My wife and I took a vacation in Jamaica for a week with good friends. I’d just come off a steady stream of EnlightenNext influences, among them, my enlightenment class.

I’d been particularly focused on the five tenants of enlightenment:
1.clarity of focus
2. the law of volitionality
3. Face everything; avoid nothing
4. the truth of impersonality
5. for the sake of the whole

And, being me, I was eager to share my new insights and perspectives with my friends. Yet, it was clear from their behavior – both passive and active - that they werent’t going to be receptive students. I decided to bid my time until the right opportunity presented itself. So, I watched and waited.

As the hours and days passed, I heard their reactions to my ponderings about life and family. Repeatedly, they stated that they weren’t ‘complicated’, that they were ‘not very sentimental’ and that they liked to look at life in very direct, immediate terms.

I also repeatedly saw examples of the above five tenants, but without any spiritual focus. It took a few days to realize this, of course, as lying about on the beach doesn’t’ provide for a vigorous environment for observing behavior. We did, however, often talk about our pasts and our careers, relationships and thoughts on our young families.

Without any knowledge of my particular lens of perspective, I hear them describe how they didn’t take things personally; show regard for a greater circle of people (be it coworkers, family, even their marriage), and again and again talk of their plans and choices, - both in terms of past experience and future wishes.

I reflected on the similarities between their lives and mine; between their defacto adherence to the tenants, and my own.

And that's when I decided that I just don’t get it yet.