A realistic self-help book wouldn’t sound like “Easily banish your anxiety with these simple tricks!” It would sound like “Moderately improve your anxiety over a span of many years by continuously choosing to do the hard thing instead of the easy thing, and there’s no real end point—you have to keep going indefinitely if you want to keep improving.”
Allie Brosh
Why am I alive? I want to get better at the art of living, and to help you live better, too.
I believe that living well has sub-component skills which we can practice and get better at. I’m writing them down here as a reminder to myself, and also in hopes that they will be useful for you.
We can practice / get better at:
- Choosing gratitude, humor, play, tenderness, hope, service, and generosity.
- Seeing the unshakeable goodness of people.
- Choosing enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning over pleasure.
- Reflecting on death, and using this as a stimulus for cherishing the things and people in life.
- Commitment and closing doors (this leads to wholeheartedness).
- Solitude.
- Empathy and seeing others deeply.
- Creating a narrative of meaning for your life.
- Working within your zone of control.
- Feeling negative emotions and using their messages to improve your life.
- Not lying, especially to yourself.
- Writing down your fears and facing them.
- Reflecting on failures: what they taught you and what good things they enabled. Turning trauma into “cherished wounds.”
- Defining your morality and living up to it, even in private.
danscreativeoulet 