The Dog-o-mat- now available in St. Max, France and coming soon to the UK. You put your dog in the machine and wait. He comes out clean and dry. Romain Jarry the entrepreneur behind Dog-o-mat says that it doesn’t take long and the dogs don’t mind.
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I don’t buy lottery tickets. I don’t think about buying lottery tickets. I don’t follow how big the jackpot is. I don’t understand the different types of lottery cards.
The only time I think about the lottery is when someone is holding up the line at the convenience store where I get my morning coffee with a lottery card purchase. It’s a minor inconvenience but I hate standing in lines and so it always makes me wonder why people buy them. You have a better chance of being struck by lightning than winning the lottery. Nevertheless the state sells plenty of lottery tickets.
So, today, while waiting patiently for the guy ahead of me to shell out $5 or $10 on assorted tickets, I assembled a list of possible reasons to justify handing over money to the state.
Here are my thoughts:
The governor needs the money.
I get a tingle up my leg scratching off the cards.
They make great gifts.
It’s my retirement plan.
Just for a moment I feel that anything is possible
I’m building a card collection.
It’s my turn to win.
I’ve got too many bills in my wallet.
These are all that I could think of. Maybe you can suggest more.
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We all have a comfort zone. It’s that place where everything just feels right. You know what I mean. It’s a place where you know what to do. It’s a place where you know what to expect. It’s a place where nothing threatens your security or well-being. You wake up singing. Each day promises more of the same.
That’s the way life is supposed to be. Right?
It’s your goal for each day to make sure that you stay right in the center of your comfort zone.
Wrong!
If your life focus keeps you in the comfort zone, you forfeit any possibility that you will fulfill your potential. You will never become the best you possible and you may actually become worse.
Think about the times in your life when you were definitely not in your comfort zone. They were probably the most exhilarating times and the ones in which you stretched the limits of your abilities and became better. You may have hated them at the time but now you remember them fondly. Maybe it was going away for college. Maybe it was a new job. Maybe it was a new relationship or a commitment like marriage. Maybe you volunteered for something without thinking about how you could get it done. Or maybe you got pushed out of your comfort zone by forces that you can’t control and you coped, grew and thrived.
When you are stretching, nothing is comfortable and familiar. You improvise experiment and flounder. You learn. You improve. You rethink. And all the while you are changing and growing, even when you may not accomplish the original objective or feel like a success.
The problem is that we are programmed for comfort and we will do whatever it takes to get back into a comfort zone, either the one we left or a new one we create at the new level we achieve. Either way it is a continuing struggle to move away from a comfort zone and into the unknown.
My point with this observation is that when we are feeling comfortable and secure, we are going nowhere and maybe actually backing away from somewhere. We are accepting no challenge to the status quo, changing nothing in our lives, learning nothing new and taking no chances. Yet it feels so uncomfortable to do something new and it is so hard to stop changing course back to what feels good.
The problem with accepting your comfort zone is that it is only comfortable in the present. It will not take you to the level you need in the future and it may result in a future that is quite uncomfortable.
It’s a hard job to push yourself into new and uncomfortable territory when life is so comfortable where you are.
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Since weekends are generally slow reader days at my blog, I am saving interesting and perhaps funny things that are somewhat off the beaten path. Then I can use them for a weekend posting.
This one for example.
Nitelife in Amsterdam
This shot is from a grownup minibar in downtown Amsterdam. Visitors get an icebucket and a key to open the bin of their choice. It’s a sort of an update on the automats from the old days.
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I heard this last weekend from some people who have made big changes in their lives. It points up that I continue to tolerate that which I claim I want to change.
Here is the back story.
Seven years ago, I took a well-paying job to supplement my retirement income. My rational at the time was that over 5 to 10 years, I would be able to afford to retire a second time and maintain my lifestyle while enjoying being ‘job-optional’. The two incomes leave us pretty comfortable and the job is tolerable and therein lies the rub. I am comfortable with this situation and not motivated to do what is necessary to make this a temporary situation.
I have with fits and starts revved up my efforts and then allowed them to fall back to maintenance mode. There is no continuing urgency backing up my commitment to this program and so here I am, no closer to my claimed goal than I was seven years ago.
So the problem here is that I can tolerate my job and the things that it keeps me from doing. Recently, the powers that be around work have done some things that should make me intolerant. Over my working years (too many to count) I have developed an ability to adjust to the unacceptable and I have to stop myself from this and let myself get angry and intolerant.
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I read a thoughtful post on love recently. The author considered love an emotion and talked about the power of an emotion and and the other side of that emotion, the fear created from the concern that love won’t be returned. It made me think about what love has meant in my life.
