Thirty-seven reasons for gratitude:
People to cherish
😈 Territorial Best Girl |😇 The cool chic ambigous looking ‘teller-of-truth’ neuroscientist|🍺Egyptian Fratboy |🇫🇷 “M’baku”, brother from another mother who is from France | 🎭The Mysterious Honduran Madrista | 🐐 Big Kev |👨👩👦👦 My Family | 💯Work Mentor turned Friend | 🇮🇩The even quieter than me Indonesian |✝️ Mrs. S.B., Who I met at a Club |🍷 The Bachata Instructor, Terrorize of Bartenders & Hotel Connoisseur |💃🏻Baby B, the badass dancer | 🎇 The kiddos who are like Oceans 11 |💎Beautiful Gem of a Person
Things to enjoy
The color purple | Astronomy | Quantum Physics | Sex | Rain | Snow | Miami | Washington, DC | Italy | Bethesda, MD | Liberalism | Buddhism | Dance (breakin’) | Graffiti |Anime | Walking on the Trail | Hip-Hop | “EDM”| Futbol| Reading interesting books | Delicious Food | Liverpool FC
Do you love yourself? Do I love myself? Do I think I have anything of value to give this world? Do you know what you’re good at? It’s interesting how much we know what we’re not good and what we don’t like. Yet very few of us can describe our true strengths and preferences in nearly as much detail or as much conviction (note: There is a subtle but very clear difference between doing this and boasting/bragging).
The genesis of this #37 gimmick was a couple of weeks ago. Nothing happened to me, I’m fine! Thankfully no tragedy, or no existential crisis. Simply I was in a bit of a myopic funk. It happens. Of course logically, you live in the capital city of an advanced economy, in one of the more affluent suburbs in the world. And you are in good physical health. So logically things are ok, but when that spiral takes a hold it doesn’t feel like things are ok. And remember this — no matter what anyone will tell you, emotions and feelings will always override logic and facts.
The other part of this was about gratitude and self-acceptance. Because when you’re down in poor spirits, we tend to be even more self-critical than we are. So the idea was to celebrate life through my feelings, thoughts, and interests. In one of my recent entries, I spoke about how you should be able to walk around the world with ease. But the prerequisite to that is being at ease with yourself. Am I always? Maybe we need to remind ourselves occasionally that we’re awesome too. See there are two types of fatigues that turn into huge boulders that we carry around like a modern day Atlas — like literally physically exhaust us — the two being self-judgement fatigue and persona fatigue. I’m going to say it — I’m weird, eccentric, and a rather strange guy. But it’s like a friend recently told me, just be your unique self. I hate that banal milquetoast cliche, “just be yourself”, it’s the absolute worst (that, and “good things come to those who wait” and “opposites attract” (no they don’t!!!!) and “don’t judge a book by it’s cover”…🤦🏾♂️) . I just interpret it a be the best unique optimum you, not to really be yourself. Sometimes it’s better to be the hipster cafe shop at the corner, than to be Starbucks. Of course being Starbucks is ok if it comes naturally, but if not we get worn out by that that persona fatigue. If we are putting on a front, maybe we are broadly accepted, like vanilla ice-cream, but we miss out on the rich, deep connections. This is something I’m working to get better with.
So in this last entry, I want to share some takeaways. Things I’ve learned or remembered writing this past month. Things I want to tell myself. Things I want to tell you. Things I want to tell the world. Things I want to imprint into my psyche. Observations. Self-goals. This is heavy on mindset, and is written in a streaming thoughts style. Warning: It’s long.
- Do what you want. I wrote about fucking rain and color purple. My list. My life. You have a list too I’m sure. And a life. We should own our lives, and live our own movie.
- The brain is trained to seek certain moods. Negativity can be self-reinforcing. This is scary because of the spiral, but it also means we can do the opposite and train positivity.
- You can talk about anything in an animated interesting way. Perfect example is the Egyptian Fratboy.
4. Don’t argue for your own limitations. Leave that to others (who you shouldn’t pay too much attention to).
5. Be music. I really, really, really like the type of music that I’m into. It’s been extremely rewarding selecting soundtracks to accompany the #37 entries — which by the way none of them have been random. I was thinking just now that music has a lesson embedded in it. See the music doesn’t care if anyone’s listening to it, it just bumps even if nobody is twirling around on the dancefloor. But also when everyone is gettin’ down…still not a stutter or doubt. Like a song doesn’t spontaneously change itself because of anybody’s particular reaction to it. It’s still bumpin. It’s doing what’s its always been doing. Be music: express yourself, tell your story as you want it. If people don’t like it, great, if they do, great. Either way the song is the song.
6. Learn different viewpoints, get out of your echo chamber. Not to become a better arguer, but to really know, learn and understand a different perspective (note: this doesn’t mean agree or adopt those perspectives).
7. My male friends are pretty much almost all extroverts. Loud, dominating, commanding, funny, life of the party type. To be honest often it can make me wonder if I’m invisible, but I’ve learned to just roll with it because I am who I am — an introspective person. And to be fair — see there’s usually there’s the good side — there’s less pressure on you to entertain and babysit everyone.
8. All you have is your experience, ability, and what you’ve learned. If you think about it, none of that can be taken away. The corollary to this is that no one can actually approve or disprove of you. Why? Because they don’t know you. For someone to approve or disapprove, they should have all the information.
9. Self-esteem is not what we think of ourselves. It’s what we think other people think of us.
10. It’s ironic that as an introvert, the happiest, funnest times in my life have been when I’ve been around a large group of friends laughing and enjoying each others company.
11. Social interactions are about joking around, talking practical stuff, and exploring deep philosophical thoughts. All are good. My reflections had elements of all three. My friendships with people have elements of all three, some bring more of the philosophical, some more of the joking around. But I value all three.
