Hi! Here’s FIVE Things FOR… | The HI54 20/20 Vision Board
Originally posted back in January 2020 (y'know… BEFORE a multi-year global pandemic was added to our list of shared experiences), but I sometimes re-bump this post up the published blahg pile (maybe make few tweaks/edits as I do) in order to meet my self-imposed "new" post every weekday quota because… reduce, reuse, recycle, innit?--
I had made it all the way to 2020 without ever having put together a vision board, BUT, I guess one can only outrun certain things for so long, eh?
It’s not so much that I thought the idea behind vision boards was “lame” — I mean, I am a responsible casual stoner that has always enjoyed reading/listening to stuff in the self-help & spirituality world, as “lame” as those things can sometimes be to admit out loud, trying to apply whatever little life tips & theories felt the most real to me on the self-directed path to at least putting a little extra efforts towards trying to be a bit more “enlightened”, whatever that means, because what else are you going to do with yourself all day err day for an entire long-ass life? — I suppose I just associated ‘vision boarding’ with the more traditional financial/career aspirations that I’ve never really had a lot of (so the idea of cutting out pictures of champagne beaches and dream houses never quite grabbed the power of attraction in me).
But, as one grows older and lamer and acquires more acquaintances that openly vision board, one eventually realizes that the main point of a vision board is just putting together a bunch of stuff that you want to keep reminding yourself of. And it doesn’t have to be snapshots of the life that magazines try to sell you as what you should be trying to aspire towards. It can be quotes you don’t want to forget. Aha moments you want to return to. Stuff that feels important deep down, below the surface… meaningful-to-you stuff that you want to keep from getting buried under a million other distracting signals & cultural propaganda that your antennas pick up on throughout your day-to-days. Y’know…reminders to stay on board with your intentionally selected visions.
And since we’ve all experienced how helpful it is to have visually centring posters hanging on our office walls, especially on days when we’re feeling low & lost, I mean who can deny the power of a kitten telling you to “Hang in There!” while they are also hanging in there…
So, near the beginning of the year of soon-to-be-ironic 20/20 vision puns, I started thinking to myself, “What are the things you’d like to have taped up on the wall to remind yourself of daily? And could you feed 2 birds with one bone and get a new blog post out of the time that goes into making a vision board for oneself?” — AND — well, here we are with a blog post about what would be on my vision board, in 2020 and in whatever year we’re currently in now, so…
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Hi! Here’s FIVE Things FOR:
THE HI54 20/20 VISION BOARD
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When I try and paraphrase this Terence McKenna quote to someone else, I often cut the quote down to the main essence that I try to remember to remind myself of:
“Stop just consuming other people’s experiences of life all the time — you’re supposed to help create culture too”
And dang if that advice isn’t even more important to be mindful of these days than back when McKenna first dropped his barbs in the 90s (which you can listen to below on the ‘lyric video’ that someone nicely put together for this Terence deep cut hit):
Now, I don’t think Terence meant “don’t watch/read/listen” as a strict 100% DO NOT, UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES, CONSUME ANY CULTURE rule — I think he was just pointing out how far gone we’ve gone to mindlessly giving up our ability to actually take part in all the highs & lows that come with being alive ourselves, in favour of effortlessly consuming someone else’s recorded experiences. So we stan celebrities and obsess over their personal lives & relationships rather than paying attention to our own; we watch people playing sports instead of enjoying the benefits of getting out and being more active ourselves; we fill our heads with the thoughts and opinions of other people to the point where their opinions start becoming ours and we don’t even realize how often we’re just listening to other people talk and repeating their thoughts whenever we find ourselves actually talking to other people (ie. at a certain point, listening to podcasts or watching tv show after tv show is just filling our heads with other people’s thoughts/lives to avoid being stuck dealing with our own).
Of course, we can still get a lot out of appreciating others who do the things we enjoy better than us—that’s how we learn & grow—but when we start using others’ talent/work as an escape from the messy work of being fully present in our own lives & experiences, we end up under valuing our own capabilities + the benefits that come along with exercising those abilities on the regular.
For me, this McKenna quote (or at least my shortened synopsis of it) often comes up when I catch myself zoning out to another basketball podcast thinking, “Do I really need to know what these guys, who I do not know, think about who is doing best at basketballing this week? Do I really want to give any more of my time/headspace to more fake trades and debates about hypotheticals?”. And the answer to that question is usually an affirmative “No”, which is often followed by a “Yes” to the next question of “Couldn’t I be spending this time on something more beneficial to my own life right now than being a passive listener eavesdropping on strangers having conversations about people/things that I could go have conversations about IRL if I was really that interested in the people/things that these people I don’t know are talking about?” .
