Bloghttps://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/category/the-path/2020-09-10T13:22:15.956063+00:00How I Found Dharma Refuge2020-09-09T00:00:00+00:002020-09-10T13:22:15.956063+00:00https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/how-i-found-dharma-refuge/<div class="rich-text"><p>We base our lives on routines. Some we end up with because they give us comfort and instant gratification in the now. Others we proactively build based on a notion that in the long run they will bring benefit. A little while ago it dawned on me that I spend<i> a lot</i> of time sitting around. Every single week I'd spend hours and in some months I’d spend multiple days of doing nothing but sitting and watching. When you step back and consider that ~33% of our lives we are asleep, all that sitting adds up to a good chunk of the remaining waking hours. Hours that I could be doing something <i>more useful</i> and yet time after time I instead choose to just sit and meditate.</p><p>This post is my story on how I discovered Dharma Refuge, a local non-profit group where people come together to practice meditation.</p><p>Many have written about the benefits of meditation and many others have disputed those claims as not being scientifically/clinically proven. Those who practice it and those who don’t each have their own reasons and opinions. These are my reasons for doing it…</p><ul><li>It’s a mental exercise in learning how to stay focused. Kind of like doing push-ups but for your brain.</li><li>It allows you to learn more about your own mind. Learn what is in it by observing types of thoughts/emotions/sensations that tend to pop up</li><li>It allows you to practice self-awareness by training the mind to notice its own state and consciously decide how to respond to what's arising</li><li>Through self-awareness, it helps us achieve a higher degree of emotional/mental self-regulation since once we notice our own state, we are able to pause and then (not always) proceed with a more skillful response.</li></ul><p>Before 2020 introduced its own set of challenges and disruptions, my meditation practice included 15-min sitting every morning, attending a weekly 35-min sitting at <a href="https://www.dharmarefuge.com/">Dharma Refuge</a>, every ~1-2 months finding a day of silence for ~8 hours of meditation/reflection and once a year in October going up to <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/what-silent-retreat/">Jefferson, ME for a 5-day silent retreat</a>. In 2020, the daily/weekly practice is still going strong, but it is those longer pauses in life that I’ve begun to miss lately.</p><p>But here meditation is only half the story, the other half is that along the way I discovered Tibetan Buddhist teachings, which in their tradition (as well as in several other traditions) are collectively called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharma">Dharma</a>. What I have come to appreciate is that while meditation plays a central role in a Buddhist practice, in itself meditation is simply a technique or a tool (think of a “hammer”). The Dharma and the people who devote decades, if not their entire lives, to studying and teaching the Dharma is what helps people like myself to learn how to use that tool effectively (i.e. when you pick up a hammer, do you build a mailbox, a shed, a house or just go around bashing things?).</p><p>I don’t label myself as a Buddhist. I’m not even sure if there is such a thing; there could be but I’m not. But I do regularly attend meditation and dharma teaching sessions. I don’t generally advertise this part of me when I meet new people, but I also don’t try to hide it, and from time to time it does come up in conversations. It is always interesting to see people’s reactions, which range quite widely. Oftentimes, the follow-up question I get is, how did it happen?</p><p>It’s an excellent question, considering that to most people (myself at one point in time included) Buddhism is simply a religion, one of several major ones, but in no way special or differentiated from the others. Whereas, having been raised until the age of 11 in a Soviet Union where the government did their best to eradicate all traces of religion, prior to this I barely attended a handful of religious services my entire life and those that I did attend, were in my childhood and generally against my will. For the majority of my life, I did not have a single spiritual bone in my body that I was aware of. In fact with my upbringing growing up in Eastern Europe and with two engineer parents on top of that, I had plenty of bones that did the opposite, they would actively scream to stay away from anything that smelled like any kind of organized religion.</p><p>So that’s the starting point for this story, and thinking back, it yet again feels like another <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/universe-has-way-shaping-us/">series of random events</a><b>.</b></p><p>In the Summer of 2015, my wife and I spent a few months living in Asia while the courts were finalizing paperwork for our adopted son. We stayed mostly in Seoul, South Korea but also got a chance to visit Hong Kong and Japan. While in Japan we took a 9-day bus tour to see a number of various places around the country. We spent A LOT of time on a bus. It was on that trip that I dipped into Amazon’s philosophy section and dug out <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Motorcycle-Maintenance-Inquiry-ebook/dp/B0026772N8/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr="><i>Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance</i></a>. It was a very interesting read and after I finished it, I noticed (either in Kindle Store or on Goodreads, don’t remember), it was tagged <i>Buddhism.</i> For all of five seconds I had a thought cross my mind, “hmm curious, good book but I don’t see the Buddhism connection” and then… I moved on with my life.</p><p>About half a year later, having gone through the rotations of the book genres that I typically read, I once again turned to looking for the next philosophy book. As I was scrolling through pages and pages of various titles on Amazon looking for something that would catch the eye, the one that caught it was a book written by Steve Hagen titled <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Buddhism-Plain-Simple-Practice-Being-ebook/dp/B005CVTTWM/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Buddhism+Plain+and+Simple&qid=1599653585&s=digital-text&sr=1-1"><i>Buddhism Plain and Simple: The Practice of Being Aware Right Now, Every Day</i></a> and again… there’s that word, “Buddhism”. It’s a religion and what was it doing in a philosophy section!?</p><p>So being a bit curious by this point, my next step was to visit one of my favorite website in the whole wide Internet, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism">Wikipedia</a> to read the first introductory paragraph summarizing Buddhism. I started reading… a) I confirmed my suspicion that “it’s just a religion” but then b) I noticed the Wiki page mentioned it was a <i>non-theistic</i> religion and I wasn’t quite sure what that word meant so I clicked on it. That took me to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontheism">another Wiki entry</a> describing a class of religions that, to the best of my personal interpretation (i.e. I’m not quoting wiki), do not worship or follow any deity. Up until that with my limited, narrow understanding of life and universe, that description simply did not compute. Isn’t the whole point of a religion is to worship and follow some kind of god?? Curiosity piqued just a tad more, I hit the Back button and returned to the Buddhism page to figure out if they are not following a god, then what kind of a krazy scheme is this? I read few more paragraphs past the introduction and took away that Buddhism doesn’t deny the existence of deities but at its foundation is the belief that if anyone is going to help you in this lifetime, you better have faith in yourself and focus there. Make your own effort to learn to work with your own mind and the world around you rather than simply relying on a some external factor to come along and make everything better. Well… this is something I could get behind. And so…</p><p>I bought Steve Hagen’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Buddhism-Plain-Simple-Practice-Being-ebook/dp/B005CVTTWM/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Buddhism+Plain+and+Simple&qid=1599653585&s=digital-text&sr=1-1"><i>Buddhism Plain and Simple</i></a> and read the whole thing over the Christmas vacation while visiting in-laws in Philadelphia.</p><p>First off, that book is a great read and I would encourage everyone who is practicing and learning to be a human to read it regardless of your beliefs or affiliations. When Hagen authored that book, one of his intentions was to provide an introduction to the core essence of Buddhist philosophy as he understood it without going into the specific variations, coloring and biases that were introduced over the last 2,500 years by various cultures where Buddhism is prevalent. And I think he did an amazing job.</p><p>But my own story doesn’t quite end here. I read Hagen’s book and just like with <i>Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance</i> I moved on with my life.</p><p>As the next 9 months of 2016 unfolded, I transferred roles in my job from a software engineer to an engineering manager. Due to the combination of multiple factors…</p><ul><li>A role change and new stresses/challenges of having to learn how to manage and work with other humans and my boss, to whom I am forever grateful for her support and patience with me, repeatedly reminding me, “dude, you need to be more mindful”</li><li>A conversation with a friend who happened to mention that recently he started meditation and found the practice helpful</li><li>The increasing wave of visibility and popularity of mindfulness and meditation in popular media</li><li>And a book, Willpower Instinct, that my kindle happened to recommend to me where the homework at the end of chapter one was to start meditating five minutes every morning. (I’ve <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/universe-has-way-shaping-us/">written previously</a> about how I discovered that book)</li></ul><p>… in September of 2016, I began the meditating every morning. At first it was five minutes and then gradually got up to fifteen. As I’m writing this, 4 years later in September of 2020, my morning meditation is still fifteen minutes and very much a part of the daily route.</p><p>About two months into this new habit, I realized its status has changed from a short-term experiment to something I was interested in cultivating long-term. This is when I remembered that in Hagen’s <i>Buddhism Plain and Simple</i>, there was a good portion of the book dedicated to describing proper form, technique and mindset for learning how to meditate. I went back to the book and reread it for the second time. It was during this second pass, that I noted at one point in the book Hagen mentions how he is affiliated with a Buddha Dharma center in Minnesota where people would come together to practice meditation and that in recent years these centers have begun to sprout out all over the United States. Quick Google search for “buddha dharma center rochester ny” led me to discover that we indeed have several organizations; the one that caught my eye, was the <a href="https://www.dharmarefuge.com/">Dharma Refuge</a>. But… because by this point it was the New Year holiday and I’ve always had a long-standing personal policy to never start anything new at the beginning of the year (that’s what everyone else does; I have to be different… the story in my head went), I made a mental note to check out Dharma Refuge at the end of February.