Our toil must be in silence, and our efforts all in secret; for this enlightened age, when men believe not even what they see, the doubting of wise men would be his greatest strength.
~ Bram Stoker
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On this day
July 4thGoing full circle
No matter where your adventure takes you, most of what is truly meaningful is still to be found revolving around the mundane stuff you did before you embarked on your adventure. The stuff that’ll be still be going on long after you and I are both dead, long after our contribution to the world is forgotten.But often, one needs to have that big adventure before truly appreciating this. Going full circle. Exactly.
~ Hugh MacLeod
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Guilt and efficacy
Accepting that “accidents happen” requires an acceptance of limitations to the control we have over our own lives. The philosopher Bernard Williams describes the hazy area between intention and outcome, where factors outside of one’s control can influence the course of events and our reactions to them: “anything that is the product of the will is surrounded and held up and partly formed by things that are not.” This thought may be unsettling, but constitutes the first step in letting go of guilt and moving forward along the path of healing, both for those who have caused unintentional harm and for any who are struggling with trauma.
~ Peter Attia, from How do you move forward after making a fatal mistake?
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I am lucky in that I do not have any self-assigned guilt of the magnitude Attia is describing in this article. (I was pleasantly surprised by this article, it being different than his usual hard medical science.) But I do have a life-crushing pile of self-assigned, paper-cut-sized guilt for countless things I see in hindsight that I could have done better: Why didn’t I learn some particular lesson sooner? How did I not see that situation as it was developing? What if I had let go of that thing sooner? Perhaps you have occasion to ask similar questions.
I’ve verified that there’s nothing I can do to change the past. (Perhaps you’ve also.) But I have learned to tack faster: I flippantly made a silly tall joke—”how’s the weather up there?”—to a very tall friend as we passed at a busy event. As the day, and the next day, wore on I realized I was repeatedly thinking that had been inappropriate. The next time I saw him, I told him so, “dude, my joke was inappropriate and I apologize.” Radical honesty, as it’s sometimes called.
And for the things which end up one way, for reasons beyond my control, I deploy one, two, or all three of: 50,000 years from now, what difference will it make? Did I do everything within my power, (aka the dichotomy of control.) Memento mori.
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Starting
The tendency to put off difficult tasks that we don’t want to face is almost universal.
And it turns out, the moment of starting a task is often so much harder than actually doing the task.
~ Leo Babauta from, Getting Good at Just Starting a Difficult Task – Zen Habits Website
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Tom Petty’s lyrics not withstanding, I agree with Leo. Starting is definitely the hardest part. Unfortunately, I don’t understand why it is so difficult for me.
Take this blog post. It’s 9pm. I go to sleep at 9:30. (Why, is an entirely different story, see, Sleep.) I’ve a long drive tomorrow, and I’ve a few things left to stuff in my overnight bag. I’ve waited all day to do this small task. Writing these blog posts is straightforward; I have a well-oiled process for dropping into the right mindset and dipping into a fertile sea of cached ideas to find one to inspire. Invariably, a few minutes into the process, I’ve found an interesting thread to pull on. This is so much fun, I could—quite literally—do this all day. So why then do I wait until 9pm?
Because you see, it’s not just writing this blog post. I feel all the things on my to-do lists—both literal and in my head—are like writing this blog post: Straightforward, self-chosen, in line with my priorities and goals, inherently interesting, generally worth doing, immediately rewarding in most cases. And yet, the proverbial 9pm rolls around before I feel enough pressure to start.
The only thing I can think of is that some part of my mind just knows that the list will never be done. No matter how many times the “let’s get stuff done” part of my brain were to rise to the occasion, there’s some other part of my brain that will roll Sisyphus’s rock back to the bottom. Maybe this is all there is to it? Is the problem, not the “doer” side, but the “setter upper of things to do” side? Is the problem that I don’t know how to simply be?
Have I, perhaps, only learned instead how to be a human doing?
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The way we communicate
So, don’t feel bad about procrastinating when you need to write—humanity put the whole thing off for a couple hundred thousand years! By a conservative estimate, we’ve had writing for about 4% of the time we’ve been human. Chatting is easy; writing is an arduous chore.
~ Erika Hall from, Conversational Design – A List Apart
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The more time I spend texting—in all its various forms—the more I’m growing to understand the allure of the mode of communication. I’m a digital immigrant, born far enough before cellular, wifi and the Internet in general… or at least the publicly accessible one. Anyway. As an immigrant, I’ve always found the written form—email, forum, message boards, etc.—the easy form of communication, and the ephemeral “texting” the more challenging. Like anything else I suppose, the more you use it, the more you become accustomed to it. I’d say I’m a solid C+ at texting these days. The digital natives can spot me in 10 seconds. But I’ve learned to appreciate the medium.
After reading this piece from Hall, I’m shifting my opinion: I used to think it was, in descending utility, spoken word, written word, and then texting. But now I’m thinking texting slots in as better than the static written word precisely because it’s a form of two-way communication. When I write… *ahem* I get to spend all the time I want, preparing this salvo of characters to be launched at you. *tap* *tap* Hello? Is this on? …yes? Okay, now I can broadcast at you on and on and on and on and on until your eyes glass over and you stop reading. On the other hand, texting requires me to interact with you, not quite in real time, but it’s an interactive conversation.
Hey there! havent talked in ages!!! :D Wats up??
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Look at that
In outer space you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
~ Edgar Mitchell
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One tongue
Nature has given us two ears, two eyes, and but one tongue – to the end that we should hear and see more than we speak.
~ Socrates
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Restricting your eating times
The reasons for these health benefits relate to the fact that the human body appears to be designed to thrive in a cycle of “feast and famine.” By imitating the ancestral conditions of cyclical nourishment, your body enters into a state of optimal functioning. Three major mechanisms by which fasting benefits your health include:
Increased insulin sensitivity and mitochondrial energy efficiency. […] Reduced oxidative stress. […] Increased capacity to resist stress, disease and aging.
~ Jeff Roberts from, «https://insights.collective-evolution.com/2015/02/05/why-restricting-your-eating-time-period-to-8-hours-will-transform-your-health-fitness/»
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Victorious effort
We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.
~ Theodore Roosevelt
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I need to work this into conversations more often
What you’ve just said… is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
~ “Decathalon Judge” from, Billy Madison – Wikipedia
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