đź“· #MundaneLife đź“·
Half of my "default breakfast." Homemade bread, butter, strawberry preserves.
🤒 Zen and the Art of Being Just a Little Bit Sick 🤒
Last week I was sick for a couple days. It wasn’t an acute, “Oh man, I am sick!” kind of sickness. More of a, “Why do I feel like this? Is this how I always feel? Why do I want to take a nap even though I never take naps? Do I always feel this lethargic? Is that a headache coming on...” It was a subtle sickness, which, in some ways, is worse than being able to look at yourself in the mirror and say, “Wow, I am sick as hell.”
For some reason, feeling physically bad seems to trigger negative thoughts and feelings that have nothing to do with the actual ailment I’m experiencing. It’s like my brain gets a signal from my body that it’s time to “feel bad” and since it can’t cough or sweat or do other things to show its distress it just starts surfacing negative self-talk to add to the mix. “You know why you feel bad? It’s because you aren’t good at your job. You know that important meeting you’ve been planning for? It’s going to go so badly. What are you even doing? You think you can be a professional writer? A professional writer wouldn’t have skipped last week’s newsletter.”
The whole experience made me think about my very basic understanding of meditation. Meditation is the ultimate practice of judgement-free noticing and awareness. There’s no such thing as a “good” or “bad” meditation session. You haven’t “failed” when you notice your mind wandering — you’ve just been presented an opportunity to practice bringing your attention back to the breath. The feelings that come up during a session are just feelings and they don’t need qualities of judgement or value attached to them. You do not have to be led around by your feelings and you don’t need to let them trigger thoughts.
Similarly, the next time I’m feeling physically unwell I want to practice not using that as a cue to feel mentally bad, too. For some reason my brain likes to use that as a signal to get in on the mix but I don’t think it has to be that way. I can experience being ill without bringing in other judgements about unrelated parts of my life, too.
Because, of course, once I started feeling better over the weekend and into this week of course everything was fine. The thing I was planning went great. I’m back into my normal routines and doing good work. The blip of illness was simply that, a blip while my body fought off some kind of minor bug — not a sign that I’m bad at everything I care about.
❗️What Has My Attention❗️
I’m running the risk of just becoming a Farnam Street shill, but I enjoyed both of these articles in the latest issue of Shane’s weekly newsletter, Brain Food: Commenting vs. making and Effort.
It’s the second half of this article by Rands that felt relevant to this audience (not the analysis of career paths for an engineer). The idea of being on a quest — appreciating the journey and not the destination — that felt like a nice reminder.
This issue of The Imperfectionist by Oliver Burkeman struck a chord. In the Internet-era the key problem isn’t finding enough good things to read, consume, or do (the needles in the proverbial haystack) but making decisions about the deluge of needles that are pretty easy to find. It made me think about this article I wrote in January of 2020 where I laid out four different approaches to dealing with an overwhelming world. Burkeman’s article is an articulate defense for what I call the “Surfer” paradigm. As someone with “Minimalist/Completionist” tendencies, it’s making me rethink how I treat some of the sources of information in my ecosystem.
Finally, there was no new Fields of Work from two weeks ago (the aforementioned sickness preempted that) but we do have a fresh episode that went up this morning. Search for “Fields of Work” in your podcast player of choice or listen to it on the website. Among other things, we discuss some major changes at my client and how to handle the completely unexpected.
đź—„ From the Archive đź—„
I’m periodically checking out old articles from my archive to see whether I still agree with what I wrote and just how much they make me cringe after a decade of personal growth as a person and a writer.
Quality Over Quantity is the Core of Simplicity (November 2009)
This is certainly evidence of the early days of my blog being very focused on the minimalism and voluntary simplicity movement. Interesting to see that this is still something I think about (struggle with?) a lot. Much of my early interest in minimalism and living simply was connected to the fact that I was very poor and couldn’t have bought anything even if I wanted to. In 2009 I was cobbling together an existence between substitute teaching and freelance writing while living in an illegal studio apartment with a roommate. Sitting here in 2021 I’m in a very different position, but still hold to the basic principles and ethos I describe in this article.
Until next time,
Sam