🔥Welcome to volume 000018!🔥
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.
🦸We Can Be Heroes 🦸
Life is both chaos and order. It’s Yin and Yang. We often forget the order and notice the chaos, but they are both always there. When we see the chaos, we look around and wonder what is going to happen next. The ground below us shakes.
This too will pass.
The question we need to answer is what can we do right now? How do we become our best self in this situation?
We start with gratitude. It begins with gratitude towards our self. We need to put on our air mask before helping others. Being thankful calms us. Being thankful for our lives puts things in perspective. Reflecting on how lucky we are for being here at this moment, takes the spotlight off of the chaos and allows us to see order.
We need to prioritize acting with gratitude towards our body and taking care of our mental and physical well being. Double down on self care in this time of stress.
Then we add gratitude for those around us. Being grateful for the doctors and hospitals that protect us by fighting the war. Being grateful for our friends, neighbors and community.
We finish with kindness. The kindness that helps others through tough times. The kindness that says we are in this together. The whatever it takes type of kindness that gets someone to the other side of the river. The kindness that brings order to the chaos.
Life is hard and right now it is multiples of hard. Uncertainty surrounds us. Dreams are getting postponed and jobs are getting canceled. People with preexisting conditions or health factors face increased risk and stress. We respond by doubling down on kindness.
We ask how can we help. We do the easy and the hard work. That is how we become heroes.
Heroes show up as their best selves in times of chaos getting us to order. They show up with gratitude and kindness. They help people land on their feet and they stay upright when getting hit by the waves.
Let’s put on our capes!
📓Articles to Read📓
Situational Assessment: Right Now by Jordan Hall
Jordan breaks down the current issues we face global with systems crashing and the meta-crisis that we face. He ends it by offering some things we can do now including:
Upgrade your Sovereignty. Increase your ability to make effective choices under a larger diversity and intensity of contexts. There is a lot of room between panic and denial. In the future, everyone counts and has to be able to take responsibility.
Upgrade your Discernment. Increase your ability to separate signal from noise. In particular, the noise of your own biases and projections. Learn to deal with reality before reality deals with you.
3. Upgrade your Integrity.
Instead, though, you might aim for the root of the excess energy. When housebound, your blood can get all stagnant or, alternatively, it can go all wild and bang off vein walls. You need an exhausting hobby. Your hobby is now push-ups. Your hobby is squats. Your hobby is running up stairs until you heave like a little fish on a dock. Hold a plank until you don’t want to anymore. Lie on the ground, pant, find new clusters of dust bunnies. Clear them out. Continue doing whatever you were doing before.
If the outdoors are available to you, emerge! The natural world is a salve. Sunshine is antiseptic. Get that new air. Bike very fast, run however. Make a phone call and walk up a hill near you. Don’t think about all the times the gym was there and you didn’t go. Sometimes I wonder if the gym actually exists, or if it’s just a rude specter that exists to haunt us about unfulfilled intentions.
Alex Danco wrote about Antifraglilty
Taleb’s favourite go-to example is deadlifting: free weights make you stronger (as opposed to exercise machines) because they expose you to more stressors, and more degrees of freedom in how they stress you. Your muscles and joints are antifragile, because of what they do: they are oriented towards those stressors, and they use those stressors as information. Optionality is not enough: having the option to grow is not the same as growing in active response to stress.
Accordingly, antifragile systems and organisms tend towards a common theme: bottoms-up decision-making, rather than top-down decision making. Antifragility requires real options, and real options are low-cost. Antifragility is only successful if you can actually detect, react, and grow in response to deviations from your present state in real time; the only way you can feasibly do this is for disorder detection and response to take place at a small enough resolution, and tight enough turnaround time. Top-down systems have a hard time with antifragility, because for them, all options are costly.
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Future Fossils - On Corona, Complex Adaptive Systems and Creative Opportunity (pocketcast / Spotify)
Living with uncertainty as the world is complex and we generally don’t know. We can’t actually notice all of reality and only see a subset. We can’t even realize how complex the world is and that is why we default to false narratives
Authority continues to break down leading to the figure over the reality narrative. We need liquid organizations that are adaptive, but we have solid organizations that can’t respond in time
In China crises and opportunity are the same
Our systems are optimized for the wrong things!
Positive outcome potential from Corona is we take better care of ourselves, more local solutions and end up with a more flexible and adaptable systems
When we created our cities, we paved over the rivers and nature, ruining many important parts of life’s ecology
How can we see this crises as a potential restoration of healthier dynamics for the individual, family, planet and an invitation to innovate
We get to witness the beauty of human kind coming together to rise up and create something new and beautiful
Robert Kegan on the Emerge Podcast (pocketcast / Spotify)
Walks through the 5 stages of adult development
If you think you are at #5 then you probably aren’t
He has yet to meet someone under 40 who is at stage 5
Rebel Wisdom with Sense Making: The Coronavirus (pocket / Spotify)
💣Words of Wisdom💣
“In the words of Candi Staton’s great gospel song, ‘hallelujah anyway.’ Hallelujah that in spite of it all, there is love, there is singing, nature, laughing, mercy.” ~@ANNELAMOTT
Spiritual Enlightenment - Jed McKenna
The enlightened have awakened from the dream and no longer mistake it for reality. Naturally, they are no longer able to attach importance to anything. To the awakened mind the end of the world is no more or less momentous than the snapping of a twig. “The wise see the same in all,” says the Gita. “The wise are impartial,” says the Tao. The enlightened cannot conceive of anything as being wrong, so they don’t struggle to make things right.
This Is Burning Man - Brian Doherty
“But ‘you had to be there’ is an important lesson of the Burning Man experience, actually,” he realizes. “What it teaches you is you have to be there every moment — have to be alive, alert to possibility, enjoy what the world is offering and what you have to offer the world. It’s like, I remember waking up one morning in ’97 and seeing a careening couch go out of control and smack into a tent.
The 48 Laws of Power - Robert Greene
Because most people are too imprisoned in the moment to plan with this kind of foresight, the ability to ignore immediate dangers and pleasures translates into power. It is the power of being able to overcome the natural human tendency to react to things as they happen, and instead to train oneself to step back, imagining the larger things taking shape beyond one’s immediate vision. Most people believe that they are in fact aware of the future, that they are planning and thinking ahead. They are usually deluded.
How to Love - Thich Nhat Hanh and Jason DeAntonis
Body and mind are not two separate entities. What happens in the body will have an effect on the mind and vice versa. Mind relies on the body to manifest, and body relies on mind in order to be alive, in order to be possible.
🙏Thanks for reading.🙏
How can you be a super hero for your friends, family and community? What can you do to help out in this time of great stress? How can you be a little bit softer, kinder and act with gratitude and grace?
Any thoughts, comments or ideas to share, please reach out.
Namaste,
Christian
