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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.

Not groveling, not submissive. Just empty of self, empty of judgment, accepting of all events.

Acknowledge reality without glee or remorse, and move on.

Gary Vaynerchuk’s videos are full of the need for humility. He talks about it as meaning without care for others’ opinions. That’s a good view, too. If it needs to be done, do it. Opinions (yours or other people’s) don’t come into the equation.

Focus is hard even when one thing sits in front of you. The logistics of a busy life? Focus is a hopeless quest.

Via negativa.

In the last two days the number of things on my plate mushroomed.

Via negativa.

In business, I’m working extremely slowly and with great care through the course lessons right now. If I can do what the course lessons promise, I can achieve a level of freedom from the barrage.

Meanwhile, I let the fires burn, while maintaining a firebreak around the new world I seek to build.

Maybe a juggler metaphor is better. People are throwing more balls at you. Don’t catch them. That’s hard for the ego to take. It’s hard for the people-pleaser in me.

That’s what the teacher tells me to do. Let the fires blaze. Understand the lessons extremely well at the foundational level. Apply them once, in a small way. That is the way out of the Life of Fire.

Via negativa.

Nota bene. I am doing all of this to me. None of this is anyone else’s fault.

I just looked back at some of the stuff I wrote here.

I’m embarrassed. The stuff I wrote sounds whiny, pompous, disjointed, confused.

Good.

It means I am not polishing things up to make myself look good.

I’m a grown-assed man, outwardly successful in life, family, etc., and a kaleidoscope of confusion within. That is my reality.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It takes action action action.

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