Current conditions: calm.
Do the work. It pays off.
This is not to say that the world is arrayed before me, exactly as desired. Externals or internals.
Doing. I’m doing. Always into action.
Reading. Taking action (sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly). Reducing the amount of irritainment I allow in my life. Building a habit of consistency via 75 Hard.
Each day a new beginning.
I remember driving to an appointment and listening to the radio. (Now I never listen to the radio in my car, and we don’t have one in the house.)
I flipped to hear Jason Bentley on KCRW. He played “Lifeboat.” The song has stuck with me since then, especially this couplet from the chorus:
It’s a bright, sunny morning
Each day a new beginning
Lifeboat, by Miranda Lee Richards
Now, on the back end of reading Jordan Peterson’s two books, I look at each morning as a moment of pure potential. What will I do today to mold, from the potential presented to me, a reality worth living? Or in Peterson-speak, I look forward to creating order from chaos. That, after all, is what we, as humans, do.
Miranda Lee Richards did that. She created the order of a song from a chaos of ideas in her mind.
The melody of Lifeboat pops into my consciousness frequently, especially on my dawn walks around the neighborhood.
What a improbable gift.
Someone I never met (Miranda Lee Richards) wrote a song for her own reasons. This was a significant, difficult task for her, I’m sure. Yet she persisted and produced the lyrics and melody that became Lifeboat.
Against all odds (I’m sure) she recorded the song. The music industry is brutal.
Of all of the songs that could have been played at that moment, Jason Bentley chose Lifeboat. I happened to be driving that day and pushed the button to hear what was on KCRW. The two-second audition I give to songs 🙂 enticed me to stay, and the song I heard is with me today.
My life is permanently better because I remember two lines of a song heard during the course of that tenuous string of events.
The causal chain continues. The ripples of a new way to see the new day continue to spread from that pebble dropped in my mental pond.
I’m listening to a Jordan Peterson speech in which he talks about hierarchies based on competence. “Competence hierarchy” means people or chimpanzees or anything will rank according to competence rather than power or dominance.
I like that word. It’s something to aim for: competence.
The word implies earnest effort, diligence, discipline, humility. It connotes value: above all we strive to be surrounded by competent people. If I’m competent, I am valuable to others. Competence creates a social world for me.
Competence does not mean average or inadequate. Pursuing competence diligently is the path to excellence.
Competence is created by action. So is excellence.
Let’s go be competent today, through diligent, honest effort.
Here’s a thought for me today. Work is currently where I am fighting hand-to-hand combat with self, swallowing some bitter chunks of truth.
Jordan Peterson on Abraham and Isaac:
We’ll start with a truism, stark, self-evident and understated: Sometimes things do not go well. That seems to have much to do with the terrible nature of the world, with its plagues and famines and tyrannies and betrayals. But here’s the rub: sometimes, when things are not going well, it’s not the world that’s the cause. The cause is instead that which is currently most valued, subjectively and personally. Why? Because the world is revealed, to an indeterminate degree, through the template of your values (much more on this in Rule 10). If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, therefore, it’s time to examine your values. It’s time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions. It’s time to let go. It might even be time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you might become who you might become, instead of staying who you are.
12 Rules for Life, page 170. Emphasis in original.
What you like (your values, preferences, things you choose to do and own) will influence what you see in the world. This is the reticular activation system so beloved of self-help gurus. Think of “red” for instance, and all of a sudden you will see red things everywhere. (I remember David Allen doing that once.)
What you like (or dislike—it’s the same thing, just in a different direction) not only helps you see what you want to see (or don’t want to see), it motivates you to action in response. And your actions cause a result.
That’s the idea. The universe is not randomly throwing meteors at you (though it might). The universe is not placing people in your life who hate you.
No. It’s much more likely that the ideas you cling to most are affecting your perception (“she hates me” is believed, without evidence, just completely in your head because you have ideas about how lovable you are). This thought in turn motivates your actions (“well, I will reject her first, because she obviously hates me and this relationship is doomed”) and then life develops accordingly (“I am lonely”).
At work. What’s the deep idea that’s holding me back? That’s preventing me from being all that is possible for me?
Hiring. Working with others. Relying on others. It’s in there, somewhere. Cloaked in self-reliance and industriousness, but it’s there—some kind of rugged individualism mode which has served me well but should be balanced with other attributes. Social, communal, cooperative attributes.
Yikes. Assume this thought has some truth. I just let it out of my head and into my thumbs without editing or coaching. All I tried to do was be as precise as possible in articulating the idea.
What will I do about this? And how?
The crows take flight noisily. A peacock reacts.
No music or podcasts. Just the early morning sounds of the neighborhood.
That is what Bob called it.
You start arguing with yourself, in your head. Do this or do that? What is right and what is wrong?
Or you start having imaginary arguments you’ll never have with people you’ll never meet. That’s me. All the time.
