I just finished reading a very depressing book, The Illusion of Empire by Chris Hedges. He’s a Pulitzer Prize winning write and an awesome wordsmith. But the book is difficult, simply because he paints such a grim picture of the world, particularly of America.

In C.H.I. terms, we would say that he is really facing current reality honestly. That’s admirable. In this case, it’s also shocking. Who knew things were so bad? We sure don’t get that sort of picture from Fox News.

But, what’s missing – which is the usual – is the vision. Where is the vision? Without that, it’s just depressing. Might as well jump off a cliff or party till we drop.

He does make a wonderful concession to the power of love to triumph over darkness. That’s on the last two pages of his 300 page book. This seems to be about a familiar balance between current reality and vision.

It’s challenging to be so aware of the “facts,” without losing hope. But, we must have a vision. As it says in another best selling book, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

What especially strikes me, in the aftermath of my reading trauma, is the desperate need there is in us to connect with something noble about ourselves. We look in vain to celebrities, political leaders, new age gurus. Often we are disappointed. In the end, we must look in the mirror to really find what we are looking for.

But models are important (not the runway type). The C.H.I. Practice trainings are designed to help people be able to model nobility in their lives, living from vision and values that inspires others to do the same.

The nobility is there, in each and every one of us. And, any one of us expressing even a sliver of it, encourages others to come out of the closet and do the same.

It’s been a weird spring, right? Sunny one day, hailing the next. Kind of exciting, but also a drag for planning. Tashina and I lived in Maui for seven years so… you can guess, WE WANT SUN NOW!

I was enjoying a coaching session with a C.H.I. student the other day and we were discussing procrastination. Something I just don’t have time to get around to doing. He was reciting various problems he was encountering and mentioned that lately each day seems like the same. “I just do basically the same 12 things every day.”

In other words, The Ground Hog Day Dilemma.

I said something unusual… it just came out of nowhere: “How about getting up in the morning and asking yourself, “What can I feel today that I couldn’t feel yesterday?”

Even I was impressed.

I took the question to heart myself and tried it out. What a totally different orientation. Usually the day is all about what I can do. Instead, I focused on what I could feel. And, it was profound. Feeling what I was feeling more deeply, because I focused on that consciously, I found that it affected everything I was doing. In good ways.

You might want to try it out.

Will

I was thinking about time, how little time most of us seem to have. Makes it seem impossible to add anything new into our already crowded lives. Wow, if someone invented a time machine – not a gizmo to travel back and forth through the centuries but a way to make more time – they’d get rich in a hurry.

Well, that’s actually another way to describe the C.H.I. Practice, as that kind of time machine. Most of us waste a lot of time being inefficient and focusing on the wrong things. If we can learn new habits, voila, more time.

For instance, arguments. You may have had a few yourself. What’s the point? Proving who’s right, right? What a waste of time. The C.H.I. approach is to feel what you’re feeling and choose what else you want.

It matters less who is right as who can get back to feeling what they want to be feeling quicker. Without denial.

Time fills up with what we put into it. Remember feeling jealous of someone? How many moments, minutes or hours (yikes, even years) did you waste on that? So what? He or she achieved something that you didn’t. What’s the big deal with that?

Here’s the really big deal. You’re dying. Right now you, me, everyone, is edging inevitably closer to the edge of our lives. That abyss is yawning open… coming into visibility for some of us. So, we have a limited amount of time to live… to figure out why we’re here and live the life we want to.

I’m thinking about creating a new kind of watch that has Next at every point on the dial. Cause a lot of smart time management is shifting faster. What’s next?

Death comes soon enough and it starts casting its shadow in advance. As far as I’ve learned, the only antidote to numbing depression about that is to choose to live fully now, in every moment that I’ve got.

I love the C.H.I. tools for that, because the focus is always on what I want and what I feel. Right now.