Sitting there beneath an oak
Hatched a thought and let it soak
What if AI wrote a joke?
Who’s attention would it poke
Would it be dull obscene or woke?
How many would just take a toke
and let the words go up in smoke?
When will the laughter Bank go broke?
Though perfection is nice
We all choose a price
To pay for some vice
Be it pie by the slice
Or vodka on ice
Can’t avoid sacrifice
There’s no need to think twice
Go ahead roll your dice
Acceptable Risk
… who says it does?
Some of the people who read this blog have, by now, come to recognize the overuse of elipses… indicating that you are about to get some off-the cuff remarks…as if I ever have ever written remarks on my cuffs? Would that be the cuffs on my shirts because they offer limited writing space and I often roll them up so they would be of limited utility. So maybe we’re talking about the cuffs on my pants or slacks? Well I mostly wear sweats and the cuffs are often covered by socks or sort of folded under and around… So these remarks aren’t off the cuff…
So what other phrases do I abuse? There are so many… and some of the ones I use I am now seeing all over print and web media. Some are sales phrases.
This is a limited time offer….. while supplies last… special offer just for you…
A “limited time offer?”
Well captain obvious… we have a human experience that does not extend forever in the realm of time as of yet… so every little thing is a limited time offer. Life is a limited time offer. That means that any offer might be like a snowflake in a blizzard of limited time offers.
While supplies last?
Of course …. Because when things don’t exist (or the supply is at zero) then you can’t have it right now. And supplies are limited… same notion. At any given moment in life experiences are either available, can be made available, or are not available. The trick here is in seeking peace and joy choices have to be made in terms of whether or not your spirit is available and paying attention to what is being supplied or what might be available right now.
No Pressure…
Well there’s a lie for you…When someone asks you about something or for something and says “no pressure” it’s as a buffer to hide rejection. So.. if someone says “Hey would you like to go to dinner with me.. and like no pressure.” Are they really saying “I really want to see what life would be like if we shared a meal or two but I don’t want you to know that I have a fragile ego and it’s hard for me to admit I will feel rejected if you don’t feel like I do? Most the time when most people..myself included say no pressure they are saying “I hope you will join this experiment with me… but I don’t want to admit to you what my reactions to your answer might be. There is no such thing as “no pressure.”
Come to think of it….. what would happen if there actually were “no pressure?” Well for one no pressure—no wheels. Oh sure there are a few solid rubber tires out there and some plastic ones too, however, most the transportation we navigate the streets with just wouldn’t go so smoothly without pressure. Yep and no pressure—no modern bathroom functions like a nice soothing shower or a good cleansing flush. So maybe that phrase needs to be used a little less…but no pressure.
So… all the above was intended to remind all of us that we see phrases that don’t make much sense and they are often meant to convince us that we should do something before time runs out or while supplies last however these phrases leave out some critical information like? While supplies last doesn’t get followed up by “but no pressure we have plenty or can create more.” Well…. Maybe in seeking peace and joy it is important to reflect on what some of the other actors using language in a lazy way might have you believe instead of encouraging you to explore the world and your actual thoughts and emotions.
The next time you are offered a “lifetime” guarantee please be bold enough to ask “what’s a lifetime”
A May fly lives 24 hours tops… a redwood lives hundreds of years and also if something quits working isn’t its lifetime done so doesn’t everything have a lifetime guarantee?
Well well… to sum this all up maybe the best way to avoid falling for a bad deal isn’t looking for what others can offer or guarantee, but to flip the script and focus on what we have to offer and keep offering it, recreating it while supplies last, and to put it out there for others to share… with just a little pressure.
And of course “watch what you say” or smell what you hear?
In the seeking peace and joy universe many of us spend many a day/year dancing or wrestling with big questions like Who am I and what should I do with my life? Answering these heavy questions often requires doing some exploration and testing of activities to see how one fits in. Some professionals encourage folks to start with activities they might enjoy so that choices of vocation and use of recreational time wind up in some sort of harmony and balance. This makes sense. Now these same professionals often urge us to match traits and values with activities to make decisions about our purposes in life.
Well… this past week marks the beginning of the NFL (American Football) season and one thing is clear.. human beings really love competition.
It is also clear that many people have a wide variety of skills, interests, and values so obviously exploring “what should I do?” Matters calls for some research..so this is what happened. A search revealed some results combining competition, intellectual challenges, and a variety of physical activities such as jumping, dancing, etc.
Well here’s the perfect match for most Americans who want to combine healthy exercise with a competitive mental activity…
Chess boxing
Yes my friends there is such a thing. In fact for just over twenty years there has actually been A professional association devoted to this. Apparently competitors make a chess move and then box for a few minutes and then alternate these things until one of the players either gets check mate or gets knocked out. Research also revealed that the average annual income for chess boxers is around $43,000.
