Nat

I’ve become a big fan of the show, because I’ve always loved the spectacle of humans demonstrating their tremendous skill, the outcome of their great passion and effort. There are several contestants this year, among the women, who achieve great musicality when they sing. They don’t have to sell a song because they can inhabit it.

Tonight, Melinda Doolittle brought down the house singing “My Funny Valentine.” The phrasing was great. Her stage movements were engaging and well connected to the song. Her lower register was deep and vibrant. The judges loved it, and so did I.

I’ve also been thinking about a book I just started reading, “>Living Buddha, Living Christ, by Thich Nhat Hahn. In it, Nhat Hahn, the famous Vietnamese Buddhist, describes the many similarities between the Buddha and Jesus Christ. It’s very moving to see how he brings together two towering figures who embody different traditions and makes them examples of the same great enlightenment.

Greatness inspires me. Keep singing, Idols.

Well my friend Judy had a Washington airport story that made my 38 hour trip home seem like a luxury trip. She and her husband and small child were trapped in an airport two weeks ago for 3 entire days!

Despite its being a horrible story–12 cancelled flights; 4 times in a plane on the tarmac that never took off!–she reported the same experience that I did. She barely saw anyone get angry that entire time. I had the same experience this weekend in Dulles.

More amazingly, she’s just as impatient as I, and suffered a much worse ordeal, but she surprised herself by staying very calm throughout, just as I did.

I have a deep sense these days that we in our society are on the verge of a significant cultural transformation in how well we tolerate challenges and hardship. We are growing more emotionally stable and mature as a society. I believe this deeply.

We live in interesting times. Stay tuned.

I’m not a patient person, so it was ironic that I had 24 hours worth of airport delays over the weekend to test my patience. During this vacation, I’ve quoted from two books (Happiness by Mattieu Ricard and Buddha or Bust by Perry Garfinkel). As it turns out, both discuss at length using any daily challenge to develop your skills at transforming your reaction to circumstance.

In a nutshell, each says that we have to cultivate our reactions to unpleasant experiences if we want to feel better. Usually I hate to be cooped up, and as I read one of Ricard’s chapters, I was sitting on the ground at Dulles in a snow storm for 3 hours in a completely full 30-seater plane.

Instead of my usual squirmy, self-pitying reacation, I drifted gently into a nap and then woke up and read eagerly till we pulled back to the gate. All in all, I feel more queasy about it now than I did while experiencing it.

It’s inspiring to be encouraged by people who say that mindfulness practice–steady effort to keep your focus right–helps you get beyond your own frustrations. What a great lesson.

Matthieu Ricard, a cellular biologist turned Buddhist monk, has written a magnificent book called Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill. In addition to his work writing, translating, and teaching, Ricard has participated with several Western biologists in experiments to determine whether meditation changes the structure of the brain.

This book aims to define happiness as an internal quality and to teach the skill of acquiring it more reliably. At the end of the first chapter, he says that happiness is all about a love of life. Then he continues:

The search for happiness is not about looking at life through rose-colored glasses or blinding onewself to the pain and imperfectiosn of the world. Nor is happiness a state of exaltation to be perpetuated at all costs; it is the purging of mental toxins, such as hatred and obsession, that literally poison the mind. It is alos about learning how to put things in perspective and reduce the gap between appearances and reality. To that end we must acquire a better knowledge of how the mind works and a more accurate insight into the nature of things, for in its deepest sense, suffering is intimately linked to a misapprehension of the nature of reality.

I’ll share more of his insights in future posts, but I’m really encouraged by this one.

“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”

The Buddha said that, and it sounds like a close corollary to the Eckhart Tolle description of sin I quoted earlier this week.

I see plenty of anger, and I feel too much of it myself. I’m sure I cause plenty also, even though I try hard not to. Of all the damaging behaviours, anger is the one I understand best that I should avoid.

Wouldn’t the world be more pleasant if no one cut you off in traffic, shouted at you for making a mistake, treated you rudely in front of your co-workers? So maybe you should avoid dooing those things yourself. That’s what I tell myself most mornings in the car on the way to my office.

