Month: August 2020

Help. Man. Ask for it.

Ask for help.

Help.

Help!!!

Photo by Papaioannou Kostas on Unsplash

The act of asking for/getting Help is to foster your nature not usurp it.

Help is to push you to engage your abilities not negate them.

Help is because you are doing something more than you.

Growing requires help – to put it bluntly did you change your own diapers?

Help is an important ingredient in becoming the person you want to become.  The man you are meant to become.  To us men that is counter intuitive.  We feel that we are supposed to press on into the future of life of our development as an individual.

Bull shit.

Help can be you in a restaurant saying ‘Hey, can you people at the other table pass me the salt.  My table doesn’t have any, and I want some.’

It could be when you are walking your dog one day before work and your dog goes poop.  You look at the leash and there is no little plastic poop-bag tied in a knot to the handle of your leash.  So you have to ask,

‘Hey buddy, can I ask you for one of your poop bags’

Help is a driving instructor; help is a math tutor; help is a music teacher; help is supposed to come from a priest, help is a nurse; help is the bus driver getting you to work on time, help is the minimum wage woman serving your large double/double.

Help is a good hockey coach;  help is good; help is natural; help is ColdPlay playing their song Up and Up; help is you helping yourself; help is a brave young man manning up to support his young wife even though he has basically no idea what being married is. 

Asking for help is more normal than what we call normal.   

S.O.S. = serious help needed. S.O.S. is a phrase of convenience in Morse code.  The three letters together mean nothing.  To appease our need to give it meaning some say it means ‘Save Our Souls’.  Whoever said that was on to something.  

It is a cry for help.  An honest one.  Not some kid crying wolf.  A man carries that kid within him all his life.  And many a man have trouble moving on from that young boy, breaking that bond.  Because they don’t know where to go and don’t know how to honour that boy’s beautiful life.

Asking for help is like the meatball asking to work with the spaghetti sauce.  Asking for help is the ice cream asking the cone to taste great for a young child on a hot summer day.

Photo by Hello I’m Nik 🎞 on Unsplash

Help says:

I am interested in your ideas

I can really use an outside view on this one

What is one thing that you can see that I am missing

What is the next step

What should I do

Help

Help says Help me.  Please

Though words are important to identify what you are asking the other person they do not change the real message.  Which is; I have the humility to understand that we all need a hand as we learn and grow and make mistakes and use forgiveness to grow – and that is me now.

And I uphold me.  Now

Watch me.

The Book Of Five Rings By Miyamoto Mushahi — My Wandering Books

Quick Review The Book of Five Rings is a pretty good insight into a disciplined mind and professional samurai from 17th century Japan. The author teaches sword mastery and at the same time there are deeper lessons in the book. Strategy lessons flow throughout the book. The Main Nine Principles In the Book of Five […]

The Book Of Five Rings By Miyamoto Mushahi — My Wandering Books

Marriage For Sale

Is that a thing?

Arranged marriages basically amount to that. Agreeing on a price for someone’s son and someone else’s daughter to enter into marriage through a portal not called love.

In this short article we are not going to get into that topic but rather mention a few words about marriage where you and your spouse are offering your spousal services to each other. And further still that each person actually buys into the fact that they are in that marriage, for worse and for better.

Marriage: it gives more than it takes, if you give it time and buy into your marriage. It’s a barter arrangement: I will offer you my husband services and in exchange I accept your wife services. If both people feel they are getting pretty good value in return for what they think their services are worth then you have a functioning marriage. Simple in theory. A whole different story in reality.

Being on the same page, at the same time, as your spouse is key. You don’t have to agree. In fact you learn a lot when you are arguing about the same page be that money or cleaning or children. (Please take a look at my posts on The Female Frixion as another key to understanding how others are thinking differently about that same page.)

Marriage gives more than it takes, but it takes a lot.

If you are not giving and taking then what are you doing?

