Alex > Recent Status Updates

April 1: Learn all you can and keep learning, whether you are 6 or 60. The minute you stop learning, life will begin to pass you by. Consider the fate of the college professor who jumped out of a plane without a parachute. The only way to succeed in our fast-paced, ever-changing world is through constant learning.

March 29: It doesn't take much to find the high road to success. The path that leads to life's most precious treasures and triumphant possibilities. But to discover those joys and feel zest for the future, you desperately need an agenda for the present. You need directions for today. You need a purpose.

March 25: The same hammer that shatters the glass, Marcus Garvey explained, forges the steel. Looking at adversity and challenge in this manner, we really can love our enemies. They serve as hard shots until we learn to return them.

March 24: Your imagination is a magic wand. Use it to visualize success

March 23: Am I stopping for realistic reasons because I hope to avoid some impending danger? Or am I stopping because I do not believe myself capable of reaching my objective?

Visual thinking is not about seeing per se... Visual thinking refers to the way the mind works. To the way we perceive.

Hyper-systemizers struggle with even the simplest of everyday social tasks, like making and keeping relationships, yet they can easily spot patterns in nature or via experimenting that others simply miss.

Most children connect language to things in their lives at a remarkable rate. Speech comes naturally to verbal people.... Many visual thinkers on the spectrum, however, must learn to adapt to the dominant culture. ...Language does not come naturally to us.

We even call commentators talking heads. The dominant culture favors verbal people. Theirs is a language-filled world.

I stood on an overhead catwalk and looked at all the complicated conveyors and exclaimed to no one, We don't make it anymore. This is the price we have paid for removing most hands-on classes from our schools, such as shop, welding, drafting, and auto mechanics. The kids who should have grown up to invent these equipment...are shunted into special education.

But when we're not emotionally vulnerable, we miss out on opportunities to have more authentic human relationships. It's harder to draw closer to our children. It's harder to draw closer to our parents. it's harder to draw closer to our romantic partners and friends. We never tap into the things that are bothering us, or we're struggling with because we can't acknowledge that we're hurt.

As long as our only legible emotion is anger, we are never shamed. These are the rules that I learned and spent most of my early life following, religiously. Here's what I was not taught. Black men model manhood after those who oppress us. We measure our humanity against the humanity of those who seek to kill us, our family, and maybe most of the planet.

A misguided theology of suffering. The shame narratives that define too many of our experiences haven't come out of nowhere. They are deeply rooted in a westernized, white supremacy-laced theology unknowingly embraced by the black church

A misguided theology of suffering. The shame narratives that define too many of our experiences haven't come out of nowhere. They are deeply rooted in a westernized, white supremacy-laced theology unknowingly embraced by the black church

The shift that needs to happen is one that aligns with the gospel the most. Embracing mystery leaves room for our own mysterious emotional responses, and allows love to fill us up in ways that our certain faith never could.

For three days, parents don't have to wonder what's going on with their children out there. But the downside, the part of this alleged certainty that does the most harm to black women is that it has a tendency to wield shame as a mechanism for keeping us in those boxes, even when we choose not to be. We find our safety there, and anything that disrupts that box is ousted like a demon or called one directly.

It is also the trauma of systematic denial of resources or stability needed to address the pain and aftershocks of massive collective trauma and daily assaults and indignities. We have survived through a persistent commitment to life by filling simple lives with big love and a commitment to justice. And the truth of the matter is that the need for healing does not disappear because we have found a way to survive.

You commit yourself to some of the worst emotional pain you have ever felt. I committed myself to that pain. You want to literally crawl out of your skin. It is not linear or exponential. And sometimes you realize that shame, hiding, shrinking, suffering is infinitely easier in the short term than the arduous and intentional work of getting spiritually and emotionally free.

And I lean over to my little boy, kissing the top of his head. I let my heart swell with joy over his very existence in my life, for that little personality that is intrigued by zippers and pockets and hoods. I will love him harder, and in this become softer. I will be vulnerable, open to being hurt, because I trust that my joy in him cannot be taken away.

I look back now and I wonder how much of it had to do with the weight of family complications and how much of it was what my brother had, the affliction of adolescence, the natural irritation of growing up, let alone growing up black.

This shame is going to kill us.

Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow. He leans over and takes her hand. With the other, he touches her face. You your best thing, Setha. You are. His holding fingers are holding hers. Me? Me? —Toni Morrison. Beloved.

Mar 20: You are a gardener, and you are planting seeds (thoughts) in your subconscious mind based on your thinking. As you sow, so shall you reap. That which is possible only becomes possible after you have used your can-do mind. The can-do mind believes in success, abundance, health, and prosperity. The can't-do mind, on the other hand, succumbs to negative thinking, fear, and disbelief.

Mar 8: But there are times when we fail to trust our worthiness, when we do as we are told and blindly follow orders. Consequently, we live marginal lives. Ironically, some people have to be dragged kicking and screaming to a better life.

Mar 6: Integrity makes life easier, as well as more joyful and powerful.

As long as a man remains in a state of psychological development in which his mother is the most important woman to him, he cannot mature as a man. A man's eros, his capacity for love and relatedness, must be freed from attachment to the mother and able to reach out to a woman who is his contemporary. Otherwise, he remains a demanding, dependent, childish person.

Judging others increases our alienation

rarely if ever are any of us healed in isolation.

All over the world, people live in intimate daily contact with one another. They wash together, eat together, sleep together, face challenges together, share joy and sorrow. The rugged individual who relies on no one else is a figure who can only exist in a culture of domination, where a privileged few use more of the world's resources than the many who must daily be without.

Love empowers us to surrender. We do not need to have endless anxiety and worry about whether we will fulfill our goals and plans. Death is always there to remind us that our plans are transitory.