blank blank fullness

So as I was spraying, this book resurfaced when recommended to me by someone who had been taught and taken through the inner 'journey' by author don Miguel's apprentice. These Four Agreements are pretty unassuming in their simplicity. Sort-of like the puissance of Billy Joel's voice, if you will. However...never underestimate the power of mindful, condensed offerings. They are often in small packages with great rewards. Kind-of like those little pills you'd pop into a bucket of water or, as per Bart's method, spray with the hose to unleash ferocious sponge T-Rex's.

These cornerstones feel obvious but hey, 'common sense' -- it's not so common! Thought I'd share to proliferate the care.

Expand your command:

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word
Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

2. Don't Take Anything Personally
Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering.

3. Don't Make Assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

4. Always Do Your Best
Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.

I feel a pattern emerging here. All these teachings are linked, share the same feelings of holistic and honest, integrity-bound intentions. It's not for me to tell anyone to change who they are. But, as a great text of a message made its way to my eyes tonight, it is paramount to know that "the more you extend kindness to yourself, the more it will become your automatic response to others."

Major lesson swirling around these past few...weeks, months, years -- the only person you can ever truly change is yourself ! (and maybe in so doing, change the worllllld! no, probably not the world. but maybe?! or at least your immediate surroundings, how about that?)

In Philadelphia the other night, driving around looking for a place to buy a nice bouteille du vin, my new friend Krystal and I stumbled upon an ice cream shoppe with a line out the door, a sweet patio set up, and an irresistible allure that only a hot summer's night (and a waning interest in wine hunting) could help trigger. Apparently, The Franklin Fountain is a well know hot-spot for the ice cream connoisseur. That frozen cow's milk was good, let me tell you.

What really got me was the atmosphere. It was like stepping into 1908 all over again (that sort-of implies that I already have, which makes me giggle because it's probably true, but I digress...). They certainly get a 10/10 for authenticity in my book. The quality of the product is enough to garner those stars but the whole package, which it seems is nothing short of a requirement for anything to truly succeed and 'convince', made my ice-cream-licking experience a total joy.

Most notable (besides the aforementioned attributes), for me, was this notice posted to the wall:

A Treatise on the Ills of Forcible Air

OR

A Justification For Refusing Mr. Carrier’s Patent for

An Apparatus for Treating Air.

By Messrs. R. Burleigh & J. Heinbach, Ed.

June, 1906.

i. Civilized man has existed for thousands of years without the aid of conditioned air.What deems the Modern Man to be so weak?

ii. Sweating is the human body’s means for cooling.Without our natural venting, in what lies the use of perfumed deodorants?

iii. Obesity is the product of comfortable inaction.

iv. Such Conditioning Apparatuses are monstrous machines compromising nature’s gifts of light and sound, never mind architectural integrity.

v. Our own Dr. Benjamin Franklin extolled the virtues of fresh air ventilation in a letter to Benjamin Rush (1773), noting “People often catch cold from one another when shut up together in close rooms, coaches, etc., and when sitting near and conversing so as to breath in each other’s transpiration.”

vi. Air-borne ailments such as the so-called “Legionnaires” are propagated by these evil contraptions, as close to home as the finest rooms of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel.

vii. What pleasure does one derive from savoring frozen dainties, such as Ice Cream or Tuft’s Arctic Soda Water, on a Warm day in a Cold room?

viii. Is the Nature of our “Modern” society to be Conditioned to accept these Machines?Or will our Mother N. succeed in her time-honored wisdom of a breeze?The mores or lesser of men shall decide.

TAKE NOTICE!

Mankind has meandered through all previous millennia without the crutch of a mechanized breeze. Throughout the ages fresh air has hardened and sculpted our vitality. Such a supplement as conditioned-air is unnecessary and liable to reroute our evolutionary trajectory source-wards. We here at The Franklin Fountain vehemently refuse to conform to the hegemonic demands of a moribund society.

While coolants and refrigerants may very well provide a frigid interior for Fountain clientele, they would simultaneously expel a proportionate amount of heat into an already-sweltering exterior atmosphere (as the first Law of Thermodynamics should have it.) It would be downright rude of us to swaddle ourselves with chilled air while sloughing off the heat to our neighbors. The aforementioned contraptions behave in the manner of the most avaricious loan shark: Offering temporary comfort only to collect later with exuberantly compounded interest. The heat and noxious gases that these newfangled gadgets belch into the welkin accumulate exponentially. The toxicity of this gaseous alluvium is perilous, for it will desiccate our fragile atmosphere, rendering our planet’s airy aegis as torrid as praline brittle. We refuse to contribute to this harrowing scenario.

