Tag: Life

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The Menu of Life

The Menu of Life. Life is likely not going to go as planned. Your life well, it does what it does and as much as you plan, things change.

As much as you are an excellent planner, setting out that trajectory, establishing those goals, implementing them one after another successively. As you are moving towards that goal with values in assessments all taking place, well life has other plans. You say, “I’ll do this and as a result, this will happen.” It doesn’t always go that way.

We’re all mature enough to know things don’t go our way, but here’s a way to reframe that experience. Planners can experience frustration when things don’t go the way they’ve been planned. There’s anxiety, fear, “It’s not supposed to go this way!” is the response. We could call that reaction immature but that’s not realistic, and a little naïve.

Reframe The Baking, Let’s Cook

Let’s reframe this let’s rethink of it in terms of food preparation. You see life is cooking, it’s not baking. Cooking you can fudge a little, change the ingredients. You can add a little here, take away something here, adding some pepper to it instead of whatever the recipe says.

One of the ways that you can see this in life is on a restaurant menu. You see the phrase. “Our take,” or “Our spin on a classic pasta dish.” Maybe a Pasta Primavera and our spin on it. That is cooking. You can change the bread of a clubhouse sandwich and still have a clubhouse sandwich.

Errors in Baking

Baking, leave out an ingredient or change one. Switch salt for sugar, they look the same but you don’t get the result you want. Everything is changing. So, life is not baking it’s about cooking it’s about being flexible. Can you change the ingredients can you change the cooking time if you want? Are you flexible enough? If you’re baking you’re not, you’re setting yourself up for rigidity and disappointment. Choose cooking to be flexible and enjoy that meal your cooking.

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KRIS WILDER

Kris Wilder is a martial artist based in Seattle Washington. He has authored many martial art books, including the classic, The Way of Kata. Making no apologies for his obsession of Football he can be found telling any who will listen about the nuances of the Canadian Football League.

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Ashes to Ashes

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Ashes to ashes, dust to dust is a classic statement used in funeral services. It’s not a prayer and you won’t find it in The Bible, although it is implied. It is found in the Anglican Book of Prayer on page 501 of the burial rite but enough about that.

Kids, the youth we’re all going through life and those groups of people believe that “Heck we’re gonna live forever!” It’s immortalized in songs, poems, movies, plays, etc. There are warnings about mortality as well, in just as many media, songs, poems, etc. It’s like the burial rite it is a statement of the inevitable.

Inevitability

There are three reactions you can have to this inevitability. You can live it up. Party until you want to stop or you die. That is also immortalized in song. There is another version of this which is to ignore it. And the third is to embrace mortality daily.

Here is the productive way that it should be handled. You see when we ignore it which is the way we live most of our lives, we ignore our mortality. That’s fine and dandy, we use that because it works for us. The, “Live it up until you die,” works well too. To celebrate a wedding or birthday, you know you want to live it up a little bit and you want to have a good time. Or you choose to kind of ignore the mortality that’s embedded in those events.

We can embrace our mortality and also not have it hang over us. You see all three of these are appropriate in context and content and useful. Imagine acting as if it was a funeral at a wedding? That’s disturbing, it’s dysfunctional as well. I’m sure you can conjure other visions of inappropriate behavior within an event.

Three Ways to Use Ebb and Flow

You know your life contains all three of these and this is how you do it well. You understand the content and you understand the context. The ebb, and the flow. You survive using these three methods of moving through the understanding of the mortality, your coming death.

So, in the end, balance is the key. It’s using these three different segments of understanding and using them to be tools. To not only be in the right place at the right time but to live into the moment as well.

Three Methods

Those three rules again are; To ignore your mortality (which is really what we do most of our lives). Or it is to completely live it up and partake of the wine and the festivities daily. And the other one is to remember our death is coming.

You can see how when used in the wrong context they don’t serve a purpose. If you understand these three roles and you use them in the right place, life becomes adroit, appropriate, and contextual.

Psychology Today: 5 Strategies for Accepting Your Mortality

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