Welcome back!!
Quick note - for some reason, sometimes these get filtered back into the “promotions” tab. Wednesday Balms, as the name suggests WILL be in your inbox every single Wednesday. If it is Thursday and you haven’t seen it - most likely it got sent somewhere else. We named this project after a day of the week as a commitment to the calendar and a reminder for releases.
Thank you.
This week we feature a response from JI:
“When asked, what is the secret to happiness? His (The Dalai Lama’s) response, ‘father dies, mother dies, child dies.’”
Kellen: The quote speaks about the simplicity of happiness, but maybe also Peace, that manifests through natural order. It was an adventure to try and unpack what this means in the context of informing our lives and it reiterates the tenuous nature of our own sense of peace. The answer to our questions may be simple, but not easy.
Myka: This quote made me think of the impermanence of all things. As fatalist as it initially seems, accepting that everything has an end is the first step toward appreciating and valuing the truly limited time that there is. There is unearned peace that comes from avoiding the end. There is earned peace in having fun with the journey until then.
Thank you for sending your thoughts our way, JI!
It has been enjoyable to hear people’s thoughts about these topics and what it evokes for them. I wish we could spend more time on each of them, maybe an idea for later weeks.
Today’s Lineup
Side A - From Peace to Love
Side B - What is (not) Love?
Side C - Craft of Love
Experiments for Earning Love
SIDE A - From Peace to Love
Myka: In continuing the pattern of seeing something by what it is not . . .
Where Wisdom falls short, Peace comes into play.
Where Peace falls short, Love comes into play.
Wisdom is an exponential product of data and objective reality. It is details. It is interpretation. It is information. People utilize wisdom to inform their decisions and make choices, but at times, more wisdom compiles more indecision.
Cursed with knowledge is an applicable phrase.
When wisdom apparently isn’t enough, Peace becomes most useful. Peace is resolution, it is assurance (vs insurance), it is acceptance. When Wisdom doesn’t provide enough leverage, Peace is what let’s you resolve a hard choice. Because of this, Peace is often beyond reason.
It is the force that tells you to “make the choice you can live with” as opposed to “choose what you think is best.”
But what happens when Peace is no longer helpful?
Person A: What do you want to eat?
Person B: Anything.
Person A: >:(
Sometimes, there is Unearned Peace with not wanting to confront the options and make a decision. But also, some people are honestly so open to everything and so easy going, that they become truly unhelpful. Masters of peace are at times, dreadful to deal with.
So what then?
If Wisdom isn’t helping and if Peace isn’t helping?
Maybe what’s needed is Love.
SIDE B - What is (not) Love
Myka: In many ways, Love is like a fire.
Scientifically speaking, fire needs a combination of three things in order to exist.
Fuel, heat, and air.
Love, like fire, needs to be fed. It needs tending too. Without care, love dies.
Love, like fire, needs a spark. It needs something that strikes it spontaneously, lights it up, and changes it from a state of rest to a state of energetic expression.
Love, like fire, needs to breathe. When starting a fire, you often need to fan the embers until they become flames. Without air, a fire chokes out. With too much air, a fire withers away.
Love, like fire, needs the perfect combination of all these things. It is reactive and reaction. But just because there is a flame and a response, that doesn’t necessarily mean the Love has been earned.
Kellen: Unearned love resists nature. It craves outcome, control and force.
Unearned love is a singular experience: pleasure.
Unearned love attempts to freeze time, to make something last.
Earned love is far from singular, it is complex, nuanced, and ever changing.
Earned love embraces surrender. It builds on gentle investment.
Earned love is not only the seed, but the water, soil, sun, rotation, attention, patience, and cultivation that what you do does not change the plant itself, but promotes its life to prosper.
Earned love creates change without force.
Earned love is living in a way that is mutual, shared and ultimately relinquishing that the “I” is the most important thing to be gratified.
Myka: Unearned Love, at times, seems like an imbalance.
