Reality Laughs

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.

First full day. Yesterday held a mid-morning Decision and action.

Remove obstacles by saying no. Remove obstacles by asking for help in removing them, of course. But above all, say no.

If I don’t listen to the still, small voice now . . . when will I?

I’m plunging forward. There are no half-measures.

It started today.

100 days of “No”.

That’s as good a mantra as any.

It’s arbitrary so I reserve the right to change the number, but the objective behind it stands.

We’ll start our analysis with a truism, stark, self-evident and understated: sometimes things do not go well. That seems to have much to do with the tyrannical nature of the world, with its plagues and famines and tyrannies and betrayals. But here’s the rub: sometimes, when things are not going well, it’s not the world that’s the cause. The cause is instead that which is currently most valued, subjectively and personally. Why? Because the world is revealed, to an indeterminate degree, through the template of your values (much more of this in Rule 10). If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, therefore, it’s time to examine your values. It’s time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions. It’s time to let go. It might even be time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you can become who you might become, instead of staying who you are.

Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, page 170. Emphasis in original.

Oh.

Where you are judged on your actions today.

Future you is the judge. That’s why Hell is so awful. Future You is the judge. There is no escape from the realization that you did this to you by your own decisions.

Have a goal

If you do not have a definite aim, you will go nowhere and everywhere.

It need not be a well-defined goal. Need not be a SMART goal. But make it directionally accurate. You know your goal is somehow northwest of where you are. Aim northwest. You will get clarity from movement.

One of my goals is to be a crazy-fit 90 year old man. I have an image of the future and me in it. White hair, buzzed short. But . . . fucking hell, he’s 90??? Astonishingly fit.

I’m in no rush to reach that vision. I will become 90 years old one day at a time, no matter what. I don’t yearn for this or recoil from being 90 years old.

I am only interested in what I’m doing today.

And it is an intriguing aim. Imagine quality of life in every facet at 90 as a “fucking hell, he’s fit” 90-year old man. Imagine the interesting task of building toward that goal: what to do, how to eat, everything. N=1 experiment.

Start now

You have a goal. When do you begin?

Start now.

Start here

You lack the tools, the resources to achieve your goal.

Start with what you have on hand right now. You have the resources to start. You don’t have the resources you need to finish. But you’re at the starting point, and you have enough on hand to start now.

Get tomorrow’s resources tomorrow.

Starting now gives you something you didn’t have yesterday: direction and momentum.

Start with what you know now

You can’t get much done at all. You need information, you lack skill.

Life lessons are learned in life.

I started lifting with a few YouTube videos and a great deal of sheepish confusion at the gym. I learned some stuff quickly, from putting my hands on a barbell. Those were lessons I learned only from doing.

Better technique comes with practice and instruction. But I can only practice and receive hands-on instruction if I’m in the arena, at the gym, as an ignorant amateur weightlifter.

Do what you are capable of now

Do what you can do just as you are right now. You are smart enough to take action today. You are strong enough. You will get smarter and stronger tomorrow, building off the momentum and learning of today.

I can only lift the bar, without weights? So be it. Go upstairs one step at a time.

Aim forward, measure back

Always aim toward your goal. You will find it moves in front of you, like the horizon, so you will never get there. You will never be done. You will never be there.

But you will feel immense satisfaction by staying in the present moment, immersed in your self-appointed journey. And you will feel pleasure — and find guidance — by looking back to yesterday you, and noting your progress.

Today You, Yesterday You, Tomorrow You

You lifted weights at the gym today that yesterday you could not lift. You understood something you read that yesterday you could not understand.

Don’t fret that the barbell could have contained more weight than you lifted. Look at what you did today, compared to yesterday.

Don’t fret that you are still ignorant and lack understanding. Look at what you know today that you didn’t know yesterday.

What you were yesterday was the foundation on which you built today’s accomplishment. Today you is built on the foundation of yesterday you.

Incremental progress. One millimeter a day, if that’s all you can do today, is world-changing.

Build a strong today you. Tomorrow you will be thankful for the foundation you built today, just as you are thankful for the foundation yesterday you built for today you.