Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.
William Munny, life coach (via austinkleon)
Tag: life
Each of us is born with a series of built-in confusions that are probably somehow Darwinian. These are: (1) we’re central to the universe (that is, our personal story is the main and most interesting story, the only story, really); (2) we’re separate from the universe (there’s US and then, out there, all that other junk – dogs and swing-sets, and the State of Nebraska and low-hanging clouds and, you know, other people), and (3) we’re permanent (death is real, o.k., sure – for you, but not for me).
Heroism is often some seriously boring stuff.
Memento mori – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Timepieces were formerly an apt reminder that your time on Earth grows shorter with each passing minute. Public clocks would be decorated with mottos such as ultima forsan (“perhaps the last” [hour]) or vulnerant omnes, ultima necat (“they all wound, and the last kills”).
Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is ‘importance’ in the only real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.
No Country for Old Men (2007) – “I feel overmatched.”.
All the time you spend tryin’ to get back what’s been took from you, more’s goin’ out the door.
I need to watch this movie again. Cf. F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Life Lessons with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar – 20 Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was 30 – Esquire.
Career is never as important as family. The better you are at your job, the more you’re rewarded, financially and spiritually, by doing it. You know how to solve problems for which you receive praise and money. Home life is more chaotic. Solving problems is less prescriptive and no one’s applauding or throwing money if you do it right. That’s why so many young professionals spend more time at work with the excuse, “I’m sacrificing for my family.” Bullshit. Learn to embrace the chaos of family life and enjoy the small victories.
Take the hard feelings away, and this is the right thing to do. Put the feelings back and it hurts like hell, but the right thing to do hasn’t changed.
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
E.B. White. (via)
Our unlived lives–the lives we live in fantasy, the wished-for lives–are often more important to us than our so-called lived lives; we can’t (in both senses) imagine ourselves without them.
Adam Phillips in his new book Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. Gotta track this one down. I liked Going Sane and On Kindness. (via)
Favorite improvements of 2012
In addition to my previous posts on movies, books, and music, I’ll mention some things that made my life better last year, in some way or another. I’m dividing it here into two parts: things I bought, and decisions I made.
Products
- Amazon Prime. Wonderful. Love it. I get another source for movies, and I get stuff I don’t always need, more quickly. This is why we made civilization.
- A grapefruit spoon. Great example of having the right tool for the job. When you need both cutting and scooping power. An incredibly thoughtful gift from a friend who listens well.
- A drain snake. There is no reason, in this day and age, in a nation of great prosperity, to suffer through domestic life with a slow or clogged drain. (I think I have a thing about drains. The sink strainers I bought a couple years ago still deliver me daily joy.)
- A shoehorn. I hate when my shoes get the crumpled heel counter. And it feels nice. Hard to explain, it just feels proper and kinda smug, which is great way to start the day.
- Better sound. The small, relatively inexpensive upgrades for my amplifier, headphones, and earbuds have made all the difference. Louder sound, cleaner sound, less background noise. And I don’t even think I’m much of an audiophile (……….yet?).
- Ghostery is a great way to fight the Man, and an easy, at-a-glance way to roughly gauge which sites are more bullshitty than others.
- Embracing a uniform, sorta. My favorite thing to wear is a grey t-shirt and jeans. Or grey t-shirts and pants. Or a grey sweatshirt. Or a blue or white button-up. Or some combination of the above. Boring. Predictable. Stockpile the good stuff and phase out the rest!
- Art. I ripped a bunch of things out of art books to frame, but I also bought a kick-ass print to hang by my desk and had a friend make me a painting that sits in the bedroom.
Decisions
- I resigned from my job at HowStuffWorks. I had a good run, but it was probably past time. (4.5 years! Dang, y’all.)
- I started a new job at SimplePart. Awesome startup I was super-stoked to join.
- I resigned from that new job at SimplePart. Awesome company, but the wrong fit, it turns out. No hard feelings on either side. They’re gonna make piles of money.
- Taking my time to figure it out. I’m lucky I’ve been a disciplined miser since college, which gives me the chance to leap into the great unemployed unknown every now and then (and go hiking). This whole discernment process has been exhausting/exciting/stressful/fun, depending on the day/week/minute. Who knows what’s next?
- I started going to therapy. There is nothing quite like it. Everyone I’ve mentioned it to has been supportive and/or jealous. Not to claim that I’ve made huge strides as a human being, but I can’t think of anyone who would not benefit from setting aside some time (and money, yeah) for thoughtful conversation focused on yourself.
- I called my family more often. This isn’t saying much, but it’s a step in the right direction for sure.
Here’s to another year of small improvements and big ones.
Get out of the conceptual rut that a good life looks one way and a disappointing one looks another.
Festina lente – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A classical adage and oxymoron meaning “make haste slowly” or “more haste, less speed”. It has been used as the motto of many people including the emperors Augustus and Titus, the Medicis and the Onslows.
Slow is smooth; smooth is fast. (via)
I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (via malevichsquare) Cf. George Saunders:
If I just stay fully engaged in whatever has presented itself, things will be fine. That is, I try not to think about things like: Next, I begin MY NOVEL!
Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue w/ your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years
Age and experience will slowly whittle away at your dreams, so don’t do that to yourself. Let other people do that to you.
The Service Patch – NYTimes.com
Many people today find it easy to use the vocabulary of entrepreneurialism, whether they are in business or social entrepreneurs. This is a utilitarian vocabulary. How can I serve the greatest number? How can I most productively apply my talents to the problems of the world? It’s about resource allocation.
People are less good at using the vocabulary of moral evaluation, which is less about what sort of career path you choose than what sort of person you are.
In whatever field you go into, you will face greed, frustration and failure. You may find your life challenged by depression, alcoholism, infidelity, your own stupidity and self-indulgence. So how should you structure your soul to prepare for this? Simply working at Amnesty International instead of McKinsey is not necessarily going to help you with these primal character tests.
[…] It’s worth noting that you can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero. Understanding heroism and schmuckdom requires fewer Excel spreadsheets, more Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job.
I missed this last month, so many thanks @davidbhayes for the post!
The question arose as to what we would do differently if we were immortal. […] I answered that I would travel more. Later the question was asked, what would you do differently if you found out you had only a short time to live. I answered again that I would travel more. Click, buzz, whirr…does not compute, does not compute. […] Given that I would travel more if I was to live either less or more, the probability that I was at just that level of mortality that I should not be traveling now must be vanishingly small.
Alex Tabarrok. Swap out “travel” for whatever it is that you happen to value a lot. (Got reminded about this post via Ben Casnocha.)
10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won’t Tell You
6. Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives.
7. Your parents don’t want what is best for you. They want what is good for you, which isn’t always the same thing. There is a natural instinct to protect our children from risk and discomfort, and therefore to urge safe choices.
Los Angeles Review of Books – Life Is Short; Art Is Shorter
Life is interesting all over. Every life, properly understood, is compelling. Anyone aspiring to be an artist knows there’s no such thing as why-bother or nothing-to-see.
Mark Larson 