Kevin P. Mahan @kevinpmahan - Tumblr Blog

This is Good Living

It’s a common phrase these days packed with history and future hand-in-hand.

“This is good living.”

Wherever we are and whatever we’re doing it’s a subtle reminder that there is some goodness hidden in this present. It didn’t always used to feel this way. I used to take this all for granted waiting to land in a place that felt better. Come to find out this is good living. Right now.

The future is going to be pretty similar too. Granted, our hardest climbs are probably ahead of us. Even in that valley with mountains ahead good living is present.

So practice with me today when you’re wildly distracted or slowly come to... “This is good living. I didn’t know it would feel like this.”

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Invited to Play

Mornings need minded that God’s got this and I’m just invited to play today.

Bring my best. Be who you are. This isn’t your game. You just get to play today.

At 70

Made a list, always a list, of what I see when I am 70. The list has lots of people and measured achievements. Todays activities are dominated by fading relationships, always natural, and mass achievements. That feels cliche, but it’s probably what drives me.

Connections too. Connecting ideas, creativity. Connecting people, meeting. Connecting identity, growth. Connecting faster, bettering.

At 70 I want to be a deeply connected man. In order to get there I’m gonna need to do some disconnecting.

Blue Book - Marriage Evaluation

Use this 4-page PDF of evaluation questions to get away to get it together. Rachel and I have use this as a yearly evaluation habit we think all married couples should experience. It was created by Steve & Sherrie Pettit and I edited a couple things.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nKN0g--4SiUrrWEVvN2BYuRV939Qdci_/view?usp=sharing

#marriage bettertogether

All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

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austinkleon

The problem with fancy notebooks

On a recent episode of Back To Work, Merlin Mann talked about how he uses notebooks and the problem with fancy notebooks:

There’s something about a piece of paper that can be both really intimidating and very inspiring. Because there’s nothing you can’t do with a piece of paper. The biggest hurdle to using a notebook… is to get over the reluctance to put a mark on a page.

When I buy one of these Fancy Italian Notebooks, it’s so pretty. And I haven’t screwed it up yet! I haven’t said anything dumb. I haven’t made something I didn’t mean to say. Part of the problem with the Costly Italian Notebook is you don’t want to screw it up: each one of those pages cost money. It’s expensive. You don’t want to tear pages out of there because you don’t like what you wrote.

You start out thinking, “You know the nice thing about paper is I can do whatever with it,” but the irony becomes, “Yeah, but I don’t want to screw up this pretty notebook that I kind of don’t deserve.”

The solution, Merlin says, is to take a page from Wreck This Journal, and own your notebook, to mess it up and make your marks, whether they’re crummy or not:

The whole point of [keeping a notebook] is to make it yours… and do it in your own way…. That’s how you need to treat every notebook you’ve got! You need to be okay with whatever you put in there being complete garbage…. This means that even if you don’t know how to draw, it’s okay for you to draw. Even if you don’t know how to doodle, it’s okay for you to doodle. Even if you don’t know how to write, you know what? You are totally okay to just go write something. And if you don’t like it, you can tear it up, and throw it in your neighbor’s yard.

Later, Merlin says a notebook is “a safe place, a place where you can go to make a mess.”

This is something I tried to drill over and over in my journal talk: “Notebooks are a great place to have bad ideas.”

Above: scans of Merlin’s notebook, of which he says “Nothing doesn’t go in here”

Fathers have skills that they never use at home. You run a landscaping business and you can't dress and feed a 4-year-old? Take it on. Spend time with your kids and have your own ideas about what they need. Get into it. It won't take away your manhood — it'll give it to you. I did that. I spent more time with my kids. I took it on. I found out that I'm a pretty bad father. I make a lot of mistakes. I don't know what I'm doing. But my kids love me, go figure.

Louis CK on being "Dad," not "Mom's Assistant" via Fatherly

austinkleon

The best toys — Tinkertoys, Lego, Play-Doh, Lincoln Logs — allowed us to build and rebuild almost endlessly. With my kids, I noticed that these kinds of toys have become increasingly rare. Lego bricks are sold primarily as branded kits. Instead of a pile of blocks that could become anything, they are now essentially disassembled toys. Instead of starting with a child’s imagination of what could be, play is now fixed on a single endpoint, predetermined by Lego’s designers.

Raul Gutierrez (via austinkleon)

Our personal limits are so far beyond what we can imagine, but we are responsible to forge ahead until we reach one.

Kai's first soccer outing with the family. Shoes on and ready to run!

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How many of our most joyful memories have been created in front of a screen?

John Freeman (via Clare Hooper)

Anticipation

The anticipation of His coming. Our Advent. Wonder at the change His perfect life will bring into our broken world and broken lives. This is our Christmas. Our anticipation.

"...Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God." John 3:19-21

But it would be wrong to say that we’re simply being ourselves online, pure and unfiltered. Most of us aren’t catfishing, or creating fictional characters, but we are probably spinning our lives to some extent. In their study ‘Identity Construction on Facebook’ (2008), published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, Shanyang Zhao and fellow sociologists at Temple University in Philadelphia found that user profiles were not strictly identical with the users’ offline identities, but were rather the identities they would like to establish in the offline world, but have not yet been able to. This illustrates how the online identity that most of us use is, to borrow a phrase from the American philosopher Stanley Cavell, our ‘next self’. Dress your avatar for the life you want, not the life you have.

Patrick Stokes at Aeon Magazine

Fine additions to my growing workspace board.

Pinterest.com/KevinPMahan/Workspace

#vine #scripture #creation

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Little buddies enter our lives creating chaos everywhere.

Little buddies cripple our strength and steal our rest.

Little buddies make common things difficult.

Little buddies need help with everything and everything is gross.

Yet, Father Life is a worthy calling of connecting with the heart of our little buddies.

Little buddies enter our life to test our selfishness. Over time they reflect a better us. That’s Father Life.

Tweaking

Prepped for the day without a digital device. Removed email from my phone. Unsubscribed to a dozen non-useful emails. Archived straggling desktop documents. Closed computer and found work still happens without it. Talked in the waiting room instead of phone browsing. Docked phone in the other room for the evening. Played with son without media filling the background. Read the Bible, paper version. Laughed without control.

Canceling at home Internet. Planning picnics and porch meals. Experiencing memories without recording them. Sitting around without being lazy. Making things from scratch. Interviewing people that fail well.

Our lives are personal experiments that we both orchestrate and live. Every little tweaked detail matters to all the others in the system. You don't like something? Change it. Experiment.

This is not my brag list. These are my experiment notes.

#shareness #efficiency #experimenting #lifehacking

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