Be Like Water

Ok so I have to admit, I am in to Zen and Eastern philosophical type teachings. I'm not sure what that means, but I basically read a lot about it and aspire to be more Zen-like in my life.

Why? Because it's fucking awesome, that's why.

So I can't help but share a nugget of wisdom that I think really is powerful and yet so simple.

The phrase I'm talking about?

“Be Like Water”

Yes, the simple statement “be like water” holds so much truth that it blows my freakin' mind. I can only imagine how seemingly stupid and simple it can be on the surface. So, with pun intended, let's dive right in.

THE COOLNESS OF WATER

Take the actual substance of water, with it's simple chemical makeup of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms, and remember it's important qualities. It is a universal solvent, relatively moderate freezing and boiling points, the fact that it is necessary for life on earth and it has a comparitively low viscosity (making it flowing quickly down a river). Basically, it's good to remember that water is one pretty sweet molecule, to say the least.

Now imagine a river, it can be your favorite river if you'd like, and think of the water flowing through it. Imagine how effortlessly and smoothly it flows over rocks and through the landscape. It takes the path of least resistance through the terrain. Because water simply “is”, it follows the basic rules of gravity.

So what the hell does that have to do with anything?

AS A MINDSET

The whole concept of being like water is more about your mental head-space than anything else. Seeing as water is not rigid, neither should your mind be. Water does not resist what is in front of it and neither should humans.

Essentially, not resisting things as they are is the key idea.

The easiest example would be to take your daily commute or drive. If you have extensible experience in driving, you know that you eventually will get stuck behind Grandma or have some idiot on your ass. These occurences are inevitable, that is just the way things are. This is the situation right in front of you.

So what happens in this situation? You get mad. You are upset because the Grandma should know better than to drive so slow. Maybe the fact that old people are driving just pisses you off. The idiot behind you is clearly in the wrong, and somehow you will telepathically change his behavior by being upset. You are mad because you have a different idea of how things should be.

Basically the way things are is not compatible at all with the way things should be (at least in our heads) and that friction causes a lot of anxiety and anger. Substitute driving for an annoying neighbor, lazy co-worker, bad service at a restaurant and you can see that all the situations are fundamentally no different.

ACCEPT WHAT IS AND MOVE FORWARD

When we encounter these situations and feel the anger or anxiety, it's important to remember that it's a good time to practice acceptance. Accepting that this is the challenge presented is a simple shift in thinking that doesn't take willpower or anything special, it is just looking at Grandma in front of you without any negative emotions and moving from there.

It means you don't have to go through the arguments in your head of “how wrong this lady is” or “why old people shouldn't be driving” or “why this happens to you ever day” or whatever silly arguments you have in your head that you are right and the situation that is in front of you is wrong.

To continually have those arguments in your head is a complete waste of energy and, chances are, a generally unhealthy way to go around your short time on earth. Who wants to go around their entire life being bitter that things aren't going the way it should be according to them? Not me. I'm guessing not you either.

THEN MOVE FORWARD

So when we talk about being like water, it's not that you should just do what someone else tells you to do or somehow ignore that Granny is slow. Accept that Grandma can't find the gas pedal and find a good time to pass her. Or if you can't pass her, use the opportunity to enjoy the beautiful weather, the song on the radio, or take a few deep breaths to practice being in the moment. Don't resist the moment, take what is in front of you and make the best of it.

Many times where I am stuck behind Grandma, I have found it useful to take a second to remember that this is a great opportunity to practice patience. Or maybe it's a great time to practice focus. It really doesn't matter. All I know is that I want to spend as little time in my life being upset, anxious or angry and that seems the best way to go about it.

THE CONTINUAL PROCESS OF LEARNING

However, many times I have found myself getting extremely upset in both examples, even though I am a supposedly “enlightened” one who knows how to “be like water”. Usually it comes in the form of something I am not used to experiencing. For example, I work in retail and am used to a certain level of disrespect or general rudeness from customers and have learned to let it go and not let it affect my mental state.

But from time to time someone will come in and just really surprise me with a dickish comment or attitude. Sometimes I get upset and sometimes I remember to view this as just another lesson to practice patience and acceptance. But I am certainly not perfect and have not “mastered” being like water. That is not the point.

To be more accepting is something you practice constantly to the day you die and while you will definitely get better at it, it is useless to attempt to master it. It's way cooler to mess up and laugh at the fact that you get mad over such trivial things.

