Stay on Offense Climb Mountains

Attacking Adversity

Bookish Weapon Number Forty-Three

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Bob Goff’s new book “Dream Big” is inspirational. It actually got me to start dreaming again. Surely it is a Bookish Weapon. You need weapons like this if you are going to Stay on Offense. Dreaming is essential.

The Bible says something about old men dreaming dreams and young men seeing visions. I would say that dreaming big is a vision. Especially if it is something that will captivate others.

Ambition

Goff says, “If ambition had two handles, they would be love and hope.” He says you should grab hold of love and hope and never let go. That makes sense. My experience has been that they are very easy to lose.

His main ambition has been to love God and people without an agenda. I suppose an example of this is him giving his personal phone number out to everybody and then taking the calls.

Who, Where and What

One of the first things you need to do according to Goff even before you start dreaming is to find out who you are, where you are, and what you want. That seems reasonable. He uses his experience as a pilot to explain this and I identify with that because I am I Private Pilot as well. However, Goff owns a small airline so he has a few more hours than myself. When you are landing you need to let the tower know who you are, where you are, and what you want.

That is sort of true. I remember when my wife and I were flying back from Abbotsford in Canada in a Piper Cherokee 140. As we were approaching Paine field in Snohomish County on our way to Boeing Field, a 747 was taking off below. It began to ascend and looked like it was going to hit us. I contacted the tower to tell them who I was, where I was, and what I wanted. I was Piper Cherokee four four four niner uniform, at 3,500 feet heading south and I wanted to know what to do since it looked like I was going to get hit. The tower told me to keep going at tht altitude and all would be well.

Technically when you are above 2000 feet you are not officially under the tower’s authority so once I could see the 747 pilot’s teeth, I decided to do a 180. I told the tower my plans and they wished me a good day. We survived.

Goff says, “An unexpectant life is one that is merely on repeat.” I like that. You need to have some expectations. You need to know what you want. One of the great pieces of advice I read was to ask yourself over and over, what you feel, what you want, and what’s your next move.

Sleepwalking

This part of the book was my favorite. Many of us sleepwalk through life. It is easy to do. It is difficult to realize who the Universe/God has designed you to be in this world. At least it is for me.

Goff says, “I fully engage life and the people around me with love, honesty, and an unreasonable, almost annoying heap of expectation. What would happen in your life if you started to do the same?” He says you need to live in “constant expectation of what might happen next.” That’s very good! Read that again!

So what About the Dreams?

List them. Goff says to get a pen and paper and list your dreams. How long has it been since you did that? Have you ever done it? So do it! Then, “…ask yourself which one of your ambitions is more beautiful and lasting and impactful than all the others.”

“Ask yourself what would make you happy and fulfilled.” Go ahead do it. Don’t just read it. Are there any themes in your list of dreams/ambitions. Anything you keep coming back to? If there are then those are clues. Stick with it.

Goff says, “…your dreams come in three sizes: easy, kind of hard, and seemingly impossible. The size of your ambitions doesn’t necessarily indicate the difficulty of achieving them.”

The author talks about so many more things in this book. Like putting yourself into the “stream of possibility.” Yes, you can do that. And figuring out how God wired you. Being a real dreamer and not a daydreamer. How? Take action.

Go Hiking But Just Don’t Fall

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The possibility of failure is always in the back of my mind when I am in the mountains. My balance has become worse over the years.

Still, that should not prevent you from hiking. It is like anything in life. It requires courage. To accept that you might fall, but that you can learn from past experiences to help prevent it.

Face Plants

I have done many face plants. There are several that I recall well, but the one that stands out from all the rest is falling down Pebble Creek on Rainier. It was before I began wearing Microspikes on the mountain. It was steep and all ice. My legs went out from under me and I tumbled a hundred feet into the rocks cutting my legs and my head. I was lucky that an EMT was on his way up the mountain and he bandaged me up and told me to get to a hospital.

Getting fired from a job is a face plant. I have been actually fired a couple of times. One was when I was selling stamps. You carried this 35-pound briefcase full of rubber stamps door to door. I was horrible at it. Most recently I was fired from a wholesale pharmaceutical company. These failures, just like face plants on the mountain, teach you something each time. I learned the importance of Micorspikes from my Rainier fall and learned about weaknesses I needed to strengthen after being fired. In sales of course, typically you are fired for not meeting your numbers. I have worked for over thirty different sales organizations. Most of the time I was either the number one representative or close to the top. A lot of job changes were companies going out of business or me just deciding I could do better elsewhere.

Breaking Something

Falling can also lead to actually breaking something. Once I cracked a couple vertebra after landing on my back and on another occasion I cracked a rib. These kinds of things go with the territory when you are someone like me who has never been very athletic. I also have repeatedly broken expensive trekking poles.

