Living the Real

The seven life-changing lessons I've learned from the pandemic

• Matt Boettger • Episode 20

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It has been a year since this pandemic began its devastating effects on the US.  It was literally on my birthday (March 11th) when the US began its lockdown and the WHO declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. I took this week to think about some of the lessons I have learned so far from this difficult year. What have you learned from the pandemic? I would love to hear! You can email me your own reflections at matt@livingthereal.com.

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Matt Boettger:

My life has changed dramatically over the past year. And I'm guessing I'm not the only person who feels this way since March of 2020, we entered into this pandemic. And none of us knew what we were expecting to get ourselves into. It was so unknown. I think we had an intuition that somehow on some level, this was going to change us. This was going to cause clearly frustration, but I didn't know how much it would change me personally. This episode of the podcast is just talking about the seven. Things I have learned so far and it's still unfolding. I don't even know where these are going to land eventually, but these seven powerful realities by which I have learned invaluable lessons over the course of this past year. Clearly my life has changed in practical ways, how I received packages in the mail or groceries, and then cleaning them off, seeing people and not seeing people masking around, social distancing. All these different things changed me in a practical way, but then it began to permeate and penetrate my mind and how I see things. And then as things unfolded and things became political and the black lives matters, all this stuff happened and it began to really enforce a different outlook in my own mind. Now some things didn't change dramatically, but it deepened my awareness of what it means for me. To live the most real life possible generally. And then in the context of a pandemic, it made it all the more, visceral and real. And I want to share the seven things I've learned this far, and I'm sure it's going to change and mold as I continue. So once again, I'm Matt. Bottger welcome to living the real, I hope this week. This week is the most real life possible yet for you let's get going. Are you living the most real life possible? I asked myself this question all the time. Most of the time, the answer is I just don't know, but sometimes the answer is definitely not. This is why I have this podcast. I'm Matt Bucher, and welcome to the show. Two small things. If you get a chance, please leave a review like on Apple podcasts and also check out my website, live in the real.com where I offer lots of resources and how to live the most real life possible. Now on with the show. Okay. So let's get to it. My seven things that I have learned so far that I think are really important. So I want you to listen up closely. Now I know in some of these podcasts, I go deep, but this is how I think this is how I feel. This is all about me trying to figure out how. To live the most real, authentic life possible. And it requires some deep dive sometimes. So listen up, listen intentionally, Hey, it's a podcast. This is where you can pause it, reflect, listen to it again. But I know without a doubt that by listening to this in a complete episode, this is going to impact you. This is going to have a difference in your own life and it's going to make this week slightly more real So I want to start with my lesson. Number one. Now these are actually in the right order. These aren't random, these build on one another, and I want you, and I hope that you see this. And I really, really more than anything, hope that you get some good stuff from this, but what you can carry forward today and tomorrow. Now the number one lesson, or maybe not the number one, but lesson number one. That I've learned is that life is complicated. Life is complicated and here's the big thing. It's okay. It's totally okay that it's complicated. Now, this was a big revelation to me in a particular sense. The first is a realization that life is not linear. Now. I don't think that's too much of a surprise to maybe listeners that life is not linear. That there's things all over coming at us from different directions and making claim to our lives. And there's just not a linear answer to the complications of life. Now, this was a problem my past, this is why this is big for me. And it's something that I haven't really figured out yet in the sense of, I haven't allowed it to really impact my life that tremendously. Because before this awareness, so to speak, or at least the deepening of the awareness, I tried to strip down my life to make it easier.

