🌾🌱🌷Gardening Our Lives 🌾🌱🌷
🔥Welcome to volume #00056!🔥
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.
🌾🌱🌷Gardening Our Lives 🌾🌱🌷
The spring weather hits, and rebirth hangs in the air. The blooming flowers light up our daytime walks. The planting season arrives as the weather breaks and nature comes back to life.
Life screams it’s time to garden.
This week I reconnected with some old acquaintances and friends. The reconnects ranged from bumping into each other to Linkedin reach-outs and Twitter shout-outs.
We need to cultivate the relationships in our life, watering the ones we care about and letting ones that fail to serve us die. Relationships can act like trees; the deep roots don’t need to be cared for as much. These relationships are always there for us.
What happens when we decide to garden our lives?
We cultivate what matters most to us. The seeds are friends, activities, habits, and tasks. Gardening isn’t thinking about something 24-7 but spending time tending and treating. What needs watering? What weeds need picking? We need to be thoughtful and put forth the effort.
We tend to our daily activities, habits, and relationships. We garden for now and plant for the future. We need to plant seeds, create plans, then water and watch them grow. We also need to pick the weeds. The weeds show up as bad habits, wrong work, and people we need to pick out of our lives. Other times we make compost and recycle relationships and ideas for the future.
Gardening provides nutrients, increases our mental health, and connects us with nature, others, and ourselves. When we apply the gardening mentality to all our endeavors, we see similar results.
📓Articles to Read📓
One of my mentors, who I never met, Kevin Kelly celebrates another birthday with 99 bits of unsolicited advice
My favorites:
That thing that made you weird as a kid could make you great as an adult — if you don’t lose it
Sustained outrage makes you stupid.
Be strict with yourself and forgiving of others. The reverse is hell for everyone.
To be wealthy, accumulate all those thinhttps://www.eliotpeper.com/2020/04/alix-e-harrow-on-opening-doors-to-other.htmlgs that money can’t buy.
Contemplating the weaknesses of others is easy; contemplating the weaknesses in yourself is hard, but it pays a much higher reward.
Bad things can happen fast, but almost all good things happen slowly
If you meet a jerk, overlook them. If you meet jerks everywhere everyday, look deeper into yourself.
Be frugal in all things, except in your passions splurge.
Children totally accept — and crave — family rules. “In our family we have a rule for X” is the only excuse a parent needs for setting a family policy. In fact, “I have a rule for X” is the only excuse you need for your own personal policies.
People can’t remember more than 3 points from a speech.
Eliot Pepper interviews Alix Harrow, who wrote 10,000 Doors of January, which was highlighted in a previous edition of the Middle Way.
Why are doors to other worlds such a powerful metaphor? What personal thresholds have you crossed that changed the course of your life?
Doors are the ultimate promise, aren’t they? Every closed door in a story is a perfect little Chekov’s gun, begging to be opened.
My personal thresholds are all the ordinary kind: new houses and apartments and cars, schools and colleges and office buildings. The one I remember best is the enormous arch where I married my husband, a tangle of grapevines and saplings my father lashed together especially for the occasion. He planted cardinal flowers around the base, so we were married on the threshold of a green and crimson door.
Andy Kirk does a look back at the Whole Earth Catalog
Stewart Brand kicked off the sustainability movement and played a key role in unleashing the technological revolution with his Whole Earth Catalog (which was later edited by Kevin Kelly before he started Wire Magazine and before he and Stewart teamed up to form the Long Now Foundation). The catalog was named after the picture of the Earth taken by NASA and inspired by Stewart.
Stewart would advise us to treat the planet like a garden.
Starting with that amazing image of the planet in a sea of inky black space, Brand helped change the trajectory and constituency of the American environmental movement by bringing together a new community of environmental thinkers and advocates who invented what came to be known as “sustainability.”
Brand’s optimistic vision of reconciling American technological know-how with environmentalism also appealed to broader audiences. With its call for readers to recognize their status as “gods,” and its celebration of good tools and green technologies, the Whole Earth Catalog helped popularize the “appropriate technology” movement, which advocated for small-scale, decentralized and environmentally benign options. Brand introduced readers to key thinkers like economist E.F. Schumacher, whose 1973 classic “Small Is Beautiful” offered an influential argument for appropriate technology and “economics as if people mattered.”