KEEP IT SIMPLE

Don't over think this whole thing. It's not meant to be taken super seriously or even call out other people on their “resistance to the moment”. That would be dumb. The whole idea here is that getting all worked up over really trivial things (like traffic) is foolish. It's not worth it to get upset over it, yet we all find ourselves doing it. To remind yourself to be like water is simply looking at things through a different paradigm, one that I have found to be much more useful. I hope you can find it enlightening as well.

Earth: A Moving Experience

I can't help but be inspired by any picture of the Earth from space.

Yes, the vivid blues and whites are no doubt beautiful, but there is just something more to it. In that beautiful intersection between art and science, I find that staring at the big blue spaceship we ride on to be a spiritual experience.

It seems so obvious to me that Earth is an inspiring little thing to look. But let's go down the list here.

Our planet is just close enough to the sun to keep us warm. Any closer and our water would boil and there goes life on planet Earth. If we were any farther away, the water would turn to ice and again, life becomes extremely difficult in these conditions.

Water is so abundant on our planet. Just look at all the blue. It's a bunch. Over two thirds of the earth's surface is covered by this rather simple molecule that makes life possible.

It's ozone layer, which you can see very distinctly from most pictures taken in low earth orbit, protects us from a great deal of the dangers that the vacuum of space is filled with.

To think that close to 7 billion people are running around, waking up, sleeping, working, crying, loving, writing, wondering, thinking and living on that little ball is unfathomable. Each human being supported by the fruits of the mothership, planet Earth.

And that's why I am so moved every time I see a picture of Earth from space.  That's why when I see it in a magazine, or a doctor's office, I stop for a second and lose myself in it.

When you know all the crazy things there are to know about the little old rock we live on, it makes it seem just a little more amazing. And then when you get to see it in all it's glory, it really hits home that we are a bunch of lucky mother fuckers to have experienced life on it.

My Experience With Time Management

Most of my friends wouldn't know this, but I work A LOT on my computer.

You see, for the past 4 months, I have been tirelessly working to make myself passive income online. That's a whole other thing that I could blab on and on about, but let's stay on track here.

You see, I spend a great deal of time online (in front of my laptop), and the idea of productivity and just general use of time has been pretty cool topic to learn about and try. I've read everything under the sun about time management and how to work efficiently, so I feel like sharing my findings.

First you should know that I love love love testing out everything in my life. I like trying every new way to organize, eat, work out, talk, and everything in between. So yeah, this is from my extensive trials of test and error.

My "insights":

• A Task Will Take As Much Time As You Plan  For It
• This is a BIG ONE. The time you set out in your head to do something, is exactly how much time it will take. If I tell you to write me a 1000 word paper about “how to grow flowers in a garder” in an hour, the odds are it will take you somewhere close to an hour. Now, if I tell you to write the same article in a half hour, it will probably take you the same time. And possibly even better quality.  
• I certainly have no stastical proof to show but I have observed it to be the truth. When I sit down in front of the computer in order to do work, oftentimes there has to be strict limits about a.)how much time I am going to spend, b.) what needs to get done and c.) what needs to be finished by the time I'm done. Sometimes I miss the mark, A LOT. Sometimes I have really crappy final products because I needed to spend more time on it. But that's just how it goes.  I can usually do a lot more work in less time than I think.  It's really just a learning thing.
•  Planning Out Every Minute of Your Day Sucks
• Yeah I did that. To be honest it wasn't that difficult. But what began to happen is that I was starting to become a robotic decider that made decisions of going out for fun based on how many leisure hours I had left for the week. This is tough because I was super-productive when I was tracking and planning my days by half hour intervals, but in the end it was killing spontaneity and brought some unexpected anxiety. It just wasn't for me.
•  There's a System for You
• There's a million and one books out there about time-management. Some of them have quirky little notepads that you keep with you, others have apps you can download to remind you of meetings and to keep track of your hours. Just know that there is no magic bullet, and you should find what works best for you. I say, try as many out as you can and put in the pieces that work, throw out the ones that don't
•  Time is Muey Importante
•  Ok duh, obvious point. So it might be more helpful to say that efficient use of time is muey importante. If you use your time efficiently (doesn't mean obsess over it), you can spend less time with more results. Just because you spend two hours in front of a computer doing research doesn't mean you were productive. A lot of time can be wasted if you are easily distracted. So yeah, time = important.  Goes without saying, but I'll say it.
• Limited Leisure Time?
• My life currently consists of very little leisure time. I don't get to hang out with friends or go to bars because I live far away all of them and choose to save money on gas (this is changing soon, yay!). But for me this leisure/social time is extremely important for my mental health, because I am a social creature. So what I've learned in this area is that things I really enjoy need to be enjoyed. Does that make sense? In other words, if I am going to go out with friends to let loose, I need to let loose. Not be in the bar talking about strategies to get more traffic to my blog. It means getting into “durrr” state and having actual fun.
• No Bigger Waste of Time than TV
•  TV sucks. Anyone who reads this should know my opinion on that. In terms of a time waster I can think of nothing superior. It's not that the actual time spent watching the TV is a waste, it's that after watching the TV, your brain is not in the productive mood. Chances are it's in the “dur” or “caveman” mode, where you are barely above chimpanzee cognition. If you want to toil away endlessly at your goals, keep watching TV. If you want to attempt to reach some crazy goals, turn that shit off.
• Change is Tough
• Love you all but I noticed that whenever I make some big changes I tend to feel certain negative feelings coming from those around me. To be completely honest it's nothing big and I don't resent it, but it's something I've observed. Whether it is saying that I am going to stick my face in my computer instead of hanging out with a buddy, time management can kind of make you seem like an uninterested dick. But shit ain't easy and you have to figure out how to start chipping away at your goals. You just have to be able to say no and figure out how to juggle a normal life with goals.
• Sometimes, You Just Have to Quit
•  There are some things I hate admitting and one of them is that “I can't do every single thing I want to do, at least not all at the same time”. It's just not possible to do everything you want to do at the same time.. You have a finite time in which to accomplish goals. Sometimes you just have to decide which are more important, and narrow down your focus to those goals only. It sucks to quit something, but at the same time you have to be able to use as much mental energy on as few tasks as possible.