Photo by Alex Blăjan on Unsplash

Marriage Math = not being lonely / (divided by) loving and being loved.

Photo by Matheus Ferrero on Unsplash

Marriage should provide comfort, that is part of its nature. It is not, however, a Communal Comfort Zone where we hide together to avoid each other; resisting challenge, and or growth, or listening, not asking important questions, not demanding a response that upholds a respecting marriage.

Marriage is a platform where we share responsibilities and satisfactions, vision and fears, love and being loved. When the foundation of this platform is eaten away by lack of self-confidence in himself, a confidence she is naturally expecting, then it impacts the sharing and the feelings. This falls into blame and lack of forgiveness punctuating our thoughts and conversations.

Life is constantly a kaleidoscope of rolling life stages, stages of marriage, of satisfaction and urges to grow. If these overwhelm us then we fall behind, feel unappreciated for our uniqueness as a man who needs to be needed and understood and respected. To avoid the man lashing out because he has these valid emotions that can lead to completely invalid violence, he needs to be in charge of his Satisfaction.

The 3 For 1 Approach is great to generate Satisfaction in a man.

The 3 ‘fors’ are: Forgive, Fortake and Foretell.

Forgive means to understand what is important and make that your focus. It means to understand yourself and others so the anger can whither. It means using the experience as a resource to grow and avoid the troughs of low emotion where bitterness festers. It helps you be receptive to the moment of possibilities as opposed to funnelling your energy into fear and criticism.

Fortake is you taking responsibility for your Daily and Devotional Emotions. Who knows what that will mean in 5 minutes or for the rest of your life. It means blaming others for how you feel is not your modus operandi.

Foretell is using your innate ability to focus your energy on where you want to grow. This can be applied to your Daily Emotion of what you want in your career and family. It also applies to your Devotion Emotion you can use to respond to the religious urge that you receive in odd moments when you ‘feel good, but there is something else, waiting or calling or prompting’. Many times we respond to this weird urge/sensation with what we know about business or other opinions. If we could wait and let ourselves not know without it making us uncomfortable we can help foster our religious life response – and develop another, elevated avenue to Satisfaction. This is you the visionary, rising above distraction to engage in perception about what you want and what you want to become.

Use the 3 For 1 Approach to offer a Satisfied Man to your spouse.

Women are Better at … – Excerpt from a book in progress about Satisfaction

Women are better at being women than men are at being men.

Photo by Preillumination SeTh on Unsplash

This is not man bashing.

Photo by Ana-Maria Nichita on Unsplash

Imagine your three big terracotta flower pots on the sunny side of the house where the tomato plants soak up the sun.  Even though they have that bitter tomato plant fragrance they smell fabulous in the summer afternoon heat.  The pots where the chile plants were sown and watered got grouped by the gate in the shadow of the big tomato plant pots.

Photo by Justus Menke on Unsplash

Due to the conditions the tomatoes ripen and each plant gives lots of fruit.  Whereas the chiles are small and few.  The chiles have the same desire to grow.  Tomatoes grow into tomatoes.  Chiles into chiles.  Their success depends a lot on the local conditions.

The local conditions in a woman includes her management of the Female Frixion (see below).

The local conditions in a man are impacted by his dealing with life through the Male Stack.

This is not fanning the flames of the battle of the sexes.  It’s not saying there is a competition to achieve self-realization as a man or woman. It’s not a race to embody your gender before your spouse embodies theirs. It’s not a comparison because we are talking apples and oranges here.

Women are oscillating while men are projecting.  

Women get lonely – and seek out companionship. Men get lost – and need direction.

Men will proclaim when a woman in the same situation will reflect.

The Female Frixion generates an emotional conflict in women about the prevalence of one of the three lives in the moment or stage of life.   Those lives are:  Professional, Romantic and Maternal.  In men they are: Professional, Romantic and Paternal.  Men don’t live the same friction of feeding these three lives in the same way.  Women internalize the friction and men externalize the stress.  Women make themselves responsible for their emotions about the 3-way balance of these inner lives.  Men can often not understand how or why they would be responsible for their own emotions. 

