Learning How to Walk
🔥Welcome to volume 000017!🔥
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.
👶Learning How to Walk👶
Watching a baby take its first steps takes your breath away. It puts a smile on your face. The struggle and hardship from failure after failure leads to a liminal moment. The baby becomes more than just a baby. Like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Walking transforms the baby to something new.
The baby experiences such joy when he walks. The baby can walk before it happens, but needs to believe she can. The process includes weeks and months of testing. Trail and error. They walk holding someone’s hand, needing a security blanket before finally dive bombing into solo missions. Solo drop-ins lead to a step or two and then the butts on the floor. The evolution varies for each of us. Then it all comes together and we walk across the room.
Is it possible not to feel joy when watching a baby walk? Seeing the struggle manifested in them doing the thing creates a moment of AWEsome.
What do we need to start trying to do? What do we have inside of us and could do much sooner, but we have to attempt it. We need some trail and error. We need to cue up the experiment.
My favorite moment of the process is when you almost get to the top of the mountain. Those first one or two steps when we are a baby. You can see the finish line (even if there is no finish line). You can touch it with your finger tips. Next thing you know, we are walking.
📓Articles to Read📓
NOLS Wilderness Medical Acronyms
Seems like an apt time to focus on some first responder methods given the current landscape. See the Life is a Festival Podcast link below for a deeper dive on Wilderness Medicine Classes (I’m taking a NOLs class at REI in Chicago at the end of May if anyone wants to join me, just shoot me an email )
The ABCDE
A memory aid for identifying and fixing immediate threats to life, which is part of your initial assessment of a patient.
Airway: Make sure the mouth, nose, throat, and upper airway are clear of obstructions so the patient can breathe.
Breathing: Look, listen, and feel for breathing. Are they breathing? Is the breathing labored, easy, deep, shallow, etc.?
Circulation: Check for a pulse and look for signs of severe bleeding.
Disability: Making a decision if spine protection is needed (if you didn’t observe the incident, assume disability).
Expose: Examine your patient for obvious, major injuries, and if needed control bleeding
Montaigne on Death and the Art of Living by Brainpickings
Face death head on, don’t be afraid of it, and inner life is the key to life.
[L]et us learn bravely to stand our ground, and fight him. And to begin to deprive him of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a way quite contrary to the common course. Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death.
We should always, as near as we can, be booted and spurred, and ready to go, and, above all things, take care, at that time, to have no business with any one but one’s self: —
Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life.
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Tyler Cowen on Venture Stories (Spotify / Podcast Notes)
Tyler thinks IQ is overrated, especially by smart people, and stamina is highly valuable
We over rate people like ourselves
He is excited about green energy and what is coming down the pipeline
Ambitious people earn way more than average folks
James Carse on The Art of Reading, Thinking and Teaching (Spotify / Podcast Notes)
Play infinite games, where the goal is to keep playing the game
Played football and realized he liked learning better than playing footabll
“I’m never completely satisfied with anything I’ve thought, anything I’ve read, or anything I’ve said. I’m always looking for how I might draw an exception.”
“Here’s one of the ways I think about writing: I want to say something and then see what I said, and then back off further and see what I’m seeing, and then write that down. It’s a kind of emptying the mind, reflecting on it, and then reflecting on the reflection.”
Life is a Festival with Ryan Gardner (from NOLS): Wilderness First Responder (pocketcast / spotify)
Responders need to show up and take care of the whole person to find the best possible outcome in the end
How do you keep your spark dealing with so much stress and trauma? Wondering in the wilderness by himself. He sees his life as a path that we wonder along. Integrate, embrace and acknowledge the trauma
Educating lets you share you passion and lets you learn from the others. Gives him two lenses to view the world.
Leadership is about learning what leadership methods work for you. Self awareness is key
4 Quadrants of Leadership —> Relationship master, driver, architect/analyst and spontaneous motivator
Wilderness is a great place to understand yourself and see what you can handle (similar to Burning Man)
Seeing a lot of leadership styles helps you become a better leader
How can I be graceful when leading? Leadership is facilitating in a graceful way
Have a system, know the system and stay in the system. Know what the greatest threat is and it might not be what people you are leading thinks it is
Human body is fragile but extremely resilient
Living in different places helps us understand ourselves in different ways
Showing up, being present makes things special
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Letter to a Friend Who May Start a New Investment Platform - Graham Duncan Blog
Tim O’Reilly has a wonderful metaphor for money: he says money is like gasoline while driving across country on a road trip. You never want to run out, but the point of life is not to go on a tour of gas stations.
The Icarus Deception - Seth Godin
Six Daily Habits for Artists Sit alone; sit quietly. Learn something new without any apparent practical benefit. Ask individuals for bold feedback; ignore what you hear from the crowd. Spend time encouraging other artists. Teach, with the intent of making change. Ship something that you created.
Parker and I had one of our epic conversations in which we laughed as much as we spoke. We came to realize that the only answer to the existential question of “Does my life have meaning?” is, again, another set of questions: “In what ways have I been brave?” And “How have I been kind?”
Conventional wisdom about human decision-making has always held that our attitudes drive our behaviour, but evidence strongly suggests that the process mostly works in reverse: the behaviours we adopt shape our attitudes.
🙏Thanks for reading.🙏
What do you want to grind through and master just like a baby figuring out how to walk?
Any thoughts, comments or ideas to share, please reach out.
Namaste,
Christian