Tag Archives: seize challenges

How to Enjoy Life

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I’m sitting here on my deck, in the sun, with my cats, listening to the birds. It’s my birthday. I’m 45.

And I’m thinking about my life up to this point, as you do. It’s been fun.

Certainly not always, or I wouldn’t have learned as much as I have. But there have been a lot of good times.

Part of that, I think, is that I’ve had a lot of different experiences and been exposed to a lot of new things. One of the reasons that novelists often get seriously started in their 40s is that by your 40s you have a lot more to draw on, a lot more to write about.

In his book The Deeper Meaning of Liff, Douglas Adams gave us the word “pulverbatch”, meaning that list of odd jobs and experiences that a writer traditionally gives on the back flap of the book. Why was that even something he could point to and have people nod and smile in recognition? It’s because having diverse and unusual experiences makes you more creative and more interesting.

Now, I’m not a physically adventurous person. I don’t bungee jump or climb mountains. But adventure is where you find it.

I’ve been fortunate to have a series of day jobs that exposed me to interesting people, places and things. (The jobs themselves weren’t always interesting, but very few jobs are interesting all the time.)

My first career was as a freelance writer and book editor (eventually, in-house for a large publisher). I did mostly nonfiction projects, and learned about wine, travel, gardening, famous people, fishing and cooking, which are some of the most popular nonfiction topics. Except for the fishing and the famous people, I became interested in those things too, and they added to my enjoyment of life.

My next career was as a technical writer and, eventually, corporate trainer. Writing manuals and training material sounds dull, and it can be, but I got to travel to remote parts of the country, live amid beautiful mountains or natural hot springs at someone else’s expense, and visit giant hydro dams, sawmills and paper factories. I worked on revising the national manual for probation officers, and learned about the law and the people who deal with those who break it. It was fascinating.

Martin F
Life As Art / Foter

I’ll always remember standing in a sawmill in a hard hat and high-visibility vest and thinking, “So this is where a master’s degree in English gets you!”

I even got to go to Malaysia to help my contracting company bid for some work there, and spent a wonderful week eating every kind of Asian food imaginable.

You get to understand a system pretty well when you spend a couple of years documenting it and training it, and in early 2000 I took a job as a systems analyst, and eventually an IT consultant. It’s taken me to more sawmills and paper mills and forests, a coal-fired power generating plant in Australia, a fertilizer factory, treatment plants for drinking water and wastewater, and most recently behind the scenes of the city where I live.

I’ve had the chance to talk with, and work alongside, the dedicated, unsung people who keep a modern society functioning in unglamorous but indispensable ways. I’ve been places that few people get to go. (And I’ve been well paid for it.)

None of that was planned. I never sat down and made a bucket list that said “Visit a hydro dam, learn about the ins and outs of keeping city parks running, and eat sushi in Kuala Lumpur”. But just by hanging loose and taking the opportunities that came to me, I got to do all those things.

It’s made for an interesting life, so far. It’s given me a depth of background for my fiction writing that you’d be hard put to achieve through any kind of curriculum. I say this as a devoted reader: I’m glad to have learned so much that isn’t in any book and never will be.

You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting here very often lately. I used to post once a week, and now it’s been six weeks or so between posts. That’s because at the moment I’m letting myself follow my interests, rather than flogging myself to produce a bunch of content that means nothing just because I feel like I have to. (Or worse still, filling up the silence with poorly-written guest posts.)

I’m in a fiction writing phase at the moment. I think it might last a while, but I try not to predict these things.

When I have something to say about personal development, this is where I’ll say it. It’s not impossible that I’ll come back and post regularly again here in due course, but for now, enjoy the archives, take a look at the resources page if you haven’t lately, and think about this:

What is there in your life that you can look back on and think, “I’m really glad I had that experience”?

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How Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death Changed my Life

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Today I have a guest post for you from Nadia Jones. This is only the second guest post on the site, because I have very strict requirements for guest posts (so don’t worry, this isn’t going to turn into one of those blogs where you seldom hear from the owner any more).

Here’s Nadia:

About a year ago, I was experiencing ongoing periods of intense depression and anxiety. While medication certainly helped make daily life possible, the pills weren’t able to make life particularly enjoyable. There was something missing, some idea that I had not yet digested that was keeping me from overcoming this particularly dark period in my life.