Now, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy watching basketball (well, the 10 minute summaries that get posted after the full 2.5 hour game is finished) and I enjoy listening to the odd NBA podcast every now and again (for example, mindless chatter is sometimes the perfect soundtrack for doing the dishes), and there are many other passive consumption activities I take comfort in using to temporarily escape small chunks of my day with (for example, who doesn’t enjoy a good tv show or movie) — BUT — I’m also very aware about bs like when the Amazon rainforest was big time on fire back in 2019 and the 7 richest countries pledged a whole $20 million dollars (combined) to help fight the fires, AND, as people pointed out on Twitter, athletes like Steph Curry are pulling in yearly salaries that are twice that amount of G7 aid.
And you don’t have to be an economist to notice there’s something very off about that dynamic, especially when you compare it to how much money YOU and the people you care about make each year.
Because, at the end of the day, we’re talking about folks who are just REALLY good at doing stuff like shooting a ball through a hoop (ok… and also really good at jumping). Now, I’m not saying that they’re not impressively good at those things & waaaay better than me, I’m just saying that maybe we’ve all gone a bit too far with how much value we attach to being really good at stuff like shooting balls through hoops & etc. I mean, other people are literally starving to death out here in this same timeline (and not just in the poor countries that everyone in the well-off nations try to not think about so as not to have to stir up any feelings of guilt/shame in our selfish way of life, you’ll also find some of those poor souls not too far around the corner from any big city’s taxpayer-funded but somehow-owned-by-a-billionaire sports stadiums).
And salaries in sports are just one example of how over inflated individual earnings have become for people who are good at doing things that we’d all actually enjoy being able to have more time/energy to do more of ourselves. But Capitalism tells us that only a few super gifted people are allowed to do the fun stuff once we become adults, the rest of us need to shut up and get back to the jobs where the salaries stay stagnant & the hours needed to afford to get by magically remain at 40+ hours a week forever (even with exponentially evolving technology) — and then, if you have time/energy after your ‘create surplus value for the owner class’ job is finished for the day, you can turn on the tv and watch others doing stuff you once enjoyed doing yourself (but don’t worry… you can now participate your wages by betting on what you consume). And that all feels like a bunch of bs, but first you gotta turn off the hypnotizing distraction boxes and propaganda rectangles long enough to come to that realization.
So how about we start taking some of the power back by actually doing more of the things we’d enjoy doing ourselves if we weren’t spending all of our free time consuming the experiences of others (whether that be sports, or writing, or music, or talking to friends/families about topics you like listening to podcasts about, or all of those things and more)? Because, even if those that get paid to do the things we enjoy our often way better at doing those things than us, at the end of the day, someone else scoring a goal doesn’t really have much to do with your own personal experience of getting to be alive and being able to do those things for yourself (especially when we see how much of our collective wealth gets sucked up to those at the top keeping us entertained/distracted).
At the very least, becoming more active participants in the activities we enjoy will help keep what we’re consuming & how much in better perspective. Maybe it’ll even lead to us scaling our content consumption down to a level where we can start seeing life a bit more clearly and focusing on more important things like… *gestures at all the broken parts of our society that we often ignore in favour of tuning into another temporarily entertaining distraction*
Or, as Terence McKenna put it:
“You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
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I don’t remember the first time I saw this quote—and I can never manage to memorize Jiddu Krishnamurti’s name when quoting him—but I do remember the words immediately resonating with me and it’s been one of the only quotes I tend to remember verbatim whenever it randomly pops back up in my head. Which is quite often, because the message always seems to become more relevant.
I think the main reason this quote keeps resurfacing is, not sure if you noticed, but the way the world operates is pretty stupid and f*cked up and extra frustrating (or “profoundly sick” as JK put it). And it is very easy to get discouraged about struggling to be “successful” in a society where we all seem to keep blindly ignoring all the signs & scientists & serious thinkers throughout time that have been warning us about how we can’t keep going along with this ‘Infinite Growth, Profits Over Everything’ grift any longer. And even though most everyone can seem to see the problems, we never manage to keep enough of us on point long enough to ever properly address the agreed-upon problems that are affecting us all, because no one wants to talk about the problems because it makes us feel overwhelmed & ungrounded & partly responsible, which can make being someone who wants to actually address our collective reality quite isolating — BUT THEN — it is around this point in that familiar thought-spiral that this Krishnamurti quote bubbles up from my subconscious and I’m reminded that maybe it’s a good thing to be bad at playing the game being sold to us by the very people driving the bus straight off a cliff.
As another wise guy named ‘Jesus’ (ever heard of him?) supposedly said: “You have to be in this world, you don’t have to be of it.” — and that message is a helpful thing to keep reminding yourself of whenever you find your inner goodness being diametrically opposed to our current societies outer badness/madness.
