Music washes away from the soul, the dust of everyday life.  13 Apr 2025, 12:38 pm

Music washes away from the soul, the dust of everyday life. 

BERTHOLD AUERBACH

Could you fathom a world without any kind of music whatsoever?

Think about every category that music plays throughout our lives, and contemplate what that our existence might feel like if there were no melodies, no lyrics, no musical content…at all!

From the first waves of music that reach inside the womb, to the last notes we hear, before we make a transition, music is as integral to our existence as oxygen. Even if we were to sequester every form of music we might be able to conjure, nature itself, will still produce music for our inner beings to resonate to.

Rhythm alone would be near impossible to miss. From the woodpecker in the forest, to the gentle lapping of waves on the shore, to the cadence of a herd of animals moving across the field, to the wind moving through the trees, music is omnipresent.

Given that our bodies are mass that is built atop the highly interconnected, vibrational fields, is it any wonder that music is as magical as it truly is?

What is it about the music, that tames the cobra? Or that calms a lion?

Music is everywhere, and its impact on every living thing, including plants, is scientifically staggering, when we take the time to drill down on the details of how music impacts and engages any form of audience.

What is it about the right sad song that is so comforting when we are hurting deep within? We build playlists to listen to when we are down, as well as those that are so exhilarating to listen to, when we are up.

When we hear the right track in a film, it may instantly become part of the entire rest of our lives. How would that scene play out without a musical score? Music can fully drive the emotional track of a film or theatrical performance.

Dance would be nonexistent without music.

At a sporting event, the right few notes can solidify an entire audience and galvanize their enthusiasm.

Music will always hold humanity in the cradle of its presence, because music is a core building block upon which all of existence is forged.

Happy Wednesday!

https://brianweiner.com

Being positive doesn’t mean ignoring the negative. Being positive means overcoming the negative. There is a big difference. 12 Apr 2025, 5:04 pm

Being positive doesn’t mean ignoring the negative. Being positive means overcoming the negative. There is a big difference.

Do you believe that a negative mind will ever give you a positive life?

When you look at the situation through logical perspective, the concept of negativity breeding positive outcomes seems clearly counterintuitive to the outcome desired.

Negativity has pragmatic value in many ways. Negativity allows us to remain skeptical where required. It causes us not to take specific leaps of faith. It precludes all opportunity for highly emotional decisions to wipe out stability in a single burst of enthusiasm. It keeps us cautious from engaging with people with whom we may find ourselves embroiled in controversy. 

Negativity, most certainly, has its place in life.

But… as a way of life, negativity delivers a severely reduced value on your overall life experience.

In contrast, positivity has substantial benefits, far too numerous to delineate in this musing. For tens of thousands of years, positivity is the rocket fuel that all of humanity has been built upon. If negativity were the ruling variable, we might still be cowering in caves, hoping not to be a meal for the dominant ferocious animals walking and swimming the planet. 

People confuse the perspective that an optimist will likely overlook all negative variables in favor of jumping into any situation with enthusiasm and gusto. They will presume that an overt optimist will dismiss all negative considerations in order to further enable them to accelerate rapidly in the directions of their choosing. Much like chasing a folly.

I would argue that being an overt optimist has very little to do with that presumption. To the contrary, an optimist is always looking at the negative and evaluating what that negative perspective may mean in terms of issues, conflicts, and troubled waters ahead. 

The optimist evaluates all of these parameters… and then, with all calculations in place, the optimist no longer sees the negative as being insurmountable, but rather, sees them as just another chapter along the path of success. 

The optimist leverages courage, determination, fortitude, willpower and focus to defeat all of the obstacles and to rise above all conflict in order to arrive safely at their predetermined destination. 

Optimism embraces the negativity, and leverages it to empower them to accelerate their own efforts to step up their game and show up at the finish line, triumphant. 

If you seek such a lifestyle, you must understand that the negative stimuli must galvanize your determination. It is a gauntlet laid before you in order that you must dig deep within and find your inner strength to rise way above any obstacles and accelerate with full determination in the direction of your choosing. 

It is said that optimists see the cup as half full, rather than half empty. The truth is that the cup is always full to the brim with part liquid and part air. (unless it is in a vacuum.) If you know your cup is always full, the rest is immaterial.

Positive people are not blinded by negativity, they are empowered by the situation and they internalize those variables and use them as combustible fuel to propel themselves through the impasse and back into the clear.

Happy Tuesday!

The difference between a good life and a bad life is how you walk through the fire.  11 Apr 2025, 4:58 pm

The difference between a good life and a bad life is how you walk through the fire. 

CARL JUNG

How do you navigate your way through the flames? 

