New Beginnings
December 31, 2006 | 12:33 pm
It’s interesting to me how welcome the New Year is. In actuality, it’s an arbitrary date that delineates time periods for the convenience of communication. Yet, we grasp at the hope that it brings. It’s New! We can begin again. We can change. So, we resolve to change some things. To get in shape (make sure you get Lisa Mercer’s book!). To learn something new. To spend more time with our families.
In the Bible, we read that, “God’s grace is new every morning.” What an idea that is! Each day is new and an opportunity to frame the balance of our lives. As is often said, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”
We need boundaries, though. We need to reflect and reset. The more frequently we do that, the more successful we will be in doing and becoming what we have purposed to do and become.
What will you change this year? What will be different today? Do you promise?
Let’s go!
Posted by: — Stephen Hultquist
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One foot of fitness
December 29, 2006 | 5:21 pm
This morning, I woke up to another foot of fitness. For the second time in about a week, Colorado’s Front Range has been blessed with a nice blanket of snow. This time it was a bit warmer, a bit less windy, and not quite as prolific as last week. But, it’s still a foot.
As I enjoyed the process of clearing the driveway and sidewalks again, I thought about a new measure of fitness: a foot of fitness. Last week, the two feet of fitness turned into a couple of days worth! It was just too much for one sprint. Today, my little guy and I cleared them in a bit more than an hour. A nice workout that Lisa assures me will help with my core strength as I head up for more skiing in a few days.
Viewing our experiences differently and creating metrics that we can measure and remember is valuable in helping us find the steps and progress along the way. So, today it was a foot of fitness for me. What is it for you?
Let’s go!
Posted by: — Stephen Hultquist
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So how’s it about opening the heart?
December 27, 2006 | 10:14 am
Last week I gave a very hurried introduction to geocaching – an activity in which one uses a GPS receiver to locate a hidden “treasure.” There’s nothing obvious in that description about opening one’s heart.
And in fact many people do not. For many people, geocaching is about competition, being the first-to-find (FTF, in geo-jargon), amassing numbers of geocaches found, geocaches placed … you get the idea. If I played it that way, I wouldn’t have written the book Open Your Heart with Geocaching. Then again, if I played it that way, I wouldn’t exactly be … me. The reality is that, as is true with much of life, what you get from geocaching has everything to do with what you put into it. Seek competition, and it’s competition that you’ll find.
Geocaching brought me into the woods, and nothing has been quite the same for me since.
I’m a confirmed City Girl, and if there’s any wild place that I love, it’s the ocean, the wildness of the dunes of Cape Cod, the seals poking their heads out from the surface of the water, the sound of the surf. But what goecaching does is challenge you: instead of spending times in your own special places, it invites you to explore places that others think are special. I’ve seen, to quote the Babylon 5 character, “one moment of perfect beauty,” and it wasn’t in a place I had chosen to be – it was in a place that someone else had chosen and had led me to.
If that isn’t opening your heart, I don’t know what is!
Posted by: — jcezanne
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Preparation
December 26, 2006 | 1:35 pm
Every activity requires some level of preparation. A decision to act. A choosing of the target. A plan, however informally developed. But, there is preparation before we move.
Tomorrow, I’m skiing. That’s a decision made, a target chosen. I am skiing with my two daughters. Now, there needs to be a more formal plan. Get the gear ready, pick a departure time, coordinate with friends.
In life, too, we need to pick targets. If we pick too many, or if they are fuzzy in our minds, they will be much more difficult to hit. Plans will be more difficult to determine. We’re not likely to hit any of them.
Tomorrow, I’m skiing. With my girls. So, it’s time to get started in the process of preparation. What are you doing?
Let’s go!
Posted by: — Stephen Hultquist
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It’s a Wonderful Life
December 25, 2006 | 1:29 pm
No matter how many times I see this movie, it always brings tears to my eyes. I believe that all of us, at least once in our lives, have one of those “I wish that I was never born” moments. Yet all of us have performed seemingly insignificant acts that have had a significant effect on the lives of others. On this special holiday, take a trip back in time with your personal angel, and acknowledge the things that you’ve done that have made someone else’s life worth living.
Posted by: — lmercer
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Our View of Life
December 22, 2006 | 4:18 pm
As I was out shoveling today for the second day of digging out from our Christmas 2006 storm, a corporate jet flew off after departure from Jefferson County airport. I got to thinking about the executive on the plane, and wondering how he had responded to the storm. Was it a highly-annoying interruption of his plans? Or an opportunity to jump into the jet and head to Aspen?
As a leadership coach, I have known leaders at both ends of that spectrum. There are times when I have been at different places along that continuum, as well. How about you?
Loving life has among its many facets the ability to recognize that life is unexpected. And the unexpected in life delivers the real blessings. How do you respond to the unexpected? In our highly-scripted lives, it’s so easy to expect everything to be perfectly the way we had planned. When circumstances or experiences are counter to expectations, many people find themselves angry, frustrated, and looking for someone to blame.
Interestingly, if our expectations are that at least sometimes, life isn’t going to be perfect, there can be more joy in the surprises of blessing and good fortune. That’s one of the keys to loving life. Worth actively changing your expectations? I think so!
Let’s go!
