this weekend i finally got out on the water. the cold rainy spring, the massive flooding here in the st louis where the two largest rivers in america converge, the new job - all conspired against me doing one my favorite things all year...getting onto and into a good sized body of water. beautiful day with friend jeffe and his speed boat. there were a hundred boats on the sandbar in the missouri river we ended up at ranging in size from little fishing boats to half million dollar yachts and all kinds of people playing frisbee and volleyball and barbequing.

and i did the coolest thing while we were chillin at the sand bar at the long tree filled island. some of you may remember that i enjoy doing tai chi. i like it much better than yoga in that there is a flow to the movements that really resonates with me, body and mind. there is one move where at the end you bring this little ball of energy you worked on generating between your palms and you push it into your dantien (a chakra or spiritual body point right below your navel) and yea I know its invisible and all, but it always, always, sends out this little wave of warm tingly feelings outward from my stomach area. Weirdest dang thing. not logical at all, but still undeniable from an experiential standpoint too. but i guess if you consider that all matter is energy and we are just batteries made of meat for using and releasing some of that energy, its not so far fetched.

anyways the sandbar from the beach went out a ways into the river which is still pretty high and strong (from the recent floods) with a 7 or 8 mph current. I went out almost chest high and the fast moving water is wanting to push me and it required a fair amount of balance and strength just to stay in one place. and I had the idea to do tai chi. after a few minutes of adapting myself to the new much heavier medium, I totally got into it, and it was not only a good workout but forced my movements to be absolutely aerodynamic. now I so want one of those little forced current lap pools to not only do laps, but also this vigorous new form of tai chi.

yes i live in st. louis, about as far from large bodies of water as you can get, but somehow manage to keep water in my life still. one day i will buy another sailboat and actually take advantage of the charterers license i worked hard to obtain, and sail the caribbean as was my original plan. until then, i play with the cards i've been dealt, and enjoy the game as much as i can. which some days is much easier than others...especially when i'm on a boat on a beautiful day.

posted by bluematrix at 07/30/08 19:54 | link | comments (8)

this might sound strange to you but no one ever ‘fails’ at anything.

everything you do produces a result. if you're learning to playing catch and you drop the ball when its thrown to you, you haven't failed. you simply produced a result. the real question is what you do with that result. you can either say, 'i suck at catching balls' and leave or you can say 'throw it again' and eventually learn to catch. (yes, you can fail to pass a test or a class, but that is simply a label for a measurement and i’m talking a bit broader definition of fail here)

failure is a judgement. it is an opinion. it comes from your fears. the best baseball sluggers in the world ‘fail’ 70% of the time. it’s all perspective. as an individual we are all ultimately failures at life in that we all die eventually... so should we stop trying to live?

we need to learn how to fail. to not let one failure defeat you altogether or keep you from attempting new ventures. how many people can lose a big business deal and say, "that was great. I learned something from it and am better for it." unless you can say it - and really mean it - you probably weren't learning that much from the experience.

it may come as a surprise to hear that truly successful people not only have failed, but also are good at failing. studies have found that we may have been lucky if we were forced to fail. one might even say that a key to success is learning to fail well. i guess i’m lucky then because i sure have been shot down a lot. (and truth be known, i do feel lucky and kind of successful too)

we have to understand that it is the fear of failure that hurts far more than the failure itself. actually, it is the fear of not being sure what will happen. most of us can learn to accept and deal with the worst if we really know what's coming. we may not like it or look forward to it, but we can handle it. not knowing is a different story. it creates anxiety and a very gut level desire to escape the whole problem. each of us is different in the things we fear, and to analyze the reasons we are pressured by the fear of failure we have to find out what kinds of failure bother us..

basically two things happen when we begin to feel pressured. we get anxious or nervous and tighten up, and we begin to rely on our defense and escape mechanisms. some of these mechanisms are: getting a lot of sleep but still feeling tired, coming home at night and getting lost in the TV or newspaper, or a hundred others.

the result of these mechanisms is that we begin to lose sight of the issues or problems by trying to put them out of our minds so they don't worry us so much. As the problems become vague, solutions become more improbable, and, unconsciously, that makes us more anxious.

reducing the pressure requires that we break the mental set that "success is equal to right and therefore equal to good, while failure is equal to wrong and, as such, is bad." We have to learn to accept failure as a normal healthy part of life. We all fail sometimes, and if we can learn to bend rather than break under the pressure of failure, we are much better off.

so go try something new and/or hard and if you fail at it...cool.

posted by bluematrix at 07/24/08 21:03 | link | comments (2)

you've never seen a people with as little time as westerners, even though we have homes filled with time and work-saving objects. 'time is money' the saying goes' and we even apply banking language to - talking about 'saving', 'investing' and 'wasting' time.

but the quest to spend time the way we do money is doomed to failure, because the time we experience bears little relation to time on a clock. our brain creates its own time, and it's this inner time, not clock time, that guides our actions. In the space of an hour, we can accomplish a great deal — or very little.
inner time is linked to activity. to measure time, the brain uses circuits that are designed to monitor physical movement. inner time can run faster or slower depending upon how we move our bodies — as any tai chi master knows.

the brain’s inclination to distort time is one reason we so often feel we have too little of it. one in three americans feels rushed all the time. even the cleverest use of time-management techniques is powerless to augment the sum of minutes in our life (some 52 million, optimistically assuming a life expectancy of 100 years), so we squeeze as much as we can into each one.

go to the poor third world countries and ask, "Do you have a little time to talk?"  "The rest of my life," they'll say, and sit down and share themselves with you for the afternoon.
 
we should have more time than anybody, but we don't have any time at all.  we've defined freedom falsely as an outer thing, in terms of time, space and options.  americans think they're free if they have more options.  in fact we're paralyzed by them - with so many choices, we don't have to surrender to any one of them.  there's always another door to open.  we are pushed around by our options and kept busy fixing our time-saving appliances.

take a deep breath, tell yourself time is merely an invention, and slow the hell down.

posted by bluematrix at 07/16/08 22:18 | link | comments (4)

so today it's all about doors...

doors to perception

doors to reality

what's behind door #3?

is that a door or a reflection of a door? and how do i tell the difference?

its the same particle going thru both doors, depending on which one i'm looking at

its about the door you choose after the coin toss

is that a door or the light from the doorway hitting the wall just so in my bedroom?

or maybe its just an endoorphin opening a door in my brain allowing enzymes to be released

or a memory of the chamber of 32 doors off broadway

doorene tells me to shut up and rolls over

god closing the door but opening the window and letting some air in

knock knock knockin on heaven's door

i know, i'm a doork sometimes

the weird gargoyle door knocker staring back at me

the door as a segue from this moment to the next

the underwater doorway mural i did in jeffe's recording studio

is jim morrison really dead as doornail?

the open door policy of changing one form of matter (food) into another form (calories/energy) that allows this matter (me) to continue on its current iteration

the door that beckons me into that darkness filled with light

- i have my hand on the doorknob...

posted by bluematrix at 07/08/08 19:39 | link | comments (1)