default.black (finding your baseline)

Is that chair black or navy blue?!?

During a recent trip to Hocking Hills we stayed at an AirBnB with a lovely second-story deck furnished with black and white chairs and an outdoor table…or was it navy blue and white?

Black and navy blue can look very similar depending on lighting, angle, surroundings, etc., and when you are not a great judge of color (like yours truly) it is very difficult with any degree of accuracy to even guess. At this point the only thing left is to either ask my darling wife if she’s available, or to grab something I ‘know’ to be a particular color and conduct my reference-based assessment.

Life is full of black and navy-blue decisions that, unless you have a well-established baseline and some belief in yourself, can be very difficult to discern the accuracy of your choice. Some call it our moral compass, others refer to it as personal values, and still others name it integrity. Perhaps those are all different names for the same concept but they all point to a need and desire for a baseline in which your behaviors are rooted. The difficulty is in learning and understanding how this baseline is established. Socrates, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and a countless sea of others have all wrestled, debated, and even given their lives over to these questions and I encourage you to read what some of them had to say on this complex topic.

Knowing yourself is a sizable part of creating your world-view and baseline that you can trust and stay relatively consistent at. I am of the opinion that life events may happen that can make you change your world view, like having a child with Down’s Syndrome or joining Jiu Jitsu after age 40 (both of which I have experience with and would be happy to chat about over a coffee). 😄 ☕

We should ponder and document, in a nice little journal (default.journal), the baseline ideals that construct what thoughts and actions define our personal values, and adjust them as we move through time in this journey called Life! If you don’t know where to begin, I would like to offer a little jumpstart to self-discovery! Please sign up for my blog at www.mydefaultlife.com so you never miss a new blog post as well as notifications of new products in my store. I will also email you a default.values jumpstart guide that will eventually become a journal. (You will be notified as soon as it becomes available.) Why is it called jumpstart? Because if you are younger than 46 you will get a “jumpstart” sooner than I did! If you are older, just like BJJ after 40, it’s not too late to start! “The hardest belt to get in Jiu Jitsu is the white belt.” Jocko Willink. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EP10OFfIua

So, back to the question of whether the chair was black or navy blue, thanks to having my trusty black journal as a baseline, I can confidently report the chair was black.

-live your default.values

default-values_jumpstart.pdf

Download PDF • 23KB