The Space Between the Notes
Feb 17 2013

“Music is the space between the notes.”  ~ Claude Debussy

Everyone is so busy these days. We fill our lives with things that take us from here to there in minutes, when even just fifty years ago it might have taken us hours or days to do something.  The infrequent times I get to work on my music are the times I get to exercise a different part of my brain.  I’m in the middle of getting two songs produced with a professional named Ron Wikso. I’m learning a ton about the process, and he has been patiently explaining it to me.

The phrase “between the notes” has come to my mind often these last few weeks as I’ve found myself with a little more time to work on my songs, but I struggle with enjoying the space…the temporary lull in some of the noise…because there are so many other pressing daily life details that need to be attended to with the kids, job stuff, house stuff, etc.

I think that not only in “music,” but also in life the most poignant moments can lay in the space in between the noise of our daily lives.  The times when things in our lives are on pause (or change dramatically) while we wait for the next great refrain or chorus to start are often ignored, because we are waiting for the “silence” in one part of the symphony of our lives to end and the activity/music to begin.  Unlike an already written sheet of music, we don’t know if the next refrain in our lives will be a joyous beat, a steady (a.k.a. boring) rhythm, a pleasant melody, or the background music from a horror movie.  We don’t know, yet we often live in the anxiety and can’t enjoy the space…the space to explore other options or even to take a nap!

True learning, profound connection, and great discoveries have been known to happen in the space between thoughts, yet most of us are afraid of that space.  We don’t often choose the space or if it chooses us, we don’t know what to do with it.  It has been proven that meditation has many benefits when you can stop the thinking and sit still in silence, but it’s not easy.  “I think therefore I am” could have easily been said “I am therefore I think, play, laugh, feel, love, etc.”

The more we are able to quiet our thoughts and live in that space, the more peace we seem to achieve and the more positive impact we have on those around us.  The challenging nature of that endeavor mixed with the constant flux of our lives is why I believe there are very few gurus and prophets in this world.  Most of them are men who did not have kids or had someone else taking care of their kids.  Many of them also did not want or need money and were fine with sitting under a tree or in a cave meditating most of the time.  If I had no kids, I might try that life for a while. 🙂

May the space between the notes in your music or the choruses of your lives become great defining points in the stories you tell.  I already know I’ll be a grandma or teacher with the best First World “war” stories based on the space between the notes of my life…

Groundhog Day – February 2, 2013
Feb 2 2013

Happy Groundhog Day!  According to the Washington Post: Groundhog Day 2013: No shadow for Punxsutawney Phil, so spring is around the corner.  It feels like it’s been Spring in Austin, Texas for a while now.

Like the main character in the movie Groundhog Day (wikipedia), I find that February 2, 2013 has some de ja vu elements to February 2, 2012.  In others it’s completely different.  I think I have grown & learned a lot since last year but apparently I, like many others, still have much to learn.  Guess that’s what makes life worth living: the new & unexpected adventures around the corner vs. being trapped in the same day-to-day experience unable to even drive yourself (while holding a groundhog) over a cliff to escape.

The Art and Science of Dreaming
Jan 21 2013

Martin Luther King

Thanks For Dreaming Mr. King was the post I wrote last year on MLK day.  I posted it verbatim below. Many of our dreams have come true because of the risks he took.  Why are people so scared of some people’s dreams that they feel the need to kill them?  Many of us are still dreaming and our dreams don’t always come true in our lifetimes.  Maybe one day all of us will dream of good things happening to everyone instead of dreaming of killing others based on their beliefs, ignorance, or desire to change the world to something slightly different.  I’m glad my light brown kids are growing up hardly thinking about the color of their skin.  How much more they should be able to feel and do without someone judging them based on something they were born with.

***

Martin Luther King, Jr. had a big dream. He had more courage and vision in his pinky than most of us have in our whole bodies. Here is an except from his speech “I Have A Dream.” (Go listen to the recording of his speech at this link).

