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Memory of this exact thought, over 30 years ago.

I didn’t even know what “it” was. All I knew is they had something good in their lives that I didn’t. And I certainly didn’t want more of the life I was living.

I was right. It worked for them, and it worked for me. It still works today.

Belief coupled with action.

And try to not be intelligent and inject your own opinions, while you’re at it. Your best ideas got you to this precise jackpot that you’re staring at right now, so you know what more of your own intelligence will produce: more jackpots.

A deadline staring at me. Time to sit down and get the work done.

But the headspace? Only a little grumpy about it. Only a little stressed. Pretty good overall, willing to just sit down and work from top to bottom on the work I did yesterday. I have a good draft. Now take it to final.

The “pretty good headspace” comes from the usual habits. Remember. That’s all I need to do, to say to myself. It snaps me into awareness. Me, simultaneously the creator of the universe around which all revolves, and the smallest speck of random matter in the universe, so small it cannot be found. I am everything and I am nothing, both at the same time.

The “little grumpy” and “little stressed” is the part that I need to let go of, right now. That’s why I’m writing this: to remind myself that sitting down and doing the work is the appointed task, and my opinion of the task does not matter. In fact, opinion is one of those things that can only detract from having a good life, a peaceful life. Opinions can’t make a good life.

So let the opinion go. Just do the work.

And for future opinions, realize the reason for the grumpy and the stress. The reason is too many things to do in too little time. Something must fall to the ground, undone. You don’t want anything to fall to the ground, but it must. Even if you were blessed (haha it would really be a curse) with 52-hour days while everyone else had 24-hour days, you wouldn’t get it all done.

So deal with the root cause: too many things need to be done in too little time, because you made those promises. The root cause is me, not the jobs to be done.

For the now: have a cup of coffee. Sit down to do the work in the way you know it needs to be done. There are two things on your now plate: the work project and the home project. Say no to everything else. You know how to pace yourself, so do it.

That action plan takes care of the opinion module for the day. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” As usual, the KJV says it best. And the tasks of the day are not really evil, are they?

It’s a good quote to remember. Take action now, ignore thinking about the past (promises I made and can’t keep today), and ignore thinking about the future (what people might think or so because I can’t keep my promises).

Or even easier: Just do. Don’t think.

1. Daily spiritual maintenance actions.

2. Long term life change actions.

3. Today’s work tasks.

Don’t forget to eat.

Awaken; return to yourself. Now, no longer asleep, knowing they were only dreams, clear-headed again, treat everything around you as a dream.

Meditations 6?:31.

Check the reference later. 31 is right, but the 6, I don’t know.

Remember. This is all I remember from a couple of fevered years of Fourth Way. (I tried to revisit Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson and gave up after a couple hundred pages, bemused by it and my former self.) And that’s probably not the main point of that teaching.

Still, the idea came from there, and I carry it with me still.

Saying “Remember!” to myself wakes me up and gives me an eagle’s view of me, in relation to the world. For a moment all is as it should be.

There is a feeling of scale that I get: me in relation to the entire universe. An appreciation for everything around me. Especially trees. I get a special love for trees when I do this around trees, even those planted in urban sidewalks.

That’s the easy part (but it leaves me so quickly). I forget again and become an automaton.

Treating the rest of creation as a dream — that’s the thought-provoking part. Is this the same as simulation theory?

If I treat everything as a dream, an illusion, then it’s malleable and can be changed or stopped at will.

Waking up stops the dream. Having a dream and knowing in the dream that it’s a dream? That also stops the illusion.

Since dream has many meanings, what if I take it to mean “as desired”? “I have always dreamed of sitting on a yacht in the Aegean Sea at sunset.” That sort of dream. Then the world is simply a reflection of what I desire. Change your desires, change your world.

Can thoughts change matter? I’m not going to get into that. What I do know is that my feeble, amateurish, intermittent efforts seem correlated with a good life today, both material and mental.

As an operating hypothesis, then, I treat the universe as malleable, as open to exploration and gaming like a computer game.

The important thing is to not look at the humans around me as NPCs. Probability = nil that I am the only sentient, self-aware player in this game. 🙂 In fact, it’s probably useful to question whether I am a player or NPC myself.

In any event, all around me is dreamlike in one sense. Every morning I wake up, and there are no more dreams. One day I will die, and this dream will disappear. (Funny how awakening from sleep to start a new day has the same consequence as dying.)

I thought using WordPress as a journal was a silly idea.

I used fancy paper notebooks. Text editors, Google Docs, anything else you can think of. None of them worked over time. I stopped.

Maybe I was not mentally ready to write down my thoughts. But I think a simpler explanation is that the WordPress app is on my phone and within reach all the time.

There is less friction.

And there is something liberating about hitting “publish”. I have learned that saving a draft means the idea dies. I have a dozen drafts and I look at them now and go “meh”. In fact I will delete them as soon as I finish this.

The freedom of done.

Moral:

• Remove friction. Sometimes that looks weird. Judge not, just look at what happens.
• Terminal action. Think, do, move on.

I deliberately turned off all analytics so I don’t know if anyone is reading this site.

This is important: I myself don’t matter, but if what I do helps another person, that matters. This is an implementation of B’s “I’m not here for you, I’m here for me . . . “ philosophy. And whether I know about the readers (if there are any) or not will not make any difference to that hypothetical reader.

