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I keep coming back to this comment by Harry Callahan. Important important important.

Memory of long ago when I started down my professional path and was tempted by the high risk, high reward (if you’re lucky) shiny path. An older, wiser man in the same profession told me I had to know what I was: a “bet it all” personality or “slow and steady”.

Even me as a dim bulb young lost person knew who I was. I wanted the high payoff but couldn’t tolerate the risk. I also knew the slow and steady path would pay off handsomely, because I had the older, wiser man in front of me as an example.

I doubled down on the slow and steady, and here I am, reaping the rewards.

It works the other way, too. Know who you are and see if who you are is slowing you down. I have been blinded by one of my skills, and now realize it is slowing me down.

Be careful that your biggest assets don’t become your biggest liabilities.

But you can only have those realizations when you know who you are.

Reality laughs. Now I have a clue about why, in a certain activity, I have been stymied. I assumed I should be using my biggest asset. Nope. It’s holding me back.

. . . why Marcus Aurelius comes back to the same thought, the same topic, the same idea. Again and again and again.

Because he needs to re-examine the thought in that moment. And so he writes it down.

Daily, hourly reminders. I need them, too. My head can go to hell in an instant. These reminders help me return to heaven.

I remembered the Funkadelic song today. Gave it a listen again. It’s still great.

Who would have expected this message from George Clinton? I know someone who was a huge P-Funk fan in the early 70s. She flatly won’t take the man seriously. That he would have spiritual perception seems preposterous to her.

Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts.

Preposterous or not, there it is. Right in front of you.

Good thoughts bring forth good fruit

Bullshit thoughts rot your meat

Funkadelic, Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts

Worth listening to. And the song reminds me of the age-old question: do you disregard the art because of the artist? I think the answer is no.

What follows coheres with what went before. Not like a random catalogue whose order is imposed upon it arbitrarily, but logically connected.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.45. (Gregory Hays translation).

And I am not the connector, the producer. I do not have this power.

At best I can be the sower who goes out to sow. I laid the seed. Perhaps applied water. Everything else happened without me.

Think of this in business and maybe you won’t think that you’re so damned important.

Again with Freedom.to. The old saying is “God did for me what I could not do for myself.” The same is true for a simple piece of software. Freedom keeps me away from the hellseeds of the internet, because I am not yet strong enough to do so myself.

Daily, I set the blocklist. I could set up a repeating schedule but it’s better for me to do it daily. The simple action helps me remember myself.

At some point I will not need Freedom. I know this is true because I see websites on my list that used to consume my attention, and now they are meh. In time, I will be able to take other websites or leave them, indifferent. Training wheels, for now.

Admit weakness, take action. Not necessarily to become strong so you can resist evil, not so you can banish evil entirely, but strong so you can make the evil irrelevant to you.

I simply, for instance, drink black coffee. Through time and repetition I weaned myself from added sugar, then added cream. Now the presence of sugar and cream is as relevant to me as the presence of salt and pepper. Don’t want, choose against.

Admit it, though. Today you need help from software.

Yes I do, and I’m grateful for it and the people who brought it to my attention.

Yesterday a decision was made.

Action has been taken. What was decided has become real.

Ever since I started using Freedom.to aggressively, my phone has become a blessing rather than a curse.

The Kindle app (to read) and the WordPress app (to write) mean this thing I carry around feeds me. I am reaching into my pocket less. If I’m standing in line somewhere, I stand in line. I don’t pull out my phone to do things.

I can and do listen to good books on my phone. (Taleb’s Incerto got a complete triple play recently. Going through it three times without a break? That’s a lot of Taleb).

I can and do listen to good podcasts, and I am now avoiding bad podcasts. One in particular had many, many gems, but I had to dial it down because of the (ahem) associated externalities (Scott Adams). How to think, good. The other stuff, eh, a bit much for me. Better to read his books. Right now the good podcast I’m tracking is The Warrior Poet.

I didn’t think I would get to the point where my phone was my servant. But here I am. Accomplished by saying no. Via negativa.

I really should set up an affiliate link to make some money off my constant reference to Freedom.to. But I won’t. Money is not why I’m here, doing this. Adding money to this activity will change it.

It’s hard, in the moment, to know why you’re pissed off. The more important thing is to stop being pissed off, because that state of mind is of no value.