Matt:

You what happened? There was an enormous amount of collateral damage and stripping my life down to make it easier because what happened was it came at the expense of relationships. I would oversimplify relationships and make them easy. And I would have to in some sense mold them to fit my own framework. Goes back to last week's episode, going from the inside out rather than the outside in, if you have listened to it and listened to it, it's important. And what happened? I ended up treating relationships badly. People are hurt. People are offended. People felt judged because I stripped them down to fit into a particular kind of mold to make it simpler. Now. The goal is still to make simple decisions in my life. I'm not trying to look at the outside world and say, it's complicated. So then my life needs to be complicated. That's not it at all. It's rather: it's the realization that life is complicated, but my life doesn't have to be complicated in the response to that. So I can still make simple decisions without having to strip reality down. That's the goal. This is the biggest, I think, gift that I've received in this particular lesson. Is that there, there is not a contradiction and looking at a life of someone else or something, and yet still maintain your own simplicity in your own life. You don't have to strip something down to make it fit and make it easier. You can maintain and hold its complexity like a human being and yet still respond to it with a simple gesture that I'm still trying to work out to this very day, but I know this to be true, and I'm trying to caution myself and trying to strip people and things down too quickly. So I can quickly make a decision. We're gonna talk more about this in a second. That was a big revelation to me. So when I talk about. The complications of life. I'm not necessarily talking about life being extra difficult, but rather that life circumstances are multithreaded. Again, it's idea that life is just not linear that it's complicated and they have many threads involved. The pandemic really awoken me to this reality. Take this, for example, this is just came to the top of my head and five minutes, just riffing through the different threads of the pandemic that make it complicated. Thread number one, it's an unknown virus, it spreads quickly, it kills many as exponential growth. Thread two: the safety of people we serve. But the safety in many different forms: psychological safety, the physical safety, the economic safety. Thread three: just time. We don't know about the virus, you to make an urgent decision. It's complicated. So you need to make decisions quickly. Thread a number four: the financial and other resources available to actually help address the pandemic. What kind of resources do we have? Do we have enough? Thread five: the historical precedent of a pandemic, looking at the past at other pandemics to see what worked and what didn't, and at least trying those to begin with, not knowing whether the work or not, but we need to start somewhere right or wrong Thread six: changing information and misinformation, as things begin to evolve and become more of a pandemic, we learned more about the virus. And then by learning more, we have to change. And of course information was changed, but then sometimes that turned to misinformation. That became an element of suspicion. Thread seven: the healthcare system. What was needed to keep the health care system afloat during times of surges, Thread number eight: lack of preparedness. Knowing that we, as a country, weren't quite prepared for this pandemic. And so we needed to buy time going back to time to, to get things ready, to be able to address... well, the issues, the cases well. Better diagnostic tools, better medical resources, more medical resources. Trying to find better treatments to try to buy some time doing extraordinary measures to buy time so that we could better address it. And maybe thread nine: clinical versus observational. It is one thing to do clinical data to understand what the virus is doing. And then there's observational data of what the actual virus is doing. And sometimes those can be at odds to each other. And how do you understand the observational data can be misleading. Take flu as a great example. People start to think that, Oh my gosh, COVID really isn't spreading as much as we thought people aren't dying nearly as much. So why are we doing lockdowns? That's a complicated question. And then what helped make sense of it for me was the flu. Because the flu came this winter and it was non-existent. Why? Because it was just coincidental. No, because people were taking measures for COVID that had an enormous amount of impact on the flu. So that was a good piece of evidence to suggest. Wow. Could you imagine if we didn't do these things where we would be at with COVID. If normally we'd have 50,000 cases of the flu and we have 18 at this point in time, December, January, February, because of what we've done. Could you imagine what the impact would have been? If we didn't do anything with COVID, how bigger the numbers would be. So you see all these different threads happening, right? This is not an episode about the pandemic necessarily, but it shows you how life is nonlinear. There's multiple threads involved here. And then on the flip side of things, you have the idea of the linear approach. That COVID is not real COVID is a plot for one world rule, pushing communism or socialism. And these theories are grounded in other theories, which are based on other theories, but nothing that's actually real or substantial. Let's