Fate

138 – The Greatest Obstacle to Living

“Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow, and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”

– Seneca

Show Notes:

– Do you think too much about the future that you are not living in today?
– This quote from Seneca hits two really great points of the Stoics.
– Momento Mori, remember you will die, and because we could die at any moment, there really is no other time than now. There is now and not now.
– Amor Fati, love your fate. Because we have so little control over what happens to us in life, worrying about the future is worrying about something that may never happen.
– So when you think about it, the only thing you have control over is your choices at this moment.
– Many of the great philosophies and religions focus on mindfulness, of being in the present moment.
– What does mindfulness mean exactly? What does it mean to live in the now?
– To me it mean bringing my focus, my attention, my awareness to the present moment. To be fully engaged in my life, and not stuck thinking about how great things are going to be in the future, but to be present and involved with what’s going on around me and the work that I am engaged in.
– To be honest, I do get very stuck in the future. I think about all these great things that I want to do and create, or how much better it’s going to be….tomorrow or the next day or next week, and pretty soon, it’s next week and I didn’t get done what I wanted and I didn’t enjoy the things that happened.
– It takes effort to keep myself in the present and not get stuck thinking about the future. It’s a lifelong habit that I’ve built up and it’s not easy to break. But I have found that being more present and more focused on the moment, things seem more vivid and intense, it a good way. It’s like I’m more awake to the world. For example when I go on a walk in the wood near my house, if I’m making an effort to notice more of the world around me, the woods seem more colorful and the smells more sharp. It’s the difference between being half asleep and fully awake.
– Growing up, we’re often too focused on what life will be like in the future. When we’re in grade school we want to be in middle school. Middle school we want high school. Then off to college, career, family.
– And the thing is, whatever our future holds, it’s all going to happen anyway, so why not focus on enjoying today?
– Have you ever seen the painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges-Pierre Seurat? For those of your who’ve seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, it’s the painting that they stare at in the Art Institute of Chicago. It’s an amazing work of art that is made up of tiny points of unmixed paint. By doing so, your eye fuses the colors together to create the end color. So to create purple, Seurat would paint red dots next to blue dots until the eye saw purple. Seurat focused daily, deliberately putting each individual brushstroke to canvas, focusing on each small section to bring out the colors he wanted, until 2 years later the 10 foot painting was complete.
– Creating a life is the same way. If we take the time to lovingly and deliberately focus on and live in each day, in this present moment, then we have a great life each and every day. We never have a bad day.
– There’s a great quote by Steven Chandler in his book The Time Warrior. “Don’t create your year, create your day. Figure out the perfect day and then live it. The year will take care of itself. So will your life.”
– What can you do to create your perfect day?
– I think choosing what are the most important things for today, and then doing them with care, and focus. Let go of what you’ll do tomorrow. Tomorrow doesn’t yet exist, so is not real. Now is real, and now is the only time that you can do anything with.
– Don’t be busy, be effective. Are you doing something that matters or are you wasting time?
– Do it well. Don’t half-ass your way through something. Do it with care and focus and in a way that makes you proud.
– What can you do to keep yourself in the present moment?
– Slow down. This is one of the hardest things for me to do. But it takes time to live deliberately. We get too caught up in finishing, that we forget to enjoy the creating or the doing.
– Stop. Sometimes just stop and breath from time to time and look around and see the world, to be thankful. I know some people set reminders so they take time to re-center themselves.
– Write it down. For me, one of the most effective things I do is to get all the things in the future out of my head. I write them down so they don’t spin around in my head. I take care of it now, or I choose a time in the future to take care of it. When I do that, when I get it off my mind, it frees up brain cycles for more important things. When I don’t do that simple exercise, I spend time trying to hold onto all these ideas, and appointments and such, and half the time I forget them anyway.
– Living immediately helps you to worry less about the future, because your focus, your attention is on the present. This also helps you not feel overwhelmed because the future is not your focus. Now is the focus, so you only deal with the now, and ignore everything that is not now.
– Like Ferris Bueller says, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

 

132 – Anything Can Happen

“How ridiculous and unrealistic is the man who is astonished at anything that happens in life.”

― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations Book 12

Show Notes:

– How often do we think that something in life shouldn’t happen to us?
– As if we are somehow immune to the things that happen to anyone else in life.
– How often do we think that we are owed something?
– As if we are somehow privileged above others, that we deserve something
– We may think it’s unfair when something we worked hard for fails to materialize.
– We may think it’s unfair that someone we love gets cancer, that they didn’t deserve it.
– We may think we deserve a perfect partner because go to the gym workout and wear nice clothes.
– The world is full of all kinds of stories about people getting hit with the unexpected and didn’t get what they wanted.
– Who determines what is fair and unfair?
– So much in our lives that is simply up to chance, where we have no control over it.
– We never deserve anything.
– Now this doesn’t mean that all is lost.
– Let go of trying to control the things that we can’t control, and focus on what we can.
– We cannot control the circumstances that happen to us.
– We cannot control the outcome.
– What we can control is how we respond to the things that happen to us.
– If we are diagnosed with an serious illness, we can’t control that it happened to us.
– We can’t control whether we’ll recover from it.
– If we follow the prescriptions of our doctor, we increase our probability of a positive outcome.
– We may not get the job we think we deserve. But we can increase the probability that we’ll get a good job if we put the work in.
– We can also choose our attitude towards towards our situation. We can be angry, we can be sad, we can react in many different ways.
– We’re going to have deal with it anyway, so if we can approach it in the most helpful way we can, we reduce our overall suffering.
– I think that most suffering in the world happens when we try to control the things that we can’t and fail to control what we can.
– Life is full of surprises, but it shouldn’t be.

Photo by Ben Rosett on Unsplash

130 – Suffering Before It’s Time

“He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary.”

― Seneca

Show Notes:

  • How often have you stressed over something or worried yourself sick, only to have the scenario you were so worried about never happen?
  • When you worry about something, and you let your imagination run with something, then you suffer many times before you even get to the event that might happen.
  • Unless you can know the future, worrying about something is inventing problems that may never happen.
  • And that kind of suffering is something that we can all probably do without.
  • I’ve talked about this topic on the show before, but I think it’s important to go over these principles many times because we always need a reminder.
  • And the Stoics understood that we as humans have wild imaginations and that we can come with all possible things that can go wrong.
  • And while at times this can be useful with the idea of hoping for the best but preparing for the worst, we need to be sure that when we do imagine the worst that we aren’t wed to the outcome.
  • Because it’s worrying too much about the outcome that we want that causes us to suffer.
  • As the Buddhists would say, we’re suffering because of our attachment to something outside of our control.
  • And because the role of chance and randomness on our lives that can influence the outcome to most things, we have little control over the outcome.
  • What we do have control over is ourselves.
  • We have control over our thinking.
  • Our actions.
  • We can focus on making good decisions.
  • We can focus on doing good work.
  • We can focus on the process.
  • We do what we can do, and learn to be okay with whatever happens, knowing that we put effort into the things that we could influence.
  • When we do these things, we let the chips fall where they may, continue on.
  • The next time you find yourself worrying about something, ask yourself, “Am I focusing on the outcome, or am I working on the process?”

Photo by Jaclyn Moy on Unsplash

128 – Good Luck, Bad Luck, Who Knows?

 

“Man is affected, not by events, but by the view he takes of them.”

