Wisdom

Better With Age

/ James Browning

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Walking across a college campus for a business meeting with the athletic director of a Midwest college an epiphany hit me. In my late thirties college aged people hardly noticed me. I suppose I just looked like someone’s Dad. It occurred to me that I had become “invisible to college girls”. And that makes sense considering I was on average close to twenty years older. However, the male ego is a fragile thing.

I’m absolutely certain the twenties are not an age I would want to endure again. Too much change; too many mistakes; too much uncertainty and a general lack of respect from those older. The thirties were a time of arriving, but not yet getting there. I swear I did not deserve to be called an adult until at least my 40s!

The quality of my life has continued to improve as I have aged. An article published in the U.K. sheds light on aging.

Researchers have found that people’s’ mental abilities peak at 22 before beginning to deteriorate just five years later.

Professor Timothy Salthouse, “Results converge on a conclusion that some aspects of age-related cognitive decline begins in healthy, educated adults when they are in their 20s and 30s,” he said.

The study of 2,000 men and women lasted over seven years. The respondents, aged between 18-60, were asked to solve visual puzzles, recall words and story details and spot patterns in letters and symbols. The research by the University of Virginia found that in nine out of 12 tests the average age at which the top performance was achieved was 22.

The first age at which performance was significantly lower than the peak scores was 27 – for three tests of reasoning, speed of thought and spatial visualization. Memory was shown to decline from the average age of 37. In the other tests, poorer results were shown by the age of 42.

However, the report published in the academic journal Neurobiology Of Aging, found that abilities based on accumulated knowledge, such as performance on tests of vocabulary or general information, increased until at the age of 60. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/4995546/Old-age-begins-at-27-as-mental-powers-start-to-decline-scientists-find.html

Another article about a related study in the same U.K. newspaper said, “While university-age participants were quicker to make choices which led to immediate rewards, another group aged 60 to 80 were much more adept at taking strategic decisions which took future stages into account”. Two experiments designed to mirror realistic decision-making scenarios showed that older people were far better at making choices that led to long-term gain.

So to the college kids who I am invisible to, enjoy your twenties because it’s downhill after that. I just can’t help smirking a little when I write that. The next time some 30-something hotshot who thinks they have the world by the ass lays a ‘tude on me I will silently think he or she is actually quite comical. They’re already past prime in some ways and don’t even know it.

I am happily grateful to be a bit less admiring of younger ages after reading the British articles. I’ve gotten better with age. All in all, I am the best I have ever been.

It’s not how old you are,
it’s how you are old.
Jules Renard

Years of Friction

/ James Browning

tree adapting to friction

It is not work that kills men, it is worry.
…worry is rust upon the blade.
It is not movement that destroys
the machinery, but friction.
Henry Ward Beecher

In Colorado last week visiting my son, I was waiting in the car when I noticed the little tree in the photo. No only had the sapling accepted to its position in life and had adapted to it, the tree had begun to use the adaptation to its benefit against the winds in Boulder.

Years of friction of the tree trunk rubbing against a cable caused the sapling to adapt. Now as the tree gets older it has begun to grow around the source of friction making itself stronger in the process. It changed and now benefits from what once was the source of injury.

And so it is with life. Resistance to life as it is, does not benefit a person. The injury is to the thinker and not the subject of the thoughts. Things improve when one allows them self to be adapted to real life. The little tree does not think. It only does what is the most healthful for survival. For the tree, like humans, adaptation is often he different between a good life and a difficult one.

The sapling could not know the Serenity Prayer, but practices its principles implicitly.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
From a poem by Reinhold Niebuhr

I am grateful to the small tree. It “spoke to me” with a reminder to adapt to one’s circumstance when there is not other option.

A gem cannot be polished
without friction,
nor a man perfected
without trials.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

A Little Space

/ James Browning

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Once in a while I find filling just a little space here says more than if I jotted down a page and a half.

True happiness is to enjoy the present,
without anxious dependence upon the future,
not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears
but to rest satisfied with what we have,
which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing.
The greatest blessings of mankind are within us
and within our reach.
A wise man is content with his lot,
whatever it may be,
without wishing for what he has not.
Seneca

With abundant clarity I am aware practicing Seneca’s words all the time is impossible. In my perfect imperfectness, gratefully all I have to do is my best.

If you’re doing your best,
you won’t have time to worry
about failure.
H. Jackson Brown Jr.

