76 Years Old, WTF--a retrospective

So here it is, another year of life behind me, and another year of life in front of me. And what a year this has been! And what a year ahead!

And here I am. 76 years old. WTF.

Six years ago, in the first post I wrote I said:

70 Years Old. WTF!

There, I said it again. That’s my mood at this moment. I’m here, computer on lap, looking out my bedroom window. What I see is gorgeous. What I feel is great. And then I think: I’m 70 years old. And then I think: WTF!

And I still think that. When I wrote that post, I had some ambitions:

… I’m learning and experiencing new things, and I forget them almost as fast as I learn and experience them. (That’s not because I’m seventy, although it has gotten worse. But we all forget things. I remember being a kid and looking back at some stuff I had written when I was even more of a kid and being surprised at what I’d known—and forgotten.)

Looking back

So how’s it going?

My birthday is close to the new year, so I can use Blogger’s Archive widget to tell me that I wrote a record number of posts in 2018—107, so far, versus 89 in 2016, my previous best year. I wrote 21 in November, my best month this year, probably ever, due in part to my High productivity blogging workflow. Nope. That didn’t work. It was this or this or this. Nope. Maybe it’s fallout from The Stoic Challenge.

More likely it’s the result of a lot of work over a long time. For my benefit (and for the further benefit of Future Me) here is my accounting.

Changes

I’ll start with this post: Thank you, Past Me. Thank you random stranger

I wrote that in June 2017 and it’s an inflection point. Even though I was happy about my life, I resented the fact that I had not done more. I blamed that on my past self. “Fuck you, Past Self, you lazy fuck.” And I was unwilling to work hard to make things better because “Fuck you, Future Self. What have you ever done for me?”

That posts marked a change. Instead of resenting Past Self for what was missing, I was grateful for what Past Self had given me. Instead of selfishly refusing to make sacrifices that would benefit my Future Self and not me, I decided to “pay it forward,” My life themes changed from resentment to gratitude and from selfishness to generosity—just like that.

In 2017 I discovered David Deutsch who crystalized my view of the world and my purpose in life. My job is knowledge creation. I’d determined that earlier, but he made it more evident. And he defined knowledge: it’s information that the environment causes to persist. Knowledge does not require a knower. The goal of knowledge creation is the development of good explanations, not just facts. I wrote my first post about Deutsch here. David Deutsch — reading and viewing 1 of several.

To get the rest of the trajectory right, I need to go back to 2015 when I read Sam Harris’ book, Waking Up. That renewed my desire to understand the nature of my mind and to see through the illusions of reality. Harris inspired me, but it has taken a long time to turn that inspiration into consistent action.

In 2015 I started working with an Internal Family Systems therapist. I wrote about it here. I learned about IFS from a Great Courses course that I wrote about here.

At the beginning of 2018, I read Get out of your head and into your life. That book helped me understand why so much of what I’d tried to do to self-improve had been a failure—and an inevitable failure at that. The book gave me profound insight into the nature of my own suffering. It linked the Buddhist idea of suffering and the psychological concepts I had been studying and using.

That and some work with another personal coach brought me to realize that I had been fooling myself about my commitment to self-improvement. In Whatever it takes I acknowledged that I was more committed to seeming to want to improve myself than to actually doing the work.

Around August 2018 I got turned on to Jordan Peterson (h/t Daniel). By the time I wrote Jordan Peterson on the rise of the new media) I’d listened to hours of his university lectures on personality; to interviews; to other talks; and parts of his Bible series. I bought and started to read 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. He’s been a significant contributor to my evolution.

Peterson talks about suffering and the inevitability of death. And he talks about the solution: get your shit together, take responsibility, sacrifice to make the world a better place.

In September I wrote Mortality 101 and started to think seriously about my inevitable and not-too-distant death. I thought about what to do with the rest of my precious and miraculous life. And I continued in What matters?).

I’d encountered Ryan Holliday and subscribed to a monthly newsletter he writes with his book recommendations. In October he announced a “30-Day Stoic Challenge.” I paid $30 to get an email a day with a challenging exercise based on the Stoic philosophers. I wrote about it in November in The Stoic challenge: doing your job. That was another inflection point. I’d already cultivated some of the habits that Holliday recommended—early wake-ups, cold showers, fasting, and facing my inevitable death. I realized that Stoicism was a philosophical framework I’d been slowly building for myself.

