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Today is March 27 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “how often do you think about what you fail to notice?” Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing noted “The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.” Navigating the chaos and leveraging your mind, body, and spirit requires a substantial level of self-awareness to recognize what it is you fail to notice. Laing wrote extensively on mental illness, specifically the experience of psychosis which is a condition of the mind that results in difficulties determining what is real and what is not real. Laing's views on the causes and treatment of psychopathological phenomena were influenced by his study of existential philosophy and ran counter to the chemical and electroshock methods that had become psychiatric orthodoxy. This failing to notice concept can trace its roots back thousands of years to the origins of Buddhism. According to legend Siddhārtha Gautama belonged to the Kshatriya clan of the Sakya and born in Lumbini near Kapilavastu in Nepal. His father was the king of the Sakya clan and believed his son to be destined to be a great king himself. The king confined his son the prince to live within the palace walls and surrounded him with earthly pleasures of women, food, and luxury. This allowed the king to conceal the realities of life from his son. After leading a sheltered existence surrounded by luxury and pleasure in his younger years, Prince Siddhārtha, according to legend, ventured out of his palace for the first time at the age of 29. He set off from the palace to the city in a chariot, accompanied by his charioteer Channa. On this journey he first saw an old man, revealing to Siddhārtha the consequences of aging. When the prince asked about this person, Channa replied that aging was something that happened to all beings alike. The second sight was of a sick person suffering from a disease. Once again, the prince was surprised at the sight, and Channa explained that all beings are subject to disease and pain. This further troubled the mind of the prince. The third sight was of a dead body. As before, Channa explained to the prince that death is an inevitable fate that befalls everyone. After viewing these three sights, Siddhārtha was troubled in his mind and sorrowful about the sufferings people endure in life. After experiencing these three life situations of aging, suffering, and dying, Siddhārtha came upon the fourth sight, an ascetic or holy man, some who lives a lifestyle characterized by abstinence from sensual pleasures, who had devoted himself to finding the cause of human suffering. This sight gave him hope that he too might be released from the sufferings arising from being repeatedly reborn, and he resolved to follow the ascetic's example. After observing these four sights, Siddhārtha returned to the palace, where a performance of dancing girls was arranged for him. Throughout the performance, the prince kept thinking about the four sights of sickness, aging, death, and the holy man. In the early hours of morning, he finally looked about him and saw the dancers asleep and in disarray. The sight of this drastic change strengthened his resolve to leave in search of an end to the suffering of beings. Siddhārtha then left the palace to begin an ascetic life, at the end of which he attained enlightenment as Gautama Buddha. The legend of Buddha illustrates what R. D. Laing would write about thousands of years later: “The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.” Siddhārtha had a limited knowledge of the world because his father kept him in a sheltered existence. Siddhārtha failed to notice aging, sickness, death, and holy man because he failed to notice that he failed to notice. It was impossible for him to change because he was simply unaware that he was unaware. The four sights woke Siddhārtha up to reality, and according to legend, altered the course of human history. Modern researchers have spent a good deal of time examining why people fail to notice that they fail to notice. One of the more famous examples of recent studies is called “the invisible gorilla.” To test someone’s ability to ‘notice that you fail to notice,’ researchers Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons devised an experiment in the 1990s entitled "the invisible gorilla." In their study participants were asked to watch a video in which two teams, one in black shirts and one in white shirts, are passing a ball. The participants are told to count how many times the players in white shirts pass the ball. Mid-way through the video, a gorilla walks through the game, stands in the middle, pounds his chest, then exits. Then, study participants are asked, "But did you see the gorilla?" More than half the time, subjects miss the gorilla entirely. More than that, even after the participants are told about the gorilla, they're certain they couldn't have missed it. "Our intuition is that we will notice something that's that visible, that's that distinctive," explains Simons, "and that intuition is consistently wrong." Chabris and Simons conducted one of psychology’s most famous experiments and discovered remarkable stories and counterintuitive scientific findings to demonstrate an important truth: Our minds don’t work the way we think they do. We think we see ourselves and the world as they really are, but we’re actually missing a whole lot. Chabris and Simons published their findings in their 2010 book The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. While “the invisible gorilla” test sheds some important light on how our mind works, or perhaps doesn’t work, it does not involve a life and death situation. For individuals who ‘fail to notice that they fail to notice’ because of texting, however, such a lack of awareness can be deadly. Research conducted by Sarah Simmons and her colleagues in 2020 studied results from 17 different experiments that included a total of almost 900 pedestrians. Simmons and her colleagues found that people who walked while texting or browsing on their smartphones were more likely to get hit by a car (or to have a close call) than those who walked while not using their phones. Even just talking on the phone led to a small increase in almost or actually getting hit by a car. Today’s reflection challenges us to stop and think about what we fail to notice and how that impacts our decision-making process. In some life situations, it could be deadly. How often do you remind yourself that you do not know what you do not know and fail to notice what you fail to notice? This question may at first appear difficult to comprehend so stay with it for a while and let it sink in before answering. How has the range of what you think and do been limited by what you fail to notice? Do you even spend time thinking about your range of thinking? If not, why not? Why do you think it is so difficult for people to understand the concept “we fail to notice that we fail to notice?” Have you been stuck in a situation unable to change? Why do you think you are unable to change? After today’s reflection, how likely are you to now think about what you fail to notice as a means to change your life situation? Have you ever helped anyone see something that they were unable to notice? Are you open to having others help you see something that you are unable to notice?

