Postcards from the Funny Farm

This post is dedicated to a friend going through a tough spot.

Paul McCartney said all those years ago that “My love does it good.”  He was right.  All the love he has put into music like Yesterday, the Long and Winding Road, and literally thousands of other hits could fill a stadium … as it often did and still does.  Think of how many humans he has inspired?

James Taylor sang about going to the Carolina Outer Banks “in my mind.” It’s impossible to tell how many people his song has enlightened.

To me, songs like these mean that self-love is important and we can use it to help people as well as ourselves.  Most of all, they say that if you don’t love yourself first, you can’t love anyone else.

Any one who says “he doesn’t love himself” is not only in need of love but is also possibly a grave threat to himself.

We should love ourselves.  I know this flies in the face of Christian culture that states we should humble ourselves and as Paul says at some point, “Beat our bodies for the cause of Christ” (paraphrased).  But it is a simple truth that nurtured and fostered love will have an impact on our family and world.

I’ve spoken with several people in preparing for this series and the data has been staggering.  I learned that most people will not say they love themselves. In fact, some will say “far from it.”  This is spite of the fact that they are wonderful gifted, attractive people.  Even more surprising was that I found more women did not love themselves.  How sad, how utterly sad that is to me.  Why is this so?

I learned at an early age from great parenting and through authors like Leo Buscgalia and Rollo May that we need to love ourselves and love others as a #1 priority.  I think much of my time spent in the church chipped away that that foundation of self-love and I found myself quite neurotic and self-loathing in my teens and early twenties.  As I left the church and came back several times, I learned there should be a balance: self-love and loving God.  In my eyes, God is self-love and the church is simply self-”repair”.  I don’t know about you, but I prefer love to repair.

Do you mediate?  Do you pray? Do you buy yourself your favorite ice cream cone and listen to a favorite song over and over?  I’ve been doing that for over a month with Coldplay’s “Viva la Via.”  Man, what a song.  These are just a few examples of how to love yourself.  You can buy yourself something or just spend time reading your favorite parts of a book, enjoying nature, or enjoying anything you feel a connection with.

I strongly feel that a lot of our problems in society whether they be with the family or the economy can be traced back to people who do not love themselves.

Remember in “A Christmas Carol” when Scrooge remembers his old girlfriend and the children he knew before in life? It all made him so happy, he jumped with glee and wanted to right all the wrongs he had done.  More than giving out money though, the best lesson that Dicken’s tale gives us is that a man or woman needs to find the love for themself. That will produce empathy for others and hence … giving.

Remember dads, moms, leaders in the world, and everyone else what Paul McCartney said: “Your love does it good.” Keep it tender, keep it fed, keep it warm and it will change the world.  In some upcoming posts I’ll be exploring “self-love” in more detail.  Perhaps your comments can help steer my inspiration.

A question for you: Do you love yourself?  If no … why not?

Along the rows of Adelanto where I teach, there are rows and rows of foreclosed homes. The damage in the varies from the windows being busted out to the trashcans laying askew on the driveway week after week. My overly creative mind, sometimes to its own detriment, can’t help but imagine the stories:

This is where she dreamt of more for her life …

This is where he first held her hand …

This is where grandma passed away.

You can imagine a lot more if you try.  I watched mt oldest daughter Isabella take her first steps at our last house we used to rent.  While I wouldn’t have liked to stay there, it would be great to age and grow old in the same house where all your wonderful memories happened.  Imagine if my daughter could hang her tire chains on the place I put mine.

So how much heartache is going on out there with millions losing their mortgages?  I’ll bet it isn’t the signing over of the place that gets them the most.  More than that, it’s got to be the memories they are being crow-barred away from.  I am so thankful I have a good job and I can pay my mortgage.  But, in an economy like this, is it wise to hand on to object memories like houses?  Maybe it’s wiser to see it more as large brick of wood once on a truck and now in another shape.  Not much more, and not much less.

If you recall Jimmy Stewart in the Christmas classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” you remember when the angels are talking about George Bailey’s suicide attempt.  Clarence says, “Is he sick?” and the senior angel says,

“Worse, he’s discouraged.”  Clarence Oddbody got his wings but not by giving George inspiration.  He helped him along and George was the one who finally seized it.  I wrote a list a while back on how to foster inspiration, it has some stuff I use.