You can break things in life as well. I broke two marriages and many bank accounts. But once again you learn and grow. Then with some luck, things got a little better.

So get out there and go hiking!

Bookish Weapon Number Forty-Two

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“Falling Upward,” by Richard Rohr is about, as the subtitle says, “A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life.” It is a thoughtful book by a well known Franciscan priest.

It is a good book for people who are in the second half of life and are wealthy enough to be able to partake in all that the second half offers. In fact, it is also an interesting book for those that are just old, but are still living in the first half.

First Half

Rohr points out that we are a “first-half-of-life culture,” largely concerned about surviving successfully. I would add, or just surviving. He says, “We all try to do what seems like the task that life first hands us: establishing an identity, a home, relationships, friends, community, security, and building a proper platform for our only life.” Yet, many, will not accomplish the first half of life in their entire lifetimes, clinging tenaciously to basic survival.

“You need a very strong container to hold the contents and contradictions that arrive later in life.” If you don’t have that strong container it’s tough. He says, “In fact, far too many (especially women and disadvantaged people) have lived very warped and defeated lives because they tried to give up a self that was not there yet.”

Tragedy

“The Tragic Sense of Life,” is the title of one of the chapters in this book. I thought it made a lot of sense. He says that the Greek word for tragedy means “goat story.” I thought that was funny because I have been referred to as a “Billy goat,” due to my hiking. The idea however is that we can grow from tragedy. Rohr says, “It all depends on whether we are willing to see down as up; or as Jung put it, that “where you stumble and fall, there you find pure gold.” “Lady Julian put it even more poetically: “First there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God.”

He says, “I am personally convinced that Jesus’ ability to find a higher order inside constant disorder is the very heart of his message – and why true Gospel, as rare as it might be, still heals and renews all that it touches.” That is a profound statement and it certainly rings true. Order and chaos are a part of life, in constant ebb and flow.

Second Half

“In the second half of life, we do not have strong and final opinions about everything, every event, or most people, as much as we allow things and people to delight us, sadden us and truly influence us.” What a great way to live! The older I get the less I think I know for sure about anything yet I have met many older men who have set their opinions in stone. Rohr says, “It always deeply saddens me when old folks are still full of themselves and their absolute opinions about everything.”

People who do the second half of life well have combined their occupation and their life so that their “delivery system” is one. He says, “Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore but to love what you have – right now. This is a monumental change from the first half of life, so much so that it is almost the litmus test of whether you are in the second half of life at all.”

This book continues with a look at the shadow self. Shadow work is a topic in many books these days, but I think this one offers unique insight. So buy the book! You will be glad you did. After all, it is another bookish weapon.

Go Hiking And Feel Limitless

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A couple of weeks ago I hiked up Mailbox Peak. It is one of the more difficult climbs off of I-90. I did it on a Sunday morning which is my usual time to climb. Then a friend decided he wanted to climb it the following Saturday. Usually, I don’t hike the more difficult ones the close together, but I am happy that I did. It made me feel limitless.

How does nature do that for a person or does it just do it for me? Let’s explore that a little.

No Rain

First, there was a forecast for rain so I came prepared with my usual fair, an old REI jacket, hiking pants and a cover for my backpack. I never wear “rain gear.” But it didn’t rain. There were just clouds which made the temperature perfect for a hike. The younger hikers with me pushed up the mountain and I made it in a record time of under two hours.

Beating a personal record always lifts my spirit. I somehow convince myself I still have what it takes which is becoming increasingly harder to do these days. So I would add this to the formula for feeling limitless.

Lightning

As we sat on top of Mailbox admiring the decorations hikers have bestowed on the mailbox and that someone has installed a second mailbox not far from the first, we noticed lightning strikes across the valley. We could hear what sounded like a small car starting its engine.

Then as we began the climb down the lightning continued. Spectacular jagged cracks in the sky from heaven to earth. It made me feel a part of something out of this world. Sort of limitless.

Thunder

As we moved down the mountain further it began to rain very large drops and then once we were in the forest the thunder began in earnest. It was the loudest I had ever heard. I suppose that is because I was never out in the forest in the middle of a thunderstorm before. Again it made me feel part of something otherworldly. Limitless!

I could no longer see the lightning strikes, but I could hear the results. Somehow I couldn’t get used to the overwhelming sound as I jogged down the mountain. It surrounded me.

Rain

And then it began to rain. Not sprinkle. Real rain. Pouring down like it was coming from a hose aimed at the top of your head. Normally, rain is just an annoyance. You know you are going to get wet and you move through it. This was another level of wet. Rain gear would have been nice, but not as much fun.

