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When I read last week’s #reverb10 prompt on friendship, one person entered my head immediately. But I don’t want to pull out and highlight how one person’s friendship has really ignited me this year because 1) I don’t want to sound gushy, and 2) I’m a nice person. And in keeping with the trend of thank you speeches at the Oscars, I don’t want to leave anyone out.

Let me tell you a story. You know that I admire people who open up, are vulnerable, and share their ideas about world domination with me. Ideas are infectious and inspiring. When I see someone I care about achieve greatness, it launches me down the same kick ass adventure as them. No one does it alone, and that is so true, especially in my life.

It takes a village

It takes a village to lift an individual to the next degree of greatness. A village made of people who share common interests, speak the same language, and weave in and out of each other’s lives. There are the regulars, the newbs, the tourists, the every-once-in-awhile’s and the causal acquaintances. This village may also be known of as a community.

Every once in a while, the every-once-in-awhile’s and casual acquaintances drop by the village on a more frequent basis. They take a liking to you and you to them. You open up to them and they open up to you. You reveal ideas to them and they reveal the most honest feedback back to you.

You become better because of your conversations with them, or worse. Either way, you’re different from how you were before and a stamp of them is left on you (whether you realize this or not). (more…)

The word wonder makes me think of a cave where you can find everything you want and everything that you desire. Once you find this cave, however, you have to be smart and not be tempted by all of the wonders that lay in the way between you and what you want to find most. This cave is of course fiction, a la Aladdin.

This is the first #reverb10 prompt that came through and I didn’t know my answer right away. This question is large, deep, and vast, like all wonders should be. And the author is asking us not to find one wonder but to share the recipe for how wonder existed in our lives over the past year.

Kind of a hard prompt if you didn’t march through the past year searching for the marvelous somethings that exist in life.

So I went to Twitter to look for inspiration, read a few posts to see how others interpreted the prompt, and I found my answer. (more…)

Every so often someone on Twitter or Facebook boldly declares that they are unplugging this weekend, going dark. Usually they’re on their way up the mountains where there’s no cell phone reception. Other times they’re staying in town and just need to mentally unwind. And sometimes they don’t announce it at all and they fall

off the blogosphere.

And it takes awhile before we notice.

Falling off

A friend of mine, Andrew Swenson, recently “fell off the face of the social media earth,” without announcing it (or if he did, I completely missed it). A few of us piped up in between that we missed him. And when he resurfaced, he explained what happened and what he had learned. I admire what Andrew did. He had a lot of things going on in his “real” life and he needed the space to really figure it out for himself.

Being silent & holding back

When someone says that they’re doing this, it is just noise. But when someone just does it, it leaves me wondering what’s going on, what’s really going on in their life. Going dark without letting someone know is like staying out past your curfew when you were in high school; those who care about you get worried.

Being silent online means that something is happening that you can’t quite articulate. There have been a number of things that have happened since I’ve been social-media-ly-social that I have held back from explaining or taken a few days to figure out the right message to deliver the news with. Most of the time it’s about things that don’t matter in the scope of the universe but that matter a lot to me, otherwise I wouldn’t care and would just say it.

That leads to a series of questions—if we are extra social, why do we hold back when life is the most out of our control? Why do we develop these relationships when we’re feeling on top of the world and retreat offline when we aren’t?

Simple: we want people to view us in the way that we want ourselves to be viewed. We are attracted to people who are attracted to us. We want to surround ourselves with safe, positive energy and ideas. It’s human nature. And if we expose ourselves as anything but that then we leave ourselves open for something else—an unknown.

And this unknown is pretty damn scary because it’s our heart that we have bared from our chest and we don’t know how you or anyone else is going to react to it—if they’re going to dance around in it or stomp it out, leaving it and all our ideas pulsing, waiting for the blood to stop flowing and dry out.

If you look across the blogosphere, the “unknowns” we blog about are things that are exciting and exhilarating. We write about challenges that we’re ready to face, how we’re living a life according to our own rules, and how we’re crushing it.

Being affirmative is sexy; being vulnerable with a purpose can be too.

Photo Credit: Leah Makin Photography

When people ask me what CrossFit is, I have a hard time explaining it because by definition, it is “broad, general, and inclusive.” CrossFit specializes by not specializing. It’s one of those things that you need to experience in order to understand.

This is one of the gentlest videos I’ve watched about CrossFit, but the message is compelling all the same. There is no blood, sweat, or tears in this video, but it gives me chills all the same. And it shows the one thing that keeps me going back to my gym.

My Gym from Patrick Cummings on Vimeo.

Community

Community is a word that we throw around haphazardly. Sometimes it’s an adjective, a verb, a noun; other times it’s a goal, an objective, an obstacle. But rarely do we use it to mean the definition we learned in fourth grade: a group of people living in a particular local area having common interests.

At My Gym

At my gym, when they don’t show up, I call them.
At my gym, when I don’t show up, they call me.
My gym is different than other gyms. And I am different because of my gym.

At my gym, we celebrate birthdays by doing handstands.
At my gym, the mayor makes me my own jump rope.

At my gym, we scream when we accomplish personal records.
At my gym, we write those records on the wall.

My gym is Lynnwood CrossFit, and I am better because of my gym.

I admire vulnerability. The kind that flashes across a friend’s face for an instant — then they blink, realizing what happened, and it’s gone.

I love it when someone lets me in. When they open their ideas, their heart, and their soul to me because they want me in there. When they share ideas in a whisper that fills a room that wraps around your body like smoke. The kind of ideas that change how a person looks — when you’re home and you notice that there’s a flicker, a flicker of something that’s stirring inside you. Something that embodies something that’s bigger than the original something; something that whispers, loudly — share me.

Photo Credit: FotoRita