Does God employ accountants?

Success.  Hierarchy.  Organization.  Promotion.  Team.  Management.  Leadership.  Success.  Those words resonate so well with me.  Not the management.  Also, resonated.  Past.  Definite past.  I was a shitty manager.  It’s 4AM.

Clay’s talk hits home for me:

(I met Clayton about 2 years ago – a remarkable man).

People don’t judge you by your title or how many people you’re leading, do they?  Yes, they do.  A close friend of mine is crossing the chasm into the freedom and we had many conversations on how it feels.  The light of the daily grind goes off.  Switch off.  Suddenly, freedom.  Complete, intoxicating, mind-blowing (I wonder what’s the origin of ‘mind blowing’) freedom.  But there is also element of solitude from the corporate habituation.  Solitude that can occasionally be confused with the feeling of loneliness.  Solitude of freedom where daily 100-2000 hello/how ‘u doing ‘s  in the parking lot, lobby, elevators and hallways, ‘how was your weekend’ facing the wall of the urinal, and all the other daily bullshit cheat chat – off.  Then the feelings kick-in (diabolical resistance or insecurity or need to be reassured by others our yetzer hara*) about the freedom.

* In Turning PRO, Steven Pressfield writes about having breakfast with a Rabbi and asking him about the subject of Resistance and if there are parallels in Kabbalistic studies.  Here is what Rabbi said:

“There is a second self inside you – an inner, shadow Self.  This self doesn’t care about you.  It doesn’t love you.  It has its own agenda, and it will kill you.  It will kill you like cancer.  It will kill you to achieve its agenda, which is to prevent you from actualizing your Self, from becoming who you really are.  This shadow self is called, in the Kabbalastic lexicon, the yetzer hara.  The yetzer hara, Steve, is what you would call Resistance.”

Louisa’s email to me yesterday was about my yetzer hara.

Feelings are data.  We feel how we relate to things or people.  Suppressing the feelings can be an emotional apartheid, meanwhile there isn’t a “daily noise” (http://simplynoise.com/ – listening to it now – thanks Ferhana!) to silence the feelings, so you deal with them.  Feelings are also indicators of being.  And they can create habitual patterns if thinking (mind traps?).  Breaking through all that.  That’s the freedom.  Someone wrote this: “… when the doors of perception are cleansed you see things the way they truly are – infinite …” or something like that (I think Jim Morrison came up with the name ‘Doors’ from there).  Cleansing the doors of perception of success, leadership, management, organization.  Turning off the noise of the routine, bringing back common sense (your common sense, not the society’s or worse yet – corporate’s), enjoying solitude of life, enjoying time spent with the people closest to me (not the dude by the urinal, trying to engage into a meaningless conversation, whose name I didn’t know then or now), cherishing the friendships that are deeper, more deliberate and more meaningful.  I love what Alton Brown said: “You’re never more alive than when you’re on the cusp of madness.  And you can live a lifetime in that little wedge of craziness.”

On an unrelated note: I love notepads/notebooks.  I have too many as it is, but still like to get more.  Especially, the graph notebooks.  The ones with squares.  And I love my fountain pen.  I know, this may sound a little Ayn Rand-ish, but I really do.  Montblanc 149 is a thing of a beauty.  This one isn’t bad one either, but mine’s better 🙂