Now there are some seeking peace and joy implications for this sort of result, however, first we might also know it’s good to have career options so here’s a few suggestions that additional research may uncover…just not yet.
How aboutNASCAR Knitting Speed Skating Scrabble referee, or in your spare time doing a little archery tennis?
Okay… maybe the point is… people and circumstances along with geography, educational opportunities, cultural obligations (the list of variables goes on and on) can thwart (love that word) almost any matching activities—job—purpose scheme no matter how many computers and data banks we throw at it. So how then do we carve out the answers? No one knows for sure…. Well that’s not very satisfying you say… true..but it’s pretty helpful… What?
You see when we start looking to others to tell us who we are and what we should do we discount the knowledge housed in the soul of the person who is the real expert on what we like and what we have to offer… that’s right it’s you! Look we don’t advise “Cannonball Catcher” or “industrial Dog Polisher” for recent grads…but we do suggest that one experiments because there are a lot of jobs to do and a lot of activities to explore and if you are lucky you will get to experience many of each. Can one improve the odds of having this happen? Probably and here’s how..
Wake up in the morning… Ask the universe what you can do fort today. Then ask what are the lessons I learned yesterday… Next dedicate yourself to shaping activities that consider if the results of those tasks done by others to you would be as rewarding as they will be when you do them… and then … take a moment to ponder… “What if I’m wrong?”
Oh and if someone asks “who wants to be the javelin catcher today?… keep your hand down…
Peace
So I suspect many of you are like me… darn glad there is autocorrect for spelling errors and there are people in your life that help you turn the mistakes you might make in life into things that might make sense or may actually turn out okay. However, let’s pause a moment…something we don’t do enough of…
If you and all of us are we… stop and pause a moment we soon realize that a great many times when we go out to eat somewhere for some special event.. we order the same darn things from the same darn restaurants… and then we imagine we are going to make our lives somehow more special by going the same old routes to the same old places and do the same old things. Now there’s nothing wrong with that if it is your way of creating a secure launch pad for creating something new and valuable for the world. Sometimes that’s needed. On the other hand (how many other hands do we have? Well let’s see.. we have a right hand, a left hand, there’s the upper hand and there are people who are underhanded. Eric Clapton is “Slow Hand” and some fair people are even handed… Oh and if when we applauded we actually gave people a a hand we could only clap twice.. once with both hands and then once single-handed (see if you can do it… I bet you can… and if you can’t find another person and the two of you can clap just fine… anyway enough about that lets get back to auto-correct… While it’s great.. it makes us realize how many of the
Tricky (I after e except after e) words we have no idea how to spell anymore.. Well don’t blame your slipping memory… what was I writing about? Oh yep spelling sort of or the words that have always given us trouble. The list goes on and on because the rules of English spelling are insane.. Like why doesn’t home rhyme with come and how does come sound like comb oh wait comb sounds like tomb? Nevermind the former comedian Gallagher did a great bit on this.. So two words I struggle and most people are in the same boat are words that rhyme with pipe … recipe and defeat like receipt ?
Oh Now let’s get to the “seeking Peace (Piece) and Joy part of this deal…
Since in the Peace and Joy universe there is a podcast with the same themes.. a search was conducted… and how can two conductors have less similar task than a person who drives a train and someone who waves a stick to tell the tuba player to blow harder? Okay back to the recipe…
The search was typed in for “the recipe for happiness” on Apple podcast…
Results?
Well let’s put it this way… Betty Crocker has been spreading recipes for a century and has had a book “the big red book with that spoon on it” for over 70 years and that’s a whole bunch of recipes for a lot of things… yet in glancing over the recipe for happiness there were more words written than Betty could shake a spoon at… Why is that? Well that most likely because each of us working together or separately because too many cooks … have a unique set of experiences and characteristics (ingredients if you will) to work with and each of us serves up the results of these recipe to different people who sit around our tables in life. Now .. what seems important here are two things..
First since there are so many recipes with so many ingredients it should seem impossible that your recipe will make everyone happy every day… and Second… If you don’t like the stuff someone is feeding you today…. Don’t get all blown out of shape….because nearly all the time you’ll eat again tomorrow.. Not always but almost..
Okay that is about enough this has been more than a mouthful yet for dessert not desert …here’s a closing thought… The recipe for happiness can be variable and elusive, however the recipe for disaster seems fairly consistent…
You take a good helping of arrogance…mix in… a healthy lump of ignorance and spread that liberally over a layer of apathy…
Bon Appetite
