⚡Maintaining and Managing our Energy ⚡
🔥Welcome to volume 000021!🔥
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 active while we ride this out.
⚡Maintaining and Managing Our Energy⚡
I’m cruising along on my skateboard with a backpack full of sushi for my wife’s birthday. Duck Sauce plays on Spotify and I’m feeling the flow. Then my airpods jump from making my head bob to an outgoing ring. Who am I calling? My skate game is a work in progress, so no time to jump off the board and cancel the call. I hear “hello” and exhale because I dialed one of my good buddies.
We chat a bit about investing and then pivot to energy. Not energy into our homes, but our own energy levels. How the life backdrop makes energy management even more important than normal.
The idea of energy was timely. I pulled out the skateboard because I was feeling run down and needed a jolt. My living room being my office, gym, and where I practice capoeira and Tai Chi, blends everything together. The space of separation gets lost. Our mind struggles to find separation for the different tasks and moments of the day.
We find ourselves trying to manage our energy in a limited environment. This increases our stress levels, the stress levels of those around us and makes managing our energy levels mas importante.
We need to be vigilant noting what gives us energy and doing more of that. When we notice the things that take energy away from us, we either need to reframe them or try to limit these moments. Think of it like a glass and we can fill it up with energy or pour it out.
Jamie Wheal calls folks that destroy energy “Hungry Ghosts”. They eat energy and leave you with nothing. We get to attempt to do the opposite and leave people feeling excited and replenished when they interact with us.
Right now we need to be vigilant in protecting our energy and replenishing it. That means movement, meditation, good conversation, friends, family and community. Avoiding the hungry ghosts and limiting the energy ghouls in our world. We need to manage and stay away from the Zero Sum players. It means focusing on sleep plus passive and active recovery activities.
When my call ended with my buddy I felt refreshed. It’s the infinite game type of conversations, with both sides being additive to each other. We refilled our cups.
Then the next day he texts me the Calvin and Hobbies comic below. Reminding me that play is one of the ultimate forms of refilling our cups. Playing infinite games, where the goal of the game is to continue playing. Keeping our energy maintained.
What gives you energy? What takes it away? How do you do more of the former and less of the later?
📓Articles to Read📓
68 Ideas from Kevin Kelly on his 68th birthday
Kevin Kelly is one of the mentors who I’ve never met (though I just missed him at Burning Man one year). His books, ideas, and wisdom always make you think and reflect on how you see the world and how much the world has to offer. His list of 68 ideas are all gold.
• When someone is nasty, rude, hateful, or mean with you, pretend they have a disease. That makes it easier to have empathy toward them which can soften the conflict.
• Being able to listen well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love keep asking them “Is there more?”, until there is no more.
• Gratitude will unlock all other virtues and is something you can get better at.
• Learn how to learn from those you disagree with, or even offend you. See if you can find the truth in what they believe.
• Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.
• Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence to be believed.
• Trust me: There is no “them”.
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Parasocial Relationships by Brain Lenses (spotify)
Most of our relationships are a blend of fact and fiction to begin with, which may partially explain why we’re so comfortable with these one-to-many relationships.
When you sit down with a friend for a coffee and conversation, the person at the other end of the table is partly themselves, partly a version of themselves optimized for that specific scenario. Some of that optimization might be physical—the way they’re dressed or carrying themselves—but it may also involve an adjustment to their speaking pace or tone, a tweak to their eating or drinking habits, their pretending to be more or less expert on a particular topic based on what seems prudent and beneficial to the flow of conversation, and other such taken-for-granted, reality-distorting elements that allow us to engage in comfortable conversation with each other on a regular basis, without having tiny character traits, misalignments of behaviors, or minor disagreements trip us up.
📚 Books to Read or Listen to📚
Messy by Tim Hartford (goodreads)
This is a solid read. It extols the virtues of one of my favorite practices and that is being messy. The power of messy allows us to have more ideas, be more creative and go beyond our current limits.
Brain Eno and his oblique strategies approach which led to break through albums for Ziggy Pop and David Bowie.
Bowie living in multiple places and tackling various projects to keep reinventing himself and his outputs.
OODA loops (Observe-Orient-Decide-Attack) and masters of the practice of getting in their opponents OODA loops like Amazon, Bezos, and Trump
The one thing Ben Franklin couldn’t master on his list of virtues was being orderly, which was a feature not a bug
Openness, adaptability, and resilience are inherently messy, so BE MESSY
💣Words of Wisdom💣
A Joseph Campbell Companion - Joseph Campbell
We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come. If we fix on the old, we get stuck. When we hang onto any form, we are in danger of putrefaction. Hell is life drying up. The Hoarder, the one in us that wants to keep, to hold on, must be killed. If we are hanging onto the form now, we’re not going to have the form next. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Destruction before creation
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas and Robin Buss
‘Only a weak spirit sees everything from behind a dark veil. The soul makes its own horizons; your soul is overcast, and that is why the sky seems stormy to you
How to Change Your Mind - Michael Pollan
Carl Jung once wrote that it is not the young but people in middle age who need to have an “experience of the numinous” to help them negotiate the second half of their lives
This Is Burning Man - Brian Doherty
It’s always a pleasure to bitch about other people’s motives, but charity and reason compel us to remember that when it comes to the secret engines driving another’s soul, we are only interpreting the pings and rumbles — we can’t really get under the hood and take a look-see.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
How is your energy management?
Who gives you energy? Who takes it away?
What gives you energy? What takes it away?
What changes do you want to make after you reflect on that?
Any thoughts, comments or ideas to share, please email.
Namaste,
Christian