talk about relationships now, using this as an analog. How me right. Has a tendency to shape things in such a way to make it simple. That he is just being a"D" or a"B". I'm not going to say the word, right? Somebody who's just being bad. You can't stand it. You're judging them, she's just a terrible person, but what's behind that. That's like the conspiracy theories. But being able to uphold the complications of someone's life. Let's take that same example of the threads and unpack that just briefly in light of a relationship. Thread number one: unknown circumstances of their life, their history, their present, their perceived future. Do you know about it? Do you know what the, but their past is like? What got them to this point? Why they're acting that way. Tread two: the safety of the person we are engaging. Their psychological safety, their physical safety, their economic safety, their emotional safety. Do you know where they're at? Do they feel threatened in any one of those environments that might be contributing to how they're behaving with you? Thread three: the time. Moving from one thing to the next you're so busy, you have no time to breathe and that can make you a short tempered person. Because they have so many obligations to stay alive for themselves or their family. Did you consider that Thread four: financial and other resources. Limited resources for them to make them feel free? They don't feel free because they have such limited resources. They feel the stress. So it's hard for them to be present to the people around them. Thread five: the historical precedent. How were they raised? How were they taught to behave this way. They were raised up with it needs to be corrected. Absolutely. But they're just not completely utterly to blame here. It's complicated.So sitting with with them is maybe a really advantageous thing and not just judging them so quickly. Thread six: changing information. Life has so many changing variables with no anchor and it can be overwhelming. If they're constantly having a changing reality with no anchor, no substantial reality in their life to be grounded in, that makes somebody really vulnerable. It can make them reactive. And over-reactive because they feel threatened about everything. Cause there's no a refuge for them. There's no safety in their life. Thread seven: lack of preparedness. Maybe they don't have enough protection in their life to engage life proactively. And so they have this kind of lens by which they look at the world reactively. And it's not just because that's what they want. It's because it's, the life has been dealt to them in some circumstance And thread nine: what do you see versus what is really going on? What are you seeing is a symptom of a deeper reality? In reality, as a cry for help, it's a cry for a vulnerability, feeling out of control, feeling lonely, feeling afraid. And instead of going around and going how bad they are and how to judge them. Gosh, realizing that life is complicated. It doesn't mean that we respond equally with a complicated response that makes things worse. We can respond with a genuine, simple answer, like empathy, sitting with someone, a hug, an embrace, just feelings of Goodwill towards that person can go a long way. So this has been really important for me and still shaping me in ways that I have a long way to go. The conclusion on this one: we will fill the gap between experience and expectation with Goodwill. And lean into discovery over that of determination: judging them. They're just an idiot. But discovery and the complication, the problem without making your own life complicated. So, while life is truly complicated, which is a huge realization to me, our lives don't have to be complicated. It's grounded in two big principles: Goodwill towards the person. Or at least filling that gap of the experienced expectation. I expected this as someone experienced this and that sucks. And then discovery. Understanding the complexity of their life, then responding with a simple act of charity and love, understanding. Because you don't have all the answers. You really don't know what's going on. So that's number one, that life is complicated. It's okay. That it's complicated and that we don't force ourselves to strip it down, thus stripping our relationships down because that's not the way by which we can inter life in a simple way. The second one I learned the second lesson, which was powerful for me is that imperfection is the gold standard. Imperfection is the gold standard and not perfection. Now, where does this come from? It's been the whole mask story in the COVID pandemic. Whether masks work or not work. And what do we mean by work? Cause some people had the understanding that no, clearly masks don't prevent COVID a hundred percent times they don't work. And that was a big dismissal. But in fact, they do work now. Do they work 100% of the time. No, but they are effective in diminishing the transmission of the virus. Imperfection is the gold standard here. That helps tremendously. And why this is the next lesson that I've learned is because in the first lesson it's complicated. It's okay. The second lesson is the response to that complication. And that our response is not a perfected response. That just creates this insanity cycle, right? We need an imperfect and charitable and loving response to the complexity of life. You've heard me say this before, but the Pareto Principal is so powerful here. That 20% of our efforts provide 80% of our rewards and value. This has been proven over and over in so many different circumstances. And this just shows you