progress – The Conscious Pilgrim

getting it

At this point, I have a number of daily practices. I’m a bit of a creature of habit when I’m home, partly because when I’m not home, I need to adapt. This is fine, and I have no problem doing it because it’s part of a greater plan, but when I am home, I keep it pretty rigid.

I was recently reflecting on the pandemic times with someone, and was reminded of the practices I had in place that have gone by the wayside, though many are still in place after several years. Then I began to reflect on all the podcast episodes and audiobooks I’ve digested since then.

I’ve really dug into philosophy and self-betterment over the past 5 years as a vegan, and longer, actually, as I was already on my spiritual journey when I came to veganism (though that was a big turning point). The rub is that once these things became part of my modus operandi, I didn’t have to focus on them specifically anymore.

I don’t have to think about stoicism because I’ve adopted it.
I don’t have to think about veganism because I’ve adopted it.
I don’t have to think about not drinking alcohol because I’ve adopted it.
I don’t have to think about endurance training or weightlifting because I’ve adopted it… they are a part of what I do. I do not thinkk about the merits of doing or not doing any of these things because the decision has been made a long time ago to do them.

It’s easy to think about the morning journaling and evening yoga practices that fizzled out after the pandemic, when demands on my personal time resumed, but it’s somehow less easy to think about the practices I have that stayed with me because they’ve just become part of what I do. Even so – as I type this and mourn my lost evening yoga practice, I suddenly remember that a Yoga Nidra practice gets me to sleep every night.

I also have to trust myself – something I’ve struggled to do for years, because I was not trustworthy for a long time. I couldn’t be trusted in a room alone with a box of donuts not that long ago, so this trust has come slowly, but at the base of my being I can always trust that I am doing my very best. I know that, because we are all doing our very best. So now I must trust that since I have tried all of these practices and some stuck while others didn’t, that the ones that didn’t just weren’t for me.

That is to say, just because someone wrote a book about daily journaling doesn’t mean that I have to journal daily. I journal weekly… and you’re reading that journal now! I also write songs with both frequency and urgency… so to say my writing practice has fallen away isn’t a fair assessment, either.

At any rate… this recent reflective time has shown me that; although there are miles to go before am finished, I am getting it. There are always things to try and things to stop trying… but I have to trust myself to hold on to the important stuff and filter out the suggestions that don’t mean so much to me.

I’m getting it.

The irony of this post is that despite trying my very best, I somehow managed to overlook the fact that last week, I didn’t manage to get anything posted. It was going to be a songwriting featurette but I just didn’t get it done in time.

So for the first time in 3 years… I missed the mark. Ahh, well.

treading lightly

Sometimes it feels like the whole world is walking on eggshells, and perhaps they should be. As we move forward as a society and as a people, we follow an inclination to do better than previous generations, but there’s always a select group of people who feel that things were better before.

This view is one of privilege, but not necessarily current privilege – more likely a place of past privilege that they are longing for. We’ve all heard it before – maybe we’ve even said it before – “Simpler times” when the dollar was worth more, in a time when nobody’s ever heard of autism, or being trans, or peanut allergies, or the climate crisis, or wage inequality, or whatever. Naturally, all of those things existed, but the populus thought it best not to voice their concerns. Everyone who wasn’t directly affected by those things got to be ignorant of those things, and ignorance is bliss, of course.

That’s all fine. Times change, and people change… but people don’t always change at the same rate, and at the current high-speed velocity of new information being blasted toward each of us, I think there’s a level of patience required for those members of previous generations who are not accustomed to this velocity of information.

I’m not speaking directly about ‘wokeness’ or ‘cancel culture’ because I really don’t think those things exist, and if I had my way, I’d never type those words again. I’m also not talking about the political institutions or billionaire villains of a country I don’t live or vote in. I’m speaking about generational differences.

Since everything needs a name, apparently, I am considered an ‘elder millennial’ or a ‘xenial’ which means I am technically a millennial, but share more commonality in my upbringing with Generation X, and I can tell you with 100% certainty that back in the 1990’s when I was a teenager, we were the absolute most accepting and most inclusive people we could possibly imagine. However, by comparison to today’s standards, we would all be considered climate-denying racists, and every last one of us is glad that the very few cell phones available at the time were not capable of taking and sharing video due to the absolutely insane shit that was going on. We did things and said things that wouldn’t fly now, and if there was some documentation of what was said & done back then, we’d all be in trouble.

But those people in the 90’s… they improved. They got better, and they had kids and raised them to be better… and their parents, who were essentially raised in the dark ages – they’re generally better people, too. But they got there (and are still getting there) at a different rate.

All that to say that people do change, and that redemption needs to be available to all of us. So many people have had some ‘viral moment’ saying or doing something that doesn’t represent them at all, but are denied the opportunity to atone for these things now because the audience has both made up their mind, and moved on.