</p><p>I didn’t make my way to Dharma Refuge until the last week of March in 2017 when I joined the group for their Wednesday night practice. As Sue, the local teacher there, would jokingly say on occasion, “people tend to come for the meditation but then they stick around for the Dharma,” I found that statement to be profoundly accurate in my case. In three years since that first visit (and with exclusion of destabilizing events of 2020) I have not missed a Wednesday night practice unless I was out of town.</p><p>What I discovered, and continue to discover to this day, is that Buddhism really wasn’t what I thought it was. In one way it is very much a religion with its own history, rituals, prayers, temples, monks and everything else one would expect. However, as <a href="https://tim.blog/2018/02/02/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts-eric-ripert/">Eric Ripert mentioned in an interview with Tim Ferriss</a> (great episode, highly recommend), Buddhism <i>can be</i> a religion if you want it to be, but it is also a science and a philosophy, and not knowing this when I joined Dharma Refuge, that’s where my surprises came from. For one, there are striking similarities between Buddhist teachings of the East and the philosophers of the West, whose books I enjoy picking up from time to time. At the very core, both of these groups of people spent their entire lifetimes trying to figure out how a human is to live a decent, virtuous life (and in some cases what “virtue” itself is) and then pass those teachings onto the next generation. But then there’s also a large overlap between Buddhist teachings and the modern world psychology and sociology. Our business world these days is raving about the importance of mindfulness and emotional intelligence, and here we have 2,500-year-old knowledge that talks about being present, listening to others (listening to the whole world, not just people), empathy and compassion, educates its practitioners about how every human sees the world through their own lens, how limiting those lenses can be at times, how precious those lenses can be at other times, and how to honor, respect and be open to the differing views rather than fight against them. Doesn’t that sound familiar to anyone who had any management/leadership training? How about diversity and inclusion training?</p><p>I’ve stayed with Dharma Refuge and continue learning and attending Dharma teachings because this practice has already changed who I am. Learning how to be more present, open and self-aware has been immensely helpful in my professional role. Which is not to say I still don’t have my moments of visiting a dark place from time to time, but that’s also part of the practice: accepting our very own nature, our humanity and our imperfection. At home, my wife repeatedly tells me I am not the same person I was four years ago. According to her, I am now a better husband, better father and generally a better human. And that's why I continue to sit. Just sit and watch.</p></div>My Search for Values2020-05-27T00:00:00+00:002020-05-27T12:32:55.670765+00:00https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/my-search-values/<div class="rich-text"><p>This post picks up where the other one, <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/my-winding-arrival-search-values/">My Winding Arrival Search for Values</a> left off. After some contemplation during the 2018 new year holidays, as I returned to daily routine, I set off on a path to “find my center,” or more specifically, make the focus of my life be something a bit more wholesome and healthy than working for work’s sake (yes, I am a recovering workaholic). The first good chunk of 2018 involved mostly meandering through various topics/ideas and using the <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/discovering-balance-and-focus-through-being-bored/">weekly reflection hour</a> to process what I was reading and thinking. Eventually, I arrived at the conclusion that what I needed was to put all my concentration eggs into a personal core values basket.</p><p>Before we get into “the how” of that process, let’s start with “the why” and “the what.”</p><h2>The Why</h2><p>From the moment we wake up to the time when we hit the pillow at the end of a day, we are involved in a great deal of various activities. Sometimes, we happily go through the motions of the day. Sometimes we continue to go through the motions while beginning to get a sense that what we are doing seems to be losing its meaning. And sometimes after spending years (or even decades) on autopilot, especially in those quiet moments when we are stuck with our thoughts on a bus, a plane or a hiking trail, we think to ourselves, “WTF am I doing with my life? Does any of it even matter?”</p><p>Without a clear and conscious definition of what is important to us, we are in danger of veering off course. When that continues to happen year after year, we may one day find that existence has just become about eating, pooping, sleeping, keeping yourself numb with TV and/or social media and going to work to support the first 4 survival habits, while the dreams of becoming who we’ve always wanted to be are nothing but a distant mirage. Granted, this doesn’t happen the same way to all of us to this extent (or at all), but without the clarity of why we do what we do, the danger is still there.</p><p>On the other hand, when we take the time to define what is the most important to us, we can begin to view all other activities, no matter how trivial, as something that supports that which we find meaningful and purposeful. And if we continue to keep our values in mind when making choices in life, little by little, we bring ourselves back into alignment with that which gives us meaning. Just like the North Star has helped explorers for centuries to find their way, having explicitly defined core values and using them effectively could do the same for our own journeys through life.</p><p>As Stephen Covey wrote in <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/library/#the-7-habits-of-highly-effective-people-powerful-lessons-in-personal-change">7 Habits of Highly Effective People</a>, a book everyone should have on their bookshelf, we all have a center. I mentioned above that my center used to be work. Other centers from his book, which I also <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/my-winding-arrival-search-values/">mentioned previously</a> can include friends, family, money, power, religion, entertainment, self or anything else that the default loop in our minds keeps coming back to again and again. A center is our foundation. It is a place we come back to when the world swirls around us and we need to get grounded. When our center is destabilized (e.g. the work center doesn’t like it when the leadership changes a direction of a company), we lose that last island of safety and stability and then it starts to feel like our entire existence descends into chaos. Unfortunately, most centers we typically gravitate toward are external; their stability depends on factors we do not always control. On the other hand, what makes values/principles center so valuable is that it is completely internal. When we establish it, we end up with a solid foundation that nothing and no one could ever shake.</p><h2>The What</h2><p>The word “values” or the phrase “core values,” elicit different reactions in many of us. Those who spent a good chunk in the corporate world almost instantly begin to smell BS, and how can we blame them when so many companies pay meaningless corporate lip service to this term? For others, the term is simply too abstract (I started off in this camp). In a recent conversation with an individual who just set off on their own discovery path, they asked “why do I even need values? Can’t I just live without them as-is?” Well, bad news... Whether you <i>want</i> to have core values or not, whether you think they are BS or not, you already <i>have</i> them and there is nothing you can do to get rid of them. You may not be able to name them and write them down, but that doesn’t make the fact that you have them any less real.</p><p>To make this concept a bit less abstract, we could start by acknowledging that for all of us there are specific things/activities/attributes/actions/qualities in our lives that some find more important than others. And what some of us find important, the rest of us wouldn’t even give a second glance. Each human being is unique. What is important to me may not be important to my spouse and vice versa. Ultimately the things that we care about and where we choose to put our energy is what makes us who we are.</p><p>The exercise of defining our values is simply taking the time to identify and write down those attributes of existence that we find most important; nothing more and nothing less.</p><p>But there’s a catch: we are multidimensional; we have many responsibilities and even more interests and dreams of the future. At first glance, it seems there are plenty of things that are important to us. This is where the "core" comes into the picture. The real challenge and the goal of the exercise is to keep going deeper into the cluster and identify just a few (2 to 5) focal points that are at the <i>very center</i>, at the very core of who we are. Yes, the other things around the core are also important, maybe even very important, but when we find the core <i>and </i>are able to explicitly name it, we discover our foundation.</p><h2>The How</h2><p>There are a number of various approaches to this discovery process. The most common one that I found is to start with a large list of qualities/attributes and whittle it down by thinking through what personally resonates. As I am writing this, I just typed “identify core values” into Google search and the very first search hit is <a href="https://www.cmu.edu/career/documents/my-career-path-activities/values-exercise.pdf">exactly this exercise</a>. It is not a bad starting point.</p><p>For me, another source of inspiration was <a href="https://lifehacker.com/how-finding-flow-helped-me-decide-what-i-should-do-with-1789344272">Trent Hamm’s article</a> which I discovered in the <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/whats-your-plan/">beginning of my own journey</a>. His approach was to sit down and “find flow,” which was to identify the times and activities in his life when he felt genuine fulfillment, those moments that caused him to lose track of time and space. And then look for common attributes/patterns in what he wrote down.</p><p>Yet another approach is to think back to your own childhood. Back to the time when our lives were not burdened by the accountabilities of having to be responsible, mature adults. What were the things we enjoyed doing? What were the hobbies and activities that brought us joy? What were our personalities like back then? Somewhere in those memories might be hiding significant patterns.</p><p>I did all those things.</p><p>However, the one thing I haven’t seen many sources mention is the total amount of time and effort one might expect to invest into this search. Even the list exercise I linked to above might leave you with an impression that you can sit down, look at some words, cross some of them out, then cross out some more and by the next morning (or next week) you have identified your core values and you are done! Maybe that happened for someone out there. If you’ve done it in less than a week and found it meaningful, <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/#lets-connect">I’d love to hear from you</a>. My initial discovery path where I began to feel that I had a somewhat well-defined and thought-out set of values took me from Spring of 2018 well into October of that year.