Reality Laughs

. . . to yourself.

“Tell the truth, or at least don’t lie.” That’s from Jordan Peterson.

The 75 Hard challenge has given me a couple of opportunities to see this in action.

First, with myself. On Day 33 I forgot to take a picture of myself. On Day 34 I briefly entertained the thought of lying and continuing with the streak. Within a couple of seconds the thought was gone. You can’t lie and get away with it: you know the truth, and knowingly, deliberately compromising your own integrity . . . well, I don’t know if anything more destructive than that.

Oddly (or maybe not) within 30 minutes of starting over on Day 1 of the challenge — by telling myself the truth — I felt better, stronger. Success, I felt, is inevitable for me. By that I mean success in the small task of completing the 75 Hard challenge, but also more generally in life itself. All because I told myself the truth.

Second, with another person. I was describing the 75 Hard challenge to someone, and my reset at Day 33 simply because I didn’t take a picture. The response was to wonder why I didn’t just take a picture and carry on. I marveled, silently.

Those who have eyes to see, etc.

Don’t lie to yourself. If it’s you against the world and you fail, it’s not the world’s fault. No matter what external “cause” you can point to, something is going on inside you and that’s the real problem. Fix that.

Just as a barbell reveals the extent of your physical weakness, the world (or more precisely your reaction to the world, your opinion about the world) simply reveals the limits of your mentality. Your mistaken beliefs in your abilities. Your ignorance. Your arrogance in refusing to accept new information. Your unwillingness to refuse the seductive lure of cynicism, resentment, or envy.

The friend who suggested lying about the Day 33 picture failure will pay the price for living with that mindset. I will pay the price for telling the truth. (As near as I can tell, it cost me a few seconds of disappointment that I had to reset to Day 1.) We don’t get to choose, when faced with a “lie or tell the truth” decision, to do neither.

The Great Filter.

Today is Day 10. I am doing 75 Hard with greater clarity and a sense of ferocity that I previously lacked. I think that’s because I told the truth to myself.

75 Hard reset.

Day 33 – did not take a picture. What’s hilarious is that I did the second workout (my last task) and thought the thought — phone in hand — “I must take the picture now”. Yet I distracted myself and didn’t.

75 Hard isn’t hard. 75 Hard is just a mirror that reveals me to me.

That barbell isn’t heavy or light. It just reveals my current strength. The exam is not hard or easy. It reveals my current state of knowledge and my study habits up to now. Etc.

Day 1 today.

Maybe I should say it is a challenge to be bold, presented to me by a book.

I got the second Jordan Peterson book (Beyond Order). The title of Chapter 2 felt like a direct, personal exhortation:

Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that.

Problem. I don’t know what that is (but Peterson addresses that in Chapter 3). What could I be?

Answer. I don’t know. Murky, tentative, I’m afraid to pick one thing or another.

But! I have an idea of what I how I want to do it. Not the aim, but the physical method I will use, day in and day out, because I want to and because it is important and because, surprisingly to myself, I enjoy it.

I have the recent experience at work (the last week or so), which has changed my trajectory. It looks, well, better than what I was doing before. So I’m iterating towards . . . I don’t know.

I have today’s experience at the gym. The session was deeply rewarding. The reward was not in the accomplishment but in the being there, midday, getting sweaty and poking the boundary of my accomplishments outward just a bit.

A single-minded aim at the mundane — again and again. Do that thing at work. Again. Again. Again. Do that thing at the gym. Again. Bump the weight 10 pounds. Again. Again. Again. Pay attention to and support the people I love to the best of my ability. Again. Again. Again. Again.

Maybe that’s it. I’m finding inspiration in repetition and routine. Me, who has the attention span of a gnat.

So let’s just follow the “again” path for a while.

At work: no new customers. Care for those I have now.

In personal life: continue the daily practices I have embedded. Daily exercise, daily spiritual reading.

Amongst the humans: appreciate them, tell them so, and give gratitude and support as often as I can.

Again.

And again.

Then do it again.

And see where it leads.

I’ll give myself 1,000 days to see how it goes. I will expect zigzags and recalibration and resets. If a future choice presents itself, choose the harder path. When given a choice between more or fewer, pick fewer.

Excerpt

I’m putting this here, typed from the book with my very own thumbs, because someday I will want these words and the book will not be close at hand.

Aim at something. Pick the best target you can currently conceptualize. Stumble toward it. Notice your errors and misconceptions along the way, face them, and correct them. Get your story straight. Past, present, future—they all matter. You need to map your path. You need to know where you were, so that you do not repeat the mistakes of the past. You need to know where you are, or you will not be able to draw a line from your starting point to your destination. You need to know where you are going, or you will drown in uncertainty, unpredictability, and chaos, and starve for hope and inspiration. For better or worse, you are on a journey. You are having an adventure—and your map better be accurate. Voluntarily confront what stands in your way. The way—that is the path of life, the meaningful path of life, the straight and narrow path that constitutes the very border between order and chaos, and the traversing of which brings them into balance.

Aim at something profound and noble and lofty. If you can find a better path along the way, once you have started moving forward, then switch course. Be careful, though; it is not easy to discriminate between changing paths and simply giving up. (One hint: if the new path you see forward, after learning what you need to learn along your current way, appears more challenging, then you can be reasonably sure that you are not deluding or betraying yourself when you change your mind.) in this manner, you will zigzag forward. It is not the most efficient way to travel, but there is no real alternative, given that your goals will inevitably change while you pursue them, as you learn what you need to learn while you are disciplining yourself.

