Jump into life, Nadi shmadi, Way of the drunken master

I should probably save this for a later time, when I have more leasure to write a long post, but I don't see myself having that time until close to the end of the week, so this is likely another short post.

I'm not sure I so much write "shorter" posts, as simply less polished ones. Less pictures, less things covered, less thought into what is most interesting in my life, and more of a straight-up stream of consciousness (edited slightly since this is directly linked with me and possibly subject to potential employer's google searches, though that's very definitely not who it's for. Perhaps they won't see it if I make a separate Facebook page for my professional profile.)

I got my Nadi leaf read! It's a longer story, for now, to quickly sum up my impressions... well, certainly nothing definitive, one way or another. But possible both ways. It really comes down to, do I believe this person, telling me that my name and my parent's name are written in these leaves? I myself and pretty skeptical, but until I learn whatever language the leaf is written in and demand to see the page that supposedly has my name, I'll never know. The best I can do is basically use my life to determine its accuracy. There are plenty of definitive statements about my future, and I just have to write them down, along with the years, and then, at the appropriate time, retrospect and see how accurate it was. But if you were hoping for something definitive and miraculous, I'm afraid you will leave the story disappointed. While everything seemed fairly accurate or plausible, unlike many of my non-nadi-leaf Jyotish readings, (which I've come to accept as totally unreliable for any kind of useful predictive information.) I am well aware that in the process of going through the leaves, by the final time I was just fed up with the process, and started giving him more than a yes/no response, and then, surprise surprise, he came up with my leaf very quickly.

I'd be disappointed, but I've been disappointed so much on this ill-fated quest that I'm over it. I'm just glad to be done with the 5:30 am sessions of being delayed for hours and then going through a bunch of leaves and not finding anything. On the other hand, it's not impossible that it is the real deal. I continue to maintain both perspectives and nothing has happened to definitively collapse the probability wave. There were several accurate things that I did not mention to him at all. A few of which were personal and not something he could have found out even with some kind of identity information snooping service. As I said, I'll let the predictions vindicate or damn the reading, as well as my more careful analysis of the predictions etc. (I didn't record it, as I promised the universe I wouldn't, but he recorded it for me.) but I certainly won't be making my life decisions based off of it. Until and unless I become much more satisfied as to its predictive accuracy. I'm still about at a coin toss as to which I think it is, just because I don't really have much concrete to modify it one way or the other.

And it's not like I need proof that miracles exist. I've gone on that quest and, after long searching, been satisfied to the highest degree, even from the part of me that is sharp, skeptical, rational, and vehemently opposed to blind faith and believing things just because I want them to be true.


In other news, I'm quite happy with my personal development at the moment. I think I would call this: "being balanced in imbalance."

You see, I'm moved out of my old apartment, but not staying long at my parents. My stuff is exploded all over the place, I'm constantly having to move boxes and my workspace around for various reasons, I've currently got a whole bunch of important things due in the next two to three days, and I'm working on my teaching, including all the parts I'm least comfortable with, like calling up parents and enforcing discipline.

In order to do this well, I need extreme powers of focus to not be constantly distracted, and the willpower or grace to decide to do the things that are most important, and not do them for too long either, as I have a tendency to spend longer than necessary on them, due to my perfectionist streak. And to let go of the less important things for the time being, though they itch at the back of my mind.

It's terribly challenging, and I'm not particularly good at it, but what I'm pleased with is my new and improved approach, which is to fail often and with abandon. And to leave the day in the past, when it's done, and start over, give it my best effort again, the next day, and the next. Or even the next hour, and the next. This is SO much more efficient and fast as a way of learning. Previously it would be a cycle of try, fail, pout for a good long while, then finally try again, succeed a bit, then fail, pout for even longer. Try again, fail again, give up. Let a bunch of time pass, try again... you get the idea. Now it's just try-fail-try-fail-try-succeed a bit-try-fail-try-succeed a bit more-try...  All over a few days rather than months and years. It's much much better.

I learned at some point vaugly recently that when you scan the brain of a procrastinator procrastinating, that is, avoiding doing something they need to do, the pain centers are all lit up. But as soon as they actually start doing the thing they were procrastinating about, the pain centers stop firing. This is exactly how it works, subjectively, though for some crazy reason we keep forgetting that fact. The pain is in the putting it off. If you don't want to feel bad, then just do it. No, just start doing it. We think the pain is just a faint shadow of how painful it will be when we actually do the thing, but that's not the case. Even when it really is bad, it's still better, because after the discomfort of, say, an unpleasant conversation, then it's done. Over.

