Month: May 2021

Do what you say you will do.

Your brain will see this and take note.

Self-esteem comes from self-discipline.

Hint: tiny commitments.

Also: don’t call them promises. Call them commitments.

Think of all the shitty, insubstantial, and downright poisonous books that have been published by the big publishing houses.

Think of all the dim bulbs and propaganda artists who are given a platform and vast wealth on TV or the movies. Think of how they spew shit, unselfconsciously or even deliberately.

Think of all of the people on the internet, pounding out content, with millions of followers or just a few.

Think of yourself. Fearful to the extreme of being judged and having your work judged.

Measured against these people and what they have done?

Please.

Yes Baby, I been drinkin’
And I shouldn’t come by, I know
But I found myself in trouble
And I had no place else to go

Got some whiskey from the barman
Got some cocaine from a friend
I just had to keep on movin’
‘Til I was back in your arms again

I’m guilty
Baby, I’m guilty
And I’ll be guilty for the rest of my life

How come I never do
What I’m supposed to do
How come nothing that I try to do
Ever turns out right

You know–You know how it is with me, Baby
You know I just can’t stand myself
It takes a whole lotta medicine
For me to pretend that I’m somebody else

Those are the lyrics from Randy Newman’s “Guilty”. The Bonnie Raitt version from the early 1970s album is the one I like best.

The words rang painfully true when I was younger. And they still hit the mark today, though thankfully without the medicine.

I suppose my entire life’s quest has been to be at peace with myself and all around me.

And I’m still looking for it, sometimes getting nearer, only to sense it slipping away, giggling, drawing me onward.

Single-minded focus is difficult for me.

Memory tells me I could once focus for hours on a single task. Perhaps memory is telling the truth. Perhaps not. I don’t necessarily trust memory, because it is just a story I tell myself, a story subject to change.

But still.

“Focus harder!” is a useless admonition. Yet, that’s my solution.

Tools and productivity techniques are beside the point. They merely polish the turd. They treat the symptoms, not the disease.

Don’t reject tools out-of-hand. Work Cycles, for instance, is a tool that has revealed self to self for me: how I consistently overestimate my ability to get a task done in a given amount of time. Freedom, for instance, helps me break the nervous tic of checking to see if there is something new on the internet that I must read.

What do I do with these observations? How do I stop asking The Overestimater for his opinion? How do I let The Magnet Mind go search for iron filing by himself, leaving me to my simple tasks?

Every effect has a cause. Seek the cause.

No pointless actions.

If it’s in your control, why do you do it? If it’s in someone else’s, then who are you blaming? Atoms? The gods? Stupid either way.

Blame no one. Set people straight, if you can. If not, just repair the damage. And suppose you can’t do that either. Then where does blaming people get you?

No pointless actions.

Meditations 8.17

Before dawn. A cup of coffee, the dog is fed, and I’m reading Marcus Aurelius.

I burned a few minutes of my morning fuming about politics and a dystopia I imagine to be inevitable.

Pointless.

Remember this picture next time you’re busy having a conversation with yourself in your head about how smart you are and how you’re going to tell them exactly why they are wrong.

I did a 45 minute walk this evening and I swear 40 of those minutes were consumed with self talking to self, rehearsing exactly how I would tell Them exactly what’s what. They are benighted fools and I am a humble yet wise man, etc. etc. They need to be corrected and I’m just the man to do it.

The other five minutes were consumed with “are we home yet?” and “I need to pee.” I would have been better off sticking with these topics.

David Goggins tell you how to succeed when The Path looks rocky and impossible to traverse.

Win the morning.

And just as important is what he says later in the video: in the middle of the suck, “remember your resumé”.

Remember that you have accomplished great things before and lived through the suck before. Maybe not this specific suck, maybe not as big a suck as you have right now, but you did it.

You can do it again.

I think everyone is looking at me and judging me.

Maybe, but who cares. I don’t have to lift big today.

I have a 20 year training goal. Tiny steps.

It’s normal to feel pain in your hands and feet, if you’re using your feet as feet and your hands as hands. And for a human being to feel stress is normal—if he’s living a normal human life.

And if it’s normal, how can it be bad?

Meditations 6.33

Marcus Aurelius, as Emperor, had far more opportunities for stress than I will ever have.

Yet I squirm and run from the slightest circumstance that might cause stress.

It’s not the situation that is stressful. It is my reaction, my opinion of the situation that creates the unpleasantness that I label “stress”.

It’s another example of how important it is to know the truth. If you are trying to make a change and you don’t know what’s real, where you are—the truth—you are as likely to make things worse as you are to make things better. Maybe more likely to cause damage.

Events are not stressful. The recent event I went through that could have destroyed my business . . . that was not a stressful event.

It was my opinion of the event that kept stress at bay. I didn’t feel stress in the emotional sense. I felt a sense of urgency, a need to act quickly and decisively. But not stress.

I am writing this down for my future self. It is too easy, in the heat of the moment, to forget past victories. I kept on The Path this time. I kept on The Path countless other times.

(Remember when the house was midway through remodel and there was no more money and I was behind on paying taxes and the kids were tiny?)

(Remember before I was married that month after month after month after month when I was newly self-employed how it would be the 28th of the month and I would have $50 in the bank then by the 3rd I would have enough cash—barely—to pay the rent? And how I always ate every day and slept in a warm, dry place every night?)

Manna from Heaven.

Keep pedaling the bicycle and you’ll stay upright. That is what I told myself then.

And don’t have an opinion about your state of existence, because it will only add noise to the equation. Marcus Aurelius and “in your control”.

Trust God. Take action.

But to reiterate the point about stress, because I need the simple truths pounded into my brain (“tattoo this on your brain, newcomer!” as Hal would say every Wednesday night, given half a chance): stress is not in the event. The event occurring is normal.

Stress comes from my thinking about the event and my judgment about the event. That is also normal, because I am human.

But it is within my control.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Psalm 23:4

That’s what it’s all about.

Think how much is going on inside you every second—in your soul, in your body. Why should it astonish you that so much more—everything that happens in that all-embracing unity, the world—is happening at the same time?

Meditations 6.25

Odds are good that Marcus Aurelius knew of the hermetic teachings.

Ancient aphorisms like this seem to be truths known to the ancients, to be proved correct by <Jocko voice> “science” </Jocko voice> in modern times. They are Lindy. Their survival signals their truth.

I am drawn to the esoteric, the occult, the hidden wisdom of the ancients. Let’s acknowledge that bias up front. That’s one of the reasons I spent so much time patrolling through the Fourth Way, theosophy, the Gnostics, Rosicrucians, etc.

They all turned out to be dry wells. All of them, eventually, seemed to devolve into ceremonies, personalities, and frivolities. They fell off The Path.

Perhaps that is the course of entropy in systems of knowledge: ego eventually triumphs and personalities trump the principles. Consider the clarity of Christian principles, then visit St. Peter’s Basilica in The Vatican. The contrast knocks the fillings out of your teeth.

Watch for that in your own life. Stick with the principles, the eternal truths. Don’t add your own personal bullshit.

As above (ego destroys organization), so below (ego destroys the individual).