the pursuit of imperfection is the highest goal here. Life's complexity is embraced without making our life complicated by the Pareto Principle. Because for me, the ideal, the ideal that, which is not like a imperfect, but the perfected thing you're trying to achieve that ideal sweeps, our legs out from unrested makes us collapse a perfect example. This is back in March in 2000, everyone was going crazy with the pandemic. What do we do? It's unknown. Is it on packages? Are we going to get it by just standing on our front porch with nobody around? And we're afraid. In our home in like many other homes were overreacting. Doing everything we can to protect ourselves words, we were aiming for the ideal. Not one little virus will enter into our home. And what happened? By us pursuing the ideal, we went a week or maybe even two weeks without refilling our hand soap pumps around all the bathrooms. And there were many bathrooms, at least two of the three that didn't have soap in them. That is a Perato Principle. Basic things is to wash your hands, but we were so succumbed by all these other variables of washing off our vegetables and packages and spraying our door knobs and that we just were so exhausted, we never got around to refilling the hand soap. And it just took our legs out from under us. And that's what life is like when we try to pursue the ideal. It just makes things all the more difficult and we get nowhere. So lesson number three, and again, they're all connected. Systems really do save. Systems save. We saw this. Right away in the pandemic, that the lack of good systems in the US at least particularly led to a deeper crisis in the pandemic. Not knowing how to handle it as a nation, but only on an individual level. This breakdown of systems made the virus spread much more quickly. And this breakdown of systems is partially due because of the American sense of self-reliance. Self-reliance, self-determination, is a fundamental right, but it's not the only right. We just allow everyone to be responsible themselves. That's great when things are going well, but when there's a pandemic or even a national crisis, and it's calling for national efforts to get rid of it, to help it, to bring aid, then we don't have the resource available because we can't do much on individual basis. It requires a community. In the midst of this learning lesson, the systems really do save. I've learned that we are connected, whether we like it or not. And the pandemic has made that utterly known. Whether you want to be connected or not, we are connected. And no matter what you do, the impact of other people's behaviors is going to impact you. There's no way we can get around this. This requires us to let go of some of the individual rights for the sake of the common good. And we need to develop the systems in place to be able to take care of those around us. I've been really into this idea of lean principles. Of trying to live the most simple life. And not to store up too many things, but just respond into the moment of the circumstances before you not try to create so many scenarios that which may not ever happen and try to plan for them because it is wasted energy. To plan for that which is in front of you and maybe a little bit of in front of you, but that's about it. To try to stay way away from wasting too much energy and things that just aren't going to happen. Well, this pandemic just totally flipped that on its head of how it works. And really the only way we can actually live that way. I think that's a great way to live, to live the kind of simplicity, not trying to think about all the other things could potentially happen in your life and plan for them. You'll find yourself planning your entire life without living it, the only way that can really work is if you have something above you, some entity above you that can provide for those casualties that come every once in a while, that can't be fixed by that kind of way of life. I'm thinking of example, of just a kid or a child. My boys: six, five and three. And how they had the freedom to just live life spontaneously and hurt themselves and forget about their lunch. And then also they're starving. Because they have parents who are thinking about that, and helping them get them their lunch and changing their clothes and giving them their baths, and helping them clean up. They're able to have that kind of freedom because I'm there. If they didn't have us, they wouldn't be to live that way. They wouldn't live long. Like that way. Similarly, When times get tough, we can look to the government that's meant to help us in those rare moments to survive and to be able to adjust. And get through these difficult times. The next one is: we're constantly battling the fight between effective and efficient. I think this is related really, really, really related to the above. If I saw this in many local government officials trying to deal with COVID. And what's effective and what's efficient. So speaking of systems comes right off the heels of this. I've learned there is a greater distinction between efficiency over effectiveness. So what is efficiency? Efficiency is really about constraints. Dealing with time, money, resource constraints. It's a broad sweeping, often a course of action, to be efficient and can seem unjustly discriminatory at times. Because you're just being efficient. You're trying to get something going something quickly because of constraints. And yeah, it may not be perfect, but it is efficient. It gets the job done quickly. And then there's effective. This is oftentimes we do when there's maybe less