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

Thank you for dreaming Mr. King. You helped changed the world with your courage and the risks you took to make life better for all of our children. Today I will remind the kids what dreaming big can mean.

The Impermanence of all That Exists
Jan 13 2013

This weekend I went to the Blanton Museum of Art exhibit that showcased Tibetan monks building a sand mandala.  After spending days and hours creating this mandala out of fine, colored sand, they “dismantle the mandala, sweeping up the colored sands to symbolize the impermanence of all that exists.”

I wonder if entrepreneurs who achieve the most success, not only in dollars but also impact on the world, truly understand that everything is impermanent which results in a shift in how they perceive risk.  Steve Jobs could have floundered in his business in the early days, as most entrepreneurs do, instead of becoming a household name for founding Apple and Pixar.  I’m sure he and his team threw away many designs or product ideas that they spent countless hours on, but they kept on painstakingly placing the grains of sand on each next iteration. If a few grains of sand shifted in some of the most popular designs he had envisioned in his head, we may never have known he existed.  And now even he is gone but his company lives on…for now.

Imagine That. It’s 2013!
Jan 6 2013

Happy New Year!   From what I’ve observed at this point in my life, it seems to me that there really is no telling what awaits around the corner with regards to jobs, kids, health, love, or whatever, so I’ve given up on resolutions for the time being.  We are living in interesting times, and I have been fortunate/unfortunate enough to experience many things…some of my choosing and most not of my choosing.  Maybe I will live long enough and happen upon the right muse(s) along the way to enable me to write more about it…

So in 2013 I’ll just do my best to breathe deep, laugh with my kids, and spend time with people who support/love me & my kids (i.e., no fair weather friends or family).  I’ll continue to do my best at whatever I’m attempting to do and support others even if I find myself in less than ideal circumstances or around negative people, which seems to be happening less and less.  I also will continue to come to grips with the reality of my busy life (e.g., it took me close to 5 days to actually finish writing this short post because of work, facebook, watching TV, words with friends, going to the movies, spending time with real offline friends, downtime, and kid stuff!). 🙂

May you experience the most peace, love, and joy possible in 2013!

Happy Holidays – 2012
Dec 25 2012

Merry Christmas.  Happy Hanukkah.  Joyful Kwanzaa. I hope everyone had a very Happy Holiday season and was able to spend time with people who you like and love and who like and love you right back.

Our Christmas was really nice and peaceful.  Lots of great presents under a small tree.  Tasty lunch at a Japanese restaurant.  An afternoon of putting legos and other toys together, followed by seeing Cirque du Soleil at the movie theater. I wasn’t sure if the kids would enjoy the show, but they did and were fascinated by the flexibility, strength, and costumes of the cast.

Happy Holidays!

Broken Hearts and Broken Minds
Dec 16 2012

I try not to get too political on my blog, but sometimes an event happens like the killing of 20 six and seven year old kids and 6 educators by a mentally unstable individual, who had access to a semi-automatic gun, that compels me to write something.  The stories about their little bodies riddled with multiple bullets, make me shudder.  I can’t imagine the horror and pain those parents must feel.  I am partly in shock and cannot even wrap my mind around dropping off my 7 year old daughter at school to subsequently find out some lunatic shot her and her friends.  It makes me sick to my stomach.

There are so many random shootings by mentally unstable people and it seems as if this one is really striking a different chord.  People are tired of this nonsense.  There are no easy answers. I believe people have rights to own a licensed hand gun or even hunting weapons, but semi-automatic and automatic weapons just don’t make sense.  The people who fill out the right paperwork and clear the background checks aren’t usually the crazy people.  It’s their friends, relatives, or others who have access to the places the law abiding people keep their guns who have the potential to wreak havoc.  Can we feasibly check everyone that could potentially come in contact with a gun that someone is legally registering for?  Probably not.