The other day I was filling out interview questions regarding this blog and one of the questions was: “What do you do to get inspired?” I can’t remember my exact words but I answered how I don’t DO things to be inspired. I wait for it to fly by: then I CAPTURE it. I can’t create inspiration, I can only foster it. In the Allen Ginsberg sense of the word, to me inspiration is HOLY: it comes when it comes and you don’t order it around.

You can be floating on your back in the Bahamas and still feel like #$%^ if your mojo(inspiration) is no-no. I just try and be ready to capture the mojo when it flies by. Pocket mp3 recorders, yellow pads on clipboards, templates on my desktop, my list goes on. If you’d like to continue discussing other ways to “capture” inspiration, let’s start that in the comments. This post is, after all, about cleaning :)

Like any other activity, cleaning is not an automatic source of inspiration. However, if you’re bored and uninspired, I highly recommend it. And when rearranging gets involved it’s a double-whammy! In a phrase: BE the outdoor furniture covers! Cleaning can be especially helpful to writers (including bloggers, novelists and freelance) and artists, but all walks of people benefit.  I once read of a writer who looked at a blank page for weeks when upon opening the cupboard he smelled breadcrumbs that triggered volumes of introspection. If you want to be inspired in the work you do, get ready for inspiration when it comes. If it doesn’t come and you’re bored: you could pick a cleaning job large or small and just do it. Wouldn’t it be a great thing if simple cleaning job like buffing out your wife’s car (the topic of my current guest post at It Might be Love) could keep you off the therapist’s couch.  Folks, in my 39 years almost without fail, inspiration has always followed through cleaning. And hey, if I’m wrong, at least you got a project done!  Now the toughest question:

So you’re inspired: now what?

I want to discuss Ellis’ theory of Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT) as it relates to a happy marriage. Let’s face it, when your marriage is thriving and healthy, it feels like you’re taking pure energy pills. I may have mentioned REBT here before but this is a unique way of looking at it to keep your marriage positive and growing in love.  REBT is a way of breaking down communication and understanding why we and our spouses do what we do. The basic template are these ABC’s:

A: Adversity comes our way and we are forced to deal with it.  This can be like the house being messy for example.  Will you clean it?  Will you yell at your spouse over it?  Will you do nothing and BROOD? etc.

B: Beliefs we hold cause us to see adversity in given ways.  For example, if I grew up with a maid, I will not likely clean the house all the time.  On the other hand, if I was the cleaner my whole life I might never let it get bad. Then finally,

C: Consequences result after A and B combine to make our actions.  The trick is really studying how we got here in a given situation.

I think it is the best piece of advice I could give to a married couple to study Ellis’ ABC’s of REBT.  It is the logical continuation of possibility thinking (I wrote a series on that btw) Understanding that your spouse says and does things directly as a result of their beliefs might lessen the number of arguments you have.  For example, if you learn that your wife never got new shoes much, then you might understand her apprehension to buying your kids as many as you think they need.  That’s a simple example but this method can help you manage your money, sex-life, raising and disciplining of kids, etc.  Remember to think your arguments through and remember your ABC’s.

Got a method to your marriage that works for you?

“We are all time travelers moving at the speed of exactly 60 minutes per hour.”
-Spider Robinson

Some of us are traveling in limousines, others are at the freeway on-ramp with cardboard signs. Regardless of the means, we are going from a point a to a point b every day of our lives. It is easy to look at other peoples work and art in life as nonsensical and bad. Have you ever seen a car with a million poorly placed stickers on it and gone: “Why? It is such a nice car.” That is their art and you should respect it. Once we were down at the beach years ago and I was making sand castles with my niece. I saw the remnants of a sand castle with sticks like towers and assumed the creator was long gone. It was in a good spot so I swept it away as if it never existed. I think the creator must have been mentally ill because she came screaming at me and my young niece as if we were the devil for destroying her sand castle. We got through the scene some how and relocated. Luckily it didn’t seem to affect my niece much but I thought about it for weeks after. I really felt bad about it.

The sand castle wasn’t the real lesson here. For me, it was a lesson about other people and respecting the art they create along the journey. My recommendation is to be very slow to criticize the art that people make whether it is their bumper stickers, their sand castles, or … the way they do simple things in life. It never hurts to give compliments, you can find one for anything. Another way to grow in this area: do a listening experiment.  I hope the sand castle incident will have the same effect on you as it had on me and make you less reckless with other people’s art and hence other people’s emotions. Just like an effective acne treatment, so your words can help and heal someone struggling.