I've been reading and thinking about another related phenomena, in regards to stressful situations, apparently, how you interpret the stressful situation can result in it being healthy for the body, or deeply unhealthy. If you are met with a challenging situation, like, say, you need to give a presentation in front of a group of people, and you start feeling your heart beat quicker and the energy start to buzz, you can take the perspective (I don't thing this generally happens consciously) "Oh no, this is horrible, I want to hide, this is going to be awful, I'm gonna fail, I just want to run away and hide." OR "Alright, I can feel myself getting excited about this challenge, ramping itself up to make sure I can give it my all. Bring It On!"

The first way leads to unhealthy responses that age your body prematurely. The latter lead to general health and well-being, and additional energy and motivation.

I just glanced at this research today, so I could be missing some of the finer nuances. The point being, and all of this just to say, I am more and more turning towards the intimidating things that I have to do standing between me and my dreams and goals, and saying "BRING IT ON!" And it is a glorious thing to do. I wish I'd known to start sooner. So much wasted time, but then, the past is past. I'm learning to let it go and just ask what I can be doing, now, that will make my life and time well spent, now. I should be very clear: I'm failing all. the. time. with this stuff. I'm not good at it yet, at all. But I'm learning quickly, and every time I slip and fall, I quickly get back up and go back at it.

Leap into it,
-Isaac

Fahrenheit 451. Russian Chest Hair. After Enlightenment, the Dishes.

Aaaand the voting results are... nothing. Nobody voted. not once. Yay! I don't have to do any of the topics! which is good for me, because I've already forgotten them, and that would be extra work, and I'm running very low on time.

Yesterday, and today, I tried to KonMari my books. It was both phyisically exausting, moving all that paper pulp around, and mentally exausting, as I have an undue fondness for books, so letting go of them, even books I will likely never read, is like waxing chest hairs. Maybe some people have wimpy and easy to excorscise chest hairs, but I have manly, Russain bear-man chest hair, and waxing that would be liable to simply skin me down the front. But it's not quite as serious as pulling teeth. Or maybe I just don't like cliched phrases. Also, I made the dire mistake of skimming through some of the books. Occasionally, this  is fine. Usually, it's not that much time. But it adds up, and every now and then a book sucks me in and I loose my momentum and objectivity and have to reset, which takes time and energy.

This kind of purging is not something I can just relax while doing at the end of the day. It pulls at my fears, my attachments: well sure, I've never read it in the year or two or three I've had it, but what if I want it down the line? And it has so much good info in it! And it's about my favorit saint! No matter that I haven't looked at it ever and the only reason I would do so in the forseeable future would be to justify not throwing it out/giving it away. Or that I have several redundant sets of most of that information, in various configurations. There is a part of my brain, perhaps a part shared with pack rats and chipmunks, that needs to hoard precious things. The more precious, the more intense is the need.

I carried a half-eaten bag of rice with me, that wasn't even mine, from one apartment to the next, just because I didn't want it to go to waste. I didn't even like the rice, as it was old and non-organic. It took me... a year and a half, to discard a free, half-eaten bag of poor quality rice. I made some rice pudding with it, but there was just too much. And part of me didn't want to use potentialy arsinic-sprayed ingrediants. So imagine the dire, brainstem urgest I must quell to let go of a good book that I just really am never going to use.

Knowledge is precious to me. I used to have a belife that if I just owned the knowledge I wanted to aquire, it would somehow magically make me read it and then implement it. But this is not so. In fact, it seems like the opposite is true, if I have something that I was already ambivilant about reading/doing, then having it seems to release some of the pressure to do something about that urge to, say, learn Russian, or learn to draw. I do much better if I make myself struggle a bit, make do with what I have, and then, once it get's just too irritating to deal with as I constantly have to contend with sub-par tools or lack of technique, then I get the whatever it is. More often, I simply don't do the thing in the first place, and then I'm glad I didn't get whatever book or tool or what-have you.

I've also found that having lots of information decreases the power of all of the information. Determining the importaint one for any task is effortful, so more often, I'll just settle for the first one that comes to hand. And there is kind of a limited amount of stuff that I can be acutly aware of. If I have one bookshelf of super high quality books, I can glance at it often, and quickly pick out one that is appropriate for my need, or be reminded of one that I want to read or re-read. But if I have a while bookshelf full, I kind of go numb to all of them. The good one's get lost in the shuffle, and the whole thing becomes a piece of furnature rather than a series of tools.

I guess the bottom line is, I have a very limited amount of time. That limits the amount of attention I can pay to anything. It limites the amount of time I can spend reading. Time becomes super valuble, when you really stop to think about it. Why in the world would you waste your time reading or doing something that was only ok? Except that's exactly what I'm thinking, as I keep all these "ok" books. I'm thinking, some day I'll have time, and then I'll get to them, and then I'll read them and have in my brain and level up. Except it doesn't work that way. the new information pushes out old information and the actual development of skill is less about trying on new skills every week and more about sticking with a few good one's until they become great.

This is what has been branded into my brain recently as I think about simplifying my life and removing clutter. Life is bounded and limited sevearly by time. Time is precious, non-renewable, inflexible. You cannot get more time by managing it. You can only use what you have better. And to do that, one of the main things you need to do is very simple: stop doing the things that don't matter. Stop doing the things that kind of matter, stop doing the things that definitly matter, and focuse as exclusivly as you can on doing the things that are wildly importaint. There will be some things that you have to do for phyisical upkeep, that really do not seem wildly importaint. Laundry comes to mind. But you can't go starving nakid and unwashed for very long before it starts to get pretty importaint, so I guess we should figure out a way to do the seemingly unimportaint things, in a way befitting the precious rescource they are using.

For me that means trying to turn every activity into a form of spiritual practice or devotion.

I feel like this is a quote from a poetry collection or something: "After enlightenment: the dishes."





A MORNING PRAYER WRITTEN BY ST. THERESE
(this went along with the above image I found)

O my God! I offer Thee all my actions of this day for the intentions and for the glory of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I desire to sanctify every beat of my heart, my every thought, my simplest works, by uniting them to Its infinite merits; and I wish to make reparation for my sins by casting them into the furnace of Its Merciful Love.

O my God! I ask of Thee for myself and for those whom I hold dear, the grace to fulfill perfectly Thy Holy Will, to accept for love of Thee the joys and sorrows of this passing life, so that we may one day be united together in heaven for all Eternity.
Amen.
---

Oh, here's the name of that poetry collection: "After the Ecstasy, the Laundry" I have some qualms with the writer's assertion that he is enlightened (I could do a whoooole blog post on that one. Not the first guy like that I've run into. He's had a profound spiritual experience, likely permanently life-changing, but he is to enlightenment as a zygote is to a full-grown adult. Except the zygote doesn't claim it's a full grown adult and stop growing, whereas these jokers tend to do just that.)

I’m off to see the wizard. Nadi leaf chronicals climax coming...soon. Voting results... not yet tabulated. Ellipses...excellent.

Well, I’m off to a Tom Brown Jr. course for the week. This is kind of the last chance to write one of these, and it’s really going to be short because I’m literally taking my last few bags out to the car, locking up, and driving away after this post.

I’ve been packing like crazy, and then cleaning up my boxes and such so my parents can use the basement. I got one day of KonMari tidying in, went through the whole category of clothes, and it was glorious, and didn’t really take that long. I am so looking forward to finishing that up with all the categories, now that I finally have just about all my stuff in one place. Well, except for all the books in Fairfield. Maybe I can do something about that when I get there...

In any case, lots to talk about, and I have time for none of it in detail. In brief: I’ve been tracking where I spend my time, and that has been fun, and somewhat informative, though I need to go over my time logs in more depth. I’ve been really rocking it with my morning routine, added one or two things, and it’s fantastic. Makes me feel like an absolute champ. And I’m slowly working through all my papers on extension. I’ve got one more and then I can get my teacher certification, and then at any point I can send in another teeny one that does nothing for my grades or anything else, but I will certainly do it, because I said I would. But it’s not urgent. And it will take two mornings, tops, likely only one morning.

