Carrying Stones

Finding My Faith

These are some questions I have on my mind lately. With a string of careers and marriages trailing behind me as evidence of taking the scenic route to this point in my life.
I sang in church this morning and that means more than you think. I feel closer to God than I have in years, and the joy of rekindling that spiritual relationship rose from my throat this morning during the worship service.
This marks a third major era in one way of dividing my life into chunks; a third chapter in the story of a prodigal son in which I play the main character. My parents took me to our Baptist church every Sunday and most Wednesdays. Church was a part of our family life, simple as that, and it shaped who I am today. I forged wonderful friendships with my peers in church and learned much from older leaders in the congregation.
For some reason, I decided that life wasn’t for me and I embarked on the second chapter in my life. I began wandering away from God during my freshman year of college. I felt guilty about skipping chapel on Sundays in the beginning, but I was a grownup! I didn’t live my life by the church bell. Eventually, the guilt faded and I began to live my life without God on my mind.
I started to say “without God in my life” or “live my life alone,” but I know God was always with me, whether it was in the prayers of those who love me or just God watching over me. I look back and know He was there making sure the stupid chances I took didn’t kill me. I believe He has great things in store for me, and I’m excited about the opportunities for service.

Questions of Faith

Some religious concepts still furrow my brow. If God knows all, then our lives are predetermined and we are just characters on a stage reading from a script. If we truly have free will, how could God be all-knowing?
I’m not the first to struggle with these ideas and won’t be the last. Philosophers, scientists, and men of faith have been talking about these enigmas for thousands of years and will continue to do so. Here’s the thing. Individuals must reach these conclusions for themselves, assuming they have the free will to reach any conclusion on their own.
Faith must be the key. Having faith is as easy as breathing for some and I wish it was that simple for me. Evidence that God exists is abundant in the beautiful complexities of nature and the universe. My struggle is with the juxtaposition of man’s choices with God’s omniscience I perceive in the Bible.
John 3:16 says those who choose to believe will have everlasting life, while Romans 8:30 talks about the “predestined” and uses past tense to describe those God called, justified, and glorified.
Free will versus Determinism.
The simplicity of faith comes from releasing those concerns and living without answers to those philosophical questions. Indeed, that is the definition of faith.

faith |fāθ| noun — 1. complete trust or confidence in someone or something 2. strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof

And that brings me to the third chapter in my life; the one where I let go of those worldly questions and live a simple life of faith.

Epic Traffic Jam in China Enters Its 9th Day – TIME NewsFeed:

Nothing is worse than sitting in traffic, right? How about sitting in traffic for nine days?
A 100-kilometer-long traffic jam in China’s Heibei Province has left thousands of truck drivers stuck on the interstate heading towards Beijing since August 14. What’s worse, officials are saying that the jam could continue for up to a month!

Julian Cortazar wrote about this in “La autopista del sur” from his short story collection “Todos los fuegos el fuego” published in 1966. Here is the opening of the story from a translation by Suzanne Jill Levine published in “Latin American Writers: Thirty Stories:”
“At first the girl in the Dauphine had insisted on keeping track of the time, but the engineer in the Peugeot 404 didn’t care anymore [sic]. Anyone could look at his watch but it was as if that time strapped to your right wrist or the beep beep on the radio were measuring something else—the time of those who haven’t made the blunder of trying to return to Paris on the southern thruway on a Sunday afternoon and, just past Fontaine-bleau, have had to slow down to a crawl, stop, six rows of cars on either side (everyone know that on Sundays both sides of the thruway are reserved for those returning to the capital), start the engine, move three yards, stop, talk with two nuns in the 2CV on the right, look in the rear-view mirror at the pale man driving the Caravelle, ironically envy the birdlike contentment of the couple in the Peugeot 203 (behind the girl’s Dauphine) playing with their little girl, joking, and eaching cheese, or suffer the exasperated outbursts of the two boys in the Simca, in front of the Peugeot 404, and even get out at the stops to explore, not wandering off too far (no one knows when the cars up front will start moving again, and you have to run back so that those behind you won’t begin their battle of horn blasts and curses), and thus move up along a Taunus in front of the girl’s Dauphine—she is still watching the time—and exchange a few discouraged or mocking words with the two men traveling with the little blond boy, whose great joy at this particular moment is running his toy car over the seats and the rear ledge of the Taunus, or to dare and move up and observe with some pity the elderly couple in the ID Citroën that looks like a big purple bathtub with the little old man and woman swimming around inside, he resting his arms on the wheel with an air of resigned fatigue, the nibbling on an apple, fastidious rather than hungry.”

