Category — i couldn't help but wonder

Downtown Wichita in the rain

Beautiful & flat

Completely strange shopping mall with some kind of play area with gorilla. I cannot figure this out. But thought the gorilla looked pretty cool coming through the mist. Gorilla in the mist, Kansas-stylee.

Drive became extremely foggy at one point. Kind of cool.

Prairie moonscape.

Mountains rising up on the road to Boulder.

Some video musings:

A super proud moment!

Yer typical Austin breakfast joint

Oklahoma beauty

Hello, everyone. I am a Twitteraholic.

I never dreamt that Twitter would become such a big part of my life. I joined about a year and a half ago and at first, it was just something fun. It’s still fun but it’s also more. It’s a way to let people know what I’m up to. It’s a way for me to find out what people think about the important topics of the day. It’s a way to get truly up to the minute info and insights about our world. And it’s still really, really fun.

Most of my friends can’t understand what I love about Twitter. They say stuff like, doesn’t it take up too much time, isn’t it a waste of time, why would anyone want to know that I just ate a cupcake or stubbed my toe? When I described Twitter to him, one friend said, “I’d rather stick a pencil in my eye.”

One of my Twitter pals (@Pistachio) told me that a friend of hers called it “ambient intimacy.” And that is the best descriptor yet. Throughout my day of sitting by myself at my desk, I am able to tune into this giant flow of humanity anytime I like. I just find it so touching and quirky and funny and surprising and also quite sweet. That’s what I love about it.

Last week, I had the surprising good fortune to land on Mashable’s “25 of the Most Inspiring People on Twitter” list and that was awesome. It made me feel so good. Then I had the pleasure of being followed by a whole bunch of people in a very short time. I can’t lump them together. I want to know who each one is. So I look at the profile of every single person who follows me because I’m so touched that they might want to hear about my life. And I want to hear about theirs!

Well, actually there are some people I don’t want to hear about so much. The big hit of new followers made me think about a twitter strategy, which I never in a million years thought I would need. It’s actually been an interesting exercise to think through.

And btw, if you’re not on twitter, get on it!! Follow me!! Twitter.com/spiver. I promise to follow you back, as long as you’re not trying to sell me something on the physical, emotional, or spiritual plane.

So here is my fascinating follow-back strategy. (But sometimes I accidentally delete someone’s profile or otherwise lose track of my emails. If you think I should be following you back, un-follow and re-follow or just tweet me.)

I like to follow people who

• Are genuine.
• Tweet about daily life, as opposed to their philosophy of daily life. I’d rather hear how it’s working out than any recommended beliefs or strategies.
• Question authority.
• Are going through something extremely sad or extremely happy.
• Have a point of view on something that interests me (social media, Buddhism, Enneagram, cooking & food, love, sorrow, music, outfits & hairdos, writing, Macs, inner and outer life adventures, reality TV, creating world peace).
• Seem kind.
• Tweet encouraging things to others. (Personally, not through random quotes.)
• Are funny and sassy and smart, but not mean.
• Are passionate and human.
• Post pictures of their pets.
• Just seem like decent human beings.
• Tell me they like me (hey, I’m only human).

I’m not so into following people who

• Are in it to advertise their business or service, especially if they pretend they’re not.
• Only tweet about their professional services.
• Only issue tweets and never enter into dialog.
• Only (or mostly) post quotations.
• Only care about success.
• Have never tweeted anything.
• Want me to join in their cause.
• Express any sort of fundamentalist view.
• Exhort me to do anything.
• Protect their tweets.
• Display no uncertainty about self, others, or life.
• Show me their nakedness absent a personal request.
• Are humorless.
• Might be dismayed if I followed them back.
• Have a following: follower ratio of 3249:1
• Act as Thought Police: obsessed with positivity and counsel mind control to avoid anything negative.

I got on this list of 25 of the most inspirational people on Twitter at position #12. I have no idea how this list was created or why I’m #12, but I really love that it happened!