constraints involved, it's a more narrow surgical option. It's more targeted. And I saw this balance between efficiency and effectiveness throughout the pandemic, all over the place. And people pointing that government officials and other people as if they're being discriminatory. And that could have been the case, or it could have been, this is just humanity wrestling with that hard distinction between being efficient and effective. I remember back in my undergraduate days, I took this class in philosophy and they were talking about how the God can't exist. Because you look at the world, it's just not efficient. It's so inefficient. It's almost unintelligible. Now. There's a lots of things I could go against with this, but just taking that at face value. I still had an answer. Now my, by the way, my upbringing, my past is computer science. So I, at the time, particularly I was in undergraduate school getting my degree in computer science. So computers were at the forefront of my mind. And I remember thinking look at computers, for example, now at least back then they, things are different. And how is it back in the nineties, where there was a spinning hard drive. You don't, you barely see that anymore. There were slow. And there's this thing called Ram, which still exists today, which is this fast memory. It's super fast. And I remember thinking if you looked at a computer, you say the same thing. It's Oh my gosh, look at this. No person, no beam could create this on their own. Look at all this information. All the most important information about a computer is stored on the slowest piece of hardware, the spinning a hard drive that makes no sense. People know that we're only, strong as our weakest link. And if you put all of the most important information on the weakest part of the computer, then you slow everything down. This is stupid. Who would have made this? This is clearly just evolution, a computer. Now if we realized no, somebody really made it and yes, it's really is inefficient, but there's a reason why. Because Ram at that time and still today was really expensive. And if you really filled the computer with all the Ram to store all of your information, super fast Zippy it would cost like$20,000. Nobody can afford that. So you made it economically efficient for them. By making some inefficiencies in the computer. And so we say that about this as well with God and the creation, all that kind of stuff. And the same thing here, dealing with efficiencies, inefficiencies, and effectiveness in working that balance. And it's an important thing to battle. And my conclusion here be careful not to become suspicious of someone, something when it very well likely could be a choice to prefer efficiency, over effectiveness. And it's hard to know when to do which. We need to know the why. Look for the anomalies and the principles being governed to know whether it's being consistent with their principles or inconsistent. And that helped me see better about when people were being maybe shady or when people were just trying to do their best and maybe they screwed up, but they're doing their best. We need to go back to filling in the gap between experience and expectation with Goodwill. Everyone is doing their best with the unknown realities, whether it's COVID or anything in their life. And here's the big take home on this. In the end, we should prefer effectiveness over that of efficiency when it comes to people. We should be efficient with things and effective with people in general. And sometimes it's hard to maintain that distinction. Now somebody might fight that and say, Ooh, effectiveness, even with people is not very good, because effectiveness is all about trying to achieve some end, some proper result, which kind of sounds like you're using someone now. What's the result I want to get with the human being? And this goes back to my previous episode of living the principle of the gift. The biggest possible effect. The biggest possible result I can give to someone, right? If I'm truly being effective in a relationship with someone in my mind, is that when they are with me, they feel more themselves and not less than themselves. And man, I suck at this in so many ways and really hard ways and the most vulnerable where I should be exactly the opposite. The most important relations my life is where I fail at this. But this is the ideal. This is the effect I want to give. I want to provide. I want to be effective with people and efficient with things. Boy, I do know when I try to be efficient with people that's really, really bad. So we are constantly battling the fight between effective and efficient and we need to be okay with that. Next one is the whole idea of gift at verse grasp is real. It is really, really real. And I see this and I saw this preeminently at the very beginning of the pandemic when people are going crazy grasping at toilet paper, when there was none left for anyone. And that's the paradigm which we live in. The shift from grasp to gift. There's a great book called the Rise of Christianity. This person who wrote this is not a Christian, he's not a believer. He's not, he doesn't even have faith. We just studied on a socialogical level and he saw it because he was wondering, he's asking the question. How on earth did christianity didn't become such a dominant religion in the first three centuries with 12 fishermen, starting it out who were illiterate? He realized one of the biggest persuasive elements of Christianity in the first three centuries was that their ability to love utter strangers, radically. And now he gave a number of