Trying out the latest version of Simplenote, which looks incredible. I was recently torn between Simplenote and Writeroom, the former for it’s pure simplicity and the latter for its full screen writing environment on the iPhone. With the latest update to Simplenote I have fullscreen simplicity in a single app.
But wait, there’s more…
Simplenote picked up more than a bigger space to write. It now has tags that can play double duty as folders (if that helps you get your head around tagging). What’s nice is you can label a document with more than one tag, effectively putting it in more than one “folder.” This is a bit like having the original file in one folder on your desktop Mac and copying an alias into other folders. It’s all one document, but you can access it from whichever place is convenient at the time.
Managing files this way can help kick your aging brain into gear. Tag your grocery list with shopping, kitchen, dining, and lists and you’ll find that single file in any of those categories. Pretty slick!
I may have more to say about Simplenote at some point, but lunch is about over and I have to get back to the office. At least my mind is made up about which iPhone app I’ll be using for my writing and hope it helped you make a decision, too.

Randy Nelson, dean of Pixar University, knocked it out of the park when he defined the difference between collaboration and cooperation. They are not the same.
A great quote from the 9-minute talk:

The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance. –Randy Nelson, of Pixar

Pixar University is mentioned under the description of the Creative Team on Pixar’s corporate overview:

In order to attract and retain quality animators, the company founded Pixar University, which conducts three-month long courses for new and existing animators.

WordPress hates me today. You can watch the embedded video on my Tumblr blog or go straight to the source at Edutopia.

I am waiting in the lobby while Julie sits with Jordan while he is inside a thumping MRI machine. This is one of the legs of our journey to help Jordan grow more quickly.
Jordan has always been small and his doctor has been patiently concerned for a while. He was attending a medical conference in Chicago and sat in a session about endocrinology and growth patterns. He immediately thought about Jordan and realized there were some more things we could try to help him along.
I wasn’t able to go to his first visit with the endocrinologist so I missed the firsthand experience. They x-rayed his skeleton to determine his “bone age,” which turned out to be about 8 to 9 years old, or more than two years behind schedule. The doctor requested the MRI that has brought us here today to take a look at his pituitary gland. All of this will probably lead to a yearlong treatment–daily shots of human growth hormone.
Julie did not want to come here today due to a case of PMS (Protective Mommy Syndrome). She is probably struggling to be back there with Jordan while that machine pings around his brain, but she a calming influence on Jordan that I lack. She’s a great mom and I’m so proud of her.
So here I’ll wait for a while longer until they finish. I hope Jordan got his wiggles out before they got started so he can get out of there quickly!

I went to a website for one of the accounts I hold. After it allowed me to type in my correct username and password, it spewed out large red letters ordering me to change my password.
Most of passwords are nuts–impossible to remember–thanks to 1Password. Look. I’ll go generate one for you using that software:
4dI8%^bg"t;G=3Rf@_SF0U7qn6KN~Ow9aMCJYWQx5k|1Dz2yT
See? I think that’s enough to protect an account, especially since the only reason I logged in in the first place was to cancel the account.
So, I enter my ultra-secure randomly generated password and it doesn’t pass muster.

The password must be 8 characters or more, contain at least 1 letter and 1 number, no more than 7 numbers and no more than 2 consecutive identical characters.

OK. So I default to something I can remember. Just something to get me logged on so I can squash this service. More red letters:

The new password has been previously used as one of the last 16 passwords. Please enter a different password.

Let me pick my own password!
Anyway, I finally got it done and the account is cancelled now. Thank goodness!

Sometimes when I’m fleshing out a skeletal idea I turn to Google Images to put some meat on them bones.
Google’s search engine is great for when you want to find a quick answer to some matter you’re researching, but I have found my thinking becomes more divergent and interesting when I search for images of an idea rather than words.
Let’s use the word “chocolate” as an example. The search returns most of the items you expect from Google: Wikipedia entry, Hershey’s, Godiva, Ghirardelli, nutrition information and more of the same.
Clicking on images takes you to a different place altogether. Sure, there are some chocolate bars and melted chocolate, and candies, but there is so much more. Detailed Chocolate roses for instance, or disturbing chocolate babies (which are fake by the way and in no way related to these chocolate babies, which is much funnier if you remember seeing it than reading the transcript for SNL’s “Jackie Rogers Jr.’s $100,000 Jackpot Wad” skit)). Maybe these chocolate pencils or the image of this strawberry dripping chocolate may rewire your original thoughts about chocolate.
Now, do an image search about whatever topic you are researching. It may break down some of your mental models and rewire your thinking to help you move forward in a unique direction.

