Author: Roger

At the start of most yoga classes the teacher will take a moment to have you set an intention for the class. For a long time I have almost exclusively made my intention kindness. First of all I am intent on being kind to myself during class. I do not want to injure myself and I also do not want to judge myself if I cannot do a pose.

Secondly and most important I want to carry that kindness with me for the rest of the day. I want to keep being kind to myself but I also want to extend my kindness to everyone I interact with. There is no cost to me for being kind and there is no expectation that others will return in kind.

If I start with an intent to be kind my hope is that I will remain optimistic in all situations. There are times where kindness needs to be less gentle but in the end I am striving to help and solve an issue.

Many people call this naive and unrealistic and I wish them well and move along with my life. If I have learned anything it is that there can never be too much kindness in the world. I am far from perfect in this regard and fall into the trap of distrust and fear of others intents.

Is it possible that people will take advantage of my kindness? Absolutely and over the years this has occurred and I have learned not to deal with those specific individuals. The challenge has been to prevent those experiences from prejudicing me from ever treating people with kindness.

Kindness is a choice. You can choose to treat everyone kindly or you can choose to distrust everyone. I prefer to live in a world where we choose to be kind to each other.

Today is Martin Luther King Jr (MLK) Day in the US. MLK was a proponent of non-violence and human equality and a major persona of the Civil Rights movement in the 60’s. He is best known for his I have a Dream speech in which he described a dream in which he saw people of all colors and walks of life living together in harmony.

Today we appear to live in a world that shows an incredible amount of kindness and at the same time a vast lacking of kindness. It feels like the answer it to just tell everyone to be kind to each other. Unfortunately hate blinds people from seeing, giving, or receiving kindness.

I have been doing at least one yoga class a day on the Apple Fitness+ app since it came out Dec 14th 2020. I have discussed the app before and continue to be impressed with the quality and quantity of classes they keep outputting.

Today I did this 45 minute class with Jessica Skye which focused on movements that open the chest and hips. I think my favorite move is the ninja pose cause of the name and also cause its very challenging for me.

Yoga is something I started doing in 2003 when I needed something to counter sitting at a desk all day. That was also when I was doing phone support and sales, which was a pretty stressful job. Yoga helped me either prepare for the day or wind down at the end.

As I get older yoga has become more important to ensure I have full mobility. This will allow me to keep staying active and hopefully avoid injury. I know I mention wanting to get better at pullups but while we are away from home I am just focused on maintenance.

Get over yourself and start living your life.

Currently I have 40 posts in draft mode for this site. These are posts that I started writing and then for some reason stopped and did not post. Most of the time I stopped cause I wasn’t sure what someone would think of me for writing it. I second guessed my initial thought that I had something to share with the world. I thought about someone specific reading that post and thinking: “Holy cow that guy is an idiot.”

First of all I have seen my analytics of how many people are reading this site. Let me just say that if you are reading this right now you are in rare company. Also if you are reading this, thanks.

Secondly the purpose of this blog is to share ideas in a non-professional manner. It may be shocking to hear this but I do not get paid to write here. 😂 Instead I am writing here to develop my writing skills and to share ideas and experiences.

So this is me getting over myself.

I am listening to the audiobook of The Art of Possibility and the 3rd chapter is titled ‘Giving an A’. Its based on the idea that grades are made up concepts that allow us to rate ourselves compared to everyone else. Therefore an A is something that can be given to anyone at anytime as there is no cost to doing so.

The purpose of ‘giving an A’ is to validate someone’s effort and encourage them to continue trying. We can always improve and encouraging someone to improve is always more helpful than criticizing their current output.

Giving an A is something we can do at anytime and with anyone in our lives. It costs you nothing and can mean everything to the person you give it to. The book gives some great examples of how this works, albeit mostly in a music class and symphony setting. However the examples can easily be extrapolated to any part of life.

I am not a huge self help book person but this one is really good and I recommend it. The authors, Rosamund and Benjamin Zander, are married and also read the audiobook. The swap reading parts of each chapter and are very engaging to listen to. Rosamund is a therapist and Benjamin is a conductor. They use various stories from their professions and use them as examples for why you should practice their ideas.

A new trend in browsers is hiding the full path of the URL/domain you are visiting. For example if I goto the Kinsta Features page in Safari the default display of the URL looks like this:

This is being done for non-expert users to make things more ‘simple’ for them. That is my guess as to why they do it this way.

If you go into Safari Preferences and click the Advanced tab you can have it display the full URL:

Now lets return to the Kinsta Features page:

This gives me a lot more information than the default setting in Safari. There are limitless reasons why seeing the full URL is helpful and very few reasons to not show it. My recommendation is to click that button to show the full website address in Safari.