</p><p>During that time, there were few things that helped catalyze the process:</p><ul><li>A book</li><li>A journal</li><li>Two meditation retreats</li></ul><p>The book was, <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/library/#the-pragmatists-guide-to-life-a-guide-to-creating-your-own-answers-to-lifes-biggest-questions">A Pragmatist’s Guide to Life</a>. It is not an easy read and at times can be somewhat dry and extremely analytical. First part of that book guides you through defining your personal “objective function,” which is their term for defining a set of attributes which maximize the intrinsic value one gets out of life. The book has many terms with examples and most of them are presented with arguments that both support as well as refute them, and it never gives an answer; that’s left for the reader. I also liked the thought experiments the book presents to help think through various questions. For example, if one believes happiness in itself has intrinsic value, would they agree to live out their entire life in a test tube if they could feel happy any time they want by simply pushing a button? I spent many hours talking through some of the ideas and questions in that book with my spouse as I reread parts that first section multiple times.</p><p>In July 2018, for almost unrelated reasons I decided to try journaling. Never had a diary or a journal in my entire life. Never attempted to start one before this. What triggered me this time was a human experiment to get myself to wake up early. While researching improving sleep, I came across an article that suggested daily journaling 15-30 minutes right before going to bed. The premise was that if you step away from a glowing screen right before bed (a plus in itself) and instead take that time to process your thoughts by writing them down, it helps to quiet the mind which in turn leads to falling asleep faster and having a better night’s rest. While improved sleep was the primary desired outcome, a welcome side-benefit ended up being that I could use the journal to write about the value discovery. The article was not wrong; writing helps thinking; who wooda thunk? Quick sidebar: that experiment indeed had a positive outcome. As I’m writing this post two years later, I still journal virtually every evening and my average wake up time is hours before it used to be. </p><p>Lastly, I’ve attended two meditation retreats that year. First one was a 2-day non-residential retreat in August near Boston. Second one was a 5-day silent retreat in Jefferson, ME. Although 5 days of silence just for this exercise would probably be excessive, there is something to be said about <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/discovering-balance-and-focus-through-being-bored/">taking a good chunk of time just to be with yourself and your thoughts</a>. It was on the second day of the August retreat, as I journaled during lunch and the smaller breaks in-between meditation sittings when all those data points from the word exercises, childhood memories and the Pragmatist’s Guide began to crystalize into something tangible and articulable.</p><p>This was not an easy path and if there are shortcuts, doesn’t feel like I found any that I can share here.</p><h2>The Outcome</h2><p>I have my very own set of core values, which I’ve listed on the <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/#home-b">homepage of my website</a>, and I feel they do an excellent job of defining who I am. Those 5 values truly have become foundational.</p><ul><li>To keep them in the forefront, I intentionally use the words in various conversations, almost daily. And in my profession as a manager who gets paid to talk to lots of people, as well as in personal life as a husband and parent, I never lack opportunities.</li><li>Besides just talking about them, I actively make sure to backup my words with actions and will pause to acknowledge, “I am choosing/doing X because it aligns with my ___ (insert a values)”</li><li>Every time I start a new journal, the first page is always my ideology tree (another idea from Pragmatist’s Guide) with my core values being the roots of that tree. It is a picture I come back to often.</li><li>As I do my weekly reflection sessions, often I would write out those same 5 terms and use them as a springboard for further thoughts about what I’ve been doing lately, where I am going and how that compares with what I identified as important to me.</li></ul><p>I can’t claim that I am completely off the work center as once in a while I still manage to fall off the wagon. However, having gone through the motions of identifying the values, I feel it has been one of the most impactful and meaningful exercises within my own journey as it allowed me to establish a more balanced and solid foundation from which I show up for myself and others. It is the place I keep coming back to as I climb back onto the wagon every time I fall.</p></div>My Winding Arrival at Search for Values2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:002020-04-02T11:25:00.487208+00:00https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/my-winding-arrival-search-values/<div class="rich-text"><p>Previously <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/whats-your-plan/">I wrote</a> about the time a few years back, when my wife and I decided to stop procrastinating and did one of those “responsible adult” things by contacting a few professionals to make sure our family affairs were in good order. However, we ended up walking away from those professionals with a whole bunch of questions and confusion and a lot less of answers and clarity.</p><p><a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/whats-your-plan/">What is your plan?</a> What are your goals? Where are you headed in life? Why are you headed there? These are some of the questions that they raised, and indeed they were (still are) great questions.</p><p>Without a single clue where to even begin tackling them, I came up with a relatively simple first step: I will review my schedule and allocate an hour each week to make some space for myself and my thoughts and then use that time to chip away at these things. In the process of doing so, I ended up stumbling into one of my first discoveries: <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/discovering-balance-and-focus-through-being-bored/">personal reflection and the crazy benefits it can bring</a> when it becomes a habit.</p><p>Having that one hour a week to sit down and think about how the previous week unfolded, what I’ve accomplished and did not accomplish, compare that to what I was aiming to achieve and then plan the following week, gave me a very delicious taste of clarity and control, at least around the more immediate, short- to medium-term things in life. In fact, I enjoyed the experiences of weekly reflection so much that I put the existential topics of “why are we here” on hold for a good chunk of a year and instead focused on more practical things, like establishing an exercise routine, making sure my family has a great summer and getting rid of some habits that were not serving me.</p><p>Then at the end of 2017, we were once again visiting my in-laws for Christmas, and being away from the daily routine, work, home and personal projects, I ended up with plenty of time for thinking, more so than the typical one hour per week. And it was during this time that the existential itch for some answers and clarity around the greater, deeper topics came back to the forefront of my mind. I simmered and stewed on these thoughts over the holidays and ended up coming back home with a renewed enthusiasm and a sense of determination to make a real dent in the upcoming year.</p><p>Before proceeding further, I’d like to warn the reader that this blog post doesn’t really have a clear, consistent message. In fact, if you keep reading and don’t get a sense that I’m going around in circles, you are probably not paying enough attention. I’m writing this to...</p><ul><li>cover about a five month time span within my own path, which this project of mine is attempting to document.</li><li>provide another live case study example that illustrates what can happen when we set aside one hour per week to guide ourselves towards a goal. Even if the first goal is to figure out which goal(s) we should be striving toward.</li><li>reiterate that all this self-improvement crap that we keep reading (including this very post) isn’t some kind of magical solution, read blog/book, do what it says, magic happens. There is no magic. It takes work and energy. A lot of work and energy. However, as long as you keep moving, you are (or you will) move forward and the journey itself will absolutely be worth it.</li></ul><p>And... back to the beginning of 2018...</p><h3>The search for center</h3><p>Having come back from the holidays, I still had no clarity on where I was headed, how I was getting there or where to begin. So just like before, the first few weeks were spent doing some loose exploring and meandering of various topics. Then one day I got to thinking about Stephen Covey and his book, <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/library/#the-7-habits-of-highly-effective-people-powerful-lessons-in-personal-change">The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People</a> and a thought came to me: I’m a workaholic; maybe I should stop being one.</p><p>In his book, when describing Habit 2: Begin With the End in Mind, Covey mentioned how different people have different centers. Besides my all-time favorite The Work Center, other centers include family, children, money, status, pleasure, and religion. The key is that each of these centers ends up being a focal point and source from which everything including safety, fulfillment and happiness for a given individual stem from. While all these things have importance, being centered solely around any of them results in an individually becoming overly focused on only a small aspect of their life, and worse yet, an aspect they may not even have full control over.</p><p>Covey sets out a proposition that a better center that we should all strive toward is one that is based on principles. In his view, this is the only center that allows us to take a step back, look at the wider view of the world and our lives and make decisions such that our actions maximize the impact on everything that’s important to us, not just a single aspect. This would encompass everything including family, children, money, status, pleasure, religion and work.</p><p>And so... with no other alternatives to dig deeper into, I set out to find my principles.</p><p>What Google has to say about principles...</p><h3>The search for principles</h3><p>What are principles? Before an individual can find the principles which are important to them, it would behoove one to actually understand what principles are. I didn’t (not sure if I fully understand them today either). Having spent some time reading up on this topic, the best I came away with is that the principles are a set of rules that a person could establish for themselves in order to live their life and act in a way that supports their core values. Some see principles as the natural laws that concern human behavior and govern our interactions with each other. Given what we choose to do, the principles define the final outcomes and consequences of our actions.</p><p>Therefore, the principles that one should focus on would be those which would help that individual make decisions that result in maximizing an impact on what’s important to them. Consequently, it seems that it is impossible to come up with a set of principles without first understanding what is ultimately important to oneself. And... those would be values.</p><p>What are my values? No idea. How do I find those? No clue.</p><p>Hmm. Back to Google...</p><h3>The search for values</h3><p>Apparently, according to a bunch of smart people, the core values are already in us; part of us. They highlight what is most important to us and fundamentally represent who we are. However, while all of us have core values and possibly even feel that we kind of know what they are, not many of us can explicitly identify and articulate them. I certainly could not.</p><p>This is where I took a bit of a detour on the journey. I spent a few reflection sessions attempting to think through what are some of the things which I feel are important to me and very quickly “being healthy” bubbled up to the top of my mind. It did so because recently, having taken control of my eating, sleeping and exercise habits, I started to feel that I was actually healthy for the first time in my entire adult life. It felt great.