I heard America has the worse statistics (behind Somalia) on gun related murders per capita in the world.  Some say we should arm our teachers like they do in Israel or Switzerland.  Others say the problem with that solution is that both of those countries require military service by all young people who get solid gun safety training as well as psychological screening.  Plus, who wants our kids going to school with teachers who have guns strapped to their backs?

I signed a petition at Whitehouse.gov to make discussion on this topic around the proper interpretation of the 2nd amendment a high level priority.  The petition is HERE.  Based on my understanding, the 2nd Amendment was primarily made to enable the common person to protect him/herself from the government, not insane people.  Advanced US Government weaponry is no match for anything available in the civilian market these days.  I mean, who is going to say it’s okay for Joe Blow to own a nuclear missile or an armored tank?

There are no easy answers but in my opinion, questions and potential solutions need to be asked & examined that include gun regulation combined with mental health screening.  What is going on in our society that enables mentally ill people to hide their illness so well from others?  Why is it that those closest to them do not speak up to get them help?  Hard questions to answer because of the numerous human, financial, and psychological variables.

My thoughts, prayers, and well wishes go out to those families dealing with so much heartache and pain right now.  They can no longer hug & kiss their little darlings good night. 🙁  I hope our country will come up with some solutions that prevent something like this from ever happening again!

How People Believe in God
Dec 3 2012

Buddha Stone Statue in China

A movie and a book intersected in my life recently with stories about how God is experienced and perceived by us humans throughout the ages. Life of Pi (the movie, released in 2012) was made from a book written by Yann Martel in 2001.  A book written by Deepak Chopra called God: A Story of Revelation(Amazon link) happened to come to my attention through a marketing email, and I read it on my iPhone Kindle reader over the last couple of months.  I have been fascinated with stories about God, psychology, and philosophy since I was about 11 years of age.

The movie is intense, full of metaphors, and starts with the statement that once you hear Pi’s story, you will believe in God.  I don’t want to ruin the punchline, but it’s worth noting that Pi says “and so it goes with God” when he finishes telling the two versions of his story about the time he was lost at sea and the character listening to his story tells him which story he prefers.  One is a magical story of triumph with God’s help, the other reflects the darkest side of humanity and “survival of the fittest.”

Deepak Chopra’s book described the lives of several people of differing faiths and the paths that led them to profess that they heard God speak to them.  The people he writes about are: Job, Socrates, St. Paul, Shankara (similar to Buddha), Rumi, Julian of Norwich, Giordano Bruno, Anne Hutchinson, Baal Shem Tov, Rabindranath Tagore, and Einstein.  It’s interesting to note that all except one are men.  I guess women were too busy raising kids and taking care of their husbands to have the time to wander the streets, write poetry, or be thought anything other than heretical/batty if they proclaimed God spoke to them.

Those on a path to find God usually lead pretty persecuted and misunderstood lives where “bliss,” for lack of a better word is only sometimes achieved after much affliction combined with not “fitting” in to the time they were born.  But they all seemed to have felt as if God was within them and inside all living things.  Even probably 50 years ago saying things like God was anything other than someone up on high looking down on us (randomly helping us), would result in persecution.  However, now as Eastern philosophies blend with Western, it’s not so odd to think that we and everything on this planet are pieces of God.  Science has even started to prove that we are made up of vibrating energy.  His book states that science moved us away from mysticism/faith to cold hard facts and is now moving us back to the unexplainable and cohesive universal force that keeps things in order.

It seems that our belief in God and what & who God is evolves and changes based on the stories we tell about the human condition. Apparently, the more we explore ourselves & the universe and the more we share our stories, our relationship to and with God changes.

Thankful – 2012
Nov 25 2012

Another Thanksgiving in the US has passed.  It’s nice to have a holiday to remind us to be thankful and grateful for the many positive things in our lives as well as for the challenges we have overcome.  I was reviewing my past Thanksgiving posts and last year I wrote Thankful – 2011 (such an original title!) and included a photo of a dragon from my October 2011 trip to China.  That trip was amazing, the memories wonderful, and I made some great new friends who I still hang out with.

