Guiding principles are only good if effective under disturbance to basic order (stress, crisis, anxiety).
As a rule, don’t speak superfluously. Don’t express more than necessary. Be precise.
Excepted are the journal writings, intimate correspondences or any related consciousness streaming mediums. Yet for the remainder of daily interchange, better err on the minimal or even the silent.
When engaged about general affairs, especially by a familiar, I run a dangerous risk of transgression from constructive speech onto the rocky precipice of unconstructive complaints, however explicit or insinuated.
I rather communicate in the manner I wish others communicated to me.
Technology should serve man’s needs, not the other way round. We are in no way obliged to ever expand our nature. Man need not consume every ground-breaking innovation like malleable water the underlying basin.
Consider this arbitrary arsenal: a few-function wristwatch, a flashlight, a radio, a vinyl player, a photo camera, a phone that’s nothing but. The devices serve their function but otherwise fade out of focus. One would have to get creative to overload their use beyond intent; to acquire radical behavioral patterns.
At a relatively abandoned natural park, a tiny cell within a small hut caught my attention. Probably the janitorial storage room, we used it as refuge to pass the pouring rain.
Few items occupied the deteriorated interior: a wooden table, a bench that could double as a bed, a drip coffee maker lacking the original pot, a straw broom among other cleaning supplies, some scraps of paper, an aluminum plate and a fork.
Man doesn’t require much to exercise basic necessities and comforts.
I’ve witnessed some exceptional marvels in recent explorations:
- Moss gardens and flower beds atop highly elevated mountain peaks
- Lavishing shrubbery of foliage the size of tin cans and flower heads of anthropomorphic design
- Passing streams that come to rest in spumy cavities
- Cateracts over damp caverns enshrouded by mist
- Cobblestone passages with traits of the medieval and the Gothic among the otherwise tropical
Meditation … one of those independently trained investments that bears fruit in endless domain. Practice it anytime and anywhere, irrespective of form, circumstance, ambient noise, duration, or bodily contortion.
Cannot necessarily eliminate a toxic element from daily life. Must sometimes first reshape your entire existence. Consider thoroughly the importance of what you have in respect with what you desire.
Jazz standards bore me. And end of story. Over the Rainbow, Round Midnight, Autumn Leaves, Song For My Father, Cheese Cake, Corcovado, and even the many arrangements of Cantaloupe Island: I wish performances employed less predictable, less arranged measures. For that I appeal to Archie Shepp, Albert Aylor, Peter Brötzmann, Ornette Coleman or Coltrane’s posterior output.
I look towards the rural with increasing zeal. Something in a recent conversation with a Gaucho (native of Rio Grande do Sul) particularly inspired the thought.
Somehow I’ve remained oblivious to the prospect of cooking on vapor. Astonishing, the convenience of achieving the boiling effect without all the subsequent drainage.
More than ever do positive health habits serve in presence of energy drainers, economic calamities and swarms of paranoia.
Maintain daily exercise that challenges your heart rhythm. Maintain solid nutrition.
Attend to your offices with the standard fervor: read, write, meditate, produce, play the harmonica, pet your cat, drink herbal tea, …
Cannot derive useful metrics within a short time slice; not the biophysical, not cognitive, nor the socioeconomic. Observe time in coarse fragments.
The comparison of yesterday with today bears little consequence, more often manifest of random factors than useful hypotheses. For matters of personal development, better err on a month; for historical, at least a year. And when you believe to have adequately zoomed out, zoom out yet another notch or two.
Keep following the relentlessly unceasing upwards slope; even shrouded in mystery of where you’ll end up and when. Legs fatigued, walk faster yet, thus transmitting positive reinforcement to your mind.
Once reached the top, something fantastic tends to await. It may not project externally, but having exerted the colossal effort, you will conceive it as such.
Lay down on some boulder and close your eyes for a time. You will not care for the rigid surface nor the mounds of ants. The level of grandeur you’ve attained pays no mind to such trifles.
Evoke stimulating visuals to further elevate the fatigued spirit.
Imagine yourself on a battlefield. Or as a nomad wondering the Mongolian plains. Or a medieval knight covering vast territory to return to native lands after the Inquisitorial conquests. Or an elf inhabiting Middle Earth. Or Epicurus, Philip II, Dersu Uzala, the protagonist of your preferred adventure novel, your house cat, etc. No, not the bloody cat.
Would these yield to routine discomfort?
Don’t assimilate modernities without stark necessity. Cultivate time invariance. Anticipate warm holes.
Be willing to make due with any available means to attend to the fundamental. You can always augment the innate with more. But once habitual, eradicating the extra, the synthetic, takes far greater strength.
Do you really wish to fill your leisure time with mindless occupations? Is this how you wish to recall your existence?
There is certain harmony in the incessant dog barking and growling in rural settings.
True, it represents the canine’s sense of dominion; of apprehension. I’m met by menacing beasts in most random walks.
And yet were we to separate the context from the noise, are the sound patterns necessarily more or less pleasing than a rooster’s cock-a-doodle-doo? Or coarse and out-of-tune vocals?
It doesn’t take much to perturb biochemistry and render you melancholic:
- Vitamin D deficiency
- Neglecting the morning routine
- Synthetic nutrition overload
- Skipping walks, stretching, exercise
Better avoid the above malice.
I’ve lately travelled with all three volumes of Montaigne’s essays in one abominably thick paperback, surpassing the breadth and weight of all my electronic equipment combined; and absolutely worth the hassle.
A handful of short stories entertained in recent months: Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, Machado de Assis' Alienista, Edgar Poe’s Silence - A Fable, The Man of the Crowd and Some words with a mummy.
Questions, comments? Connect.