Modernity has depleted this fair country of much of its once-ample asper. Convenience has cost us our character and indolence is now an all-too-common syndrome of the American populace. We refuse to compromise spirit for luxury.

The Virtuse of Sweat

I. Let us not forget that homo sapiens are just another species of animals, which biologically must excrete all sorts of fluids, with transpiration (also termed ‘perspiration’ in some universities) being the most elementary example.

II. Transpiration is a signal to let others humans know that we are feeling a particular way, especially under warm conditions when the anti-arid action is accelerated.

III. Male sweat is thought to contain pheromones that trigger physiological activity in females, increase brain activity in women and peak arousal.

IV. Transpiration contains mainly water, so as the body drinks it up, it must release it in various ways.

V. Sweating shows that we are working. The harder we work, the harder we sweat. This is not to be underestimated!

VI. What is the term “sweat equity” without sweat? True equity requires physical output or work to create wealth; otherwise it is hollow materialism.

VII.When we are perspiring together, sweat lubricates the situation.

VIII.Benjamin Franklin penned “No Gains without Pains” and particularly promoted athletics to keep the body trim.Whilst sweating is a sign of our efforts, Dr. Franklin patented a unique “disposable Underarm Sweat Shields” to absorb the effects

I find this way TOO COOL, what a G that Søren...

"Half of Kierkegaard's authorship was written behind the mask of several pseudonymous characters he created to represent different ways of thinking. This was part of Kierkegaard's indirect communication. According to several passages in his works and journals, such as The Point of View of My Work as an Author, Kierkegaard wrote this way in order to prevent his works from being treated as a philosophical system with a systematic structure. In the Point of View, Kierkegaard wrote: "In the pseudonymous works, there is not a single word which is mine. I have no opinion about these works except as a third person, no knowledge of their meaning, except as a reader, not the remotest private relation to them." Kierkegaard used indirect communication to make it difficult to ascertain whether he actually held any of the views presented in his works. He hoped readers would simply read the work at face value without attributing it to some aspect of his life. Kierkegaard also did not want his readers to treat his work as an authoritative system, but rather look to themselves for interpretation."

He would be a 5.

today.

I'm not gonna dip my toes in here, the water temperature is fine, no matter the temperature.

If Freud is correct in his conclusion that the 'civilized' (and, in his eyes, to an extent, neurotic) adult internalizes the authority figure, therein referred to as the superego, then inside, in our invisible selves, alongside the primal and naturally existing child, lives a parental essence. This essence is necessary in our world, in society. It is the voice that tells us to play nice after we've thrown sand into the eyes of that kid who tried to steal our doll (Barbie, GI-Joe; pick your side- and there goes another layer of identity). It is the impulse that, long after we've left the house and the kid-size sheets, gets us into the bathroom to 'go' before we leave on a trip (be it to the store or across the world), the same impulse that follows us into parenthood when we go on to spawn little versions of ourselves...The holographic effect is mind boggling when considering multiple generations and if you are lucky, you have grandparents or great grandparents to shed such perspective on the evolutionary journey to 'you'.

So if, as many gurus and teachings say, striving to live in accordance with the child inside us is the epitome of being true and right- the path to happiness, then this fax should help give us all some great guidelines, whether you're a parent, child, adult, teen, tween, or (wo)man-child. Children are so crucial, fragile, important.

My boss is Jewish and periodically gets Aish HaTorah's Shabbat Shalom Fax. Mazel Tov!!

Oh, you Jews...thanks for being, well, Jew! (ba-dum-chhhh)

So basically (ha), if we step outside of ourselves and enable the superego (parental essence) to treat our inner child as such ^, we should all be better off for it. And even if, by no fault of their own doing (blame communism, war, previous bad parenting, poverty, wealth, insolence, paparazzi, vanity, etc, etc, etc) our own parents may have been unable to provide us with the full scope of 'what children want', it's never too late to gift ourselves what we all deserve.

What's more, we'll then be equipped with the tools to treat those around us, child or not, with equal accord.

"It's 10pm. Do you know where your children are?"