12. A significant amount of pain is just not being ok with pain. The pain is first arrow. The second arrow (suffering) is often self-inflicted. When we stop resisting difficulties, we can instead actually use them as an opportunity to become non-resistant.
13. We talk way too much about people/things we don’t like and give people/things we don’t like way too much energy.
14. Don’t underestimate the value of being a good friend.
15. If there is one primary trait that every, single friend I wrote about has, it’s “non-judgmental”. At least non-judgemental to me, which is much appreciated.
16. If there’s one thing that none of the friends I wrote about has, it’s flakiness. I am very flake averse, one of the few ways to easily piss me off is to flake :)
17. It’s ok to hold paradoxical paradigms. The classic one which is always a tension I’m holding is self-acceptance vs self-improvement. The idea of being enough compared to being your best self. On this I think self-acceptance is about dropping group think. Another one realizing is realizing life is damn hard vs. also assuming the world is good and we don’t have to make it more difficult than it is. This is related to point #6 earlier, believe a critical mind can sometimes hold what seems to be two conflicting thoughts.
18. I’m thankful for the people in my life. I swear initially, I thought I’d only write about like four people. And it started getting harder to leave people out. There are a handful of people I’ve become closer friends with only recently, who I would definitely write about if I had to do this again in a few weeks.
19. It’s funny how publicly announcing that I was doing this added to the accountability. A good example of positive pressure at work.
20. It’s easy to get in a flow state when you’re being authentic or engaging in something that resonates with you. Not one of the entries I wrote was difficult. The sentiments flowed out effortlessly.
21. Who has been reading? Honestly not like a million people. But that’s ok. Truth is most people probably don’t give a fuck about me, you, or any one particular individual. Thy are living the movie of “me”. In reality most of us are just taxi driver #44, not 007. But we all live our lives as if we’re Kim Kardashian, and everyone is watching our every single move. We are over the top narcissists, when the truth is “nobody cares!”. Sounds dark, but it’s actually liberating. Now we don’t have that pressure. We should welcome this because now we can just be.
22. Appreciate people’s individuality. Writing about people made me appreciate how different they are. Quirks that they themselves may see as flaws, I actually find endearing. Someone felt they are “too direct”. Someone felt they are too “geeky”. But those were precisely the things about the people that I found endearing. I wonder if the same is true in reverse, if things I “hate myself” for are actually traits that others may like.
23. Being authentic is the comforting blanket around your vulnerability. There were times I thought I was too personal, and I had to balance individual’s privacy with telling an accurate & true story. But it was a hard feeling to what it was like writing truth.
24. Self-awareness is where it’s at. This has all been one gigantic exercise in becoming more self-aware.
25. Forgive or forget even if just for you. The more people we forgive, the easier we’ll forgive ourselves too. Resentment, grudges, hate doesn’t fix anything. It’s just self-abuse. It’s wasting our time being tortured even more.
26. Reality is relative. Science proves it. There is no absolute reality — even in quantum physics. As I’d written in my quantum mechanics entry, it’s literally scientifically proven that all realities exist simultaneously, and we see what we look for:
27. Self-Expression is it’s own reward. I can honestly say that even if it’s zero people that read this, it was still worth it.
28. Embrace contrast. How would we want our lives to be if we were forced to watch them as a movie for eternity? A movie without up and downs is not as epic. That’d be a boring movie.
29. Have hobbies that are regenerative, and that speak to you. Not escapist ones. Like most people wake up, zone out all day, go home, eat shitty food….we are basically constantly seeking to escape our very own existence. Taken to it’s logical extreme, this is like living in a hell realm on earth.
30. I’m the opposite personality in writing, than I am verbally 😆. I’m verbose, and I can go on and on and on when I’m writing, I think I discovered something about myself. My texting habits were a hint, I’ve already been “told” that I text real wordy by a certain truth-teller I wrote about.
31. Once you commit, you will be surprised by how much will pop-up. I decided I was all in on writing without figuring out the details, or even exactly what.
32. Smell the roses. I realized that writing about the trail, snow, rain. I Before I would wonder whether I was not happy enough or sad enough when I should be. But it’s ok because it’s balanced by how I take pleasure in mundane ordinary stuff like ironing. It’s not always the pot of gold, the roses on the way there are pretty pleasant too.
33. Lean into your fears, big and small. I got fairly personal on some of these, and it could be a little scary sometimes. But there’s something magical about how willpower can shine through the scarcity (will I lose friends or approval?), mental static (paralysis of analysis), and false limitations (my story won’t be interesting enough) that we put on ourselves.
34. You should go full nerd on your hobbies, whatever those are. The reason I haven’t watched many shows is because I watch anime. And I like to read. Don’t do things you don’t like to do or you’ll start to resent life, and the people you’re doing those things to impress. And they’ll resent you back. I have a friend who is into Bridge. I have another who is into Indian calligraphy. etc. Do you.
35. Do some crazy shit. Enjoy the crazy shit in your life. Life is short. YOLO. Provided you’re safe, enjoy the crazy.
36. Advice I would tell my 27 year old self: Absolutely put all your eggs in one basket. Ignore the conventional advice. Do something and change course. While you’re doing it you’re loving it. Don’t keep all doors open. PICK ONE. If it’s the wrong one door walk out, go to the other door.
37. Smile. As often, constantly, and frequently as you can on the inside. Remind yourself on the outside sometimes too!
“Keep smiling and one day life will get tired of upsetting you.”
“Smiling has always been easier than explaining why you are sad.”
“Life is like a mirror. It will smile at you if you smile at it”
Street Art of the Day — Just Smile (Kobe, Japan)
