This place is relocating.

For those of you who don't already know, I am making a move. I accepted a Financial Advisor position with Edward Jones in Peachtree City, GA. In lieu of this increased distance from my family and friends, I have started a personal blog to keep everyone updated on how things are going my way. I am not deleting Shower Sessions just yet. I will likely transfer the posts over to briancochrum.com bit by bit until they've all settled there and will then delete this one, but I wanted to let you all know where you can catch up on what I'm up to and how things are going my way.

Screaming a whisper...

Tonight I sit, overwhelmed with a conviction that I believe should be shared by all of my brothers and sisters in this family of humanity. We all have a deep commonality running through each of us – we all are connected by the thread of finitude. Life, as grand as it can be, only lasts a whisper in the verse of eternity and the impact of that brevity is powerful. I am reminded of a quote by the renowned long distance runner Steve Prefontaine. He wisely said, “To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.”

It is one of my greatest fears that my brothers and sisters around the world, as well as myself, will one day find ourselves at the end of our days with the regret of having wasted that precious gift. My heart hurts at the thought of just how dreadful that realization could be.

I do believe that there is value in each and every person who has ever been blessed by God’s graceful hand enough to have known the experience of life – even life in the briefest glimpse. That value is embedded within our very nature by God’s creating us in His image. That value can never be taken from us, no matter how full or empty we decide to live. With that being said though, I can’t help but sense a reality of even greater value.

If you have ever taken part in any philosophical discussion, you may have heard the idea of existence being expressed in terms of essence and particularity. Essence is that thing (or those things) that exist beyond the particulars. The essence of life then, is transcendent above and beyond the particularities of life; and those particularities can be anything from individual experiences to individual entities. What I have become all too aware of is this: Life happens at numerous levels and if we are to take hold of it and find true meaning and use in it, then we must focus our energies and efforts on spending time at the essential level because it is the only one that will last beyond us.

That understanding has been of vital importance in my life and will continue for the rest of my days until I must give up the gift of life in this world. It has and will continue to act as the foundational base for my entire decision making paradigm. To allow potential to be wasted for any reason, be it laziness, fear or even ignorance, is to spit in the face of our Creator (or Gift-Giver). There are no barriers too great for us to reach our potential – after all, it wouldn’t be our potential if we couldn’t reach it.

Therefore, I urge you brothers and sisters to stir one another into action. I urge you to examine yourselves and your world; to take ownership over the gift that you’ve been given so as to take responsibility for the potential that lies within each one of you – within each one of us – and to never allow yourselves or your neighbors to prefer comfort to compassion, pleasure to perseverance, membership to meaning, or perception to participation.

Our lives are but a whisper, so let yours be heard.

On Educating Leaders...

This is a video of Patrick Awuah from TED.com that speaks of the importance of educating leaders in order to impact societies both locally and globally. It is well worth the time to watch.

My Epiphany of Rational Emotion...

As time passes and I'm graced with day after day of this life-gift I can't help but notice some interesting trends develop in my mind when I give thought to the way that people work. I tend to have four major points of interest in life; who God is, who I am, how the world works, and how people work. The piece that has been honed a little more in my mind lately relates mostly to the way that people work.

I think, and I mean this with a sense of gracious joy and valued respect, that people are more-or-less weird. Weird in a lot of ways. I can't deny my own membership to that club and won't attempt to here, but I will say that the more I live, the more I can understand why we are so strangely weird.

I can't say with any certainty that I have figured out the root of this trait, but I believe that it has something to do with the battle that goes on inside each of us between our two most human of characteristic tools – reason and emotion.

Now, for a long time I have been somewhat biased in my perception of these two contenders. Due to my own disenchantment with the way that emotions tend to screw with our heads and lead us down the wrong path from time to time I have been a bit hard on that unique side of humanity. Reason, for a number of reasons, has just always weighed in on the more valid and valuable side with me. I'm sure a lot of that has to do with my fear of not being in control – and what a funny fear that is now that I think about it; as if control were even remotely attainable for us.

With that background though, my thoughts have led me to a seemingly contradictory stance of late. And that may be exactly what it is, but none-the-less it is where I am. I must say that I have been convinced of the extreme importance of our emotions and the role that they play in our time here on earth. I definitely believe in God and his design and providential hand in our existence here. So I suppose it shouldn't have come as such a surprise to me when I realized that those emotions that we have are part of his providential plan – just as much a part as our reason.

The thing that I have been working on the past few weeks and months has been how to reconcile to two contenders (reason and emotion) to one another in such a way as to afford us the benefits of both without reaping the damaging side effects that accompany a life tilted too severely in either of their directions. My conclusion at this point in life is this, that reason and emotion are both vital to our experience of a full life on this earth, but emotion is to live in a subordinate role to reason. Its a simple matter of form following function. Emotion can function in the form of reasoned boundaries – and function quite effectively and safely, but reason cannot function in the boundless realm of emotion. That recognition is the hinge on which the argument is raised and the only point needed for me to become convinced of its validity.

Given that precious sense of understanding, I feel a sense of freedom that has, up to this point, escaped me. I no longer have to be afraid of emotion, on the contrary, I can welcome it with open arms. And the tool that allows for that free embrace is the system of boundaries and accountability that our precious gift of reason affords. Therefore, the value of reason and emotion are shared, but the priority and sequential occurrence of the two are distinct in that reason stands as an essential prerequisite for the free and safe experience that emotion has to offer.