Learn to keep your needs simple and your wants small.
Learn to breathe deeply. To taste food when you eat it, to sleep deeply when you sleep. When you laugh, let it carry on until you’re sweating and out of breath. When you get angry, get really angry, just let things burn through you. The less you push these things away, the less they come out in inappropriate and debilitating ways. It’s not anger or the sadness that controls you; it’s the resistance of it that keeps them tucked in their place in your soul.
Learn to let negative thoughts drift back to where they came from—
nowhere.
Do the things that are effortless. Let them be effortless. Find love that’s effortless. You’ll be instructed to believe that success comes from grueling, soul-bending hard work, but that’s more something we impose on ourselves because letting effortless things also be successful ones makes them feel unmerited. That’s how we create problems where there are none.
Decide to keep nothing but what is meaningful and purposeful. When you cycle and circle around your space, touching, seeing, and using only things that evoke a feeling of security, purpose, meaning, joy…your everyday life
becomes grounded in happiness. When there’s not enough to make a mess, no more than you can clean and wash and handle, everything feels settled.
Complexity is often the easiest choice. It’s easy to let ourselves get wound up and bound down to the ways we let our thoughts and fears run narratives into storylines into realities we live out.
Simplicity is difficult because it requires clean thinking. It’s the long, hard way to a cleansed perception (that is: not shadowed by conditioning or negative thoughts). But it’s yours, and yours always. You can keep all of one hundred belongings for the rest of your life, and every one of them will be used, broken, replaced, taken, thrown out, rendered obsolete. But your perception of how meaningful and useful those temporary things were, how much you appreciated and enjoyed them—that’s yours. And that is what choosing a life rooted in simplicity does: makes the ordinary miraculous.
People like to make big claims of what will bring you happiness. And happiness, in some form, is what we’re all seeking, even if we don’t place that word on it. Stability, love, money. Happy psychology, the phenomenon of the last 25+ years, has come about really for the fact that we pioneered a country for the sake of unbridled, radical happiness: religious liberation, freedom, democracy.
Yet these things, these houses that hold us and companies we run, these relationships we fail at because we’re constantly expecting them to be more
—the desire to max out pleasure—has not made us happier.
Because we have not changed how we think—and that’s the only real change that ever happens, because it’s the basis of how we feel. The magnitude of one’s life is directly parallel to how deep their perception of it is. Your life grows as you do. What you experience is a reflection of what you are.
Do not forget that you do not have forever to do this, to change this.
It’s easy to let another day, week, month, year slip by, letting yourself keep seeking the light in people and money and more and more and more.
It’s easier to spend that time seeking the light in yourself because you think that’s the right thing to do. You don’t find the light—the ability to perceive
—because you already are it. The work is getting rid of everything that stands in the way.
71
18 LITTLE
REMINDERS
FOR ANYONE
who feels like
THEY DON’T KNOW
what they’re
DOING WITH
THEIR LIFE
01. Nobody knows what they are “doing with their lives.” Some people have a better idea of what they’re working toward, but ultimately, none of us can accurately anticipate or summarize what our existence is about. Not yet.
02. You decide what your life is defined by. The feeling of being “lost”
isn’t what happens when you go off-path, it’s when you forfeit control. It’s what happens when you don’t want to accept the course of events that have unfolded. Being found again is a matter of owning what happened to you and continuing to write the story.
03. J.K. Rowling didn’t know she was going to be one of the most famous writers in the world; she was just writing a story for her kids. Steve Jobs didn’t know he’d be a pioneer of how humanity interacts with technology; he was just a guy in his garage making a computer. Oprah didn’t know she’d become the poster woman for self-improvement and success; she was just trying to do a job. You don’t need to know what you’re doing to still do something extraordinary.
04. There is no way you will be able to predict or plan what will be happening in 5 years from now.
05. If you can predict and plan for that, dream bigger. Try harder.
06. Planning your life (or having a cohesive idea of “what you’re doing”) isn’t necessarily ambition; it’s more just a soothing notion.
Focus instead on what you want to do with each and every day of your existence. That’s noble. That’s worthwhile. That will get you somewhere.
07. You owe nothing to your younger self. You are not responsible for being the person you once thought you’d be.
08. You owe everything to the adult you are today. You owe it to yourself to ask yourself what you like, what you want, what calls you, what you need, and what you deserve.
09. Do you know why you don’t have the things you once thought you wanted? Because you don’t want them anymore. Not badly enough.
10. It’s likely that you’re between realizing you don’t want what you once did and giving yourself permission to want what you want now.
11. Give yourself permission to want what you want now.
12. If you want to change your life, stop thinking about how you feel lost and start coming up with actions you can take that move you in a direction—any direction—that’s positive. It’s a lot harder to think your way into a new way of acting than it is to act your way into a new way of thinking.