I also wrote a post on Nov 30, 2008 called The Strength Of A Thought, and I still wonder the same about “thoughts” but have softened my query and am moving more toward observation/acceptance of my musing on that day: “So, how do we rule our thoughts instead of our thoughts ruling us?  Or maybe the question is can we accomplish this in this lifetime? In this body? In this experience? Oh what power our thoughts have on the direction we step in our lives…whether it’s right, left, backward, straight, or directly into stardust…into our dreams.”

Reason for photo: The kids insisted on taking the cloud photo a few weeks back that I’m using in this post.  My son felt quite certain that the middle cloud looked exactly like a dragon’s foot and my daughter agreed.  I’m thankful for their vivid imaginations.

Lincoln and Dealing with Change
Nov 18 2012

I saw the movie Lincoln last night. I left this comment on Fred Wilson’s post about the movie:

“I saw the movie last night and was deeply impressed with how it was done and the actors rendition of all of their parts. Watching a movie like this gives you perspective on what we have to deal with today in most of our (very lucky) daily lives. The fear & demons Lincoln had to wrestle with must have been tremendous. One line I remember went something like “We can show people that democracy does not have to be chaos.”

As I observe start-ups and small businesses I’ve been involved with, those who have thrived attempt to manage chaos with some sensible structure, coordination among team members, & meaning. Those who don’t have that belief/skill set tend to build continuously chaotic companies with high turnover. Like with a child, the first year or so of chaos and sleepless nights are understandable, but after that healthy parents and healthy kids are expected to start “growing” up so to speak and communicate differently.”

On facebook I posted: “The movie Lincoln is a must see. So well done. Saw it last night. Definitely gives you perspective regarding what people were dealing with then vs. now. Standing up for your beliefs in a smart, intelligent, strategic way is not easy and most go the easy route because the fear of rejection is so huge in many of us.”

The amount of change in our daily lives today gives us very little time to think about our decisions.  We often make decisions hastily without taking the time to analyze what is sometimes an overwhelming amount of information.  We often don’t make decisions at all because we are too used to the the status quo, we worry what people will think of us, or we are paralyzed with the amount of information we feel we need to sift through.  In Lincoln’s time the conflicting information he was receiving was also tremendous, and in his situation there were people’s lives at stake…not just jobs, profits, losses, and Wall Street earnings that many of us deal with today here in the United States.

Of Politics, Pundits, Links, and Movies
Nov 9 2012

So much to write about and so little time.

As the world knows, Obama won!  I hope he can continue the trend around change and find a way to bring a divided nation together for all of our sakes.  Check out Fred Wilson’s (A venture capitalist in New York) post on the topic How Do You Take The Vote?.  I like the way he outlined the results.

I recently saw a movie called Cloud Atlas that was well done and though provoking.  I want to see it again to catch all the references I’m certain I missed.  It’s based on a book of the same name that was written in 2004  by David Mitchell. It interweaves six stories about people who show up in different life times that move from the South Pacific in the nineteenth century to a post-apocalyptic future.  Tom Hanks’ character gets better (i.e. fights his demons and trusts his instincts about love).  He and Halle Barry make an interesting couple throughout.  I know it is a science fiction, but I sometimes feel as if people I meet I’ve known before or have more close connections with.

Author: Aruni | Filed under: Just For Fun, movie reviews, politics | Tags: Barack Obama, cloud atlas, david mitchell, halle barry, obama, tom hanks | Comments Off on Of Politics, Pundits, Links, and Movies

Happy Halloween – 2012
Oct 31 2012

Halloween is an interesting day that brings up memories from my youth through adulthood.  I love that my kids are so excited about it and enjoy trick or treating.  My son dressed up as a Jawa and my daughter as a Native American (that’s what it said on the package her costume came in).  People kept calling her Pocahontas and she kept correcting them saying she was a Native American, not Pocahontas. 🙂

I used to love spreading out the candy I got on the floor of our living room when I was a kid.  My favorite sweet things were pixie sticks (pure sugar). As a teenager, I enjoyed dressing up as a belly dancer wearing an army jacket.  I had an absolute blast at our company Halloween party on the 25th of October.  I dressed up as Uhura from Star Trek and there were many others dressed up as Star Trek characters so we could have easily formed a whole crew.  I finally had to buy a new costume because for the past seemingly 10 years, I sometimes dressed up as an Egyptian princess.  Anyway, I hope everyone had a safe and fun Halloween.

