You’ll get the most out of this article, if you map it on yourself, on your life… Everything I write about you can find in your own life, in one form or another.
On Tuesdays I do my grocery shopping. Oftentimes I buy something chocolate, not a whole lot, a few bites I can finish before I get home. Other times I buy more…
I always know I did something really stupid within a few hours… Sugar doesn’t agree with me.
Sometimes I am knocked out for days… my mood, my energy level, my sleep, my mental sharpness all suffer.
So, here I am, Wednesday morning. It began with me not wanting to get up. Then I was so cold, my teeth were chattering. Then I didn’t feel like doing anything. Apathetic.
So I started to ponder, through the fog, and here I am two whole hours later… by this time, normally, I have finished two articles. Not today… I don’t even know if there is enough in me for one whole article… But let me try.
How you do anything is how you do everything.
The great thing about this statement, that you can pull out a little corner of someone’s life and see the whole life… just like with holograms… Don’t even try to understand if you eat sugar or drink, or eat bread… it’s too complicated for you… lol.
OK, so let me look at this breaking my diet every Tuesday thing.
I read somewhere that what you do five days a week is what you are… But it is a lie. If you are faithful five days a week, cheat on the weekends… then you are definitely a cheater.
Eat vegan five days a week, barbecued ribs on the weekends? You are an omnivore…
Painful, isn’t it?
But let’s look further into this breaking my diet for some chocolate thing…
I don’t quite see the connection yet, but if you break your five-day life for some excitement… what do you think you really do in the five days? Tolerate, behave, waiting for the special, the exciting, the different, the fancy.
And what do you think your relationship to your “normal” life is? Your partner, your children, your work? Tolerating them. Not looking at them if you can avoid it. Because they are not the one… somewhere, something is better than them.
People who love the weekend, yell out: TGIF! thank god it’s Friday… do this everywhere… and the people in their lives are taken for granted, maybe abused, like work.
Being present, being attentive, bring excellence and presence to everyday life is rare. It’s cultural, it is induced by the culture… but who suffers for it is you.
And then there are the exceptions: the high achievers, the people who get fulfillment in all of life, the people with the seven-day life.
Meng, my student from Indonesia, turned his life around when he joined Reclaim.
At the time life was about getting home and spending time with the wife and the daughter.
I knocked him conscious, thank god, and put him to work… This was about a month or two ago.
Today his life is seven-day… he is building something that he enjoys building.
I can see that being exposed to a supermarket and isles after isles of yummy looking treats seduced me trade my life for chocolate…
Bad deal.
What is the DNA capacity that allows me to choose? The capacity to see what is more important than another thing. The capacity to seeing what has lasting benefit, and what is just for the moment… and what has a downside and what doesn’t.
It sounds like everyone should have it, but obviously this is not true. Most people choose the pleasures that have a downside… and give up on their lives as a whole. They go from brief pleasure to brief pleasure with meaninglessness, blah, or even depression, unhappiness, sluggishness, loneliness in between.
I call the missing capacity hierarchy…
Obviously the DNA tree doesn’t come with annotations: I need to make up my own words for the capacities…
But this one seems to fit well. Hierarchy is like a pyramid: what is most important is on the top… lesser important things are below…
Choosing what matters, whittling down your todo list, promising less, all come from this capacity.
Also seeing that what other people think is not that important. That being smart all the time, being perfect all the time, that being special all the time is not that important, in fact it is NOT important, because it is killing you and your life.
Being able to choose consistency over campaigns… that is also this capacity.
Being able to choose the daily grind that builds something, instead of waiting for the extraordinary challenge… where you can be a hero… that is also this capacity. And it can be turned on…
If you can’t see it is missing, you have too few capacities to begin with.
PS: I am not telling you what to do, how you run your life. I am only showing you what you can’t see, what you are unwilling to see. That is my work. If your consciousness is high enough, it will do the rest of it. If it isn’t… you’ll be annoyed. Fine by me.
