forged ahead after deciding to use a few images as a guide. Soon I found myself enthusiastically working on this abstract painting without the use of any real images. And then being stymied by my instructor who introduce new shapes and colors into this painting “to make it more varied and interesting” and it seemed to ruin much of what I had done. I pushed ahead, challenged and realizing that the time and energy to produce something worthy might be more than I could endure and that the result could easily be failure. But I persevered as I felt this  might inform me and free my more traditional painting style; making me a better, more uninhibited artist – like the Impressionists I have often admired. As of this writing this process and the resulting artwork is unfinished and the value of the exercise is unknown. However, I am optimistic that my next painting will be better than the last because I pushed through my comfort zone on this one.

(UPDATE – here is a picture of my first abstract as of Nov. 2015)

When I was in my early 30s I was faced with a tough decision to move from Denver to California for a new career. I had been working in government and was seeking to get into the private sector, but the only job opportunity was in California; not a place I wanted to live at the time. I had two homes in Denver, one co-owned with a girl friend, and I left them all driving my small Toyota pickup to the Bay Area with nothing but my cloths and a few essentials. I rented an apartment and furniture, paid rent and the monthly mortgages in Denver and barely subsisted. From my arrival in early November till January 6 (my birthday, which was a Sunday) I worked every day of the week, often 10 hours or more to learn the trade and make my mark.  I was lonely but I was committed and had nowhere to go but up. Slowly I made friends, that today are some of my best friends, and I became accomplished in my work and successful, which led to much greater success later in life.

Had I not chosen an uncomfortable move to California I would not be where I am today nor with the people who I love. No one knows what’s the best route to happiness, but I do know I have lived a full and blessed life at least in part because of some challenging decisions I have made and the resulting love from family and friends that I have found.

Patience and Persistence

Patience is a virtue, they say.  Well, I am often not a very patient person or at least I have not been in the past. I do consider this a short-coming in my personality but I have to admit that not being patient and living most of my life with an attitude of “Just Do It” has worked for me.  At least much of the time, so it seems.  However, I am not sure it has been so good for others I love such as my very patient and loving wife and our children. It seems with patience comes other attributes that are important too, such as living in the moment and unconditional love.  I do think that I have missed something in not being a more patient person and I look to improve.

So what about Persistence, the second part of the title of this blog.  How is patience related to persistence?  They both start with a P and end with an E.

Many years ago a young aspiring employee of the engineering consulting firm I worked for came to me complaining about the lack of work opportunity and expressing the desire to be more challenged and involved. I believed in this person and thought that it was only a matter of time when she would be more engaged and successful.  I told her this and finished with the advice; be Patience and Persistent and what you want will come in good time. This was the case.  Years later, after moving up in the organization and off to California, she sent me a small framed needlepoint that she had made using the company logo as the background with the message “Patience and Persistence”. At the time I was impressed with her work and pleased that she thought enough of my advice to do this for me. But I did not think much more about the message.

A few years ago I advised my younger daughter to be patience and persistent; for reasons I do not remember, and gave her the needlepoint. I told her the story and she seems to have taken it to heart.  I think both of my daughters have done this.

Patience and Persistence produces a balance that makes one a better, more accomplished, loving person. As I have indicated in a few different ways in this blog, I believe that persistence towards a goal is needed to achieve what we want.  And maybe that is all that is really needed to do so, with the caveat that to persist one must have passion; creating the desire to stay with it. However, without a good dose of patience, a willingness to experience the ups, downs and flat times with a perspective larger than oneself, the joy of the experience can be lost. Self centered people are generally very persistent and driven, but they are not fun to be around.

I look forward to being a more patient person; more understanding and loving of my family and friends, and forgiving of myself too.

Pronoia

Last year while on a group scuba diving trip to Roatan, an island off Honduras, my older daughter and I met up with a very interesting man with an interesting view of his life, and ours.  His name was Kim and he is a doctor and avid scuba diver.  He is also an extrovert as will be demonstrated.  But more importantly he had something to say about the way he and we should live our lives.

He said he experienced Pronoia, much like Paranoia but different in a very important way. He knew that people were talking about him when he was not around.  But he also knew that what people said about him was well-meaning and positive. In other words he felt the love and positive energy of others directed towards him – Pronoia.