Today is March 26 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “how good do you want to be?” Do you even ask yourself this question? Those that navigate the chaos and leverage their mind, body, and spirit ask themselves this question quite often as it reminds them of their potential. In The Graveyard Book author Neil Gaiman emphasized the value of recognizing potential when he wrote: “You're alive, Bud. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you can change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you're dead, it's gone. Over. You've made what you've made, dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here; you may even walk. But that potential is finished.” Maverick British advertising legend Paul Arden recognized his potential and asked himself how good he wanted to be each day. In fact, his first book was It’s Now How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be, Arden challenged readers to think about the answer to this question and gave them five choices: do you want to be pretty good good very good the best in your field or the best in the universe. Arden understood his destination and wanted to be the best advertising mind in the universe. To accomplish this, he thought differently than others. As colleague Dave Trott said of Arden: “Fear of failure, fear of embarrassment, fear of what other people might think, fear of losing our job. All the things that look like insuperable obstacles, Paul just didn't see them; he went right through them as if they weren't there. So, they weren't.” When he was diagnosed with an incurable lung condition, a condition that eventually restricted his movements to the length of the oxygen tube stretching from his breathing machine, Arden directed commercials, wrote advertising campaigns, opened, and ran a photographic gallery, and wrote three best-selling books. When Arden wanted to quit his job as a creative director at one agency to be an art director at Saatchi, it didn't look like a smart move to some people since it was a step down to go from creative director to art director. But he wanted to work at an agency that he admired, with people he admired, so he saw it as a step up. And in his first year at Saatchi, he won a prestigious D&AD award for a brilliant Health Education Council ad highlighting old people dying from hypothermia. He said he wanted to learn to be great at TV ads, not just press ones. “Paul didn't want the predictable, or the expected, the ordinary, or dull, or safe – what was the point? He wanted the risky, the unusual, the daring, which brought with it fear, insecurity and adrenalin. Wasn't that the whole point of being alive?” Paul Arden asked himself ‘how good he wanted to be’ and lived a life answering that question – the best adman in the universe. As Og Mandino wrote in The Greatest Miracle in World: “Most humans, in varying degrees, are already dead. In one way or another they have lost their dreams, their ambitions, their desire for a better life. They have surrendered their fight for self-esteem and they have compromised their great potential. They have settled for a life of mediocrity, days of despair and nights of tears. They are no more than living deaths confined to cemeteries of their choice. Yet they need not remain in that state. They can be resurrected from their sorry condition. They can each perform the greatest miracle in the world. They can each come back from the dead...” Today’s series of questions might be a bit more challenging than some from other posts. Take your time answering each question. Be sure to pause and reflect on how you really feel at this moment in time. Know that your answers can change and probably should depending upon different life situations. The following questions will increase your self-awareness and they may also throw cold water on your face to wake yourself up if you allow them to. How good do you want to be? Do you allow yourself to change what you want to be good at throughout your life? How often do you just go right through obstacles that would stop most other people? How often do you remind yourself you have infinite potential? Do you want the predictable, the expected, the ordinary and the safe? Have you already surrendered your fight for self-esteem? Have you compromised your great potential? How often do you remind yourself you can perform the greatest miracle in the world and come back from the living dead?

Today is March 25 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “how often can you be non-attached?” As you Navigate the Chaos it is easy to get attached to people, places, and things. Getting attached is a natural extension of being human. But today’s post challenges us to identify all that we are attached to, and then learn to let something go when it impedes our ability to leverage our mind, body, and spirit. Often referred to as anchors, examples of attachments potentially holding you back include dwelling on a specific event from the past, hurtful words someone once told you; or the actions of a person you are close to. Many other examples of attachments exist. Humans get attached as it is perfectly normal. For today’s reflection, however, it is important to ask what effect an attachment is having on your ability to navigate the chaos and translate one dream after another into reality. Getting attached to someone or something is one of the most common human experiences. The key is to understand when and why you are forming the attachment and then delving into your relationship with it. The concept of non-attachment dates to The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, a collection of 196 Sanskrit sutras (aphorisms) on the theory and practice of yoga. The Yoga Sutras were compiled prior to 400 CE by Patanjali in India who synthesized and organized knowledge about yoga from much older traditions and introduced the concept of Vairāgya or non-attachment. Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati noted: “The word 'non-attachment' does not really exist in English, but it exists in Sanskrit in the form of vairagya, meaning to be free from attachment, without rejecting anything. It represents a state of mind that is continuously observing the nature of events and is unaffected. Non-attachment can easily be developed provided we can expand our awareness to see the reality behind things.” Vairāgya (वैराग्य) is a Sanskrit term used in Hindu that roughly translates as dispassion, detachment, or renunciation, in particular renunciation from the pains and pleasures in the temporary material world. The Hindu philosophers who advocated vairāgya told their followers that it is a means to achieve moksha (emancipation, enlightenment, liberation, and release). The word vairagya is composed of two words: raga meaning attraction and vi meaning not to be affected. Vi is a prefix which in combination with raga means 'not being affected by attraction'. It goes without saying that once we are attracted to something, the possessive qualities of our nature and ego manifest. Sometimes that attraction can be positive, sometimes negative. We have to look at things from their positive as well as their negative aspects. When attraction is negative it is limiting; when attraction is positive it is freeing. It gives a different vision of things. “One interpretation of vairagya is that our consciousness is typically ‘colored’ by our attachments,” wrote long-time yoga teacher Richard Rosen, “whether they are objects, other people, ideas, or other things.” Each human being has attachments influencing the identification of ourselves as well as with others. “Through vairagya, we ‘bleach’ our consciousness of these colorings. This isn't to say we have to abandon our possessions, friends, or beliefs; we just have to recognize their transitory nature and be ready to surrender them at the appropriate time.” American actor Jon Hamm provides a modern-day example. Hamm was attached to his dream of acting and learned how to let it go. Both of Hamm’s parents died before he was 21 years old. After graduating from the University of Missouri in 1993 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English, Hamm returned to his high school to teach eighth grade acting. Attached to the desire to act for a living, Hamm moved out to Los Angeles with $150 in 1995. His older appearance made it difficult to find employment, however, and after three years his agent dropped him. Still attached to his goal of acting, Hamm continued working as a waiter and set his 30th birthday as a deadline to succeed in Hollywood. His belief was that “You either suck that up and find another agent, or you go home and say you gave it a shot, but that's the end of that. The last thing I wanted to be out here was one of those 45-year-old actors with a tenuous grasp of their own reality, and not really working much.” He gave himself permission to be non-attached to his dream and in doing so allowed things to happen. Soon thereafter he landed the role of the advertising executive Don Draper in the AMC drama series Mad Men, which premiered in July 2007. The Draper role earned him a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Drama Series in 2008. Reflecting back upon his experiences Hamm believes that “Losing both parents at a young age gave me a sense that you can't really control life - so you'd better live it while it's here. All you can do is push in a direction and see what comes of it.” American spiritual teacher Ram Dass wrote “A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there’s work to be done.” A scene from the 1995 movie Heat directed by Michael Mann and starring Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro illustrates nonattachment to the extreme. While sitting at a restaurant, DeNiro’s character Neil McCauley tells Pacino’s character Lieutenant Vincent Hanna: “A guy told me one time, ‘Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.’ How often can you be non-attached? When you find yourself attached to something, how often can you let it go? How often do you have a ‘feeling of aversion or attachment toward something and realize there is work to be done?’ Who or what are you clinging to and why do you think that is? Do you have a sense of whether your attachments are holding you back from translating one dream after another into reality? Is someone attached to you so tightly that they are preventing you from making forward progress? Are you attached to someone so tightly that you are holding them back from pursuing their goals and dreams? How often do you ‘push in a direction and see what comes of it?’