I’m happiest on the days when I take my own advice.

Palm Desert, California, where we’ve been this week, is the first place I’ve visited in years where I’ve wanted to move and also thought my wife would be happy. There’s something about the sunshine, the mountains, and the palm trees that make it feel like an oasis from everything troublesome or difficult.

Maybe it’s just being on vacation here that gives it this quality. I bought the local paper, The Desert Sun, this morning to read the real estate listings, and I read an article about a sting operation for parole violators. They rounded up a dozen parole offenders on weapons and drug charges, so I know this place has its problems like most other spots.

Still, the wondering makes me happy. How would it be to live in a place where you can play tennis outdoors all year long? Where you never have to drain the pool? Where you could have a palm tree in your back yard? It’s like living in a lottery win fantasy.

Yesterday at the tennis center, I admired the grapefruit trees, and our doubles partner said, “They let you pick the grapefruit and take them home if you want.” So we did.

They’re the pink ones, and i”ve never had one fresh off the tree. Like all fresh fruit, they are immeasurably more delicious this way. The juice spilled over my hand into the trash as I peeled it.

It tasted impossibly glamorous.

Among the many antidotes to sinful behavior that Tolle describes in A New Earth, he writes, “You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge” (p 13, A New Earth). The book gives an entire method for doing this by recognizing and controlling false ego, but today I just want to comment on finding the goodness already within you.

I can be pretty hard on myself, and many of the people I like best are the same way. For the most part, I think we do this with the best intentions: modesty, high standards, a desire to excel.

But it’s also very important to appreciate the strengths good qualities we already display and those that are latent within us. My parents taught me that God finds all of us loveable.

I’ll remind you. God loves you. Happiness starts there.

Eckhart Tolle, the best-selling spiritual author of The Power of Now, has written a great new book called A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. A New Earth promotes a method to end personal suffering, find happiness, and help end suffering and conflict in the world.

Early in the book, Tolle gives a great description of the term “sin”:

Sin is a word that has been greatly misunderstood and mistinterpreted. Literally translated from the ancient Greek in which the New Testament was written, to sin means to miss the mark, as an archer who misses the target, so to sin means to miss the point of human existence. It means to live unskillfully, blindly, and thus to cause suffering. Again, the term, stripped of its cultural baggage and misinterpretations, points to the dysfunction inherent in the human condition.

His book moves froward from this premise to describe ways to identify the point of human existence, to reduce suffering by overcoming misconceptions about the ego.

Cloud9000 intends to foster this approach to living, as well as any others that achieve the same thing.

Buy the book. It’s a great read.

I was thrilled to read in USA Today that LeBron James, the basketball superstar, announced after the NBA All Star Game this weekend that Microsoft(R) and he will launch a new web site for kids and teens. The site is designed to inspire young people to push themselves to succeed. It describes how he overcame struggles and hardship in his own life. It will post challenges for kids to tackle and let them chart their progress, and it will allow LeBron to comment on how to meet challenges.

The web site is called LeBron.msn.com, and it should launch this week. James has a well-publicized interest in working with young people, and this is a great way for him to reaqch a very broad audience.

James’ web site is a great example of a person’s using his celebrity as a platform to help young people achieve. It’s fantastic to see the websphere devoted to such a promising purpose.

Good for LeBron.

I love the start of a trip. My father spent lots of time in our childhood involving us in the planning of the next great family vacation. So we experienced the trips many times in our heads before we ever took them. The great question before each was whether the real trip would be better or worse than the imagined trip.

Going to the Sun Highway in Glacier National Park was way better than we imagined. We saw moose and the wooly mountain goats that look like a cross between a goat and a unicorn. We had a snowball fight in August at 12,000 feet, the first time I ever experienced summer snow in the Rockies.

I was 13 for that trip, and I’ve loved Montana ever since. Today I have the internet and guidebooks to bring my imagined trip much closer to reality than in my childhood, but that’s OK. These tools help me know what I want to see and where I want to go before I ever arrive. I’ve become expert at finding the kinds of restaurants, coffee shops, bookstores, and hikes that I love.

It’s great to anticipate having this much fun.