Forecasts & Forests: Reflections on Expansion, Hobbies, and the Spiritual Path
Standing in the Eye of the Spiral: Navigating Life's Twists with GT
Forecasts & Forests: Reflections on Expansion, Hobbies, and the Spiritual Path
WARM UP. Good greetings to everyone joining in reading today. Currently I am enjoying some Jet’s Pizza while typing and listening to some heavy rainfall. Florida only has two seasons, rainy season and sunny days. I enjoy the stability of predicting the weather closer to the equator here, if you’ve spent enough time on the internet you have seen the meme videos of how quickly Michigan's weather can change throughout a single day. We got to spend nearly two hours at the sanctuary (beach) this morning, with how much rainfall we are getting now, it must be said we had perfect timing to avoid heavy rains.
This week we were able to take a tour of a new space for our gym to move into. We are looking to expand into a larger space to facilitate growth. The space we are looking at would take some effort to make it fully operational and could be outfitted very well for the work we do. We have had some major and minor shifts in our group class structures as well as launching a new group class schedule which is a large endeavor to get the entire team onboard. The new space would get us nearly the same amount of space as our previous gym yet at half the price. As I'm eating this Jet’s pepperoni pizza it reminds me of working at my first gym, Powerhouse Gym EL. My roommate and I at the time would take big bong rips and split a large deep dish to satiate the after effects. I hadn’t really ever considered wanting to run and own my own gym as much as he did, funny thing is he and I both are owners of our own gym now. It’s been two years now since owning and operating our current business model, my projected bandwidth for sticking around SoFlo has to be around 2-3 more years. Not that I am displeased with the predictability of the weather here in Florida at all. A projected move is necessary since my confidence for repeatability of this business model in other places around the world/country has grown significantly. I also desire connecting with nature in a couple other habitats.
In Michigan it was easy to connect to nature through the forest. Here in southern Florida the ocean is easy to get into. My feelings inside would like to get back to the forest in some capacity and the idea of experiencing the mountains for a time seems to feel in alignment. I am continuing to attend my weekly online men’s group and we continue to discuss what we’ve labeled “The 10 Life categories.” Last week’s topic was ‘hobbies.’ This is a topic many folks within the group have said they are challenged by. Being creatures of habit and intentionality, our group had an exploratory conversation about what exactly could be considered a hobby and how do we structure our intentional actions throughout a week in order to find a way to practice a hobby. My major hobby is playing pickleball. Playing pickleball has its physical challenges with consistent change of directions and start and stop motions. Often I need physical activity to calm my brain from the weekly cycles of business, life and relating to the world around us. This coming week's conversation topic will be Spirituality.
I personally really enjoy this topic. Not to necessarily share any of my spiritual practice or experiences, rather to hear the others speak on it. Mentally spaciously I have a daily spiritual practice going on. As with Bruce Lee's martial art “The way without a way,” I have used what has been called “syncretism” to find what belief systems seem to work for me, and discard what doesn’t. Top tier belief systems for myself seem to stem from the Taoist tradition of belief around Wu Wei and the Buddhist traditions revolving around the four noble truths. The last few weeks I have been trying to condense the Buddhist four noble truths into a clear modern language without changing the meaning or the words of what is traditionally accepted as the word of the Buddha. As I see it, the first noble truth is to have compassion. The second noble truth is the reason for people having dukkha or having “unease,” which is to have desires. The third noble truth seems to be to train to have a reflective mind on when occurrences of dukkha arise. And lastly it seems the fourth noble truth is the path to mental freedom from this dukkha, which is practiced by following the noble eight fold path.
COOLDOWN. That will be enough for today. I am looking forward to the adventure that life will present in the week ahead. In the meantime I would like to encourage all of you to Live Intentional Authentically Through Excellence of Action.
Take Care,
G$