Life
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Intensely watched, intensely remembered
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1 min read
Intensely watched, intensely remembered. It’s not the trouble-free we ought to pursue. It’s the challenge of a good idea. Instead of pushing through the messy middle, we dash to the nearest exit: answering another useless email. It’s the distractions that make us dumber. Like a blob of mercury, we are mentally stoned. The immediate response…
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Choosing to walk
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2 min read
Erling Kagge is the first person to trek the Three Poles Challenge: the North Pole, the South Pole, and the summit of Mount Everest. In his book Silence: In the Age of Noise (Amazon), he dissects the of the art of silence. “Humans or homo sapiens didn’t invent walking. But walking invented human beings. So, of course,…
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Know Yourself prompt cards from The School of Life
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1 min read
More introspective goodies from the School of Life folks, led by philosopher Alain de Botton. These prompt cards remind me of those Brian Eno Oblique Strategies (Amazon) cards that help creatives get unstuck from thinking blocks.
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Humans are noticing machines
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1 min read
It doesn’t take a lot of effort to become a noticing machine. But it does take practice, exercising the eyes, ears, to stretch the thinking tool that is the human brain. Noticing is an awareness, an alertness that calls to mind what the mind shouldn’t scan over. But the observant person shall not force it.…
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Inconvenient truths
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1 min read
We live in a world where self-checkout is more painful than regular checkout, where Instagrammers risk their lives for the perfect pic, and where people hide behind their avatars to become trolls. Sure, a quick google yields all the answers. But the price for the latest convention is reduced comprehension. As soon as we hide,…
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‘We do not grow absolutely, chronologically’
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1 min read
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers,…
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You wield the paintbrush
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1 min read
The easiest way to get the failure out of your system is to bomb a few times so there’s less emotional baggage in the next endeavor. If your struggles persists and you can’t successfully mock the channels of other people, make your own. There’s a long-tail out there for everybody. Keep in mind that you…
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The important stuff is the ordinary stuff
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1 min read
The important stuff is often the ordinary stuff. It’s the small daily actions — like holding the door open for a random stranger or calling your family or friends to catch up — that have a profound impact on your well-being. Everyone wants to progress. But advancement can be selfish. It gets in the way…
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Hardly looking
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1 min read
Like a bar of soap, it gets smaller the more you play with it. Whether you’re investing in stocks or the portfolio of a better life, you have to leave some things alone. You can’t force the future. It comes to you to meet you halfway. So free fill to take your foot off the…
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Hopium
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1 min read
Hope is not a strategy. Hope is a selfish emotion — we look it to bolster our well-being. Hope, it is convenient. It’s the nearest dopamine hit in a crowd of external placebos. But hope is sometimes all we have. It never capitulates. The reality is that good things happen — they just take time…
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The checklist of normal
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1 min read
“Everything is the way it is because it got that way,” said the British biologist D’Arcy Thompson in 1917. An amalgamation of Cells and clustered neurons, people bloom from individuals into the collective and back to weirdos again. It’s human nature to be weird, but also human to be lonely. This conflict between fitting in…
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Live to work and work to live
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1 min read
We love to feel embattled because we like to think we labored for it. If we haven’t struggled, we haven’t yet lived. The urge to grind away at the remarkable supersedes trepidation. So we feel the fear and do it anyway. “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: No fear. I mean, really –…