— Epictetus

Show Notes:

• Human beings are creatures that love good stories. Stories are the things that we use to make sense of the things in the world.
• Myths, such as the Greek and Roman or even Norse gods were used to explain why things happen in the world.
• Human beings like to give meaning to the things in their lives.
• It’s part of what makes us human. We give meaning to the expressions on other peoples faces. We give meanings to the words they speak.
• We attribute feelings and thoughts to animals even when we have no real idea of what their thoughts really are.
• One of the core tenets of Stoicism, is the understanding that events and circumstances are simply neutral. They have no meaning other than what we give to them.
• Things happen in life without any reason, which is hard because we as humans want to give meanings to events. We crave a reason. We crave a why. We want to believe that the hard things we go through have some greater purpose. Otherwise we feel that we suffer for nothing.
• For example, if we’re struggling with something, we can look at it as a struggle.
• But if we treat our challenges as opportunities to grow, then we haven’t suffered. We’ve grown stronger. It’s all about perspective.
• Years ago, I heard a great parable that illustrates well.
• A farmer finds a wild horse in his field. He’s able to lead the horse home and puts him in his stable.
• The neighbors upon hearing about the horse, congratulate him on his good luck.
• The farmer simply replies, “Good luck or bad luck, who knows?”
• The next day his son, while trying to train the horse, ends up being thrown, and breaks his leg.
• The neighbors upon hearing about the son, console the farmer on his bad luck.
• The farmer simply replies, “Good luck or bad luck, who knows?”
• The next day while the son is in the hospital, the representative from the emperor comes into town to draft conscripts for the army to fight on the border. His son is released from his obligation because of his broken leg.
• The neighbors upon hearing about his son missing the draft, congratulate him on his good luck.
• The farmer simply replies, “Good luck or bad luck, who knows?”
• After a week, the son comes home to finish recovering. While at the hospital he met a nurse and fell in love, and decided to get engaged.
• The neighbors upon hearing about the engagement, congratulate him on his good luck.
• The farmer simply replies, “Well, when it comes to marriage…good luck or bad luck, who knows?”
• Events and circumstances of life are neutral. It’s up to you to decide if you have bad, or good luck.

Photo by Amy Reed on Unsplash

120 – Are You Lucky?

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

― Seneca

Show Notes:

– Are you a lucky person?
– The Stoics understood that most things in life are out of our control.
– The reason that they stress that ideas so much, that we try so hard to control things around us.
– Trying to control things outside yourself causes yourself and others a lot of suffering.
– Other people, events, and circumstances are certainly outside of our control.
– So much of our life is simply up to chance.
– The people we meet and become friends with and fall in love with.
– The jobs that we get because of being the right place at the right time.
– So many things that just happened by chance, and all of them outside of our control.
– In the Drunkard’s Walk, a book about the role of randomness and chance in our lives, Leonard Mlodinow, after showing example after example about how poorly we as humans misjudge the role of chance in our lives goes on to say, “…ability does not guarantee achievement, nor is achievement proportional to ability. And so it is important to always keep in mind the other term in the equation—the role of chance…What I’ve learned, above all, is to keep marching forward because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized.”
– If we want to meet a great partner it’s not going to happen if we stay at home playing video games or watching Netflix. We need to go on a lot of dates. We need to be able to carry on a conversation.
– If we want to be a musician or an actor, but we never practice, even if we hustle to get a coveted gig, if we aren’t prepared and we don’t have the skill to pull it off, then we’ve wasted an opportunity.
– I find that there is a lot of dedication on the internet for shortcuts to success. As if success is a bunch of hacks that you can do so you don’t have to put actual work in. But the thing is, taking shortcuts can cheat us of the opportunities for growth. We should become masters of our craft, not only because it prepares us to take those opportunities, but mastering our craft is part of the journey, it makes us who we are.
– And the more we become masters of our craft, the less we need “shortcuts”.
– We also need to be careful to never think think that we “deserve” something.
-Sometimes we think we are entitled to a certain way of life because who we are.
– Entitled to a certain job because of where we went to school.
– We are never entitled to anything.
– As Steven Pressfield said about creative endeavors, “We are entitled to our labors, but not the fruits of our labors.” Meaning we entitled to work our butts off and but we may still never find the success we think we deserve.
– As much as we all want a lucky silver bullet, because luck/chance/fate are all outside of our control, what we can control is consistently putting in the work.
– Fortune favors the bold, but she also favors the prepared.

Photo by Sergi Viladesau on Unsplash