My Devil Called “Fear”

/ James Browning

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Unobtrusive music is usually playing when I write and a style of electronic music called ‘chill’ is my favorite to have in the background. Traveling in Europe I developed a taste for this ‘chillout’ music that is characterized by a mellow style and mid to very slow tempo. Today a song called “Hayling” by FC Kahuna (Jon and Dan Kahuna) caught my attention. The song contains only two lines of lyrics that are repeated several times:
Don’t think about all those things you fear
Just be glad to be here.
Those words got me thinking about my “Fear” and the battles I have fought with it (lots of successful ones I might add). Four thoughts that surfaced this morning were:

1) There has been nothing, and I repeat NOTHING, that has had a more negative impact on my life than FEAR. The underpinning of almost every one of my failures, mistakes or fiascos has been one of the family of fearful feelings: dread, worry, anxiety and shame. The realization alone that these are the greatest blocks to joy and happiness diminished their power over me.

Men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire. Dan Brown

2) The essence of life boils down into two forces: Love and Fear. Those two emotions are like the ends of a see-saw. The quality of my life is determined by which end is currently tipped. Life is hell when “Fear” is the heaviest. Living is good when I can keep the see-saw balanced. “Joy” fills me when Love has the greater weight.

There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance.   John Lennon

3) Far too many of my fears, for FAR too long, were long based on what others thought of me. A “feeling of not being good enough” is fertile ground for fear to grow in and a sense of flaw and defect is water and fertilizer to enhance its growth and power.

The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us… the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls. Elizbeth Cady Stanton

4) My fears thrived in part because I long believed somehow, someway I could figure out ‘why’ things happen or are the way they are. The eventual realization that some things don’t make sense and never will was a giant step. It’s not the answering of ‘why’ that matters most. It’s in the search wisdom is found.

It’s the questions we can’t answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he’ll look for his own answers. Patrick Rothfuss

Bringing up the subject of “Fear” and writing about it is a bit like dancing with the Devil but hoping to not be burned. The good news for me is seeing/thinking/writing about “Fear” is now figuratively like blowing on coals that usually aren’t hot enough to burst back into flame.  I’m grateful for that. Fear is no longer the silent, hidden and disguised illness within it used to be. Exposure to the light of day makes my Devil called “Fear” smaller and the coals of fearfulness too cold to restart a fire.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
Frank Herbert

Who Am I?

/ James Browning

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Please don’t be fooled by me. Don’t be fooled by the face I wear, for I wear a mask. I wear a thousand masks, masks that I’m afraid to take off and none of them are me. Pretending is an art that is second nature to me, but don’t be fooled, for God’s sake don’t be fooled.

I give you the impression I’m secure and that all is sunny and unruffled with me, within as well as without, that confidence is my name, coolness my game, that water is calm and I’m in command and that I need no one, but don’t believe me, please don’t believe me.

My surface may be smooth, but my surface is a mask–my every varying and ever concealing mask. Beneath it dwells the real confusion, fear and aloneness. Beneath lies my smugness, my complacently, but I hide this–I don’t want anyone to know it.

I panic at the thought of my weakness and fear being exposed. That’s why I frantically created a mask to hide behind– nonchalant sophisticated facades to help me pretend– to shield me from the glance that knows– but such a glance is precisely my salvation, my only salvation and I know it. That is if it’s followed by acceptance. If it’s followed by love, it’s the only thing that can liberate me from myself, from my own self built prison walls and from the barriers that I so painstakingly erect. It’s the only thing that will assure me of what I cannot assure myself, that I’m really worth while, but I don’t tell you this, I don’t dare–I’m afraid to.

I’m afraid that your glance will not be followed by acceptance and love. I’m afraid you’ll think less of me and you’ll laugh and your laugh will kill me. I’m afraid that deep down, I’m nothing and that I’m just no good and that you’ll see this and reject me.

So I play my game; my desperate pretending; with the facade of assurance without and a trembling child within. And so begins the parade of masks, the glittering, but empty parade of masks and my life becomes a front. I idle chatter to you in suave tones of surface talk. I tell you everything that’s really nothing and nothing of what’s everything and what’s crying within me.

So when I’m through going through my routine, do not be fooled by what I’m saying. Please listen carefully and try to hear what I’m not saying–what I’d like to be able to say, but for survival I need to say, but what I can’t say.

I dislike hiding, honestly, I dislike the superficial game I’m playing, the superficial phony game. I’d really like to be genuine, spontaneous and me, but you’ve got to help me, you’ve got to hold out your hand, even when it’s the last thing I seem to want or need.

