This made me think… a lot Live your life “So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no [Read Full Post]
From http://kottke.org/05/12/richard-dawkins-letter-to-his-daughter-juliet Richard Dawkins’ letter to his daughter Juliet on good and bad reasons for believing. “Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority, or revelation?” Good And Bad Reasons For Believing Richard Dawkins Dear Juliet, Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know? How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the sun and are very far away? And how do we know that Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of those stars, the sun? The answer to these questions is “evidence.” Sometimes evidence means actually seeing ( or [Read Full Post]
In thinking about boats to burn (see my last post) made me think about grad school again. Even before I started my Master’s in Instructional Technology at SJSU (program which no longer exists) I thought about about going back to school and getting a PhD in Instructional Technology. It has boiled down to Learning Science and Technology Design or Anthropology of Education at Stanford. I’m not in my 20s anymore, in fact, I’m 2 and a half years from turning 40! I need to balance my wanting to go back to school with how expensive it would be and the money and time investment needed to complete the task. I’ve always been afraid of rejection, even more so in this big, life altering, OMG WTH am I getting into, step in life. The one time that I did decide to apply I was turned down ’cause of a bureaucratic mistake [Read Full Post]
what boat do you need to burn? a testimony to your future There’s a story my friend Pasha told me about about a mythic band of magic-loving Irish folk. Feeling the call for newness, they would forge out to settle on a new island. Necessarily, they would make the journey by ship. When they arrived to their next land they would unpack — and then promptly burn their boats. No desire to go back. Focused forward. New journey, new way of getting there, new results. Usually we want to do more of what got us to where we are. There is safety in repetition. Familiarity, best practices, proven techniques. I think the Bright Future craves more daring from us. a testimony to the future I bless the path that showed itself to me astute, blind, courageous, clever, faithfully I forged and floated to now. I testify to the utility of [Read Full Post]
If… IF you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can dream – and not make dreams your master; If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools: If you [Read Full Post]
The older I get the more I realize my life is based on dichotomies. The law of opposite pairs exerting equal and opposite pressure. I’ve thought about it a lot as I begin a new stage in life… I was, or I think I was, hired for a short-term contract position as content developer with Support Space’s certification team… It brought up a lot of questions back into the front burner. I’ve tried to condense them into the dichotomies as I’m feeling them right now. Short term satisfaction versus long term happiness The old now versus later. I have a job for the next 3 months and then I’ll have to decide if I want to stay (assuming that they’ll want to keep me anyways) or I want to move into something else. Staying put means that I get stability for the short term; I’m happy right now and the [Read Full Post]
Not too long ago I finished talking to a recruiter about a job with Paypal in San Jose and I’ve been working with another recruiter for a job in San Francisco well, South San Francisco, which tied to something I got from Danielle Laporte got my wheels spinning and thinking. Beyond the basics of food, shelter, and health, what do you need money for? Does beauty matter? Does comfort matter? Does stability have great meaning for you, or the capacity to travel the world? If you say it matters to you, then it matters. And what matters varies wildly from person to person. Money is a means to an end is the knee-jerk answer. But what are the ends and what are the means deserves a little more thought and reflection. The end is the goal where you want to be at when completing a task, a period in life [Read Full Post]
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Damn the leg hurts… I was kinda expecting a certain level of pain but not the amount of pain that I’ve been through this past week. Partly because of the pain and partly to get mom off my back that I’m starting PT tomorrow.
“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.” Tom Stoppard There are so many different things going on right now that I’m scared and don’t know how to deal with. This is going to be both my 2011 in review and my looking forward to 2012 and also a stream of consciousness to make sure I do remember. 2011 Part 1: Georgia Ever since I left California to move to Georgia in 2010 I was very ambivalent about the reasons why I moved. Yes, I needed the change, I needed the challenge, I needed to prove to myself that I could do it. What didn’t dawn on me until I went back to work in January was that it didn’t feel [Read Full Post]
