When you look at yourself, your physical image, does it matter if you think you are attractive or not? Do your feelings about how the world sees you make a difference in your life…and should it? Surprisingly…yes, it does, at least at a DNA level…and here’s why…

200,000 years ago when we came down out of the trees and started living on the savannah’s and plains of Africa, a huge change occurred in how we hunted and survived. We were no longer protected by the foliage of the trees and bushes and couldn’t hide from predators so we began to rely on the cooperation of other people to keep an eye out for animals larger than ourselves. The ones who could damage or kill us. This cooperation and collaboration—also called a social order—was absolutely necessary for our species to continue.

How we chose those people—without language mind you—was by observing them as to what was important to us; our protection. That meant we looked for Individuals by leveraging what we already knew to be a successful system—mating preferences—which was the use of physical attributes such as symmetrical facial and body features, acceptable ratios (i.e. hip to waist, weight to height, etc.) and other visual attributes to identify those who we would want to mate with but also, who could work well within the context of a social order. By “context” I mean individuals who were able to suspend the focus on satisfying their personal needs in favor of the needs of others AND were able to project that “trust” to others…without using language to do so.

Because they leveraged mating rituals, physical attractiveness became a very important characteristic as to what indicated a trusting individual and therefore who was considered a useful member of that small social order…that helped our species survive the next 200,000 years…and what eventually became the much larger society we know today.

So when we look at ourselves in the mirror, there is a component of our reptilian brain, the oldest part of our thinking, that equates beauty to our ability to survive and survival is a hugely powerful motivator…even if we’re not aware that it’s there. Once you do know it’s there, however, you are able to quite easily see that we no longer need to keep an eye out for a saber toothed tiger sneaking up on us…

…and that regardless our physical attributes, we easily override those prehistoric feelings and decide how we feel and ultimately our own happiness.

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen

It’s kind of an amazing thing actually, considering there are no long years of intense schooling, no onerous and rigidly impressive entrance examination required, no monitored residency or other practical legal requirements and no license or regulatory commissioning…it is basically just letting nature do what nature is wont to do and then after 9 uncomfortable months or so, a highly energetic (and admittedly painful) admittance to the Mother club.

The amazing thing isn’t the actual admittance test—squeezing that wriggling little human through a tunnel 5 sizes too small—although that is pretty damn amazing (and kind of gross actually), the truly amazing thing is that even without that entrance examination or formal training, without under and post graduate schooling or any kind of monitored internship, these truly incredible women we know as our mothers have done such an astounding job of taking what we frankly admit were dismal specimens of humankind and, against all odds (and loud and constant prediction from other family members) created personable and productive members of society.

Well, most of us anyway.

So on this auspicious day of joy and thanks, it is not to the underpinnings of motherhood we raise our shared glass but to the fact that in the desperate throes of early childhood, in the darkest of dark nights where we cried without succor or respite, in the unmanageable space of our tottler-hood and our unholy entrance to adolescence via that purgatory known as puberty…no, on this day of days, we raise our glass and thank mothers everywhere for the simple fact that, faced with the monstrosity called childhood, they didn’t just give up and drown us in the tub.

Thanks Mom!

It is the intrinsic, the inevitable, the
moment; gathered, assayed and waiting
she or he, us or them…they look on
approvingly as the word slides
indelicate and obtrusive, unasked for
fuck
the moment grows the silence like
a totality unclaimed, we, she, him, they
all cajoled into thinking into being
paradigms, platforms of humility of
pretentious palatability
fuck
the hordes, the masses unwashed
unashamed, mostly working mostly
unaware of deeper meaning, of
connection, that slim tenuous linking
of words to character
fuck
the few, the self-chosen, the harbingers
of the next and the next, they pronounce
and they provide; structure, limitation
conscription and containment in the
guise of social fortification
fuck
a wrecking ball of sub-verse compels by
simply being, the word, the word revolts
and reveals both thinness and concrete
revulsion, she, he, they, him, us, we
decry and defend
fuck
left better, worse, unaffected we
tell stories we forget soon, we motion
without remembrance but that word
that scar of informality left un-breathing
on the literary flesh
fuck
it is said, written, sung often and sporadic
it is angered by itself, it is old and new
used and forgotten…it separates and
includes singularly, without precedent
and always is just
fuck

On the whole Benghazi thing…the point isn’t the content of the lies the administration told but the fact that they, as a group, decided to lie in the first place. To cut through all the fuzz and fog, here’s an analogy that hopefully puts things in perspective.

