Archive for May, 2011
051 Creative Journey
by Charles on May.31, 2011, under Creative Journey Blog
Hello my friend,
Welcome to the 51st installment of The Creative Journey, the experience of one Charles Yerkes, Eadarian Poet, perpetuator, and otherwise mildly creative and excessively modest personage.
Just Let Go: Part 1
Such a small phrase, merely three little words in length. Yet, for the most part, it is one of the hardest things in the world to do.
Why is it so hard? Because we love our right to be bitter and miserable and, “Don’t you dare try and take that right from us!!”
I am, of course, referring to the letting go of wrongs done to us by another. They needn’t be large wrongs. Indeed, the smaller the better for hanging onto; for smaller ones fit better in the palm of our hand for ease of carrying, metaphorically speaking.
It could be that larger – more serious wrongs are too big to be magnified beyond what they are, and as such, are fairly easy to see and deal with. Whereas, the smaller the wrong (in importance) the more we tend to magnify the problem (the wrong) to the extreme so that we can no longer clearly see it and thereby have a more difficult time dealing with it. An interesting thought anyway.
Howsoever, by not letting go we tend to become miserable, unhappy, angry, and mostly resentful of the one how has wronged us.
The sad thing about this situation is that, at least 99.9 times out of 100, the other person is oblivious to how we feel and our misery affects them not at all. They may not even be aware that we received a wrong from them. And if they are aware of this, meaning that the wrong was intentionally delivered, they don’t care or are even happy that we are upset.
So we have allowed them to hurt us twice. By giving to them a power over us that they do not possess on their own, the power to extend our pain and misery past the wrong that was done. Only we have that power. The power to continually make ourselves unhappy, or as some say, “to steal our joy”, but there truly is not theft of joy, we have given it away.
I mentioned earlier our right to be bitter; what this actually involves is self-pity. It feels very good to hear someone say, “Oh, you poor dear. You were treated so unfairly. I hope they get theirs, and soon.” Even if we are the only ones saying it, it feels good to hear. We want a correction to happen, retribution to fall, punishment to be imposed, and thereby a vindication received unto ourselves.
Vindication here being revenge spelled a little more politely.
To be continued….
Charles Yerkes
Eadarian Poet, Perpetuator, Photographer, and Fiddle Player
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To choose a past installment(s) of The Creative Journey click here. To view a Quote of the Week, click here.
068 Weekly Quote
by Charles on May.31, 2011, under Weekly Quote
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Chaos happens. Blessings are by design.-The Eadarian Poet
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To see past “Quote of the Week”(s) click here.
Or to choose an installment(s) of our blog, The Creative Journey, click here.
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067 Weekly Quote
by Charles on May.23, 2011, under Weekly Quote
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A happy life is to be preferred to an easy one.-The Eadarian Poet
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To see past “Quote of the Week”(s) click here.
Or to choose an installment(s) of our blog, The Creative Journey, click here.
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050 Creative Journey
by Charles on May.18, 2011, under Creative Journey Blog
Hello my friend,
Welcome to the 50th installment of The Creative Journey, the experience of one Charles Yerkes, Eadarian Poet, perpetuator, and otherwise mildly creative and excessively modest personage.
Your best is never halfway done. Part 2.
I will also mention that the best book I have read on this law of attraction stuff is an older book, a book first printed in 1952. The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale is an amazing book. One well worth the read and one the makes all the more modern books on this topic pale in comparison.
So, we have seen that doing our best is not perfectionism, is not being a perfectionist.
Interestingly, doing our best does not even mean that we will succeed in what we do. How’s that for a complication? Sometimes doing our best will mean we only get mediocre results. Yes it is true. For the final achievement in any endeavor will greatly depend on our level of skill in performing that task. Doing our best can only ever achieve what our topmost level of skill dictates.
For instance – I can do my best all day long to draw a life like portrait of someone and only ever deliver a decent stick figure. Drawing is not my forte. Likewise, I can do my best all day long trying to fix my car and at the end of the day… have changed a mean tire. Don’t believe me? Just ask my dad; he can tell you several funny stories concerning me and spark plugs.