examples of when plagues, which has somewhat aligned with what we're talking about. When there was plagues and towns and how the talent would run out of the town to escape the plague, even leaving their friends and their family behind who had the plague to fend for themselves so they could escape it and hopefully remain healthy. And as they were leaving the town, you would see these Christians. Walking into the town, like, why are you doing this? And then, cause they heard that there was a plague and they're going in to help those. And they were just mesmerized and shocked by. They don't even know these people and they're going into a town of strangers, into a plague, risking their lives to help someone they don't even know. And this happened over and over and over and it shaped the culture and it made them lend an ear towards the credibility of Christianity. That is the idea of gift right? Going in and often yourselves as a gift together. Whereas this idea of trying to get as much toilet paper is a different kind of paradigm. This is hoarding grasping. It's my rights. It's American individualism proceeding that of the good of the other before me. Now I saw the idea of gifting going on. I saw Facebook posts asking and saying, Hey, go to your restaurant. I know you can't get it, but buy a bunch of gift cards. So that when it is over, you can use those gift cards, help support them in creative ways. That's gifting. Even staying home is a gift. Not going out and risking, contaminating other people and transmitting the virus. It was a weird concept of gift, but it was. Wearing a mask is a gift. It's a sacrificial gift. It's small compared to what we just talked about the first few centuries, but it's a small sacrifice. It's a gift. Nobody wants to do that. It's actually saying, okay, I have desires of my own heart, which is real, totally real, but I'm gonna put the good to the other person before that, the desires of my heart. I'm not going to negate the desires of heart, but I'm always going to keep it checked to the good of the person before me is always a little bit higher. So I want that it's a good practice to be in. Okay, Self fulfilling prophecies infiltrate our lives more than we'd like to think that this goes right off the heels of the last one. The idea from gift from grasp the idea of the example of the hoarding and March and April, there was a fear, a real fear that there would be no food nor supplies. And it was the fear itself that caused it. And that awakened me to the deep sense of man self-fulfilling prophecies are a lot more of a reality than I would like to think it is. It'd be nice to blame other people, but I'm wondering if more so than I've ever thought before, that is our mindset disposition that creates these realities in my own mind, in my life and your life as well. Now, we create as much as we discover. This is absolutely true. We create a solution to the world's problems, through discovery. Or, we create more problems for the world problems through determination. And we create these problems out of nowhere because of the way we approach life and ourselves. How we think is what oftentimes what we become and what we provide to the world around us. Now clearly there's an undeniable, like manifestation idea behind all this. But I want to put that in a boundary because I'm cautious about this. So yes, we do manifest stuff and I'm cautious on how much we do. But I do know that the way we think contributes greatly on how we behave and how we act. Next lesson: Change and even retraction does not mean lack of competence. When we change our own mind, we grow. It doesn't mean lack of competence, all this all over. Now, why is this important for me. Because I have a tendency not to want to change. The best example of this is when I first got my brand new Nissan Altima, 2008. So excited about it. I only had it for a year and it was coming back home from Nebraska, with my sister and her husband and their child, my nephew. And I had my bike on top of the rack And I forgot about it because we've been driving for eight hours from Nebraska to Colorado. And I was pulling in my car port and I ran right into the carport with my bike on top of it. And what did I do? Did I stop? As soon as I heard the crunch of my bike. No! I literally kept pulling in the car port. I didn't stop. I didn't change. It kept on going. And now I remain calm the whole time, but didn't get very angry, even though I destroyed my car, you know, somewhat. And it was brand new. But that image of me not stopping what I was doing and not changing and not causing more damage to my car, haunts me. Cause that's what I do with my life. I just keep going up. I made this decision. I'm going to keep going because I'm going to be in integrity with myself and I will be integrity with my stupidity. And I realize I do this so often. I make my decision and I'm resolute. I just keep on going. I don't learn. Again, this goes back to why I love Living the Real so much in this concept discovery. I'm not allowing the outside world to shape and mold me and change and make me grow. I get stubborn. And I stick with it. And that Nissan Altima driving in the car port is allowing it to scrape my entire car is a perfect, terrible example of my inability to change on the spot. What does this mean for us? How do we be in the live this idea of allowing ourselves to be changed and molded and grow and not be stuck in our own ways? And in this idea that we change is not a sign of incompetence. It's a sign of maturity and growth. When you do big things, the plan big, enormous realities. It's harder to change