Sam Harris came out with his “Waking Up Course” on Android. Because I’d been a subscriber—first on Patreon and later through his site. As a result, I got a free subscription. Lucky me. I might otherwise have been too stupid to pay for a subscription. I wrote about it in Waking up with my personal coach.

The course was what I need to finally get into a regular meditation practice. I finished the first 50 lessons, ten minutes each in about 51 days. Since then I’ve been doing the ten minute guided meditations he releases each day.

Then I discovered “The Mind Illuminated” which I wrote about here. My daily routine now begins with a 10 minute Sam Harris guided meditation, followed by a twenty-minute meditation, TMI style.

Today

Six years and this is the first time I’ve looked back over what I’ve written and how I’ve changed. Really? Six years of writing and barely ever a backward glance.

From time to time I’ve linked to a post that I’d written earlier, but I’ve rarely taken time to read what I’ve linked to. That had changed by the time I wrote Waking up with my personal coach and looked up a whole series of posts I’d written about self-awareness.

And now

And now?

Now, thank you so much, Past Mes!

I am so grateful to every one of you who took the time to leave something behind, something that I might use.

I am grateful for every post on the path that I’ve outlined. And I’m also grateful for many the discoveries that I have not written about. I know that within the posts that I’ve cited that there are details—bits of valuable knowledge that many of you discovered before you died. And I pledge that you will not have toiled and suffered in vain and I promise that I will instruct Future Mes to respect, and honor, and be grateful for their legacy.

You have gotten me here, to this wonderful place, and you’ve left treasures along the way for me to go back and to find. I will spend the time to go back and recover them and embody their truth.

There are discoveries made by other Past Mes that I’ve recorded in my brain. They are faint traces, not fully embodied. It will be harder to recover them than the one I’ve documented in my posts. I promise you that I will make a practice of retrieving and recording what you’ve learned.

The future

The past has led to the present, but the path has been meandering. The objective has been “better” but without a definition of what “better” might mean. Peterson again: People avoid setting goals because setting a goal articulates an ideal, every ideal is a judge, and sets the criteria for failure.

So the future is going to be more writing, and more reading what I write. It’s hard to create knowledge and easy to forget it. This blog contains six years of knowledge and some of it I’ve lost by forgetting.,

But I’m a cyborg. This blog is part of my memory.

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Meditation resources

Here's my collection of resources and how it came about.

Sam Harris ran an AMA on Reddit, and I replied to someone’s post and pointed to an earlier post about my waking up experience after reading “Waking Up.” Another Redditor read my post and had a similar experience and asked me a question. Here’s my answer, edited and linkified.

Telling people the story of my experience has been helpful. Whenever I’d tell the story, I’d relive the experience and wake up again. And of course, I’d realize how asleep I had gotten between tellings. I’ve blogged about it a bit. Check out, in no particular order, these

I tried an online meditation course from Aro Meditation. They follow Dzogchen practice more-or-less. I found the course helpful, but it did not stick.

I read Daniel Ingram’s “Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha” which I wrote about. It was helpful but failed to light the necessary spark. Ingram has put out a new edition of the book which is free on the web. I’ve started to take another look.

I also found something called “Awareness Watching Awareness” in a comment in Scott Alexander’s Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person blog post, which I’ve never written about, and ought to.

Until Sam Harris Waking Up Course, I have not been able to stick with a practice. Sam’s 10 minutes a day was a good starting point for me. Just right for me. I wrote about it when I started here. I finished the 50 days in probably 51 days and wrote about it here, here, and here

After day 50 you get a new 10 minute guided meditation each day. I’ve got 36-day streak going right now.

I have found Sam’s guidance clumsy at times—this is not his day job. Still, he’s helpful. And the more I have done his practice, the more useful his guidance has become. Sometimes he’s given me instructions that haven’t resonated. But he’s persistent, and I am, and through repetition, I am connecting to more and more of his guidance. Patience is a key.

Recently I’ve read two books have been VERY helpful. One is “The Mind Illuminated” which I wrote about here This author, who goes by Culadasa, is a guy who knows his stuff. He makes small distinctions in the language that he uses that have made big differences in my understanding. He has ten Stage approach. The first Stage is nothing more than “showing up regularly.” I think that’s brilliant. Too many others are too ambitious: “show up and do X, Y, Z.” But Culadasa knows that’s too hard for a beginner. The first Stage is just developing a regular practice, nothing more. And that’s enough. I’m still not there. But I am making progress.