There is a website making the rounds on the Internet that claims to take a sample of your writing and tell you what famous author’s writing matches your own writing style.
I dropped in a recent post and it told me I write like Chuck Pahluniak. See?

However…
I dropped in a portion of William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech and it returned a finding that the writing matched James Joyce. Entering a passage from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man proves that Joyce is, in fact, himself.
Faulkner and Joyce shared the “stream of consciousness” style, but can’t they let Faulkner stand on his own?
I don’t think I write like Chuck. I think I write like me.

This blog is born again as Carrying Stones. The name comes from William Faulkner who said:

“The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”

This quote calls to me for several reasons. William Faulkner is one of the greatest authors of all time and a great source of inspiration for me. The source may be from a renowned Southern writer, but the quote isn’t about writing per se (though it can be taken as such). To me, it also means taking life a little at a time instead of trying to swallow it whole.
A Faulkner quote also seems appropriate to commemorate the opening of Faulkner at Virginia: An Audio Archive. I posted this over at my other blog:

Hours of audio footage and transcripts from discussions with William Faulkner have been published online by the University of Virginia where the author was a writer in residence in 1957. The university also maintains Faulkner’s manuscripts and private papers in its special collections.
The site is worthy of investigation for literature fans, especially those fans who are most interested writing from the South. I first learned about the site in an email from the magazine Garden & Gun.

Welcome again to my old new blog.

    <!-- Processed by MultiMarkdown -->

I was flipping through Google Reader’s new Play option and found a quote from Albert Einstein:

“When we all think alike, no one thinks very much.” – Albert Einstein

It got me thinking that my thinking doesn’t jive with the vibe I established here. This space has been titled Southern Athenaeum for several years now. Here is what I said the site was about:

A record of my observations about life in the South and thoughts on anything I might be reading. A mishmash of interesting quotes, pearls of wisdom, photos and observations; all served up from from my writing desk in northwest Georgia.
While my focus is on all things Southern, I’m not going to limit myself to that topic. I’ll be talking broadly about creativity, so you never know what you may find here.

Some of that holds true, a lot of it doesn’t, and the title just doesn’t seem to fit. Southern Athenaeum sounds like it should be about Southern writing (my original goal), while the content has been more about the technology associated with Apple Inc. My literary reading has been offset by books about education and leadership. Productivity. The Medici Effect and the confluence of ideas. Improving connections with those you know and reaching out to build new relationships.
These are topics of increasing interest to me.

Publish your passion

Anyone starting a project or a blog or a career should take some time to thoughtfully and honestly answer at least a couple of questions.

• What are you passionate about?
• What topics excite you?
• What is that thing that everyone gets sick of hearing you talk about?

Yeah. Create art about that stuff. Write. Paint. Sculpt. Design your work around your passionate interests.
My focus has changed and it’s time for this blog to follow my lead instead of the other way around. One thing will not change here. I will write these posts. I have another blog, Stuff I Read, where I post links with limited commentary about stuff I read online. That site reflects my interests, while this site is more personal.
I’ve been reading today in search of a new title that reflects the content a little better. I enjoy writing about good design, gadgets, Macs, iPhones, and the software that runs on them. I also plan to begin writing more about building the capacity for leadership in myself and others.
In addition to helping me Get Things Done, David Allen shares inspirational ideas and other thoughts on Twitter as @gtdguy. One of his recent toots also contributed to this update.

Sanity = if you’re not exactly sure what you’re doing, view technology as a hobby & fun distraction instead of a solution.

The blog wasn’t as much fun as it used to be, so I’m going to stop worrying so much about matching the content to my highbrow idea of a title and just have fun with it.
Because the words I cobble together here are personal, it goes without saying there will be more writing about my family. My tendency has been to refrain from writing about my family, but I’m lifting that self-imposed moratorium. With a wife and four kids there is plenty to say.
Photos. Photography is a hobby that comes and goes for me. Some of my photos find their way to my Flickr photostream. I’m still trying to decide if photos are going to remain a part of this blog, but I do plan to take and post more photos on Flickr.
I’m still working through this and have taken the title down until I find something that fits, so expect a little more rambling until I find my place.