If you twitter, follow me! I promise to follow you back. If you don’t twitter, you might want to check it out. I love it. Someone (can never remember the name) called it “ambient intimacy” and that’s the best description I ever heard. It’s lovely.

A good way to start on twitter is to find someone you know (like me), see who they follow, and start following those people. If you hate it, you don’t have to keep it up. It’s a very relaxed thing.

THURSDAY (Arizona):

to film Andrew Weil direct response show.

FRIDAY (Vermont):

To teach a meditation retreat for writers.

Things can change awfully fast in this world.

I somehow got invited to host a direct response show (30 minutes) for Dr. Andrew Weil. The two of us sat and talked about healthy aging. Filming took two days to set up and two days to complete, although my part only took a day. Here is the crew setting the stage:

I got tagged! Now you’re it. Talk to me.

1. For breakfast, I drink warm almond milk with a teaspoon of instant espresso. Try ordering this on the road.

2. I was the Chapter Leader of the Boston Guardian Angels when I was 19 years old.

3. Doug Sahm almost pushed me into a swimming pool because he was so mad at me.

4. I’m a gadget geek.

5. I’m incredibly introverted and shy. No one believes me about this.

6. I could teach you the Enneagram. I don’t care if you want to learn it or not. I feel maniacally compelled to inform everyone on earth about this system and believe that learning it could lead to world peace. I’m sort of not even kidding.

7. Out of the blue, about 8 years ago, I became a full-blown claustrophobe. I have no idea why.

8. The more I love a piece of music, the harder I find it to listen. I become overwhelmed. If I knew the musician and they have since died, I almost can’t even bear to hear their name.

9. In High School, I was a gymnast and could throw three back handsprings in a row. I can still stand on my head indefinitely, walk on my hands, and do many cartwheels.

10. I think “developing a personal brand” is insane.

11. Currently, this is my favorite poem:

The lonely child who travels through
The fearful waste and desolate fields,
And listens to their barren tune,
Greets as an unknown and best friend
The terror in him, and he sings
In darkness all the sweetest songs.

–Chogyam Trungpa, excerpt, “The Silent Song of Loneliness”

12. I sat on Hubert Sumlin’s lap. OK, and also on Albert King’s. And I saw Lou Ann Barton coldcock Junior Wells. I think he tried to sit on her lap. I could go on and on about bluesy things.

13. I often dream about cats.

14. I’ve been a Buddhist all my life, only I didn’t know that’s what it was called until about 15 years ago.

15. I seriously almost died in a car wreck and have many scars. I kind of like them.

16. My sister, father, nephew, and I all have moon in Pisces. My dad and I also have Pisces rising. This means something to me.

17. I am a Kinesthetic learner. Which explains #22. Pretty much.

18. I would be so happy to move back to NYC or Austin or Washington, DC. Everyone who knows me knows this and is sick of hearing me complain about Boston. I’m sick of hearing me complain about Boston. Yet I kvetch on.

19. I believe that good can come from looking into darkness.

20. I would rather live in an apartment than a house. I sleep really, really well in hotels. I like knowing other people are around when I’m not expected to interact with them.

21. My husband can almost always cheer me up.

22. I flunked the 8th grade.

23. I am in completely in love with Bruce Springsteen.

24. I hate talking on the telephone.

25. I believe that the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are here.

Hello book publishers. You’re starting to scare me.

I work in publishing but was a record label executive from 1990-2001 and am fascinated by parallels between the two industries. When it comes to the digitization of product and attempts to master/mangle the phenomenon of social media, the publishing business is where the music business was about 10 years ago. And although publishing probably sets its collective IQ (not to mention good manners) as superior to the music business, I can’t find evidence that their reactions to industry sea change are substantially different.

While attending this week’s O’Reilly’s Tools of Change in Publishing conference, I heard a lot of this:

There is still time to change course and we’ve got to do something now—but we don’t know what.

In the meantime, let’s co-opt whatever new trends we see out there by assigning some low-level marketing person to troll Twitter or hiring a social media consultant.

Please, please don’t let us end up like the record business.

If there’s anything to be learned from the recent past, it’s that none of these thoughts are worth pursuing. The “somebody do something” mentality duplicates the kind of hoping-for-the-best attitude espoused by long-time executives in music who simply could not or would not question the viability of the professional cocoons they’d built for themselves. And who can blame them—corporate mega structures are schooled in consolidation as the primary means of growth, not fleet-footed, shape-shifting responsiveness to change. But now we’re in a world where getting bigger is not the answer, getting smaller is.

The question I hoped would be addressed at the conference was: How will publishing avoid being trapped by its own environment? But it never was. Instead, I noticed a lot of talk of waiting and seeing how things are going to work out before making any earth-shaking, world-class responses to a world that has already changed.

At the conference, I was excited for a keynote aimed at comparing the music and publishing industries. Although entertaining, it lacked vision. The speaker talked about how only wimps fear the freedoms of the digital marketplace and attempt to control intellectual property rights and that at least we’re not going to start arresting people like those thugs over at the RIAA. I was disappointed not to hear a more sophisticated dissection, beginning with debunking the idea that digital downloads killed the music business, or could kill publishing.

Downloads did not kill the music business. Shortsightedness and turf-protection on the part of music business executives did. Piracy and changing distribution schema will not kill the publishing industry. Shortsighted infrastructure-protection on the part of publishing houses will.

What offed the music business—and what the publishing industry is facing—is a corporate structure built to churn out hits to subsidize an entire product line. (For more detail on how this happened–boring to everyone but me–see this 2007 post.) Rather than developing artists, exploiting regional marketplaces, and building financial models that can support a mid-range list, both industries sold their souls out to entertainment at the expense of art and expression. Both are in the business of selling many copies of a few items, not a few copies of many items—the kind of product that can be shot out of a cannon, dominate the retail market, and then basically disappear—because anything else is simply too complicated for a similarly bulked up corporate retail environment to track. The appearance of downloads and file sharing could almost be seen as a desperate measure on the part of consumers to listen and read in an un-mandated manner.

Commodification of bookselling is the eight-hundred pound gorilla in the room, not e-books or DRM (Digital Rights Management) or the Kindle.

Without making friends with this beast, my guess is that in 2-5 years we’ll see a publishing industry that looks like the music business does today: Super-downsized major companies selling a product line aimed at an older demographic and a jillion new companies creating the next generation of publishers, retailers, and readers. Just like in the music business, some in publishing will be mourning the death of the business while others will be wildly excited because all they see is opportunity.

At Tools of Change, Sara Lloyd of Pan-MacMillan nailed it when she said, “Publishers understand markets, but not customers.” As anyone in the music business could have told you years ago, the customer is now a human being, and publishers—who still see retail as their customers—don’t know how to build products for individuals who might want to discuss, interact with, congregate around, or add their own $0.02 to the content. The customer has stepped out of the bookstore and into the foyer of the publishing houses, they are knocking on the doors of authors, and asking to be addressed as individuals. They will consent to purchase, not when coerced by a front-of-the-store display or fabulous media coverage, but when their friends start talking about how awesome/helpful/inspiring/powerful the actual book itself is. And this—the book itself—is what publishing has lost sight of in the attempt to build market share. To change this kind of corporate culture will require super-human “change management” to flip a mega-entity staffed by people who are petrified of losing their jobs into a business that can be one step ahead (instead of ten steps behind) consumption trends.

Ultimately, the music business sacrificed music to save the business. Hopefully, publishers will realize that if books are similarly sacrificed, what will be left is an industry that doesn’t care about its product, focuses on creating grandiose supply chains instead of amplifying demand, has no idea what its customers want, sees value only in commodification, and has to keep spinning out hit after hit after hit just to keep the doors open. The result? A beast that consumes itself. I truly wish I had heard some mention of this at the conference. Maybe next year.

Spoke recently with Stephen Mitchell, internationally respected translator of the world’s great wisdom texts, who has published versions of the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, The Book of Job, and Gilgamesh. His wife is Byron Katie, author of Loving What Is, among other wonderful books about wakefulness and joy.

