Building A Better You

Don't Be Afraid of Your Future  There’s nothing to be scared of….Right? At one of the high schools I work at, they have these blackboards near the entrance to the school that they like to write cutesy little sayings on: “Throw kindness around like confetti” and that sort of thing. Things that sound they came from a Dove Chocolate wrapper. Today’s message was, “Don’t be afraid of your future.” Being the cynic that I occasionally am at the beginning of work, I thought, “What the hell does that even mean? Who, generally, is afraid of their future?” After a moment of reflection, I realized that I was. Shit. I  am . What’s more, I’ve known plenty of people who are, even if they don’t realize it or speak it out loud. Two years ago, I was asked to talk to a 12th grade student that I had known since he was a freshman. I’d watched him grow from a 14-year-old pain in the ass to an 18-year-old, respectful, studious, less frequent pain in the ass. His teacher asked me to talk to him, beca...

10 Things Better Than Staring at Your Phone What did we do with our downtime before we had phones? For one thing, there was actually downtime! Now, anytime I’m not actively working on something, I grab my phone and trick myself into thinking I’m being productive. I answer emails, research places to camp next year, I read the news. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of this, but it’s not something I need to do, and honestly, it usually ends up stressing me out more than anything. Recently, I’ve been working on being more present, living in the now. Staring at my phone takes me out of the now, and puts me in the future, or the past, and I’m pretty much anything but present. What I have started doing instead, is finding things that keep me occupied, but don’t necessarily have some specific end-goal, and don’t stress me out. So, what can you do instead of mindless scrolling? Write Anything. Write in a journal, write a letter to a friend (when is the last time you did that?!), write ...

  It's Not Them, It's You It seems like there’s no end to it. I suppose there never will be- it’s been happening for thousands of years. “What’s wrong with the world?” “What has gotten into people?” “Why are things so bad?” In reality, things are, in many ways, better than they ever have been for people. Generally speaking, you are safer now than at pretty much any point in history. You are less likely to be the victim of abduction or physical violence. Full-blown wars are less frequent. No, the world is not perfect. Not by a long-shot. And, there are dangers unique to our time: nuclear proliferation, runaway climate change, etc. Day to day life for most of us, however, is better than ever. Yet, people frequently expound on how terrible the world is becoming. Which begs the question: Why? Are these people living in a different reality? The simple answer: Yes, they are. We all are. Our realities are constantly being created and recreated. We each have our own personal lens throu...

 Do Something Hard How comfortable is your life? Your day to day life, I mean. For many of us, I’d say our lives are rather comfortable: We wake up and get ready for the day, we go to work and put in our time, come home and have dinner, then settle in for an evening of reading, or binging a show before falling asleep to do it all over again tomorrow. Often, it feels like deciding what to eat for dinner is the hardest thing I do all day. Some people develop grit when they’re young and they struggle through things in school. I was fortunate enough to have a rather easy time in school. Things came easily to me. I rarely needed to study. It was great, until I got older and was faced with actual challenges. Rather than dive into them, I did my best to avoid them. If I wasn’t good at it initially, I had no interest in continuing to do it. That’s fine for some things. We don’t have to do  everything  that comes our way. I’m not great at organic chemistry? Fine, it’s honestly som...

  Better to Stumble Forward Than to Stand Still My first article took years to write. It’s something I had thought about for a long time. I read books on writing. I watched YouTube videos made my writers. I researched the best things to write about, and the best places to write about them. Where did all that planning and research get me? Nowhere. At the end of it all, I still wasn’t actually writing anything, and therefore, not actually a writer. Maybe I could be called a researcher, or planner, or dreamer, but not a writer. The day I became a writer didn’t come until I was fed up with the way my life was progressing. Looking around, I realized I wasn’t doing the things I really wanted to do. I also realized that nobody was going to come along and say, “Kevin, it’s time to start now.” That was entirely up to me. What was holding me back? This was the question I had to ask myself. There were several answers that came to me: I was afraid of failing. I didn’t feel prepared. I was afra...