The emotional dimension of love is the one we usually address. It’s the one we see in the popular media and the one we remember from our youth. But there is more to love than just emotion. For a person like me who acts more from reason than emotion (this is not a judgment or recommendation, just a fact) the emotional side of love is fleeting and usually tentative. That may not be true for everybody but for me the lasting dimension of love is commitment. It is what you can build a life around. I love my wife. It may have begun as emotion (or hormones) but over the years my emotions have run hot and cold. If I followed my emotions alone, I am sure that I would be unhappily divorced today. Because I have come to understand love as commitment, I have learned to love my wife (commit myself to making her the most important person in my life) even though at times I may not really like her. My love for her is a commitment to making her life as good as I am able. She responds the same way.
Do we make each other feel wonderful every moment of every day? Definitely not. I often fail and sometimes my failure is big time. My wife is gracious (or at least gives me another try) in my failings because she has learned that it is never my intention to hurt her despite the apparent evidence to the contrary. My only point here is not to diminish the emotion in our lives but to suggest that emotion may lead to hasty actions and long regrets. Building on the motion with commitment can make a relationship that stands the test of time.
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The hottest family car ever purchased by my father was a sharp black 1959 Chevrolet Impala convertible. This one looks great in red but our black one was super. I know that we bought it during 1959 but I don’t remember taking it to the prom. What I remember most is driving to the Art Institute in Kansas City during summer breaks home from school with the top down and Stevie Wonder on the radio. It was a pretty classy set of wheels that I am afraid I didn’t appropriately appreciate in my youth. All I remember is how hard it was to get the top to latch. I also drove it to Fort Leonard Wood when I was stationed there. Somehow it disappeared by the time I got back from the Army and my father bought me a car. More about that car later.
Here are a couple of youtube reminiscences. The first is Dinah Shore and her backup singers singing the praises of Chevrolet. “Its the one.” The second is a loving caress of an imperial blue four door sedan. Looking back from this era of dull cars all of which look alike, the flamboyance and flair of the late 50’s is amazing. To imagine that the best selling car of the time had those incredible horizontal fins sweeping out from the trunk seems impossible today. And yet today’s folklore is that the 50’s were boring. Maybe some aspects were boring but we had real cars.
Just another in the series of Carlson cars past. Like this. And this.
More 50's Nostalgia Let me just start with this. My father bought one - a 58 four door (the small one using the Ford rather than the bigger...
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My son chewed me out last night. “What was I thinking?” he asked. “Your blog has become boring and pretentious just like those motivational CD’s you listen to and what’s with this begging for comments.”
Now I have learned from the 31 Day Blogging Course that you respect, appreciate and respond to your return readers and I have to say that my son has followed me faithfully from the beginning. I tried plan A: I offered him a guest post but he was not interested. So here is plan B. I’m sharing one of the gems that he has sent me recently.
Photo by Eddi07
This one cracked me up. He told me about it the other day and then forwarded the video clip. It was a V-8 moment. I loved the new Star Trek movie. It’s actually the best movie I have seen in years and I didn’t even resent paying movie theatre prices to see it in Imax lite.
He also likes the nice houses that I come across and share. Like this one on the wrong side of the Beverly Hills city limits. It’s a little stark for me. The back yard is not a place you would like to hang out but better landscaping might make it a contender.
Finally, for you readers – and I know that there are a few of you – even if you don’t leave comments despite my desperate pleading. If I don’t hear from you, I am going to assume what I want to assume about my efforts here and head right on over the cliff. If I crash and burn at the bottom, it’s all your fault.
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Weekly Planning System-Week One Image by Jon Newman via Flickr How's it going? My experience tells me that simple ideas have the most powerful impact. That is why I...
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I have covered quite a bit of ground here at RalphCarlsonBlog. I started the blog thinking that I would report on quirky and interesting things that I would find and that someone else might enjoy. As I worked on the blog, however, a voice seemed to take over and I posted on more personal things. Some things I have learned in my many years of experience. Other things I am seeking to learn more and better. So over these months I have posted on quite a number of topics. If you haven’t followed me over those months, there may be posts that you would like but wouldn’t find, or look for. So to help out here is a categorized list of some of what I think are the most interesting.
Going Live Blogging Fixation [/caption] I don't know about you but I often find that I focus on one thing too much. I set a goal and...
Architecture in my past. [/caption] Part of my peculiar perspective on things comes from the way I think. I was just reminded today while discussing a mathematical problem at...
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Guest Post at Spend On Life When Ashley at Spend on Life asked me to guest post on her blog I was pretty excited about it. I have read her blog...
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