“There is no fate worse than being continuously under guard, for it means you are always afraid.” - Julius CaesarTerrorism is a form of fear producing war involving the lowest amount of effort to produce the maximum amount of downstream consequences - including psychological. When you allow it, your mind is a terrorist. I think that what we might fear most is ourselves. Going deeper, maybe it’s us holding ourself accountable. Perhaps we fear being held to account for our actions. When we are held to account for how we behaved and why, we necessarily doubt. We go back in time and we wonder, was my understanding of the truth back then real? Life suddenly feels uncertain. Why should you be held to account for what you didn’t know? Because what is certain is your present experience - right now. Now is certain. What you believe and what you perceive now is certain. You can only make decisions base on what is in front of you now. You must accept that there is more out there that you do not and can’t know; and that’s okay. And, you must accept that you will be held to account for what you do now; be comfortable with that.Be comfortable knowing that you don’t know what you don’t know. Be comfortable knowing that you know there are things you don’t know.Believe that being perfect is being “a work in progress.”
“As dripping water wears through rock, so the weak and yielding can subdue the firm and strong,” - Sun Haichen, Wiles of WarYou and I are the weak and yielding at times. And, like we water, we can wear through rock. If we can persist, drip by drip, we can make an impact. Drip by drip. Don’t underestimate what you can do.
Saying “no” to things is actually saying “yes” to you and your time.You don’t have much time, and everybody would like to compete for it. I heard a saying once, “you can tell a lot about a person by where they spend their money.” I add, “you can also tell a lot about a person by how they choose to spend their limited time.” It’s one thing to give of yourself fully to others. However, when all you do is give your time to others, you’re operating at a net loss to yourself. Saying “no” solves that.Check your calendar this next week - where is your time going? How much of your time are you giving back to yourself?
Rohan Rajiv shared an insightful word in his recent post - Sitzfleisch: the stamina to resist the temptation of responding to these short-term influences.Our world is full of stimuli; more stimuli than we likely are meant to receive. An email comes in, we react. You’re tagged in a slack message, you react. You are stressed and you notice the Doordash app, you react. Our environment is one of reaction. What if we flipped the script?What if we developed a Stoic mental toughness and resisted the stimulatic (I just made that word up) world of today. What if we turned off our notifications? What if we made it more difficult to be accessible? What if we made the world a bit further from our reach? How much more calm might our lives be? And with that extra calm, how much more productive might we become?Along with sonder and pâro, I think I’ll put sitzfleisch in my tool belt of useful words.
I read this post from Seth Godin, and I want you to have it. In a culture fascinated by attitude, gloss and performance, it’s easy to believe that adopting an affect is precisely what you need to make a difference.In fact, the persistent, generous work that happens when no one is looking is what actually makes a difference.Looking the part (or simply acting like it) isn’t nearly as important as the change we actually make.Read more here.Who we intend to be shapes the mask we wear; but, the mask we wear doesn’t make us serve any better.Outcomes matter.
When you do take things too personally, and you know you do. Try this:Take a walk or do something physical.Sit with the emotion and thank yourself for it. “Hey, I’m feeling this way now, and it’s okay.”Don’t avoid the feeling - endure it! Identify what behaviors you can implement to turn things around for yourself. Focusing o behaviors is a way to de-personalize.I wonder if our early ancestors were tougher than we are today. Do you think?Imagine the struggles and hardships they experienced and endured. If they had chosen not to endure it, then we might not be here. I am forming the idea that the thing you and I can do more is endure our pain and suffering a bit more. To be thankful for that experience, and to learn from it. Imagine what great wisdom we could get from our pain? How might that wisdom help us help others? If death is an inextricable part of life, so is suffering. And if that’s true, then perhaps the one behavior that helps us move through the loss of a loved one or through our most painful moments is to endurance. Perhaps our life’s story is our story of endurance.
The hardest part about not taking things personally is not taking things personally.It’s easy to say - give yourself grace and separate.It’s hard to execute.Why?
I continue to believe that the people who take time to self-reflect and pull forward their learnings to the present will be more effective than those that don’t. In a world of “go go go”, the person who can stop and still their mind wins.
Gale Garnett was likely thinking about something else when she wrote the lyrics to “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine”; however, I believe the lyrics are a powerful meditation in a different context.
The refrain (generally) is:
“We’ll sing in the sunshine, we’ll laugh every day, and we’ll sing in the sunshine, and be on our way.”
The last verse refrain combo:
“And when our year has ended, and I have gone away, you’ll often speak about me, and this is what you’ll say: ‘We sang in the sunshine, we laughed every day, we sang in the sunshine, then [we] went on our way.’”
In The Great influenza, author John Barry describes how viruses work. They attach themselves to certain receptors in the body. The virus replicates itself. It disguises itself. It destroys from within mercilessly. As much as we try to develop medications to cure them, the best advice is to let it run its course. The even better advice is, “the best offense is a great defense.”Moral wars are like viruses. When we battle each other on the field of morality, we battle for something intangible. That intangible is greater than us, it cannot be quantified, it’s deep, it’s often linked to power. Moral wars never end well.If Person A plays the moral war and Person B plays the conventional war, Person A is likely to win - likely through a scorched earth strategy. Better to avoid the moral wars.Nobody truly wins, and nobody truly knows what they are fighting for - they just know they have to fight. That’s the most dangerous kind of opponent.