Weekly reflection #216

Dear Mat,

Spend more time making the big decisions. There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.

— Naval Ravikant

Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.

—Buddhist saying

I never ask if “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” I think “this is what it is” or “this is what it isn’t.”

— Richard Feynman

There is a tendency within some people—maybe due to a mix of personality characteristics and internalized behaviors—to either do something perfectly or totally give up. Each time you make a mistake as you define it, you can merely begin again.

It is always a great time to begin again. Life is fundamentally a set of moments in a long-running succession. One after the other. Each moment is an opportunity to begin again. You instead may conceptualize a day as a fixed unit. If you feel cognitive dissonance toward what you ate for breakfast vs. your desired physical condition, you may decide to throw the baby with the bath water and not bridge that gap at all anymore because now the entire day is jeopardized by your decision.

You have been exposed to a lot of information about nutrition and dieting and health and fitness and you feel paranoid that if you don’t eat healthy (what does that mean again?) you will die young and very soon, and everyone will attack and ridicule you in public for not having made the right decision on the food to eat, and the Broccoli god will eat you during sleep.

You are just one action away from the next stage of reality. Reality is. It doesn’t ought to be. And you can warp your perception of reality via your decisions and actions, one moment at a time. At this point, it does not matter much what you did in the past, or what you will do in the future besides this next moment.

We make up stories and attach our emotions to them. And those stories and emotions become who we are and are reinforced by the people around us. It does not have to be that way. You can hold everything lightly and not identify with all those made-up stories. Write a fiction book with them instead.

That would be a productive use of the stories you have been telling yourself. Read Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott for inspiration on how to write fiction, and how to write in general. Or merely write. I think that would make for quite interesting books if everyone on the planet would write about all the stories they tell themselves with humorous detachment. It would be an insightful mass psychological experiment.