It is all spark, with no substance. A toxic relationship fueled by dramatic break ups and make ups as opposed to steady care and kindness. It is all fuel, with no meaning. A relationship that exists only because it sounds good on paper. A situation that prolongs itself purely on rhetoric and reason. And then there is a relationship without adequate room to breathe. Which could be a good match that either takes things too fast or too slow and ultimately becomes unsustainable.
Love, in all forms, is like fire in terms of recipe.
Earned Love, is fire with the proper practice of it.
SIDE C - Craft of Love
Kellen: One embodiment of earned love is craftsmanship.
The amount of hours that are spent with a specific discipline that borders on irrational (perhaps surpassing this). The term “shokunin” comes to mind, the Japanese term for “artisan,” think Jiro Dreams of Sushi.
It is the combination of intention and surrender that play such key roles in Earned Love.
One does not earn Love through fantasy. One earns love through action. Action that is not based on results.
Myka: For those of you that know me, Music is as a sacred part of my world and might be closest thing I have to a religious practice.
But that wasn’t always the case.
I wasn’t a child prodigy. I wasn’t even a product of hard work. I just liked music.
In 4th grade, I was one of three kids to NOT make it into choir. That means out of the 70-something kids in our class that auditioned for choir . . . only me and two other dudes didn’t have our names on the “kids who made it” list.
In 6th grade, I decided to try out concert band. I originally wanted to play the trumpet, but was told to play the trombone because I didn’t have small lips. I remember not being able to play well because I didn’t practice at all. And I didn’t practice because I sounded so bad. It was a self-recursive loop that gave me a C in an elective.
Then, in 8th grade, one of my best friends (he was one of the kids that didn’t make it into choir, shoutout KK if you’re reading this) wanted to join Stage Band. He played drums and suggested I try out for the guitar. I didn’t know how to play the guitar. I didn’t even own one. When I signed up for the class, Mr. Abe made it very CLEAR that he wasn’t going to teach me how to play the instrument and that I would have one summer (maybe a few months) to learn the instrument.
Conventional wisdom would imply that this story ends like the first two.
But, it doesn’t.
Unlike the trombone, which wasn’t even my first choice, the guitar was really cool to me. There was a wealth of rock music that I enjoyed and the idea of one day being able to play those songs was incredibly exciting. Spark. Fuel. In contrast to Choir, where I was one of three kids to NOT make it into the class, in Stage Band, I was one of three guitarists to have a spot. It was a space to breathe and feel comfortable.
Heat. Fuel. Oxygen.
Learning a new instrument is tremendously non-peaceful. It is like holding chopsticks with your weaker hand. It is a feeling of knowing what you want to do, but being pitifully unable to do it.
All of this to say, despite having no Peace and no Wisdom, somehow I managed to learn how to practice and play the guitar - through Love of music. I am sure that my neighbors (and my family) grew tired of me trying to learn Under the Bridge for months. But what I’m also sure of is the immeasurable joy that came with being able to play parts of that song.
And I think that’s the thing about Love that is most interesting to me. It exists in a space that is beyond reason and beyond resolution. It doesn’t make sense and it does the opposite of bring peace - it brings excitement.
Kellen: There are many things we do that we are unable to materially defend. We have pets that bring us joy, yet only are a material (and financial) burden to our lives. What other explanation do we have, other than love, when we are acting irrationally?
Things that don’t make sense may be best explained by our understanding of love.
Experiment:
Interact with something you enjoy and capture or express the reaction.
This could be something like:
Listening to your favorite song and dancing around the house to it.
Spending time with your partner and telling them how you feel.
Watching your dog take a nap and giving him a round of applause.
Interaction with something → capturing the reaction from that interaction.
And then after, please tell us how it goes.
We’d love to hear about it.
I totally hear you guys. Even in the way we throw around the word "love" in daily language, for things like food, items, experiences... it feeds the illusion that love is easy, quick, material even.... feeding into our consumer mentality. We use the word and the the things we "love" to fill holes within us, rather than something we become or radiate out of our being, and share with others as a sort of overflowing.
Yet another GREAT read!! I love how each unearned construct (Wisdom, Peace, Love) becomes differentiated yet complementary during these presentations of each!! Keep it up. Makes my morning.