I recently ran an event for Daily Reminders Premium 🔖 Subscribers—it was our monthly group call—and there was a bit of a theme to the questions that came in beforehand.
It was all around the need to get stuff done.
- One person was facing a backlog of emails and didn't know where to start
- Another attendee wanted to be a bit more organised in their home life, and get stuck into their priorities list, without procrastinating
- One self-aware subscriber—determined to slow down—even asked for help about how to avoid turning ‘not having a project’ into a big project!
😆
And look, none of these are ‘wrong’ – they're just a part of operating in the human mind-created society that you live in (wherever that might be).
And it's important to see that:
Again, this is not to deny the rules and expectations, it’s more to see that they’re not natural; they’re not an inherent part of life itself.
Life doesn’t come with a rule book.
There was a great article by Caitlin Johnstone that caught my attention recently, where she speaks to this issue, succinctly, reminding us that:
“Life isn’t about racking up a bunch of accomplishments or hitting certain milestones, it’s about living. Literally physically being alive, and making sure you fully live it.”
Yes, there are deadlines—some of them job-related, granted—but how many of them are actually self-imposed, because we feel like there are things we ‘should’ (🚩) be doing, or things we should have, or ways we should be?
How much are we driven by the thought/feeling construct of guilt?
The article delivers a rousing wake up call, as it goes on:
“Only humans are crazy enough to believe life is going wrong even when they’ve got a beating heart, a full belly, and no physical threats in the immediate vicinity. No frog is sitting there worrying about its worth as a frog. No eagle is flooding its body with stress hormones because it hasn’t accomplished enough in life. They get their food and they relax. That’s their whole day.”
Worth remembering that we’re part of that exact same system – we’ve just massively complicated it all, adding in consumerism, and capitalism, and no doubt a whole bunch of other ‘isms’ I can’t be arsed looking up.
And we become slaves, not to the system itself (not actually a thing we get to experience), but to how our minds respond to all that (because we live in the feeling of a thought-created perceptual reality):
“All your mind can do is make stuff up about what a life well-lived looks like … [it] thinks it’s driving this life, but it’s actually just a loud and bratty passenger.”
Preach it, sister! 😍
“When you stop listening to the babbling mental monologue and the labeling, dividing mind which thinks it knows what everything is, you start seeing everything for the first time … That’s what living is really about. It’s about truly showing up for your one precious life. Not the story of your life. Not other people’s ideas about your life. Not your arguments with life or your assumptions about what it should look like. Your actual life, as it’s actually appearing, in the here and now, from moment to moment.”
And I have to stop now, or I’ll basically just quote the entire damn piece – it’s so on the nose.
You see Caitlin—like me, each day we get together here at Daily Reminders Central—is imploring you to wake up to the True Nature of your experience, pay a little less attention to the mental commentary, and a little more attention to where life wants to take you.
Hmm, how could we sum up this world-view, I wonder?
Oh! I know.
Think less. Live more.
😘
Giles
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Related
Caitlin Johnstone
Read the full article (or listen to it) on Caitlin’s website