Each woman struggles for years with this aspect of their life.  Often it can make them not feel good about themselves.  A woman might start to think she is not ’a good mother’.   The truth may be she is a good mother but the friction that follows her around, like a 4 year old girl follows around her older sister, won’t let her in peace.  

This friction  heightens her awareness to her inner lives and cultivates the connection with her instinct.  Her instinct is about life.  Her female instinct responds to the moment that her mind is focused on.  It is not simply her instinct about how she feels about her emotions.  That is included.  But it needs to be understood that her instinct, the instinct, is fast and true and collects no emotional baggage.  We collect the baggage with our low emotion ego trolling.  The more emotional luggage we insist on hauling around life the less we can listen to and recognize the instinct.  

Lateral consideration of the three lives all at once that is the mental/emotional process of women is in contrast to the vertical surging that is the one-at-a-time male style process.  This is the Male Stack.  Instead of a need to bring all three lives forward with the same grace and focus like a woman, the man engages one life at a time.  The male life management style may appear to require less subtlety and finesse from the man himself because according to him ‘it is what it is,’ ‘what you see is what you get.’ That is the challenge staring each man in the face: To make his living of the three lives in his own unique way a vertically integrated generator of male instinctual response.

Because the female consideration is not as reactive as the surging male she can appear to be powered by an unsure woman.   That is not always true.  Perhaps rarely true. 

The decision making circuitry to decide about the same thing as a man is different in a woman.  That needs to be understood.  And appreciated. So it can impact our lives.  Reflected upon so it can impact our marriages.  Impact our language, sayings, expectations, our workplace (like making workplace based daycare more possible).  

An excellent illumination on the reality of women’s decision making is How Women Decide by Therese Huston. The book focuses on the extra and unfair work a woman has to do quickly, mentally in the moment to make her decision appear as valid as possible in the eyes of men. Huston also delves into the innate decision making differences between men and women. She highlights if a woman can grasp how to utilize her natural mental/emotional circuitry in a business setting then she can deactivate the resistance to her style of thinking. For our personal relationships the useful insights that are supported with how-to ideas are relevant to generating good conversation with your spouse to elevate understanding.

When we choose we, men and women, can update our beliefs about women.  We can learn a lot if we take the time and observe how this friction is a reality.  Communicate the fact of it and tell stories about it.  Resist the laziness that permits this difference to damage and not enlighten.  Resist blaming a woman for being a woman.

Women are not better than men.  Men are not better than women.  However because of the Female Frixion women are generally more true to their nature than men are to theirs.

This lack of connection with one’s essence as a man can cause stress in a man.  Without a strong emotional core, a man under stress can blame others for wanting to help him, he can delve into some form of drugs (including the internet). A man, even if he is really a good man, if he feels stressed, unappreciated or lost can get angry and become violent.  

Most likely women would think men experience this friction between the inner lives but they don’t.  So in difficult moments that require a couple to be on the same page, they often aren’t.  This can convert an important or difficult conversation into an argument.  Faster than we can stop it.  The argument is powered not by the issue being discussed but by the lack of understanding.  And exacerbated by how we feel about not being understood or understanding. 

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If women have the Female Frixion to connect them to their instinct, what do men have?  What can be the sand in the seashell that is a positive friction to produce a pearl?  

Ask yourself:

What do you stand for?  As a man, husband.

What do you uphold?  In the stress of providing for your family on a daily basis and also in the search for a sense of purpose.  

How agile are you within the Male Stack (of the three lives)?

Do you want to cultivate your response to the instinct?

What do you adhere to?  When the conversation turns sexist.

What do you cause in others?  By what you resist.

What are you in service to? For immediate and lifetime results.