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Some of my students pondered my article from yesterday and asked themselves: why am I not reading?
One found something that may be the reason billions of people don’t read: by the time they would get to reading, they are too tired. They are spent.
The priority they assign to reading is low.
Normal lives are full of stuff to do that some meme says: you must do.
Take a shower every day, for example. Many people even wash their hair every day. Read the newspaper. Every day. Do shopping when they need something, when they need it. Drive the kid to activities.
Cut coupons. Check facebook, your email, chat, watch cat videos.
Cook every meal… instead of batches is one way many of my students spend their time, instead of reading. I, instead, buy enough to make 7 meals, I cook the food, and put it in sandwich or snack bags… more the snack bags, which are about one fist, so it’s the perfect size.
This means that I don’t cook every day. I always have 10 or so meals prepared in my freezer.
Many of you will hear: these are bad things, and do a mental calculation and be proud of yourself because you don’t do one or another.
Try to listen differently. Try to listen as if i didn’t say bad, or wrong…
As if I were on your side and merely did an inventory of where your time is going.
I have had an issue with time myself. I did a lot of overnights because of that.
I did every course about time management, I even slept three hours a night for three years to be able to do what I wanted to do.
Then about ten years ago I heard a presentation and it all changed. Today I have a sound principle by which I organize my days. I still have issues… but they are temporary.
Here is the presentation I watched.
The presenter took a fish tank, and said: this is how much time you have. 24 hours a day.
Then he took big rocks, medium rocks, sands in buckets, and water in buckets.
He said he was going to put all of those into the fish tank…
All put side by side, it was obvious that he wasn’t going to be able to do it.
He put the sand in first, then the medium rocks, and when he tried to put in the big rocks… they didn’t fit. The fishtank was full.
So he took it all out, and said: let’s see if we reverse the order: can we put them all in?
It sounded ludicrous: of course not… physics is physics… no?
But he went for it anyway.
He put in the big rocks first. Then the medium rocks. They the sand. He shook the fishtank and we could see as the sand filled in spaces we could not see between the rocks. And they he poured in the water.
At the end nothing was left out…
And then he said what change my life: the big rocks are your big commitments. What you invented for yourself to live a life worth living.
The medium rocks are things imposed on you by society, family, your partners.
The sand is the things you don’t really need to do, no one would complain if you didn’t do it, but you do it anyway. And the water is the stuff you think is fun, but totally inconsequential… it is neither here or there.
Now, when I looked at my life…
…I didn’t have anything that I invented for myself to live a life worth living, or if I did… there was nothing to do, they were words.
I did have reading… reading every day before I turn the light off. I had some vague notions that my health should be a rock… and that maybe I should do something that is going to survive me, like the tree you plant, even though you know you won’t live long enough to sit in its shade.
And, or course, I had my work, the work I did for money. The activities there were my medium rocks. Going to the chiropractor, going shopping, making healthy meals.
I only thought about what the big rocks should be when I talked to people about their stuff… as a coach. I never found time to think about it as a thing to do.
My life was still always rushing about, 10 wall clocks in the house, wore my watch to bed, all signs that my life wasn’t my life. That it belonged to some invisible power that told me that I should do this, and unless I do that, life will be over.
But slowly I started to drop all that urgent stuff.
I started to take those “rules” with a grain of thought, by saying: it ain’t necessarily so.
Now, am I perfect now? No, but it would take me a lot less work to have the near-perfect life now, now that my boulders (big rocks) and medium rocks are front and center of my attention, instead of being: “I hope I’ll get to them.”
I have managed to reclaim my life. From the memes… from the voices… from other people.
There is this woman who goes to the same exercise class as me.
A few times we talked after the class, and for her it became one of those medium rocks… now we have to.
She got sick, and she emailed me that she was sick and wouldn’t be able to come to class.
Then it became: now she has to email me every week to find out how I was doing, and to report on her well-being.
This is how those midsize rocks are born. You do something, and then “commitment and consistency”, now you have to.
You don’t have to anything.
Last week she waited around while I changed clothes after the class, and said that she was going to walk me home. I said: I don’t feel like talking. It took courage. I don’t know if she took it personally… and honestly I don’t care either. I don’t want to give an hour or two a week to activities that don’t move me or my life in the direction I want it to move.
I get paid $200 or so an hour on average… and I have a captive audience…
Compare that with the same hour spent with this woman: she isn’t interested in what I teach, she doesn’t agree with anything I gave my life to… she wants to just be friends about the weather…
Hell no. No thank you. I prefer climbing the hill myself… and I prefer that no one worries about my health.
You need some clear distinctions here: does anyone worrying about you or your health ever made a difference? No… worrying doesn’t mean they will be there when you need them. No, they will continue worrying. So you get nothing.
I have a friend who doesn’t worry about me, but when I need him, he does what I need him to do to assist me. He is a friend to keep, he is a friend to invest in.
This woman: no. It’s like throwing away time… the only non-replenishable resource I have.
Yesterday I wrote an article about the process to raise your vibration so you can become a human being… and change the meaningless and empty life full of stuff to a life worth living…
I said: reading, increasing your accurate vocabulary is what is the ticket… without that you are a no-go.
Without reading your life remains puny, full of sand in the fishtank.
