Category Archives: culture

Healing Through Connection: 2024 in the Rearview

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When we find our people, we can truly be ourselves.

How are we, my friends?

What are we looking/thinking/listening through from 2024? What catches our attention, stands out? How do we feel in mind, body, spirit, and soul from/for it all?

What emerges for me:
Community. Belonging. Liberation. Sharing. Healing with Help.

Readers of this blog know about Ethos, my gym. Tim and Victoria named it aptly, and now Tim and Cory operate it with integrity and vision: “Train. Recover. Connect.” What other gym prioritizes relationship in its mission and tagline? These are my people! I worried that moving from a small garden unit in River North to a space almost three times larger in Roscoe Village would somehow alter the culture–the ethos–one never knows what can happen with such transitions. Happily, I think it has only grown stronger, and now there is space for more of us to benefit. It doesn’t matter who you are, how much you lift, your age, or whatever. If you bring your full self and engage, you’re one of us–because we all make it so. It’s amazing. Of note, making friends in their 20s and 30s and outside of medicine has broadened my perspective and improved my life more than I knew I needed, and I could not be more grateful. We never know who our people may include until we meet them.

So go the leaders, so go the led.

In any domain, culture is influenced most strongly by the designated leaders, the ones with authority and power. This year I found AJ: Musician, composer, Quinn creator, animal lover, motorbike enthusiast, filmmaker, amateur home DIY engineer, and all around beautiful human. His fans call ourselves Angels, a fast growing community drawn together principally in admiration for AJ, and bonded in various other ways. Watch any of AJ’s videos on TikTok or read his Instagram posts to see this humble, curious, funny, loving, and nerdy man connect with his fan group in the most wholesome, extemporaneous, and unassuming ways. Listen to his Quinn audios to experience soft and strong, dominant and submissive, gentle and powerful, masculine and feminine humanity in all our complexity, brought to life with voice only, and know why we hit play over 250,000 times since he started creating them in June. By December 16 we had listened a total of over 1.7 million minutes–almost 3.5 years.

During the 4+ hour holiday live stream today when he shared and then responded to messages from Angels around the world, I was floored by the power and energy of mutual uplift between AJ and us. Yes, he has amassed a following that lifts and amplifies him and his work. He has also gathered and cultivated, just by being himself, a tribe of women who lift one another in empathic, present, compassionate, and utterly humane love. Listeners comment on how his content and community create the safety to be fully ourselves that we experience no place else. That is profound. It’s all him, and also not–it’s all of us, together, amplifying one another. By the end of the live stream AJ himself reflected on how desperately this reciprocally loving and accepting energy is needed in the world. So now it’s his and the Angels’ mission to spread it. He leads by dynamic and responsive example. And while he’s most visible as a strong male ally of women in this space, I am sure that his example will also reach, move, and support men–those ready to more fully integrate their emotional selves and connect more deeply and meaningfully with women, other men, and non-binary people alike.

Be a candle. Use your light to light others. Your light diminishes not at all for the effort, and there is only more light in the world.

In case you wonder, yes, I am still immersed in the romance audio universe and loving every moment. The friends I have made around the world from Colorado to Oregon to the UK and Australia form yet another community of mutual uplift, with its own unique and loving vibe. This tribe introduced me to Quinn, the app for audio erotica. This new immersion has taken my sexual education to the next level, and sharing my learning has benefited more than just myself. I know I am far from alone in this expansion, and as AJ’s Angels express repeatedly, the Quinn messages of self- and other-acceptance, love, and uplift heal and save us all.

Communities like Ethos, Angels, and romance audio gather, enfold, champion, and strengthen parts of ourselves that we may otherwise minimize, repress, or even reject. Such loving and uplifting communities help make us whole. Enveloped in such ardent belonging, we are liberated to truly be and express our real, unmitigated selves, no matter how quirky, weird, or previously outcast.

Looking ahead to 2025, I will work to continue forging Community everywhere I am. I will point out shared humanity across difference and divergence whenever, wherever, and with whomever I see and hear it. Our people inhabit more diverse spaces than we know or admit. My conversations since the American presidential election continue to teach me this. I could not have known 9.7 years ago how aptly I named this blog.

Healing Through Connection.

That pretty much says it all.

Humans

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Pietà, Michelangelo, Rome, Italy. Photo by Phara Blair

“Partnership with a good dog has millions of advantages over partnership with even the best human being.”
—Bride and Groom, Susan Conant

What would you write, given ten minutes with this prompt?

Below is my take, and then some reflections.
Thanks to friend Joan for choosing the prompt, and for hosting Sara and me for another Mallon Writers session the other evening. We’re coming up on a year as a group, and I am so grateful for these women.

Humans.

We are remarkable–remarkably creative, resourceful, intelligent, and SHITTY.
We are wired to connect; we crave it, require it. And yet we are terrible at it too often.

How can we reconcile this paradox?
Every day we can find myriad examples of both the immense kindness and altruism, and also the most unspeakably heinous violence and destruction–all visited by us on ourselves.

FASCINATING.

What determines our behavior?

Do we each believe ourselves capable of the highest and lowest that humans can do? I do.

I believe that under certain circumstances, any given person has the potential to behave in any given way. To me, this is the most realistic and humble way to approach human nature. We think we know so much; and yet the vast majority of our behaviors and relationships are driven by how we feel. And we are largely, I think willfully, blind to this reality. Most of us live our lives far from the extremes of human altruism and violence, but I think it’s our denial of the potential of both within all/each of us that facilitates the expression of the worst by some of us.

How would the world operate if we were just a lot (or even a little) more honest about our shadows? About our light?

How interesting that the best and worst of both aspects of our nature are so unsafe to share, to remotely acknowledge the possible existence of?

Humans. We are complex, emotional beings who delude ourselves into thinking we are rational, and we oversimplify to avoid discomfort.

Oh well, it is what it is; we are what we are. Amazing–and maybe not?–that we have survived as long as we have.

Altruistic and malevolent.
Collective and individualistic.
Fit in and stand out.
Masculine and feminine.

Readers of this blog know how I embrace and relish a good, integrative paradox. The older I get the more deeply I appreciate complexity, nuance, and the importance of context and circumstance. My mounting enthusiasm for it all seems to fly counter to prevailing cultural winds wherein overgeneralization, oversimplification, and refusal to recognize, let alone tolerate or engage with complexity seem to stymie our leaders and systems with alarmingly powerful force.

Where are the leaders who can not only dance gracefully with complexity, but also lead us by example doing it?

Some days I can’t decide if I’m a cynic or an optimist. I know I’m both, and I lean net optimist. I think we are all both; thankfully we don’t all lean cynic for too long at the same time. We all hold the tension within ourselves, swayed one way or another at any given time by myriad simultaneous variables. It is what it is; we are what we are. We have survived for thousands of years and yet, thousands–even hundreds–more are not guaranteed by any means. It all depends on how we–individually and collectively–decide to treat one another and our planet, both today and forever.

So, we shall see. Anything can happen.

What Counts?

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Tainan, Taiwan

On January 15 this year I posted about a new habit I had committed to establishing:

1. Upon waking, get sunlight for at least several minutes before getting on any screen
2. Delay caffeine intake for at least 45 minutes after waking

I also committed to writing Morning Pages (3 pages, long hand, stream of consciousness journaling) in those first 15-30 minutes, which was actually the primary goal. The point of the practice is to unlock clarity and creativity in those first minutes of waking, when the door between conscious and subconscious awareness and insight is more open than at other times of day. Today was Day 310 total (I miss a few days a month, on average). But it was delayed, so did it count?

I do three high intensity workouts at Ethos every week. It gets harder to motivate to do things at home anymore, and yesterday I felt sheepishly happy to Iog 20 minutes of moderate effort on the elliptical. That counts as exercise, in my opinion. But what if I had only walked to the grocery store and back (which I also did)? What intensity and duration justifies that green dot on my habit tracker?

What counts as meditation, prayer, or ‘low carb’?

Why does it matter?

How many times a day do we encounter one recommendation or another for how many steps we should take, how much protein to eat, what school of meditation is best, what sleep routines to adopt, and how many people we need in our inner circle? If we wanted to follow all of the ‘experts” advice for health, just reading the recommendations and attempting to execute would be a full time job.

Of course I get to decide what counts as Morning Pages or exercise or not, because I am only accountable to myself for the habits and behaviors that uphold my own health. In the end it’s about goals, trade-offs, and results. Why do I do these things? What am I trying to accomplish? What am I willing and not willing to do for the desired outcomes?

What works for me, regardless of what ‘experts’ say and ‘studies show’?

Morning pages make my day better whether I have looked out the window or at my phone beforehand, though the insights may come a bit easier with the former, because I always spend more time on the phone than I intend. But it still usually takes at least a page and a half before novel ideas and epiphanies emerge. Regardless, I feel calmer and centered having journaled at all before the day starts in earnest.

Moving in any way for any amount of time benefits both mind and body, and I can both feel and see consequences of variations in frequency, duration, and intensity over days, weeks, and months. If I move above and beyond activities of daily living and work, then I count it, track it, and review over time to correlate with how I feel.

I see people getting fixated on ‘what counts’. Our culture of metrics, trackers, comparison, and competition foster this tendency toward obsessiveness. It’s too easy today to lose the forest for the trees, and much too easy to forget that the complex global ecosystem of a whole person’s health is synergistic in multiple simultaneous dimensions rather than simple or linear in any way. Whenever we hear anyone say, ‘just do (xxx), and it will fix (some global problem that nobody has yet to solve because there is simply no one right solution),’ we should approach with high skepticism and alert critical thinking.

If it aligns with my commitments and gives me a sense of progress toward my goals, then I say it counts. Tracking helps me see patterns, intersections, and correlates. It makes me more self-aware in real time, holds me accountable, and gives me a little dopamine hit with each green dot logged. Counting can be its own reward.

In the end, however, it’s the being and the doing that matter. So count it or not, I get to choose. The rewards of action and results outweigh those of counting. I think it’s good once in a while to consider more deeply the basic questions like, “What counts?” It keeps me honest.