From one of Patton Oswald’s stand up specials, he shares his late wife’s mantra, as a devout atheist: “It’s chaos. Be kind.” Nothing means anything, nothing happens for a reason, things just happen, they only have the meaning we bring to them, be kind.
In the future this will be a period of time I’ll remember clearly, which makes it valuable. Easy times lead to no substantial memories which is effectively the loss of that time.
Dad’s out of town so I’m staying at his house taking care of his dog. I love this dog. But also take this dog for granted a lot, especially when I’ve just come home from work and I’m irritable and overwhelmed.
I pretend that, instead of this being me here and now, it’s a future version of me, from maybe thirty years in the future, when this dog has been long dead. Then I imagine that this moment is some kind of miracle wormhole through time where the me from the time this dog is an ancient memory has been given a few minutes to be with the dog.
Like, I would happily trade my finger and all the money I have for a minute with my mother, who died fifteen years ago. But I can’t.
What I can do is treat the people around me as I would treat my mother in that one minute, if it were somehow granted to me.
Almost like opening myself up to visitation from my future self. And in doing so, I experience more richly and it will actually work. When the dog is long gone, in the ground for decades, I will be able to visit him because I opened myself, which led to deep memory inscription.
Brilliant post, and I try to do the same thing, if I’m somewhere beautiful or profound and I have a few minutes to myself I like to make a “memory bubble” to me it’s like a little snapshot of experience that I work really hard to recall every minute detail ( including my emotional state and sounds and smells, etc…) and then I can revisit them in the future.
I like this because it makes you appreciate where you are at the time more, and gives you good memories to lean on in the future.
Incidentally, I think this phenomenon of appreciating the present by looking through the lens of a future where it’s lost, is the basis of the band name The Grateful Dead.
I’m open to discussion, but now that I’ve existed for a substantial period of time, I’ve found that my most prevailing memories are the ones hard won (e.g. when I almost had to sleep on the streets or ran out of money in a foreign country or got evicted from my flat). Whereas days sat on my couch watching telly, or in the pub having fun with friends, or another routine day in the gym are all blurred memories with no definition and no real sense of elapsed time.
Well not all the time, but a lot more of the time. Here’s a philosophical question. Do you think being on a holiday is easier than having to go to work? Why would not being on a permanent holiday be easier? Do extremely rich retired people look like they’re having a hard time aside from physical decline?
We have those problems too. We have to worry about money at the same time.
If you were rich:
Relationship issues> the best counseling, less time working, more holidays, de-stress any number of other ways to make solving those issues easier.
Family member dies> stop working for a period of time (if you even choose to work) spend time with family, pay for funeral for a nice send off, pay to have cleaners and meals cooked for the house of the deceased to ease their burden. Pay for people to fly or take time off work so they can spend time with family.
Diarrhea> fancy toilet and bidet.
The idea life is not easier with money is a lie. We know this because everyone who has it will do everything they can to keep it and get more. The difference is the more money you have, the more problems your brain has to manufacture. Not knowing which Bentley to buy or feeling like your too busy while you have the power at any moment to pay to have other people do a lot of those things aren’t real problems because you have the resource to solve them. When you’re poor your problems are more real. Not having enough food or worrying about rent or paying to medical costs are real problems.
And it’s true. We don’t survive the trials of life we just molt into the next version of ourselves.
If a certain transformation is going un-completed because it feels like death, it can be helpful to recognize that it is death. That’s no illusion.
To truly live life to the fullest, one has to sacrifice their self to a future person again and again and again. When you finally get there, it won’t be as the person you are now.
I tried sacrificing myself to a future person once. But the future person had the same feelings, interests, and shortcomings. Then the future person realized herself as being no better than the person who sacrificed herself to her.
I like the idea and message of the first one except that I used to have an absolute asshole of a neighbor who drove a heep-ed out Wrangler with a spare tire cover which had the phrase on it. I can’t separate any longer.
Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
YMMV but to me it’s a comforting thought that, in the very end, nothing you do actually matters. From the most insignificant pauper to Musk, eventually we all die, rot, fade away and are forgotten.
That may be sad, but it liberates you in this moment. It does for me somewhat, anyway.
Hey I just want to say that in my own life, I had a rough upbringing. Lots and lots and lots of emotional abuse, and it wrapped me in a cocoon of inhibition. I was terrified of taking on shame, so I didn’t want to do anything.
The perspective you’re referring to did indeed help me escape the cocoon of fear, to allow me to try things that I was afraid could possibly go wrong.
I took it pretty far. I did intense zen training for about three years, and about nine years in total. I pursued “no self” pretty hard, and it was helpful.
However, at a certain point I had to switch polarity in order to progress. At a certain point I had freed myself of the initial terror of action, but it wasn’t working. The next step, which took me beyond that place, was to reverse that orientation and find things that really did matter.
Not saying you’re wrong. Just saying be prepared to switch vehicles at a certain point. As the buddha said: When you get to the other side of the river, leave the boat behind.
There is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world; there is only the comparison of one state with another. Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss. It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live…the sum of all human wisdom will be contained in these two words: Wait and Hope.
My mantra is just rama rama rama. Meditation with a mantra helps a lot of you put in the work beforehand.
It sounds like you’re talking more about a motivational slogan, though. Mine is, “You don’t have to want it, you just have to do it.” It helps because it frees me from the tyranny of desire. I don’t need to figure out if I’m in the mood. I don’t need to trick myself into enjoying it. I can just do the thing and be done with it.
Relatedly, there’s a line from a favorite book, “Somebody has to and no one else will” with a similar vibe.
This is really close to what I do as well. If I’m overwhelmed, I think to myself, “Just start with one small thing. Then do another small thing. Eventually, lots of small things add up to a large thing. Won’t get anywhere doing nothing and worrying about how much I have to do.”
When I was in college I had a therapist. I was telling him how I wasn’t sure if I was being perfectly efficient about how I was going about things, that I was wasting time and energy in my approach.
His advice was just to focus on doing something rather than nothing, without trying to optimize it.
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