If you need one rock: make that reading. Organize your life around it. Have stuff that you won’t get to because you are reading.
This is not a done once and forever thing: I am still working on my life.
One of the ways I make my “sand” more like part of a rock is this: I use everything I do that is insignificant for learning. For developing skills, dexterity, insights.
Making coffee is not a mindless thing any more: it is an exercise, a skill-builder, an insight generator. Making ghee… muscletesting my supplements every day… All are now moving me in the same direction as the big rocks.
It is not exactly what you do that makes your life empty. It is what happens inside… or what doesn’t happen.
Going to an exercise class is part of my quest for a life worth living. Going to bed on time is part of my quest for a life worth living.
Doing public liver cleanses… am I doing it for you? No. I allow you to benefit from it, but I am doing it for a life worth living.
I even hired the coach that fired me after five days for a life worth living.
He is used to people hellbent on money, and I was hellbent on a life worth living. We didn’t play well together.
When you are my client: you are part of my quest for a life worth living… or not.
If you aren’t, you won’t last. If you are only about money, or sex, or your marriage, or finding out the truth… whatever, we are not a good match, because we are not traveling in the same direction.
I look at all the visitors that come to my site in search of reviews for money making programs, or maybe healing programs, or maybe programs that make you thin.
I know that I don’t want to have them as clients. Why? Because they are about some medium rock, or maybe even sand… that they don’t even have one rock. They are about fixing what they think is wrong…
But going for a life worth living is not a fixing thing… it is a building, it is a leaning in the wind, it is living by inspiration thing.
And reading, regular reading, will be needed for it.
Believe it or not, unless you re-start your life with something that causes growth, your life will remain small and busy with stuff.
PS: Yesterday’s Monday Morning Memo was the perfect thing for me to read.
One quote in it especially. “Never focus on what you’re looking for so much that you overlook the thing you actually find.”
Without this attitude, never focus that much… is the principle of ascension. Of doing the spiritual practices, the Amish Horse Training Method, the Meme Hunt, the A is A… even reading… even leaning in the wind…
If you focus too much on anything, you’ll miss everything.
When I talk about wide cone of vision, or seeing the Big Picture, I actually mean being able to do one thing but seeing everything.
It is the key to being able to live life as an experiment. To practice or learn skills while you are making coffee, while you tell someone you don’t feel like talking to them, when you muscletest your supplements, even when you read.
I would say this ability is the second most important capacity that you need… but if you can’t see because you don’t have the vocabulary, then it is putting the cart in front of the horse.
I still believe that being taken around in the world, Like Alice in Wonderland, (a book I still haven’t read) is the primary activity that unless you do it, you won’t get to a life worth living.
But without the ability to defocus, and allow the big picture to be there while you are doing things, you’ll never get context… because context needs that capacity, needs that ability.
Capacities and distinctions are intimately intertwined, and depend on each other.
Now you know why so few people have high vibration.
But unless you stop doing the inconsequential “must do” things, and allow yourself to relax into the wide cone of vision living, become a reader who reads to read… all the capacities will not take you there.
Both my brothers were born with 11 capacities open… the epigenetic shift manifestation. But one has lived a meaningless, empty life, the other managed to live at least some of his life with meaning.
I know some people who didn’t live by the right principles, and in a few years lost their vibration, and lost their capacities… and now live a narrow, “small screen” life.
Big life, a life worth living, can only happen through consciously pursue it, and making it the biggest boulder in your fishtank.
PPS: Some of the best insight come to me while I am looking for pictures for my articles.
This is what I saw today: if you are a poor reader you don’t like to read. If you have a low vocabulary, you’ll be a poor leader and you won’t like to read.
The only way to become a better reader is to do it even if it is painful.
Your TLB will scream, the voices will scream, the memes will scream… and you’ll either prevail or not.
If you become a reader, you’ll have a chance to live a life worth living. If the voices win out… you won’t. It’s really up to you. It is not how you were born, how your genes are, how your childhood was, how this and how that.
I have had two clients who started as poor readers. A poor reader can’t keep their attention on their torture device: the book. They aren’t interested because they already know that it is boring, that it is hard, and they have no experience that it’s worth going through the pain for what is available at the end of the rainbow.
People who lack curiosity
never find the end of the rainbow
or hear the chimes at midnight with a friend.
What I did that at least potentially turned them into readers is this: I suggested that they only do it for the mechanics. To train their attention. Not understanding, not fluency, not the content. The mechanics.
You think that you are supposed to be good at everything without practicing the mechanics… no matter what the area of expertise we are talking about.
I teach and exercise that can save your day, and two out of five will do it, the rest assume than knowing of the exercise will make a difference.
And how you do anything is how you do everything.
Unless you consciously practice the mechanics, you are superficial, and a poseur… You are duping people into trusting you, following you, living you, but you are empty, and your life is empty.
Unless you master the mechanics of reading, you won’t become a reader.
Avid readers started as kids… but that doesn’t mean that you cannot catch up. But just because you are older, doesn’t mean you can skip the mechanics.
So practice, and practice and practice.
Don’t want to? I get it.
If I had a way to block my site from you to visit it, I would…
this video shows the rock/pebble/sand principle of creating a life worth living.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_N_uvq41Pg