On the other hand, in the kitchen, my best has led to roommates postponing plans long enough to eat what I’ve quickly thrown together and they’ve even volunteered to do the dishes afterward. I am a very good cook, for which I owe my mom a world of thanks.
Now, the same is true for each of us. We all have skills we shine at and others that we don’t have enough of to even hide from view. Just a fact of life.
So – let’s move on and look at what exactly is ‘doing our best’.
Doing your best is doing what you can do. It is as simple as that. Doing what you know to do, completely, not cutting corners, and doing so without the fear of failure. Applying your self fully and joyously to any task you undertake, without slacking, and without worrying.
Your best is being to the fullest, exactly who you are. Quite the freeing thought is it not?
Doing your best also leads to the ability to learn from your mistakes and thereby improving your skills in a given area. Which has the happy consequence of automatically helping you avoid mistakes, to avoid getting it wrong.
Back to the cooking analogy, say… we decide to bake some cookies. Doing our best means preheating the oven, following the recipe, and using a timer to help us know when to take them out of the oven. This will give us the best tasting cookies that this time of baking can give us. We have done our best, have done everything ‘right’. But let’s say the cookies that resulted were a bit under cooked. We can learn from this and lengthen the cooking time for this recipe, for this particular oven, and the next time we will have cookies that are most excellent to eat. And we do this without fuss or strain; we stay happy while doing so. We have done what we know to do and then quickly improved what we know to do through the experience of an unsatisfactory result.
Doing things half way might look like, turning on the oven and popping in the cookies immediately, not adding all the ingredients, or having no way to keep track of your cooking time. All of these, alone or combined, will positively end up with… not so nice tasting cookies. But see, doing things this way is not doing your best, not doing what you already know to do.
You say, “Baking cookies. No big deal.” That is the point. Doing our best needn’t be a great big hairy deal. Learning from mistakes need not be a great big hairy deal. When you focus on simply doing what you know, on achieving a better end, you will. And as you learn and put into practice more of the better things to do, the mistakes will take care of themselves without additional thoughts from you.
And that is a very freeing deal.
Enjoy your life my friend by doing your best. The satisfactions found therein are not to be missed.
Until next time,
Grow in freedom,
Grow in peace,
Charles Yerkes
Eadarian Poet, Perpetuator, Photographer, and Fiddle Player
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To choose a past installment(s) of The Creative Journey click here. To view a Quote of the Week, click here.
066 Weekly Quote
by Charles on May.18, 2011, under Weekly Quote
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Happy – by choice.-The Eadarian Poet
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To see past “Quote of the Week”(s) click here.
Or to choose an installment(s) of our blog, The Creative Journey, click here.
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049 Creative Journey
by Charles on May.15, 2011, under Creative Journey Blog
Hello my friend,
Welcome to the 49th installment of The Creative Journey, the experience of one Charles Yerkes, Eadarian Poet, perpetuator, and otherwise mildly creative and excessively modest personage.
Your best is never halfway done.
This is an interesting concept.
Except, somewhere along the line I had come to equate doing my best with achieving a perfect result. Rather, to equate not attaining perfection with not doing my best, at whatever endeavor I was pursuing.
I really could not tell you where this thought came from and really I’m not interested in finding out. Nor do I think that I am so unique as to be the only one who has made this connection before.
But I have seen what this mindset leads to, frustration. Frustration and Perfectionism. Perfectionism is getting everything just right, making everything line up just so.
This idea sounds good on paper. Wouldn’t it be great to have everything just right? The problems with this, however, are many.
1) We don’t live in a perfect world.
2) The honest among us all admit that we are not perfect people.
So, how could an imperfect person in an imperfect world ever sanely hope to do something perfectly? Indeed, how could such imperfect people even know what perfect is? And the truth is we don’t.
Ask one hundred people what a perfect day would be like and you will receive one hundred different answers. From sunny and seventy to cloudy and windy – perfection is a very nebulous, vague, and mist filled notion. It does sound good to the ear but it has no practical reality in the world we live in.
Not only this, but as I have studied this topic, I have noticed that even though the word ‘Perfection’ is used, what is mainly being focused on is – not doing something wrong, not adding an impurity to what is being done, or the trying to remove all impurity (that which prevents perfection) from what we are doing.
No matter if the action is drawing a picture, building a house, making a sales pitch, or any other action we take, when doing our best has come to mean perfect performance, we become so aware of not doing something wrong that this is what we tend to do, something wrong… something much less than good or adequate, never mind perfect.
An example: In college I was a lighting design major for the theatre. I loved it. Part of the training for this was theatrical drafting. My roommate and I were in the same class. He would spend fifteen to twenty minutes on a project and be done, and it would look good. I, on the other hand, would spend hours on the same project and it would look terrible. I was so focused on getting every line perfect, making it just the right width, the right darkness, the right… everything. So focused was I on the perfection of it, on eliminating every wrong mark, not allowing a miss mark to remain on the paper that the drawing was always inferior, never good.
What was the difference between us? It was not that he was a better draftsman, when we had speed drills in class our drawings looked very similar, mine being better not his being worse. It was because I was so focused on getting things right, too right… perfect. See, by being so aware of mistakes and wanting to eliminate them entirely, my focus was actually on not getting the drawing wrong, on not allowing any mistakes to mar the end result. By focusing on not getting it wrong I made getting it wrong a chief part of my focus. And I always achieved that focus very well.
Now there are many books out dealing with the laws of attraction. So I’ll not go into this now. Except to say that what you focus on you will get. And since perfectionism tends to be focusing on not getting something wrong, getting something wrong occupies a large part of that focus – so that is what you get, something wrong. We tense up, we choke, and we stutter and stumble all because we are so focused on not getting it wrong.
To be continued…
Grow in peace.
Charles Yerkes
Eadarian Poet, Perpetuator, Photographer, and Fiddle Player
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To choose a past installment(s) of The Creative Journey click here. To view a Quote of the Week, click here.
065 Weekly Quote
by Charles on May.10, 2011, under Weekly Quote
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Dogma: Conviction that has lost its faith.-The Eadarian Poet
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To see past “Quote of the Week”(s) click here.
Or to choose an installment(s) of our blog, The Creative Journey, click here.
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048 Creative Journey
by Charles on May.06, 2011, under Creative Journey Blog
Hello my friend,
Welcome to the 48th installment of The Creative Journey, the experience of one Charles Yerkes, Eadarian Poet, perpetuator, and otherwise mildly creative and excessively modest personage.
Hypocrisy part 2:
Say… ten years ago I made the mistake of touching a very hot iron and burned my hand so severely that it not only blistered but the damage went beyond blistering, and I lost the use of the hand. And it was only through years of healing and painful therapy that I was able to regain the use of that hand. Regained the use of it but still have the burn scars on it, scars which will never go away.
Ok. To call me a hypocrite because I now warn others not to touch a hot iron is more than ridiculous.
The reason we all agree with that last sentence is because nobody in their right mind actually wants to touch a hot iron. We all recognize the painful consequences of doing so.
That is the difference between the hot iron illustration and any other action we are warned against – our wanting. We think we want the pleasure that a certain action will bring. So much so that we do not think through the pain and emptiness that those actions will soon lead to. And because we want the pleasure, however short lived, we choose to remove all obstacles barring us from the pleasure. Even when those are wise words of caution, which tell us that, the pleasure is fleeting, hollow, and not truly gratifying.
So we shout, “Hypocrite!” At those who were burned before, in essence saying, “Don’t you dare stop us from being burned as well! If it was good enough for you, it is good enough for us!” And that is the point of the warning. Being burned was not good. It is something to be avoided.
Another popular attack, similar to the above yet directed at those who have learned from the experience of others, from the burning that others have had to endure. These have learned from the life lessons of others and avoided the pain.
Lets’ go back to the hot iron for a moment.
Because I listened to the warning of others, saw the pain in others from being burned, and made the choice that touching a hot iron is something to be avoided; and so remained healthy and happy. And have then chosen to warn others not to touch it because of the known pain it will cause. I then hear attacks such as, “Since you’ve never touched a hot iron, how do you know what you are talking about? Since you’ve never been burned, how can you warn anyone against touching a hot iron? Since you really don’t know what you are talking about.”
