This is my first post and I have to admit I am pretty confused by some of the doodads that make the blog work, over time I will work at that as I become more acclimated to the environment.

So why ‘better at life’?  First off, it seems to me that is something most of us want, to be better at how we move through life, how we meet life and how we engage it, though we might have very different views of what all of that means. Much of what I plan to focus on is the relationship between our inner world, the internal one that is personal to each of us and the outer world that we all share.  I hope to do this by exploring current topics in politics (I’m a progressive, though am not prone to categorizing my thinking), culture and psyche and how these domains co-mingle in reciprocal feedback loops that impact each.  But, who knows where this will go?  If I actually pay attention to being better at life, that means living it and being open to seeing how things unfold.

For some time I have felt that way too little attention is paid to the inner world of the psyche, with way too little curiosity about how that world impacts the outer world of culture, politics, business and a better life for all of us.  We have had so many leaders (just look around, or think about the past several decades) who hold it as a badge of honor that they don’t reflect on their actions.   To me that is a catastrophe.  And we only need to read the headlines for the past umpteen years and especially over the past eight to see what the kind of destruction that is possible. We don’t really need to read headlines, but just to look around us. Thankfully, our new president elect is a 180 degree departure from that way of thinking/being. But, that story hasn’t been written either, yet.

Of course all forms of media have been a big part of the problem by denigrating any kind of reflection or even accountability as ‘navel gazing,’ pushing for sound bites, relentlessly turning most all issues we face into polarized camps of voices that give people a show, but very little of it worth much. I have a bunch to say about this, but that will have to wait for a later date.

We are facing massive changes in our cultural landscape and in the world and that means massive changes in our inner landscape as well.   Much of life in the US has been lived on the outside, in the material world.  That isn’t bad, but it has been out of balance. Now that is changing and as far as I can tell we are just at the beginning of shifts in pretty much everything we have been accustomed to seeing as sign posts toward being better at life.

So, stick around and let’s see what we can cook up in discovering and supporting better ones.

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