Posts in the “personal” category

The first 2:50 of this song, “Where Are We Now,” by The Burned, is some of my favorite music. (After that it takes a strange turn.)

This is my favorite song and music video of late, Humble and Kind, by Tim McGraw:

“I meditate for your protection.”

“I love you so much that I want you to be happy, even if that happiness no longer includes me.”

From the movie, The Longest Ride.

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

The Milky Way is moving at over half a million miles per hour. (In the time it took me to type that, we sailed about 1,500 miles through the Universe.)

Inside the Milky Way, the Earth revolves around the Sun at 66,600 mph.

The Earth rotates around its axis at about 1,040 mph, depending on your latitude.

And yet, somehow I feel like I’m sitting perfectly still in this chair. That’s quite an illusion.

“He screams at you, hollers at you, makes life unbearable until you’re about ready to quit, and then he starts being real nice to you and makes your life enjoyable for a while.”

Someone talking about Steve Jobs, right?

No.

It’s Jerry Kramer talking about Vince Lombardi, in 1967.

“All we do is work.” ~ Gary Kubiak, head coach of the Denver Broncos

IMHO, when you hear Buddhists or mindfulness people say something like, “Life is like a dream,” one thing they mean is that more than 99.99999% of the stuff going on in our minds are thoughts about the past and the future. (Past happiness and regrets, and future hopes and concerns.) Because the only thing that’s real in the present moment is what’s actually happening in only this moment, anything that’s outside of this moment is in a strict sense no longer real.

Being old enough to know what a record player is, I like to think of mindfulness and “being in this moment” as being like the needle on a record player. Your mindfulness is the needle, and you’re only playing whatever musical notes are under the needle at this instant. What’s already gone by the needle is the past, and what’s coming at the needle is the future.

Along this line of thinking I like Eckhart Tolle’s two quotes, “The present moment is all you ever have” (you know that’s true if you’ve ever lost consciousness, not knowing if you’d ever open your eyes again), and, “The whole essence of Zen consists in walking along the razor’s edge of Now.”

(Note: I wrote about this a few days ago in a short post titled, Go beneath the story ... meditation is the tool for that.)

This is some great text from an article titled, Brian Bannister and the art of making pitchers better:

The talk represented a landmark in (Rich) Hill’s professional career, and perhaps in Bannister’s. Hill, Bannister noted, had a spin rate on his curveball that ranked among the highest in the game. Yet as a starter, the veteran lefthander felt compelled to work within a standard framework, utilizing his curve as a secondary pitch. Bannister guided Hill to a radically different usage pattern.

“We talked about a different perspective of looking at pitching,” said Hill. “I remember it clearly. We talked for a good hour, hour and a half the first day.

“It was so refreshing, talking about shaping pitches, shaping the breaking ball. We talked about other pitchers — Zack Greinke, Clayton Kershaw — specifically about how they can shape their different breaking balls that they throw.

“All of those things took me from four pitches to maybe 12. It was like I had 12 pitches because of changing speeds, changing shapes, changing locations.

“If you talk about pitching as a standard, we talk about fastball and location. We don’t talk about changing speeds on our fastball really. It didn’t really click for me until talking to Brian.

“He gave me the freedom of creativity. That’s the best way I can put it. My creativity went through the roof after these conversations.”

“If a raven outside our window is piercing our eardrums with its raucous cry, that’s the sound of awakened energy, the voice of the teacher waking us up.” ~ Pema Chodron, Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change

I just heard this song for the first time in a very long time. This is Fool to Cry, by the Rolling Stones:

“The goal is to survive doing what you love.”

From Craig Medred on Twitter. As you might guess, he lives in Alaska.

“His genius as a coach beyond the scheming was that he trusted his players, and he’d give us enough discretion to gamble on things. It gave us ownership in the system and inspired great loyalty.”

Gary Fencik talking about Buddy Ryan in this New York Times article.

On the evening of March 5, 2016, Peyton Manning called the Broncos to say that he is retiring. This is a statement from Broncos head coach Gary Kubiak:

“It was a blessing to coach Peyton Manning. Nobody worked harder at the game and nobody prepared harder than Peyton,” Broncos coach Gary Kubiak said in a statement. “His preparation was the best I’ve ever seen with how he went about his business. There was nothing like his work habits. Each and every week, he did everything he could to get ready to play not only against the defense but even against the coordinator.”

“Being with him this season, going through what we went through and accomplishing what we accomplished — that was special. He and I battled together and along the way we talked about dreaming that it could end the way it ended. And I’ll be damned, it did.”

(Text from this espn.com page.)

“If you can't do it naturally, then fake it.” ~ Alfred Hitchcock

This is a quote from this Denver Post story about Peyton Manning:

“Here’s a small snippet of life with Manning I won’t forget: Broncos president Joe Ellis, leaning against a wall in the hallway, and sincerely thanking No. 18 for ‘raising all boats’ with his professionalism and obsessive attention to detail, establishing a gold standard that had a real, big impact from the equipment room to the board room at the team’s Dove Valley headquarters.”

This is pretty cool. Here’s a description of the program from thedodo.com: “An innovative new idea, called the Shelter Buddies Reading Program, is already making a huge difference for animals at the Humane Society of Missouri. The idea is simple: train kids to read to dogs as a way of readying them for forever homes, all while instilling a greater sense of empathy in the youngsters, too.”

Here’s a short video to show what the kids are doing:

When I first moved to Colorado I heard a guy named Cecil Lammey on the local radio stations use the term, “stay frosty.” This being microbrewery country, I assumed that he was referring to beer, but after a while I realized he wasn’t the phrase in that context. It turns out “stay frosty” is a military term that means “be alert” or “stay alert.”

As an example, it was used in this quote from the movie Aliens: “Hey, I know we’re all in strung out shape but stay frosty and alert. We can’t afford to let one of those bastards in here.”

“Do you know what you’re being tested for today?”

“Yep.”

Doctors are currently testing me for something called a “Pheochromocytoma”:

If you’re interested, you can read more about it here on Wikipedia, or here on the Mayo Clinic website.