The personal blog of Ben Blain, his thoughts and flaws as a human.
My Startup Work:
We all have choices to make.
If we’re lucky we’ll understand why we chose what we chose. Mostly we won’t, but that won’t stop us.
Maybe something will choose you instead. A wild animal will live in your woodshed for a season, before returning to its arctic home forever.
Choosing is profound. To make a significant choice means to appear within a single future and plant a line to follow, that traces back through time to your heart.
To find a future compelling enough to entangle your heart isn’t easy: it becomes an act of time travel. Transporting yourself into different futures, looking around with hope and wisdom, imagining what may happen – though you never know for sure…
Then, once the heart decides, you begin travelling to a different future.
If it sounds exhausting it is. Making choices is hard and frightening work, so it is little wonder that we choose to put things off… but suddenly a new year is upon us. Help!
Here’s a tip about choosing: despite the options being infinite, you will only ever choose from a small subset of futures determined by your self-regard. If you hate yourself, your heart will imagine futures consistent with that. If you love yourself, you will be choosing from a much nicer subset of futures.
If you still believe that you aren’t enough, well you’re in for a busy 2025.
So be thankful that it isn’t all up to you. Call it Fate, God, Causation, or the Joker (I like Fate personally); there are forces at work to bring you somewhere new.
Let us toast, to Fate and Love.
Happy New Year!
31 December 2024.
Dearest Wonderful Reader,
As I drew the 2024 card this evening, I was picturing in my mind each of my readers and subscribers: my friends.
I chose the bonfire because it is a deeply important symbol to me. To me it means hope, perseverance, protection, and celebration.
As a teenager we often spent nights at the beach around a bonfire like this one, sharing our lives together. Sometimes another group, or a lone wolf, would be attracted and sheepishly enter the circle of lit faces. We always received them.
In moments without conversation the sparks would crackle and spring into the engulfing dark, shining spectacularly.
Our lives are brief. Let’s live them spectacularly!
Thank you for visiting my bonfire.
Arohanui,
Ben Blain xoxo
Meri Kirihimete!
The meanings of the words reflect the journey of my life.
See what I mean:
Experience – time spent in the environment.
Intelligence – seeing what is real.
Real – how organisms survive.
Wisdom – having experienced consequences.
Love – observing and honoring somebodies’ essence.
Truth – living in the same reality.
Communication – sharing meaning.
Right – what brings the heart peace.
Past – what has happened.
Probability – ignorance of causation.
People – storytellers of worlds.
God – The Earth.
19 December 2024. “The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein.
(breathe in)
“I am not for everybody.
(breathe out)
Pleasing is not my purpose.
So my true friends
Can find me,
I choose to be myself.”
Be a beacon for those who will love you best.
17 December 2024, Hihi.