them. It's a kind of perennial example of a rocket ship going into outer space. And it's going so fast that you can only make small incremental changes because it's just so much going on at that moment. It's now too late to make big changes. You put all your eggs in one basket. Versus, if you go small and slow, you can iterate very much more quickly and change in smaller ways and faster ways. So to help me to invest small amounts of time, energy resource, towards things, to help me create my own natural feedback loop of life so I can change and grow and not be so stubborn. And try not to put my eggs all in one basket and just keep on trucking forward in spite of all things. Again, like last episode, it's a priority is the outside world informing me not imposing my world on the world. So again, the conclusion this allow life to be the feedback loop, and commit to intervals large enough to make progress, but small enough to allow change, change in your life. And the last thing I learned from this. This is powerful, and this is a one it's still unraveling. I don't fully understand, and this is has changed me the most, and it's really scary for me. And that is fear is not to be feared. Fear is not to be feared. Now, what am I talking about here? I have had a tendency to believe that fear is a vice. If you fear you're weak. But I realized this is not true. And I seen this with the pandemic. With people using fear to judge people and make them the lesser. Gaslighting people out of the name of fear. I realize what is fear, but nothing, but the proper servant of love for the imperfect saints. Quote that I found. Fear is the proper servant of love for the imperfect saints. Fear recognizes the fragility of life and love. That it is fragile. And this is the hardest one for me to really take in, and I don't know where I'm going to go with this, to be honest, but I know it to be true. I've been accustomed to run away from fear. Why? Because it makes me feel out of control. Want to get my life under control and fear. It doesn't allow myself to do that. So I have to do a mindset switch. There's been a deep learning experience for me. That fear is actually information that connects the world with human vulnerability. And the effect? If I can actually allow it to come into my heart, and to actually allow it to stay there for a second, and take ownership of my own dang fear. Do you know what the effect could be? I could have more love in my action. Would that be nice? I'm sure some people will really appreciate that. More love in my action. Now I know that the big caveat in here that we're not called to be working out of fear, but allow fear to deepen the pursuit of our discovery of ourself. What does it say about me? What do I need to be awakened in my own heart? What about the other people around me? I need to sit with them, or the world, even God. So, this is still really unfolding for me in a powerful way. I don't even know where I'm going with this. So this is what I've learned so far, and I hope it's been helpful for you. The idea that life is complicated. It's okay. And we can still respond in a simple way that imperfection is the gold standard and not to try to be the ideal. To live by the Pareto Principle. That systems really do save, and we need to build a system around us to keep us going and to remain connected to the people around us And to be able to rely on the systems above us, to live a fulfilling life. And that we're constantly in the midst of the system of life, where we're battling efficiency and effectiveness. And it's hard to build the systems around us, whether an everything's a system dating the system, marriages, the system. I'm not trying to make it inhuman. It's just part of it. Like you have rituals, you go on dates. All these things. And the constant fight is I want to be effective over efficient and efficient and effective. And when, when do I make those assessments? And out of all that, living the context of gift, rather than grasp and try to do everything I can to extend myself just enough by which I'm actually giving more than I'm getting. And to really realize that, man, self-fulfilling prophecies are real. And I've got to be careful by which what I think and how we behave to create worst problems for myself, for my family and the world around me. And then that change is an act of maturity, not spinelessness. And finally, speaking of spinelessness, that fear is not to be feared. Fear as an opportunity to be vulnerable and respond with love in my action. The seven things I've learned this past year, it's still unfolding. Conclusion. The growth of desire that I want for myself is to embrace the complexity of life with an insatiable love, for curiosity, while living the most simple life possible for myself and for my family. My action for you that I want for you. You right here this week is to unpack the complexity of one thing in your life without feeling overwhelmed alone, the complexity to sit with you without responding with complexity in your own life, but with respond with simplicity. Bite down on the activity of discovery, and not on opinion or judgment. Take one thing, take that complexity, love it. And sit with it in empathy. Have a wonderful week and I'll see you next week. Take care. Bye-bye you for listening to this episode of living the real. If you want to check out more information, go to living the real.com and sign up for my newsletter. If you want to support this podcast, you do that at patrion.com/ltr as well as one-time payments at Venmo and PayPal in the show notes. See you all next episode. Take care. Bye-bye.