I’m trying to keep the ego at bay.

Yet I keep wondering. Get tempted. Look at the stats button in the WordPress app. Maybe I should fire up analytics.

That’s the ego.

I am writing this to remind myself that the ego nudges to the forefront with all sorts of reasons why it needs to be fed. They’re bullshit reasons, lies.

Keep your head down and just write for yourself. It’s working. It’s making your own life better. That’s the only reason you’re doing this.

But keep doing it in public, because even though I’m here for me, maybe this will help someone else. Just remember that they get whatever they get. It’s out of your control what they get, and it’s out of your control if anyone ever reads these words.

I don’t want to know about other people reading this, because that would give me a big fat head. (Or maybe they would criticize me and I would be sad.)

I’m not strong enough to fight off the ego, so it’s better to not let it put down roots at all. Stay invisible, make it impossible to know what’s happening out there. Put your head down and do the work.

I walk past my dog on the way to the kitchen. She rolls on her back, legs in the air. I scratch her belly. She is happy. Me too.

When I start something I have a vision in my head of what an expert result looks like. My beginner’s efforts are embarrassing.

In little ways what is happening now is that I’m willing to start. Period. I’m willing to look at my first efforts and realize that they’re bad but they will evolve to better, quickly. And I look forward to seeing that evolution unfold.

It happens when I write something. It starts off bad and I know it’s bad, but as it goes along it gets better. Magically. It’s almost as if I didn’t know how to think or express myself, but the effort of trying to think and express myself actually brings about that result.

In a roundabout way I’m saying that I like experiencing the journey from noob to competent. I like feeling the progression of building skills and knowledge. Something was not there. Then it was.

From competent to mastery? That’s a chasm that I have only bridged a couple of times. Put down your head for 25 years and work. That’s the only thing I can say about mastery. Shut up with your 10,000 hours. And even mastery is only a bare beginning.

I have more mastery to discover within me. Let’s trudge fearlessly to the next one — the most interesting journey of all so far, because it involves hand-to-hand combat with self. Not a body of knowledge, not a technical skill, not a profession. Self.

With luck, a specific course of action I have embarked on this week will lead me to a peaceful co-existence with self.

But in the meantime, reaching journeyman status is fine. We are all Privates in this Army.

I’m going to be knocked around. Stuff will happen, people will say things and my feelings will be hurt. This is inevitable.

Equally true is the fact that I’m going to make shit up in my head, and I’m going to take it seriously and wallow in it. This is guaranteed. You can take it to the bank.

So, what to do?

When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances, revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of the harmony if you keep on going back to it.

Meditations 6:11.

Let’s just take for granted, from now on, that all quotes from Marcus Aurelius come from the Gregory Hays translation of Meditations. I don’t read the other translations I have.

What I’m doing right now, by reading in the morning and writing these little thoughts, is building the counterweight, building the keel. When knocked off top dead center by some external event, my habits bring me back.

It happened while reading and drinking coffee this morning. I was talking to myself about something. In rehearsal, I was. As usual, it was some imaginary future event where in my imagination I was impressing an unknown audience of strangers who I would never see again because they exist only in my head with my stunning wisdom. I caught myself. Returned to Meditations.

That’s the spiritual keel bringing me upright after a self-inflicted gust of mental wind.

I did not take the episode seriously. It’s like the famous bemused Reagan quote, “There you go again!” There my brain goes again, talking to itself to puff up the ego. Remember. And back to top dead center.

As Marcus Aurelius says, “unavoidably”.

Even if I could become immune to outside events and how they affect my thinking (hint: not in this lifetime), I can never become immune to the brain generating its own thoughts.

I can’t stop or control my dreams at night, and I am going to experience random rehearsals and talking to self during my waking hours. The best I can do is develop a center of gravity that brings the pendulum back to rest.

Random memory of B saying that.

Paradoxically by being there for his own benefit he helped countless others.

And that was his point. He was there for himself, to help his own predicament, and the only way to help himself escape his own predicament was to be helpful to the community around him.

It’s like D telling me one day that he did this thing (birthday cards for people) because he realized he was so self-centered and selfish and didn’t care what happened to people around him. And it hurt; he did not want to be that kind of man. So he just started sending people birthday cards. Then, one day he discovered that he genuinely cared about the people around him.

Wow. The people I have known who helped me in small ways and great. Both D and B have been dead for a long time. Yet they did small things and said small things that are still alive in me, making my life better (when I remember them and what they said). I’m a bit weepy right now.

This is interesting.

When I am ok then I write less here.

And right now I’m ok.

So I want to be sure to write this down to remind myself that I’m ok. I’m always ok. I just don’t always believe it.

Why am I ok? Reading. Marcus Aurelius at the moment. I can’t read Seneca in the morning for some reason. But Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius are easy.

Relentless, by the way, has fallen dead on its second read-through. I have no appetite for it. It’s sort of like a one-note song, though I know that there can be subtle nuances in monotony. I’ll get back to it. Or not.

In the meantime, Gary Vaynerchuk videos are passing the message along. No expectations. Just give. Work really hard for a long time. All good stuff.

I can only hope that my kids have a great relationship with me in the same way he seems to have a great relationship with his parents. If he has what he appears to have, Gary Vaynerchuk has wealth beyond measure.

So the outside reminders come, but from another path.