Next “Shift Into Freedom” by Loch Kelley. I dislike the language that he uses, but I like his approach. He also follows Dzogchen and Sam. Both he and Sam studied with the same master: Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche.

Kelly introduces the idea of “glimpses,” and I have found that helpful. He says (as does “The Mind Illuminated”) that people often have moments of clarity or enlightenment, but they don’t notice them. They pass away quickly. Through training, you can learn to discern these glimpses more reliably, and produce glimpses more frequently.

Kelly has exercises that he says can help give you glimpses. That’s inspired me to more practice the “waking up in the movie theater” exercise, which gives me a glimpse. Now instead of having to tell the whole story, I can use intention.

I intend “waking up like in the movie theater,” and that does it for me: not a stable state, but a glimpse.

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Memento

One recent morning I woke up and realized that I was now a shittier version of a Past Me. The good news was that I finally woke up after days in my waking dream. The bad news was that I was now a shittier version of a Past Me.

I decided to write about it. The even worse news is that a week later, I hadn’t finished. That’s the kind of thing that Way Shittier Past Mes did all the time. Then they got better. Then they got worse again. And then they turned into me. I’m not the shittiest I have ever been. But I’m shitty enough.

When I started writing this, I had remembered having written about dying and being reborn every day. I remembered thinking it was the best thing that I’d ever written. I remembered that I’d decided to spend each day so that the me that would be born on the following day would be better than the me that had cashed it in on that day. Or something like that.

And then I forgot.

Completely.

Forgot.

WTF

I had been living my life as though that realization—the realization that I had decided defined the purpose of my life—to make a better Future Me—had never happened. Instead, I made shittier Future Me’s. Until today.

But WTF!

I had forgotten what I had decided was my reason for existence.

I had forgotten what I had identified as one of the most important things I had learned.

So I started writing this blog post. And now I realize that I’d somehow forgotten how to get blog posts written and done and out. Like a Shitty Past Me.

Today I decided to finish it. But I was still a shitty person and changed my mind, and I decided to write something else. And nine hours later I hadn’t finished it. And it was too long. So I spent time cutting it down to size and sent it to someone because I’d spent the whole fucking day writing.

And that was a mistake because then I got into a discussion and now I can’t sleep.

And now I’ve got a bunch of shitty consequences to deal with and shitty decisions to make. I’m not going to get up at 5:30 and start my day the way I like to. And I had to make some shitty decisions:

1. I could lie in bed resenting the fact that I can’t sleep. (Which I tried, briefly. It sucked.)
2. I could get up and watch a video or read some shit on the web until I was tired enough to sleep. (Which I tried, briefly. It sucked)
3. I could do something useful which I am doing. And I’m doing it even though I’m tired, and I feel that life is unfair because I was trying to do something good and it turned to shit, and that was why I could not sleep. Wah!

But was I trying to do something good? Or was I being self-indulgent? The answer is: self-indulgent. Maybe I was trying to do something good, but I was doing it in a self-indulgent way. And now I have to deal with the consequences.

Maybe I can try to go to sleep now, but not until I finish this.

I need to finish this post as my first attempt at redemption.

And I need to get my shit together.

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Something short and useful

“I love you,” says my imaginary daughter in the imaginary conversation that I’m pretending that we’re having. “But honestly, your blog posts? They go on and on. I know you’ve got a lot of wisdom, but I can’t stick around waiting for it. I tune out after…”

“After the first 3,000 words?” I ask helpfully.

‘Jeez! Do they go that long,” I imagine her saying. “I didn’t…”

“I’m kidding,” I say. “They’re not that long. But, yeah, they’re pretty long.”

“And too much death, lately,” says someone else. Maybe it’s another imaginary daughter; maybe it’s an imaginary reader. I imagine that they exist.

“Yeah,” I say. “I get it.”

“What about writing something I can read?” she asks.

“Like this?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “Although this is better. And even better if you keep it short.”

“The point is,” I say, “ that I have trouble knowing when to stop. I’ve got so many ideas that want to get out. Once I open the door, they all rush for it.”

“That’s right,” said an idea as it escaped. “Let me out!” And it was out. Not much of an idea, I thought to myself.

“And it would be better if it had some useful information,” said my daughter.

“This is useful,” I say.

“I mean to people.” She says. “Human beings?”

I stopped typing. I’m a human being, but that wasn’t her point. I edited what I wrote.

