Take 18 minutes out of your life to watch this. You’ll be glad you did.

I am psyched beyond reasonable measure to be heading to SxSW. Last year, I’m fairly certain I vowed I was done, that I was not going back. I came home seriously sick and disillusioned. And yet here I am, just a single turn around the sun, barely able to concentrate on my work. Being human sure is interesting.

I’m sitting here, looking at my brand new, silly fast, beautiful new computer. And I have a knot in my stomach. I should be feeling relieved that I have a machine that not only works, but works much faster than the one it replaces. It’s a joy to use.

There’s a nagging voice in the back of my head that’s saying “you should have stuck it out with the old machine. You caved in when you could have made do, saved some money, and put less crap into the environment”.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

If you are eligible to vote in your state’s primary, please do so. We’re all responsible for the governments we choose.

As a Canadian, I can’t vote. But Canada is very strongly impacted by US policies. Hence this friendly request. Thanks.

Oh my. The last post I wrote here was exactly 6 months ago. That’s rather weak. Hard to believe I’ve left it alone for half a year.

But I’m 37 now, and I’ve finally come to grips with the fact that I move from passion to passion, rarely looking back. This has made for a rather bumpy ride through life. I have many scars, both literal and metaphorical. But each one tells a story, and the value of those stories is immeasurable.

So here’s the story of what’s occupied me this past half year, told concisely.

Work. The Blog Studio continues to happily fill my days. We’ve been doing our thing for long enough now that we have our systems down. Projects (usually) run smoothly, and I get to concentrate on IA and UI design. When I remember to, I feel proud of what I’ve built. I designed my ideal job and made it real.

Singing and playing guitar/keyboard/harmonica. All my life I’ve wished I could be a rock star. It’s not the glamour or money. It’s the singing and performing. To me, there is no more personal form of art than singing. Nothing makes me feel as naked. Or terrifies me quite as much. There’s also nothing quite as rewarding as fully committing to a lyric, and nailing it. I play twice a week with two groups, I practice guitar as much as possible, and am trying to learn to play harmonica and keyboards. Youtube is an amazing resource for lessons.

Family. I love being with my family. I have so much fun hanging with my kids. There is nothing more important to me than being the best dad I can be. I put a lot of energy into this. That energy doesn’t necessarily go into doing, instead it often goes into letting. Letting the kids be rambunctious monsters, or noise factories. It takes a lot of energy and attention to avoid snapping. But that expenditure is worth it. My kids are turning into amazing people. This may prove to be my greatest accomplishment.

Self. I try to spend about an hour a day on myself. Usually this doubles as walk the dog time. Currently, I’m working on accepting the moment just as it is. This is a very powerful practice; one that requires that we be able to clearly see what’s happening, and that we greet it with tenderness.

Art. I’ve been fooling around a lot with paint. With the help of my kids (especially the 4 year old) I’m learning to let go of representational imagery in favour of colour and texture.

So there you have it. The past six months in under 500 words!

Get out your calculator folks. It’s time to do some eye opening math.

Let’s say you sleep an average of 8 hours per night. Just how much wakeful life would you gain if you weaned yourself down to 7 hours per night?

The results are might leave you wide-eyed.

1 hour extra wakefulness times 365 days per year = 15.2 days awake

That means that in just 24 years, you will have spent an extra year awake.

Of course we all need our sleep. It’s quite amazing how much we take it for granted though. Drinking caffeine and alcohol can have significant impacts on the amount of sleep the body requires. So having that latte and that beer might be having a much greater impact than you realize.

Sleep is luxurious, and is something to be thoroughly enjoyed. But do you know the cost of that extra hour? It might be higher than you think.

The quality of my life is not dependent on the status of my to-do list.

Freaky.

Oh, got some articles on entrepreneurship coming up.

I’m constantly coming across the phrase “be in the moment”. I used it myself in my post what I learned in under 150 words.

But what the hell does it mean? Simply put it means experiencing a moment without the baggage of past and future.

Try this exercise – it takes all of 5 seconds:

Stop.
Breathe slowly.
Let go of your past – just for this breath.
Try to feel the air as it moves across your nose or your lips.
Breathe.
Don’t worry about the future – just for this breath.
Breathe again.

That’s it. You were in the moment. It’s really simple. Not easy, but simple. Repeat that simple exercise a couple of times per day for a week, and watch what happens.

Wow. What is thought? What is intellect? What is communication?

Watch this 8 minute video. The first half may seem odd, but stick with it.

Hey, good question. I’m glad you asked! Ok, so you didn’t. But this is my blog, and I can pretend all I want.

Living consciously means simply this: acting and reacting from your true inner self, not from your ego or from habit.

Easy, right? As if.

Living consciously has been my over-arching goal for a couple of years now. I didn’t call it this at first, because I wasn’t aware that it’s what I was trying to do. At first I just knew that there was too much incongruity between how I acted and how I really felt. The more I looked into that, the more I realized that much of what I did as I went through my day was a series of preset reactions to stimuli. I wasn’t really choosing what I doing. I just kind of did it, while the conscious me went along for the ride.

When I started reading up on Buddhism and other such stuff, I got totally drawn in to the concept of now. Being in the now is a way to sidestep preset reactions. If I’m in this moment, I choose how to act.

Over at 97thmonkey.com, I propose that in living consciously can change the world. Now, don’t mistake me for a mystic. I’m not suggesting that the world’s problems will magically evaporate. But I am suggesting that when we live and act consciously, our actions take on a couple of new characteristics:

• we tend not to make as much of an impact on society and the environment
• we tend to act with more kindness and gratitude
• we tend to value quality over quantity

As fucked as our world is at the moment (see the recent update to the Doomsday Clock), I just can’t see us getting out of this mess with the same thinking that created it. Living consciously, I believe, may offer a gateway by which sanity can prevail. Put another way, if I’m less invested in my ego, and more invested in this moment, I’ll make decisions that lead to more good, not more bad.

So that, in the colloquial nutshell, is what I mean. Living consciously is such a simple thing to do. But don’t mistake simplicity with ease. For most of us, the length of our entire lives has been spent conditioning us to act from ego. The ego clings to control with a maniacle rage, not realizing that by releasing its control, You become richer, not poorer. Getting past your ego can be one of the most challenging tasks a person can face. But I think more and more of us are feeling compelled to do so. I’ll go into the reasons why at another time.