Going Inside - Meditation, Actualisation & The Question

Welcome to the podcast where I invite you on a journey to explore meaning vulnerability and purpose through the lens of a life lifting geekdom I'm David Monteith and I am the Naked Geek.

Welcome back to the boudoir. Welcome. Welcome. Come in, sit down, chill out, have a drink. Talking of drinks. I just want to give a shout out to beers52.com. Um, they're not sponsoring me or anything, but. I bought tickets to this event and up popped this thing, you know, get a box of beer and all you pay is postage.

Okay. Somehow, I ended up subscribed to this box of beer and turned up every couple of months. And what I liked about it was it was, they opened my eyes to a lot of beers I hadn't tried, and each month the box would have a theme. So, one month, it was Croatian beers, one, it was Chicago beers. One was …. whatever.

And you’d get a magazine about beer in it. You'd get a couple of snacks you could try, which were kind of healthy snacks you could try, which was all good. And the thing I liked actually was that none of them were overpowering. Like, you'd get a Porter made with coffee, but the coffee wasn't overpowering, or you'd have a fruity bear, but the fruit flavours weren't overpowering.

So, it sat in a really nice place for me. And I just really enjoyed what they did. So, I'm just giving them a shout out. Beer52.com. You could do a lot worse than check them out if beer is your thing that you like innit.

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So, what are we talking about today?

So, I often get asked who my favourite comic character is. And I love this question because that character is The Question. Now, even many comic people will look a little blank at this one but watching the absolutely lost look on the faces of non-comic people has become one of my favourite games, I think. I particularly love it when you get into arguments with people about Marvel versus DC, which is a ridiculous argument, and they say, “well, DC characters are just way too overpowered”. And I'm like The Question, cause he ain't got any power. He just wears a hat. Um, well you, you know what, in the show notes, there'll be some images in there that you'll be able to see, but I was first attracted to the question by the imagery of a faceless man in a trench coat, uh, a classic noir detective with a fascinating history and approach to his quest, a character who was both lost and focused at the same time, typified by transformation and renewal. I mean, I could go on about this character at great length. And one day I probably will. I mean, there is so much to learn from his origin alone, but today I want to focus on a way in which the question has helped me quite recently. And to do that I need to give you some context.

Now I had a great coach who suggested that one of the things I do to help increase my productivity as an entrepreneur, as a family man, as a person, was to establish a good morning routine. No, not a routine, a system. Yeah. A morning system. And, and part of that was, you know, you don't become, don't become slave to a routine.

Just find a system that works for you and can adapt that. And as long as the system works, it's all good. So, I did this, and it was actually really good for me. It was good for my mood. It was good for my way of being with my family. Um, this also involved cold showers, by the way, which usually started with some kind of Viking howl into the abyss but became surprisingly easier to do as time went on.

Anyway, like all things that require discipline, it can be quite easy to get out of the habit and hard to get back into it. So yeah, my dedication to my morning system, did kind of wobble a bit. Now after I got out of hospital, I decided to read a book I've had in my Kindle library for a while called The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod.

And this was actually a really simple but useful book, which laid out a system, a morning system that involved silence or meditation, affirmations, visualization, exercise, reading, and scribing or writing. And I found it really useful, especially in the way it helps me revaluate what was happening in my home.

10 years of marriage, 16 years together, three kids at home, money struggles, career disappointments, running a home, getting in each other's way. I think, our marriage has become what a lot of marriages are. There's miscommunication. We annoy each other. I in particular tend to withdraw when I'm in a mood, I forget the good things.

I'll get ridiculously irritated by the small things. And perhaps the worst thing of it all is that I start to take my wife for granted. She becomes part of the furniture and it's a very dangerous place to be in. But through my morning system, I managed to become aware of these things. And awareness is, you know, that's the most amazing starting place.

Um, I became aware of these things and I tried to turn them around and make a difference. I managed to quiet my mind. I amplified the gratitude and appreciation just for being alive. I self-actualized by which I mean, I focused on what I wanted to be, what I was aiming for, I filled my head with purpose and focus.

However, I've started to notice over the last few weeks. I've lost the progress I've made. I'm snippy again, I'm unappreciative. My work is suffering to the point where I'll sit at the computer and look at it and suddenly an hour has gone by and I've done nothing. I can feel the majority of my communication with my wife is just complaining about stuff.

And I know from experience, this is a dangerous downward spiral. Now, thanks to an anonymous friend on Twitter that simply calls himself The Question and post lots of stuff about you guessed it - The Question, that character has been on my mind a lot recently, and I found myself thinking about him and I found myself thinking about “going inside”. So, The Question - one of his practices was to go inside and it was a form of meditation he did that brought calm to his somewhat tortured soul. It helped provide him with focus and direction, and he would often make breakthroughs in his cases as a result of doing it. It also helped him control his violent tendencies, because he had those in spades.

Now, there was this really interesting period when I realized that part of what made The Question, The Question was missing. It happened really subtly. I realize it'd been a few issues since Vic, that's, that's his real name by the way, had gone inside. And I remember feeling a little dissatisfied with the comic, feeling that the writer, the late and great Denny O'Neil had lost his way.

He'd forgotten a key part of Vic’s transformation renewal from what he had been into, what he was now. Interestingly, the character also became more violent. He’d forgotten what he was about. He left behind his quest to understand and looking back, I realized that that was actually a stroke of genius, brilliant storytelling in which the comic was meant to be unsettling because the main character had quite viscerally lost his way.

Of course, the comic wasn't going to be what it was because the character wasn’t. Um, there are few examples, I reckon, of comics writing in which the writing follows the character in such a deliberate fashion. And it's one of the many reasons I believe that this is one of the most underrated comics runs ever. If you want to check it out, this particular run started in 1987, around 36 issues. Um, and it was just, I mean, the stuff that came out of it, I'll talk about it another time, but this, uh, Question, this faceless detective, it was just amazing, but where was I? Yeah. So suddenly, now you can probably see it coming a lot easier than I did, I had an epiphany.

I was The Question, in that my version of going inside, my morning system had been abandoned. I've been too busy to give it its proper place. And without me noticing everything had started to get out of joint. I mean, even my production of this podcast hit a total wall. I feel like we need every edge we can get in this life, and I was denying myself something that I knew worked for me. Why, why, why do we do that? I thought I was too busy. And as a result, I became less productive. Um, why, why do we do this kind of self-sabotage thing? I hope I can say lesson learned, and it only took me a few days getting back on my system to feel the difference.

So that's my thing. Now, when I feel like I'm about to deny myself something I know is good for me, I'm going to remember The Question and what happens when you don't go inside. So, my advice, if you're struggling, don't just hope you'll get past it. Don't randomly wait for things to get better. Find your process, find your version of going inside, because, and I'll say it again, we need every edge we can get in this life.

Thank you once again, for spending time in the boudoir, and I've got one favour to ask you, go to the Facebook group, join the conversation, let me know what your process is, what it is that gets you to, where you need to. Until next time I’m David Monteith, I’m The Naked Geek