Happy Sunday!

Jumping into January, Mindy dives into the transformative power of setting intentions and finding those intentions when things don’t go as expected rather than clinging to expectations. She explores how her subconscious predictions shape her reality and how intentional living can redefine experiences and connections.

I’m looking forward to spending more time on ideas and the inherent dialectic that arises when Mindy and I are chewing on a common idea.

—david/gonzo

Happy New Year!

Whether you’re the type of person who likes to make resolutions, choose a word for the year, celebrate your growth since last year, or just tries to muster up the energy to make it through January (arguably the worst month of the year), I think the start of a new calendar year brings up some unique emotions. David and I attended a NYE party put on by some friends of ours, and I shared how I feel like 2025 could be what we were all hoping 2020 would be, cool and interesting and memorable in good ways-–there’s just something about nice numbers like this. Then the next day I came across this video on Instagram about the mathematical coolness of 2025 and now I’m even more convinced. (Also David’s September birthday is mentioned as an especially cool date of this year - so fun!) I write all this fully aware that an upcoming political change of power brings up a lot of dread for a lot of people, and parts of me are included in that group. But 2024 was such a year of growth for me, which makes me both grateful for it and pretty darn happy to close (slam) the door on it. I also think I actually learned and integrated some of the biggest lessons that showed up for me, which means they won’t show up in quite the same painful ways in the future. That’s pretty exciting. So in spite of the concerns of the world, I’m feeling personally optimistic. It’s taken a lot to get to a place where I can hold concerns without getting dragged down by them, but I can’t do anyone any good from a low place. I think our own hope, optimism, resilience,  and love are some of the best gifts we can bring to the world. I’m so grateful for the optimism that David has developed, and that he’s been someone I can lean on when my own reserves have lacked. 

That was a rather lengthy prologue, but this month we wanted to focus on the power of intention. Last week I mentioned that I was listening to the book The Expectation Effect. I finished it this week and can heartily recommend it. If you’re into this sort of stuff at all, I’m sure you’ve come across some of the various studies that investigate the power of belief over the years, but having them all compiled and spending some real time thinking about them was powerful for me. (Here’s a good summary if you’d like to learn more.) One of the main points the author hits again and again is how we all have what he calls an Internal Prediction Machine that helps calculate how much energy and resources to put into something. It makes sense if you think evolutionarily–survival is benefitted if we always keep some reserves in the tank for some unexpected thing that might come up–maybe a mountain lion comes at us at the end of a long day and we will still need to be able to run away or fight it off. So whether we are doing physical or mental tasks, this Internal Prediction Machine tries to make sure we aren’t really giving it our all, just in case. The problem is that it really doesn’t know what our All is, and its not very biologically tuned in, and it has been largely influenced by an assortment of beliefs we’ve assembled throughout our lives.  I imagine it like a little know-it-all figure who tries to back up its beliefs with a lot of “well, you know what they say….” and very little actual research, either of the personal or scientific variety. 

As a person who has struggled with anxiety and made a lot of progress in that area, l can now see a huge difference in how I look ahead into the future. I used to have a consistently hard time before social events, especially if there were going to be a lot of people I didn’t know, or if the agenda was pretty open ended. I imagined a lot of unpleasant scenarios and it so often left me feeling pretty drained before I even arrived at the event. This past year David and I have on several occasions talked beforehand about what our intentions were for a specific activity, either with friends or with our family. Some examples of the intentions we have stated: a desire to show up for a friend who was struggling, to have moments of connection with a number of people, to lose ourselves in the music, to laugh and relax, to connect with each other. A couple weeks ago we were going out dancing with friends and we also decided how late we’d want to stay out, given what we had going on the rest of the weekend. Sometimes it's nice to be open to whatever happens and just come from a responsive place, but this time it felt great to have thought through things and stick with our intention. Having intentions has helped me feel less like a pinball in my own life, to refer back to my analogy from last week. I’ve also been pleased with the feeling of success and accomplishment that can come from setting an intention for an event. It adds a little extra sparkle to an enjoyable time, and can help minimize any rough stuff that may have come up. 

Last week I shared how my relationship with writing had evolved over the past year and that I was feeling a need to mix things up for our 2025 This Is Real efforts. From the perspective of intention, I can say that my past intention was largely to share the helpful tools I’ve learned about or insights that I’ve had with people because I wanted to help others. Having an intention that involved others can be tricky. Over the course of 2024 we had people reach out saying that they appreciated something or were benefitted by something, and that always felt really good and validating. But what about the weeks when we got no feedback? Were those weeks a waste of time? If the only goal was to be helpful to people and the result was measured by active feedback, then yes. Listening to David talk about his experience writing for the newsletter, it was obvious that his intention was more to spend time with an idea and practice putting it into a cohesive written piece. This was completely self-contained and he could accomplish this intention as soon as the newsletter was written. Whatever happened after that was just gravy. I’ve only gone through Bhagavad Gita one time, but my favorite idea from my study is that of doing action without attachment to the outcomes. “Therefore, without attachment, always do whatever action has to be done; for it is through acting without attachment that one attains the highest state,” Krishna says to Arjuna (3.19).