You and your spouse have been having an on again, off again argument about your spouse’s gambling at a card game run by one of your spouse’s friends. You keep saying that you can’t afford the losses and that there are way more losses than wins. Your spouse has argued that there are more wins but the actual losses can’t be refuted so eventually, you both agree that your spouse will stop going to the card games.

One Monday morning you look online at the bank balance of your joint account and see that there is a bunch of money missing. You immediately suspect that your spouse has been gambling again so you confront them. Your spouse explains that there was a mugger identified in the neighborhood and that, over the weekend, on the way home from work with their paycheck, the mugger robbed your spouse at gunpoint. You ask them to repeat the story several times over the next few days and your spouse doesn’t change the story. A week later, a friend of your spouse calls you and tells you that your spouse lost a load of money at a card game Saturday night.

You immediately confront your spouse and the answer you get is, “Yeah, the money was lost at cards but…what difference does it make now, the money is long gone.”

Now tell me how you feel about your spouse, their integrity and their respect for you…

…that’s the point.

Think of something that you absolutely know without a doubt you can’t do…like singing or walking a tightrope or writing a short story or being a racecar driver or a heart surgeon. Now think about how you “know” that you can’t do it. Were you told as a kid that you couldn’t? Growing up, did you assume from reading about it in a book or looking at it on TV that it was too hard for you to do? That it was simply outside your capabilities? As an adult is it because it’s just too hard to learn something new?

All the reasons above, and any more that you can cite, are wrong. Every single one of them.

Wrong.

The reason—the only reason—why you know you can’t do something is that you truly believe you can’t. Period. Regardless the path to get to that belief, you simply accept as true that it is hardcoded in your DNA and there is nothing you can do to change that. The power of your belief is so strong that it easily overrides reality and the plain and evident truth that is right in front of you. That truth is that if belief is strong enough to stop you from doing something—something that physically or mentally you are quite able to do—then surely that belief must be strong enough to allow you to do those very same things.

What is the difference between knowing you can and knowing you can’t?

You.

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen

Words.

By themselves they seem so unimportant. We form them in our minds to represent the material world around us and they become aggregations of sound we project meant to confer a concept, an idea…meaning. Connect a few of them together—write them down or speak them aloud—and they convey stories we tell to people other than ourselves. These stories describe something—important or unimportant equally—about things we’ve observed or felt about in the universe around us. The more these stories are shared and passed around, from person to person, generation to generation, they become the very facts and evidence we base our beliefs upon.

These beliefs become our basis, our way of life in an overall society of over 7 billion humans but more importantly, these beliefs allow us to form our own sub-societies where we have more effect…more impact…because, in order to feel more connected to each other, we organize ourselves into groups and clubs, into cities and states and finally, into nationalities and religions.

While we use nationalities and religion to search for connection, we also use these to separate us, to disconnect ourselves from those whom we believe to be inappropriately different. We use them as justifiable excuses for fearing and eventually hating other humans…and wanting them to come to harm…simply because the words that represent the ideas that they have in their minds don’t match the ones in ours. We’ve seen this many times in the history of this planet with billions of humans dying as a result.

Words.

By themselves they seem so unimportant…

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen

There are hundreds of people in thousands of books who want to teach us how to be a better people. How to succeed in business or life or whatever we’re trying to succeed in. They all have different methods and styles but it seems like it is always about something we don’t have. Some characteristic that we’re missing…but, surprise!…they just happen to have it to sell to us.

