🔥Welcome to volume 000019!🔥
I’m Christian Champ. This is ☯️The Middle Way Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore, share, and invite you along for the journey.
Hope everyone is staying safe and staying home in this crazy time.
💪Doing Our Best 💪
Do your best. Those words ring in my ears after hearing my Tai Chi teacher, Tim Suh, share that wisdom before we practice our short form. What a simple elegant powerful phrase. The maximum that we can do is our best. That is it. We get to dig in and focus and bring our best. That is our maximum. We can only fill our glass up to that point. If we reach that point, then we celebrate the outcome.
When we aim for our best and make that our goal, we relax into the moment. We come at it with a clear mind and an open heart. We don’t compare ourselves to anyone else. We let go of any self-judgment and play with self-compassion. We know that our limit exists and the closer we get to it, the more that limit gets extended. By participating, we win. We play infinite games, which we can’t win or lose, and the point is to continue to play the game.
Right now it is time to try to do our best. We get to do our best as humans, as family members, and as members of our community. We feel overwhelmed because our job got canceled or our job got intense. We play the role of employee, parent, and teacher in the most intense manner. We get pushed to our limits.
Our days all feel the same but different. We grasp for routines to buffer the storm. We grasp to hold on and find some normalcy. We hold on to scripts that might be gone forever. We make it to the other side by showing up.
All we can do is try to do our best.
We get to show up as our best and let go of the rest.
** Tim is offering donation based Tai Chi classes via zoom during the lock downs just click here to get involved
📓Articles to Read📓
How Leaders Overcome Adversity by Ed Batista
Everyone reading this newsletter is a leader. Whether it is at home, at work or in our community, we are all leading.
To lead in times like this we should:
Engage Others in Shared Meaning
Distinct and Compelling Voice
Sense of Integrity and Strong Set of Values
The Ability to Grasp Context
Hardiness or Resilience
There's no single step you can take to immediately expand your capacity for these behaviors, but merely being aware that they are the building blocks of resilience can help you be more mindful of engaging in them deliberately. And there are several practices that will enable you to become more effective: some form of mindfulness, regular exercise, and sufficient sleep. While it's obviously difficult to commit to these activities at a time of crisis--and it will get harder over time--they are investments, not indulgences.
It Only Wants Targets by Adam Elkus
This article tackles what happens when all your narratives break at the hands of a virus. This is why the complexity folks, tech folks, and multi-disciplinary thinkers started ringing the alarm on corona, but few people listened. They were too busy caught up in their own bs narratives.
Managing public health and disease was one of the core tasks that helped build the legitimacy of industrial era government in the 19th and 20th centuries. When civil servants are too burdened by bureaucratic red tape and the need to perform political face-work to properly pursue this endeavor, it is a sign that Western society has traded the substance of political competence for its appearance. And more generally, a society that cares more about declining trust in institutions than what institutions have substantively done to deserve trust – and which devotes far more effort towards managing the behavioral psychology of risk than actually reducing risk – is engaged in narrative-making as a singular pursuit above all else.
Corona and Our Leaders by Soma Burja
What happens when your institutions are dying.
In the middle of the 20th century, a cadre of credentialed experts was created to replace citizens. This was a mistake. The selection mechanism for entry into this cadre selects against bravery and original thinking. Experts should be consulted, but what use is an expert unwilling to consult on a grand vision? The American system of the 2020s through the city, county, state, and up to the federal level has been staffed with people who know how to speak and make themselves appear blameless, but not how to act.
Positives of Quarantine Education by Waiters’s Pad
The current education landscape is running a Zack Stein thought experiment and a lot of why he proposes re-imagining up the education system plays out in this post.
Intrinsic motivations. My kids follow a program put forth by their school but this is mostly finished before lunch and they can move onto more enjoyable things. My guess is that a long-term homeschool arrangement would break the link between learning and school and create a hub where learning is connected to school, but many other things as well.
Udonis Haslem telling spring breakers to stay home
Your simple actions matter!
It’s because when I was growing up, we had too many nights where the only thing we had for dinner were those little red boxes of raisins. Nothing else, no lie. That was the main motherf***ing course. Man … you know that smell I’m talking about? The smell of that California Raisin–ass cardboard? You’d be sitting there thinking, “Alright, it’s only about 15 hours till I get to school tomorrow so I can get some fish sticks.”
And that was the reality for lots of kids before all this coronavirus stuff and all this economic pain, you know what I’m saying? That’s just life. Kids going hungry, that’s our normal, right?
If this crisis doesn’t wake us up and make us change as a country, I don’t know what will.
And that’s really the thing about this crisis that we’re living through right now. This moment we’re in … it’s not about you. It’s not about your spring break, or the way you wanna live your life. It’s like, yeah, trust me, bro — I wanna chill, too. I wanna work out at the gym, too. I wanna be on the court again, grooming these young bucks.
So hell yeah, I want my old life back, too.
But this ain’t about me. It ain’t about you.
This thing is about us.
This virus is going to affect everybody, especially the most vulnerable.
So if you got a nice, stable environment? Keep your ass home.
If you got a roof over your head? Keep your ass home.
If you got a crib with Netflix and a refrigerator full of food? Keep your ass home.
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Future Fossils - Pandemic Perspectives (spotify / pocketcast)
Virus as a teacher
Media diet to contemplate the darkness of nature
Appreciating the
Do we get more global cooperation from Corona given its a global action?
Ram Dass - Stuck Between States (spotify / pocketcast)
A timeless talk / meditation that directly speaks to where we find ourselves today
📚 Books to Read or Listen to📚
Entangled by Graham Hancock
💣Words of Wisdom💣
The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz
I put this section first even though it deals with some serious endgame issues such as how to fire an executive and how to lay people off. In doing so, I follow the first principle of the Bushido—the way of the warrior: keep death in mind at all times. If a warrior keeps death in mind at all times and lives as though each day might be his last, he will conduct himself properly in all his actions. Similarly, if a CEO keeps the following lessons in mind, she will maintain the proper focus when hiring, training, and building her culture.
The Passion Paradox - Brad Stulberg, Steve Magness
“I couldn’t possibly do this” syndrome only grows stronger with age. It also creates a formidable sense of path dependency, or the narrative that you are on a certain path, and the best—if not only—option is to stay on it. But path dependency prevents you from exploring opportunities that could lead to a better and more fulfilling life.
Self-sacrifice in defense of one’s community is virtually universal among humans, extolled in myths and legends all over the world, and undoubtedly ancient. No community can protect itself unless a certain portion of its youth decide they are willing to risk their lives in its defense. That sentiment can be horribly manipulated by leaders and politicians, of course, but the underlying sentiment remains the same.
I didn’t like the particular experience, I learned I liked having new experiences. Second, although I am tall, I had always secretly defined myself as a physically weak and somewhat sickly person. After climbing Kilimanjaro, I had to acknowledge that I was mentally and physically tough. I was forced to redefine myself. Climbing the mountain was the hardest thing I had ever done, physically, in my life, but I had done it. Of course, part of the reason it was hard was that I had approached it like a damned fool. I was not in shape and not prepared, and I refused to listen to anybody.
Ingenious: Robert Sapolsky - Issue 15: Turbulence - Nautilus
You got to be reductive about lots of different domains. But nonetheless, even that more multidisciplinary version of reductionism isn’t going to work because that’s not how complex systems work and humans are a complex system.
🙏Thanks for reading.🙏
How do you make sure you show up and do your best?
Any thoughts, comments or ideas to share, please reach out.
Namaste,
Christian