I finally found my Nadi Leaf. Maybe. I’ve written an entire unpublished blog post about that, and the Gray zone uncertainty abut it. Again long story short: in a few weeks, the guy is going to read the translation he got from the leaf to me. It is still possible that it is real, and that it is somewhat of a cold read. We will see how he does with the family particulars, but frankly at this point I’m not expecting miracles. From him, at least. I certainly have come to understand miracles are a very real thing. Oh my yes.

OK, I’ll see you in a week likely. I didn’t receive any emails informing me that people had cast votes for the next blog post subject, but perhaps those notifications have just been turned off. If I got greater than zero votes, I will at some point soon do a blog post expanding on whatever got the most votes, but it will have to wait till I have time to do that. As it is, I’m running a half-hour past when I planned to leave.

Good luck, good love, safe travels if your on the move, and stay safe, moving or no.
Love,
I

The Logarithmic functions of despair. Voting options.

Wow, it's already Tuesday! I feel like I've been super productive the last few days, but apparently, that didn't include posting to my blog. I guess I always know I have to do this, but now I'm gathering all the other things I didn't really know about, because they are one-off things, and so my days are full of that stuff. There is so much I could talk about. I want to talk about logarithmic utility curves for working on "good day building blocks." I want to talk about Faustian deals made apprehensively with apple watches, I want to talk about the power of priming willpower with little wins. I want to talk about how awesome getting back to my original miracle morning has been, I want to talk about the valentines day experience I'm shipping to my new squeeze.

But I've got a lot of other things I need to do tonight as well, and it's already almost the time where I'm trying to turn off work and start winding down. Like, two minutes away. Tell you what, I'll just pick one, and if I missed your favorite option, send me an email or a comment and I'll elaborate on that one next post.

So, logarithmic utility curves: when I say "good day building blocks" what I mean is, there are a few things that we can do, that, if done, make a big difference in the quality of our days. Usually they are some or all of the following: exercise, enough sleep, good diet, spiritual practice. There are plenty of less common ones, and the spiritual practice is maybe a smaller category than the sleep, exercise, and diet, in terms of number of people who it's important to.

Anyway, here's my point, or theory (based on personal experience and observation): there is an initial point, where time invested, say, into the first 15 minutes of exercise, yields HUGE rewards. I feel so much better when I've gotten even just a little exercise, vs. none, that it is absolutely ridiculous not to do it. It's not extra time in my schedule, if I look at the rest of the day, because I get probably twice as much important stuff done. That is a good time investment. people are happy if they get a 10% return on stocks, and we are talking a 100%+ return.

However, there are people who get really excited about one of those categories, say exercise, since we are using that, and they want to get that double return on more time. But it's not a straight line, it's an inverse logarithmic line (like my cookie tastiness over time graph) that quickly levels off, giving negligible gains for increased time in after a certain point.

People tend to get focus locked on one thing, like sleep, or diet, or exercise, or spiritual practice, or any number of other little side avenues, and end up putting tremendous effort and time in, achieving only minimal additional benefits for their hard work and extensive time. My suggestion then, based on this theory, is, once you've reached the basic level of good returns on one of these Good Day Building Blocks (GDBB or God-bubba) you then shift your attention to getting another one up to that basic level of maximum returns on investment.

Say you're getting a nice walk for 20 minutes a day, but you're eating white bread covered in corn syrup: leave the exercise as is for a bit until you've gotten yourself onto more fruits and vegetables and whole foods. And maybe all of those are on lock, so you download f.lux to your computer and get off the phone and computer entirely an hour before you go to bed. And then maybe you add in a few minutes every day taking a walk in nature, or chatting with close friends, or dancing, or meditating. Whatever fills you up. Not all of those, just the things that make the biggest difference to you. Maybe the next thing to do is just sit down with a piece of paper and brainstorm all the things that fill you up and are GDBB's for you, and then try them out to see which ones make the biggest difference. Then, once you've got your building blocks all at basic levels, you can take your favorite and keep pushing it as much as you want.

But if you're missing one of the holy trinity: Food, Sleep, and Excercise, then you probably need to get on that. I would personally also add Silence (meditation, for me) to that list of essentials, but I don't want to be prescriptive, just encouraging: go find your GDBB's, and get yourself doing even 5 minutes of each of them. If they really are your biggest GDBB's, the results will be sufficient reason to expend the energy to keep them up and expand them to the point of diminishing returns.

Graphs!









This last one is where I got the title of this blog post from: