Faith Venture

Your mom signed you up for piano lessons. Or maybe guitar or saxophone or violin. She drags you off to a teacher. You meet the teacher, who seems forbidding, and are awarded a beginner’s instruction book.

Returning home, mom says, “Now sit down and practice the first lesson. Remember, practice makes perfect.”

She was wrong.

Gasp?!! I’m calling mom wrong? Yep.

Practice makes permanent.

We learn that from habits. We do something a few times, and it becomes a habit. Maybe a good habit like rising from sleep at the same time every day, refreshed and ready for the day. Maybe a bad habit like turning on a TV show to unwind at the end of the day accompanied with a glass of wine and a bag of potato chips.

Perfect practice makes perfect.

Perfect practice demands awareness.

Practicing that pose in Yoga aware that all the body parts are in proper alignment.

Practicing musical scales until muscle memory makes it easy to go up and down the scale and then change keys and do it again.

How about reading material that enhances your brain and emotional stability–spiritual writing, math and science, fiction that activates your imagination? Yes, that, too.

Prayer? Yes. Not just dashing a quick thought (although nothing wrong with that), but disciplining your time to approach a few minutes a day (maybe three times a day like Daniel of the lions fame) with intention.

Meditation? Ten minutes at a regular time daily is enough to get you started toward rewiring your brain and changing your outlook on life.

With intention and awareness. Perfect practice makes perfect.

Do you know what you need to do today? Something that will move you closer to your goals? Serve someone? Enlighten someone?

Let’s see if this describes the experience of someone you know.

First thing in the day, you say, “I’ll just glance through email to see if there is any important information that came through last night.” Then, maybe, “Just let me glance through my Twitter feed.”

Then maybe an hour later all momentum for the day is gone.

I try to look at spiritual disciplines here. But spiritual disciplines, rightly understood, must become part of daily life in the world. Thinking through this, I thought of the story of the monk I wrote about the other day. You know the type–physical labor is beneath me, yet I still want to eat.

I use a task manager called Nozbe. I dump every thought into it of things that I need to do. Some things need to be done today, others can wait. It has a function called “Priority” where you can mark the things that are important.

Two things are important disciplines:

1. Do a weekly review to scan the entire list, make any additions, and then prioritize tasks.
2. Every evening just before sleep or every morning before the daily news (if you must) and definitely before email, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook (if you are still there), write in you journal (yes, pen and paper) the most important task for the day. Not urgent…important. Maybe do also numbers two and three. If you finish those, then you can return to the app and choose the next most important task.

Work on these priorities during the time of the day when you are most alert and sharpest. Then check and reply to emails, Twitter, and the like. Although for some of us Twitter is work. So it may be a most important task for 15 minutes or so early on.

I’m composing this on a 747 heading to 30,000 feet. Heading home from a large trade fair.

Some people joke, or perhaps they are serious, about being closer to God because they are so high in the air.

A better understanding of scripture, though, guides us to the idea that God is close to us no matter the geolocation. We could be in an airplane, on a mountain, deep sea diving. God is accessible wherever.

We need only open ourselves to God through meditation or service. Then we draw closer.

A good way to become overwhelmed and unproductive is to say yes too many times. It’s OK to say yes and do things, but sometimes we say yes too readily without considering the long term effects or the cumulative time sink of too many yeses.

I’m at the world’s largest manufacturing trade show. Stopped by a booth and saw someone I know. He asked me about taking on a project.

Someone asked my wife about our taking on a project. She said yes; I said OK.

Someone invites me to a conference where I should be able to make contacts that could lead to new business. I say yes.

There will come a point where I’ve said yes too many times. And then all the work will come due at once (Murphy’s Law).

And I’ll be overwhelmed and have to work my way out.

Sometime a yes is good. It opens up new possibilities for service or business (which is service).

Sometimes we have too many of those yeses.

Be careful how many times you say yes.

What you fill your mind with foreshadows what you will become. Similarly, those with whom you associate will influence how you will be.

Associate with the chronically critical and negative, be careful.

Associate with helpful, achieving people and you will be inspired each day.

