Tag: relationships

  • Three Life Lessons from Frodo

    I just finished watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy again.  No matter how many times I’ve watched them I’m always surprised at how profound Tolkien was at his understanding of the human condition, our frailties and our strengths.

    Lessons I learned this time. (and probably many times before)

    1.  Life is about choices.  Those we make and those we have thrust upon us.

    2.  Life is about personal sacrifices.  Life is bigger than us and requires that we think of the other people in our life first.

    3.  Life is about following your calling.  We all have one.  Have you found yours?  Are you living it?

  • 3 Reasons Your Story is Important to Me

    This post is in response to Chris Brogan’s post and challenge about the importance of story in our lives. 

    A few month’s ago when I was at a crossroads in my life I watched a video that posed several questions.  To me the questions were so profound that I wrote them down and have pondered them many times since.  The question are:  What is my calling?;  What if my calling is my story?; and What if my story is where I am right now? 

    When I first had these questions posed to me through the video I had 2 reactions.  First, “cheezy” and second, after they lingered a while, was “wow”!  The second question was a bomb shell for me.  What IF my calling WAS my story?  You’d think at 43, that I would have all of life’s big questions answered, but what I find is that the farther I go down the trail of life the more questions I actually have.

    What if my calling was my story?  What if I was not only the narrator, but a character in my own story.  What if I was also a co-author, not just in my story, but in the stories of others and vice versa?  These were all questions that came to mind as I pondered the my own emotional and intellectual response to the initial questions.

    So why would your story be important to me?

    First, it is in hearing other’s story that I realize that I’m not that unique and yet still uniquely me.  We are all travelers in this life, sharing similar experiences and yet we have very different responses and outcomes.

    Second, by the mere fact that you are reading this, our stories are now intertwined.  Maybe not like a best friend, husband, wife, son, daughter or someone very close to us, but we still are connected.  I have come to realize that MY story is not just my story, but the coalescing of my story with those around me as well.

    Third and by all means not last, your story and you are important to me.  Every person is truly valuable and when one single story is not heard we all suffer loss.

    I hope that this post along with Chris’ in some way inspire you to realize that you have a story, it’s important and you get to co-author it.

    Have a great day and make your story great.

  • Humans Are Like Windows

    Bsod_small

    No I don't mean like "windows to the soul" or like a pane of glass.  I mean like the Windows that we PC users have all come to love and hate.  If you've ever used Windows for any length of time you've experienced the dreaded "blue screen of death".

    So, how are humans like Windows you ask?  Great question.  Be honest now, when you get that blue screen (to MS's credit I've not seen it in a very long time) you immediately crunch down on that power or reset button as fast as you can and never even try to understand what the dying last words of your operating system were.  What just happened?  Well, my mantra is "that's Windows", but something did actually happen to cause the dreaded blue screen.  It's likely that even if you did take the time to read the problem it would not be intelligible.  I'm fairly technically competent, build my own PCs, a little programming, network my home etc. and I can't understand what they mean half the time.  I've been on the phone with Microsoft support for 2 hours once and they couldn't even figure it out.

    Each time a blue screen occurs a log file is created of what is usually referred to as the "stack dump".   A stack is basically a set of instructions, commands, calculations or other that are held in memory awaiting to be run.  A stack dump then is when this set of instructions gets written to the log.  A software engineer can sometimes look at this dump file to determine what caused the error to occur and possibly diagnose the situation.

    The problem is that many times these events seem random.  Have you ever been in a relationship or conversation with a person and all of a sudden they blow up on you.  Well, you've just experienced the human blue screen.  Unfortunately, we don't write our stack dumps out to a log file.  Many times the error that Windows shows is "A fatal exception has occurred." luckily the errors we as humans make are rarely fatal and there are chances to repair any damage done.  Sometimes with Windows the best fix is to just wipe the hard drive clean and start all over with a fresh install of the OS.  Obviously, we can't do this as humans.  Memories get moved from our RAM (short term memory) to our hard drives (long term) and they are stuck there forever.

    So what do we do?  Do we have to go around walking on egg shells to avoid those blue screens.  Of course not, but it's always nice to remember that we are all humans and like PCs sometimes we can break.  Value the relationships we have – defrag the relationship's hard drive once in a while.  Uninstall old junk – hurt feelings, even old friends we really don't need; make room for new fresh programs and hardware – friends, activities and hobbies that are not damaging. 

    There you have it, humans are like Windows.  I don't know what I'll do when we all go to Linux or a quasi OS like a browser.  We won't have those same problems, unless of course that browser is made by Microsoft.

    Do you have any of those human blue screen moments?  Share your thoughts and experiences.

     

  • Humans are Analogue

    This is the first in at least a two part series of my analogies of what humans are like (as if we didn't already know).  It's at least two parts, because that is how many ideas I have floating around in my cerebral soup right now.  If one of my two neurons fires between now and when I get finished with the first two, who knows something else might get spawned.

    From Wikipedia:  Analogue electronics (or analog in American English) are electronic systems with a continuously variable signal, in contrast to digital electronics where signals usually take only two different levels.

    When you read the definition did anything jump out at you?  It did me.  As much as my wife would like to think I can turn on and off my emotions like a robot, I can not.  See, we humans are analogue creatures.  We are constantly receiving a continuous variable signal.  Digital circuits are On or Off.  Of course, with today's technology we've made digital circuits mimic analogue circuits, think old school radio knobs vs. pushing the button to turn up your MP3 player's volume.  The problem and it can be a big problem, just ask Toyota, is that with digital circuits sometimes they don't respond the way we want them to.  They forget their programming and there's no graduation, it reverts back to On or Off.

    Human interactions involve a huge set of variables or input.  We are constantly taking in data.  Sometimes it great, kind, loving words from our kids and sometimes it's negative self talk or our boss ripping our head off.  

    So, what's my point?  Well it's simply this:  we are analogue; we have an infinite number of thoughts and potential reactions for any given situation.  The next time you're in a conversation or discussion and don't get the reaction you thought or wanted remember that it's not all or nothing.  Maybe the person didn't understand something or maybe they had a bad day.  It may have nothing to do with anything that was said.  If we'll all just give each other an extra dose of grace my guess is that we'll have less misunderstanding and hurt feelings and more fruitful relationships.

    Agree?  Disagree?  Let me know your thoughts.