</p><p>Maybe being healthy is my core value, certainly it feels like something that should be important to me. What if I was to approach being healthy proactively and intentionally? What does it even mean “to be healthy?”</p><p>Hmm. Back to Google...</p><h3>The search for health and wellness</h3><p>What is health and wellbeing? (...and on that note, what did people do before Google and the Internet?) Obviously physical health, how you feel in your own body is part of wellbeing. But as it turns out, there are several other aspects to being healthy, and many people/organizations have gone through great lengths to define and systematize that.</p><p>There were multiple weeks of processing the topic of health and wellbeing, which <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/health-and-wellness/">I also wrote about a little while back.</a> As I was doing that, one of the dimensions, Spiritual Health, jumped out at me. I’ve never considered myself spiritual or religious but the description made me pause and think:</p><p>Spiritual Health -- Expanding a sense of purpose and meaning in life</p><p>And here’s the funny/sad thing: up until that point in my life, I’ve never even considered that anything we (i.e. humans) do has a purpose or meaning. I certainly have never felt like I had, or even needed that. But here I just spent reading ~12 different wellness websites and across the board they are all saying that a healthy person does live their life with a sense of purpose and meaning.</p><p>What would that be like? How do you get that?</p><p>Hmm. Back to Google…</p><h3>The search for purpose</h3><p>On a positive note, there is no shortage of websites that describe various methods and tools to help one find a purpose and meaning in life. Unfortunately, none of those websites will do the work for you and the ultimate question, “Why am I on this planet?” is just not an easy question. In fact it is a pain in the behind. It requires thinking and a lot of it.</p><p>Many more weeks later, while reading through various articles and blog posts, I came across Victor Frankl’s book, <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/library/#mans-search-for-meaning">Man’s Search for Meaning</a>, which wasn’t the first time. Stephen Covey’s 7 habits, which set this entire train in motion, also mentions Victor Frankl when describing the very first habit, Be Proactive. It talks about recognizing, as Frankl did, that between the external stimuli and the response, unlike other animals who simply react, human beings have a gap. When we recognize it, in that gap is our freedom. In that gap is where we can always think and choose what our next action will be.</p><p>Considering the topic of the week, it seemed it was a good time to pick up and read Victor Frankl.</p><p>It is not a happy book. Frankl spent three and a half years of his life in Nazi concentration camps and he wrote the book as soon as he was able to after being liberated (in something like 9 days?). His is an incredible story of survival and perseverance of human spirit. According to Wikipedia, this book made the list of "the ten most influential books in the United States." In the first part, Frankl talks about his own direct experience in the camps. In the second part, he takes a step back to talk about <a href="https://positivepsychology.com/viktor-frankl-logotherapy/">Logotherapy</a> and his own professional psychologist views on the human mind, how it works and what it is capable of.</p><p>There’s a passage in the second part of the book, that I found somewhat curious and amusing:</p><p>Some of the people who nowadays call on a psychiatrist would have seen a pastor, priest or rabbi in former days. Now they often refuse to be handed over to a clergyman and instead confront the doctor with questions such as, “What is the meaning of my life?”</p><p>For Frankl, “nowadays” was 70 years ago, and I could be wrong, maybe it’s just me, but I think since then our society has continued to move further and further away from spirituality. This was also a second data point mentioning spirituality that I came across in the span of a few months. Together these two data points will come intertwining back but not for a while.</p><h3>The search for purpose continues</h3><p>This story is now somewhere in May of 2018 and it feels like I’m onto something worth continuing to pursue.</p><p>What is a purposeful life? How do you live with a sense of meaning?</p><p>For thousands of years, countless philosophers, religious leaders, professors and amateur bloggers have written multitude of books, papers, articles and stone tablets attempting to tackle these very questions. As far as I’m aware, there are no simple answers. However, there are various approaches, perspectives and schools of thought. We can read through all of them and reflect on what resonates with us and what doesn’t, but ultimately, each individual has to find/make their own meaning and purpose, and some can spend entire lifetime just reading all those texts. Others will not even bother to begin.</p><p>After a few months (arguably a very short time, but hey, got to start somewhere) of my own reflection and contemplation on the topic of meaning and purpose, the approach that spoke to me the clearest was this: Life is NOT about a destination. It is NOT about attaining a goal or reaching a place. Rather the purpose is (maybe) in the ever-evolving and unfolding flow itself. For me to live a meaningful life, I would need a deep understanding of what is meaningful to me. If I manage to develop this understanding and then align the things I do every day, week, year, decade with the things that I find meaningful and important, I might be able to develop a sense of purpose. At least that’s what it says on the internet.</p><p>So what is meaningful and important? Well... those would be the core values.</p><p>At this point a reader who a) made this far down the page and b) is paying attention will realize that we’ve just gone full circle. Yep, it happened. Fortunately/unfortunately that’s part of the experience that many of us cannot escape and I certainly didn’t. Life is messy and it ain’t a straight path, and sometimes you will walk around in circles.</p><p>For the sake of not making this post any longer, I will draw a line in the sand here. Having wandered around for a bit, I have gotten to my own personal realization that everything begins with core values. For the next 4-5 months, this is where I put most of my attention, but that story will have to wait till a future post.</p></div>Reflections on my Second Silent Retreat2019-11-02T00:00:00+00:002020-04-02T11:11:06.894568+00:00https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/reflections-my-second-silent-retreat/<div class="rich-text"><p>Few weeks ago, I attended a 5-day silent retreat organized by the <a href="https://www.dharmata.org/">Dharmata Foundation</a>. Since coming back, I’ve done some thinking about how it went and what I experienced, and a number of people have asked me what it was like. As this story was already told, retold and reshaped a few times, I thought I’d share it here. I’m not going into the details of what a silent retreat actually is, but I wrote a <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/what-is-a-silent-retreat/">separate post for those who are curious.</a> This post is all about reflections on the last trip.</p><p>In short, it was great... I think... maybe.</p><p>The longer version... well, let’s see how that comes.</p><p>As the title not so subtly alludes to, this was my second silent retreat. Both of them were at the same place, same time of the year, for the same duration, led by <a href="https://www.ramdass.org/anam-thubten-rinpoche-and-no-self-no-problem/">Anam Thubten</a> and organized by the foundation that he started. Last year, I walked out from the first retreat with what felt to be an incredible level of relaxation, rest, energy and possibilities. After coming back, I told my wife how incredible it was and that I wished to share that experience with as many humans as possible, starting with her. In discussing this, we decided to plan a kayaking trip the following summer, find a quiet spot in the middle of the woods and spend at least one full day not talking to each other (didn’t quite happen that way, but that’s a different story)</p><p>I cannot say that I walked out feeling the same way out of this second retreat. It was good. It was relaxing but it wasn’t mind-blowing like the first one was. Maybe it’s just that the element of novelty has worn off. But I also cannot say I walked out without any impact either.</p><p>But I did intentionally force a relatively major difference between last year and this year: my expected outcome, what I came and what I walked away with.</p><p>The first time around, I was motivated in a big part by <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/library/#the-7-habits-of-highly-effective-people-powerful-lessons-in-personal-change">Stephen Covey’s 7th Habit: Sharpen the Saw</a>. During the opening ceremony when Anam, the teacher leading the retreat, asked us to take a few moments to think about why we are here and what we are hoping to accomplish, I already had a clear and ready response: I’m here to do Stephen Covey. I will reflect on the last 12 months and think about the next 12 months and I’ve got a specific list of questions in my journal I would like to think through and answer. For the following 5 days I spent most of the available time with my journal thinking and processing all kinds of things. I was done with those questions at 11 am on Sunday, just a few minutes before final closing ceremony. And while there I read <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/library/#the-book-of-joy-lasting-happiness-in-a-changing-world">an entire book</a> (it was about joy and I'd highly recommend it). In other words, I was relaxed but also “productive” and not bored at any time of the retreat.</p><p>This go around, after reading a few books, especially <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/library/#radical-acceptance">Tara Brach's Radical Acceptance</a>, and having listened to one of Sam Harris’ podcasts where he talked about his own experience in silent retreats, I decided to try a different approach. The way Harris describes retreats, many people would typically go through escalating levels of boredom up until about day 3 or 4, when boredom would almost become physically painful and then... "something snaps." The feeling of boredom is when a person is wishing to be engaged/entertained; it is the mind’s grasping/wanting for stimulation, for doing things and stuff. That snapping "something" that Harris mentioned is when your mind comes to terms with your situation and gives up on the grasping. At that point, Harris says, you would feel some kind of shift, that might be accompanied with a sense of freedom, peace and/or joy. In Brach’s book, she also talked about how when in a retreat you give your mind all the space and freedom for things to arise, things might arise. And possibly things that may not be easy to deal with. As I wasn’t bored at all last year, so this time I made a plan: no books, no journaling, no efforting of any kind toward anything, but rather just be there and see what pops up.</p><p>Having tried this "no anything" approach, what did I experience? Was there a “snap”? Did anything arise? I’m still not quite sure, but I felt... something... maybe?</p><p>I spent most of the first two days just attempting to stay awake during the meditation sessions. Not ideal. Typically in the past, even when I’m not fully rested, I’ve never had trouble staying awake when meditating but for whatever reason the first two days were especially bad this time. This was probably the most difficulty I’ve ever experienced staying awake since beginning meditation practice 3 years ago. I finally managed to take a 30-min nap after dinner on the second day before the last meditation session of the day, and that helped a bit.