Author: Reality Laughs

Present, not past or future.

I keep asking “how do I live in the now?” The only thing I can conclude is that it is the wrong question to ask.

It’s time you realized that you have something in you more powerful and miraculous than the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet.

Meditations, 12:19.

Perhaps the present eludes me because I seek it. It’s already here.

I woke up at 4:30 a.m. and lay awake for an hour, hoping to get back to sleep. Just feel your heart beat. Just breathe. All of these things I do, trying to put me in the present, trying to still the mind. All unsuccessful.

Squeezing a handful of sand ever tighter.

This activity (writing) helps me.

Awaken before everyone else in the house. Make coffee. Feed the dog. Read Marcus Aurelius. Make these little notations.

Calm.

Mastery of reading and writing requires a master. Still more so life.

Meditations, 11:29. Maybe 10:29.

Maybe the Fourth Way people are right. You need a School. A Teacher.

Agreed. It’s too easy to lie to myself, to cut myself some slack.

More important, I don’t know what “good” looks like. An unenlightened mind can’t enlighten itself. A teacher knows what mastery looks like.

At least I’m fixing this in a technical matter starting in February: I’m enrolled in the Symbolic Logic course.

Yes, but that’s a technical skill. Marcus Aurelius is talking about life. What about mastery over the important stuff? You have done this before. Bob. Tom. Ed. So many others. Gino. Glenn. Go find more men like the ones who opened your eyes years ago.

It’s essential to read, and you can get a lot from recordings and videos. But you need a human who presses you where you are lying to yourself, or have a blind spot. As Bob used to say, you must have human help. God is not enough.

Here’s your job.

Put this message out to the universe: that you seek a teacher. Start observing. Look for the quiet, calm man who has nothing to prove. You will find him.

The more the day progresses today, the more stressed I become. At this point I’m just buzzing aimlessly.

New stuff inbound. Nothing being shipped outbound. The input channel is shut for new stuff but old stuff and old commitments continues to erupt into all new and much bigger.

Plus I’m rattled emotionally.

I got rattled by a random political bullshit flyer on a light post when we went to the taco truck the other night. And I got rattled by the Bird Martinez stabbing, which I saw today after finding her YouTube channel last night.

The first one (the flyer) was a mixture of me feeling personally attacked and vulnerable, while at the same time feeling anger at the stupidity of the message and messenger.

The second rattled me just because the attack was pointless and sad. (Apparently the assailant is her brother-in-law). I don’t know her, but the videos showed an open, decent, loyal, warm person beneath a layer of self-aware bravado. I gave $50 to the GoFundMe.

Time to Do One Thing. Get back to Now. Just do.

I watched a YouTube video last night, a cartoon illustration of an Alan Watts talk.

He illustrated the meaning of “the present” by striking a gong.

He described exactly how I view myself in the world: a giant hourglass bringing the future to me, through the bottleneck of the present, which then produces the past.

I had a weird sensation when he struck the gong, and let it reverberate until the sound disappeared. I experienced, indeed, the present. All I did was listen to how the sound changed.

How do I stay there? How do I live in the experience of the resonating gong? That’s all there is, so why do I go elsewhere? How do I ignore (well, not ignore, but see the concepts for what they are) past and future?

The yearning this has created in me is startling.

I read that somewhere and I like it.

Sometimes I get agitated about wanting to finish a task fast. The more I’m agitated, the harder it is to finish. And a lot of times I will bail out and start something else instead.

Right now I’m doing a task that is slow and boring. (Reconstruct the past for bills received vs payments made). I’m doing it slowly.

First I hand-wrote the plan of action. How am I going to collect the old bills? What will I do with them when I get them? Same for payments. How will I find proof of payment?

Then I did an email search for what I could find. It took a little while to set up a filter, search, label sequence in GMail but I think I have a complete set of emails from the vendor. (Assuming the emails were archived, not deleted). Slow.

Then I downloaded all invoices as PDFs from the vendor to GDrive. Slow. Lots of duplicates, drafts. Confusing but it’s all in one place.

Now I’m building a GSheet with invoice data. It hyperlinks back to the individual PDF files for each invoice. Slow.

There is a second email address to search as well.

It’s slow. But smooth. I didn’t jump in halfway using someone else’s summaries. (I have two of those, which will be useful for quality control. But they aren’t reliable.)

There is a second task (this one my own). I am taking an online class. I came to the end of week three. Realized, doing the assignment, that I didn’t really digest the lessons of previous weeks. So I’m starting over, this time taking notes. Slow. I didn’t go slow before.

Slow the fuck down. Speed comes later. Be solid at every stage.

Nothing is quite so instructive as seeing someone perform a task that is easy for you.

You are skilled. You know what is happening, and why, and what lurks behind the physical manifestations of the task, seen to the expert but unseen to the noob.

Watching the noob, it is easy to get frustrated. “It’s so obvious!” That’s what my head screams, at least. My head screams other things, too.

Patience. You, too, were a noob. You still are, in fact. Other people are looking at you right now, with a screaming voice in their heads.

Empathy. Calm down. You know the XCKD comic strip? Be excited for them and yourself. Today is a day to learn a new cool thing.

Be one of the lucky 10,000 today.

What if they don’t want to learn, don’t want to put out the effort? Let them be. That’s not your problem.

But realistically most people are just hindered by fear and not wanting to look stupid. You’re are overestimating the probability that the person you’re dealing with is malicious or lazy, and even those sources of resistance can be weathered away with kindness and generosity.

This was written while contemplating a few routine tasks facing M. Logging into her G Suite admin panel to check on which credit card was attached. Dealing with the usual blizzard of bullshit paperwork that afflicts all business owners. Don’t underestimate how hard these things are for people who haven’t spent decades doing them.

It takes action action action.

From a Jocko Willink podcast, where he quotes a friend. Thinking is good. But action is what changes things.

To get accurate feedback from the world:

• Make yourself accountable.
• Make your success or failure measurable by some objective metric, not a bullshit subjective metric.

I think I have the seed of a good self-evaluation method. A way to do an employee performance review on myself. Not just for work stuff but life.

I’m going to try it out. I’m pumped.

I read this passage from Meditations and went “ouch”:

For how could we do what justice requires if we are distracted by things that don’t matter, if we are naive, gullible, inconstant?

Meditations, 11:10.

Ignore what he is talking about when he talks about justice (Nature’s highest aim, from which all other virtues flow).

What struck me is the bigger point. How can I do anything of value if I am gullible and naive?

And in real life, I am. I praise myself heavily (inside my head) for being willing to take people as they present themselves to me. That’s honorable in one way: don’t discard a person because of an opinion formed in your head before you even meet that person for the first time.

But it’s naive in another. People live in facades. They wear disguises. Sometimes the facades are deliberately intended to hide a truth from you, for good reasons (“Love me!”) or bad (“Trust me and let your guard down, so I can steal from you”).

Let’s acknowledge a truth here. I am not a shrewd judge of character. In fact, I’m terrible at it.

How can I be not naive, not gullible?

Time solves many of these problems. In time, a person’s true nature reveals itself.

Maybe learn to be cautious, wary. Wait for the reveal. And don’t dismiss the signals when they are given. Because that is something I do all the time. Second, third chances.

For myself, I want to live without a facade. I want to present myself to the world as I am, like a boxer in the ring, standing with his arms at his side.