Are You Ready for the Black Belt?

A parable tells about a martial artist who kneels before a master sensei in a ceremony to receive the hard-earned Black Belt. After years of relentless training, the student has finally reached a pinnacle of achievement in the discipline.

“Before granting the belt, you must pass one more test,” the sensei solemnly tells the young man.

“I’m ready,” responds the student, expecting perhaps one more round of sparring.

“You must answer the essential question: What is the true meaning of the Black Belt?”

“Why, the end of my journey,” says the student. “A well-deserved reward for my hard work.”

The master waits for more. Clearly, he is not satisfied. The sensei finally speaks: “You are not ready for the Black Belt. Return in one year.”

As the student kneels before his master a year later, he is again asked the question, “What is the true meaning of the Black Belt?”

“It is a symbol of distinction and the highest achievement in our art,” the young man responds.

Again the master waits for more. Still unsatisfied, he says once more: “You are still not ready for the Black Belt. Return in one year.”

A year later the student kneels before his sensei and hears the question, “What is the true meaning of the Black Belt?”

This time he answers, “The Black Belt represents not the end, but the beginning, the start of a never-ending journey of discipline, work and the pursuit of an ever higher standard.”

“Yes,” says the master. “You are now ready to receive the Black Belt and begin your work.”

The Black Belt is not the end of much hard work and practice. It is the beginning of a life-long journey.

You may not be hoping for a Black Belt, but you might be at a crucial point. Maybe you’re facing a life change, perhaps even a painful one. Or maybe you are awaiting something you have worked hard to attain − graduation, a new job, a promotion, or even retirement.

All wise people see that changes can be new beginnings. Change need not be feared. And neither should we be looking for a permanent resting place, for a full and happy life is never stagnant.

How does the change you face represent, not just an ending, but a new beginning in your life’s journey? Are you ready to accept it? 

-- Steve Goodier

Image: flickr.com/Richard Masoner

Choose Your Memories Wisely

Do you know that memory can be a powerful tool for spiritual and emotional rejuvenation? Memories are both helpful and hurtful, and you and I decide what to do with them. Let me explain.

I once attended a conference at a retreat center in the Rocky Mountains. We were given a long break one afternoon to relax and renew our spirits. I decided to go for a walk by myself.

A little way down a secluded, dirt road, I spotted horses in a corral. I carefully approached, so as not to frighten them. When I neared, I breathed in horse smells. With the scent of the horses and the corral came something I didn't expect – a flood of memories.

I took another breath and vividly recalled visiting my grandparents' guest ranch every summer as a child. When I was a teenager, I worked on the ranch. Some of my happiest childhood memories involved horses.

I inhaled deeply. I recalled hot afternoons of pulling saddles and blankets off perspiring horses then brushing down their backs. The pungent smell of horse sweat filled my mind and let loose a flood of memories I hadn't recalled for many years. I thought about the soft touch of a horse's nose sniffing my hand for a sugar cube, and the warmth of a furry neck as I put my arms around it and hugged it close. Even manure smells brought back good memories – thoughts of hours spent in corrals saddling, bridling and working with horses.

For two hours I let myself think and remember and feel. The memories worked some kind of magic inside me, healing and rejuvenating. I recalled day-long horseback rides, valley vistas of tall grass and pristine mountain creeks running beside horse trails carved in red earth. I fondly remembered those mornings I rose before dawn, saddled up a horse and scoured forest land searching for wandering horses, let out to roam and graze at night, to round up and bring in to the ranch before breakfast.

Until I smelled the horses, I had almost forgotten. And it occurred to me that these memories are important. They give me energy and new life. I should never lose them and I'd do well to visit them from time to time.

Memories are both helpful and hurtful and we decide which to keep alive.

Some people look back and feel guilty. Again and again they remember their failings and mistakes. They scrutinize these painful memories in detail. Like a child with a bag of marbles who holds them up to a strong light, one by one, examining their chips and flaws before carefully placing them back. When they take time to remember, they choose memories that are flawed; memories that evoke guilt and regret and steal peace of mind.

People similarly revisit memories of past loss, or personal rejection or any number of other hurts inflicted upon them over the years. They bitterly remember each incident and relive old feelings of loss and grief before locking the memory back into a secure place where it can be easily retrieved. The memories they choose to call up leave them sad and forlorn and rob the present of its power.

