I work from home and I like quiet there because I like to think. After all, it’s pretty much what being the Napkin Dad is all about. When my wife stays home from work, or my daughter is home from school, they often will have a TV show on during the day that they like. I have to focus that out to focus in on other things. That can be hard to do. I don’t mind it because it isn’t frequent and I think it’s perfectly fine for them to enjoy their down time watching ‘The Price is Right’. but if they aren’t home I don’t have the TV on, or music for that matter (most of the time). I have a hard enough time focusing without those distractions.
How can you become self-aware if you are always surrounded by others’ clamor. You need to face your own clamor of silence, your own thoughts, feelings, meanings, desires, failures, and confusions. You can’t do that if you don’t allow yourself quiet. Not emptiness, since you are surely not empty when you are quiet, you are just with yourself and have to face yourself.
It’s not that you have to be with yourself all the time, always evaluating, always wondering. Often I think there is a sowing and harvesting aspect to self-awareness. You read, reflect, ponder, evaluate. All those are sowing seeds of self-awareness. Then you go out and act, be. That is the harvesting. You don’t need to think about who you are during that time, you just are.
Allow yourself time to be alone with yourself. It might be scary but it’s how you will grow.
Drawing and commentary by Marty Coleman of The Napkin Dad Daily
Quote by Rabindranath Tagore, 1861-1941, Bangladeshi poet and writer
Day 3 in my week of beauty.Collect them all, win prizes!
There is something compelling about beauty. We want to possess it. To a child, the beauty might be a flower, but it could just as easily be a frog or a stone. It is filled with wonder and we want it. We want to touch it and hold it and examine it and play with it. We want it to indulge in it. The hardest thing to do is to let beauty just be. To enjoy the object, person, event, whatever it is and not try to hold on to it, to capture it.
I know, I should talk. I am an artist and photographer. I spend my time thinking about how to capture it. But I also have learned to let it pass by. I have realized that there is an endless supply of beauty. I will never be without it, I will never be unable to see it. I know from past experience I have barely had a day gone by without seeing beauty. It might be the dress my wife wears as she goes to work, it might be the way my cat is curled up in the sun, it might be the incredible spiky beauty of the weed I haven’t pulled in the backyard.
Try indulging in beauty today without trying to capture it. Let it walk by and respond by just smiling and saying I am happy there is beauty in the world and I got to experience it today.
“By plucking her petals you do not gather the beauty of the flower.” – Rabindranath Tagore, 1861-1941, Indian Author, Nobel Prize in Literature 1913.
“A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.” – Rabindranath Tagore
I know this one is a bit creepy but the quote had knives and blood in it, what was I going to do? But there is a truth here. The truth is that logic is a step-by-step process of thinking through a problem, not a way of life or the exclusive method for interpersonal relationships.
You ever come across that person who gets irate if you don’t comprehend and go along with his or her logic? I used to be that person. I am still that person some times. I thought I was right. I had my reasons. They were good reasons. My arguments made sense. But the other person didn’t agree, didn’t see, didn’t understand, or plain didn’t care. grrrrr.
It wasn’t until I went through marital counseling with my now unwife that I realized the difference between trying to win an argument and trying to win someone over. I had always just been thinking the logic of the argument was enough. After the counseling I realized that the argument wasn’t what was important, my wife was who was important.
Just as a side note, it was ironic that the best, most real communication we had as a couple was in the final year of our marriage. It didn’t save our marriage but it did teach us both great lessons on how to communicate and care for the feelings and thoughts of another person. I am better for it and am grateful I went through it, even though the cost was high.