It was like the heavens opened up, reached down, and held you in its arms. Wet arms for sure, but heavenly arms nevertheless. Once again I felt part of something much bigger. Limitless!

Bookish Weapon Number Forty-Two

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Jim Kwik is a well-known speaker and author who hangs out with the likes of Tony Robbins and other life coaches. His latest book, “Limitless,” is another great contribution to the self-help genre. It is almost three-hundred pages long.

Even though this is a great contribution, I expected more. Maybe it is because I have taken other speed reading and memory improvement courses so I was looking for something I did not already know. The older I get the more I run into this.

Motivation

One of the additions Kwik made to this book is contained in the title. The idea that we can become limitless like the popular movie with Bradley Cooper from 2011. Who’d doesn’t want to be limitless? I like what he says at the beginning of the book, “If an egg is broken by an outside force, life ends. If broken by an inside force life begins. Great things always begin from the inside.”

Later in his chapter on motivation, Kwik breaks down the “Why” into three areas, Mindset, Motivation, and Methods. The chapter is called Limitless Motivation. He discusses the importance of purpose, but first gives us a formula: Motivation = Purpose x Energy x S (to the 3rd – cubed). The S-cubed stands for small simple steps.” Good formula.

I like his discussion about goals and how he adds HEART goals to SMART goals. “Heart” stands for H- healthy, E – enduring, A- Alluring, R – Relevant, and T-Truth.

He doesn’t leave out discussing belief systems either. Anyone that Tony Robbin’s influences are going to discuss limiting beliefs and how to overcome them.

He also brings up “Primary Questions,” which are a trademark of Tony Robbins, but Jim Kwik calls them ”Dominant Questions.” A primary question or “dominant” question is the question we ask ourselves over and over across contexts. For example, “How can I survive,?” could be a Primary Question. Then you take yourself through the process of finding a better Primary Question.

Reading Fast

Kwik has a lot to say about how to read faster. It is one of his staples. So here is a recommendation: Use your finger to scan the lines. That by itself will increase your reading speed. It makes me nervous and I read to relax so it doesn’t work for me although it does work.

Another tip is how to reduce subvocalization by counting while you are reading.

He quotes Mark Twain at the beginning of this chapter and I love this quote: “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”

Remembering

You remember better if you test yourself on the material by asking questions to force you to recall and related study. Spaced review increases learning. Reviewing is key. If you do not review material you will eventually forget it.

Of course, Kwik and other memory experts all use the Memory Castle approach to memorizing phone numbers or names or lists of any kind. It was initially discovered in Roman times. You have many “castles” in your life. They are “locations” where you have spent time. Your living room, bedroom, the grocery store you frequent. You begin in one corner of a room and pick out objects in the “castle” or room like a bookcase, advancing in one direction around the room. Then you use your imagination to tie something you want to remember to that location. Simple! Not necessarily easy. You need to develop your imagination. Kwik discusses this in detail.

There is so much more in this book so please get it and read it! It is a great bookish weapon.

Go Hiking Because It Is A Pleasure Prescription

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Hiking is back! This last weekend they opened the parks up. Hopefully, it will stay that way. My first hike was last weekend and it really was my pleasure prescription.

You really don’t understand how much you miss something until it is taken away. When I found out the trail would be open I was overjoyed. I got so excited. It changed my whole day.

Strange Times

There were two strange things about this hike and both involved people. The first was when I arrived at the trailhead and that was at 3:00 AM. Usually, nobody is there at that time of the morning. Then almost immediately a car pulled in behind me. Then another car and another car. Within five minutes there were six more cars in the lot. Fortunately, I was able to get on the trail before anyone and get a decent head start. Plus I was lucky that none of them were fast.

This sort of thing doesn’t happen, but I think they thought they would beat everyone else to the mountain so they could avoid other people during this Pandemic. I don’t think it was because, like me, they were just so excited to get on the trail.

The second strange thing I saw was when I started my trek back down the mountain. A group of people arrived at the false summit. I think they were a family. The older man who may have been the father was wearing a pistol and ammo. I have been climbing up this mountain for many years week after week and have never seen someone openly display a weapon. Is it fear? I think so.

The Best

Every hike is different and this one was no exception as you can tell fro the above comments. It was also so much fun. I got to see my favorite tree! Yes, I have a favorite tree. And I discovered that my home exercise routine had improved my fitness level dramatically over where I was in March. I made it to all my checkpoints and to the top in record time.

It was also an opportunity to learn something about myself. I left my “meal” in the car so I had to get up to the top and back down with no carbohydrates. I always hike the first half in a fasted state. I was not sure if I would be able to get all the way back down or not. I do think it slowed my pace coming down the mountain, but I made it.

Go hiking! The trails are open!