I am a husband, writer, and teacher exploring what it means to cultivate mental silence.

6 Degrees of Rivers Cuomo...

6 Degrees of Rivers Cuomo...See if you can follow my train of thought here...it's been an interesting few days!!!Recently, on the 10% Happier (https://morethansound.net/tag/10-percent-happier/) podcast...Dan Harris interviewed Mingyur Rinpoche (https://mobile.twitter.com/mingyurrinpoche), a Tibetan monk who talked about meditation...Malcolm Gladwell (https://mobile.twitter.com/Gladwell)...mentions...The Weeds (http://www.vox.com/2015/10/2/9441235/weeds-podcast)...another podcast...during an interview on Longform (https://longform.org/podcast)...(you guessed it...a podcast)...while talking about his own podcast...Revisionist History (http://revisionisthistory.com/about/)...Atul Gawande...on The Weeds podcast...talks about...among other things...about his book...The Checklist Manifesto (a book I read earlier this summer)...and in passing...mentions that Rivers Cuomo (http://riverscuomo.com) read it and used some of its principles. Gawande also mentions another podcast...Sound Exploder (http://songexploder.net) (which I've heard of)...where Cuomo is interviewed about his process. I listen to the episode where...he mentions stream of consciousness writing...The Artist's Way (http://juliacameronlive.com)...Morning Pages...a book I use every morning!!! He also mentions how he goes back through his Morning Pages writing with a highlighter...detached from the actual words...looking for cool lines. That is so NWP (http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/doc/resources/help_write.csp)!!In less than 2 days Rivers Cuomo has come across my "life radar" based on things we both have in common...1. The Checklist Manifesto2. The Artist's Way: Morning Pages3. Meditation4. WritingTo honor this intersection I went and bought Weezer's latest album (The White Album (http://www.spin.com/2016/03/review-weezer-the-white-album/)) and have already listened to it 2 times through! It's a great piece of art and I'm not just saying that! This morning, I went through the week's entries of my own Morning Pages book and started what will be a weekly practice of highlighting my own golden lines. From there...I went ahead and opened a note in the Notes app...placing the golden lines "in it" for future reference.

Time to shift modes...

No!