</p><p>At the end of the third day, after having done a total of seventeen 45-minute meditation sessions, I can’t say that I felt pain, but I could tell there was some physical and mental discomfort and fatigue coming up. It was after dinner, and I was sitting in just about empty dining hall, still having over an hour till the start of the evening session, there was absolutely nothing to be done. Looking back, that was the peak of the whole retreat where my mind and body really wanted to reach for a book or a journal but I made myself just sit. I was getting a bit moody and cranky but there was nothing to be done. I thought about going for a nap but I already took one at lunch so that felt silly. I thought about skipping the evening session and doing... well, there was nothing else to do. And it was getting dark outside and beginning to rain. So I just made myself sit.</p><p>That last session of the third day was the first time in the retreat when I experienced what I think is the feeling of resting in your own open awareness while meditating. Interestingly enough, this was also the same session the year before when I felt the same thing. I’ll come back to the whole open awareness a bit later.</p><p>The next morning was Saturday and it started off well-enough. We had a pre-breakfast meditation in which I sank right back into the open awareness. After that, while everyone else lined up for breakfast, I put on my rain jacket and went out for a very slow walk in less than perfect weather. I skipped breakfast because one of the newer habits I’ve recently formed is to observe an 18-hour fast once a week from Friday to Saturday. Not wanting to be around the smells of fresh toast and syrup, I went for a walk in the woods instead.</p><p>During that walk, I asked myself, "What is the state of your mind?" which is something Anam talked about in the opening ceremony and suggested we keep practicing. The answer was, “well... kinda crappy.” And I thought about it and couldn’t quite put a finger on the cause of that. I did notice sensing a bit of downward pressure on my head and shoulders, and a thought about how many different impending things/tasks/projects I will have to return to in less than 2 days came to mine. And then I thought for a bit about the "have to." Truth be told, there are very few things I <i>have to</i> do. Almost all of them are the things I <i>want to</i> do and it’s not like they all <i>must</i> get done instantly, or ever for that matter. I can’t say that train of thought made me feel better at that moment but it did pass through my mind. And then about 30 minutes later...</p><p>I find myself sitting yet again in the empty dining hall, everyone having finished breakfast and dispersed to do random things or the morning work duty. I’ve got a cup of coffee in my hands and I ask myself the same question, "what is the state of your mind?" I was actually a bit surprised to realize that at that moment I felt absolutely great. All those states of peace, joy and being content that they talk about... I was there. But why the difference? Why the shift? The impending "doom" of everyday life was still out there somewhere in the near future, that hasn’t changed. I was still 15 hours into the fast and haven’t had the first calorie of the day. But I was warmer and dryer compared to walking outside in the rain. And I did have a cup of coffee in my hands, which was warm and also happened to be the first cup of caffeine in 4 days. The contrast in that 30-minute timespan was so stark that it is still stuck in my head. It was so stark that it was the only time I broke my “no journal” rule and did write a few things down.</p><p>I ended up riding that post-walk, coffee-in-hand happy state for the rest of the Saturday, which was the last full day of the retreat. And just about every time I went into a meditation that day, I found myself returning right back to the open awareness.</p><p>This takes us to the end of the 4th day at the retreat. The dinner is done, and yet again, I am sitting in the dining hall, with maybe 2-3 other people at other tables. I felt very different in that moment than the 24 hours prior to that. Second stark contrast of the day. I still had nowhere to be and nothing to do and yet there was nothing wrong with that. I did not feel any fatigue or discomfort at all. Just happily sitting there doing absolutely nothing. I was still aware of things happening around, various noises inside and out, few people moving and shifting about, the cooks in the kitchen prepping and/or cleaning up. Some thoughts would arise but none of them seemed important or relevant to where I was so I would just let them go and they would. I can’t say that sitting there felt special, life-changing or mind-blowing... it was... nice. It kind of felt like I was still in the meditation even though I was just sitting in the dining hall not trying/doing anything.</p><p>The last day of the retreat, we woke up, did one silent meditation session and broke the silence at 7:15 in the morning. We got to finally say hi to our neighbors next to whom we’ve been sitting for the last 5 days. This was followed by breakfast, work period and packing and then one last meditation session of the retreat. It was interesting and amusing to notice how much new thought and turbulence entered my mind just from having a few conversations with people in the last hour and a half. I can’t say if the open awareness was still there somewhere or if it was completely gone, but having engaged with others definitely brought on a whole lot of brain swirling that was not nearly as easy to dismiss and let go.</p><p>After that we had lunch, cleaned up, I helped finish all dishes and headed for the car for the drive back into the real world.</p><p>Now some reflections and take-aways...</p><p>1) If you are so tired that you keep falling asleep, maybe it would be better to simply take a timeout, go lie down, take a nap and stop torturing yourself for two full days?</p><p>2) Then again, a thing I’m coming back to is that in meditation you generally allow whatever arises to just happen. The key is that you shouldn’t feed what’s arising, follow it or engage with it, but you don’t block and resist those things either. When you do that, things just tend to come back in more force. As I was sitting there in the beginning fighting my drowsiness, I would jerk myself back and instantly feel that same pull. What if I allowed <i>that</i> to happen? Maybe if you are meditating, you could deal with drowsiness same way as with other state? If you can’t get out of it, get into it and let it go through you? Or maybe if you do that with staying awake, you’ll just end up falling asleep and either planting your face into the floor or tipping over onto the person next to you. The verdict is still open on this one.</p><p>3) Being in a quiet environment for several days helps to clear and settle the mind. That camp on the lake is a gorgeous spot to spend few days at. But when that environment was combined with the practice, in that retreat I was able to experience much calmer and deeper state of meditation than I ever felt back home.</p><p>I’m still learning about meditation and still discovering aspects/nuances that I hadn't noticed before. So this is just my take on things at this present time. We all have an inner narrator voice that keeps thinking up and bringing up thoughts. It is this voice that we typically identify as “I’m being and thinking” When we keep the awareness at this level, it is impossible to have thoughts and be aware of them at the same time. Whatever arises, be it work, your spouse or your children, as soon as you notice it and think to yourself “hey, I’m thinking about ___” that thought is already long gone. It doesn’t flow through, it doesn’t complete, it gets interrupted, and like a groundhog on a sunny day, it instantly disappears. However, if we move awareness to a lower point where we simply observe all sensory input, then even thoughts become something we could notice and watch. We can see each thought arising, the sentence/statement fully playing out in the mind then completing itself and then it’s just gone. I could sit for an entire 45-minute meditation session, observe everything and yet never be lost in thought even for a minute but rather be present in that room the whole time.</p><p>My description here doesn’t do it justice and possibly I’ll make a longer post about this someday, but it is a rather incredible state of being. A state which I’ve never been in outside of that retreat.</p><p>4) I am still surprised how quickly the state of my mind went from “I feel crappy” to “I feel great.” With just a few changes in... still don’t know. Coffee? Indoors vs. outdoors? Ambient temperature? And maybe that’s the transition Sam Harris was talking about, but there was no "snap" and I completely missed the point when it actually happened.</p><p>Our mood at any given moment is not who we are and when we pay attention to the mood, we might be surprised how often it changes all on its own. And if we pay attention to what is making it change, maybe we can even decide which mood we want to be in? Which brings me to...</p><p>5) “What is the state of your mind right now?” - I still ask myself that question, whenever I remember to come back to it, which is probably not often enough. Good way to bring yourself back and take a quick inventory of the current state.</p><p>6) Having done two retreats and taken each one to the extremes of I have questions/goals/topics to write about vs. I will not think about a single thing and see what happens, I’m thinking the next one should be somewhere in the middle. One of the key principles that Buddhist practice emphasizes is “always learn, reflect and meditate.” In the retreat, learning takes the form as the two daily teaching sessions. And clearly, there’s plenty of meditation. But reflection is a different animal. Reflection is when you do engage with your thoughts but do so intentionally and a clearer mind. <i>In theory</i> all that “free” time between the sessions is the time to reflect and think about things. Journal is probably not the most terrible thing to have around. Still, not bringing a book next time.</p><p>7) Lastly, sitting for 45-minutes 8 times a day is hard. I forgot from last year how actually physically tiring it is to sit for that long. Not much of a take away. Does make you wonder though, why do we do these things to ourselves? And yet, I was glad for every second I was there and if I had an opportunity to stay another 5 days I wouldn’t hesitate in a heartbeat.</p></div>On Health and Wellness2019-09-28T00:00:00+00:002020-03-31T11:26:27.046616+00:00https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/health-and-wellness/<div class="rich-text"><p>Being Healthy -- It is something many of us would say we want. Who would ever say I <i>don’t</i> want to be healthy? Then again, for a good chunk of my life I personally never considered what does “being healthy” actually means to me. Nor have I stopped long enough to seriously consider what I would have to start doing, stop doing, or keep doing in order to be healthy?</p><p>Today, anyone who knows me well knows that I am a huge proponent of health, on a personal as well as professional and organization levels. In a work setting, happy customers are served by healthy organizations, and healthy organizations come from healthy teams. But we can only build healthy teams if those are made up of healthy individuals. I do not know whether or not the previous statement is the ultimate truth, but it is a core philosophy that I personally follow. Looking at it from the other end, individual health doesn’t start and stop when a person is on the clock; it is always there (or not). When a person is healthy, not only are they in a better position to engage with their professional life, they are in a better position to engage with their ENTIRE life. This is why these days my health as well as the health of people around me is one of my top focus areas.