Darrell Calkins's Blog - Posts Tagged "well-being"

Anna Deavere Smith on Discipline and How We Can Learn to Stop Letting Others Define Us

21 May 2015

Anna Deavere Smith on Discipline and How We Can Learn to Stop Letting Others Define Us

by Maria Popova

“Art should take what is complex and render it simply. It takes a lot of skill, human understanding, stamina, courage, energy, and heart to do that. It takes, most of all, what a great scholar of artists and educators, Maxine Greene, calls ‘wide-awakeness’ to do that. I am interested in the artist who is awake, or who wants desperately to wake up.

Confidence is a static state. Determination is active. Determination allows for doubt and for humility — both of which are critical in the world today. There is so much that we don’t know, and so much that we know we don’t know. To be overly confident or without doubt seems silly to me. Determination, on the other hand, is a commitment to win, a commitment to fight the good fight.”

~ Anna Deavere Smith

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.ph...
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"I’m just discovering your work through your website..."

27 May 2015

“I’m just discovering your work through your website, which is a refreshingly elegant, articulate and original integration of so much, with this strangely encouraging stream of sincerity running through. You’ve got an enormous, volatile mass of ideas and flashlights pointing in various directions. Part of me isn’t quite sure what to make of it all, especially as it relates specifically to your ‘Personal Skills Development’ subtitle. For example, as much as I like and enjoy Wade Davis’ Cultures at the Far Edge of the World presentation linked on your blog, I don’t immediately see the connection to personal skills. In general your offerings seem more in the category of philosophy or spiritual thought.”

Thank you for writing in with your reflections. I appreciate the feedback.

My hope and intent is to provide a wide range of resources and ideas that provoke real questions and considerations under the surface of common dialogue. With a definite thrust toward clues for moving beyond limiting patterns that restrict our personal and communal evolution and experience of, as well as effectiveness in, life. Part of that is about giving different angles of insight into the why and how of developing skills, whatever they may be. I think the larger discussion, or maybe the more relevant one surrounding skills development, involves what quality of fuel is being used to run the skill. Inevitably, and very quickly, this enters into considerations of how much of oneself one brings to the show. For example, anyone can learn a sophisticated skill in an extremely short period of time, once they’re completely convinced of the need, benefit and value of doing so and find enough full-bodied conviction to engage it accordingly (“You never hear anyone practicing a language; they simply listen and then begin to speak.” — Wade Davis).

There’s a tunnel between our external skill sets and our deepest longings and passions. People with the highest developed skills always know how to traverse that tunnel. That is, personal integration and wholeness — and consequent accomplishment and fulfillment — are largely about “enlightening” the tool with the best we have in us. The tool could be anything — a voice or body, a musical instrument or paint brush, a trowel or computer. But skill is made up of capability, and that requires practiced familiarity over time with how to inject into the moment our unique talents, virtues and qualities.

Concerning the Wade Davis presentation… That’s placed there for a number of reasons. First, opening one’s mind to the spectrum of human creativity, perception and ways of living can help to free us up from our own self-created restrictive constraints. We have a lot more options than we believe, everywhere and with everything. Second, his presentation itself is a superb example of high quality fuel; obviously he’s absolutely sincere and passionately (and compassionately) engaged in what he’s presenting, the tunnel is being traversed as he goes and it’s easy to see. Third, he’s done his homework across the board over time, so knowledge into skill into accomplished result is clearly on display. (I’m also a big fan of the idea that good communication can solve 90% of all problems, and he’s a good communicator, which is a very complex, and important, personal skill.)

There you go. I hope this helps to clarify, and thank you, again.

~ Darrell
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Published on May 28, 2015 20:02 Tags: cobaltsaffron, darrell-calkins, darrell-calkins-blog, well-being

Walking

“Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us.

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice—take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance—which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones.

Here is this vast, savage, hovering mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.

We hug the earth—how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before—so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have seen them. But, above all, I discovered around me—it was near the end of June—on the ends of the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red conelike blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward.”

~ Henry David Thoreau

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/a...
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Need More Links and Social Shares? Try Making More Enemies

Need More Links and Social Shares? Try Making More Enemies

http://www.cobaltsaffron.com/wp-conte...

“When you claim authority (not bogus “guru” authority, but real leadership), you’re constructing something. If you aren’t solving a problem for your audience, go back to the drawing board until you can.

Not everyone who builds is a nice guy. Steve Jobs wasn’t a particularly nice guy. But he was no troll, either. He built a hell of a company … one that added to people’s lives, instead of sucking energy into an endless attention black hole.

Attention is not the same thing as authority. You can’t just be a contrarian jackass … it’s not in service of anything.”

~ Sonia Simone

http://www.copyblogger.com/controvers...
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“Mastery of anything is, more than anything else, the transformation of work into play.”

“It is important to understand that the experience of joy and grace, as well as contentment and salvation, is not arrived at by the elimination of conflict, but through one’s precision of movement within it.”

https://youtu.be/Oo85Bkm-Ano

“Mastery of anything is, more than anything else, the transformation of work into play.”
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