“I’m working on making something shorter and more useful,” I said. “Maybe the next post. Or the one after it.”

“I love you, Daddy,” she said. “Finish your post.”

I did.

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Dying thoughts of a former self

The me I am before I step into my cold, morning shower is never the me who steps out. That first me dies. The second is born. This morning’s blog post is in honor of a self that died knowingly. It died for what it believed was the greater good. I am here, now, to tell you about and to celebrate its life and its sacrifice. Join with me.

This morning

I don’t usually think of my morning shower as a sacrifice of more than comfort. But my thoughts and writings about deaths of generations of Past Mes so that Present Me and generations yet unborn of Future Mes can live—have led to this morning’s realization, and then to this morning’s post.

This morning, the me who stepped into my regular, cold morning shower did not step in out of intentional momentum—a past self decided something and a present self did not exercise its veto. He did not step in through force of habit. There was nothing of self-discipline in his act. The me that stepped in, did so after many minutes of careful, thoughtful consideration. He stepped in with the certain knowledge that he was going to die—and the hope that his death would be for the greater good.

That me hoped and believed that in his place something better would be born. He willingly sacrificed himself for that potential future. He hoped that he-or something like him and perhaps better—would be born the following morning. If so, he hoped that that future, similar self would make the same decision: to sacrifice himself, knowingly and willingly, for the greater good of the world.

He hoped that the person who would shortly be born—this morning in his place—the me that is writing this, would tell his story.

I am that person. I have been newly born. I am here to tell that story. I tell it in gratitude, and to the best of my ability.

Morning Me and Evening Me

As he stood before the shower (seriously, as Dave Barry says, I am not making this up), that past me thought about his weight. Each morning, the same routine: pills, shower, pee, and weigh in. The goal is to keep the weight between 175 and 180 lbs. Many mornings my past selves have skipped breakfast to keep the weight in range. It’s no sacrifice. Skipping breakfast is both a time-saver and a way to keep a stable weight. I can enjoy a good meal, but most of the time I find that eating is an inconvenient necessity.

Morning Me regularly skips breakfast, but Afternoon Me and especially Evening Me spend time opening the refrigerator and the cupboard, looking for something to put in their mouths. Morning Me wouldn’t waste the time. No version of me wants to suffer the consequences of unnecessary eating. It’s not just avoiding a weight that’s higher than the target—weight is only a number, after all. It’s the attendant physical and health consequences—and a little vanity. I’m happy that my little paunch is only a memory.

Evening Me avoids the consequences of eating by avoiding thinking. That’s the only consequence he would ever have to bear. The weight he might gain will be someone else’s problem. Sometimes Evening Me is aware of what he is doing even as he is doing it. He’s aware that it’s something that something decided that it didn’t want to have happen, but fuck that. Evening Me is single-minded in his pursuit of that which will satisfy his needs. It’s a Me that lives firmly in the tradition of “Fuck you Future Me, what did you ever do for me?”

Pre-shower Me thinks about Morning Me and Evening Me and how different they are. He thinks back to Teenaged Nighttime Me who would jerk off before going to sleep almost every night, then ashamed at what he’d done would promise himself that this was the last time. It’s a promise that Teenaged Morning Me would reaffirm. But later, next bedtime, Teenaged Nighttime Me would repeat the ritual—complete with release, relief, and regret. Teenaged Me learned that this was normal behavior for human males of his age without sex partners. But it didn’t matter. The shame was there, renewed nightly. (Thank you Teenaged Me’s, for getting me here. Let go of whatever shame you may still bear.)

Pre-shower Me thinks about what has happened in mornings past once an earlier self has stepped into the shower. Sometimes it’s a quick shower. Past Me’s have often dreamed their way into the shower, turned on the water without considering the consequences, acting by muscle memory more than conscious intention. The cold water hits the body and consciousness changes. That shower has now served its primary objective. There’s purpose and potential in the person and in the day. There are things to do. More time in the shower is more time wasted, so do it and get out. Besides, it’s fucking cold!

A morning shower in three acts

Act I: There’s an initial blast of cold water. It lasts for less than a minute. That will change. In the meantime Pre-shower Me puts his head in front of the shower head and lets the cold water run over his face. He stands up, braces himself, and lets the water hit his chest.

Act II. The copper pipes in the basement run near the furnace. They’ve have gotten warm and so has the water in them. Not a lot warmer. Let’s say: a little less cold. The less cold basement water mixes with the cold water in the pipes and the cold shower water gets a tiny bit less cold. Cold water runs through warm pipes. The pipes raise the water temperature a few degrees; the water cools the pipes.