Often when he entered the bar or dining room where we and everyone were gathered he would raise his hands look us directly in the eye and thank us profusely for the kind words and thoughts that we had expressed and thought about him in his absence. He was very appreciative and you could see the energy in his smile as he came up to his friends with this message of like and love. Certainly, Kim was having fun with us, but he repeated this message often enough that I began to realize that it was not just a joke, but a way of being that he embraced and was more than willing to promote with people he liked and had just met.

Kim also introduced me to the book, Younger Next Year (mentioned in an earlier posting), which I found most enjoyable and have given to friends.  I give this book credit for helping me lose weight and becoming healthier, physically and mentally.  What wonderful gifts Kim provided to me and those who have taken heed to the subtle teachings of this bold and life-loving man.

Journey

I have long-held that to enjoy anything one must focus on the journey and not the end point.  We all do things for a purpose and often that purpose is expressed and felt to be the end result. While understandable, there is no permanent end and often the result we seek is fleeting and hard to appreciate because it can be achieved and then lost so easily. Persistence (one of the keys to achieving what one desires) requires us to appreciate the process of getting to a place or result we seek. Without appreciating and enjoying the process it is very difficult to obtain the ends we seek. It is hard to sustain the effort to get what or where we want. This is why people who are “good at what they do”, because the enjoy it and have become good at it usually with some considerable effort.  My experience is that only if I feel the fun, beauty, rewards, etc. of the work to get there will I get there and be able to enjoy my achievement.

Sometimes the achievement lasts for a good while and sometimes its gone within a moment, a week or a month. This is true of many of the things I enjoy doing. For example:

• Gardening – gardens require a lot of work to be kept nice including, planting, watering, fertilizing, weeding, pruning, replanting, etc. It is when I am doing these things that I am most intimate with the garden and can enjoy it most.  Viewing a well manicured and beautiful garden, while enjoyable, it not as enjoyable as being in it, up to it in ones elbows. This is not true for everyone but its true for gardeners.
• Traveling – most of us enjoy our vacations for the experiences that they are. Some times they are more enjoyable than other times and seldom is reliving the experience as much fun as the experience. The exception to this might be telling others about a funny or unusual experience but that too is part of the process and not so much the result of having done it. Bragging about where you have been is rather boring.
• Cooking – for me I enjoy cooking most when I am not using a recipe and experimenting.  I will admit it is important to me to cook something I and others find pleasing if not wonderful to eat and I consider this eating to be part of the process. The result, feeling full and possibly gaining weight, unless we exercise often, is not so rewarding. Also, the more I cook and get better at it by learning little new tricks, the more I enjoy it.
• Exercise – In the past year I have made a commitment to exercising 6 days a week. This advice came from a book entitled, Younger Next Year, by Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge, and its a great read. I have become much stronger as a result of this exercise regime but equally important is that I enjoy exercise more, including the people I exercise with, the straining muscles, the cardio exertion, sweat, and shower afterwards.

I could go on and on trying to convince you that the process is more important and rewarding (or should be to sustain the effort) than the end result.  However I do have to admit that I hope that someday I will produce landscape oil paintings that others will admire as I can be rather critical of my work when finished.  Often I have a hard time dedicating myself to painting.  Maybe this is very reason that I am not as good a painter as I desire, I’m too focused on the end result.

Presently I am reading a book entitled, The Oregon Trail, A New American Journey, by Rinker Buck and in it he tells about the night before he starts on this 2000 mile adventure.  He is about to go to bed in his covered wagon and becomes apprehensive about the task ahead.  However, he settles down when he thinks only about tomorrow’s challenge of 20 to 25 miles across the Kansas prairie, followed by a similar journey the next day and the next. Here in lies the key to any great achievement, the ability to not only see the big audacious goal but to also to be able to break it down into smaller goals and to enjoy the day-to-day journey, the process.

Creative

My daughter recommended a book for me to read entitled Brain Storm, Unleashing Your Creative Self written by Don Hahn, producer of The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, etc.  It’s a good read, funny in places and with lots of good advice and relevant life experiences for anyone on a path to discovering who they are and want to be. It’s also nice that he reinforces many of the things I believe in. For example, in the book’s chapter entitled Defining God he cites this passage from a book entitled A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles, written by Marianne Williamson:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful and beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves,”who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and famous?” Actually, who are you not to be?  You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won’t feel insecure around you. You were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us, its in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people the permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

These words say a lot of what I have been trying to say in this blog. Also, I appreciate and am familiar with teachings from The Course in Miracles, as I have read about it although not practiced it (maybe that is for another blog).