Are you flinching every time you feel the heat and cringing at every bonfire ahead of you… each of which appears to be evermore daunting? 

Or do you bask in the relative warmth around you and recognize that there isn’t a flame in existence that can possibly consume you? 

As you traverse your way through the continuously repressive dynamic of life experiences, are you looking at every variable as being overwhelming, or does each, and every variable hone you into a much stronger being, fully capable of accelerating through the fire, and into the future that awaits you? 

There is no question that the trail we blaze is continuously fraught with unforeseen variables, which at a moment’s notice, are capable of engulfing us in new chapters of distraction and chaos, when our chosen route would be to navigate around all of this and head straight for the destination we are seeking. 

The more we find ourselves embroiled in larger than life variables, through which we must find our footing and thereby grow accordingly, the more we learn about ourselves, and about that from which we are made. 

We are fully capable of traversing any flame that impedes our path. The overwhelming distinction, in my opinion, boils down to the mindset necessary for such a journey to be possible. If the frame of mind sees everything as temporary obstacles, then, without question they are. 

Conversely, if you perceive them as insurmountable, then they are… as the late Henry Ford once said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t–you’re right.”

Finding our frame of reference to empower us to navigate the flames and exit with a positive outcome on the other side, is entirely dependent upon our personal understanding of these truths, and even more importantly, our willingness and desire to embrace all of them with the prerequisite perspectives necessary to emerge victorious when all is said and done. 

Happy Monday!

https://brianweiner.com

Weak people chase pleasure. Strong people chase purpose. 25 Mar 2025, 7:55 pm

Weak people chase pleasure. Strong people chase purpose.

What is your purpose in life? 

Do you seek your greatest satisfaction out of accomplishing something of value or do you feel most fully satiated when you have attained pleasure through whatever experiences, people, animals or material items that create those feelings for you?

When we are driven by elements that provide the required inertia to kick our heels out of bed and participate in the life experience before us, we have a life force that feels to be indomitable at times. 

This life force drives countless experiences, motivates numerous expenditures of time and money and ultimately may pay off with nothing more than a sense of self-satisfaction, which is non-convertible into anything material of value. 

Why then do people pursue that element of time engagement? 

If you believe that your time expended is delivering qualifiable results, even if only to yourself, you are going to be that much more motivated to continue to pursue those investments. In doing so, you may discover why you might be willing and desirous to extend yourself even further in that line of pursuit in order for you to ultimately achieve whatever you have delineated as your ultimate goal in having set your sites on such interests and activity. 

When an intellectual is presented opportunity to dig deeper within themselves in order that they might uncover knowledge, values, principles, interests and theories, they are considerably more willing to sacrifice other aspects of their lives. 

They may do this in order that they might have ample opportunity to drill down deeper on whatever that distraction requires in order that they might top off their internal reservoir with satiated feelings of having leveraged the qualities that make them unique towards whatever goal or outcome they had conceived at the outset of their decision to have made that commitment. 

If you find yourself making these kind of decisions in your life, you are most likely on a road to a deeper sense of satisfaction than solely experiencing short term gratification. 

Take a big chance and fully explore your purpose in life. It will pay off for you in ways that you may never have imagined. 

Happy Monday! 

You become a master of your life when you learn how to control where your attention goes. Value what you give your energy to. 25 Mar 2025, 4:24 pm

Where do you focus your attention and energy? 

The first blush reaction to such a statement might yield an array of topics, but when we reduce those topics to the concerted few in which we devote a majority of our life energy, the list of our priorities becomes all the more obvious and identifiable.

When we are scattering our collective attention in too many directions, we are quick to recognize how, where and why we are devoting this time and energy and further enable ourselves to feel considerably more certain that we are ready and willing to continue to focus that energy where it has currently been expended. 

If we are coming out of such a personal inventory feeling as if our focus has been distractedly allocated to many disparate resources, we might be well served to recognize that perhaps we might be more judicious in our allocation of time and energy going forward. 

I believe that it is wise to expose ourselves to many different kinds of opportunities, experiences, and expend time and energy in order that we might fully discover whom we truly are, at any stage of our life.

Conversely, it is equally wise to isolate a select group of those in a manner that enables our progress in those respective categories to more rapidly mature and thereby come to greater fruition. 

With concentrated focus and attention, we become more expert on whatever it is that we are expending our energies towards, and as a direct result, our capabilities mature in synchronization with our consistent efforts and energies.

As we continuously expand our horizons, we are most wise to evaluate this list and potentially re-prioritize some of the line items in favor of where our particular life has taken us. 