🎙️ Ideas from Podcasts/Videos 📺
Knowledge Project with Angela Duckworth (Spotify)
Situational vs. Personality - it’s a bit of both and no way to cut it on %
Situation drives the person and person drives the situation
Freud was right about something - much of what we do is under the surface
Challenge for coaches is when things go too well for people… What follows after too much success is a challenge
Challenge for success becomes keeping the cheap on our shoulder - Brady, Kobe, Bezos are able to keep that chip while most people are satisficers vs. maximizers
Both and for grit and situations mattering for kids
Change situations and environments when things don’t work
Goal is perennial learners for us and our kids
Can be active in life or passive in life… Choose to be active and have agency. Change the situation
Find challenges for our kids. Struggles to accomplish outcomes that need to be not too little struggle and not too much struggle
Need to do the same thing for ourselves —> coaches or peer coaches are keys for this
Feedback is the gift that most of us don’t want to unwrap, but it’s how we get better
Habits and goals are self-control devices
People quit because the value of the goal decreases or the situation changes
Create personal rules to make life easier and get to the outcomes we want. The rule on rules is to create your own rules
Business, life, and personal rules to become the person you want to become. Rules of consequences are cost-benefit and expected value outcomes. Rules of what person am I in this situation can be as a parent what do I do now.
Stewart Brand documentary from Stripe Films “We Are As Gods”
ReasonTV Interviews Stewart Brand and the Producers of We are as Gods
📚 Books to Read or Listen to📚
The Secret Life of Grocers; The Dark Miracle of the Modern Grocery Store by Benjamin Lorr (Goodreads)
Ben attempts to understand and explain how food shows up in the grocery stores. He tracks the history of Trader Joes, rides shotgun with a truck driver making grocery store delivers, works at Whole Foods, and tracks down the quality assurance system for food. He also ends up in Thailand interviewing a gentleman from Mynnamar who gets enslaved on shrimp boat
The founder of Trader Joes saw education, travel and self expression as the key themes for his store.
He added "quote health foods" ---> he used the Whole Earth Catalog and Mother Earth News as his guides by subscribing to them-- how eating healthy would save the earth was never clear to him but he was a true green (had a garden and retrofitted his car for diesel and planted living trees for a Christmas tree, replanted at New Years )
💣Words of Wisdom💣
John Wooden, UCLA Coach
Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.
Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates
So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.
What Great Storytellers Know - Bernadette Jiwa
The goal isn’t just to deliver the information, it’s to capture the imagination. We don’t have to be smart enough to manipulate people; we have to be sincere enough to move them.
Maps of Imagination - Peter Turchi
“A state of mind," Rita Carter writes in Mapping the Mind, "is an all-encompassing perception of the world that binds sensory perception, thoughts, feelings and memories into a seamless whole.
To produce it millions of neural brain patterns fire in concert, creating a stream of 'mega-patterns'-one for every conscious moment. This constellation of neural activity shimmers with constant change as one thought dies away and another comes forward. But so long as your attention is held by the basic theme, the overall pattern, a sort of mega-mega-pattern, will remain recognizable."
A Lateral View - Donald Richie
You must truly observe. Go to the garden and look at the rock, the tree. Ah, nature, you say and turn—then stop. You have just observed that rock and tree have been placed there, placed by the hand of man, the Japanese hand. A new thought occurs: Nature does not happen; it is wrought. A new rule offers itself: Nothing is natural until it has been so created.
Difficult Conversations - Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Shelia Heen
It’s Not My Responsibility to Make Things Better; It’s My Responsibility to Do My Best.
How to Love - Thich Nhat Hanh
LOVE IS EXPANSIVE In the beginning of a relationship, your love may include only you and the other person. But if you practice true love, very soon that love will grow and include all of us. The moment love stops growing, it begins to die. It’s like a tree; if a tree stops growing, it begins to die. We can learn how to feed our love and help it continue to grow.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
What seeds do you need to plant and what weeds do you need to pick?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
