Life is Out Of Your Control

“the more we value things outside our control, the less control we have”

Predictability is an illusion

It is really impossible to tell whether anything that happens is good or bad.(It is really impossible to tell whether anything that happens is good or bad.)

Circle of Control

Outcomes are mostly out of our control.

Let Go – Accept you have limited control

You can and should try to direct your life towards positive outcomes but ultimately you are not in control.

Life is a series of problems to be solved

Problem and to-do’s.

You will never complete them.

You have to accept and enjoy the process.

Focus on The Inner Life

Essential to the Good Life

The inner life is the most important
	You can cnotrol this
	You need a freedom to persue mastering teh inner life
Externalisties (they cost!) don’t work in the long term
Freedom
	Freedom From
		Desire
		Work
	Freedom To
		Choose

Master The Mind

The quality of your mind dictates the quality of your life.

Everything is downstream of the mind. Your self-control, [[Beliefs]], and ability to control your moods, thoughts and emotions all impact your health, wealth and happiness – every aspect of your life.

Create an environment that encourages a quality mind, X, chemicals ([[Nutrition]], Drugs, Fitness)

Inputs, and learn how to manage your mind.

You are not your thoughts.

Emotions are choices.

X mindfulness

Only the inner life is in your control. All thoughts, emotions, experiences, and behaviours are downstream of the mind.

Be the observor and understand that you are not your thoughts.

our feelings come directly and exclusively from our thoughts. Any feelings we have in any given moment will always reflect our thinking in that moment.

thought is the sole contributor. Not lifestyle, not a spouse, not money problems, not conflicts, just thought.

positive thoughts, they will have happy feelings.

A rich inner life removes the need for a rich outer life

Optimise To Your Values

Freedom

Freedom From…self: thought, desire, suffering, negative emotion, environment: conditioning, expectation, unquestioned norms; work

Freedom To…explore the inner and outer world, learn, adventure, and stay healthy.

Simplicity

TBD

Tranquillity

TBD

Love

Joy – creating joy in yor life and in others

Balance

Enough

The Currencies of Life

Visual

Inputs > Outputs

Ultimate goal: Time + Energy + Attention (then you can do x)

Left: Fi/Money/wealth = Time/Freedom

Right:Health Body/Mind = (provides) Energy

Top: Mindfulness = (provides ability to) Attentions

Pyramid?

Health, Time, Freedom, Money

What about Attention

See 2021-05-20: Be Here How = Sensory experiences, the ultimate goal?

The Great Meal Example

You Need the Time

But You Need Money

Time

The Value of Time

“Were all the geniuses of history to focus on this single theme, they could never fully express their bafflement at the darkness of the human mind … No person hands out their money to passersby, but to how many do each of us hand out our lives! We’re tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers.” —Seneca

Your time is limited, think carefully what you are willing to exchange it for.

“The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy”

Riches are won at the cost of life.

Other than your age do you have proof of a long life?

Time is your only true possessions. (MQ: but without attention it is not enough)

You can give it away by working or chasing external things.

Or you can own it.

Attitude & Gratitude

Attitude is Optional

Rename Choose your attitute/other

Be Grateful

Acknowledge

I have more than [[What is Enough?]]

I have everything I need, and most of what I always wanted.

I am in the 1%  – globally and historically. The richest person alive 50 years ago would choose my life. 

Externalities cost time(life) & money, plus they don’t work long term. Desire leads to suffering

Be Grateful

Be Kinder

There are virtues that don’t come naturally to me that I need to [[Work]]

Being and Doing

Everything we do generally falls into these buckeyts.

There needs to be a balance.

There is a time for striving, improving, planning and in general getting things done. They come naturally to me. What I need to develop is the ability to just be. To be in the moment, to do wthings that have no purpoose beyond the activity. Reading for the enjoyment and story, not for taking notes & imporvmement. Exercise for the enjoyment, not just for the fitness.

There are times when we need to examine, plan ,improve ourselves but it should be done intentionally at certain times, not X.

Being

Living in the Present (Aka Mindfulness)

• Actively Noticing
• Being interested
• Being Aware
  

Doing

Treating the present as a means to an end

Be intentional on what you choose to do and prioritise.

Living in/For The Future

• Planning
• Working
• [[Functional Thought]] – planning, thinking, creativity

Ideally the doing and being align, aka flow.

Living in/For The Past

• Remembering
• Replaying good or bad experiences
• Refelcting – Learning from past experiences
  

Wasting

Is this a thrid category or a subcategory of Doing

Rename – Dying, Mindlessness?