It is admirable to want to rush in and show a relative where she/he is messing up their life but if you are not willing to go the extra mile you might be better off to leave it alone. Take some time first, go do something physical, then make your call. Consider this article when you do:

Do you have relatives? Most everyone does. If you answered yes, do they ever drive you insane making bad choices for themselves and for their kids? Well you are not alone. I’ve said it before and I will say it again: boundaries must be set with family. This is a healthy thing. When you see people in your family consistently doing the wrong thing, tell them if you like but be aware it may hit you back. Did you know that lifeguards are taught not to swim out and hold a drowning man above the water? The reason is because he flails and it could take them down as well. That’s why they carry that red floater, to throw to the one in distress.

In trying to “get something off your chest” however well intended, you may be labeled “judgmental,” “ignorant,” or just plain “stuck up” as the relative inevitably “flails.” Sometimes “letting the chips fall where they may” can injure you. Still, your cares about this relative may keep haunting you like a salesman at the door. In that case you have to deal with it.

NOTE: If you suspect your loved ones are doing something harmful or neglectful to their children, skip the confrontation and please report them immediately to child protective services. I am absolutely 100% pro kids before any psychology-speak comes into play.

If it’s a lesser thing, just remember that it is hard to love sometimes. Before you act in love, make sure it is in love and not as a result of your pride. Most importantly, make sure that you care enough to go a few rounds with your loved ones. It may be you who is the one to “rudely” awaken them from a deep sleep of denial. Like any intervention, bring armor for your emotion most of all.

Last statement: If you don’t care, don’t speak.

Owners do “walk-throughs” starting at the storefront. Then, they adjust and repair things accordingly. I have always seen a parallel in a storefront to the self.

When you enter a store, hopefully there is an owner who thinks about you, the customer. If you need something, he’ll guide you to that place. If you have a complaint, or if someone treats you unfairly, he’ll step in to make it right by you. Owners accept everything.

When I was an area coach for Pizza Hut, I used to love to see my managers out in front of the store picking up slips of trash and sweeping. It showed ownership. We as ordinary people seeking self-improvement need to step back and check our own storefront, which is “the self.”

Here are some points you might find on that sort of checklist:

Appearance: A big one. How do I look? The way we present ourselves to the world affects the way we are received. Success isn’t all luck as many failures would have us believe.

Friendliness: Do I look people in the eye? Do I show concern for their needs? Am I interested? Being friendly with the world outside the storefront develops our reputation person by person and often brings in to us better opportunities. Owners commit themselves to listening then finding solutions.

Service: Was I able to help people around me today? Did I steer people in the right direction? Did I engage in conversation that was helpful?

Relevance: Was I relevant? Have I striven to become effective in relevant areas of my work, my friends, my family?

If I am a storefront then how do I look? If I am the store, how am I inside and more importantly, how would others rate me? Ultimately we should mostly strive to pass our own rating since the crowd can be fickle. Still, let us never forget that every person’s view of us is, at varying levels, important.

Now, step back and look at yourself: If only for this day, own the storefront, the world will notice.

If there is anything I give to my kids, I hope it’s the ability to distinguish between what is real and what is fake. I want my kids to recognize love when it’s real and run away from it when it’s fake. The same for friends, jobs, sales pitches, people, and the opportunities of life that present themselves. So, you may ask, what makes me think I know what real is? The answer is simple: I study it, identify it, and emulate it. If there is no model for real success in a given realm, I self-define it. If I had a magic mantra, I’d be a billionaire. There is no real shortcut to distinguishing what is real from what is fake. Each person must come up with her/his own definition. But you can practice at this ability. In some ways it’s the most important skill in life.

I once heard that bank employees go through a week long training where mostly all they do is spend time fondling and examining money. The idea being that if they are familiar with real money then they will more easily and automatically spot a counterfeit.

There’s the advice right there, the philosopher’s stone, the diamond in the rough:

Spend time with what you know is real, be it in the realm of people, literature, mathematics, religion, God (notice I made the two quite different things). Whatever it is that you hunger for in life, get close to the real. The fake will be revealed in the presence of the real.

Let me give you another example. Let’s say you want to be a success. There are minions of websites and corporations who want to define that for you. Some may be real, some may be a wolf in sheep clothing. Sp how do you navigate these waters? Define success. Watch examples of your definition. Get to know people who share components of your definition of success.