You can help wipe away from my eyes–the blank stare of grieving dead. You can help call me into aliveness each time you’re kind, gentle and encouraging. Each time you try to understand because you really care, my heart begins to grow wings, very small wings, very feeble wings, but wings.

If you choose to, please choose to. You can help break down the wall behind which I tremble. You can encourage me to remove my mask. You can help release me from my shadowed world of panic and uncertainty. From my lonely prison.

So do not pass me by– please don’t pass me by. It will not be easy for you. A lone conviction of worthlessness builds strong walls. The nearer you approach me, the blinder I may strike back.

It’s irrational, but despite what books say about man, I am irrational, I fight against the very things that I cry out for, but I am told love is stronger than strong walls. In this lies my hope, my only hope, please help beat down those walls with firm hands, but with gentle hands–for a child is very sensitive.

Who am I, you may wonder? I am someone you know very well. For I am every man you meet and I am every women you meet. “Don’t Be Fooled By Me” by Charles C. Finn

Once in a while I find something to share that brings me to a loss for words. I have no comments or thoughts that can embellish what is above. So I won’t try. Instead I will just say thank you Mr. Finn. I am grateful to you for writing this piece that speaks to me so clearly and deeply.

Never miss a good chance to shut up.
Will Rogers

You Bring Me Joy (Still)

/ James Browning

Near two and a half years of daily posts now total near 900. Once in a while I skip back months or more to see what was was at the top of my thoughts then. Today I was curious about what was on my mind a year ago. This is what I found:

The years have not caused me to forget. Still there are remnants of feelings strong beyond explanation. You cracked me wide-open and I was never the same again.

Was it because you loved me so unwaveringly deep and passionately?

Was it because you were so exotic and intelligent that you were able to enter my heart so easily?

Was it because I filled your need to be loved?

Or you filled mine?

It was all these things and a hundred more. There was a time we found ‘home’ in each other’s arms.

Once in a great while a feeling of loneliness for you, and you only, still touches down to the quick of my heart. Always I smile with hope that you are well and happy. You married in your 30’s and our contact appropriately stopped not too longer after.

Maybe my memory has elevated what we shared to a fantasy beyond fact. Although our love covered a lot of years it was not long when measured in the actual length of time we spent together. But in weight of what was shared we took a trip around the world.

Times change.
People move on.
Some grow together.
Some grow apart.

Some like us knew each other at the wrong time. I was still a boy in a man’s body pretending he knew what he wanted and needed. I pushed you away because I was afraid to be cared about as much as you loved me.

Hidden away safely, even for the time being from myself, is the only physical memory I have of you: the gift you gave me of a small music box shaped like a heart with a beautiful photo of  you inside. It will go to my safe deposit box once I find it again.

I will always be grateful that once I knew you and for the space you occupy in my memories. The pain has long evaporated and today only a sweet memory remains. There has been no greater love in my life. I’m grateful that whenever I hear Anita Baker singing you always come to mind…

If I can’t see your face,
I will remember that smile
’Cause you’re the finest thing
I’ve seen in all my life.
You bring me joy.
From Anita Baker’s song “You Bring Me Joy” by David Lasley

Franklin’s 13 Virtues

/ James Browning

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1726, at the age of 20, Benjamin Franklin created a system to develop his character. In his autobiography, Franklin listed his thirteen virtues as:

1. Temperance. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
2. Silence. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
3. Order. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
4. Resolution. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
5. Frugality. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
6. Industry. Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. Sincerity. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. Justice. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. Moderation. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. Cleanliness. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.
11. Tranquility. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
12. Chastity. Rarely use venery (sex) but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
13. Humility. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

Seems a tall order to live up to this list every day, but then Franklin said he never did. Ben admitted that he was never able to live the virtues perfectly, but felt he had become a better and happier man for having made the attempt. It occurred to me if I pick one each day and focus on bringing more of it in my life I will benefit. I am grateful to you Mr. Franklin for the idea!

It’s about living in the moment
and appreciating the smallest things.
Surrounding yourself with the things that
inspire you and letting go of the obsessions
that want to take over your mind.
It is a daily struggle sometimes and
hard work but happiness begins
with your own attitude
and how you look at the world.
Gretchen Rubin

Where Wisdom Grows

/ James Browning

School of hard knocks EDIT

Misfortunes make us wise.
Mary Norton

I learned a lesson yesterday, taught a few times before but without me getting a passing grade. Like a child held back in school, it took repetition for the insight to sink in. It does not matter what the particulars are of what I learned. The jewel of knowledge that sparkles within now, came with a great deal of pain and difficulty; the ground and fertilizer where wisdom grows.