</p><p>A while back, I wrote <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/universe-has-way-shaping-us/">a story about myself</a> where through a series of seemingly random events my life has changed, and even I did not walk away the same person. This post, is another aspect of the changes that happened during that same time period, and as such it also has its roots in the randomness of those events.</p><p>Looking back, 5-10 years ago I was NOT a healthy person. All my life I was a night owl. When I worked for my previous employer, I’d often stay up late, often working (or not working, but also not sleeping) until 3 or 5 o’clock in the morning. Then in 2012, I joined a 7-person start-up company and really started staying up late. I would sleep 4-5 hours, repeat the cycle again, barely last until the weekend and then crash for majority of Saturday and a good chunk of Sunday. By the end of 2015, I was just about burned out and couldn’t even see it. While I still "felt" productive at work, I would come home and have ZERO motivation to interact with my family, or maintain my home or do just about anything else. My favorite activity outside of work has become to sit and look at a wall. In hindsight, it was not the best of times.</p><p>And then...</p><p>After a series of less-than-skillful episodes at work, I ended up in a box. To this day if you were to talk to my then boss, she’d probably insist, “it wasn’t a box; it was a swimlane” but being in whatever-it-was-labeled sure felt like it had 6 sides, all either being parallel to one another or coming together at 90-degree angles. It was basically a corporate version of being incarcerated.</p><p>I’ve got to say... forget the universe, time spent in a box will change a person. I came out of that with a shifted outlook not just on my work, but my entire life. As I was no longer consumed by work and everything that’s going on at work and things that had to get done at work, I started paying attention to other things, like eating well and taking morning walks with my wife. And because I didn’t have a mountain of code to write at night, or rather the code was still there; I chose not to do it, I started going to sleep earlier and got into a regular rhythm that many other humans apparently have been enjoying for eons. And then...</p><p><a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/universe-has-way-shaping-us/">I lost 25 pounds</a> without even intending to do that.</p><p>Many months later, during one of my <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/discovering-balance-and-focus-through-being-bored/">regular weekly reflection</a> sessions, all of this got me thinking: feeling healthy feels great and lately I’ve been feeling very healthy. I love feeling great. And when I feel great, I even seem to get more done. And other people around me seem happier when I feel great. What if I was to be healthy <i>intentionally</i> rather than just by being nudged by various external circumstances?</p><p>Putting on an engineer hat, I set out to find a more thorough, systematic approach to defining what it means to be healthy. Which just means I went back to Google and searched for something along the lines of “wellness and being healthy” and then spent hours digesting a whole bunch of pages, the majority of which seemed to have come from organization with an ".edu" suffix in their site name. Apparently, the topic of wellness is heavily promoted by many colleges as part of helping their student population to keep things together after leaving the cozy, sheltered lives of their parents’ homes.</p><p>What I found is that health/wellness has several different dimensions, and everyone agrees on that. These dimensions break down being healthy into specific focus areas, and using these, a person is able to start thinking about things one level deeper into how they are doing in each of those individual dimensions. However, I also found that no one, including government and various psychology organizations, really agrees on just how many dimensions there are, and everyone labels these dimensions slightly differently.</p><p>This is the checklist that I ended up borrowing/combining from various sources:</p><ul><li>Physical Health - Am I taking care of my body? Enough sleep? How is the diet? Enough exercise?</li><li>Intellectual Health - Do I regularly engage in activities that challenge/stimulate my mind? Am I regularly learning?</li><li>Emotional Health - Am I able to experience and constructively live with full range of human emotions?</li><li>Social Health - Connection and relationships with other humans is very important. How is the circle of people around me? Here, we have a few sub-categories...<ul><li>Marital Health - How is the relationship with my wife?</li><li>Parental Health - How is the relationship with my son?</li></ul></li><li>Spiritual Health - Am I living my life with a sense of meaning and purpose?</li><li>Financial Health - What is my overall financial picture? How does my income compare to expenditures? How are the investments? How am I doing on the path toward financial independence ("don't say 'retirement'; people freak out when you use that word")</li><li>Occupational Health - How am I doing in my job? How is my career moving? Where is my career moving?</li><li>Avocational Health - How am I spending my leisure time and what activities are important to me here?</li><li>Environmental Health - Do I live in harmony with my environment? Do I like my environment? Does my environment like me? Does it support/enable me? Hinder me?</li></ul><p>I’m not going into detailed definition of each of these categories of wellness, as many other sources have already done a great job at that. For anyone that wishes to learn more, you can get lots of info from <a href="https://bit.ly/2ksMU2y">“dimensions of wellness” search on Google</a>. Outside of that, I have also found <a href="https://www.thesimpledollar.com/exploring-the-connections-between-your-leisure-life-and-your-financial-life/">Trent Hamm’s 8-part article series</a> to be very informative, enlightening and inspiring, although his angle is just a bit skewed towards financial aspects. Can’t really hold that against him considering his blog’s primary focus is on personal finances.</p><p>So now I have a wellness checklist. And maybe you have a wellness checklist for yourself. So what? What do you do with it? What’s it for? Is this one of those exercises (like many that an HR department attempts every couple of years) that you do and and then move on with your life? That would not be very useful.</p><p>The way I have incorporated this into my daily life is to periodically (every 2 months or so) come back to this checklist during one of my weekly/monthly reflection sessions. I would think through one dimension at a time and consider its current state. At that point, I would decide if and what kind of a course correction is in order.</p><p>Just to give a few examples inspired by my wellness checklist:</p><ul><li>I picked up yoga almost two years ago as a way to fill a vacuum primarily in the physical health, but I chose yoga over other alternatives, including HIIT which I previously did, because I felt it would also contribute to emotional and spiritual (not financial though) dimensions. The premise being that yoga is a form of moving meditation, and it helps to center your mind as well as your body.</li><li>My wife and I instituted a monthly date night (or day) to make sure we intentionally set aside time for ourselves</li><li>In the beginning of each month, we also set aside one Friday night for a board game night with friends.</li></ul><p>And then there were other, more gradual and longer-lasting transitions that got set into motion as a result of this exercise. One of the first ones was around spiritual health. When I first saw the word “spiritual”, my immediate reaction was, well that one isn’t for me, aannnnddd... skip; I’m an atheist and I’m happy staying that way. But the descriptions on the various wellness websites all converged around approaching life with a sense of purpose and meaning. Regardless of what your denomination or belief system is, even if that’s no system at all, who wouldn't want to live a life with a sense of purpose and meaning. Yet, I had absolutely no sense of what my own purpose and meaning were. It felt like a big gaping hole in my overall wellness plan. As my path continued to unfold in subsequent weeks/months/years, answering this one topic/question has become a major part of the journey.</p><p>The other interesting one has been the environmental dimension. At first I wasn’t feeling much at all about it and many descriptions like...</p><p><i>the extent to which one cares for the earth by protecting its resources. It is the ability to recognize personal responsibility for the quality of the air, water and land</i></p><p>... didn’t do it for me. I’m not quite ready to join any of the “save the..." baby dolphin, the rainforest or the warming of the globe crusades. Maybe someday. However, my relationship with this dimension changed after I read, <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/library/#willpower-doesnt-work-discover-the-hidden-keys-to-success">Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success</a>. The key message in that book is that while we want to believe we are all individual and independent (and American culture is really big on that), in truth, we are not all that separate from everything around us. Rather, there is an interdependence where we have the power to shape and influence our environment but by the same token our environment continually influences and shapes us. Looking at and considering the environment from this perspective made this dimension much more real, relevant and closer to home for me.</p><p>That’s the story of my transition where health and wellness went from something I was vaguely aware at the periphery of my thinking to me beginning to incorporate it into the fabric of daily routines and habits.</p><p>As always, it is just a story and it is my story. I write these posts and part of me is still thinking, all you do is talk about yourself here; seems kinda self-centered, wouldn’t you say. Yeah, it does. But I can’t write about you because I don’t know you. And I can’t tell you what to do because I don’t have any answers. I never discovered “the truth”. So the only thing left is my story. Maybe what I’m sharing here will help you with the next chapter of your story. Maybe what I’m sharing here will make you think, but the actions you take will be very much different from the ones I took. Maybe what I’m sharing here will bore you and you wouldn’t even get that far down to read this last paragraph. Maybe someday, I’ll stop feeling like a self-centered jerk grandstanding on a soapbox (doesn’t help that my colleagues got me an actual soapbox). But that’s the beauty of life, none of us know what’s going to happen, and our health, happiness and freedom all reside at the very core of finding peace with that realization.</p></div>Discovering Balance and Focus Through Being Bored2019-06-11T00:00:00+00:002020-03-31T11:23:53.462126+00:00https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/discovering-balance-and-focus-through-being-bored/<div class="rich-text"><p>This is a sequel to the post, where I talked about several life-planning professionals who forced me to ponder the question, <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/whats-your-plan/">“what’s your plan?”</a> The scope of what they were referring to was the entirety of my remaining lifetime: the goals, the endgame, things I wanted to do/achieve/accomplish, things I was working/moving toward.</p><p>Would you be able to answer that question for yourself right now? If not, how would you go about looking for the answer? Would you even attempt looking or simply deem the question not significant enough? At the time, I had absolutely no idea even where to start, but I also had a voice somewhere deep inside that kept saying this feels important enough and the fact that I have a gaping hole where an answer should be is not something I should leave unaddressed.