This is equally as shallow and ludicrous as the hypocrite argument.
Do not be a hypocrite; live well who you are. And, more importantly, do not live in the fear of being falsely accused of being one. You have learned lessons in life, either the hard way by being burned, or the easier way through the wisdom of others. Either way, wear those lessons well and be bold in warning others, when appropriate, and in passing those lessons on, in sharing the wisdom you have acquired.
Those who call you hypocrite today may well thank you tomorrow.
Until next time.
Grow in freedom;
Grow in peace.
Charles Yerkes
Eadarian Poet, Perpetuator, Photographer, and Fiddle Player
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To choose a past installment(s) of The Creative Journey click here. To view a Quote of the Week, click here.
047 Creative Journey
by Charles on May.04, 2011, under Creative Journey Blog
Hello my friend,
Welcome to the 47th installment of The Creative Journey, the experience of one Charles Yerkes, Eadarian Poet, perpetuator, and otherwise mildly creative and excessively modest personage.
Hypocrisy part 1:
According to the dictionary a hypocrite is:
1) A person who pretends to have virtues, moral, or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that he or she does not actually possess. Especially a person whose actions belie stated beliefs.
2) A person who feigns some desirable or publicly approved attitude, especially one whose private life, opinions, or statements belie his or her public statements.
Or to put it simply: Somebody who is saying one thing WHILE DOING another (emphasis on ‘while doing’ – mine).
Saying while doing…
There are many hypocrites in today’s world. Those who merely play a part, a role, a character, one that is not who they really are. I’ll wager that you already have had some names come to mind.
Can you guess where this post is going?
Maybe not.
For what I want to touch on it the misuse of this term that is so prevalent today. An abuse that is nothing more than an attempt to legitimize a desired behavior or at least silence objection to it.
The other day I was talking to a friend of mine. She is the mother of a couple of teenage girls and she was greatly concerned about the possibility of her children experimenting with drugs. But she was struggling with warning them against this because she had become convinced that, since she had used them in her past, it would be hypocritical of her to tell her kids not to use them, to tell them how empty and pain filled this path is.
Notice the key words – had used – she no longer does. She knew them to be a bad thing and wanted to save her children the pain that the use of illegal drugs produces. She was no longer doing the actions she wanted to warn against; she had learned that life is better without the drugs. Yet she had come to believe what our society has been telling us for many years now, that she could not pass on valuable life lessons to her children because she would be a hypocrite to do so. After all if she could do it why couldn’t they?
No matter what action we want to talk about, in the matter above it is the use of drugs but this abuse is prevalent in many other areas including: extra marital sex, premarital sex, lying, cheating, stealing (of time as well as materials), chronic lateness, being rude, and the list goes on. When ever someone who has learned a life lesson through any of these makes an objection to them, the first thing they are likely to hear is, “What do you mean? You’ve done this before so who are you to tell me not to. You HYPOCRITE!” This is then accepted and echoed by those not involved in the particular situation. Our society has come to accept this as a valid rebuttal that allows no further thought or discussion.
As we have seen, those no longer doing the actions they are warning against are not hypocrites. Yet, with so many voices constantly saying they are and no one standing up to reveal the silliness, the illogic of such statements… well, if the person raising the objection is not careful, he can come to believe that he, in fact, has no right to pass along the valuable lessons he has learned.
Last time, (installment number 46) I mentioned an illustration that I think it will do well to mention it again, that of a hot iron. Rather, we will continue with this illustration in our next installment.
Until then,
Grow in peace.
Charles Yerkes
Eadarian Poet, Perpetuator, Photographer, and Fiddle Player
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To choose a past installment(s) of The Creative Journey click here. To view a Quote of the Week, click here.
064 Weekly Quote
by Charles on May.02, 2011, under Weekly Quote
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Living a noble life is like playing traditional Irish music. There is no one right way to do so; but there are many wrong ways.-The Eadarian Poet
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To see past “Quote of the Week”(s) click here.
Or to choose an installment(s) of our blog, The Creative Journey, click here.
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Worth Quoting
Never be so libelous as to call a man perfect; once a person is so labeled it is too easy to tear him apart for being what he is, a human being.
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