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I’m not entirely sure where the mantra of “You Can’t Change The World, You Can Only Change Yourself” first got stuck in my mind (a quick google search attributes the quote to Beatrice Wood, but that name is definitely not familiar to me — BUT ALSO — there are a lot of differently worded versions of the same sentiment out there, so I suppose it doesn’t really matter who said what, what’s more important is that the overall message somehow made it’s way into my brain at some point & stuck). All I know for sure is that it was around the fall of 2017 when I first started intentionally leaning into making this universal truth a personal life motto, and it’s been a pretty helpful anchor point for dealing with these increasingly overwhelming times.
For me, the part that made this age-old advice finally click was realizing just how much I was being sidetracked with shit that was completely out of my control (ie. global climate crisis, insane income disparity, Trump and the christo-facist politics/media that make that kind of clown shoe reality show possible, pollution, war, all the bad ‘isms’ and ‘phobias’ & et F’n cetera + a poorly handled global pandemic, to name a few). And it’s not that we shouldn’t worry about all the horrible stuff going on or fight back against the people trying to pit us all against each other all the time, it’s just that when you get right down to things, the truth is that you only ever have control over your own actions & reactions & intentions — when it comes to what other people choose to do, all you can do, at best, is just strongly worded suggestions (or, better yet, inspiration thru how you try to practice what you’d preach if you weren’t so busy just practicing).
And that might feel like giving up or becoming detached from the problems of the world, BUT, once you make the change of focus to your own actions/reactions/intentions, you start to realize just how much work there is to do on your own bad wiring, hypocrisies, ignorance, short-comings, contradictions and unpacked baggage — the stuff we often leave unchecked because we’re too busy cancelling everyone else before they can turn around and cancel us (because there is an infinite amount of people and things you can point your fingers at and boo). But once you stop obsessing over all the things everyone else is doing wrong and just worry about making sure you’re living your life the right way and not being a different version of the same hypocritical a-hole you keep accusing everyone else of being, the thing you eventually realize is *OH SHIT* I may not be able to change THE world, but it is possible to start changing the parts of the world I actually interact with (ie. you start changing YOUR world, which is your interactions with you family, friends, work, community, etc… to paraphrase something I heard Jack Kornfield say in a podcast before: “It’s not up to you to figure out how to save the whole world, that would be hubris to think that — BUT — it is a reality that you are only in control of your own actions… so focus more on tending to the parts of the garden that you can reach yourself.”).
And that’s a pretty good place for everyone to start starting from + there’s more than enough stuff in your life/world/community right now for you get to work on instead of just shaking your fist at the clouds (bonus: you can’t help but develop patience and compassion for others once you realize how challenging it is for you to keep on top of your own thoughts/emotions/actions every minute of every day — and patience and compassion come in pretty handy out in the real world, especially when more of us start practicing it).
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Spirituality is a tricky subject to get into, but it’s also a super interesting subject to get into (especially if you’re not closed off to everything except whatever religion was lovingly forced down to you through your family/cultural tree), and I’d argue that the interesting bits of spirituality far out weigh the tricky bits, especially once you just embrace the cosmic ridiculousness that is getting to be alive in a human body for a few spins around the sun.
Sure, a lot of this spirituality stuff can feel weird, and people have a tendency to get weirded out by weird things, but that comes more down to the fact that people forget how everything we know about being alive is already super weird. Blood, bones, thoughts, feelings, breathing, molecules, dna, making other humans with sexing? It’s all f*cking weird… so just get over it & then get into it, you big weirdo (because life is weird).
And I don’t think anyone has so clearly & charmingly communicated all the bends and dead ends of trying to walk down “the spiritual path” better than Ram Dass (originally named the more square Richard Alpert). It’s a bummer that Ram Dass officially left his space suit in December 2019, but it’s pretty great that he left behind so much of himself for people to continue using as a doorway to discovering more about themselves — including a new documentary called ‘Becoming Nobody’ (and this trailer will give you a good overview about whether this Ram Dass fella feels like he might be one of your people):
Ram Dass’ approach to investigating spirituality has had me won over ever since I first listened to his audiobook ‘A Spiritual Journey’ a couple years ago (which I’ve actually listened to a few times now, as it’s one of those sweet “short” only-3hr audiobooks). Personally, I just really connected with his simple & lovingly open “take the parts that work for you, and get rid of the rest” approach to exploring spirituality — which just feels like the correct approach for anyone wanting to uncover something as individual and mysterious as your own understanding of your experience of life (which is something you really need to unpack for yourself).
