www.pianoplayingdave.com

I tend to be pretty laid back. It takes a lot to phase me. When situations go haywire and strenuous, I feel like I’m usually one of the last ones to loose my cool. Pretty much the only thing that ever sends me over the edge is when my video editing equipment isn’t functioning properly, or when I’m in the middle of working on a video I’m really passionate about, and things spin out of control.

But as far as interpersonal relationships go, I’ve never been one to get angry with people easily, get into fights, give/receive the cold shoulder, etc. Generally if I have issue with something someone does, I try to just un-judgmentally deal with the issue square on, clear up any misconceptions, and be done with it. And if anyone takes issue with something I have done and lets me know about it, I feel like I’m pretty good about hearing their criticisms on their own terms, and responding, rather than reacting.

Well, for whatever reason, I recently lost my handle on that concept. There have been a lot of things frustrating me these past couple weeks, and in the middle of all those frustrations, I started feeling slighted by others – started feeling like my time and friendship was not valuable to others, and started allowing my feelings to get hurt very easily.

You could say that in the midst of my frustrations, I started developing tunnel vision – where I only saw things one way, through one frame of reference. No matter what happened, it fed into this overriding thought I had in my head that “people do not care about me.” If someone backed out on plans due to other commitments, this fed into my one-track mind. If someone didn’t return a call, this fed into my one-track mind. Even if their reasons were legitimate (which they usually were), I still felt this way.

Add to that the other heightened frustrations that had been brewing within me, and I just felt like a fuming hot-head for the last week. I was angry a lot, very reactionary, and I didn’t even know why. It was frustrating.

Well, ala the subject line of this blog post, I figured out how to cool my hot head in this instance. I hesitate to just break it out into a self-help-induced 2-step process. But in all reality, it was two things that really helped me cool down in this particular case. May or may not work in other cases…

1. One of the worst things to do with stressful thoughts and emotions is just to keep them holed up inside of yourself. Being a naturally introspective person, I can tend toward that sometimes, and these past few weeks, as I let these frustrating situations simply sit inside of my head to fester and brew, it just started becoming almost like poison for the brain. My thoughts were bouncing around out of control like balls in a pinball machine, and the longer I held them in there, the more balls that entered into the machine, and the more chaotic my mind got. Really, it’s no wonder I was feeling hot-headed, because with so many frustrations bouncing around inside my head, it was inevitable that some of them were going to spew out of my mouth too.

But when you simply let the frustrations spew out unintentionally, it does no good. It causes you to say things that hurt others and produce more conflicts, and that only makes things worse inside your head AND out in the real world.

However, if you simply spend some time talking through the things bouncing around in your head with someone you know and trust, and who can help you process, it makes a world of difference. Truly, it is amazing how therapeutic simply talking through your frustrations can be. It’s like with each sentence you speak to a genuine, listening ear, one of the pinballs bouncing around in your head is released from the confines of your brain, and flies out into the open air where it no longer bounces around and drives you crazy. The listening ear doesn’t even necessarily need to offer insight or solutions. But just the fact that it’s there to receive your pinballs can bring so much peace of mind, because you are able to release them from bouncing around in your head.

And so that was one thing I did – spent some time simply processing things with a good friend. It was so key.

2. And then the second thing I did – now that I could finally think straight again – was to simply start assuming the best intentions in others. Granted, it’s true that humans are sinful and selfish. There is no question about this, and to deny this reality is to make no sense whatsoever of an extremely messed up world. Plus it goes against Biblical principles about mankind needing God’s forgiveness.

But even though humans are sinful, is that reason to just assume at every step of the way that anyone and everyone you meet is either trying to hurt you, defeat you, or use you? Tell you what, if you start viewing the world through that lens and from that mindset, then you are going to turn into an ornery jerk. You’re going to be paranoid, reactionary, and in everyone’s face. And you know what? Your “predictions” that everyone is out to get you are going to start turning into self-fulfilling prophecies. Because you’ll react to your assumptions, and in turn others will feel like you’re out to get them, and in turn they WILL be out to get you just like you thought. The cycle continues.

You assume people don’t want to be with you, and so that’s why they cancel their plans with you? Well, start assuming that, and let it lead to feelings of moping self-pity, and you’ll start being less fun to be around, and yes, people will be less likely to want to be around you, and they might start canceling their plans with you. Self-fulfilling prophecy.

But on the other hand, if you just assume the best from people, it’s amazing how that can be a self-fulfilling prophecy too. You see the world from a totally different light, and in turn, you are less reactionary, you treat others with more trust and respect, and it just leads to better relationships.

You might wind up assuming good intentions in someone who doesn’t really have good intentions. But if you assume the best in them, and start treating them as such, there’s at least a decent chance you’ll warm them up to you, and maybe their intentions will change.

True, maybe the bad intentions won’t change. Maybe you’ll get burned. And sometimes people are legitimate jerks, and there’s just nothing you can do about that. But I think we assume that in people and treat them as such much more often than we need to, and that does nothing but perpetuate exactly what we assume. We’d be a lot more at peace with our neighbors, friends, and relatives if we’d simply assume better intentions in them – if we’d ponder and respond to the things they say, rather than simply react to them. That’s the only way to truly break the cycle of mindless reactionary banter that constitutes so many interpersonal conflicts.

In any case, after I got the pinballs out of my head, and started assuming the best in people I interacted with on a day-to-day basis, it worked wonders to cool my hot head.

-Dave

Well, I’ve come to the conclusion that updating this blog regularly is not something that I can commit to right now. I know that it goes against the rules of blogging and results in people visiting less often or not at all, but so be it. I have too many other things on my plate right now to commit to blog entries on a regular basis. So I’ll just leave it as a “do whenever I have a thought” approach. Maybe once every couple days. Maybe once a week. Maybe once a month. Who knows? Check back however often you want, and if you stop checking, that’s of no offense to me. Fact is, I wanted this to be something that was fun, but it was turning into a source of stress when I felt obligated to update regularly. So I am releasing myself from that obligation, and will just update whenever I feel compelled to.

-Dave

This weekend, I was speaking at a church in Southern California about Resurrected Hope, the DVD I had made about Southern Sudan and the plight of the war refugees moving home after 22 years of civil war and exile.

Whenever I tell people about Southern Sudan, a frustration I have always had is that people often confuse the past civil war in Southern Sudan with the current civil war and genocides going on in the Dafur region of Sudan. They hear about the genocides in the news, and thus wonder why I talk about a peace deal in the video that I made. “Isn’t that war in Sudan still going on?” They ask.

Well, just to clarify for all of you – there are two different conflicts to note of in Sudan. The first one was between Northern and Southern Sudan, and lasted from 1983 to 2005. A peace deal was signed between North and South in January 2005, and thousands and thousands of refugees from Southern Sudan are in the process of moving home. This 22-year civil war which has now ended is the subject of my DVD Resurrected Hope . Feel free to order a copy of it by following the link.

However, there is a second conflict now between Northern Sudan and the western region of Sudan known as Darfur. This conflict started in Februrary 2003 and is continuing to this day. This conflict is totally different from the conflict with Southern Sudan, and the genocides happening in Darfur do not impact the Southern Sudanese – who are the subject of my DVD – at all.

Because these conflicts are largely unrelated and yet people think they are one and the same, I have grown frustrated by the confusion. But when I was presenting the DVD this weekend, I decided to address the confusion head on and clarify the difference between the two conflicts. As I started researching Darfur in depth to make this clarification, I was startled at the direness of the situation.

Have any of you guys ever seen “Hotel Rwanda?” Well, the situation in Darfur right now as we speak is on par with the Rwanda genocides. There are guerilla Arab militias known as the janjaweed invading African villages en mass – raping the women, murdering the children and men. The death toll is up to 400,000, and is climbing every day as these militias mass murder village after village. The UN wants to send peacekeeping forces into the region to end the conflict and protect the people of Darfur, but the government of Sudan is not allowing this to happen. I watched one news clip yesterday where the adviser to the president of Sudan outright said that if the UN sent peacekeeping forces to the Darfur region, then Sudan would consider this a war on their country.

This makes me so angry that Sudan would make such a ridiculous claim. The UN wants to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and Sudan equates this with war on their country? It is counter-intuitive. And the frustrating thing is that the UN is listening to the government of Sudan. They have said that they will not send in peace-keeping forces unless the government of Sudan allows them to.

And so we sit, and we wait, and hundreds or thousands of people are getting murdered every day in Darfur, and nothing happens to protect them. Their government will not let anyone in to help. And no one is forcing their way in to help.

We need to put pressure on our government to do something about this. To move beyond words, and move to action. The UN is meeting this week, and we have the opportunity to personally call the White House any time at 202-456-1111, and ask for our president to put pressure on the UN to move its peacekeeping forces into Darfur even if the government of Sudan won’t allow it. I would encourage you to call, and you can check www.savedarfur.com for information on what to encourage the president to do. Here’s an example from that website of what you could say today before President Bush speaks to the UN:

“Hello, my name is _______, and I am an activist from the Save Darfur Coalition in _______.

I am calling today to ask President Bush to make Darfur his highest priority when he speaks to the world tomorrow at the UN. The President must use this opportunity to deliver more than just a speech, he must deliver results, he must help deliver the people of Darfur from genocide.

I am asking President Bush to do all he can to protect civilians by ensuring that the transition from AU to UN peacekeepers in Darfur begins in October as approved by UN Security Council Resolution 1706.

Thank you very much for your time, have a nice day.”

For more information on being an advocate for the currect Darfur genocide and civil war in Sudan, check out www.savedarfur.com .

For more information on helping support the war refugees of the past genocide and civil war in Southern Sudan, order my DVD and/or make a donation online at www.efca.org/sudan. The people in Southern Sudan have been through all of the same things for 22 years that the people in Darfur are going through right now, and just because their war is finished, it isn’t any less reason to help them in their difficult journey back home.

-Dave

I just realized that it has been 10 days since my last post. Oops. From everything I am told, that is a big faux pas in the blogging world. You need to post consistently and often.

So, sorry for the delay. Please keep checking the site. I’ll try and keep it updated more often in the future.

-Dave

P.S. Part of the reason it had been so long is because I was recently out of town in Southern California speaking about Sudan. I’ll write about that a little bit in my next post.

A couple days ago, Amazon.com launched the world’s first online feature-length film downloading service. With a single click of a button, you are able to download movies in DVD quality for playback on a big screen, and in lower quality for playback on a handheld device.

The movie selection is pretty small right now (about 1,000 movies), but not bad for a service that’s only been in existence for a couple days. I’m sure it will grow with time, and within a few years, I bet you will be able to purchase almost any movie you want over the internet, rather than having to go out to a store to buy a DVD.

I was going to test the service out, but unfortunately it doesn’t work with Macs. However, Apple is expected to make an announcement on Tuesday that they will be offering a similar service through iTunes, so I won’t have to wait too long.

So why is this all exciting to me? On one hand, I guess it’ll be cool to have nearly instant access to any movie I want to watch in the future. But in all honesty, I’m only marginally excited about this from the perspective of a movie-watcher. DVDs have always worked fine for me. Where this really excites me is in what it means for me as a movie-maker and movie-distributor. Let me give you a vision of the future…

Along with announcing a feature-length film dowload service on Tuesday, Apple is also expected to announce a device that will essentially stream the movies you download off the internet directly to your television in the living room. As internet bandwidth picks up, and as this kind of movie-dowloading/TV-streaming technology begins to gain popularity across the country, I have little doubt that it will eventually replace DVDs just as DVDs once replaced VHS. “Downloading movies on the internet” will not just be a nerdy hobby that only tech-saavy computer-geeks embrace. Rather it will eventually just become the standard way that movies and videos are watched. You’ll turn on your TV in the living room, and start browsing movies to watch on Amazon, iTunes, or YouTube just as easily as if you were changing channels. You’ll be surfing the internet, and it’ll just feel as natural and intuitive as channel surfing.

However, there is a big, big difference between surfing the internet and channel surfing. When it comes to television channels, this is a highly expensive, highly regulated environement to get into as a movie-maker. There are only so many time slots available on NBC, and there are only a few powerful people ultimately in control of what does and doesn’t get shown there.

The internet on the other hand is an open playing field. The very fact that you are reading this blog right now is an example of that. I din’t have to contact The Wall Street Journal or USA Today and ask them to print my writings. I just visited www.wordpress.com, spent a few minutes registering my blog, and I was good to go.

Online writing has totally taken off in the form of blogs and it literally gives anyone who wants a voice the ability to publish their writings to the world. Music is quickly approaching this level of online accessibility, and I plan on releasing my next CD online for that very reason.

And some day very, very soon, movies will be at that place too: Rather than having to get in contact with NBC to air your content on TV, or rather than having to contact 20th Century Fox Home Video and Wal-Mart to distribute your DVD, or rather than having to contact Paramount and AMC to distribute your film in theaters (all of which cost millions and millions of dollars to do), all you have to do is upload the content to iTunes and Amazon, spend a few minutes registering the movie with them, and presto, your movie is instantly broadcast to the world – instantly able to be purchased and watched in anyone’s living room who is interested.

Now don’t get me wrong in all of this – I don’t believe that under-the radar, low budget, internet-distributed movies will ever replace 20th Century Fox and Paramount. These studios are always going to have access to top talent and advertising money that low-budget films will never have – and so even on iTunes, you’ll see the Paramount films with high advertising budgets getting the front page links, while the low-budget movies produced in a teenager’s basement will always be buried deep within the site, and won’t be watched or heard about nearly as much.

But even so, the possibilities are exciting to me. With the advent of digital movie-making and software instruments for scoring them, I could feasibly get together with a few friends and for a very low price produce a high-quality feature length film, and then we could hook up with a small marketing firm, spread the news across the internet, upload the movie to iTunes and Amazon, and presto, our content is distributed wide-spread across the country for a few thousand dollars, rather than several million dollars.

I cannot wait to see where the digital revolution is in 10 years. These are exciting, exciting times to be a filmmaker/composer.

-Dave

Thanks to those who wrote me e-mails in response to my last blog posting. I highly, highly prefer that. You can feel free to post a comment on my blog too if you want, but I would much rather you just send me an e-mail instead as many of you did earlier this week. It makes this blog so much more personal for me, and keeps me more in touch with the real world.

-Dave

I think that it is a common thought for people my age and younger to feel like we have everything together sometimes. We see the way the world is, we don’t like what we see, we blame those who came before us for messing the world up, and we somehow seem to think that we have all the answers to fix the mess they left us.

Well, I think there is a lot to be said for fresh eyes, perspectives, and approaches. And I think that the vigor of youth can bring a lot of change to old ruts and faulty establishments… However, when youth have total disregard for the wisdom and experience that has come before them, it’s pure folly in my mind.

People that are older than me have such a well-spring of experience, wisdom, and perspective that I lack. I wonder about the issues facing me at age 24? Well, there are plenty of 50 and 60 year-olds who have gone through “being 24″ once, and have gone through the next couple decades after that as well, and they have a lot better perspective on where I’m at and where I’m headed than I do. I can only look back, but they can help me look forward.

For the past year, I have been meeting on a monthly basis with a mentor who I respect the opinion of, who gives great spiritual insight and encouragement, and who understands many of the issues I face in life because he has gone through many of the same issues. For instance, for a long time, I was struggling with the fact that I could not connect with a local church in the midst of all my international travel. However, my mentor travels internationally 2-3 times as often as I do, and is able to both understand my frustrations, and also offer advice and feedback on them.

The range of topics we cover spread all across the board – intentional living, making time with God each day a priority, finances, church involvement, accountability, finding margin in a busy life, book recommendations, study of the Bible, finding how to serve God most effectively, etc., etc. It’s very much of a holistic mentorship (and that was what I asked for it to be when we first started doing the mentorship). We don’t simply segment spiritual disciplines like prayer and reading the Bible from the rest of life and focus solely on those, but rather my mentor challenges me in all areas of life – spiritual, professional, relational, intellectual, recreational, physical, etc., etc. There’s really no topic that is off limits, and it’s just dependent on what I’m struggling with, learning about, excited about, or dealing with during any given month.

In all of these issues, I bring some thoughts to the plate on what I’m dealing with, but my mentor has so much more life experience and wisdom than I do, that I often leave my mentorship times with such an altered perspective on the issues at hand, that it’s like I’m not even dealing with the same situation any more. I’m now able to see these issues through the eyes of someone twice my age, and that makes my approach to the issues infinitely wiser.

At any rate, I would say that seeking out an older mentor to meet with on a regular basis is one of the best decisions I’ve made in recent years, and I would highly recommend it to anyone…no matter what stage you are in life. Seek someone whom you respect, who is wise, who has a depth to their relationship with God that you admire, and who has gone through many of the key life decisions and situations that you deal with now.

-Dave

P.S. Of course, the subject of this post was specifically about meeting regularly with a mentor, but equally important with that for me is seeking the advice of my parents. They know me, love me, and understand me better than any other people in the world, and they too can help me see things from a much different and expanded perspective than I ever could on my own. I seek their wisdom all the time too.

It’s kind of odd writing for a blog. The blog gives me reports saying that 30-50 people check the site every day, but I don’t know who those people are. I’m still not quite sure how I like that… I definitely prefer e-mail – where I know who I’m writing to and who’s reading, and where I always get responses and feedback to what I’ve written. I’ll still keep writing for the blog, but just know I’ll probably start posting every 4-5 days or so, rather than every 2 days. Keep checking, but no need to check as often as before.

Also, if you wouldn’t mind, please post a comment every now and then. It’s nice for me to know who’s reading. No need to even put your name up there if you’re not comfortable with that. You could just sign with a nick name or inside joke so that I’ll know who you are, but no one else will. I’d appreciate it. Thanks.

-Dave

P.S. Or you could respond to the post with an e-mail too. A couple people have done that, which was nice.