Month: September 2021

I have nothing else to say. The title says it all. Act accordingly.

(I’m still not convinced that this website is an experiment worth continuing, but I might as well use it as a Dear Diary to park my thoughts.)

This experiment is coming to a close. I see no particular value for me or anyone else in the stuff I have written here. It’s average.

Time to rethink, retool, refocus, and go another direction.

From Gorilla Mindset.

• You already know how to visualize. You think about the past and evoke emotional responses.
• Memories are just thoughts. Memories are often false. The past isn’t real and memories are not real.

First reaction: since thoughts about past events are manufactured by me, why not manufacture productive, useful thoughts? Find what is useful in memories, useful to me in creating the future.

Try this experiment: look forward only. Every time a thought about the past comes up, say to yourself “this isn’t real” and visualize the future.

Using the past as fuel —this is the strategy. Bring the critical skills forward to today. Actually those skills are not memories. They are present tense, which you can see in how fast they decay if not used. Use emotion evoked by memories to fuel your effort today.

Reframe a memory of an event, previously perceived as painful, as an essential building block. Reframe a recurring painful memory as inert—like a rock sitting in the ground. Then walk away from the rock.

Reframe anxiety and fear as optional by mentally putting those thoughts in a paper bag and carefully folding the top, promising yourself that the thoughts are there waiting for you anytime you want to open the bag and think those thoughts. But in the meantime you can think other thoughts.

Visualization forward: target a specific goal and involve your senses. Imagine the five senses involved in the scenario you are visualizing.

Yeah. Don’t visualize backwards.

Are there obstacles to your action? If you failed to reckon with the possibility, then that would harm you, as a rational being. But if you use common sense, you haven’t been harmed or even obstructed. No one can obstruct the operations of the mind. Nothing can get at them—not fire or steel, not tyrants, not abuse—nothing.

Meditations 8.41

How many times have I read and reread and re-reread Meditations? Why have I not seen that before? FFS someone (!) highlighted the text in my copy of the book yet for some reason I am reading this for the first time.