About Last Week

A month and a half ago, my father suffered a stroke. He is partially blind, with no peripheral vision. His breathing has suffered too from the decades of smoking. His gasps for air between sentences sound literally like final breaths. The kind you hear in war films from a fallen soldier, fighting death. Because my father is slowly dying.

A month later my mother calls me to tell me she's going in for surgery for a tumor. After removing part of it, they decided that she required chemotherapy for the next 6 months.

That was five days ago.

And then Boston happened.

And then we lose background checks for gun purchases.

Texas explosion. The ricin incident. Strawberry Worker Shootings in Greece.

And then Boston part 2. Streaming at me constantly last night through my phone.

The easy thing would be to believe my world is falling apart.

It seems that way.

We are all relieved it is over and tell ourselves to never forget what happened.

We remember. Sort of.

In everyone, there was a brief moment where your daily problems ceased to exist. The subway singers you found so annoying are making you happy. The screaming kids at the coffee shop you do your work at tuned out from your hearing range. You pick up your phone and tell your girlfriend you love her in the middle of the designs a client is pestering you about.

I've seen this movie before. Person learns they've got terminal cancer and a shift takes place in their psyche. They are suddenly aware of what really matters.

Faced with death, all of our assumptions are called into question.

Am I doing what I'm supposed to be doing? Am I living right? Have I found love in my life? Do people feel loved by me? Am I happy? Is this what I want my last memories to be?

And this is the part we forget, because our "terminal cancer" goes into remission. We go back to our regularly scheduled lives.

Our fears, anxieties, self-doubts of our careers, love life, purpose flood back. We distract ourselves with the trivial news of other peoples nipple slipping out on television, as if it affects us on a deep level.

Because it's fun. It's engineered that way. And in the same way junk food looks and feels like food, these distractions look and feel like problems.

As we all settle down and try to understand the motives of the suspects in the next few days, I will put my money on one thing. Like you and I, the bombers had fears, anxieties, self-doubts of their lives and place in this world. The fear won. It beat them. To contribute to this world, a world that is often highly critical and seemingly unforgiving, takes courage, hard work and endless heart. What is more frightening than believing you are irrelevant, weak and out of place? Remember that really annoying kid in your 7th grade classroom that couldn't stop getting in trouble? How do you think he felt?

My purpose in writing this isn't to give the bombers excuses, but to crush any of those that you might have regarding your own life and purpose.

Do not forget what happened last week. Do not forget the questions you began asking yourself about your place and priorities.

We are only free to the extent of our own self-mastery. Do not let fear and self-doubt win.

Those who can not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.

The Path

Overwork yourself in high school so that you can get into your top college,
so you can overwork yourself to get a steady job,
so you can overwork yourself to save enough money,
so that you can retire at 65 years old to finally live the life you always dreamed of.

Assuming you do not die of a heart attack before then.

Is this what everyone is fighting for?

Fear, Failure and Fuck it

This morning my friend JC Chang posed a question on his Twitter.

"What would you do if you knew you could not fail?"

It's a common question asked to inspire action of unrealized dreams. The problem with this question is that it doesn't recognize the importance of failure. 

How many movies have been made where someone is living an "ordinary" life, upon finding out they're sick with months to live, sells all their belongings and backpacks around the world? 

Our knowledge of our own mortality gives us an appreciation for living. Failure gives value to your dreams. 

You've always wanted to be a writer. A singer. A photographer. You see the dream. The goal. It haunts you. And the fear of failing equally haunts you. Your dream is that stunning girl at the party, the one you cannot stop looking at. You want to talk to her. That fear of rejection is a mother fucker. That fear is a sign. Fear is the indicator that you're onto something with a high payoff. Fear is the filter to see who's worthy of what lies beyond it.

Laird Hamilton, regarded as one of the best surfers of all time (see photo above), talked about being labeled fearless in his book "Force of Nature".

Every so often, in an article or an interview, someone describes me as "fearless." In my opinion, that's like calling me an idiot. Fear is a natural response. Without it, we wouldn't survive. If you're never scared, then you've either never been hurt or you're completely ignorant. The idea that fear is something to deny is completely misguided.

Forget your emotions around fear for a second and look at the simple reality: It's an energy source designed to increase performance. Adrenaline and the natural hormones your body creates when you're scared are more powerful than any drug. The ability to harness it constructively, that's the trickily part. Once you star to understand fear, it becomes something you can tap into. In my experience, fear usually prompts me to make really good decisions. I'd even go so far as to say that it gives me power. 

How do you use fear to empower yourself? You don't fight it, and you don't overanalyze it. Think too much about a frightening situation causes your mind to start chattering and it gets in the way of your body.

In the words of Ice-T, you have to learn to say "Fuck it".