Today is March 24 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “how often do you practice mindfulness?” Mindfulness is a way of paying attention to what is happening right now, by observing what is going on inside (your thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations) and outside (your interactions and surroundings) with an open mind and without judging. With so many distractions, obligations, and commitments, it can be very challenging to intentionally allow yourself opportunities to be mindful. But the research demonstrates that doing so has some very positive benefits to help one navigate the chaos. In an April 23, 2016, New York Times editorial, Matthew E May explained that there are two opposing approaches to mindfulness: Eastern and Western. The Eastern view is more about quieting the mind and suspending thought. One such strategy for suspending thought is the practice of yoga. One of the earliest texts regarding yoga is The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali - a collection of 196 Sanskrit sutras (aphorisms) on the theory and practice of yoga. The Yoga Sutras was compiled in the early centuries CE, by the sage Patanjali in India who synthesized and organized knowledge about yoga from much older traditions. In yoga sutra 1.2, the second sutra of book one, Patanjali explained the definition and purpose of yoga by writing Yogash citta vrtti nirodha, translated as yoga is the cessation of the modifications, or fluctuations, of the mind. When one is finished with all of the physical postures in a yoga practice, they should be able to quiet the mind and suspend thought as they rest in a meditative state. The postures of yoga, the physical movement, and the breathing, all prepare one for the final pose, savasana. It is in that pose that one seeks to achieve the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. This Eastern approach is almost the opposite of the Western view of mindfulness, which centers on active thinking. As Dr. Frank John Ninivaggi noted in an April 2018 Psychology Today article “Mindfulness in the West does not denote the traditional Eastern idea of emptying the mind wholly of all its objects or contents; instead, Western mindfulness aspires to a mind that can be alert and aware for significant times during the day. Intensive practices used periodically strengthen the mind’s ability to remain mindful in between periodic exercises.” Both views share the same goal: avoiding mindlessness. As May explained “when we’re mindless, the past is riding herd over the present. We get trapped in categories created in the past, stuck in rigid perspectives, oblivious to alternative views. This gives us the illusion of certainty.” We convince ourselves that the present is something other than what it truly is. Other researchers would suggest mindfulness does even more. For example, Dr. Daniel J. Siegel echoes May’s belief. Siegel, author of Mindsight, wrote “Research has proven that mindfulness training integrates the brain and strengthens the important executive functions that support emotional and social intelligence as well as academic success.” George Mumford, author of The Mindful Athlete: Secrets to Pure Performance provides such an example and has been helping athletes understand how to stay in the moment. Mumford’s backstory is quite interesting. He played basketball at the University of Massachusetts but injuries forced Mumford out of the game he loved. The meds that relieved the pain of his injuries, however, numbed him to the emptiness he felt without the game and eventually led him to heroin. After years as a functioning addict, Mumford enrolled in Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction program and made meditation the center of his life. He kicked drugs, earned a master’s degree in counseling psychology, and began teaching meditation to inmates and others. One example is the NBA team the Golden State Warriors. The team is led by head coach Steve Kerr—who played for the Chicago Bulls during the Michael Jordan era—and was taught meditation and how to refine the inner game by Mumford. Under his leadership, the Golden State Warriors entered the most successful period in its history, reaching five consecutive NBA Finals and winning three championships in 2015, 2017, and 2018. The 2015–16 Warriors won an unprecedented 73 games, breaking the record for the most wins in an NBA season, previously held by Kerr's 1995–96 Chicago Bulls. Kerr explained that his coaching philosophy is built on four principles: competitiveness, joy, mindfulness, and compassion. According to Kerr “We compete every day. We keep score, we make sure there’s winners and losers, and everyone’s feeling that vibe. There’s got to be joy in the gym. But we have to coach with compassion and understand the difficulties of whether it’s a season like we had last year, where everything goes wrong, or the pandemic hits and the world seems to be going sideways, And if we can teach mindfulness, which is probably the biggest challenge of all in modern life, we can put all that together and teach our players perspective in how to perform under pressure.” Recognizing the need for self-care and its role in mindfulness, Kerr added “You have to nourish yourself. You have to fill up your own cup every single day to have the energy to lead others. Sometimes in our society, we glorify people who are workaholics, and if somebody’s in a high-pressure job and they’re seen out hiking or playing golf, they can actually be criticized: ‘Why isn’t that person in the office?’ I think that’s insane.” Russian author Leo Tolstoy wrote “In the same way as you cannot work with bees without being cautious, you cannot work with people without being mindful of their humanity.” To recognize people and to be mindful of their humanity, however, you first need to see them. To help with your mindfulness as you work to see people, the practice of samyama is always available. As Eric Vance noted in a September 21, 2022 New York Times article, samyama is practiced by yoga teacher Jana Long, co-founder of the Black Yoga Teacher’s Alliance in Baltimore. For Long “fall is a time for samyama, a concept in yoga referring to, among other things, the meditative practice of observing an object and becoming absorbed in it. Sometimes Long looks at the grass after the final mowing of the year and spends some time thinking about what that means for a plant. Other times, she said, she examines the roses in her garden that need pruning before winter — imagining what they need and how they will change.” How often are you intentionally allowing yourself opportunities to be mindful? And are you mindful of the humanity of others? How often do you practice the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind? Is your mindfulness training more Western centric (active thinking) or Eastern centric (quieting the mind and suspending thought)? How often are you mindful of the humanity around you? How often do you practice samyama in order to observe an object or person?

Today is March 23 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “how often do you remind yourself of the focusing illusion?” The focusing illusion is also known as the focusing effect and is a cognitive bias that occurs when people place too much importance on one aspect of an event, causing an error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome. In his 2011 book, Thinking Fast and Slow, the 2002 Nobel Prize recipient in Economics, Daniel Kahneman, discussed his concept of the focusing illusion and defined it as meaning “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.” To identify the focusing illusion you have to think hard. Since people “are not accustomed to thinking hard, they are often content to trust a plausible judgment that quickly comes to mind.” An often-used illustration of this is the weather and how people perceive their happiness in relation to it. For those who view life through the focusing illusion lens, they equate their happiness with warm weather and beautiful sunshine. But such a belief is merely one view of understanding the relationship between happiness and the weather. If you are aware that ‘nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it,’ then you realize how the weather has little if anything to do with your happiness. Kahneman commented further on the focusing illusion and outlined contributing factors, namely the combination of over confidence coupled with ignorance so often practiced by people. As he wrote in Thinking Fast and Slow “We focus on our goal, anchor on our plan, and neglect relevant base rates, exposing ourselves to the planning fallacy. We focus on what we want to do and can do, neglecting the plans and skills of others. Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control. We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs.” He applied the focusing illusion to education and wrote, “Education is an important determinant of income—one of the most important—but it is less important than most people think.” Perhaps, nowhere is the focusing illusion more apparent than in the discussion between one’s college major and future earnings income potential. Evidence suggests little correlation between one’s level of education or academic major and long-term income potential. “In one recent survey over 90 percent of employers agree that a candidate’s demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than their undergraduate major.” Daniel Hamermesh of the University of Texas concluded that “Perceptions of the variations in economic success among graduates in different majors are exaggerated. Our results imply that given a student’s ability, achievement, and effort, his or her earnings do not vary all that greatly with the choice of undergraduate major.” Focusing solely on education prevents the consideration of the myriad of other factors that determine income. When you fall into the focusing illusion trap you believe that one degree is better to have than another. When you realize “that nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it” you can accept the fact that no one degree is necessarily better than another when moving up the corporate ladder or earning potential. This focusing illusion has a very personal application as well. Actor Bradley Cooper provides one example. In an April 2013 interview published in GQ, Cooper discussed the complicated relationship he had with his father who had passed away two years earlier in 2011 after battling lung cancer. "For the first seven years of being in this industry,” Cooper reflected, “I had no confidence whatsoever. It was not until I stopped caring about things, about two years ago when my father passed away. You can be one of those people who says, 'I have perspective,' but then, all of a sudden your parent dies and that gives you an entirely different perspective. Death became very real.” Recognizing the impact of his father, Cooper recognized “my father gave me two gifts - having me and dying with me. I used to be the kid that got the shakes if I had to talk in public; now, I just don't get nervous about stuff. I can't control everything. I watched my father die and realized this is the way we are all going to die. For me, it was a switch from knowing something intellectually to knowing it by tangibly experiencing it. It rewired my neurological system. It almost did the opposite of motivating me. It was about keeping the main thing the main thing." How often do you remind yourself that ‘nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it?’ How often do you remind yourself to do the hard work required to think? Why do you think so many people fall victim to the focusing illusion and think that one’s college major is directly linked to future income earnings? How often do you remind yourself that so many external factors play a role in your success; therefore, you truly are unable to control everything?

Today is March 22 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “how often do you pay attention to the details?” Legendary basketball coach John Wooden noted "Big things are accomplished only through the perfection of minor details." Navigating the chaos and leveraging your mind, body, and spirit occasionally requires strict attention to the little things in life. Since big dreams are made up of small moments, a multitude of tasks, and countless hours of hard work, paying attention to the details matter. Ignoring one detail could inadvertently slow down your forward progress. When you rely on others to help you pay attention to the details, things get even more complicated. That’s where today’s reflection story comes in. To measure how well the little things were followed when it came to set up their concert stage and equipment, the rock band Van Halen included a provision in its concert contract with venues that called for M&M’s (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES).” The presence of even a single brown M&M in that bowl was sufficient legal cause for Van Halen to cancel a scheduled appearance. Think about that for a moment. The band was so concerned about their attention to details being followed there were willing to cancel a performance if they saw a single brown M&M in the bowl. The M&Ms provision was included in Van Halen’s contracts as a simple way to determine whether the technical specifications of the contract had been thoroughly read and understood. Van Halen was one of the first bands to take huge concert productions on the road. Unfortunately, they experienced many technical errors at different venues: whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through. For quality purposes, Van Halen would put different provisions into the contract rider just to see if every last detail was addressed. As Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth explained: “The contract rider read like a version of the Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say ‘Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes.’ This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: ‘There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.’ So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl … well, we knew we would have to line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.” Long before Van Halen used brown M&Ms as a safety check to see if the crew paid attention to the details, miners and others used canaries to check on the safety of a cave. As Kat Eschner wrote in The Smithsonian Magazine “The idea of using canaries is credited to John Scott Haldane, known to some as the father of oxygen therapy. His research on carbon monoxide led him to recommend using the birds. He suggested using a sentinel species: an animal more sensitive to the colorless, odorless carbon monoxide and other poisonous gases than humans. If the animal became ill or died, that would give miners a warning to evacuate.” Why was a canary Haldane’s suggested solution? Canaries, like other birds, are good early detectors of carbon monoxide because they’re vulnerable to airborne poisons. Because they need such immense quantities of oxygen to enable them to fly and fly to heights that would make people altitude sick, their anatomy allows them to get a dose of oxygen when they inhale and another when they exhale, by holding air in extra sacs. Relative to mice or other easily transportable animals that could have been carried in by the miners, they get a double dose of air and any poisons the air might contain, so miners would get an earlier warning. For today’s reflection, pause and consider answering the following questions regarding your relationship with the details. How often do you pay attention to the details? How often do you think you are aware of the brown M&M rule? How often do you remind yourself that ‘big things are accomplished only through the perfection of minor details?’ (Knowing full well – perfection - as discussed elsewhere in this Navigate the Chaos series, is often unrealistic). Canaries were used as early warning signs against the dangers of low oxygen. Do you have any such mechanisms in place to help you understand the details for your current life situation? Why do you think people lack the ability to pay attention to the details when so much is on the line? How can you improve your ability to pay attention to the details?