Marketing Cloud Summit – Austin, Texas – October 25, 2012
Oct 22 2012

Get a jump on your 2013 marketing planning in this “meeting of the minds” afternoon in Austin, Texas.  Bulldog Solutions, where I work, is one of the sponsors of this event along with many other well known companies in the B2B marketing space.

Join us for an educational summit in Austin, Texas, hosted by the Marketing Cloud™ and featuring Jay Gaines of SiriusDecisions, who will present “2013 Planning Methodology to Maximize Revenue,” SiriusDecisions’ ground-breaking marketing planning methodology. Customers and partners of the Marketing Cloud will then present real-world case studies that illustrate the planning assumptions offered by Jay.  

You’ll learn why:

• Your marketing must be a BLEND
• FOCUS on the persona is critical
• It really is time to MOBILIZE
• You must ELEVATE to be relevant
• BALANCE is everything

Who should attend: Marketing and sales leaders responsible for delivering revenue in 2013 in the areas of strategy, infrastructure or programs.

Date:  Thursday, October 25, 2012

Time:  1 p.m. to 5 p.m. CST (followed by a cocktail reception)

Place:  Hilton Austin, 500 E. 4th St. Austin, Texas 78701

Register Now...

We Accept The Love We Think We Deserve
Oct 20 2012

Paul Rudd (high school English teacher) tells the main character (Charlie) in The Perks of Being a Wallflower that “We accept the love we think we deserve” when Charlie asks him why people are attracted to people who are not good to them or for them.  The movie was really well done and there were many humorous and thought provoking moments. The setting was in the 70s/80s when LPs, cassettes and mix tapes were still popular…brought back memories for me.

There are so many tragic love stories on screen and in real life.  I wonder how many people accept a dysfunctional type of love or avoid feeling love altogether because they think that’s what they deserve.   I also wonder how many people accept a dysfunctional work environment because they think they can’t find a better fit where they are valued.  It’s scary to leap toward the light of something potentially healthier when so often there is no one there to catch you.  Or when people you thought could be trusted, as in Charlie’s case, unintentionally led you to believe you don’t deserve to be loved the way you want or need to be loved.  But if we are to heal, we must leap and learn to catch ourselves with a little help from friends and family.

Science Fiction, Halloween Parties, and Time Travel
Oct 8 2012

I love science fiction.  I’ve always been fascinated by outer space, intelligent aliens, and strange places.  I haven’t seen or read a ton of sci-fi, but movies and TV shows like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Battlestar Galactica always got my interest.  So, I was happy to hear that the 8th annual Halloween party theme at the place I work, Bulldog Solutions, is Sci-Fi/Glam Rock.  Everyone is invited and apparently 400+ people show up each year.  I already found my outfit (Star Trek theme), but I had to search for it online. I did not want to be Princess Leia from Star Wars and that was pretty much the only costume readily available for women at the costume stores.  All you have to do is RSVP on the Battlestar Spectacula facebook page if you want to come.

Oh, if you are into time travel go see the movie Looper starring Bruce Willis.  Guys in the future hire guys in the past to kill criminals/mob gangsters/enemies and when they decide they don’t need them anymore, they close their loop and send their older self back to be killed by their younger selves.  It’s definitely action packed and thought provoking. I wish there was less violence, but despite all the blood & guts, I found the storyline interesting.  I think they left it open ended enough that there might be a sequel.