As much as we may hope to do good in the world at large, our actual circle of influence is quite small, and our circle of control is even smaller–us! A good example of this from my recent experience is Christmas day here. It was our first time in years not heading over to my in-laws for Christmas dinner, and our youngest daughter had expressed a strong desire to have ham, like we always did there. She’s developed quite an appreciation for certain foods and also started getting into baking, so we were happy to accommodate this desire. She also helped me make rolls the day before, looking up a new type of shaped roll to try. So when Christmas day came and she was experiencing a lot of digestive discomfort, it was really disappointing. She’s still young and was pretty distraught over not feeling up to eating really anything. She joined us sadly at the table for our Christmas meal, and then left to go be alone in her room. There were parts of me that were sad and empathetic for her, but there was also a part of me that was annoyed and frustrated. After the meal I went into our bedroom to have a break, and I thought about what I really wanted from this day. There had been some frustrations early in the day as well, so this kind of felt like another nail in the coffin, so to speak. I decided what I really wanted was for her to feel loved. She’d missed out on all the fun foods and treats of the day, and it hurt my heart to think of her having this day to remember as just a big disappointment. I messaged her since I knew she had an ipad with her and said I was sorry it had been disappointing to miss the meal she’d been looking forward to, and asked if she’d like to come cuddle with me for a little while. She showed up at our door and climbed on the bed with me. I just held her for a little while, then I turned on some music. It was kind of wacky instrumental explorations, so I asked her what it made her think about. We listened to music for a while, talking about what it made us think of, and what moods it evoked. I shared some memories from when she was little and would have tummy troubles and some of the things we’d try. I think we probably spent an hour together, ending up in a funny bums in the air posture on the bed that did end up helping her tummy feel better, happily. I share this as an example of intention shifting. We’d had the goal to have a nice Christmas dinner with our children, but there was a lot there that we couldn’t really control. And from that vantage point, this child (and another child who was a bit under the weather and not up to a big meal) “ruined” it. I was disappointed that the meal wasn’t as enjoyed as I’d hoped it would be, because David had really done a great job with all of it. And the rolls were delicious! 😁 But when I reframed my intention to show up with love for my kid, I was able to succeed at that and have a win. And that effort could have gone differently or been rebuffed by her, but I still could have fulfilled my intention to show up a certain way. 

Circling back to the book, I think I want to wrap up by saying that if our expectations are so often largely operating on the subconscious level, it is our intentions that can bring our power to the forefront. One of the final sections of the book was all about aging, and how our expectations around aging and how difficult it will be has been show to be directly correlated with telomere length. (Telomeres are like the “aglets” of chromosomes–protective caps at the end that are tied to cell reproduction ability. Shorter telomeres are less robust and limit cell capacity to divide, leading to increased effects of aging.) We can change our expectations with the power of intention, and that can be incredibly powerful in our own health, physical, emotional, and mental. We can push back against our Internal Prediction Machine and learn to trust that abundance that exists within us. My intention for writing this piece has been to try and reflect on some of the ideas I gleaned from the book and to remind myself of the power of intention that I’ve experienced. I want to be aware of the tools I have at my disposal at the start of this year and use them well. Another intention of mine with regard to my writing, both here and with my poetry, is to have courage to show up, to share what I feel to share, without attachment to the outcome. I can sense the part of me that still wants someone to tell me good job in order to feel okay about showing up and taking space. It has gotten easier, but there is still that sense of tightrope walking without a net whenever I share, and little pep talks I give myself when something isn’t received as I hoped. Letting go of attachment to outcomes is a practice, and what we practice grows stronger.

—Mindy

NEAT!

Stuff we think is neat enough to share! (David⚡️ & Mindy✨)

• I was talking to our youngest son about fractals. Likely one of his numerous curious deep-dives he knew of the Mandelbrot set and Romanesco broccoli. So, I shared with him one of my favorite curious analytical understandings of reality developed by Stephen Wolfram, which he wrote about extensively in his 2002 A New Kind of Science.⚡️

• One of the underlying principles supporting Wolfram in his approach to understanding (science) is Computational Irreducibility. This principle suggests that some processes are so complex that the only way to determine their outcome is to let the processes unfold but we can choose how to experience it.⚡️

PARTING

WORDS

PIC

That’s all for this week! If you’re into this, share this newsletter with all your friends. Connecting with new subscribers is magical! 🧚🏻‍♀️

DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice.