Praying to a god we don’t believe in: Friday’s with Filar #0012
How’s everyones emotions lately? The year felt like it had some positive movement to it for the first couple of weeks - overflowing laughter from the holiday season and boasting that new year energy.
And then this week hit.
MLK day came and went with little news about it. The entire week has felt like its been missing something. The airs gotten thin, there’s more angry drivers on the road blaring their horns, and seemingly more and more negative news around. Is it just me?
They say we’re products of our environment - and I’m a huge believer in that. The people we surround ourselves with, the content we consume, the podcasts we listen to. We become all of those things, or at least we become vastly inspired by them. And even with pumping my eardrums with positivity all the time, I can’t shake the feeling I have from this week.
So I’m going to blog about it.
CONTENT CORNER 🎬:
Recently, I discovered Tim Grover - a world class athletic trainer who has been around the minds of Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, Dwayne Wade, and many many others. His philosophies have propelled these athletes not only to the top of their game, but allowed them to stay at the top. His lessons learned are filled with wisdom and counter balanced with pain. The world losing Kobe Bryant a few years ago has cut deep and impacted so many. When Tim talks about his relationship with Kobe, you can hear it in his voice - love, pain, and upmost respect.
For anyone wiling to learn about what ‘winning’ takes and the toll people endure by being at the top of their game, I’d recommend searching his content as he’s one of the best to verbalize it.
My favorite quote of his so far is “If you think the cost of winning is high, just wait til you get the bill of regret”
Chill city.
I also just ordered his book RELENTLESS on Amazon the other day. Will report back.
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Also, this has been all the rave this week - Rick Rubin going on the Huberman podcast. I listened to it just yesterday.
My take away: Rick is a got dam legend. But ultimately all of his philosophies and methods of craft are broken down into simplistic ideologies. Get sunlight and nothing is right or wrong.
10/10 would recommend.
THE MAIN IDEA 🙇🏼♂️:
The concept of ‘hope’ is really fascinating. More-so the way it transcends through our daily beliefs and practices. Whether it’s your sports team and cheering for them week in and week out, putting crystals in your pocket and turning your salt lamp on in hopes of that being the trigger to a great day, or actually going to church to pray for the well being of your friends and family - hope provides a super influential source of energy to our moods. And in todays age, technology and social exposure has given us all so much access to learn about new things and understand their value. Which leads us to either conjuring more hope towards a subject matter or contradictorily, comparing our current hopes and beliefs to others which is robbing us of joy. So what is the cost of hope?
I have two major thoughts and two sub thoughts about this.
The major thoughts are (1) hope is a lie we tell ourselves to believe that the perfect outcome of something is possible. And secondarily, (2) our beliefs drive a lot of what we hope for.
The sub thoughts are more interesting in my opinion. (1) People are always in search of something or someone new to believe in. And (2), Now more than ever it seems that people are looking for ways to project their beliefs onto other people.
So lets start with the first. Without purpose, we have no drive or reason to pursue anything and we become unmotivated to even start. But hope and belief are different than purpose. And to push the thought even further, I think hope and belief are individually different feelings from one another. Its a positive energy that’s inside of us that’s invisible. Its like a puppet master pulling fishing line strings from our chest and pulling us forward. Hope gives us a spark. Hope can be global, or mass adopted by a group of people and comes from a positive light. Belief is more individualized, what personally lights us up. It is generated from the roots of our mind and is associated to our core values. Right? They’re slightly different.
But now more than ever, instead of projecting hope, everyone’s shoving their beliefs onto one another. From political stances, to full moon energy and star alignment, its become more rampid. Why are we always trying to enforce everyone to believe in what we believe in? Cant it just all relax and live inside of us? Do we need to seek validation from one another so much where we would rather create enemies than change our own perspectives and have an open mind to other peoples thoughts?
We’re in a new era. Its no longer churches and Jehovah Witnesses knocking on your door - its amethyst rocks against red maga hats. Whats most fascinating about this statement is that when things go truly wrong in life - - I mean like someone in your family is dying, we all start praying again. We say ‘our thoughts and prayers are with you and your family’ like it was tattoo’ed on our backs. Even famous singers or actors who have passed, we’ll write captions like the above in our instagram stories, but we barely give them any thought and we definitely don’t pray. Unless they’re our own. For our own close friends and close family we do. We’ll panic. Then we pray. Then we’ll go to church or any other system to give us any chance at things going back to the way they were.
We pray to god we don’t even believe in.
All for an ounce of hope.
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See you next Friday.
Good things.
DF