Posted by: — Stephen Hultquist
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Initiation Intuition
December 21, 2006 | 9:58 pm
An interesting thing often happens on the ski slopes. You reach a certain point, and suddenly notice that everyone has stopped. “Pray tell! What has happened. What deadly terrain lies below?”
Chances are, there is nothing of significance. The terrain is often no stepper that the terrain above. There have been no wipe outs. There are no moguls. But since everyone is gathered at this point, we fear the worst. In fact, we are convinced that there is something terrible down there.
Here is what’s really wrong. By stopping, and allowing oursleves to ponder the worst, we’ve lost our initiation intuition. The slopes have their logic. If you allow them to lead you, you will know the exact time and place to initiate the next turn. But if you allow your intellect to control the process, you might find that your turns go across the hill, looking more like crossword puzzles than circles.
An instructor once told me that if you start your turns across the hill, every turn becomes the first turn, along with that pesky first turn “yikes factor.” On the other hand, if you follow along the line where the mountain has been leading you, you might find yourself dancing with gravity!
Posted by: — lmercer
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Finding the Good… and slowing down
| 4:50 pm
Yesterday’s upslope snow storm hammered the Colorado Front Range into submission. People were stranded, left their cars, and found various ways home. After skiing with me yesterday, my friend Ross slept here for the night since we were not going to get his car out of the snow. We actually had to plow the road with my little Subaru to get all the way home!
So, we had a choice. Take it in stride and find the good in it? Or whine and complain as so many would do?
We decided to have fun. To slow down. Exercise (snow shoveling is great for strengthening the core, I think, even if it’s not in Lisa Mercer’s “Open Your Heart With Winter Fitness” book!). And enjoy the preparation for a White Christmas.
So we did. What better time to slow down? To help neighbors dig out? And to find joy in the surprise. There’s an extended family in the park building a snow fort and throwing snowballs.
Like my friends enjoying Stowe with only a few runs open, we can find the good in whatever the Creator allows to show up in our lives. And we can learn and grow from it. What have you learned today?
Let’s go!
Posted by: — Stephen Hultquist
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Should I stay or should I go?
| 2:43 am
After skiing today, we started for home from Copper Mountain. Of course, a huge storm was pounding the Colorado Front Range, and we had to make a decision: stay in the mountains and find a way to ski another day, or get home to our families for this special holiday time.
Believe it or not, we made a run for it.
Seven and a half hours later, we were home. It was quite an odyssey! Closed highways, motorists who had no business being where they were in the vehicles they had, and a storm that has already dumped over two feet of snow on Denver and the rest of the Front Range and may deliver more than three feet by the time it’s done tomorrow.
But, we’re home. With family. I learned that the new little Subaru Impreza doubles as a reasonable snowplow on our street. I learned that it’s great being with friends, even if it takes practically forever to get home. I learned that home is a truly wonderful place, and the chicken soup, beer bread, and little bit of Scotch prove it.
And I did it without being upset by the change of plans.
It’s supposed to snow until midday tomorrow. More plans will change. My mom will miss Christmas with her grandkids. We may miss a family ski day. But, it’s just life being what life is: unpredictable, interesting, and inviting. Will I welcome it? Or will I try to fight a battle I can’t win?
I think I’ll embrace it and go exploring.
Let’s go!
Posted by: — Stephen Hultquist
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You do *what* in the woods?
December 20, 2006 | 2:55 pm
Yes, I do it in the woods. And in cities, and in difficult-to-find places, and in all sorts of venues you’d never think to find on your own.
“It,” of course, refers to geocaching. And I’ve written a book for this series about opening your heart with geocaching that will be out in May – and that may tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the hobby!
Geocaching has been described, tongue firmly planted in cheek, as a scavenger hunt that uses multi-million-dollar satellites to locate worthless toys.
That’s certainly one way of looking at it.
There’s another way, though: geocaching brings people closer to nature, closer to each other, and closer to things that bring them joy. That’s the way I see it, and that’s the way I’ve chosen to address it as part of the DreamTime series.
Geocaching is a fairly recent activity (though it has its antecedents in orienteering and letterboxing) made possible by access to the satellite Global Positioning System (GPS) that became available in May of 2000. A GPS unit is an electronic device that can determine your approximate location on the planet with coordinates given in longitude and latitude. People use it to navigate from a current location to another location.
The word “geocaching,” broken out, is geo for geography, and caching for the process of hiding a cache. A cache in computer terms is information usually stored in memory to make it faster to retrieve, but the term is also used in hiking/camping as a hiding place for concealing and preserving provisions; and of course caché is French for hidden.
So geocaching is looking for hidden treasure! Someone somewhere has found a place they love and has lured the geocacher to it by placing a cache there. Once she’s found the cache, the geocacher signs a logbook, may choose or not to exchange trinkets with the ones in the cache, and then later records her find on the geocaching website.
That’s geocaching in a nutshell. There is, however, much, much more to it, as we’ll explore in the next couple of months in these blogs, and as you’ll be able to read in May when Open Your Heart With Geocaching becomes available!
For me, the bottom line is this: geocaching enabled me to go into the woods, like Thoreau, like so many others before me; and, once there, I encountered more than I ever dreamed I would. I learned about nature, about community, about myself.
You could, too. All it takes is the desire to open your heart.
Posted by: — jcezanne
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