[I’m in Hannover, Germany this week. Taming my schedule for the first day of the Messe was difficult. I missed my post yesterday. Someone asked how I build routine when I travel. Well, you grab what pieces of normal that you can and adapt to the local customs quickly. Cure jet lag before it happens.]

Political writers according to their common wisdom have identified a voting bloc composed of people who fear losing their jobs to automation. Media writers leveraging our fear of things delight in writing about how robots will take over our lives. We’ll have not jobs. We’ll just sit and rot or something. (Note: most of them have no idea of the reality of robots.)

Since I study technology and manufacturing, I see many of these articles. Every industrialized country in the world, except one, has some sort of national manufacturing plan. (Hint: in the US, we don’t). I just saw a news item that had to do with the Trump administration and others in its base being afraid of “China 2025” the Chinese version of the movement that began with Germany’s “Industrie 4.0”.

Should we be afraid of all this? I don’t think so. I see the younger generation coming along with ideas and education. True, it seems the Boomers in a general sense seem to have run out of steam while yet holding on to positions. This will change.

But we have fear surrounding us.

Fifty years ago we knew very little about typical news events around the world. Now, we hear even little stories that take place everywhere…constantly. The TV news networks must fill 24 hours of airtime every day. People watch only “new” news; no one wants “old” news. And it’s all about getting people to watch so that advertisers will spend lots of money.

Cantore and Abrams and the rest on the Weather Channel exist to get us worried about how bad the weather will be.

As for me, I choose another path for my awareness. I choose to fill my mind with other things.

Paul advised us in his letter to the Roman church, “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear.”

“Money and morals seldom go together.”

Nero Wolfe, fictional “genius” and eccentric private detective created by Rex Stout, summarized the case after the culprit of the murders was identified. It was a case of international intrigue with many international competitors trying to get their hands on a country’s natural resources. Sounds pretty modern rather than 60-some years ago.

(Wife is traveling. Late in the evening I’m binge-watching the Nero Wolfe series conceived by Timothy Hutton–one of the best adaptations of novels I’ve ever seen. He filmed these with a great ensemble cast from around 2001 to 2003. Really brings the stories to life.)

Read the Bible with an eye on its instructions about how to live with-God lives. Discover how often handling money comes up. Proverbs, Gospels, letters.

Beyond that, reflect on how often in general do we put theory over practice–believing the right things over doing the right things. Do we put politics above morals? Money above morals? How we talk about other people above how we are to act toward other people?

Acting on a solid moral foundation is hard. Maybe that is why we so seldom do it. And how often we are blind to our own lack of it.

Seth Godin recently dropped a bit of wisdom on us–How to give a 5-minute presentation. Prepare a 4-minute presentation.

In honor of brevity and not filling all 300 words, here is a thought.

The mission of life is to find our gift.

The purpose of life is to give it away.

You know the stereotype of the creative genius who it spontaneous, keeps odd hours, disappears for a time.

Curious about creativity (see Friday’s post) I read through Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown Sunday morning. By the way, the pursuit of less (simplicity) is itself a spiritual discipline.

He quotes Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit), “Routine…In fact the brain starts working less and less. The brain can almost shut down… And this is a real advantage, because it means you have all this mental activity you can devote to something else.”

Ah, routine. I glanced at the clock as I depressed the plunger on the French Press this morning. 5:51 am. That is plus or minus five minutes from every day as I prepare the morning’s coffee for Bev and me (except today it’s all mine–she’s traveling). Then I sit down with a light breakfast and gather my thoughts for this post.

Back to McKeown. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his classic Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, said, “Most creative individuals find out early what their best rhythms are for sleeping, eating, and working, and abide by them even when it is tempting to do otherwise. They wear clothes that are comfortable, they interact only with people they find congenial, they do only things they think are important. Of course, such idiosyncrasies are not endearing to those they have to deal with… But personalizing patterns of action helps to free the mind from expectations that make demands on attention and allows intense concentration on matters that count.”

Maybe try:

• Get adequate sleep
• Rise, drink water, move a little
• Meditate, read something spiritually oriented, pray
• Light breakfast with some protein
• Exercise
• Get ready for the day

Go with the flow!