There’s no trying to convert you or divert you from one thing or another when it comes to Ram Dass, because what works for one might not work for another, and vice versa—so the main advice is to be open and curious and just learn to trust that your intuitive heart will keep you moving along the path that’s right for you (and it’s that intuition, if you don’t ignore it, that will alert you to any people/ideas that feel untrue along the way). And, of course, don’t forget to be here now… because wherever you go, there you are.
Also, I have to admit, it’s kinda cool that Ram Dass’ origin story includes psilocybin and running (+ partaking in) LSD experiments as a Harvard professor back in the 60s with Timothy Leary (and then, after being kicked out of Harvard for said LSD experiments, sneaking LSD to India to see how it would effect people claiming to be “holy men”). But that stuff just adds some street cred to draw in a hardened spirituality skeptic like myself (who was brought up the type of Catholic where the most important thing is that you just say you believe in whatever it is that a Catholic is supposed to say they believe in and nobody really focuses on what those things are because the other important thing is that you never question anything you’re supposed to say you believe in, despite all the blatant hypocrisies & red flags, so you can imagine where some of my “spirituality” skepticism comes from). But once I started listening to Ram Dass weave personal experiences on topics not often spoken about so conversationally and humanly, it clicked pretty quick that he was tuned into some good frequencies that my internal antenna was interested in picking up on too (and there’s a tonne of Youtube videos + an expansive podcast series that capture hundreds of Ram Dass talks, from the 60s up to the present day, that you can go dive into however you see fit + there’s also this Ram Dass starter pack of talks to get you started).
Related / unrelated: below is Ram Dass having a chat with the aforementioned spiritual-explorer Terence McKenna in the 1990s, because the internet is full of neat things like this:
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This is another quote where I only managed to remember my paraphrased version of it — but I also kinda remembered that the original version was from Jason Fried (of 37 Signals/Basecamp fame + also co-author of the very good and still relevant ‘business doesn’t have to be done the same outdated ways anymore’ book REWORK), SO, after some efficient googling, I was actually able to find the short 2006 blog post responsible for first etching this advice into the part of my brain that tries to remember helpful life tips.
You can read the whole blog post over here, but I’ll pull-quote the part of the post that inspired my paraphrase:
““When no one knows about you you can make mistakes quietly. Learn at your own pace. Fail without the fear of failure. Failing in obscurity helps protect your ego and you’ll need your ego later on when you are successful. Confidence is vital to success and if you fail big on your first try it’s going to take years for your ego to recover. Fail small now so you can succeed big later.””
As someone who runs a music blog that has only ever existed in obscurity, this “obscurity is your friend when you’re trying to figure things out” idea has been a foundational piece of advice for helping me keep at things, year after year (for better or worse). I guess it’s because I always feel like I’m still trying to figure things out… so hence the ongoing obscurity, eh?
In my early years of blogging, I used to find more comfort in the ‘you wouldn’t be ready for being a huge success right now if it happened anyways’ part of the advice, as I assumed that, eventually, I would become some kind of ‘successful’ if I just kept at things. But, as the years have gone by and the “later on when you are successful” part has never quite come to fruition, I started noticing & appreciating the creative freedom that comes when you finally just embrace all the positive aspects that come with nobody giving much of a shit about the little project/s you diligently work away at in obscurity.
Because once you get over the poor-me-sob-story that comes with realizing nobody really cares about what you’re doing (pro tip: it helps to realize that people only don’t care about you’re stuff on the same level that you don’t care about everyone else’s stuff), there’s actually a lot of relief that comes from being able to just start enjoying the work for what you get out of it & just trying to get better while no one is looking, rather than spending your limited time/energy strategizing ways to get some of that sweet, sweet temporary outside validation (external validation that often comes with ‘likes and exposure’ these days instead of ‘money for rent’ anyways).
Your version of “success” will come when it comes… it just might not come the way you were thinking it would come when you first got started on the long path of embracing the obscurity that comes with working on the work you’re pulled towards despite the reality of doing so within the current setup of a society built on finite spots of hierarchical success.
For example, especially when it comes to having the creative freedom to create freely, you might start realizing that maybe the quote should just be paraphrased down to:
“Obscurity is your friend, full stop”
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Ok, that’s 5 things for ‘The HI54 20/20 VISION BOARD’ for now…
…there’s a chance that this ‘vision board’ topic might return again with 5 more things that I want to be more intentionally mindful of, but probably more likely is that there will start being some more lists of different ‘Hi! here’s FIVE things FOR…’ popping up on the blahg going forward.
And, to jump back to the time when I was first posting the first draft of this sometimes-tweaked-&-reshared blog post to the internets, I guess I’m gonna have to come up with a better closing sentence than the original from January 2020:
“here’s hoping for a hopeful 2020 🍻”
…because we all know how that played out :)
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JEREMY / @HI54LOFI
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