But it’s easier said than done to go from mental uproar to tranquility just because you want to. I haven’t accomplished that skill yet, and I doubt I will ever get there.

The “why” question is usually fruitless, but here it can be useful. If you have convinced yourself of the Stoic perspective (within your control, outside of your control), build on that foundation to allow yourself to let go of the inner uproar.

Ask yourself why you’re angry, annoyed, etc.

If you identify an event outside of your control, then you have persuaded yourself and it’s easier to let go and return to equilibrium. You have already accepted the truth of the control/no control principle.

Epictetus, as usual:

Practise, then, from the very beginning to say to every disagreeable impression, ‘You’re an impression and not at all what you appear to be.’ Then examine it and test it by these rules that you possess, and first and foremost by this one, whether the impression relates to those things that are within our power, or those that aren’t within our power; and if it relates to anything that isn’t within our power, be ready to reply, ‘That’s nothing to me.’

Epictetus, Enchiridion, 1.5

I’m not saying it’s easy. It’s not. I’m not saying it’s instantaneous in effect. It’s not. My mind wants to chew on thoughts like a puppy gnaws on a bone.

Do it anyway. Use the realization that this is an “outside of your control” matter (the answer to “Why?”) as the trigger. Pull away from the disagreeable impressions, even if you have to pull away again, again, again, and again, for days or weeks on end.

Actually, I should revise my judgment of “not easy”.

It is easy to do. Listen to DJ Boring’s Winona. The track samples from an interview.

Winona Ryder is interviewed and says “It is difficult to be judged.” (Sample at 4:15). (Judgment by others is outside our control). She gives a brief vignette to illustrate how she was judged, erroneously as it turned out.

She also says “I can’t answer the real question. All I can tell you is it’s easy.” (Sample at 3:17). And that is truth. I can’t answer the real question, even though it’s my own question. I will be uncovering new questions until I die. All of the questions are as real as the previous one and the next.

All I can say, based on experience, is that it’s easy.

I can do. That’s easy. Let go as if you’re a maple tree releasing a single autumn leaf, and draw deeply from your roots for sustenance.

The hard part is to keep doing.

Added to the blocklist on Freedom.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Psalm 23:4

The Psalm came to mind this morning over coffee.

Some people seemingly have never had a seriously hard time in live, where everything collapsed around them. Serious health, family, financial problems. Whatever.

I have had my share. Things where, if I told them “Yeah, that happened” would take note. There is no need to mention the events because the spiritual lessons learned matter, not the events.

A walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death is what, I believes, separates the wheat from the chaff. Yes, more Biblical references. Taleb would say someone who goes through hard times will, by surviving, be antifragile. Or have the possibility of being antifragile, at least. Some might turn turtle and hunker down fearfully for the rest of their lives.

There is a self-reliant power that comes from such an experience. You know what is within your power and what is not in a visceral way. I didn’t have the words to express this until decades later when I found the Stoics. But you know. I remember being told, when fearful and lost, to put in a day’s work, then stop. You’ve done your job, now tend to the other essentials. Or another time, hearing the brilliance of the advice “stay home and get well, that’s your job today” when I had the flu and thought I should go to work but felt miserable. These were just side lessons in a larger, longer episode in the Valley. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

When you have walked through the Valley of the Shadow of Death you truly fear no evil. You don’t welcome it, you don’t want it, but you don’t fear it.

And when things become easy again (and they will) you bring that inner resilience with you.

Yesterday I brought the power of that inner resilience to bear on a difficult, time-sensitive problem. Not life-threatening, just money. 6 am to 10 pm. Bam. Done.

I thin the fact that I can dial into the inner resilience gives me something that others don’t have. I’m not saying that you can’t develop the power of that inner resilience in other ways. But I do think that you have to be forged with tests that take you to the limits of your ability to persevere. And live.

My grandfather said as much. He lived through the trenches of WW 1 and losing the farm in the Depression.

The first rule of life is don’t die. After that, it’s keep going. In my own Valley of the Shadow of Death experiences I had people around me. They could not live my life or go through the experience, but they supported me. Fear no evil. They were with me.

And now, with inner resilience, God is still with me. I still need human help, but the absolute knowledge that I can survive and be OK at the end of a big problem is a gift from God.

Epictetus would correct me and say it’s not a problem. That’s my opinion, subject to my control. Time to reframe my view of the events.