Spend time with the real and you’ll know how to spot a fake. Have you ever been duped by Amway or other MLM marketing scheme? Ask yourself this: would you have fallen so easily if you’d taken the time to define what success is for you? If I would have known (and I lost $500 when I was 20 at an Amway meeting) how real success was defined, I wouldn’t have stayed past the opening greeting with designer water and cashews. When you have defined success on your terms, no one can take away the growing happiness that results as you get closer to your goal. Have you ever bought into something you thought was real but really was a counterfeit?

Afterthought: One example of how I define success is my personal “CAN” ranking system for my b.... You can read more about this here. You might find parallels in your quest to define and rank the successes of your life.

I just read that 460 million vacation days went unused last year by American workers … no wonder we have so many mental problems in our country! To all those people so worried about missing work I say this: “Be responsible, go on vacation!” This post was inspired by a discussion at Loose Suits.

Of course people with jobs that don’t offer sick days, like freelance writers and the like, might not click on this article. Theirs is a different dilemma that I could discuss at length as well. Having said that, we are all faces with the importance of taking vacations. So if we know how important they are, why aren’t we taking them? In my opinion, folks with vacation days would be “sick” not to use them!

Any problems we have at work and at home will get worse if we don’t use our vacation days.

I look at vacation days as a time to regroup. It’s a time to get romantic with your spouse. Vacations are a time to find inspiration in even those “nothing” moments. How many times have I taken a simple walk in a new place and had tomes of inspiration flood into my mind. It can heal what you thought was impossible stress. I have written my best songs while taking vacation time.  It can be really tough to find the flights you desire, that’s why it is helpful to plan way ahead.  If it is a priority and you are willing to wait you will fare better!

Looking for timely new york flights is even harder than looking for cheap flights to germany. However the flights to thailand can be bought at the last minute too. This is true for a number of other flights as well.

I’ve been highly stressed out at work before. (hasn’t everybody?) It can feel like radioactive heat burning you up … it deserves you a day off. After a “mental health day” the heat goes away. I get fresh new ideas that ironically make me more valuable to my employer. What? More valuable by taking time off? Yes. It’s a time to sharpen my axe.

I think the paranoia many have of getting in trouble at work for taking sick days is unwise. People need to get over it and just take those vacation days like clockwork. It just might be the difference between a promotion or being written up for lack of productivity. The article I read on this was truly staggering. The best argument for this is simple: Look at pictures of your loved ones over the past few years. When you do so you will see just how fast this thing called a lifespan is passing by. Is work that important to Americans? Do people think a real man doesn’t call off work ever? Do that many Americans really think they are heroes for not taking a vacation? Getting any getaway locations in mind yet? I am. Here’s a place to buy your travel supplies. Enjoy.

Okay, so I covered the first two letters of value: “V” for visceral and “A” for aphoristic. Now the third: “L” for linkage! Link love is the #1 way to make friends and influence people (namely bloggers you link to on the web. After you’ve written your visceral post of around 200 words and given it a catchy and creative title, it is important before you press the “publish” button to add 3 deeplinks (links to other posts on your blog) and 3 linkloves (links to other blogs). This can become a standard practice and you will find it easy then. IT IS VERY CUMBERSOME AT FIRST. You need to try and automate the process however you can. It should be like brushing your teeth every morning. Just to give you some of my tips:

1. For backlinks I have a shortcut to my most popular posts page. I open it in a new tab and getting relevant backlinks that are my most popular is as easy as copy/paste. This helps with rank and authrity. It also links your best stuff for people who are interested in it. REMEMBER: The best way to include links is within the context of your writing. Just inserting them random looks like spam and worse than that, it turns off your readers. You can automatically insert links in your blog (I recommend for a 200 word post 3 backlinks and 3 linkloves) and have it enhance your content.
2. For linklove: I use WordPress. As I add new faves to my blogroll, I can go to Manage / links in the admin section an choose the “blank” window feature. Then when I want to get a link open to check out or copy, all I need to do is click. I try to consistently link to my favorite blogs and I notice they really appreciate it. ONE NOTE: Chelle reminded me that the anchor text that the url is assigned to is important to rank, so choose appropriate words. For example: I really like this guy, if guy is the anchor text, then they only get juice for the word guy. If I says: “This guy knows music!” Then you link more effectively to his site about pop culture, music, and being a D.J..

Linkage of external sites along with the 2 types listed above is the third letter in blog value. Coming up tomorrow: The mysterious “U.” Keep following these guidelines and who knows, maybe you’ll be lookin’ into those las vegas hotels