From Books

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To thinking clearly

To see the whole chessboard

To making tough decisions

To managing our emotion

To identifying the right goals

To handling high-pressure situations

To maintaining relationship

To building good habits

To being productive

To physical excellence

To feeling fulfilled

To capturing moments of laughter and joy

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Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, seems to have done his writing and reflection in the evenings, much along the lines of Anne Frank’s practice. When darkness had fallen and his wife had gone to sleep, he explained to a friend, “I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by.” Then he would go to bed, finding that “the sleep which follows this self-examination was particularly sweet. Anyone who reads him today can feel him reaching for stillness in these nightly writings.

Michel Foucault talked of the ancient genre “note to oneself”. He called the journal a “weapon for spiritual combat,” a way to practice philosophy and purge the mind of agitation and foolishness’ and to overcome difficulty. To silence the barking in your head. To prepare for the day ahead. To reflect on the day that has passed. Take note of insights you’ve heard. Take the time to feel wisdom flow through your fingertips and onto the page.

This is what the best journals look like. They aren’t for the reader. They are for the writer. To slow the mind down. To wage peace with oneself.

According to one study, journaling helps improve well-being after traumatic and stressful events. Similarly, a University of Arizona study showed that people were able to better recover from divorce and move forward as if they journaled on the experience. Keeping a journal is a common recommendation from psychologist as well, because it helps patients stop obsessing and allows them to make sense of many inputs— emotional, external, psychological— that would otherwise overwhelm them.

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The choices we make in that regard determine whether we will experience peace or not. Which is why each of us needs to sit down and examine ourselves. What do we stand for? What do we believe to be essential and important? What are we really living for? Deep in the marrow of our bones, in the chambers of our heart, we know the answer. The problem is that the busyness of life, the realities of pursuing a career and surviving in the world, cine between us and that self-knowledge.

Confucius said that virtue is a kind of polestar. It not only provides guidance to the navigator, but it attracts fellow travelers too. Epicurus, who had been unfairly branded by history as a hedonist, knew that virtue was the way to tranquility and happiness. In fact, he believed that virtue and plesure were two sides of the same coin, As he said:

It is impossible to live the pleasant life without also living sensibly, nobly, and justly and conversely it is impossible to live sensible, nobly, and justly without living pleasantly. A person who does not have a pleasant life is not living sensibly, nobly, and justly, and conversely the person who does not have these virtues cannot live pleasantly.

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There’s no question it’s possible to get ahead in life by lying and cheating and generally being awful to other people. This may even be a quick way to the top. But it comes at the expense of not only your self-respect, but your security too.

Each of us must cultivate a moral code, a higher standard that we love almost more than life itself. Each of us must sit down and ask: What’s important to me? What would I rather dies for than betray? How am I going to live and why? These are not idle questions or the banal queries of a personality quiz. We must have the answers if we want the stillness (and the strength) that emerges from the citadel of our own virtue.

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Sigmund Freud:

We all demand reparation for our early wounds to our narcissism.

thinking we are owed because we were wronged or deprived.

It’s dangerous business, though, creating a monster to protect your wounded inner child.

The insecure lens. The anxious lens. The persecuted lens. The prove-them-all-wrong lens. The will-you-be-my-father? lens that Leonardo had. These adaptions, developed early on to make sense of the world, don’t make our lives easier. On the contrary. Who can be happy that way? Would you put a nine-year-old in charge of anything stressful or dangerous or important?

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It will take patience and empathy and real self-love to heal the wounds in your life. As Thich Nhat Hanh has written:

After recognizing and embracing our inner child, the third function of mindfulness is to sooth and relive our difficult emotions. Just by holding this child gently, we are soothing our difficult emotions and we can begin to feel at ease. When we embrace our strong emotions with mindfulness and concentration, we’ll be able to see that roots of these mental formations. We’ll know where our suffering has come from. When we see the roots of things, our suffering will lessen. So mindfulness recognizes, embraces, and relieves.

We owe it to ourselves as well as to the people in our lives to do this. Each of us must break the link in the chain of what the Buddhist call samsara, the continuation of life’s suffering from generation to generation.

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To the Epicureans real pleasure was about freedom from pain and agitation. If wanting something makes you miserable while your don’t have it, doesn’t that diminish the the true value of the reward? If getting what you “want” has its consequences too, is that really pleasurable? If the same drive that helps your achieve initially also leads you inevitably to overreach or overdo, is it really an advantage?

Think about the times when your feel best. It’s not when you are pining away. It’s not when you get what you pined for either. There is always a tinge of disappointment or loss at the moment of acquisition.

Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita calls desire the

ever-present enemy of the wise, which like a fire cannot find satisfaction.

The Buddhists personified this demon in the figure of Mara. They said it was Mara who tried to tempt and distract Buddha from the path of enlightenment, from stillness. When Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his note book about how to portray envy, he said that she should be shown as lean and haggard due to her state of perpetual torment.

Make her heart gnawed by a swelling serpent, make her ride upon death because Envy never dies

None of us are perfect. We have biologies and pathologies that will inevitably trip us up. What we need then is a philosophy and strong moral code— that sense of virtue— to help us resist what we can, and to give us the strength to pick ourselves back up when we fail and try to do and be better.

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John Stuart Mill, the philosopher and boy genius who before he hit puberty read and mastered nearly every major classical text in the original Greek or Latin, is an illustration of just how terrifying this process can be. Extremely driven (by his father and by himself), one day, at around twenty years old, Mill stopped to think, for the first time, about what he was chasing.

It occurred to me to put that question directly to myself, “Suppose that all your objects in life were realised; that all the changes in institutions and opinion which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.

We get to the finish line only to think: This is it? Now what?

It’ is a painful crossroad. Or worse, one that we ignore, stuffing those feeling of existential crisis down, pilling on top of them meaningless consumption, more ambition, and the delusion that going more and more of the same will eventually bring about different result.

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If you believe there is ever some point where you will feel like you’ve “made it”, when you’ll finally be good, you are in for an unpleasant surprise. Or worse, a sort of Sisyphean tortures where just as that feeling appears to be within reach, the goal is moved just a little bit farther up the mountain and out of reach.

You will never feel okay by way of external accomplishments. Enough comes from the inside. It comes from stepping off the train. From seeing what you already have, what you’ve always had. **

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The beauty was that these creations and insights came from a better— a stiller— place inside both men. They weren’t doing it to prove anything. They didn’t need to impress anyone. They were in the moment. Their motivations were pure. There was no insecurity. No anxiety. No creeping, painful hope that this would finally be the thing that would make them feel whole, that would give them what they had always been lacking.

What do we want more of in life? That’s the question. It’s not accomplishment. It’s not popularity. It’s moments when we feel like we are enough.

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The soft paw prints of a cat on the dusty truck of a car. The hot steam wafting from the vents on a New York City morning. The smell of asphalt just as the rain begins to fall. The thud of a first fitting perfectly into an open hand. The sound of a pen signing a contract, binding two parties together. The courage of a mosquito sucking blood from human who can easily crush it. A basket full of vegetables from the garden. The hard right angles that passing trucks cut out of the drooping branches of tree next to a busy road. A floor filled with a child’s toys, arranged in the chaos of exhausted enjoyment. A city arranged the same way, the accumulation of hundreds of years of spasmodic, independent development.

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The step that many addicts— particularly the ones who fancy themselves thinkers— struggle with intensely is the acknowledgement of the existence of a higher power. They just don’t want to admit that they “have come to believe a Power greater than themselves could restore them to sanity.”

This seemingly simple step is hard, but not because the world has become increasingly secular since Alcoholics Anonymous founding in 1935. In fact, one of the founders of AA was, in his words, a “militant agnostic”. Acknowledging a higher power is difficult because submitting to anything other than their own desires is anathema to what one addict describes as the “pathological self-centeredness” of addiction.

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To such consciousness, man is the touchstone in judging everything on earth— imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now experiencing the consequences of mistakes which had not been noticed at the beginning of the journey, On the way from Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in the political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.

Realism is important. Pragmatism and scientism and skepticism are too. They all have their place. But still, you have to believe in something. You just have to. Or else everything is empty and cold.

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Because the nihilist is forced to wrestle with the immense complexity and difficulty and potential emptiness of life and death with nothing but their own mind.

We have so little control of the world around us, so many inexplicable events created this world, that it works out almost exactly the same way as if there was a god.

The point of this belief is in some ways to override the mind. To quiet it down by putting it in true perspective. The common language for accepting higher power is about “letting [Him or Her or It] onto your heart.” That’s it. This is about rejecting the tyranny of our intellect, of our immediate observational experience, and accepting something bigger, something beyond ourselves.

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