I talked with Stephen for my upcoming book, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart, which will be out in Jan 2010. I wanted to talk to him about stuff like The Secret and the idea that thinking positively could effect outcomes. When your heart is broken, you want to rearrange your thoughts so that they’re not so ridiculously painful. You want to have faith in something, to believe that what you’re experiencing is leading you to something “better.” And I really believe that it is–but I also believe we can’t know what that something is, so imagining so-called positive outcomes as a way of escaping current pain could actually be more confusing. Not to mention dulling and silly. I mean who wants to ignore reality and instead insist everything’s fine, everything’s fine, everything’s fine, if I only think the right thoughts, I can have everything I want. Yet gaining dominion over your thoughts is critical to working with heartbreak to end up wiser than when you went in.

So I couldn’t help but wonder (if I may pull a spiritual Carrie Bradshaw; cue words scrolling across computer screen):

What is the difference between positive thinking and wishful thinking?

Here is an excerpt from the chapter in my new book called “Have Faith.”

In this sense, faith is not so much a belief that everything is somehow going to work out for the best, which can be very, very difficult to imagine when your heart is broken, when you are literally—and understandably—desperate to believe that what you’re feeling is some kind of divine redirection away from what was bad for you and toward what is going to be way better than you ever imagined. This isn’t really a good state of mind to walk around in. First, it presumes that you know what’s best for you and, honestly, I’ve never found evidence that this is a big enough point of view.

I know that there is a lot of emphasis on thinking positively and believing that you can make good things happen by expecting good things to happen. Recently, I had occasion to speak to my friend Stephen Mitchell about this. He is an internationally respected translator of the world’s great wisdom texts, has published versions of the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, The Book of Job, and Gilgamesh. I asked him if, in his lifelong study of the core teachings of all religions, he’d ever come across this idea. I wrote down what he said, because it was so excellent. Here it is:

The teaching of every one of the great sacred texts is that control is an illusion. When you understand that ultimately you are not the doer, you can step back from yourself. That is the only path to serenity.  In other words, letting go of the illusion of control, and realizing that you never had it in the first place, allows you to live in the most dazzlingly intelligent, beautiful, and kind reality that you could ever have imagined—and beyond what you could have imagined.

I don’t know about you, but I’ll have what he’s having. When I thought about it, I realized that all the many things I had longed for throughout my life and had been lucky enough to get—like a good relationship, great friends, and a cool job—hadn’t exactly made me into Mahatma Gandhi. In a lot of ways, I was just as riled up and dissatisfied as ever. So maybe I wasn’t the supreme arbiter of all things good for me. Now what?

According to Stephen, actually, all I had to do was relax, to allow the world to dazzle me instead of the other way around. So I’m trying. When I can relax enough, I see that, just like me, everyone—regular people, great superstars and profound sages—probably all started out worrying that the world was going to eat them alive or that they simply weren’t lovable enough. We are all just looking for some kind of happiness. Sometimes things work out for us and sometimes they don’t. It really doesn’t matter. Eventually, all our hopes and fears are going to dissolve and at the end of our lives, according to all the deathbed reports we’ve ever received, the only thing that will matter is how loving and brave we’ve been. I mean, come on, all those dying people can’t be wrong. They seem to be saying that all the things you want and all the things you dread are just like waves in the ocean. Eventually, they just become reabsorbed into the vast play of the ocean. And you know what? The ocean doesn’t care. It never gives up. It can accommodate it all, gentle waves that lap the shore and those that roil up ferociously, tiny tidal pools and great, freezing depths. The real secret, the great ones say, is that we are much more like the ocean than the waves. Underneath all our hopes and fears is profound stillness and the memory of how to return to it. You can bank on it.

Had the good fortune last week to interview David Allen, author of the deservedly sanctified Getting Things Done and the new book, Making it All Work. His Getting Things Done system is a brilliant strategy for making sense of all your inputs (e-mails, phone messages, professional directives, personal priorities), reconciling them with your intentions and priorities, and capturing it all in an organized way so you can use your mind for other purposes besides freaking out about how much you have to do.