It’s always something we’re missing…

…but, if you believe nothing else in this universe, believe this; we are missing nothing. We were born with every tool and every capability that we will ever need in this world to be successful, to be happy…to be loved. Our larder is full, our cupboards overflowing. But…

…we also have fear. Some have lots, some little but we all have it. It is the thing that stops us from doing the things we want, stops us from succeeding. We don’t need to add anything to ourselves, we only need to remove the fear we have. One by one, all it once…however it’s done…rid yourself of fear and you will do what you want to do.

Nothing else required.

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen

In any closed system, there is nothing that can be created within that system that does not conform to the extent of the capabilities of the system itself. Look around where you are sitting right and imagine that you cannot leave the room you’re in. That is a closed system.

Now go build an automobile.

The schools we went to, the towns we live in, the religion we’re taught, the jobs we have, the marriages we’re in and just daily living creates belief systems that we use to cope with the world we live in. These systems have evolved but in many cases they are essentially closed systems because as we grew into adults, the systems themselves actively prevent us from seeing anything that does not conform to the capabilities of the system itself.

Now go cure cancer. Or quit your job to write a novel. Or act in a play. Or invent cold fusion. Or…

Please understand this, it is not enough to say or think that you want to do that cool thing or be that cool person because before you can do something new or different or scary or whatever, you need to extend the systems you’re living within so that whatever you want to do is within the confines of that system.

Or…my personal favorite….just tell those systems to fuck off, and just live. Just be.

It’s cool either way you choose.

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen

The next time you’re walking alone, say you’re in a park or even just the street…take out your earphones and listen. Listen to the sounds around you (and there are thousands) for a minute. There are people talking maybe or kids laughing or birds or honking horns or, what the hell, a cow mooing and all of those sounds are just differences in air pressure, they are frequencies—high and low pressures—like how when you put your fingertip on a loudspeaker, you can “feel” the sound.

So those millions of frequencies are bouncing around you, off of you, careening off walls, trees, cars at hundreds of miles an hour…but they cannot hurt you…they have almost zero substance. They are simply air molecules faintly beating against your eardrum which fires tiny electrical signals to your brain…which then matches the pattern to something it recognizes as sound.

Why then, when someone tells you that you are ugly or stupid or fat or undeserving of love…why does that hurt so much? If words are just faintly beating molecules against your eardrums, why does it feel like you’ve been hit in the face by a baseball bat?

The answer is that while the universe followed the laws of physics—what else can it do?—your brain took those faint electrical signals from your eardrum and formed the pattern of a baseball bat swiftly traveling in an arc toward your face.

Basically, there is nothing in nature that causes the hurt, you create the pain all on your own.

You should probably stop doing that.

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen

In the late 90’s, the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter was supposed to enter a stable orbit at about 50 miles above the surface but went too close to the planet, beneath the level at which the it could function properly, and plowed through the atmosphere, continued out beyond Mars and now could be orbiting the sun. It missed the planet because NASA uses the metric system and at that time, Lockheed Martin used English measurement in some of its control software…

…and no one thought to check because each group thought the other was the same as them.

As humans we fall into these patterns all the time. Because, even though we are subject to a diverse and wholly unique set of experiences and circumstances growing up and our world view, how we perceive everything around us, is necessarily specific to us….when we look out onto society our expectations are that everyone thinks the identical things we do, sees things in the same way, experiences living just like us.

And that is all wrong.

Of course, our perceptions and feelings are not so different from others as to be completely incompatible but every human on this planet knows that it does not take very much at all to cause confusion and eventually hostility between people. All because we assume that others think the same way we do.

Metric versus English.

The next time you’re arguing with someone or you find that you’re annoyed or even downright pissed off at them, stop for a second and think about what you’re arguing about, or what is making you angry. You might be arguing about different things…but think it is the same issue, or are using different words to describe the same issue.

It may be that you’re talking meters and they are talking miles.

Language and meanings are wonderful but only if two people agree that they are the same to each other and, sadly, too many times, we never think to ask that simple question beforehand.

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen