Category: Personal Reflections

Lessons learned about life; pearls of wisdom I’ve gleaned through pain, failure and honest reflection

Fund A Triathalete

Carl Setzer

Hey gang,

A good friend of mine, Daniel Flahiff, has qualified for the World Triathlon Grand Final Auckland this October. As you can imagine, raising the ~$4,000 for travel is out of reach. However, through the power of the internet, all of us have the opportunity to lend a hand. Via his Go Fund Me site, we all have the chance to share in funding this dream.

Besides have the vested interest in seeing a chum do something great and once-in-a-lifetime, I’m also pleased that the internet offers up ways to crowdsource solutions like this. Perhaps, pre-internet, a bunch of us would hold a car-wash, maybe engage a local tv or radio station, and have a small scale crowdsource through a local bank.

So, yay to www.gofundme.com for offering up such tools, the internet (Twitter, Facebook, et al) to broadcast this sort of thing out, and, of course, the generosity of strangers…which is, ultimately, what makes these sorts of things work.

Here’s a video about the event:

Dream’s Soundtrack

Carl Setzer

Woke to an unfamiliar song playing in my mind. Such events make me wonder. So, was this piece created by my mind, or is this some random thing, absorbed into my memory bank?

Consider all the songs I’ve been exposed: radio, movies, tv, myriad languages, styles and types. Music presented overtly & covertly, hidden in the current moment’s background. I hold that my brain absorbed all of this, deep with in some analog archive.

Dreams often come laden with meaning. Some dreams, though, come laden with absurdity. Perhaps that means something. Perhaps my Mind’s haunted by Lewis Carroll. Perhaps.

Foursquare Thoughts

Carl Setzer

I finally dove in and tried Foursquare. For a few months I tried remembering to check in everywhere I went. Once or twice, a coupon came through and I saves a few bucks. Ultimately, it was about maintaining connection with friends. However, few friends where active and fewer still significantly engaged. Additionally, becoming “friends” with a true stranger was quite uncomfortable; even for me (who is quite comfortable being public facing). The graph of Foursquare activity is quite intimate.

Summing up: keeping up with check-ins always felt tedious. There were a few fun exchanges with friends, but mostly nothing. For me, the experience was really devoid of value. I pretty much have abandoned the platform.

I’d love to heat what you think. Live the thing, hate it, think I was crazy to even try it? Drop a comment and let me know.

Cheers, all!

Musical Zeitgeist

Carl Setzer

Listen for music’s zeitgeist. Harmonics: voices intersecting, creating sounds not uttered, rather vibrations overlapping, the whole greater than the sum of the parts.

Music offers us so very much, should we choose to listen. We may learn the value of each voice, whether frantically busy or quietly adding structure, all critical to the audio portrait of a piece. Each pitch and tone crucial to the landscape. Silencing one changes the whole.

We must learn to value voices equally. This summarizes the commandment to love.

Namaste!

Instagram

Carl Setzer

Funny discussion recently: using non-phone photos on Instagram…cheating or no? Fascinating thoughts about purpose, medium, and veracity. To me, all art embraces a zen quality. Cheating doesn’t exist. Well, not in this context. Plagiarism, another beast, another story.

So, the question remains, and no answer comes from me. You?

Healing Development Mistakes and the Language of Global Affairs

Carl Setzer

Recently I’ve heard Chinese officials (and before that, Vietnamese, Indian, Mexican and others) complain about the US “preaching”, particularly about labor and environmental practices. A key piece of that, “why are you denying us the same benefit you had”. This one saddens me deeply. We saw the destructive nature of our actions and seek to purge that from our psyche. No, this isn’t an attempt to rob you of advantage, it’s an attempt to help you avoid our costly mistakes. The US is still healing from the environmental degradations of our history. Still coming to terms the destruction from the dishonest and ill-treatment of our indigenous people, or slavery. 

The goal, for me, at least, isn’t to maximize our grain. Really, it should be about avoiding the same costly mistakes we made in our development. The available mistakes to make are manifold, probably unknowable. Learn from us. If we’re wise, we’ll learn how to learn from the rest of the world. But that’s a blog post for a different day.