I interviewed him for an article I’m writing for SELF magazine about how, according to Buddhist thought, being too busy, rather than a sign of success, is considered a sign of laziness. But how can being in-demand, committed, and loaded with responsibility be called lazy?! Because you’ve allowed your agenda to run you, not the other way around. The reasons for this go deep. It didn’t get this way because you lack willpower. It’s more likely a lack of self-awareness that turned your agenda into a raging beast. You’ve forgotten who you really wanted to be in this life. So it’s actually a spiritual question as much as a time-management issue. That’s what I want to explore in this blog post.

When I’ve spoken with David in the past—and from my long-time experience as a GTD-er—I’m always struck by the spiritual underpinnings of his point of view. In this system, spiritual doesn’t mean woo-woo, new age, navel-gazing, escapist crapola. Instead, it means unflinching, committed, humorous (the more serious the practitioner, the better the sense of humor, I’ve noticed) devotion to looking life right in the eye, figuring out the truth about who you are, allowing yourself to be affected by it all, and then going, clear-eyed, with the flow. Whatever flow looks like for you. Today. This is what GTD helps you do. Sometimes it feels great, sometimes it’s mighty uncomfortable.

The goal of his system is to create a precise, peaceful, and elegant daily experience, one that cultivates what he calls “mind like water.” No matter what you throw into water—a tiny pebble, a giant boulder, your boss and the horse he rode in with—water doesn’t care. It reacts appropriately, absorbs the impact, and returns to stillness as quickly as possible.

GTD organizes your outer life so that this stillness is possible.

So now you have some measure of stillness. This is where the lazy part comes in.

“Laziness,” David says, “is basically a lack of courage.” He describes being too busy and disorganized as a “pretty effective behavior to avoid the intensity of being alive. What you might find if you slow down is who you really are. (When you do,) you’re reminded of how magnificent you are.”  Dramatic pause. “Are you ready to stand up to that?”

I had to wonder: why is it so scary to see who you really are? Because, he said, people would then have to figure out “how you could realize your magnificence and still be a lazy slob who yells at your wife, etc…” In other words, a regular person who is also extraordinary. Meaning, once you glimpse your potential, your greatness, what some would call Buddhanature, it raises the stakes quite a bit and you can no longer pretend your life is going to begin sometime “later;” when you change jobs, meet the right person, lose 8 pounds, or whatever it is. The time to express your potential, suddenly, is Right Now. You see your gifts. There’s no more denying what you’re here to do. “The planet is wired to have you learn the lesson of being responsible for where you have put your creative attachments and energy.” So with stillness comes insight into the truth of who you are and how you invest your energy. Are you ready to stand up to that?

So on one hand, GTD is a way to organize your “stuff” and you can stop with that view and it’s totally fine. It is an amazing system. But on the other hand, it can be a powerful tool on the journey to discover who you really are.

“It all depends on how deep you want to go,” he says.

The way to start? As David said in such a simple way, it made me laugh: “All you have to do is pay attention to what has your attention.” Start with right now. Start by paying full attention to your next action. And the one after that.

A tenet of the system is to look at all you have to do, identify the very next action to take regarding each project you’re committed to, and then take it. The trick is to bring your attention with you. Problems arise when your body is doing the next action but your mind is five actions down the road, or in Tahiti, or wondering if you look fat. You get the idea. Synchronizing body and mind through the placement of attention is as spiritual an endeavor as I can imagine. Not to mention, it helps you get a whole hell of a lot done. A person who can command placement of attention is a formidable creature indeed…

So, I tell myself, the next time you find yourself wicked busy and out of breath, let yourself fill up with breath once again. Notice it as it streams in and notice it as it flows out. Ride the breath like a wave and watch as the waves begin to slow and deepen until you are reminded of the stillness that is always there. The mind knows how to return to this state.

Mind like water.

Stay tuned for Part 2, wherein we discuss a second aspect of laziness: losing awareness of the present moment and instead becoming absorbed in what ifs and oh nos.