All I can do is encourage people to take part in the human experience; not only as the first person narrative, but as a supporting character in someone else’s story. Listen and ask questions… and understand that we have more in common than we think we do – more in common than uncommon – and that just because someone votes for a different party than you doesn’t mean they’re a hate-filled bigot. Almost nobody is voting out of hate for an entire demographic of people. There’s a myriad of issues that face us all, and hardly any (or none, really) viable options for any of us to choose when it comes to ideal leaders.

We’re all doing our best.
Remember that we’re all doing our best.

ain’t done yet

It’s likely no secret that I don’t get up every Saturday morning and post these at exactly 8am MST. These posts are written in advance – sometimes a couple days, and sometimes a couple weeks – and this one is no different.

As I write this, my band is gearing up to shoot a music video for a brand new song called “Ain’t Done Yet” and boy-oh-boy am I ever not done yet.

The song is actually old. The music was crafted during the pandemic but the lyrics are older than this band, and emotionally, they send me back to a time in my life when everything was harder than I needed it to be, and writing the song was ultimately a form of poetic escapism… yet as I read these lyrics again today, you might think I had just written them, because they describe the way my life is now.

Evidently, I was setting goals.
And journaling.
Both of which I feel like I struggle to find the time to do. Actually no, wait, scratch that – I know exactly when I should be doing these and I absolutely have the time required to make a habit of these things – I just don’t.

I know what I want, and I think I even know how to get it… so why write it down? Because these things change over time, sure, but also because these goals get reached and it’s important to genuinely adjust your sights every once in a while. We need to take an inventory of where we’re at and where we want to be.

The future happens anyway. So I might as well be prepared for it, rather than to wait and see how it affects me.

I once heard an anecdote talking about losing weight or running a marathon or going back to school… whatever, it doesn’t matter I guess… but it was proclaimed that “getting to that goal would take 4 years – I’ll be 45 years” and the response was “yes, but in that time you’ll be 45 anyway… wouldn’t you rather be capable of (goal).”

I think about that from time o time, and I realize that I am right where I am supposed to be.

Anyway… please go watch my new music video. (Out JUNE 5th)

happy where you are

It’s pretty easy to be happy when everything is fine… a little harder when it’s not. I had something knock my positivity a little off-course a couple months back and it’s been difficult to reclaim my bearings a bit, but I’ve gained clarity on things in a way I thought I understood before; and maybe I was right, but is much more obvious to me now.

I’ve heard lot about being happy where you are, which is ultimately the foundations of the phrase ‘money can’t buy happiness‘ but I’ve always had difficulty squaring that with my motivation to move forward and do more, being the goal oriented person that I am. Only recently have I realized that in the context of my everyday losses & victories that I ultimately couldn’t possibly be any happier than I am right now. My struggles are my own, but the truth is that I wouldn’t trade them for anyone else’s. I am self aware and moving forward, and over all I am happy – in part because I am happy moving forward.

I suppose I got it into my head somehow that the term ‘being happy where you are‘ gets broken into 2 halves, (a) ‘being happy‘ and (b) ‘where you are.’

‘Being happy‘ is not a foreign concept, but ‘where you are‘ somehow presents as some stationary place, as in ‘if my life never changed, would I be good with that?’ but that’s really not what it is. It’s more momentary and granular than that. As I type this, I’m sitting at my laptop and I am happy doing so. After this I’ll be doing something else and I’ll be happy with that – and it will lead to something else.

What I’ve come to understand is that rather than a term with 2 halves, it’s a term with an action and a qualifier. ‘Being happy, where you are.‘ and I’ve realized that ‘where you are‘ for me IS moving forward. When I am right now is putting time and action between myself and an undesirable circumstance, and if I’m being truly honest with myself then I must acknowledge that every day since that hard situation happened is better than the day before it, because progress is cumulative.

The only place we allow our failures to define us is in the mirror, and most of us would never allow someone else to talk to us the way we talk to ourselves. You wouldn’t allow someone to talk that way about a close friend, and a close friend would come to your defense if someone was slinging slander at you.

I can’t speak for you, but the little fat kid I see in the mirror needs me to defend him. After all, he got me all the way here… and objectively, here is pretty great, and he worked really hard to do so.

If we’re going to live in a frame of mind where problems compound on each other (and most of us do, regrettably) then we must also allow our victories to compound, or we’ll never feel that sense of balance or accomplishment, and we’ll never really be able to ask ourselves: “Am I happy where I am?” without fearing the answer.

So we either DON’T allow our problems to compound, or we DO allow our victories to compound. That’s a matter of preference I suppose… but in the checks & balances, I’m willing to bet that a lot of us are closer to being happy where we are than we might think.