Happy Wednesday! 

https://brianweiner.com

If it’s still on your mind, it’s worth taking the risk.  24 Mar 2025, 8:06 pm

If it’s still on your mind, it’s worth taking the risk. 

Is there something that has been on your mind, for quite some time, that leaves you wanting?

When something important beckons you and embeds into your conscience, it has a way of grasping hold and never letting go. 

It is a proverbial itch that must be scratched. Some of these prove to be a flight of fancy which evaporate in a very short time period, while others resonate on a profound level, thereby eliminating any confusion as to the importance that they represent in our lives. 

Once we have identified that which truly resonates with us, it becomes incumbent upon us to find the pathway to explore the possibility of actually experiencing or pursuing it. 

The older you get, the more clear it becomes that our lives are short, fragile, and wholly unpredictable in many regards. 

For us to forgo opportunities, in lieu of always playing it safe, eliminates some of the greatest joys that life can potentially provide.

In our relentless pursuit of happiness, there must certainly be an allocation for the journeys that were not forecast, expected, or even consciously desired, but which ultimately end up resonating on such a high-level as to become one of the highlights that we look back upon with delight, pride or affection. 

Once you have tasted the forbidden fruit of pursuing something outside your expected comfort zone and realize how ultimately attainable it truly was, your interest and desire in continuing to pursue more such opportunities will grow exponentially. 

When we find something that has a calling that clearly resonates with us, it is our greatest duty to ourselves, to be myopic in our direct exploration of such an opportunity, and to deliver ourselves to the points of embarkment so that we may take the journeys of our choosing throughout our lifetime. 

Happy Sunday!

The most important thing is to enjoy your life – to be happy – it’s all that matters. 23 Mar 2025, 5:13 pm

The most important thing is to enjoy your life – to be happy – it’s all that matters.

Are you truly happy? 

Do you wake up daily with a smile in your heart and genuine excitement for that which awaits you? 

We are entirely capable of structuring a portion of our lives with a significant set of variables that empower our ability to live within an overall feeling of happiness, regardless of a majority of the circumstances that threaten to diminish this tremendous resource. 

As we explore how we might tap into these opportunities, we might first start with trying to understand which of the respective variables in our world are most likely to provide these overall feelings of wealth and appreciation.

When we are more clear about what it is and why it is that certain things make us feel happy, we are all the more capable of leveraging these to our greatest benefit.

The secret to this formula is simple, but the execution of achieving it, is very complex.

I believe happiness is defined by waking up every day feeling like you get to do what you are going to do, rather than feeling as if you have to do it.

That simple privilege vs. obligation switch in our mind is the essence of the issue.

In my life experience, while money does provide substantially more options to feeling happy, it, in and of itself, has never proven to be the answer for me. There have been moments in my life where I have had the greatest amount of money flowing, but I was perhaps in one of the least happy chapters of my existence.

Conversely, I have had moments of substantially different capital issues, and been the most happy.

My take away was that for me to be happy, I had to be thrilled about how I was spending my time as often as my life would allow. All lives are filled with challenges, disappointments, boring stretches, stressful encounters, and more… so the perfect life does not exist.

So play the law of averages instead. If the majority of your life experience is pleasing you, then you are perhaps the wealthiest you will ever be. Keep expanding that.

But if you are feeling trapped in a life that has imprisoned you, then you might consider options that will enable you to continue down the path you would prefer to be on.

Seek true happiness and you will live longer, and be considerably more prosperous, regardless of how that prosperity manifests in your existence.

Happy Saturday!

https://brianweiner.com

No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth. 22 Mar 2025, 3:54 pm

No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.

Are you willing to speak the truth regardless of consequence? 

We are all willing to speak candidly, until such time as there is a potentially negative outcome that might await us for having chosen to do so. 

When we are perpetually desirous of remaining honest in our responses, we will questionably arrive at a moment in which one of those responses may prove to be significantly problematic as a direct result of the impact that particular truth has on the audience who is hearing it.

When we are fully aware that whatever it is that we are about to express may generate controversy amongst the listeners, we face an internal debate as to whether it genuinely behooves us to to speak the complete and total truth, when doing less or omitting an important detail (so as to not to anger or offend the listening party), would be considerably easier and less stressful. 

If no one is speaking the truth, then there is really no opportunity to distill the known facts or variables into a constructive choice for all parties to work from. 

The truth can be incredibly subjective, for as we live in a perceptual universe, one person‘s truth is not necessarily another person’s truth. 

In fact, when the two perceived truths are in conflict with one another, to speak candidly about either one will almost without question put a person in a tenuous position with whichever party does not see eye to eye with what has been shared. 