Also, in Don Hahn’s book he introduces new information (at least to me) on what it takes to develop expertise, to be really accomplished – Ten Thousand Hours.  In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, he suggests that it takes ten thousand hours to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert – in anything.  In the working world this equates to around 5 years, if one is very focused, and probably more like 10 years or more for most.  This seems to make sense as it certainly took me many years working hard to become really good at what I did, but I was all over the place trying to figure out what I wanted to do.  That’s the challenge, 1) it takes time to become accomplished and an expert at anything, and 2) knowing what you want to do is critically important so you can start this process.   It’s important that you know what you want because you need to work incredibly hard at developing your knowledge and skills, and its your passion, joy from the experience itself that we keep you going.

Don’s book focuses on what it takes to be creative and inventive – like oil painting. But as he describes the creative process it could include many endeavors; maybe all challenging endeavors are really creative.  His multi-step, non-linear process is:

1. Anticipation – hunting
2. Preparation – gathering
3. Hesitation – the fear
4. Frustration – dead ends, roadblocks and potholes
5. Constipation – full of information and anxiety but no breakthrough
6. Improvisation – try all the possibilities
7. Procrastination – avoidance
8. Immersion – time to think, time to absorb
9. Inspiration – the birth of a solution
10. Perspiration – the hard work of discovery

As suggested, getting to step 10 is not straight forward. The moral to me is, work hard to get to the point that you can work hard to get to the point that ….  IT MUST BE THE JOY AND REWARD OF THE EXPERIENCE THAT FULFILLS US AND KEEPS US GOING.

My passion today is to become an accomplished oil painter.  I have worked at this on and off now for over 20 years and probably spent 2000 hours getting to step 10.  Now for the hard work, and the joy of the experience.

Friends

Friends are important throughout one’s life.  For my daughters it seemed to me at times that friendships were all that really mattered and they were often up and down. This was frustrating for me as I knew many of these were temporary and exhausting experiences, when spending time studying and with family would ultimately be so much more rewarding.  I guess we all go through this evolution and it is generally true that  we spend a lot of wasted time finding the friends we really appreciate and vice versa.  However, as we grow older some of our  friendships seem to become more resilient and rewarding. Friendships are like investments, they become more significant as they age. One cannot make Old Friends, they just happen with time.

Over the past few years I have been able to reconnect with some of my old college buddies and their families and its like going home.  It feels so natural to spend some time with them connecting our new lives to our past experiences. For one of my old friends that lives in Gainesville, Florida (Home of the Gators, where we went to school) I recently painted a scene, almost a still-life, from a photo taken during a recent visit with him and his wife.  This visit included a trip to the Devil’s Millhopper, an ancient sink hole that drains so that it is an inverted mountain with springs and much different vegetation top to bottom.  I was there with my oldest daughter and wanted her to see this amazing place and to experience some of the joy from it that I experienced as a college student when we would slide down the Millhopper (today there are elevated wooden trails).  I delivered this painting to my friend with the following message.

“The Devils Millhopper

Spending time with you, my Old Friends, in a place of our past and sharing it for the first time with my daughter was a special experience.  Our faces were full of the wonder as we approach its fall from the forest floor where the opening in the earth puts tree tops at eye level. Now the path forward drops into the unseen, creating a mysterious feeling. The leaves from barren trees scatter the steep landscape as we enter the strange mountain on man-made steps made for our adventure.  Midway, streams of water trickle from the slope, feeding lush ferns, moss and other strange vegetation.  We take pictures of the pleasures we find in this wondrous place but they cannot fully capture the feelings we experience. From the bottom we look up to see the sky through towering tree trunks and listen to the flow of water as it disappears into the unknown.  Hiking out we understand how steep the sides of this inverted hill really are and we stop to catch our breath and enjoy the experience we do not want to leave. Despite its name we know that only God can make a place like this and it’s a special place for Old Friends to reunite; to share good times, old and new.”

Here is a photo of my painting of a fern and small stream emerging about half way down from the side of the Millhopper.