Then I read Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, and I realized that there were certain things I hadn’t thought through to get me to where I wanted to be. Although reading the entire book is, in my opinion, essential, here’s exactly what Becker taught me and how it changed the way I approach life:

The fear of death (physical or symbolic) is at the heart of all fear and anger.

Becker notes in his book, “The idea of death, the fear of death, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is the mainspring of human activity—designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.”

Whether we think of death in the physical sense, or we think of the various small symbolic “deaths” that terrify us—the idea of breaking off a close relationship, losing a job, or even losing your sense of self after failure—it is our unique human awareness of things having a final end that drives our anxiety, depression, and worries.

Fully accepting death is perhaps the most important first step in fully embracing life and all it has to offer.

In response to this fear, we attempt immortality through various “hero projects”. Most hero projects are limiting.

Mike has discussed how to be a hero at length here on How to Be Amazing. Becker, too, found that pursuing one or more “hero projects,” as he called them, was central to our well-being.

The society in which we live often dictates our hero projects.

For example, acquiring wealth is a common hero project in a consumerist society like ours. Starting a family and raising children is another common hero project, though not as universal as it once was. Seeking salvation, and thus, immortality, through religion is yet another pervasive hero system.

In the end, however, Becker found that most common hero projects, even if noble in their own right, even if cherished by the culture that surrounds us, will leave us feeling empty, depressed, and angry. This idea explains the rather common phenomenon of materially successful, wealthy people who nonetheless struggle with depression.

Going inside yourself to discover your own, unique hero project is terrifying, but ultimately rewarding.

If most hero projects will ultimately leave us dissatisfied, what, then are the heroics that we should strive for to feel truly alive?

Becker uses the idea of “cosmic heroics” to explain the only viable hero system that opens us to the full possibilities of life. While Becker doesn’t specifically define this system (after all, he emphasizes time and again that any successful hero project must be individually fashioned, rather than pressed upon us by others), cosmic heroics are the striving for an ideal self that transcends the experienced self. The ideal self “…is fully in the world on its terms.”

This process, the shedding of instilled hero systems and forging one’s own hero system, requires an understanding of the awfulness of reality. It requires the courage to let go of every preconceived notion you’ve held and reexamining it.

As Becker notes, “To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.”

Ultimately, for me at least, Becker has shown that really thinking about your personal meaning of life, and acting on it, is the key to fulfillment.

On a practical level, this entails both investing your own creative energies into projects that suit your talents, while also taking seriously that which has little monetary value in our society—our relationships with others and the openness to and enjoyment of visceral, lived experience.

How to create your hero project

So how can we take Becker’s wisdom and put it into action now? Here’s what I did:

  1. Write down your beliefs. Research educated opinions that oppose these beliefs. Open yourself up to new ideas.
  2. Write down what you are good at. Write down what you enjoy. Choose items that overlap and create your very own hero project.
  3. What are you afraid of? Think about how fear of death plays into your specific fear and slowly expose yourself. Personally, I would have panic attacks while driving, so I stopped driving altogether for over six months. After realizing that I was holding onto an unshakeable (and irrational) fear of dying in a car accident, I accepted this fear, and I tackled it head on. Accept your fears. Accept death.
  4. Let’s say that your number one priority currently is your career. Make a list of neglected relationships and place these relationships at the same level as your number one priority of work. You’ll soon find that when you actually make relationships a priority, once you make it a point to put time into them, your relationships with others will be your greatest reward.

Author Bio:

This is a guest post by Nadia Jones who blogs at accredited online colleges about education, college, student, teacher, money saving, and movie related topics. You can reach her at nadia.jones5 @ gmail.com.

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How to Get Out of a Rut

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I’ve had a few times over the years when I’ve been in a rut. I seem to have to keep pulling myself out of them. (Perhaps I’m just a really bad driver.)

This is one of those times, so I thought I’d do a post – using the experience I’ve had of successfully getting out of ruts in the past – about how to get yourself out of a rut. I’m being my own audience here.

The rut I’m in

I’ll start by describing where I am, because thinking about your current situation is always a good start if you plan to change it.

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times here, my wife is in a long-drawn-out process involving hospital visits, surgeries and limited mobility. To support her, I’ve pulled back drastically on my other activities, but I’ve also found myself more tired than usual, especially since a bout of tonsillitis recently. So the weekend just gone, I spent most of the time playing a computer game. To be honest, on Sunday I didn’t even get out of my pajamas.

Now, in and of itself there’s nothing wrong with taking an occasional day or two to do nothing in particular. I think it’s a good thing, in fact, a tried-and-true stress management technique. But in my case, low energy is becoming a pattern.