I don't suggest that you ignore pain. Feel it, understand it and do whatever is necessary to heal from it. Guilt, mistakes and pain are part of living. But why cultivate a habit of regret or bitterness? Those memories you choose to visit day after day will either flood your mind with strength-giving energy or drain it of power to live.

Choose wisely which memories to call up. Pick memories that will rejuvenate your spirit with new life. Revisit them often. You earned them, and they are a treasure nobody can steal.

-- Steve Goodier

Life As an Active Science

Image courtesy of Mikhail Medvedev

That tireless inventor Thomas Edison famously said of his various experiments, “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” Murphy's Law is much less sanguine about it: “If you never try anything new, you'll miss out on many of life's great disappointments.”

I have to say, though, that I like to experiment – especially with my life. I believe in self transformation and try to challenge myself regularly to adopt new attitudes and behaviors. I realize that I can be a little excessive with self change (you may know that already), but I am drawn to the exciting idea that my life is an “active science.”

I think changes in wrist watches over the past 50 years beautifully illustrate how important it is to experiment. Do you know who set the standard for fine watch-making for most of the 20th Century? If you answered, "The Swiss," you are correct. Swiss wrist watches dominated world markets for at least 60 years and Swiss companies were committed to constant refinement of their craft.
   
It was the Swiss who came forward with the minute hand and the second hand. They led the world in discovering better ways to manufacture gears, bearings, and main-springs of watches. They even led the way in waterproofing techniques and self-winding models. By 1968 the Swiss made 65 percent of all watches sold in the world and laid claim to as much as 90 percent of the profits.
   
Now...which country sold the most wrist watches in the 1980s? The answer is Japan. By 1980 Swiss companies had laid off thousands of watch-makers and controlled less than 10 percent of the world market. Between 1979 and 1981, eighty percent of Swiss watchmakers lost their jobs.
   
Why? One reason is the advent of Japanese digital watches. Another major reason is that the Swiss were reluctant to change the way they traditionally designed wrist watches. Like the fact that for too long they refused to utilize the less expensive and more accurate Quartz crystal. In short, they kept doing what they always did. Because they did not seriously experiment with radical new ways of designing timepieces, most Swiss watchmakers found themselves doing something else for a living.
   
Our lives are not so different. Of course we need to accept ourselves as we are, but we can't stop there. We also need to value ourselves enough make needed changes.  It's a simple formula: If we want to live fully we have to keep growing. If we want to keep growing we have to adapt. And if we want to adapt we have to try on new ways of thinking and new ways of doing. For me it's about making my life an active science.

I appreciate Mark Twain's encouragement. "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do," he points out. "So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

Sounds like fun to me.

-- Steve Goodier

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Making a Brand New End

I have a friend who says he is going to change his telephone voice message greeting. He wants to say, "Thank you for calling. I’ve been making some changes in my life. Please leave a message. If I don’t call you back soon, you’re one of the changes."

I don’t know if he ever got around to it. But I do know that making personal changes is often what life is all about. We’d better learn how to welcome change if we want to live fully.

Do you remember this story? Two men came from similar backgrounds. They both grew up in "dysfunctional" homes. An alcohol-addicted parent raised them both. They both endured numerous hardships as a result of the many problems brought about by their unstable home lives.

As adults, however, their lives looked quite different. One of the men couldn’t seem to keep a job for long. He was frequently let go for alcohol-related problems. He was married for a while, but his wife could not live with him any longer and eventually left. He felt hopeless and believed himself to be a failure.

A reporter interviewed him as part of an article she was writing on the effects of alcoholism in the home. She asked him, "To what do you attribute your present circumstances?"

"Given my background," he replied, "what do you expect?"

The other man held a steady job. He enjoyed a stable marriage and home life. He was involved in his children’s lives. Overall, he felt productive and useful.

"To what do you attribute your present circumstances?" the reporter asked him, referring to his obvious success.

"Given my background," he replied, "what do you expect?"

Naturally, our past will shape our present. Our backgrounds are crucial in determining the kinds of decisions we will make as adults. 

But in this case, both men were shaped in different ways by their past. One slipped into those old, familiar patterns and recreated them as an adult. The other was determined never to repeat what he had experienced as a child. The first man felt helpless to change. The other used his background as motivation to make needed changes.

It’s true that we are products of our past. We are shaped by our parents, by our backgrounds and by pivotal people in our lives. We are products of our past. But we CAN make changes. 

Like someone said:

"You may not go back and make a brand new start, my friend –
But you can start right now to make a brand new end."

Psychologists now tell us that our difficult backgrounds can actually make us more resilient. (Check Steven and Sybil Wolin’s fascinating book The Resilient Self.) Hardships can make us strong and give us needed motivation to be different in the future. A difficult background can actually be no less than a marvelous gift.

It comes down to one question: do I use the hard times in my past as an excuse or as a gift?

-- Steve Goodier



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Do-Overs

Even if you’re not from Washington D.C. you may have heard of former Mayor Anthony Williams. He has a remarkable story. Williams was born to an unwed teen who gave him up. He was known as a "problem child" in foster care. By age three, little Anthony had still never spoken a word. It seemed that a pattern for his life was set, that is, until two warm and caring people took a chance on him.

Anthony was taken in by an opera-singing postal clerk and her equally generous-hearted husband. He soon began to speak and eventually thrived in their home. He excelled academically and later attended both Harvard and Yale Universities.

In 1998, he came from obscurity to win 66% of the vote to become mayor in one of the world’s major cities. In his inaugural address, Williams said: "Forty-four years ago, my parents adopted me and gave me a second chance. I feel this city has now adopted me and I will give to it everything my parents taught me about love, service, commitment."

It’s no doubt that, had he never been adopted into his particular family, his life would have been wholly different. He was saved by a second chance. And haven’t each of us been given second chances? He got a do-over on his birth family. Haven’t we been given do-overs on relationships, jobs, blown opportunities and the like? Quite often second chances are the result of the generosity of someone who cares a great deal. And sometimes we are saved by those second chances.

Author Dr. Seuss says in his book The Lorax, "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."

I recently came across a story of a young American woman who was saved by a do-over. During the second World War, she lost her husband. He died in India of a tropical disease and she became despondent. In time, despair turned into depression and she lost all interest in living. She just didn’t care anymore.

She booked passage on a ship back to America. On the voyage, she became acquainted with a seven-year-old boy who, like her, was all alone. His parents had died in the fighting in Burma. He seemed to want to be with the young woman, but her pain would not allow it. She wanted nothing to do with him and avoided him whenever possible. She felt so ravaged by loss, that she was unable to get outside of herself and care about anyone else. And she certainly did not have the energy to take on someone else’s problems.

Then one night the ship was torpedoed. The young woman made her way to the deck and prepared herself to go down with the doomed vessel. Some part of her actually welcomed it as an escape from her pain. The child, too, came on deck. He shivered with cold and fright. When he spotted the woman, he came over and clung to her.

That was when a lump of ice melted somewhere deep inside her. She put her arms around the child and led him to one of the lifeboats. For several days, as they waited to be rescued, she held him and he held her. Years later her friends would say that they didn’t know whether the woman saved the boy, or the boy saved the woman. They each gave the other a second chance at life and a do-over on love.

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."

But it’s the people who give do-overs who truly change the world.

-- Steve Goodier

Image: flickr.com/Radoslaw Kut

Letting Your Soul Catch Up

You already know that practicing some form of relaxation is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself? Taking time each day to quiet your mind and breathe deeply, can make a big difference in how you feel throughout your day and into the night. But do you know that dedicating a day every week for mental and spiritual renewal is equally important?

We’re told that the word “relax” has its origin in the Latin word “relaxare,” which means “to loosen.” When we relax, we are in effect loosening tension, releasing tightly held energy and letting go. From the state of relaxation we can experience calm peacefulness.

Another great word is the Hebrew word "Shabbat" which, of course, is a day of rest. But it quite literally means to "quit; stop; take a break." Whatever you are doing, stop it. Whatever you are saying, be quiet. Sit down and take a look around. Don't do anything. Don't say anything. Fold your hands. Take a deep breath... .

Extended periods of rest are a biological necessity. The human body is like an old-fashioned wind-up clock. If it is not rewound by rest, ultimately it will run itself down.

A group of Americans made a trip with Brazilian natives down the Amazon River. The first day they rushed. The second day they rushed. The next day they rushed. One day, anxious to continue the trek, they were surprised to find the natives seated together in a circle.

When asked the reason for the delay, a guide answered, “They are waiting. They cannot move further until their souls catch up with their bodies.”

Do you owe yourself time to let your soul catch up with your body?

-- Steve Goodier


Image: flickr.com/Delphine Devos