Painting

Oil Painting has become my new vocation or at least one of them. I guess painting could just be a hobby, but it seems more important to me than that. It calls me and I want to become better, even an accomplished artist (whatever that means). For a while I struggled to give sufficient time to painting as I think I was uncertain of my skills and felt it to be a burden, more struggle than pleasure. I believe strongly that striving to get better at something, to achieve a higher level of performance and a better experience, is essential in living a full life. And it seems that the inverse is also true, to live a full life requires one to take on new challenges with energy and persistence. Nothing really good happens without effort, persistence and believing that you can and will succeed. In fact, this is a scientific Law of Nature. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, Entropy (don’t give up on me now!). While I am an engineer and have studied thermodynamics and entropy, I am not an expert. However, entropy to me means that without energy directed towards a goal of organizing nature, nature will become more random, more disorganized. We experience this in our physical lives. For example, I like to garden, but gardening requires a constant effort to plant, fertilize, mulch, weed, water – over and over again – to achieve a beautiful and fruitful garden. Left alone for a month or more the garden will die and turn to weeds. This is Entropy at work. In oil painting, some physical but mostly mental energy is put to work to organize pure colors into mixtures and then on a canvas into art. This is not done easily and without persistent effort. In fact, without the right knowledge, mental energy, the result can be seen as more chaotic than the original pure color. So like gardening, continued effort is needed to produce real art. It cannot be achieved with a single try or even a dozen tries, it takes continued effort to achieve quality art work. If asked how long it takes me to do a painting today, the answer is 20 plus years as I started painting with my Mother over 20 years ago and everything I paint today is benefited by this entire experience and effort. I believe this truth, this law of nature, affects everything we do and want to do.

Forgiveness

Over the past several decades I have learned the importance of love.  Love is the essence of spiritual life, family and community. Yet love can be elusive, particularly if you do not love yourself.  We all have things about ourselves that we do not love or even like, for example I bite my fingernails.  But to love oneself is often not about the things we do, it’s about accepting that we are fallible and yet  capable of feeling good about who we are and about how we connect with others who are important to us. It’s easy to get down on yourself because you did something that you regret or because others do not react to you the way you wish they would. But this is not about love. Love of oneself comes from the inner self that knows who you are and respects what you feel and do. I believe that If you cannot love yourself, you cannot love others.

A number of years ago I was struggling with loving myself and thus feeling love for other people. I found that I as very critical of my shortcomings in many areas, and that I could not give myself credit for who I really am and had accomplished.  I judged myself through the eyes of others. This is when I learned the importance of forgiveness. Without forgiveness there can be no love. So, I learned to forgive myself when I did something that I or others might see as less than my best. I would say to myself at such times, “I forgive myself”  and “I love myself”.  To some people this might seem to be too self-centered and narcissistic.  But for me, you have to love yourself before you can love others and to love yourself you have to be able to forgive yourself. I used these affirmations when I had negative thoughts about myself or when I felt disappointment from others. In this way I replaced negative mind-talk with positive thoughts. I felt more positive feelings about who I am and this in turn increased my capacity for reaching out, giving to my friends and achieving lifelong loving relationships.

Rules

Around 1988 my then girl friend (now my wife) and I attended a series of classes entitled Making Things Happen. It was an enlightening experience and sharing it with the love of my life meant a lot to me then and now. While we have differences, we know that down deep we have similar values and expectations. In a handout that was provided sometime during these classes was Rules For Being Human. I will paraphrase them here.

1. You will receive a body – you may not like it but it’s yours for life.

2. You will learn lessons – Life is a full-time school where you will have the opportunity to learn.

3. There are no mistakes, only lessons – growth is a process of trial and error, experimentation, and failure is part of the process.

4. A lesson is repeated until learned – lessons will be presented to you in various forms until learned.

5. Learning lessons does not end – if you are alive there are lessons to be learned.

6. There is no better place than here – when your “there” becomes “here” you will look for another “there”.

7. Others are merely mirrors of you – you cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects something you love or hate about yourself.

8. What you make of your life is up to you – you have all the tools and resources you need to achieve what you desire.

9. Answers lie within you – all you need to do is look, listen and trust.

10. You will forget all of this.

I especially like rule 7 as it is a rule I most often forget. Some years after this course a work colleague and friend of mine and I were struggling with working with a few particular people and we talked about how their objectionable ways might be reflections of our dissatisfaction of ourselves. When we were stressed by their behavior, we would say out loud to each other, “I love myself or love yourself”, realizing that we could not accept others until we accepted and loved ourselves.

I do not fully agree with rule 10. While I do sometimes forget a rule, most of them I live today as they are deeply embedded in my subconscious. The Making Things Happen experience was an important step in my learning then and now.