Caring Is Not a Weakness

Kindness, compassion, empathy, and caring empower. There’s a loud, obnoxious message permeating the collective consciousness these days. That message is that kindness, compassion, empathy, and caring make you weak. That giving a shit about the welfare of anyone other than yourself or your specific group is somehow part of the “woke” agenda. The message is that doing anything for anyone other than you and yours is a sign of weakness. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is not

Getting a Handle On My Shortened Fuse

A quest to create or find more chill, balance, and centering. Lately, I go from calm to irked like a high-performance car goes from zero to sixty. I recognize that there’s something in the collective consciousness eating away at my calm, my balance, my okay. Without a doubt, this is tied to the horribly unkind, uncompassionate, hateful, spiteful “people” in positions of power. When did it become okay to be outright rude, nasty, and disrespectful? The not-funny thing about this

What’s On The Other Side of This Mood?

That depends on the choices I make. I am not in a good mood at the moment. There are multiple compounding factors to this. For context, please allow me to lay them out here. I did not sleep well last night. I was having stress-thoughts (dreams? It’s so seldom that I recall dreams). These were about the insane, infuriating state of the nation, the world, my medieval reenactment society, the health and welfare of numerous of my friends, and a

Why Do I Keep Doing This?

Is there a reason for me to keep doing this? For my first-ever New Year’s Action, back in 2011/2012, I decided to embrace my desire to be a more prolific writer. My New Year’s Action was this: I would write a blog entry, once a week, every Wednesday. That was 707 weeks ago – 13.6 years. Every. Single. Wednesday. For more than 13 years. When I started exploring this idea for choosing my own way in life – Pathwalking –

Only You Know Where Your Lines Are

That’s good – knowing your lines empowers you. Everyone has limits of their own making. Lines in the sand that they cannot or will not cross. Some of these are utterly conscious and handpicked. Others are subconscious and not necessarily desirable. Yet, either way, only you know where your lines are. There are many things in your life that you can apply lines to. Often, people cede many of them because they worry about the impression drawing lines will make

The Best Way to Handle Fear is to Face It

The uncomfortable truth. When people are scared, what they fear can become so overwhelming to the senses and emotions that they release all reason. Fear overrides logic, overcomes sensibility, and the next thing you know, you’ve allowed someone to manipulate you. All you need to do is look at the current American political situation to see the truth of this. The fear of suffering has been weaponized horrifically. Many people have been convinced that they will suffer horribly when the

Okay or Not Okay is Okay

Nobody can tell you how to be. Life in 2025 can be thoroughly exhausting. Spend any time at all reading or watching the news, talking to people about current events, and the ongoing assault on basic human decency, and it hits you. The dread, the uncertainty, the disquiet, the unease, and the fear are mind-numbing. For some people, all of this is a distant, far-off abstract. It’s so far enough removed from you and your life that little of what’s

How Do You Engage Active Conscious Awareness?

Practicing mindfulness is equally easy and challenging. Let’s get factual, shall we? Every single human being on Planet Earth is of three minds. Each of these has a job to do as part of your holistic, overall being. No one can function without the other. The first is the unconscious mind. This is where your brain controls the pumping of your heart, the working of your lungs, digestion, synapses firing, and all the necessary things that allow you to live.

Are You Alive and Breathing Right Now?

So long as you’re alive and breathing, you can do something. Just when you think the world can’t get any crazier, it does. Before you know it, you read about the latest utterly surreal move on the part of that businessperson, those politicians, that shitgibbon, and so on. It’s distressing, disheartening, upsetting, maddening, and scary. Life is always in flux because change is the one and only constant in the Universe. Yet, most people can only handle so much change

What Are You Doing and Why Are You Doing It?

Not an easy question to answer. Everyone faces expectations when it comes to doing things in life. Things tend to be done in one of three categories. By and large, people tend to focus on doing for others and the world. And by the world, I mean that nameless faceless entity that encompasses world affairs, politics, environmentalism, and so on. While the narrative in the collective consciousness tends to imply (or sometimes state outright) that you should put others (and

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