I like to end the weekend feeling like I’ve achieved something more than playing three or four scenarios in Battle for Wesnoth. So what can I do?

Well, what’s helped in the past when I want to change a pattern?

1. Change when I get up and/or go to bed

I did this about a year ago after reading Stephen Aitchison’s How to Become an Advanced Early Riser (link is to my review). At the time, getting up earlier gave me the opportunity to exercise, and that in turn made a big difference to my energy and the quality of my sleep.

I’m still getting up early during the week, but I’m letting myself sleep in at the weekends because I’m tired.

What I think that is doing is allowing my blood sugar to drop, because I’m used to having breakfast at 5:30 or 6am and at the weekends I’m sometimes not getting it until three hours later than that. That leaves me without energy for the rest of the day.

So number one on my list of changes to try is to give myself a much shorter sleep-in at the weekend. The purist advice is to wake up at the same time every day regardless, and I think it’s good advice, but I also think half an hour or an hour of extra sleep is going to do me some good at the moment.

I’ve already started going to bed a bit earlier, and that’s helping too. (I never have managed to reduce my number of hours’ sleep, only to move it around.)

2. Exercise more

Exercise has several times been helpful at getting me out of a rut, because it raises my energy.

At the moment, I’ve structured my day so that I walk about 1km in each direction each working day (but that 1km involves a steep hill and over 170 stairs). This is maintaining a certain level of fitness, but it’s not challenging me or stretching me.

What is challenging is that I’ve been struggling for most of a year with a shoulder injury, which gets worse every time I try to get back to serious exercise. I suspect that this is partly because I’m not using good form.

So in the past couple of days, I’ve been picking up the pace on the walking, to the point that I feel the challenge. I also took a few minutes one morning to do 10 good-form situps. Just 10.

I feel more energetic already.

 

how to get out of a rut
Halasi Zsolt /Free Photos

 

3. Ask for help/connect

I tend not to use the otherwise excellent pattern-breaker of asking for help, partly because it’s often more effort than just carrying on. And a lot of what is taking my energy is not actually what I’m doing, but how I feel about it.

Still, a massage is going to help my shoulder and back soreness, which is affecting my sleep, so I’ve booked one. And I’ve accepted a friend’s invitation to go and play chess with him on the weekend. He’s a much better chess player than I am, and he’ll kick me all over the board, but I haven’t been out socially for a while now, and it’s time.

4. Start something new

The last couple of years I’ve observed the Christian season of Lent. This is traditionally a time of fasting (in the literal sense of dietary restriction), but I’ve reinterpreted it as a time of pattern-changing rather than just abstinence as such.

Last year I started a very simple meditation practice, and kept it going daily throughout Lent (which lasts just over six weeks). In fact, it worked so well I’ve kept it going, and I still do it most days, though I have been skipping a bit lately.

Having a “limited trial” of a new, self-supportive activity – so that you’re not committing to doing it forever, but for a period like a month or six weeks – is a great way to establish a new, positive pattern.

I’m not planning to start anything new right now, but I mention it because it’s been a good pattern-breaker for me in the past.

5. Stop something that isn’t helping

This year for Lent I’ve stopped a particular form of harmful timewasting on the Internet, which was a pattern I wanted to change. Again, the idea of giving something up for a limited period makes it, somehow, psychologically easier – and when the limited period comes to an end, if it’s working well for you you’re likely to carry it on.

It’s also a good platform to build your next success on.

6. Change the patterns around the pattern

This is the idea behind my 12 Hacks to Reduce the Amount You Eat. The pattern itself may seem too hard to change, but there are a lot of contributory patterns that make it easier to stay in your rut. If you start making small changes to those, you can gain leverage against the big pattern.

Really, the other changes I’ve mentioned above are changing the patterns around the pattern.

7. Remind yourself why you care

Motivation is a big part of pattern-changing and getting yourself out of a rut.

And here’s one of the best ways of building motivation. First, think about the benefits of changing the pattern. Be positive. Imagine vividly. Let your mind go wild.

Then think about what your future will be like if you continue as you are. Be as pessimistic as you can. Bring yourself down to earth with a bump.

Thinking about the positives first and then doing a reality check with the negatives, according to research, is more motivational and leads to greater success than either strategy alone.

Both the positives and the negatives are motivating me to break my current pattern and get out of my rut, using the strategies I know have worked before.

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