</p><p>In this post, I would like to share how I ended up beginning to look for the answer, and which in hindsight became one of the most effective tools/techniques for keeping my life balanced and moving in the direction of my choosing.</p><p>At the end of 2016, we were visiting my in-laws for the Christmas week. Being there, outside of my own environment and regular schedule, gave me time to think and reflect on life, things and things in life. And it just so happened that about a month before that visit, I came across Trent Hamm’s very insightful and inspiring article in my Google news feed, <a href="https://lifehacker.com/how-finding-flow-helped-me-decide-what-i-should-do-with-1789344272">“How Finding Flow Helped Me Decide What I Should Do With My Life”</a>. Since discovering it, I’ve revisited that article multiple times and have recommended it to a number of family members, friends and colleagues. I would also recommend it to anyone reading this as the entire article is a great read. But at that particular time in my in-law’s house, my focus went straight to Trent’s strategy #6:</p><p><i>Chart Out What What Your Ideal Week Looks Like and Make That Your Goal</i></p><p>So I started there. I opened a new Google Sheet, did what Trent was suggesting and ended up with this:</p><p></p><img alt="my_schedule_v1.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="800" src="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/media/images/my_schedule_v1.width-800.jpg" width="662"/><p></p><p>At the age of 37, this was the very first time in my life where I explicitly wrote out a weekly schedule. It was an experiment and I no idea if I would end up following it, but in the interests of science, I set out to find out. As it turned out over the next few months, making this schedule was an incredibly useful exercise. By doing it, I gained a level of intentionality and structure in my daily life that I never had before. But this post is not about the merits and importance of schedules. This post is about one, single purplish-blue box that I added there: “The Hour of Dennis”</p><p>I showed the schedule to my wife and shared my thought with her. We agreed that I will spend this one hour between 11 am and noon every Sunday in quiet isolation doing my own things, while she holds down the house and all the living things in in. After that visit to the in-laws, I have managed to uphold The Hour Of Dennis just about every single Sunday for about six months.</p><p>I used that one hour to think about how the previous week went, the things I accomplished vs. the things I was hoping to do, and to think ahead into the next week or the next month. And even though “The Plan” was still a daunting, unanswered question hanging over me, I would spend at least some time each week thinking about it. Just like that proverbial journey of a thousand miles that begins with a single step, The Hour of Dennis ended up allowing me to make a few steps here and there while still trying to figure out what the journey itself would be or where it would take me. And then...</p><p>... summer happened. It started with my wife and I taking a 3-week vacation to Philadelphia, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, again to Philadelphia and finally back home.</p><p></p><img alt="dennis_in_icelandx600.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="338" src="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/media/images/dennis_in_icelandx600.width-800.jpg" width="600"/><p></p><p>Then, as the rest of summer unfolded with various activities including campings, weekend family outings and the rest. Sadly the Hour of Dennis has vanished. I kept telling myself that, “it’s only another month, I’ll restart in August” and then “I’ll pick it up in September when the summer is over”. I didn’t and I didn’t.</p><p>Next thing I know, it’s end of 2017 and we are once again in Philadelphia visiting my in-laws during the Christmas break. And once again, I have the freedom and downtime to think about and reflect on life and things and those things in life. Looking back at the previous 12 months I saw how many positive changes I was able to make in the first half of 2017, and at the same time how things remained just about the same in the second half of the year. Reflection can be a powerful thing but only when you actually do it, but it can be even more powerful when you come back to it. Going into 2018, I’ve reinstituted The Hour of Dennis. Looking back at having done it regularly, then having forgotten it, and then having picked it back up, the hour of weekly reflection in peace and solitude has had, and continues to have to this day, an incredible impact on my life’s path.</p><p>There were many topics and subjects that have come through and been digested by The Hour of Dennis and many of them in some way or other were related to “The Plan” but just to illustrate the impact, I’ll mention a specific example: regular exercise. A while back I wrote how I <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/universe-has-way-shaping-us/">“accidentally” ended up losing 25 pounds</a>. After that happened, one of the concerns I read about was that when human body loses mass, it typically will burn fat as well as muscle, and if that was the case, I just burned a whole lot of both. Trent’s other strategy #5 from his article I mentioned above drove this point further home: “Treat your physical and mental health as a major responsibility”.</p><p>I looked into few various options for establishing a regular exercise routine and settled on HIIT (high-intensity interval training) for several reasons:</p><ul><li>I wanted minimal impact to my schedule to increase the chances of actually sticking with the program. A HIIT circuit could be done within 30 minutes and without having to leave comfort of your own home. So I could stick to the same routine in winter or summer, rain or shine.</li><li>Avoiding commitment or special equipment as I prefer to explore things before getting locked-in with investments and contracts</li><li>The appealing premise of HIIT promising a combination of weight as well as cardio benefits in one 30-minute block of time.</li></ul><p>In the above schedule, I blocked off a regular time for 30 minutes of exercising each day. That part was easy. What was not so easy was actually doing it. It took me almost two months before I established that routine but this is where the The Hour of Dennis proved its power. Every Sunday I would reflect on the things which were important to me; being healthy and establishing this routine was at the top of the list. And every Sunday I would look back at the gap in the previous week between what I planned vs. what actually happened and reflect on the causes for the difference. Then I would plan to alter my approach in some way for the following week and the cycle would continue. After several weeks of “planning” to exercise and not actually doing it, I realized that biggest roadblock was that I was “expecting” to “just do it” but when the time would come, I had no idea where to even begin and so right off the bat it felt like I would fail no matter what I did. So in one subsequent week I changed the expectations, I lowered the bar and set out to simply experiment with various exercises and just learn the moves, or even sitting in armchair and watching YouTube videos on HIIT exercises would meet the goals. After week and a half of doing that, I learned the moves and gained the confidence that I was looking for. And then gradually, with the help of reminding myself every single week and coming back to my goals, the routine fell into place.</p><p>That summer we visited the Cranberry Lake Campground in Adirondacks park located in upstate NY. We’ve been coming back to that same campground for over a decade and I’ve gone up the Bear Mountain hiking trail, which is located right outside that campground, on numerous occasions. However, this was the first time in my life that I made it to the top of the maintain while keeping a consistent pace and not taking a single break to catch my breath. And when we got there, I was not winded at all or dripping with sweat as I was on all previous occasions.</p><p>Looking back on this part of my path, there are a few important principles to highlight. By making these principles a central part of my daily life, it feels like I stumbled into creating a structure that has enabled me to stay moving toward any goal/achievement I’ve set for myself, including discovering the goals themselves. These are the takeaways I’m hoping the reader will walk away with and think how they apply to their own lives:</p><ol><li>The importance of making space to simply be bored. This is when you slow down and realize there’s no next thing that you must immediately jump to. And that’s when you start asking yourself, what am I doing? Why am I doing it? Why am I doing this rather than something else?</li><li>The importance of a regular reflection cannot be overstated. Sadly, when I first became a manager of a new team in the Summer of 2016, the first thing I laid down for the team was the retrospective meetings. The agreement was, “We work in 80-hour iterations. We will spend 79 of those hours doing everything we believe is important for our team to be successful, and we will spend one of those hours discussing how we can get better. None of the other processes, meetings, or tools we are using today are as important as the retrospective, so this one hour is non-negotiable.” It took me over a year to realize that the same principle would hold true for all aspects of my life: A week has 168 hours in it; spend 167 living life and one of those hours reflecting on the other 167.</li></ol><p>I’ve continued to tweak my routines and the schedule, and the specific details of what I ended up with may not work for everyone. For instance, these days I have a journal (following a loose bullet journal format) and I reflect every evening for 10-20 minutes before going to sleep. I also continue my 1 hour of weekly reflection, which I’ve aligned to always follow a Sunday yoga session after reading, Benjamin Hardy’s book, <a href="https://dennis.mnuskin.com/library/#willpower-doesnt-work-discover-the-hidden-keys-to-success">“Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success.”</a> Once a month, I take a full-day break from normal life to attend either a one-day silent meditation retreat or a day of teaching at the Dharma Refuge. And last year, I spent 5-days of silence in the woods of Jefferson, Maine thinking about a much longer time horizons, which is something I’m hoping to establish as an annual practice.</p><p>The details are not important, but I do want to close this post with one of those claims that if you only change one thing in your life, according to me, this is the only thing you MUST focus on. This one thing enables everything else, unlocks your potential, gets you unstuck, moves you where it is you wish to go and let’s you figure out where you want to go in the first place.</p><p>This is it:</p><p><i>Make it a regular practice to make space for your thoughts.</i></p><p>It doesn’t matter how you use that space or what you use it on but NEVER stop doing it. It will be uncomfortable, you will wish you could just watch TV or do something, anything, else instead of just sitting (or just standing, or walking). Don’t. Make space for your thoughts. And whenever you fall out and you skip a week (or a month, or half a year), and you will, simply acknowledge that you are not perfect, because you are not, and just return back to that practice of making space for your thoughts.</p><p>And now that you are at the tail end of this post, you might be wondering, hey but didn’t you set out to answer “what’s your plan?” Whatever happened to that? It turns out, to answer that question was a journey in itself. A journey that is still unfolding to this day. What I wrote about here was the beginning, but there were more subsequent steps that hopefully I will come back and write about.</p></div>What's Your Plan2019-04-19T00:00:00+00:002020-05-27T12:15:09.873756+00:00https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/whats-your-plan/<div class="rich-text"><p>“What’s your plan?” -- It is December 2016 and 15 months prior to this we brought home a 2-year-old kid from South Korea. My spouse and I finally got around to being responsible parents and were now sitting in front of an attorney who would help us build an estate plan so that our child would be taken care off in case something happened both of us.</p><p>As it turned out, when building an estate plan, they will expect you to know Your Plan. Not just work and your career. Not what vacation you will go to this summer. Not the major appliance or vehicle you are planning to buy. They ask about The Plan, the one that covers everything from now until your last breath.</p><p>How many of us have ever thought about this before? I certainly didn’t and neither did my wife.</p><p>And then, our attorney hit us with another one: “You guys are here because you want to make sure your child is protected if something happens to both of you and that part looks good, but there’s a big red flag in your current situation: what if something happens to just one of you? If that’s Dennis, your child and your wife will be in serious trouble. Maybe you should talk to a financial planner at some point.”</p><p>Being a responsible adult is not easy.</p><p>We left the office and set out to find a financial advisor. It took almost a month to learn about all types of advisor types out there (maybe a separate post?) and what questions to ask before you commit to working with one. We found a bunch in our area and narrowed the list down to 6 whom we interviewed.</p><p>So the day comes when we sit down with the financial advisor and one of the first questions she asks...</p><p>“So what is your plan?”</p><p>... and again she is asking about The Plan. The one that includes EVERYTHING. And even though, since leaving the lawyers office, my wife and I have spent a number of morning walks talking about this very subject, on a scale of 1 (completely clueless) to 10 (full clarity) we were sitting there with solid 2.5’s painted on our blank expressions.</p><p>That story captures the events that have set in motion a whole slew of other things that I will (most likely) end up writing a bunch about.</p><p>Having to ponder the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything from the perspective of two humans (and their one mini-human), led me to stumble into this discovery of a feeling / notion / understanding / perspective / awareness (whatever you want to call it) that not just myself, but all of us are on this constant path through life. Essentially, it is The Path.</p><p>I like outdoors, hiking, camping, etc, so now when I talk about The Path and picture it, to me it almost seems like a physical path through fields, forests, swamps, mountains, desserts, etc. And because life never stands still and things constantly change, we are all moving... somewhere.</p><p>How would this looks like for different people?</p><p>It seems that many of us are not even aware that if they were to look down they would notice a path. Rather, we just kind of stumble from tree to tree, sometimes we go in circles and at other times we just stay in place or wonder around for a bit. Kicking rocks and playing with sticks is fun, so let’s just do that for a bit.</p><p>Some of us notice the trail and we begin to follow it. But do we ever ask where is it leading us? Is this the trail for me? Is whatever at the end of it something I truly aim for or am I simply following it because it is here.</p><p>What if the path forks off into two? How many of us, take a pause to stop where we are and actually think, where do I want to end up? How do I get there? Which way should I go?</p><p>I do not pretend to know the answers or claim my opinion is of any quality, and it probably isn’t. The exercise I’d like to walk through in this blog, for myself as well as for anyone reading this is to simply reflect on my own direct experience. If/when someone reads this, maybe they’ll take away something helpful. Maybe they will disagree with my perspective and let me know that. Maybe I’ll learn from writing this blog more than the information I intend to share.</p><p>You made this far down the page. So here’s a take-away thought exercise...</p><p>What is your plan?</p></div>Universe Has a Way of Shaping Us2019-02-22T00:00:00+00:002020-03-18T19:33:19.060693+00:00https://dennis.mnuskin.com/blog/universe-has-way-shaping-us/<div class="rich-text"><p>A while back, maybe 7-8 years, one of my friends from high school was in town. We got in touch and set up a time to go out for a beer. We had a lot to catch up on, both of us got married, moved several times and changed several jobs. We became friends due to similar background, similar interests, personalities and general outlook on things. What surprised and struck me the most was just how different we became in the time that passed. I remember sitting there and thinking, this is really not the same person that I knew back in high school. And I’m sure he felt the same about me.</p><p>Then again, my own wife, with whom I’ve been together for the last 16 years, lately been telling me (in a good way), “you are not the same person you were 3 years ago.” Seems it’s time for me to face the reality and accept that we all change. It’s just part of nature and who we are.</p><p>But how does this change happen? This is the question that’s been on my mind lately.</p><p>The change doesn’t just snap and happen in an instant. Instead, we are continuously shaped by what we think and what we come in contact with. And often, what we come in contact with will influence what we end up thinking. Every event in our lives, every interaction with other people and our environment adds into our brains new patterns, new knowledge, new thoughts, new ideas. A lot of these ideas come and go, but some become ingrained and stay with us for a very long time.</p><p>I often go back to a series of events that in hindsight had a very drastic impact on me, but as I look back, seems each of them was almost a random occurrence in itself :</p><p><b>Spring 2015</b></p><ul><li>In the middle of an argument (what software engineers call “philosophical discussion”) with JJ, don’t even remember what the actual topic was anymore<ul><li>To make a point, JJ, pointed me to The Hacker’s Diet with intent to have me read the section that talks how “Many difficult and complicated problems require a combination of the skills of management and the insights of engineering.”</li><li>Read the section and jumped right back into the sparring match.</li></ul></li><li>Some combination of the author’s tone, voice or deliver left enough of imprint on me to put the book on my reading list where it ended up sitting for over a year.</li></ul><p><b>April 2016</b></p><ul><li>I decide that I’d like to be a manager and lead a software engineering team.</li><li>I did not start off as a great (or even good) manager. I had the drive and the intentions, but those good intentions did not always translate into good impact.</li><li>My boss and I had a rough start, and this was one thing that she repeatedly drilled into me: “Dude, you need to be more mindful. Got to pay attention to yourself, your speech, your state of mind and how you react to other people”.</li></ul><p><b>August 2016 </b></p><ul><li>Realizing how much I’m out of my depth in the new role, I turn to books. The book I ended up picking up was Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us</li><li>To keep the scenery from getting too static, I generally read 2 or 3 books in parallel. As I happened to finish something else right around same time, next one at the top of the list just happened to be The Hacker’s Diet</li></ul><p><b>Early September 2016</b></p><ul><li>Finished the Drive and on the final page, my kindle displayed few other recommended books. Something there caught my eye: “Willpower Instinct”. Instinct, eh? About willpower, eh? Alright catchy title, click on a link just see what the description says about the book.</li><li>Started reading the Willpower Instinct</li></ul><p><b>Late September 2016</b></p><ul><li>Decided to change dog walking route. Being curious what the new distance, I pulled up a tracking phone app. 45 minutes later I am back home, pull out the phone, look at the report and it shows 1.5 miles walked. Excellent. And then I happen to glance at another number on the screen: 150 calories burned.</li><li>1 hour after the dog talk</li><li>My wife says, “Hey, want some tea?” -- of course I want tea; “want some cookies with that?” -- of course I want cookies, I love cookies.</li><li>She puts the box in front of me and the nutrition label happens to be facing me and I’m reading: <ul><li>“serving size 3 cookies; calories in 1 serving: 150”.</li></ul></li><li>There’s a click in my head:<ul><li>These 3 cookies, which will not even give me that much satisfaction are about to undo 45 minutes of walking a mile and a half.</li></ul></li></ul><p><b>January 1st, 2017</b></p><ul><li>I start the new year with 25 lbs less than I was that night coming back from walking a dog</li></ul><p>I lost the weight and kept it off, but I gained so much more through the experience of those events:</p><p>In Willpower Instinct, the homework at the end of Lesson 1 asks you to try meditating 5 minutes a day. There’s that concept again, “mindfulness” Starting that homework became the beginning of my regular meditation practice.</p><p>My blood pressure and resting pulse rate are both at their lowest point ever. In the middle of The Hacker’s Diet there’s a chapter on a simple exercise ladder that take less than 15 min in the morning. Sad fact mentioned in that book: if you do that 15 min exercise, you are already more active than 87% of U.S. population. 2.5 years later I still exercise every morning</p><p>I discovered as you lose weight, you body actually wants to be active. I’ve tried few things and now I’ve settled into doing yoga 3 mornings a week *Since I started meditating, I dusted off another book I had, Buddhism Plain and Simple because I wasn’t sure if I was meditating “right” and that set off a whole different chain of events.</p><p>Every time I think back and reflect on how things played out, I am incredibly grateful to JJ, my boss at the time, Melissa, the authors of those books and that box of cookies. But in my opinion, what I’ve mentioned so far isn’t even the most significant and important takeaway from this tale.</p><p>What if I didn’t have that argument with JJ on that day? What if The Hacker’s Diet book never came up or I never saved it in my reading list? What if my Kindle came up with different set of recommendations and I never discovered Willpower Instinct. Yep, I wouldn’t write about any of this. Maybe I’d write something else. Maybe. We’ll never know.</p><p>The universe shapes us. Things will happen to us and each one of those things will change us in some subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways. We do not have control over the universe and it would be healthy to simply accept that fact. But just because we do not have control, that does NOT mean that we do not have influence.</p><p>That is the ultimate challenge here: It’s up to us to learn where and how we can exercise the influence over ourselves and the world around us. And just like with everything else, by repeatedly practicing the acts of learning and exercising, we have the capacity to even get better at doing that over time.</p><p>We, the humans have a ton of potential, but how much of that potential goes untapped when we simply drift through life, allowing winds and currents decide where we end up. What would we do if we could take control of the steering wheel? Where would we go? Where would we want to end up?</p></div>