Category: Essays

Both the most rewarding, and the most difficult life tasks we as people have to take on, are the establishment, and maintenance of good relationships. Relationships of all kinds: family, friends, lovers, coworkers. And the stronger the relationship, the more difficult it is to maintain. I wish I could offer a fool proof formula for doing this. I wish I could walk us step by step in a procedure on how to keep strong relationships. But I can’t. I don’t think anyone can. Many millennia from now our species may colonize on other planets and establish expeditious interstellar travel, but men will still not understand how the woman’s mind works. That was meant to be humorous, but the point is still valid. I have little doubt that the human equation is one far more complex than any out there in the astros; inner space is more complex than outer space. All I have to offer are some general tips and guidelines from the point of view of a minimalist:

• Communication – And by that I mean 70% listening, 30% speaking. Everything is on the table. We can not be afraid to put our heart out there.
• Empathy/Understanding – To go along with listening, we must put ourselves in their shoes. Let go of our own problems, and extend comfort.
• Compromise – There are personal sacrifices that need to be made in every relationship. Every, single, one.
• Patience – Pick our battles. Let the small things slide. Good things come to those who wait.
• Make room for the relationship to cultivate. Both in time, and mental energy. A mind too cluttered with many worries can’t focus on a relationship in need of attention.

Now the truth is most of these points we are already aware of. They’re practically cliche. But I think we all need constant reminder of these points, as our selfishness derails us from this path too often ……. doesn’t it?

This man’s beliefs, his fight, serve as another reminder that only people matter, not things, and certainly not ego. Only humanity.

As a child I recall learning that this man was a great leader for black rights in America. As a child I did not understand the full role which Dr King encompassed. As an adult I re-visited the history. I read Dr Kings work, and it changed me.

It turns out that Dr King was not a “black rights leader” as I understood him to be as a child, he was a civil rights leader. In his time, it was black America that was being repressed and segregated. If Dr King were alive today he’d still be fighting that fight, Ah, but I have no doubt he’d be also fighting for woman’s rights, LBGTQ rights, and Muslim rights.

You see, Dr King was not driven by his love for black America, or a hate for white America, but driven by a love for ALL of humanity. And through this love his method of fighting was passive resistance. Passive resistance is a method I believe in very deeply. It is a method of resistance that must stem from love, not hate. It requires great strength of character. And more importantly, it requires that we put our cause, our purpose, before ourselves. Let me repeat that. It requires that we but our cause before ourselves. THAT is what makes a leader. It is also the reason we haven’t seen any in a very long time. A leader is willing to sacrifice all for their cause/purpose.

Dr King writes and speaks often of the three types of love: Eros (erotic), Philos (interpersonal relationships), and Agape (a much broader spiritual love that is not focused on any specific person). Actually he speaks really only of Agape love, which is the truest love there is. It is an unconditional love. It is a divine love for God (and God’s laws) and all of humanity. It is a love that doesn’t segregate or judge. I believe that it goes without saying that Agape asserts one of my favorite laws of logic, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

So with Agape, self sacrifice to meet a greater end is implied. It is this love that is missing in the world today. Violence of any kind, serves only to hurt this kind of love. One can not inflict harm on another, and do it in the name of Agape love.

As I said before, passive resistance requires a great strength of character. Passive resistance requires that one stand firm in their ground like a mighty oak without actually engaging the enemy. To be non-violent even in when violence is being done to us. To get knocked down, stand back up again, look the enemy in the face and say “I’m not going anywhere …… you move.” THAT IS STRENGTH. Human instinct tells us to meet violence with violence. That’s just letting hate get the best of us. There is absolutely nothing strong about just giving in to our instinct. There are no winners when violence is met with violence, and the only thing that onlookers learn is that we must destroy the enemy to get what we want. That somehow we have needs more important than human life. Nothing is more important than human life, not even freedom.

Also, passive resistance has a way of exposing the wrongful party for ALL onlookers to see. When the conflicting parties literally physically display that one party is fueled by hate, and the other by love, it becomes a no-brainer who the righteous party is.

Passive resistance worked then, and it will work now. But it is a method that requires great sacrifice. We must find it in our hearts to have Agape love.

Dr King was also a believer in making a difference in business America (now corporate America), by exercising the strength of our dollar. By that, I mean a good old fashion boycott. If we want to take the power away from the power elite, stop giving them our money. Instead spend our money within our class, local small businesses. Remember, there are a lot more of us then there are of them, we can be self reliant. They however, cannot.

I have read many works of Dr King, but my favorite is this one:

Letter from Birmingham Jail

I will end with one of my favorite of Dr King’s quotes:

“History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”

Happy Martin Luther King Jr day.

Information is all around us. We are constantly being bombarded with “current events”. It’s in all our media channels: TV, FB, Twitter, Billboards, radio, magazines, at the movies, on the checkout line in the grocery store, bumper stickers. We see it on the news, on our FB wall, on the cover of Star Magazine while we wait to checkout, on our way to work. All these outlets are hijacking our attention so they can fill our minds with information that is mostly garbage (unessential to us), and/or lies.

At the very least, letting ourselves be exposed to all this garbage information is robbing us of our time, and brain power. But beyond that, it is robbing us of our mental real estate. So much of all this information we are exposed to, we actually DO absorb. Every time we hear about some new piece of Hollywood gossip it becomes a small little form that we put in a file which we load into a file cabinet in the memory warehouse of our mind; and the warehouse does not have unlimited space. Just another small piece of useless information that is deviating us from our focus.

Mental clutter is no different than physical clutter, other than the fact that mental clutter is so much easier to accumulate. We accumulate it without even realizing.

So how do we limit our mental clutter? Easy. Limit our exposure to it’s channels. Now I’m not suggesting we isolate ourselves from media altogether (live off the wire, or grid). Far from it. Because the truth is that we DO need many of these channels to in fact stay informed and current on information that IS valuable to us. BUT, we do need to filter this exposure.

 

There are many ways one can do this, so I have listed some ways that have helped me below:

• Limit our TV time. In fact, schedule it. Four hours a week (or whatever we can handle). Or, abandon TV altogether. I, for one, do not get cable service (just internet).
• Do the same for our computer and mobile media outlets. Allot only a very limited amount of time per day to allow ourselves to be exposed to these channels.
• I do not however recommend that we abandon these media outlets altogether, as most of these outlets are ideally suited to keep us up on current events. And unlike TV, we have far more control over what we allow ourselves to be exposed to. We can custom tailor our FB, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and any other channels settings to allow only those information sources that are valuable to us and we trust to come through our feed. It is important though that we severely scrutinize what we allow to come through our feed, and that we occasionally revisit these settings.

We must do a periodic exploring an purging of the pages and people we “like” in our social media. Remove the “empty calorie” entertainment. Remove the toxic elements and hate from our feed. Let in the positivity and the current relevant information from unbiased trustworthy sources (gonna have to do some homework for that).

We humans have very limited ability to weed out much of the garbage information that the powers are exposing us to, from being absorbed in to our minds. Otherwise advertisers would not spend millions of dollars on Ad space during the Super Bowl. So we must kill the flow of information at our source ….. turn off the tube.