Effort isn’t the point, impact is. If you solve the problem in three seconds but have the guts to share it with me, it’s still art. And if you move ten thousand pounds of granite but the result doesn’t connect with me, I’m sorry for your calluses, but you haven’t made art, at least not art for me.
~ Seth Godin
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Still nursing my achilles from sprints. Really didn’t feel like I was running that hard… must have not warmed up sufficiently.
We think we understand the rules when we become adults, but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.
~ David Lynch
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Solid couple of hours at my favorite local gym, Le Yard. I don’t “love” yard work, but I very much prefer this free gym membership to any other sort of “go and exercise.” Tomorrow: walking (still recovering achilles from sprints)
We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.
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I was reminded we have access to our school district’s track. 8 laps with 100m dashes. Unfortunately after 3 dashes one achilles’ tendon said ‘stop that’. But still, if that best, 6’32”-mile pace is right… I’m stunned!
Reading time: About 5 minutes, 1100 words
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This issue is https://7forsunday.com/47
There is a time and place for maximum effort—yes, that’s a Deadpool reference—and there’s a time and place for stillness and calm. I’m fascinated by the relationship and interaction between physicality (as movement versus stillness) and mentality (as agitation versus calmness.) I’ve had transformational experiences at both extremes of physicality, with mental calmness. I do get mentally agitated. But I fear that too many people experience calmness far too rarely, possibly never.
This often means working more thoughtfully, and maybe even more slowly. Slow work is not unproductive work. What we lose in speed we more than make up for in deliberateness—as well as in undistracted attention, a critical factor of productivity.
~ Chris Bailey from, The productivity payoffs of a calm mind – Chris Bailey
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Sometimes people ask me about Stoicism, and I suck at explaining it. Thinking and writing about calmness today, I’m struck that I should probably mention eudaimonia (eu̯-dai̯-mon-ía). Eudaimonia is a key value Stoicism advocates striving for.
[…] is a state of being and consciousness that is consistent with the active, effective activity of ideal agency and in general is characterized by the calm (equanimity; tranquility) that comes from the absence of further moral struggle and the absence of retrospective regret or prospective alarm about things outside one’s control, together with the confidence that comes from the effortless persistence of moral purpose.
~ Lawrence Becker from, A New Stoicism p91
2.5 millenia later… calmness, equanimity, tranquility?
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I’ve never seen any life transformation that didn’t begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their own bullshit.
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