Try discussing the Israel/Palestine conflict with people who are emotionally involved. Regardless of whose side you are taking in that discussion, you will inevitably offend someone. The truth is that both parties will have to make compromises and find common ground, for anything less continues to produce what both countries are currently experiencing.

Humanity has every opportunity to accelerate into a happier and more congenial future if people were willing to listen to one another more intelligently and allow for the possibility that what the other party is speaking about may have validity beyond the negative perspective within which it is being interpreted at that moment. 

Speaking the truth comes with consequences, but negative ramifications of not sticking to the truth is potentially even more devastating and problematic. 

Happy Friday!

https://brianweiner.com

Only when you do not know yourself, does the opinion of other people become important. 21 Mar 2025, 3:34 pm

Only when you do not know yourself, does the opinion of other people become important.

How important is the opinion that another party has of you? 

Did you respond that it depends on whom that person is? 

I believe that most would see it through that filter yet, at some point, if we are fully confident in knowing whom we truly are, then the rest of the world awakens to that without our having to say anything whatsoever. 

Opinions are like rectums, everyone has one. 

But that, in and of itself, does not make that opinion valid.

An opinion is entirely filtered through the mind of the person who formulated it, or is echoing it from a formulation they have heard from someone else. 

When we are vulnerable to that degree of uncomfortable scrutiny, we might discover how susceptible we might be to surrendering certain qualities of autonomy in our lives in favor of rendering a positive impression with someone else. 

We might sacrifice various qualities about whom we truly are, in lieu of receiving some form of third-party validation. 

In trying to assess how or why such an abstract variable could matter enough to cause variable depths of personal sacrifice, we would have to think about how and why we are so in need of any validation other than that of our own. 

This is not to say that we do not have plenty of room to grow, to learn, to evolve, to figure things out and ultimately emerge as the person we are hoping to become. 

Rather, it means that at some point, we ought to find the proper confidence and life experience to enable us the ability to validate our own self-worth and hold that to be true, regardless of any opinion of another party. 

Happy Thursday! 

Pay close attention to what people say to you in a moment of anger, as they have been dying to tell you that information. 19 Mar 2025, 4:37 pm

Pay close attention to what people say to you in a moment of anger, as they have been dying to tell you that information.

Have you ever blurted out something that you have been holding back in a moment of anger?

Almost everyone has.

The human is capable of repressing feelings of almost all kinds until there is a moment of spontaneous release, which is in many cases, instigated in a moment of anger.

At a heated confrontation, when tempers are flaring and negative exchanges are traveling in a flurry, it is most common for things to be said, that might never have been said, nor perhaps, should they have.

When we feel as if we have hit the moment of reality in which the negative variables have peaked and the irritation components are escalating, we lose part of the control that has repressed these feelings, and in the blink of an eye, our entire lives may change forever.

Once something has been said, it can never be unsaid. It may be ultimately forgiven, but as for it being forgotten, that is far less likely in the foreseeable future.

When another person says something about us that is negative, derogatory, inflammatory or just plain mean, we register that information and house it in a place in our mind where the wounds are far less likely to heal. It may roll around in our subconscious, leaving its pain readily available for moments in our lives to trigger it out of nowhere and empower it to hurt us repeatedly without respite.

Understanding that even your closest allies are likely to hurt you in one way or another, empowers us to toughen up a bit, and allow for the fact that negative perspectives are just part of the landscape upon which we traverse, working our own unique courses of action to our successes.

This knowledge enables us to mature by promoting a tough outer skin, that presumably is capable of weathering that which others so readily wish to drop on us, especially in a moment of anger.

The perspective that helps most get through such a tough moment, is actually quite simple. If we are able to find an objective third party perspective within which to view and consider that which has been said to us, we might discover a greater cause that was the impetus for that person having shared such a detail with us. They may be saying these things because they are jealous of us for one of a hundred reasons. Or perhaps they are hurting deep within, and by being mean to us, subconsciously they are trying to take us down into the place of pain in which they are living, so they do not feel so small in comparison.

Regardless of how we are training ourselves to rebound from such a moment, it is still very important to recognize that something of that magnitude has been brewing under the surface in their minds for mostly likely, quite some time. 

Independent of how we work on a personal level, to diminish the pain and impact of their statement, it is equally important to recognize that the other party has been withholding that information and in the moment of tension, has released it. There may prove to be truth in what they have shared with us, and if we were most wise, we would take a separate moment to sort through the validity of what they have said, and explore internally, or with them directly, the validity of what they have shared, why they have shared it, and work internally to mature and evolve as a direct result.

Happy Tuesday!

https://brianweiner.com