There's really a million and one more insightful and cool things I've learned about managing my time. I still am not a great time manager and I could definitely be more productive doing work, but I have come a long way, BELIEVE ME. Where I'm at is a win. No doubt about it.

Letting Go of TV

Watching TV pretty much blows. It's a waste of fucking time. It's worse than masturbation (in terms of being productive and worthwhile).

I can't tell you how much I hate the fact that if I find a TV on, I am attracted to it's shiny objects and offers of freedom from thought, like a pause button on life.

In terms of slavery, it is the perfect slaveholder. It comforts us. It distracts us. It tells us how to think, what to do. What to buy. It keeps our mind off of “serious things” and critical thought.

On the surface, I would argue that these aren't inherently bad. But just like sobering up from alcohol or going to rehab for drug abuse, time away from the “fix” can begin to feel like a dream and the time under the influence is reality.

I guess if you want to use a movie as a metaphor to this, we could use Inception as a great example. Leonardo DiCaprio's character was between the dream state and reality so often that he had a hard time knowing which is which. Suddenly, you are more comfortable in that world which is not real, an illusory place that (at least for the moment) take cares of your worries and problems.  Reality kind of sucks after that.

I really hate writing about shit like this but I can't help but see a generation of human beings who's lives have been spent living on the couch, instead of spent creating and bettering others' lives.

It'd be a damn shame.

Why Do We Do What We Do?

Someone recently asked me: "Why do you get out of bed every day?"


What a powerful ass question! (I didn't really have a good answer)


I mean seriously, why the hell do we do what we do everyday?


Why do we go to low wage jobs to rent apartments to hold our flat screen TVs to stimulate our life away to the boobtube?  Or maybe you are more enlightened than that or whatever, but still, why do you do that?


I can't seem to think of a good answer.


One good answer is survival.  You are genetically pre-disposed to "surviving" and spreading your genes.  So everything else you do could very well be a rationalization of that underlying purpose.


Sounds pretty fucking depressing.


I guess it kind of goes into the whole "why are we here" debate that brings religion and science and the big bang theory to the table.  But let's avoid these for the moment.


What if we just exist for the beauty of existence sake?


Deep shit, right?


Life is like a butterfly in that one parable.  You know, the one where a beautiful butterfly lands on your hand. Either you can enjoy the moment for what it is, or you can try to keep the butterfly as a trophy, which leads to the butterfly flying away.


That really seems to be all it is.


We humans are silly in the sense that we apply meaning to everything, but it is through a human paradigm of things.  So the idea of "purpose" is deeply ingrained into our idea of why we exist.  We exist, so we must have a purpose.


It's a great idea but doesn't seem compatible with the universe we occupy.  Look at how the universe and our earth was created, it seems that destruction and ever-fleeting beauty is the ubiquitous theme.



Everything is fleeting.  Everything ends up dissolving.  Every human ends up dying.


So it would make sense that appreciation for existence is what makes us get out of bed every day.  Most people probably would reject this as a truth, but I have a crazy theory that some people are very unconscious to it and just have yet to realize.  Maybe they will realize on their deathbeds, maybe not.


Or maybe I'm wrong.  Who knows.