Today is March 21 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “how often are you over thinking?” Leveraging your mind, body, and spirit to navigate the chaos offers many nuances and paradoxes explained throughout this 365-day blog series. Today’s reflection examines the nuance involved with thinking, or more specifically, over thinking. Do you need to leverage your mind to navigate the chaos. Yes, absolutely. Do you need to think hard, think differently, and think often, yes, of course. You need to do all those things yet avoid the trap of over thinking which in and of itself can prohibit your ability to translate one dream after another into reality. Canadian film maker James Cameron noted the danger of over thinking and said, “there are many talented people who haven’t fulfilled their dreams because they over thought it, or they were too cautious, and were unwilling to make the leap of faith.” This over thinking is often associated with those who need things to be perfect before they begin, are waiting for the right moment to pursue their dreams or hold on to a strong fear of failure. What separates those who navigate the chaos from those who are unable to is often the ability to let go of thinking and just start doing. Going back to 1873, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill discussed over thinking in his Autobiography. In his work Mill linked over thinking to happiness and the pursuit of one’s passion and had two significant observations. His first observation involved focusing on something else when he wrote “Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way. The enjoyments of life (such was now my theory) are sufficient to make it a pleasant thing, when they are taken en passant, without being made a principal object. Once make them so, and they are immediately felt to be insufficient. They will not bear a scrutinizing examination.” The second observation Mill wrote about concerning over thinking involved asking about it. According to Mill “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning.” Mill’s description of happiness is directly linked to those who are able to think about something else. “Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness.” If you are solely focused on obtaining happiness, then one option you have is to assess just how much over thinking is involved in the pursuit of your happiness. For Mill, the life situations enjoyed most were taken en passant, meaning by incident and without design. Capturing such happiness, however, requires one to keep an open mind, an active body, and a free spirit. If you are so obsessed with reaching some pre-determined level of happiness, your mind will be closed, your body stagnant, and your spirit chained to your pursuit. Leveraging your mind, body, and spirit is hard work and not over thinking is in and of itself difficult for most people. After navigating her own personal crisis, author Vironika Tugaleva addressed the need to avoid over thinking when she wrote “They say, ‘Look before you leap.’ So, look. But do not look for too long. Do not look into the void of uncertainty trying to predict each and every possible outcome, to evaluate every possible mistake, to prevent each possible failure. Look for the opportunity to leap, and leap faster than your fear can grab you. Leap before you talk yourself out of it before you convince yourself to set up a temporary camp that turns into a permanent delay on your journey into your own heart.” Those who navigate the chaos journey into their own heart. Constructing barriers around leveraging one’s body, mind, and spirit is just going to enhance your over thinking while prevent you from acting. Entrepreneur Robert Herjavek echoed a similar thought when he noted “Thinking too much leads to paralysis by analysis. It's important to think things through, but many use thinking as a means of avoiding action.” How often are you over thinking? Have you considered how over thinking could be prohibiting you from translating one dream after another into reality? What is the origin or causes related to your reliance on over thinking? Are you so focused on the pursuit of happiness that you find yourself unhappy? How often is your mind open, body active, and spirit free in order to capture those life situations that happen by incident or without design? How often do you find yourself setting up a ‘temporary camp that turns into a permanent delay on your journey into your own heart?’ Who or what is holding you back from leaping into a life situation? Are you over thinking to avoid action? If so, why are you so dependent upon thinking while avoiding acting?

Today is March 20 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “how often do you experiment with your life?” To navigate the chaos and leverage your mind, body, and spirit, it will be necessary from time to time to experiment. A young woman once asked French Cuban-American Anaïs Nin the following question: “I am interested in so many things, and I have a terrible fear because my mother keeps telling me that I'm just going to be exploring the rest of my life and never get anything done. But I find it hard to set my ways and say, ‘Well, do I want to do this, or should I try to exploit that, or should I escape and completely do one thing?’” In her answer Nin emphasized the need to experiment with one’s life and wrote a detailed response composed of several themes. The first theme Nin emphasized centered around the word ‘escape’ when she wrote “One word I would banish from the dictionary is 'escape.' Just banish that and you'll be fine. Because that word has been misused regarding anybody who wanted to move away from a certain spot and wanted to grow. You know if you forget that word you will have a much easier time. Also, you are in the prime, the beginning of your life; you should experiment with everything, try everything.” Here Nin stresses the need to experiment with one’s life. Nin continued in her response with a second theme focused on dichotomies when she wrote “We are taught all these dichotomies, and I only learned later that they could work in harmony. We have created false dichotomies; we create false ambivalences, and very painful one’s sometimes - the feeling that we have to choose. But I think at one point we finally realize, sometimes subconsciously, whether we are really fitted for what we try and if it's what we want to do. You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern.” Once again emphasizing the right to experiment with your life, Nin highlighted the ‘false ambivalences and dichotomies’ society creates. We seldom have the choice between two options; all we have to do is recognize the ability to experiment with life. The third theme Nin mentioned in her response suggested how vocations can change over time when she wrote “You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you're not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn't a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so, he walked away from banking.” Nin brings up an interesting example of someone who experimented with his life in Gauguin. In 1871, the 23-year-old Gauguin, who recently returned to Paris after schooling, secured a job as a stockbroker. A close family friend, Gustave Arosa, got him a job at the Paris Bourse. Gauguin became a successful Parisian businessman and remained one for the next 11 years. During the Paris stock market crash of 1882, however, Gauguin's earnings deteriorated sharply and he eventually decided to pursue painting full-time. Finally, Nin concluded her response with the affirmation that you have the right to alter the course of your life at any given moment when she wrote “I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now.” Nin’s own life was an experiment. As Sady Doyle wrote in "Before Lena Dunham, there was Anais Nin-now patron saint of social media," an April 7, 2015, article published in The Guardian “In her lifetime, Nin was an oddity: for one thing, she was a woman who wrote explicitly about sex from a female point of view. Her work included frank portrayals of illegal abortions, extramarital affairs, and incest, all of which Nin wrote about without judging her female characters. That’s brave in 2015; in 1940, it was career suicide.” In her lifetime critics railed against Nin and called her irrelevant, a joke, a fraud or in the words of one detractor, “a monster of self-centeredness whose artistic pretensions now seem grotesque.” That changed in 1966 when Harcourt Brace published The Diary of Anaïs Nin. The existence of the diary, a monumental life’s work that Nin was completed in secret – even when radically edited down for publication, it spanned seven volumes and 50 years – had long been speculated about in literary circles. So began the age of Anaïs Nin, feminist icon: worshipped by young women who believed she had provided the first real account of how a woman could thrive in the male-dominated world of literature. She toured the country, giving readings and speeches. Fifteen years after her death her image was tarnished when the public learned she had two husbands: Hugh Parker Guiler in New York and Rupert Pole in California. Moreover, the 1995 publication of Deirdre Bair’s award-winning biography contributed to the character assassination by painting Nin’s as a woman who, in the words of The Philadelphia Inquirer “lied and fornicated the way the rest of us breathe.” Review after review focused on Nin solely as a sexual object: someone who’d had too much sex, and the wrong kind of sex, and should therefore be punished. In recent years, however, social media has helped to rehabilitate Nin’s image and is taking place not because her work has changed, but because the world has changed to make room for her work. As Doyle noted “Twenty years after the great trashing of 1995, the landscape is different. The world of 2015 is, essentially, Nin’s world to claim. To blur the boundaries of life and fiction, as Nin did, has gone beyond being an acceptable tactic of experimental writers, and is now practiced by reality-television producers and popular novelists alike. Similarly, for a woman to write about her sex life has not been shocking since the invention of Blogspot. Self-publication, too, has lost nearly its stigma, thanks to the fact that ‘real’ writers and civilians alike are expected to do it. Like many great and ‘mercilessly pretentious’ experimentalists, she wrote for a world that did not yet exist, and so helped to bring it into being.” Nin lived a life of experimenting. How often do you experiment? If you are not experimenting enough why do you think that is? How comfortable are you making mistakes? Why don’t you want to make more mistakes? When is the last time you walked away in order to experiment? Who or what is holding you back from experimenting? What area of life would you like to experiment on and why?

Today is March 19 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “how often do you make sense of what is happening?” Navigating the chaos and leveraging your mind, body, and spirit often involves learning how to make sense of what life is giving you at any period of time in your life. Today’s reflection looks at the 2011-2016 period of time in the life of actor Emilia Clark as she had to make sense of a great deal of what was happening to her. In a New Yorker essay published March 21, 2019, Clark let the world know what she had kept secret for so many years. She had been sick. Extremely sick and near death. She was depressed. Her life was far from what most believed. As she recalled in an interview “It was nerve-racking to share it, to be honest. It always is when you make yourself vulnerable.” She waited for years to let me people know what had happened because she didn’t want people to think of her as sick. In short, here are the five events that transpired during those years that challenged her to make sense out of life. Global career success and terrified of the attention: “It was the beginning of 2011. I had just finished filming the first season of “Game of Thrones,” a new HBO series based on George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels. In the weeks after we finished shooting the first season, despite all the looming excitement of a publicity campaign and the series première, I hardly felt like a conquering spirit. I was terrified. Terrified of the attention, terrified of a business I barely understood, terrified of trying to make good on the faith that the creators of “Thrones” had put in me. I felt, in every way, exposed. A near fatal brain hemorrhage: “On the morning of February 11, 2011, I was getting dressed in the locker room of a gym in Crouch End, North London, when I started to feel a bad headache coming on.” She had to be rushed to the hospital and was eventually diagnosed that she suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage caused by a ruptured aneurysm. In her recovery from the operations, she experienced aphasia (inability to speak clearly) “a consequence of the trauma my brain had suffered. Even as I was muttering nonsense, my mum did me the great kindness of ignoring it and trying to convince me that I was perfectly lucid. But I knew I was faltering. In my worst moments, I wanted to pull the plug. I asked the medical staff to let me die. My job—my entire dream of what my life would be—centered on language, on communication. Without that, I was lost.” Eventually the aphasia subsided and she went back to work for Season 2. Exhausted and worried: On the first day of shooting for Season 2, in Dubrovnik, I kept telling myself, “I am fine, I’m in my twenties, I’m fine.” I threw myself into the work. But, after that first day of filming, I barely made it back to the hotel before I collapsed of exhaustion. On the set, I didn’t miss a beat, but I struggled. Season 2 would be my worst. I didn’t know what Daenerys was doing. If I am truly being honest, every minute of every day I thought I was going to die. Even before we began filming Season 2, I was deeply unsure of myself. I was often so woozy, so weak, that I thought I was going to die. Staying at a hotel in London during a publicity tour, I vividly remember thinking, I can’t keep up or think or breathe, much less try to be charming. I sipped on morphine in between interviews. The pain was there, and the fatigue was like the worst exhaustion I’d ever experienced, multiplied by a million.” A second brain aneurysm and deep depression: In 2013 Emilia was back in the hospital with another aneurysm—and this time, it almost killed her. "With the second one, there was a bit of my brain that actually died" and said her greatest fear after her second stroke was that she had lost the ability to act. "That was a deep paranoia, from the first one as well. I was like, 'What if something has short-circuited in my brain and I can't act anymore?' I mean, literally it's been my reason for living for a very long time!” Her recovery was also more difficult than her first—both mentally and physically. "With the second one, I found it much harder to stay optimistic," she said. "I definitely went through a period of being down, to put it mildly." Her father’s death: “Every day, I miss my father, who died of cancer in 2016, and I can never thank him enough for holding my hand to the very end.” To recap, between 2011-2016 she achieved global career success in short fashion yet was terrified of the attention. She then suffered a near fatal brain bleed. Upon recovery she was exhausted and worried all the time. She then suffered a second brain aneurysm and went into a deep depression. Clark recovered a second time, continued with her career success and then her father passed away. Clark said her character on Game of Thrones—Daenerys Targaryen—helped her through the toughest times. "You go on set and you play a badass and you walk through fire and that became the thing that saved me from considering my own mortality," she said. At the end of one interview, she paused and reflected on how she navigated such a chaotic time in her life and said, “I’m quite a resilient human being, so a parent dying and brain hemorrhages coinciding with success and people following you in the street and getting stalkers – you’re just, like, ‘Well let’s try and make something sensible of it.’” How often do you try and make something sensible of the chaos in your life? How often do you accept the chaos and recognize your ability to learn from it?