You will then find yourself turning across time, incrementally and gracefully, to aim ever more accurately at that tiny pinpoint, the X that marks the spot, the bull’s-eye, and the center of the cross; to aim at the highest value of which you can conceive. You will pursue a target that is both moving and receding; moving, because you do not have the wisdom to aim in the proper direction when you first take aim; receding, because no matter how close you come to perfecting what you are currently practicing, new vistas of possible perfection will open up in front of you. Discipline and transformation will nonetheless lead you inexorably forward. With will and luck, you will find a story that is meaningful and productive, improves itself with time, and perhaps even provides you with more than a few moments of satisfaction and joy. With will and luck, you will be the hero of that story, the disciplined sojourner, the creative transformer, and the benefactor of your family and broader society.

Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindlessly at that.

Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, pages 86-87.

So many different versions of The Fool.

What’s interesting is to see how the esoteric symbolism is varied by each artist. The white dog becomes a brown dog or a cat.

This is how myth and meaning varies and distills over time. We can see it in front of us, on a tarot card.

I wonder how many variations are deliberate attempts to echo yet modify esoteric information transfer from one mind to another? That implies a level of mastery and intentionality that is probably unrealistic to assume. Few people have eyes to see, ears to hear. Even for the truth hidden in plain sight.

Beginners mind.

Well it’s a bright, sunny morning

Each day a new beginning

Lifeboat, by Miranda Lee Richards

It’s a bright sunny morning today, and I am overflowing with gratitude, humility, and optimism. I am The Fool.

I have a task at work I have been struggling with. For months. I have been confused about what to do.

Thinking the person I am helping is not smart, deliberately making bad choices and not facing reality. That’s what I’m thinking.

Suddenly, this morning, it dawns on me. Blinding flash.

No. It’s not him. It’s me that is making the job hard. He knows there is a problem. (I have been struggling with explaining to him that there is a problem that needs to be fixed.)

What he is searching for, and asking me for, is whether there is a softer, easier way to solve the problem.

It is my job to tell him the truth. No. It’s time to face the obstacle head-on.

My part of the problem is that I forgot this. He said it to me. He asked about a workaround. Or actually I did hear it, because I remember the conversation now. But I didn’t take it to heart.

Help people the way they want to be helped.

He wants an easier softer way.

But I don’t think he wants that, really. He doesn’t really want the easier softer way. He doesn’t expect magic, though. That’s my guess. He wants the truth.

And probably he would appreciate kind assistance along a difficult path.

Talk amongst yourselves.

Grit is doing monotonous things over and over and over and over.

Approximate quote from the RealAF podcast episode 16.

Working out is fucking boring. I’m doing it right now.

I got grit.

Take our your stonemason’s chisel and hammer. That rock will break, no longer blocking your path.

Our inward power, when it obeys nature, reacts to events by accommodating itself to what it faces—to what is possible. It needs no specific material. It pursues its own aims as circumstances allow; it turns obstacles into fuel. As a fire overwhelms what would have quenched a lamp. What’s thrown on top of the conflagration is absorbed, consumed by it—and makes it burn still higher.

Meditations 4.1

All obstacles must fall. Only time and directed power stands between you and the accomplished feat.

Obstacles into fuel. The large, freshly-cut log that is impervious to fire, until persistent heat makes it hiss and steam away the dampness within. The log smolders and bursts into flame.

Choose well. Do you have time for this obstacle? Will you have the determination and strength? If so, a decision and persistent self-discipline will bring success.

Memory is a tool. Memory is the past’s guide to the future. If you remember that something bad happened, and you can figure out why, then you can avoid that bad thing happening again. That’s the purpose of memory. It’s not to “remember the past.” It’s to stop the same damn thing from happening over and over.

Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, p. 239. Emphasis in original.

Add that to TM’s curious comment to me one day: “you can change the past.” That puzzled me. How can you change the fact that World War II happened? It sounds absurd until you realize that the past doesn’t exist—only your memories of the past exist. And you can change your memories, or at least your interpretation of your memories.

Memories are incomplete, vague, maybe ill-ordered in my head. Maybe an inconsequential event is vividly remembered and a deeply important event deliberately forgotten. It never existed, as far as my memory is concerned.

Elsewhere in this chapter, the author talks of listening and describes Freud’s process. It is exactly what EL did. And EL told me what he was doing, as he was doing it. He would say “I don’t know what the right answer is for you. But you do. I just let you talk until you discover the right answer that you already have inside you.”

EL was allowing me to reorder my memories and create an answer, an order, from them. He listened. That was what he did. Then I knew what to do in the present.

Sometimes he was explicit with feedback, because I didn’t know how to think very well. This is me at age 33, for God’s sake.

Remember the time when I wanted to rent an apartment and there were two available? One was available now (and cheaper, and had a fridge). The other one was available in two weeks. I didn’t know what to do. It seems comical in retrospect, yet there I was. One graduate degree and part-way to a second, and I couldn’t make simple choices.

“Take the apartment that is available now” was his direct response to my confusion. There was a meta-lesson in that simple sentence, quite apart from solving a dilemma in the moment.

In a sense, people are our proper occupation. Our job is to do them good and put up with them.

But when they obstruct our proper tasks, they become irrelevant to us—like sun, wind, animals. Our actions may be impeded by them, but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting.

The impediment to action advances action.

What stands in the way becomes the way.

Meditations 5.20.

This is here so I can remember it daily.