🔥Welcome to Volume #00078!🔥
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.
If you enjoy the newsletter please share it with your friends.
I’m writing another 30 essays and doing daily art on Twitter if you want to follow along.
🗺️How Noticing and Changing Our Patterns Can Help Us Redesign Our Lives🗺️
"Each pattern is connected to certain "larger" patterns which come above it in the language; and to certain "smaller" patterns which come below it in the language. The pattern helps to complete those larger patterns which are "above" it, and is itself completed by those smaller patterns which are "below" it." - Chris Alexander
January in Chicago hits hard. When the thermometer tops out at ten degrees and the sun is absent, you feel it in your soul. What it does present is a time to think and reflect.
Sitting in my living room, contemplating the prior year, front and center, stood my patterns. The patterns jumped off the page at me. They cut like a river through the landscape of the year. The rivers led to growth and creativity or went dry, stifling and stopping my progress.
Finding the Flow
When the dominos line up, everything flows. We feel like Wonder Woman or Superman, living our lives with super strength and abilities. We see where we got sidetracked, stuck, or failed when the pattern breaks. Instead of superpowers, we ran with a weight vest, leading to depletion and burnout.
Hitting the Walls
My list of failures and incompleted tasks included blockage and stifling patterns. I acted in a way that negated my intentions and led to self-sabotage or not even getting started. The dominos failed to fall.
These acts included lack of sleep, marinating on irrelevant things/low probability events, and not having the courage to show up and do the work. I Twitter scrolled instead of being present, or I failed to rest and recover, instead soldiered on into a landmine.
The patterns consist of our words, actions, and environments. It's our ecology of things, externally and internally.
#1 Notice Our Patterns and Listen for Them
We need to look at them and observe. When we listen and look for them, we see if it's the small or the large that jam us up. Like driving a car and missing our exit, we get to see what threw us off.
#2 Stop or Change Our Patterns
What patterns do we need to eradicate? What patterns can we experiment with changing to see what happens?
#3 Keep Paying Attention
When we start paying attention to the patterns, we feel when the ground begins shaking, or we start slipping. What is the cause? Is it a large or small pattern? What can we do at that moment to change the pattern?
We live like a large orchestra, and we get to notice when we hit the wrong notes.
Are we playing out of turn and disrupting our band? Or is it the other patterns outside of us that come in too fast or too strong that then disrupts our rhythm?
The challenge for all of us is to make sure we listen and pay attention to the internal and external music.
We get to write down when our pressure changes and lean into detecting the causes.
We get to reflect and review our days to adjust the patterns and flow, keeping our orchestra on time and playing to the best of its ability.
📓Things to Think About📓
The Power of Self Reflection at Work by Anne-Laure Le Cunnf
Anne-Laure offers a process and many good ideas on why to take up this practice. We can notice the patterns in our work life by reflecting on them.
Reflecting on your professional experiences and learning from them can influence your career choices. Perhaps reflecting on a presentation you gave makes you discover you may need to take some public speaking classes, or perhaps you decide to hire an executive coach after you struggle to handle a conversation with your manager. You may also find a mismatch between what you value and the career path you have chosen, and you must make decisions about what you will do next. Reflection prompts action, so you can use the lessons you learned about yourself to take the next step forward in your professional life.
I also highly recommend her membership group Ness Labs. It’s only $50 a year and you get to meet and work with some great folks.
Lara Foster Writes on Daring to Respair
What do we do when we feel despair and life becomes difficult and challenging in a not-fun way. She offers the idea of respair instead of despair, a term from etymologist Susie Dent.
Dent writes:
“But one English word surely stands above all others from the corners of the dictionary. I mention it all the time, because I’m determined to bring it back. Or bring it anywhere in fact, for it never really enjoyed more than a day in the sun. “Respair” has just one record next to it in the Oxford English Dictionary, from 1525, but its definition is sublime. Respair is fresh hope; a recovery from despair. May 2022 finally be its moment.”
Lara writes of turning the struggle and changes from despair to respair by being present and sitting with it. Ultimately, we need to do what we love, which is not an easy task.
The thing about love though, is that it takes courage. Stepping into love also means stepping into loss. To love fully, we know that a time will come where we will lose it all. Grief abounds, but so does courage to keep our hearts open, to love again.
Hedgeschool written by Lara and Steve is one of my favorite newsletters.
Maria Popova on Resolutions for a Life Worth Living
Maria writes of the ideas of James Baldwin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Leo Tolstoy, Seneca, Toni Morrison, Walt Whitman, Viktor Frankl, Rachel Carson, and Hannah Arendt on a life worth living.
James Baldwin, like the ideas in Lara’s piece, offers the idea of love as the ultimate goal and one that is not always easy.
The earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.
The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility.
Meaning is Magic by Stewart Alsop
When we add more magic to our lives, we create more meaning. In a world struggling for meaning, this is a key tool for us to use.
When you give something meaning, you are practicing magic.
Meaning doesn't exist out there.
Meaning keeps us physically and spiritually healthy. It’s why we need more magic in our lives.
Most people don't get that their physical sickness is directly related to a spiritual sickness (cause meaning is magic). Yes physical sickness is real, but so is spiritual sickness, intertwined.
But the materialist framework has the illogical stance that everything is material, yet they can't explain how the brain works at a mechanical level, they can not KNOW that everything is material, yet they loudly and arrogantly claim that they KNOW
So often times when we go to doctors for meaning and magic we find ourselves confronted with a person who rejects the magic part of it, yet still doesn't understand the entirety of the field with which they interpret, who thinks that they KNOW because the system teaches them to
🎧Things to Listen, See, and Watch 🎧
Cam Houser made a video about Brian Eno working with U2
“We need to make our music in the kitchen, not the restaurant.”
Yung Pueblo with a Key Practice for 2022
This tweet is a reminder that we can program the patterns in our lives.
Habits can take 18 days to 254 days to form depending on the person and the habit one is trying to create (assuming an 85% of the time hit rate and limited mental effort to do the thing).
We Can Change the Past and Change Our Present
Annual reminder from Jason Silva that we can change the past by how we look at it which changes our futures. Change the pattern, change the now. We get to change the story that runs on a loop in our minds. The story we tell changes our future experience of events that already took place.
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Margaret J. Wheatley, So Far From Home: Lost and Found in Our Brave New World
The practice for dealing with self-doubt is simple, but I find sometimes | have to repeat this practice over and over and over again. First, you notice that you've been taken captive by self-doubt, self-criticism, self-hatred. You acknowledge its presence. Then, either you ask it to leave (if you're feeling strong) or you just stop listening, practicing active ignorance.
Margaret J. Wheatley, So Far From Home: Lost and Found in Our Brave New World
If change is just the way it is on this planet, what's happening now that makes life feel so difficult, so filled with dread? Is it any different than in the past? Or have we just gotten soft, become whiners and complainers?"
Kanye West
"Nothing in life is promised except death. If you have the opportunity to play this game of life, you need to appreciate every moment."
George Leonard, Mastery
"What is mastery? At the heart of it, mastery is practice. Mastery is staying on the path."
Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years
People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen. But joy costs pain."
Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!
“The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, and how people feel and what they understand about your work effects how they value it."
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
What patterns stood out for you in 2021? What patterns helped your aims and which ones held you back? Which ones do you want to change or experiment with going forward?
I have one addendum to the last Middle Way Newsletter (#077). Reader K.C. reminded me how important gratitude and appreciating the journey are to the White Belt Mindset.
The updated list for the mindset…
The White Belt Mindset
Aways Learning
Humble
Hungry
Consistently Showing Up
Open to New Ideas
Keep Going
Strong Effort
Repetitions
Process not Outcomes
Always Gratitude
Appreciating the Journey
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
🗺️How Noticing and Changing Our Patterns Can Help Us Redesign Our Lives🗺️