• Mindless consumtion
• Distracted
• Bored (Understimulated / Oldness)
• Stressed (Overstimulated / Newness)
• Uninterested (
  

Bring & Doing

It is possible to do many of these ‘Doing’ activities while also ‘Being’, so they give you a happy ‘present’ while also improving your chances of future happiness.

Choose one thing

Stress happens when you want to go in two directions at the same time

Creating, flow, expereincing

Experience meaning in each moment  – [[Be Here Now]] is the best advice. Focus only on what you doing in the present, don’t think about other things you need to do, and don’t worry about the future or the past. Give yourself 100% to the present experience – be it reading a book, walking in the woods, or talking to someone. Empty the mind of everything else.

)

The Direct Path

visual of hedonic adaption, treadmil , work etc and how you can skip the work and consumerism parts by mindfulness and inner wellbeing

Be Here Now

Be in the moment.

The experience of presence is the only experience – There is nothing else.

Stop constantly seeking more, creating and trying to fill desires – for that place inside us that never feels complete, which we have created.

Nothing ever happened in the past, it happened in the now. Nothing will ever happen in the future. It will happen in the now

Anywhere, Anytime

You don’t need to meditate to be mindful, it applies to the dishes.

Give you complete attention

When you are eating, eat. When you are reading, read. Give total attention to what you are doing.

Presence is required to be aware of and appreciate

Every Desire is a chose Unhappiness

In any situation in life, you always have three choices: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. If you want to change it, then it is a desire. It will cause you suffering until you successfully change it. So don’t pick too many of those. Pick one big desire in your life at any given time to give yourself purpose and motivation.

Especially the absence of desire for external things. The fewer desires I can have, the more I can accept the current state of things. The more present I am, the happier and more content I will be. Most people believe that constantly getting what you want will make you happy, without realizing these are fleeting pleasure, only to be replaced by fresh desires. They are on a hedonic threadmill with no end point, high costs (in terms of health, wealth, time) and depends on many factors out of your control.

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.

In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.

As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.

“It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done,” said Lord Henry languidly. “You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse. The Grosvenor is really the only place.”

“I don’t think I shall send it anywhere,” he answered, tossing his head back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at Oxford. “No, I won’t send it anywhere.”

Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows and looked at him in amazement through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls from his heavy, opium-tainted cigarette. “Not send it anywhere? My dear fellow, why? Have you any reason? What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men quite jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion.”

“I know you will laugh at me,” he replied, “but I really can’t exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it.”

Lord Henry stretched himself out on the divan and laughed.

“Yes, I knew you would; but it is quite true, all the same.”

“Too much of yourself in it! Upon my word, Basil, I didn’t know you were so vain; and I really can’t see any resemblance between you, with your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves. Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you—well, of course you have an intellectual expression and all that. But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don’t think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful. Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks. I feel quite sure of that. He is some brainless beautiful creature who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. Don’t flatter yourself, Basil: you are not in the least like him.”

“You don’t understand me, Harry,” answered the artist. “Of course I am not like him. I know that perfectly well. Indeed, I should be sorry to look like him. You shrug your shoulders? I am telling you the truth. There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one’s fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live—undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are—my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray’s good looks—we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.”

“Dorian Gray? Is that his name?” asked Lord Henry, walking across the studio towards Basil Hallward.

“Yes, that is his name. I didn’t intend to tell it to you.”

“Oh, I can’t explain. When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one’s life. I suppose you think me awfully foolish about it?”

“Not at all,” answered Lord Henry, “not at all, my dear Basil. You seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. I never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what I am doing. When we meet—we do meet occasionally, when we dine out together, or go down to the Duke’s—we tell each other the most absurd stories with the most serious faces. My wife is very good at it—much better, in fact, than I am. She never gets confused over her dates, and I always do. But when she does find me out, she makes no row at all. I sometimes wish she would; but she merely laughs at me.”

“I hate the way you talk about your married life, Harry,” said Basil Hallward, strolling towards the door that led into the garden. “I believe that you are really a very good husband, but that you are thoroughly ashamed of your own virtues. You are an extraordinary fellow. You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose.”

“Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know,” cried Lord Henry, laughing; and the two young men went out into the garden together and ensconced themselves on a long bamboo seat that stood in the shade of a tall laurel bush. The sunlight slipped over the polished leaves. In the grass, white daisies were tremulous.

After a pause, Lord Henry pulled out his watch. “I am afraid I must be going, Basil,” he murmured, “and before I go, I insist on your answering a question I put to you some time ago.”

“What is that?” said the painter, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground.

“You know quite well.”

“I do not, Harry.”