2023 December 5 There is more to life than facts!

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me tonight to talk about there's more to life than just facts, so let's get started. If you like what you hear tonight, please leave a like, tell your friends, send me a message. Tonight is about just feeling something, and how that may be more important than just the facts. As a saying goes, Just the facts, ma'am. That's a quote from Dragnet, for those of you old enough to remember that. 

First a little side story how I got onto this topic. A good friend of mine in Oregon and I were bemoaning that last year neither one of us got our Christmas letters written and sent. We were talking about this last year. Then last week I got her Christmas letter, like the Monday after Thanksgiving. They must have sat down, she and her husband, and wrote them all over the Thanksgiving holiday and got them all sent out. 

So the gauntlet was thrown down, and I had to reply with my own Christmas letter. My number one task this past Saturday was writing my Christmas letter so I could properly reply to them. That's where it got kind of interesting, because sometimes life gets a little bit challenging. I was thinking about what upbeat things I have to write about. Once I focused on the positive things, I could have easily written a multi page Christmas letter, perhaps even a short story.

Tony Robbins says, Where the focus goes, energy flows. As we often discuss, to a large degree we create our own future. By refocusing, I went from thinking it had been kind of a bleak few years to a great few years. The events didn't change. I changed.  This was less a matter of facts of the past few years, and far more about thinking with my heart and looking for the good things, big and small, that really did bring joy into my life. 

Last Sunday, I also finished up a short four session introduction to meditation by someone I follow on Instagram, Gabriel Martinelli. He's very active on Instagram. It's his main channel. I took his course partly to see his approach to meditation, as well as his approach to online courses, and I was pretty happy in both respects to that. I felt a little bad, because by the end of the fourth week, many students had dropped out. I think I know why. It was for the same reason that I find Gabriel quite interesting.

I believe it's because he didn't just give a bunch of do-this instructions, but rather dove pretty deeply into some of the whys behind meditation, along with a lot of the interesting anomalies and related phenomena that come about to people who meditate regularly. The students who stayed were rewarded with Gabriel's normal insight into the research, and probably gained a much better feeling for the whys behind the practice, and that'll keep them motivated through difficult times.

Just giving someone a pattern to follow doesn't allow them to really internalize the meaning and the goals. They won't have the motivation to work through the difficult times that always come with learning any new skill. Learning movements and principles are the facts of meditation, but going deeper allows one to understand and then feel the reasons and the goals behind the principles. 

The third thing had to do with evaluating a job offer. I talked about this a couple of weeks ago. Same great crew as before, even better situation, a fantastic situation, actually. There was zero factual reason not to jump on this. I truly appreciate even being considered for such a prominent role. But for some reason, and I can't even explain it, there was a feeling that this was not the correct move for me at this time. Even after I did a whole analysis of the current job versus future job analysis. The new role seemed better in every way, but it still seemed there was something better coming that I should focus on. I obviously don't have the answer yet, since it just happened, but I'm confident that if I focus on a particular goal, that I'll then be able to work towards and attain that goal.

I'm no stranger to living that way, but this is probably the first time when something totally visible and tangible, completely examined, seems so clearly good, yet something still unseen by me seemed inevitable. This seemed like where I should put my focus. Remember, I'm an engineer by trade, so I'm all about facts.

But one of the facts of life is that not everything follows the rules that we think they should. Sometimes we just need to have faith in ourselves.  After cordially declining the offer, I then remembered a saying by Pat Flynn. When you say yes to something, that means you have to say no to something else.  That's true for most of us. Most of our schedules are pretty full. We have a lot of things going on, but the corollary to that, which I really tend to focus on more, is saying no to something means you've opened up a space in your life where you can say yes to something else that can be a great opportunity. It can be your opportunity to follow a different path to a greater goal.  

I guess the real lesson is that facts are not always totally factual. Events happen, but then we as humans interpret them. Even things that seem completely unassailable and factually invariant are often more relative than we might like to think. 

Recall that Einstein opened the door with relativity, and then quantum physics and string theory take that even further. I think they currently have defined ten dimensions of life and the possibility for concurrence of events, so that multiple things can be happening at the same time. Time is not only not invariant, but time might be parallel. So life truly is relative, the deeper you dig. Even in our plain old world of conventional physics, things that we take for granted, such as cell phones, were literally the subject of science fiction when I was a child.

People knew such things were physically impossible. There's no way to attain such a thing. Do you remember Dick Tracy and the wristwatch? I have one sitting over on the table over there.  Now you have Apple Watch or Android Watch. That was total science fantasy not long ago. 

Life is relative. Even trying to estimate the temperature is difficult. If you're taking a walk outside, what's the temperature like? So much of it is relative we don't even realize it. Many of those effects are not physical. It could be our mood, how we feel, things like that. Even when you measure with an instrument - and this is my profession, so I know this very well - things that you would think would be absolutely invariant aren't. Stick a thermometer in you to measure something, you very quickly find out that there are a lot of things that can make what seems like an absolute measurement  be something very different than what you expected.

This is where our intuition in believing our heart is so important. The apparently right answer for something appears correct, but our inner mind, our heart, is steering us in a different direction. Once we get past the noise of our mind trying to keep us safe, because we know that's always in the background, the feelings that remain are probably worth carefully examining. We never know where it's actually going to take us, but if you have a really strong feeling, you probably shouldn't ignore it. There's probably something telling you there's an opportunity awaiting, and it'll become clear to you once you start down that path.  

That's it for tonight. I hope you realize that sometimes apparent facts may not really capture the things that are important in that particular moment. Sometimes you just have to follow your heart and your intuition, even if others don't understand why you need to have faith in yourself. Never be ashamed to defend the indefensible. You just have to say, Because it's the right thing to do. Sometimes you just have to follow your heart, and that's the way to bring yourself to happiness.

 That's it for the evening.  As always, UKR7.com has links to help with the war in Ukraine. It's winter there, just like it's winter over the rest of the Northern Hemisphere. There's also the World Central Kitchen, WCK. org. They work not only in Ukraine but other places in the world. 

Remember, thinking outside of yourself really changes your perspective on the world, and can open your mind in a lot of different ways. So if you can and you're able, any way you can think to help other people, I would really encourage you to do so. One of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. It brings your heart out and gives you a whole different perspective on what you have and what others don't have.

That's it for the evening. As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along, and please hit that like button. If not, please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dream of, because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you.