tags: poetry Autobiography in Five Short Chapters Portia Nelson I I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk I fall in. I am lost … I am helpless. It isn’t my fault. It takes me forever to find a way out. II I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don’t see it. I fall in again. I can’t believe I am in the same place but, it isn’t my fault.…
Last week I did a race and it made me feel pretty good. The race was the Oceanside Ironman 70.3 , a “half-Ironman” triathlon. 1 I’ve always found the breadth of areas people are capable of being passionate about so interesting. When I meet someone with a deep love for something that I feel little towards I like to try to understand the mechanics of how they actually experience that passion.…
A common piece of willpower advice for breaking bad habits is to insert a short pause in between the arising of the desire to do the thing and actually doing the thing. It’s easier to commit to the pause instead than the full not-doing-the-thing, and it works because, even though it often doesn’t feel like it in the moment, our cravings (taṇhā) are impermanent and often just sitting with them in…
Over the past 4,093 days I’ve completed 43,736 1 to-do’s. Creating my to-do list habit 11 years ago when I was deeply struggling to understand my place in the world, and then re-committing to it mid-PhD (even more strugs) a few years later was one of the primary moves that pulled me out of the downward spiral I was in and put me on the path I’m on today . Since then I’ve completed an average of…
Welcome weary traveler… This is a collection of slightly-less-than-obvious sleep advice that’s actually worked for me. I had poor sleep for my entire life until figuring out most of the below—the result of which is that I now feel that I have agency over whether or not I sleep well. Which has been life changing. The basics Before trying anything new get the basics down your room is cold, dark, and…
Suffertember VI starts tomorrow! Suffer V was a rough one for me—I failed at most of my goals. I did have a few wins though, like reaching the first jhana, successfully not taking any warm showers, and hitting some of my physical goals. In a 21 day period I went for three ultra-marathons and a triathlon, and completed 3/4. I had to pull out of the last of the four, a 50-mile ultra just outside of…
tags: poetry O Me! O Life! Walt Whitman O Me! O life! of the questions of these recurring, Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish, Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?) Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d, Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and…
tags: poetry Not Anyone Who Says Mary Oliver Not anyone who says, “I’m going to be careful and smart in matters of love,” who says, “I’m going to choose slowly,” but only those lovers who didn’t choose at all but were, as it were, chosen by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable and beautiful and possibly even unsuitable— only those know what I’m talking about in this talking about…
Amazingly, this is now the fifth year of Suffertember! Last year was the most successful yet as both Suffertember Co-Founder Westley Dang and I were living in The Archive , and almost two-thirds of the house joined us, including friends of friends like the lead guitarist of Linkin Park(!). We started off with a 6 AM run up a local hill (SF is a fantastic city for masochists) which was made only…
tags: poetry Eating Poetry Mark Strand Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry. The librarian does not believe what she sees. Her eyes are sad and she walks with her hands in her dress. The poems are gone. The light is dim. The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up. Their eyeballs roll, their blond legs burn like brush. The poor…
tags: poetry What to Remember When Waking David Whyte , The House of Belonging In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake, coming back to this life from the other more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world where everything began, there is a small opening into the new day which closes the moment you begin your plans. What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can…
tags: poetry Quatrain 36 Omar Khayyám , The Rubáiyát The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit. Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it. ~~ Alone With Everybody Charles Bukowski the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul, and the women break vases against the walls and the men drink too…
I have a healthy protein smoothie for breakfast every morning and often get asked how I make it. It’s super easy! Here are the ingredients. For each line I’ve put the ones that I use most commonly first. Base 1-2 scoops of protein powder I usually use one scoop of this and one of this or this I think plant-based protein powders are probably a bit healthier, but milk-based ones taste better, so I…
In the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster the increase in cancer incidence rates for the 600,000 inhabitants in the most contaminated areas was estimated to be between 1-5%. 1 People are justifiably still afraid of entering the exclusion zone to this day, even after the radiation levels have greatly decreased. In contrast, being enrolled in a graduate school is associated with a 500% increase in…
Continued from Book Review: Can’t Hurt Me . You are in danger of living a life so comfortable and soft that you will die without ever realizing your true potential. Repetition will callous your mind. So I sought out pain, fell in love with suffering, and eventually transformed myself from the weakest piece of shit on the planet into the hardest man God ever created, or so I tell myself. Odds are…
“It takes relentless self-discipline to schedule suffering into your day, every day, but if you do, you’ll find that at the other end of that suffering is a whole other life just waiting for you.” -David Goggins The strength of this book is its simplicity. Goggins’ magic formula for mastering yourself is to do lots of hard things to “callous your mind”, and optimally to do these things when you…
Part 1 of us1b . Most people don’t maximize their utility functions. There is a gap between the things we know are good for us and the things that we actually do. But why is this so? If utility is really so… utile, shouldn’t it be easy for us to maximize? If we get utility from things that make us happy, or give meaning or pleasure to our lives, shouldn’t we just naturally tend to drift in those…
“People will forget what you said People will forget what you did But people will never forget how you made them feel.” -Maya Angelou People often mention the importance of “voting with your dollars” or “voting with your feet” but in our increasingly connected online world there’s another way to vote: with your reviews. Have a good interaction in a normally painful place like the DMV or a UPS…
A friend asked me for tips on how to survive grad school. Rather than send her a response I decided to commodify my experience into a blog post. Enjoy! Get good at the standard self-care package: eat healthy, exercise at least a little bit every day, go out into nature often, learn how to fast, sleep well 1 , and practice gratitude. Meditate. I’m not sure I would have survived grad school without…
“Everybody should be quiet near a little stream and listen.” - Ruth Krauss I was out canooeing on a quiet lake the other day. The day was warm and the water was cheekily reflecting little blue dimples of the sky. I decided to stop paddling and just enjoy the moment. After a few minutes though a boat full of tourists on a cocktail cruise came by and I immediately felt the palpable urge to begin…
“Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with course and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: ‘Is this the condition that I feared?’ It is in times of security that the spirit should be preparing itself to deal with the difficult time; while fortune is bestowing favours on it then is the time for it to be strengthened…
“As he practiced his writing, Jijingi came to understand what Moseby had meant: writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different…