by Max | Oct 23, 2023 | Mindset, Relationships
It’s a hard time right now, and I’ve been doomscrolling for weeks thinking about Israel, Gaza and hatred in the West.
I’ve been affected by my good habits suffering, and excused return of some bad habits.
Fortunately, I haven’t become an asshole, or so I think.
But someone in my life has – and I’ve been resentful about it for the last few weeks. They have always been kind of a nice asshole, but this person has a lot going on in their life. Family stress and job stress for them were already pretty strong, plus a heavy layer of PTSD. This person is equally pained by the events in Israel, so they’re quite stressed.
While I’ve been resenting this person for a few weeks now, I realized today that they must be really overwhelmed and feeling quite helpless. And I decided to have compassion for them and what they’re going through.
Compassion is such a powerful tool for peace. If everyone exercised it, the world would be a much better place.
I learned about compassion as my father was dying. We had a complicated relationship and missed the opportunity to deeply connect around that. I was forced to have compassion for him, largely after his death, if I wanted to have any meaningful evolution and closure in our relationship. I certainly wasn’t going to get anything from him!
Compassion takes away most of the power that other people’s words and actions have on us. It is the ultimate ego surrender. To have compassion for people who are harming you, or people that are being assholes to you, illuminates the humanity in that person. It connects your humanity with theirs, improving the world one understanding relationship at a time.
by Max | Oct 20, 2023 | Mindset
Back to the writing practice. I don’t even want to look at how long it’s been.
It really is true – it’s not about how many times you fall down, it’s about how many times you get back up.
I’ve already abruptly stopped this a few times. Personal chaos, bad habit creep, and now war.
All of these things have been excuses to stop doing the core things that I want to be doing.
I could have used the fact that I’ve already slipped to say ‘fuck it’ and entirely give up. That’s when the massively negative self talk comes in:
“you’re no good”
“you can’t stick with anything”
“your writing is bad anyway”
But today I didn’t let that win. Today I got back up, got out of bed early, journaled, did my gratitude practice, and exercised. And I avoided milk in my coffee which gives me brain fog.
Those simple things that are sometimes so hard to do, when it feels like all I want to be doing is doomscrolling about Israel-Palestine. Or using the fact that I slept poorly as an excuse to sleep in and not exercise.
All of these things compound in either direction – good or bad. It can be tough to break the cycle and turn the tide back to good.
But as long as we keep trying to break the cycle. As long as we keep getting back up….
This post feels kinda shitty. I guess I better practice again tomorrow 😉
by Max | Oct 18, 2023 | Water
I recently joined ROTEC – Reverse Osmosis Technologies full time to help build a U.S.-dedicated business for the company. But ROTEC’s roots are in Israel. It was founded as a spinoff from Ben Gurion University in the Negev desert. Much of the desalination and water treatment technology in the world today has emerged from Israel, born out of necessity, the mother of invention.
ROTEC’s mission is to bring its technology to the rest of the world to improve water treatment systems. I firmly believe that commerce, and as a subsector of that, water infrastructure and innovation, are tools for peace.
Human beings are one family, and we all need water. It is incredibly painful for me to see water and water infrastructure used as weapons of war.
As a human, I abhor violence, violence against innocent civilians in particular, and I expect anyone that I interact with to feel the same.
As a Jew, I am fearful of the hate that I see in the words and chants expressed towards my people, and as the grandchild of Holocaust survivors I take this hatred extremely seriously.
As an Israeli, I am pained to be so far away from loved ones and friends in a country that I have called home for nearly the last 10 years.
Loved ones are under rocket fire, friends and colleagues have been called into the reserves, and friends of friends have been senselessly murdered.
And despite all of this pain, Israel continues to push forward. ROTEC staff members are working from home and close to bomb shelters, but they are working. ROTEC employees that have been called into reserves are still somehow sending emails. ROTEC and WFI Group have used their resources to deliver badly needed goods and equipment to displaced families from the South of Israel, and to soldiers that were forced to hurry to assignments in the North of the country.
My hope is that one day soon we can live in a world where I can help design and install advanced water treatment technology in Gaza, in collaboration with Israel, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. But it can only happen in a world where our governments care more about water, commerce and peace than they do war.
by Max | Sep 18, 2023 | Mindset
I started saying this in my head recently and it really works.
This technique is kind of like a gratitude technique but it’s much more interesting. Gratitude is almost passive. Thinking that you’re fucking cool is a much more active approach to being present and interested in everything going on in your day to day life.
I really mean to actually think “my life is really fucking cool and the fact that I’m doing the thing I’m doing right this very second, or dealing with whatever problem this is right now, is really fucking cool and I’m cool and this is a cool person’s life that I’m living”.
I haven’t yet experimented with this theory at the funeral of a family member or in the hospital or during a divorce, so it has a few stress tests that need to happen before it is officially out of beta.
But for now it seems to work and I love thinking it. Even about mundane things. And it has nothing to do with what society thinks is cool, or even what I think is cool.
I’m sitting here and ‘blogging’, and typing on this computer – it’s raining outside and I just had coffee. Fuck that’s cool. I think I’m partially zooming out and looking at myself like I’m in a movie and I’m the main character. This is the ‘blogging at the desk while it’s raining outside scene’ and it’s fucking cool and so many people wish they could be doing it.
It’s a work in progress. And the fact that I’m working on thought processes that make everything I do cool, is it fact fucking cool as hell.
by Max | Sep 11, 2023 | Health
A straight back is a proxy for how disciplined I’ve been lately.
If my back is straight, that means I’ve been exercising. If I I’ve been exercising that means I’ve been waking up early. If I’ve been waking up early, I’ve probably been meditating. When I’m meditating I can feel how straight my back is.
I was diagnosed with kyphosis at the age of 5 and wore a back brace until middle school.
All of my stress is carried in my back. I slipped a disc a couple of years ago. I have sciatica often.
My back is the barometer for how I’m doing in my life. When it’s straight and pain-free I feel confident.
And I guess it will require more work as I age. More discipline, more attention.
Good.