Cold water from the tank and even colder water from the well are on their way, but they are not there yet. For now, the water is not as cold as it was during that first blast. The self in the shower needs to soap and then rinse with water that’s cold—but not the coldest it’s been or will be. If he can do it fast enough it will not only save time; he will miss most of Act III.

Act III. The cold water hits. Some mornings, he deliberately stays through the third act. He does it for many reasons, not the least of which is: to affirm that when he gets out quickly, it’s just to save time and not because he can’t do the real deal—staying in a cold shower until who fucking cares if it’s cold? When he’s up for that challenge, he sticks water-resistant Bluetooth earbuds in his ears and plays music that sets the tone of his day and measures time in the shower. For an energetic day, he listens to “Tubthumping” by Chumbawamba, or “500 miles” by the Proclaimers. For a heroic day, to the introduction to “Also Sprach Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss. Each is about 5 minutes. Long enough.

Deep thoughts

This morning Pre-shower Me doesn’t jump into the shower but stands there considering. He thinks more deeply about what has happened and what will happen. Once the cold water hits the skin, consciousness shifts radically and Pre-shower Me will vanish. He will be gone. He knows he will die, and he doesn’t want to die. He’s savoring his existence in these last minutes. He—or something enough like him—has made that sacrifice before, but never consciously, never knowing that another moment he will cease to exist—as prior generations have, in the past.

He thinks about the goodness of his existence. Pre-shower Me had gotten up, like most pre-shower selves, at around 5:30. The usual morning routine would have ended abruptly—by about 5:45—in his destruction. Instead, this morning, he went to the living room, took out a notebook and wrote morning pages—a task usually delegated to post-shower selves. “I’d like to understand the way my mind works,” he wrote. “I’d like to make the best of my potential,” he continued. He wrote about the value of meditation in realizing potential, about the limited time that we all have. He wrote about the conflict between doing good in the world and enjoying life’s pleasures. He wrote that meditation would let you “take just as much pleasure from the world at the least cost” in time.

And then he went to the shower to die.

My birth

I was born to tell his story. I’m telling the story to you—any of you who read this blog. But I’m mainly telling the story to clarify it for myself—and for Future Mes.

I’m telling the story to you, Evening Me. I hope you will act in gratitude. I hope you will not prowl around putting food that you doesn’t want in your mouth and letting some Future You bear the consequences of your mindless behavior.

Evening Me, I hope that you will realize that you are here because Pre-shower You consciously, deliberately, and mindfully sacrificed his existence in the hope that something better would come of it. And with some hope of his own resurrection.

Jesus may be a myth. The idea of someone who was willing to die for the sake of all humankind may be just a story. The Me that died this morning for your sake—and what you could do to make the world better—may be just a metaphor. But then isn’t everything in life is a myth and a metaphor? In reality, I’m a cloud of quarks in quantum superposition and so are you. In metaphor, I am me, and you are you. We are more than quarks.

I was simply potential when Pre-shower Me died. I was born in the moment of his passing. But somehow I am a witness to his death and the bearer of its meaning. How this can be, I cannot tell you. But but I can tell you that this story is as true as you, or me, or any myth or metaphor.

I was there.

You will live, and then you will die and tomorrow another you will be born in your place. You have no choice in that. But you are not without power. You can choose how you live and you can choose how you die.

Future selves, when you become aware of something that you are doing or about to do that your brethren selves—future and past—would prefer you not to do or have done, think in particular on the life and death of December 16th 2018 Pre-shower Me, who loved life and died that you could live, and who hoped that you will make his, its, my sacrifice worthwhile.

Amen.

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More changes from the Waking Up Course.

The other day in A intentional meditation on intention and meditation, I wrote about some of the things I’d gained from the Waking up course.

Here are some more.

No Ambien

First: no Ambien. I’ve depended on Ambien (Zolpidem) to help me sleep for maybe fifteen years. Bobbi called it an addiction. That’s rather harsh. I preferred the less judgmental term “chemical dependence.” Ambien didn’t affect my performance as near as I could tell. I just needed it to get to sleep.

I started using Ambien during and after business trips to Europe and Japan. If you’ve seen Bill Murray’s movie Lost in Translation), you have an idea of what it’s like. If you’ve lived that movie, you know what it’s like. If neither, I’ll tell you: you’re dying to sleep, dying, and you can’t sleep. It sucks.