Deadly.
It’s not to say that you will not face dilemmas. Of course you will. Life is filled with intractable dilemmas. And then you die.
Most dilemmas, however, are self-generated. Optional. Relatively inconsequential. They’re easy to resolve.
Three ways to stop the debating society in your head:
I stopped writing here because I thought I had nothing to say. I’m nothing special. Others have amazing insights and I’m just a plodder.
All true.
But that’s not the point.
I’m writing for me, to free myself. The fact that others are more eloquent doesn’t matter. Or rather, it is a gift that can make my life better. Other people’s achievements do not subtract from my life—they can only add to my life.
In retrospect I have quit a lot of things by comparing myself to others.
Also. Thanks to a friend for nudging me to keep writing. Thanks Chris.
Heat wave here. Lunchtime walks would be brutal. But I will do two workouts today. I will complete the challenge.
Up at 5:30 a.m., feed the dog, inescapable biological imperatives, and out the door at 5:42 a.m.
Walk.
I’m too busy. I should be running to the grocery store to get things I forgot last night. My first call is at 8 a.m. I have so many things to do today. I think of all of them, an avalanche.
I feel rushed. Agitated by all the tasks of today, as if they must all be done now. Right now.
Despair. “Do not do things that make you hate yourself” as Jordan Peterson said in a short video I watched a couple of days ago. I can’t win. I hate myself for walking. I hate myself for not doing All The Things Right Now. And I would hate myself for not walking, for missing the window of time available now, and forcing a lunchtime walk in 90 degree heat.
Walk. Before I know it there are 8 minutes to go on my 45 minute walk. This is doable. I will be OK today.
Living my life . . . don’t drive a car using only the rear view mirror and binoculars. Do the now tasks now. The later tasks will be done later. Or not.
The lesson: just walk.
Also interesting. I planned to wake up at 5:00 a.m., not 5:30 a.m. I almost quit while I was still in bed.
But. I. Didn’t. Quit.
Finally, from Meditations:
Concentrate every minute like a Roman—like a man—on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can—if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all even the gods can ask of you.
Meditations 2.5
Up before 6:00 am. Feed the dog. Drink a cup of coffee and a quart of water (!) while reading 10 pages of Meditations.
Then run 4 miles around the neighborhood.
And I’m still at work at the regular time.
Let’s remember this feeling. It was a bit of a struggle to persuade the brain to run, but two blocks down the road I knew it was right.
Do not use your brain to think. Just do.
Thank you Andy Frisella, a stranger to me who I will never meet, for the creative spark that became 75 Hard, then sharing it freely until it found my daughter. That’s how the planet gets better.
I can now carve off out four miles effortlessly. No hard breathing, just a comfortable, sustainable pace. I don’t watch my speed but let’s say it’s about an 11 minute mile pace. You’re faster, I’m sure. You do you.
Running makes you think. I thought about how to think. What happened to me and how I learned to think? Here’s what I came up with.
Scale. I needed to understand scale, and my relation to the universe. How simultaneously I was so small as to be invisible and immaterial, yet be the center of the universe. Marcus Aurelius talks about this a lot. Well, he talks about scale, but not so much about relativity. He talks about understanding how little space he occupies on this planet or the universe, and how little time a human consumes in relation to infinite time.
This opens the mind to the possibility of humility. Humility is essential to growth. Arrogance, pride — these will bar the door to growth and peace of mind.
Ignorance. Having wrapped your head around how small and insignificant you are, the next thing is to deeply accept how little you know. You can see this by comparison to one of your peers. You can see this in your own life: what you know now compared to what last-year you knew.
More humility.
This opens the mind to the idea that you’re more likely to be wrong than right. Keeping a “probably wrong right now, but willing to learn” attitude is the result.
The importance of knowing the difference between ignorance and error must be understood and accepted. Welcome ignorance, shun error. Admitting your ignorance is the key to growth. persisting in error guarantees you will stray further and further from The Path.
Desire. A desire for something more than you have right now is what you need next. You’ve conceded that you’re small, insignificant, and ignorant. What will you do now? Give up and distract yourself with earthly vices? Or is there a pilot light in your soul that is struggling to light your inner furnace?
A friend is an entrepreneur at heart (currently a successful and valued employee at a large company) who is struggling to make the jump. He finds deep satisfaction in the hard task of plotting his three years from current reality to the new reality he can see. He compared himself to people around him, who took pride in doing the minimum necessary to not get fired, so they could go shopping, or vacation in Hawaii, or similar busy-but-empty behaviors. He’s not wrong.
They look at him as though he is an alien.
Not everyone has Desire to change. Some people just want to sit on the couch, drink beer with their friends, and talk shit about the Lakers. They are losers and they don’t know it.
That’s as far as I got in my thinking while pacing downhill, back to home.