The best teachers have showed me that things have to be done bit by bit. Nothing that means anything happens quickly–we only think it does. The motion of drawing back a bow and sending an arrow straight into a target takes only a split second, but it is a skill many years in the making. So it is with a life, anyone’s life. I may list things that might be described as my accomplishments in these few pages, but they are only shadows of the larger truth, fragments separated from the whole cycle of becoming. Joseph Bruchac

When we search for “ourselves” in the eyes of others, we have imprisoned our own-selves in believing that our self-worth is nothing unless others validate who we are. Unless we approve of whom we are, what we are, and what we are capable of doing as an individual, only then we will have released “ourselves” from our own imprisonment. D. A. Isley

The names of my best teachers are Grief, Pain and Heartache along with their half-brothers Hurt, Sorrow and Anguish and their half sisters Misery, Sadness and Despair. In hopelessness, misfortune and depression each has been my hard, but honored teacher. When I get tired of repeating the same mistake and falling into the same dysfunction those instructors of the “hard way” school show me the best path when I let them.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Kahlil Gibran

If only I could have stronger belief in my abilities; show greater self forgiveness; and love myself more. Then most anything would be possible. Gratefully, I can, I will and I shall so that I might.

Experience is the hardest
kind of teacher. It gives
you the test first, and
the lesson afterward.
Oscar Wilde

Into the Void

/ James Browning

voids DARK

If life is so short,

why do we do so many things

we don’t like

and like so many things we don’t do?

I looked into the image and let my mind, heart and soul rest while the unguided remainder of me went into the void. There a response came without my intentional help and amazingly it was clearer than thought, emotion or feeling.

My answers to the BIG question are personal and matter primarily to me, so I won’t list them. What matters is I am becoming able to put my ‘self control mechanism’ into neutral at times and allow solutions to come from the outside in. Like a randomly caught virus that can bring healing, more often than I thought possible I find a remedy floating outside me.

Or maybe it’s from a Higher Power… Or maybe it’s the power of allowing solutions to manifest them self… Or maybe it’s my subconscious… Or maybe it doesn’t matter how.

I am grateful to realize that sorting out where needed answers outside me come from is irrelevant. What does matter is an awareness that guidance can come from beyond me if I humble myself and realize I don’t have control of everything. For a person used to controlling everything and everyone, the realization that I am not my own God is a break through.

A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘universe’,
a part limited in time and space.
He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings,
as something separate from the rest –
a kind of optical delusion of consciousness.
This delusion is a kind of prison for us,
restricting us to our personal desires
and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison
by widening our circle of compassion
to embrace all living creatures
and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Albert Einstein

In Doing, I Find My Way

/ James Browning

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“Everything I do is a step on a path to where I end up”. That’s an almost too obvious statement and maybe the reason most know the words but don’t grasp the full meaning. A million course changes, intentional and not, make up the route of this ship of life I ride in. Each happening, choice or splinter of destiny set me in the direction of exactly where I am today.

In retrospect, a lot of time slipped by before the wisdom of forward motion soaked in. Often I thought, “I’ll decide/make a choice/figure it out” tomorrow, next week or after so and so happens. The days came and went with no insight or inspiration arriving. Instead frustration grew.

Some of my best decisions have been rooted in the illogical notion Sir Richard Branson frames as “screw it, let’s do it”. When something feels right, it usually is, even if logic can’t reassure that. My breakthroughs come from making a choice and just getting on with it. Conversely, logic and reason have pushed me into a lot of decisions that in hindsight were mistakes.

More often than not waiting for inspiration has meant letting time expire without much to show for it. Revelation has usually come while I was busy implementing some uninspired choice. Insight has rarely come while sitting still and instead usually shows up while I am busy painting myself into a corner. Need is a rapid and prolific incubator of concepts, ideas and possibilities!

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case. Chuck Close

“In doing, I find my way”. That sums up one of the more insightful pieces of wisdom life has taught me. In movement, no matter how uninspired, purpose is found. Sitting motionless in one spot trying to decide is akin to being partially dead. I am grateful to realize living is always in the trying, even if I fail.

The only thing standing
between you and your goal
is the bullshit story
you keep telling yourself
as to why you can’t achieve it.
Jordan Belfort