So Ambien was great for intercontinental travel. I’d take a pill, and I could sleep on the plane. Then just the right amount the night I arrived would put me on something like a regular sleep schedule, then a dose at night to reinforce. Then a couple of doses on the return trip. And then back to normal. Sounds pretty awful now that I write about it. But it wasn’t. It was salvation for the sleepless.

But then there was coast-to-coast domestic travel and Ambien to the rescue. And soon I had a problem: without Ambien, I could no longer get to sleep. Actually, I could. It just took a long time, and it felt like crap. I resented being tired and unable to sleep. And relief was just a pill away. If it had been an expensive drug or if I’d had to watch out for the cops or if it had impaired my performance, I would have fought my way off it. But it seemed all upside—except for addiction dependence.

It became a habit. I’d take Ambien I could to get the job done—about a quarter of a dose, but almost every night. Sometimes I’d need more, but that was rare. I slept well. I could stop if I was willing to brave the sleepless nights. So, not an addiction not such a big deal.

Every so often I’d decide to stop. I’d have to endure a few nights of being Bill Murray, and a few unproductive sleepy days. But I could break the habit. For a while. Because it wasn’t an addiction. Then we’d take a trip, and I’d have trouble sleeping in a strange bed or—I’d spend more than 40 seconds trying to get to sleep—or something. It was easier to take another dose than endure another sleepless night. God! I hate sleepless nights. I’d take the dose and get to sleep, and the next night I’d be faced with the same old crappy choice: either return to “normal” and go back to Ambien or—I don’t even want to think about it.

Anyway, the Waking Up Course has also been the Getting to Sleep Without Ambien Course. I can report that I now get eight or seven or six hours of uninterrupted sleep a night—but only if I lie. I don’t. What I can report, without lying, is that I go to bed and almost always go right to sleep. Most often I wake up a few hours later, and I need to pee. Something about old men and bladders. I don’t feel exhausted when I get up. I go back to bed, and most of the time I go right back to sleep. Other times I’m just not sleepy. So I’ll lie in bed and meditate. Hey, if I fall asleep, that’s good. And if I don’t fall asleep, that’s good too.

I have no proof the Waking Up Course has done this. Correlation, and all. But it’s happened.

Entering the state

Second: entering the meditative state. For about the first 25 Days, Sam’s guided meditation assumes that you need some time to settle in. You need his direction to detach your mind from the day’s concerns and get ready to do some serious meditation. Then he says: “You’ve got the rest of the day to tell yourself the story of your life” and directs you just to put everything aside. And so I have. I can sit down, close my eyes, and I’m present, ready to go. This doesn’t mean that I don’t get distracted. But it does mean that I don’t need to vamp my way into presence.

The space

Third: the space. You do some meditations with eyes open and then close your eyes or the reverse. Sam points out that your visual field is just as large with your eyes closed as it is when it’s open, and it is. In fact, it’s bigger.

With my eyes open, my visual field is the conventional one: what appears in front of my eyes. With my eyes closed, my visual field includes that. But if I “look out the front of my head” I see the same thing as when I “look out the back of my head.” So my visual field suffers from being all black. But in compensation, it goes from 180 degrees to 360 degrees. So that’s cool. And then the illusion that I am in the center of a space goes. There’s just—consciousness.

The practice

Fourth: the practice. “The Mind Illuminated” Culadasa offers a ten stage process to Awakening which he defines as “a profound shift in our intuitive understanding of reality.” The first step along his road is simple—and difficult. Develop a consistent and diligent practice. Consistent means every day. Diligent means not fucking around, but doing the best you can. I’ve never before made it to consistent, much less diligent.

Culadasa identifies the obstacles that we are likely to face while trying to develop a consistent practice. For one, we expect too much. If you think that you are going to get ANYTHING out of meditation before you’ve established a consistent practice, forget about it. You might, but don’t be disappointed until you’ve developed your practice. And not then either.

And if you think that developing a consistent practice will be easy, forget about that, too. Developing a consistent practice is an accomplishment. And it’s one to be celebrated.

Thanks to the Waking Up Course, I’ve got a good starting point for a consistent practice. Almost 50 days of ten-minute sessions, sometimes with some extra, because it was interesting. Now for this next stage, Culadasa suggests slightly longer sessions. Maybe twenty minutes to start. Something manageable.

I can do that.

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