Today is March 18 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “how often do you make things better, even by inches?” Navigating the chaos by leveraging your mind, body, and spirit often involves making things better, even by inches. This is important to remember if you are in a life situation where you are struggling for one reason for another. Instead of looking for some grand strategy to propel you forward some great distance, consider an approach that involves smaller steps, or in the case of today’s reflection, inches instead of miles. That’s the strategy Ida Random used throughout her 40 plus years in the film industry. During the 26th Annual Art Directors Guild Awards on March 6, 2022, actor and director Kevin Costner paid tribute to his long-time collaborator and production designer Ida Random who was receiving a lifetime achievement award. According to Random, as published on her Instagram account, she worked on over 30 films during 42 years in the business and considered “every movie an original painting.” An emotional Costner recalled the moment when Random changed the trajectory of his life and career. In 1982, Costner was an extra in the American biographical drama film Frances on which Random served as art director. Random would pick him up from the crowd of extras and gave Costner an uncredited speaking line “Goodnight Frances.” Costner said his line in an alleyway outside a theater where Frances Fisher, portrayed by to Jessica Lange, performed. During his awards speech and introduction Costner reflected upon that life changing moment and said: “I was unable to get a SAG card despite all my efforts. I’m singled out among the extras by casting director Elizabeth Leustig (who would later go on to become Costner’s casting director on Dances With Wolves) Elizabeth walked me up to Ida, who I couldn’t help but notice on the set having been there for three days. Ida was really Annie Hall before there was Annie Hall if you know what I mean. She always seemed to be around the camera and without notice she would move into the set as if no one was watching, pick up a book, and move it. In fact, she would pick up anything — lamps, ashtrays, pictures…Anything that seemed to be bothering her she would just move it, maybe inches. Suddenly I find myself standing in front of her, and she’s looking at me, and it’s safe to say that I had gone from thinking she might be in trouble [for moving things] to now wondering if I was. She looked at me in a very real way, and I don’t know how else to describe it. I had no idea what I had done or what she was looking for…What she couldn’t have possibly known as I waited for her to speak was how shamefully desperate I was to be seen as an actor. After a long moment — an Ida Random moment, you’d have to see one to know one — she turned to Elizabeth and said, ‘This works.’ And it would change the trajectory of my career. I’ll never forget you, Ida. You changed my life that night. That’s what Ida does: She changes lives. She makes things better, sometimes by inches…She’s the director’s best friend and confidant. She’s the actor’s biggest cheerleader as she walks them through her perfect sets…You’re a filmmaker in every sense of the word, adding your most personal touch to the movies you call your paintings.” In addition to working with Costner, Random has also worked with other top filmmakers, including Barry Levinson (Rain Man, for whom she was nominated), Lawrence Kasdan (The Big Chill, Silverado, Wyatt Earp), James L. Brooks (Spanglish), Danny DeVito (Throw Mama From the Train, The War of the Roses) and Justin Lin (Fast & Furious). As the Art Directors Guild noted during the award ceremony, Random “is a trailblazer in a male dominated industry, and her drive to succeed helped pave the way for many aspiring women designers to follow. Early on in her career she viewed the process of filmmaking as, ‘making a painting’ and this gave her a unique vision that so many learned to trust and admire.” How often do you remind yourself that you have the capacity to make someone’s life better, even by inches? How often do you remain open so that other’s can make an impact on your life, even if it is by inches? Costner said he was “shamefully desperate to be seen as an actor.” Are you shamefully desperate to be seen as something or someone? Are your eyes open to those around you who might be shamefully desperate to be seen? How can you leverage your mind, body, and spirit today to help make someone’s life better, even by inches? How can you leverage your mind, body, and spirit today to help make your own life better, even by inches?

Today is March 17 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “how often do you realize everyone suffers and struggles in the end?” Navigating the chaos and leveraging your mind, body, and spirit demands a recognition that everyone suffers and struggles, and the end is the same for everyone. Actor Mark Ruffalo is painfully aware of life’s struggles and sufferings and yet translated one dream after another into reality. After high school, Ruffalo moved with his family to San Diego. Following six months of “surfing, smoking, just wandering aimlessly”—and working as a busboy—Ruffalo was “just about ready to jump off a bridge.” Then he went to L.A., found out about the Stella Adler Academy and “walked into a class, and immediately where he felt “this is right. This is where I’m gonna be until I learn how to act. I was there for seven years.” During that time, Ruffalo and a group of actor friends started the Orpheus Theatre Company. Since he needed to make money, he also worked as a bartender for close to a decade. Reflecting upon those years, Ruffalo said “I realized nothing was happening for me—I thought, I gotta make something happen.” And so, he co-wrote and appeared in The Destiny of Marty Fine, a low-budget thriller about an ex-boxer who witnesses a mob hit and then has to kill to save his own life. As acting teacher Stella Adler said “If you can live without acting, then don’t act! It’s brutal, man. It’s so brutal. Because it’s too fucking heartbreaking.” And so it was for Ruffalo. By his own estimation he experienced 600 failed auditions. He decided to quit. Close to ten years of little progress was enough. The experiment to become a professional actor was over for him. His mother told him ‘You know, I have never told you to do anything in your life. But if you don’t get back to California, I’ll never forgive you. Are you crazy? You can’t quit now!’ Ruffalo did not quit and eventually landed minor roles in films including The Dentist (1996), Safe Men (1998) and Civil War Western Ride with the Devil (1999). Through a chance meeting with writer Kenneth Lonergan, he began collaborating with Lonergan and appeared in several of his plays, including the original cast of This is Our Youth (1996), which led to Ruffalo's role as Laura Linney's character's brother in Lonergan's Academy Award-nominated 2000 film You Can Count On Me. He received favorable reviews for his performance in this film, often earning comparisons to the young Marlon Brando, and won awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and Montreal World Film Festival. His next role was in 2001 in Rod Lurie's The Last Castle playing a bookie in a military prison alongside Robert Redford. After completing work on The Last Castle, Ruffalo was diagnosed with a vestibular schwannoma, a type of brain tumor also known as an acoustic neuroma. The tumor was found to be benign; however, the surgery to remove the mass resulted in partial facial paralysis and affected his hearing. The paralysis subsided after a year, but Ruffalo remains deaf in his left ear. His career was taking off and he was determined to not let this physical setback prevent him from translating his dream into reality. Ruffalo would go on and land a role in XX/XY a 2002 American romantic drama film nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. From there his career would continue to progress. Some highlights of his career include 13 Going on 30 (2004), Zodiac (2007) and receiving a Tony Award nomination for his supporting role in the Broadway revival of Awake and Sing! in 2006. Ruffalo gained international recognition for playing Bruce Banner / Hulk in the Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero films and in 2019 starred in and co-produced Dark Waters. In December 2008, he suffered the tragic loss of his 39-year-old younger brother, Scott, who was found shot dead in his Beverly Hills apartment. The murder remains unsolved. In a February 22, 2020, interview with Patrick Smith for Independent Ruffalo reflected upon his brain tumor and the death of his brother and said: “I don’t know what I’d be without those experiences. Something like that happening or any kind of tragedy just opens the world in a different... you realise human beings’ fallibility. I have my own deep insecurity. And so, I am not that certain about anything. None of us know the ending of the story. All of us are walking around with an enormous amount of uncertainty and so maybe I bring that uncertainty to the parts I play. I am painfully aware of that vulnerability of us as human beings…There is a gift in everything tragic if you survive it. You don’t go through that without the person who left you. They leave you a gift that only their passing can give you. That’s the only grace that we have as human beings, that through the suffering we actually gain something that couldn’t be attained any other way…And in the end, we are fucking toast. No one gets out of here alive no one gets out of the real struggle and the suffering.” How often do you remind yourself that everyone suffers? Have you ever convinced yourself that you are the only one that suffers? If so, where did that come from and how could you allow yourself to think that? When dealing with others, how often do you remind yourself to ask if they are suffering so that you can treat them with kindness, empathy, and compassion?

Today is March 16 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “how often do you tilt at windmills?” Navigating the chaos involves dealing with worries, enemies, and adversaries. The phrase ‘tilting at windmills’ derives from an episode in the novel Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes wherein protagonist Don Quixote fights windmills that he imagines are giants. Technically, ‘tilting at windmills’ is an English idiom which means attacking imaginary enemies. The word "tilt", in this context, comes from jousting. The phrase is sometimes used to describe confrontations where adversaries are incorrectly perceived, or courses of action that are based on misinterpreted or misapplied heroic, romantic, or idealistic justifications. As Cervantes wrote: “Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, ‘Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless.’ ‘What giants?’ asked Sancho Panza ‘Those you see over there, replied his master, ‘with their long arms. Some of them have arms well-nigh two leagues in length.’ ‘Take care, sir,’ cried Sancho. ‘Those over there are not giants but windmills. Those things that seem to be their arms are sails which, when they are whirled around by the wind, turn the millstone.’” Often regarded as the greatest writer in the Spanish language, Miguel de Cervantes’ novel The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, also known as Don Quixote, is cited as both the first modern novel and one of the pinnacles of world literature. The catalyst for his work, however, was the harrowing five years starting in 1575 that he spent in the dungeons of Algiers as a prisoner of the Barbary pirates. As Ariel Dorfman wrote in The New York Times October 7, 2016, article "In Exile With 'Don Quixote,'" upon his return to Spain, a crippled war veteran neglected by those who had sent him into conflict, “Cervantes concluded if we cannot heal the misfortunes that assail our bodies, we can, however, hold sway over how our soul responds to those sorrows. His ordeal put him face to face with a dilemma that he resolved to our joy: Either succumb to the bitterness of despair or let loose the wings of the imagination. The result was a book that pushed the limits of creativity, subverting every tradition and convention. Instead of a rancorous indictment of a decaying Spain that had rejected and censored him, Cervantes invented a tour de force as playful and ironic as it was multifaceted, laying the ground for all the wild experiments the novelistic genre was to undergo.” Cervantes published the work in two parts: part one in 1605 and part two in 1615. This is in and of itself important to remember as you navigate the chaos. It takes time and might involve a life-changing experience. One of the greatest novels in world literature was written in two parts over the span of a decade and came about following his five years in captivity. Remember that as you go about trying to translate one dream after another into reality. In the novel, Don Quixote believes his nemesis, a magician named Friston, turned the windmills into giants. Don Quixote battles the windmills because he believes he will defeat them and collect the spoils and the glory as a knight. However, when he charges the "giants," his lance gets caught in a sail. The lance snaps and Don Quixote and his horse Rocinante are hurled some distance away to the ground. After his companion Sancho Panza helps him up, Don Quixote explains why the giants are gone and only windmills are in their place. Instead of recognizing his mistake, Don Quixote insists that the windmills were once giants. He says that Friston turned them into windmills and did so on purpose to deprive Don Quixote of the honor of slaying the giants. While it is easy to label Don Quixote’s obsession with the windmills as giants as delusional because he was, it serves us better to recall the words of another accomplished writer. Mark Twain noted “I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” As you navigate the chaos remember to differentiate between real and perceived concerns. There is no need to torture yourself. The more time you spend attacking perceived enemies the less time you have for those tasks that require your attention. How often have you worried in your life, yet it never came to fruition? How much time do you spend reflecting upon real versus imaginary enemies, giants, or worries in your life? If you attempt to battle imaginary enemies, giants, or worries, you risk falling to the ground as Don Quixote did in the novel. It takes a disciplined mind, a dedicated spirit, and an untiring heart to navigate the chaos, to leverage your mind, body, and spirit, and to overcome the real difficulties. How often do you tilt at windmills? How often does a fight with an imaginary enemy distract you from moving forward? Why do you think you fight so much with imaginary enemies? How often do you focus on developing a disciplined mind, a dedicated spirit, and an untiring heart? If you are not spending as much time leveraging your mind, body, and spirit, why do you think that is? Have you noticed that most of the worries of your life have never actually happened?