A Note To Every Friend Who Needs It

How is your little slice of this moment treating you? A lot of us could be better off right now. There is greater wellness to be found as we move forward. For some, it is out of reach, but for many it is still in sight, and we can bring it closer to all of us, together. Wherever you are, I urgently hope to meet you there with these words. Please silence your internal responses as you go through this if you can help it. Try to receive it as one whole message without critique or rebuttal. You’ve already heard all of it in some form or another, and you've seen the connections between the dots. I’m just trying to get that path firing.

It takes a lot of hard work that you haven’t really been given the opportunity to do to master the skills you want to learn and employ. That you have struggled to achieve in this area is not a condemnation of your capacity to overcome the challenges. There is a comfort in complacency with unpleasant but livable circumstances, something everyone embraces from time to time. It’s hard long work to get out of there but you can and you will eventually. You’ll cry and writhe and suffer, but no more than you do now after some adjustment, and eventually a lot less. To get there, you have to get over that hump and start hacking away at it through the tears. You are being forced to compete in a world where you didn’t get the best opportunity to train, but your opportunity is still great, and it will be for the rest of your life. You can make up for past losses right now. You have to rise and keep pushing against that urge to rot in complacency. There is salvation for all of us in the hard work of self improvement, and along with it all the maintenance which facilitates it; the cleaning, the cooking and eating, the social needs, the sleeping and moving for the sake of the body and mind, the emotional regulation.

If you can find it within yourself to get up right now and dive into any part of that cycle besides whatever part entails reading this, then stop reading this right now - you can come back later - and get up. Go.

If you can’t; if you're stuck distracting yourself from the feeling of impossibility of the work, if you're passively seeking relief or something to breathe new life into your weary body, if you have the moment to yourself but you're settled into that complacency, then try this: Set a 10 or 20 minute timer, put your phone down, and focus on your breath. Take long, deliberate draws of air and let them go gently. Silence your thoughts as best you can, especially the self-critical ones. When time’s up give yourself a break on another timer and repeat until you either get up or fall asleep. You’ll find yourself roughly in the right place in that maintenance-operation cycle based on whatever it is that your body needs strongly enough that it communicated it to you and got you up (or perhaps it fell asleep, which is just as good if that's where meditation took you).

Maybe you can't get up, and you don't have even 10 minutes to meditate. Maybe you're on a short break at work or attending to other parts of the maintenance, already following the approach that I intend meditation to lead to, engaged with your body but stuck in the grind. Many of us find ourselves always hungry, tired, or racing to the bottom, but few of us have literally no space in our lives to attempt to find peace and direction. The attention economy is no small part of our predicament; the device you're reading this on wants to kill your spirit, slowly and profitably. Ask yourself - what can I leave behind in this moment as I pass into the rest? Where can I sustainably carve out time for myself? Do I need to reach out for support to make that happen? One of the cornerstones of this practice is that you need social support, and there is someone within reach of you who is capable of providing at least a great enough portion of that support to start the cycle in motion.

It's necessary to acknowledge the individualism of this practice. Here self improvement is the primary focus, the core concern. It's important to note that this is not a moral individualism, or individualism as an end, but individualism as a means to a stable, broad, collective wellbeing. Unfortunately, that is the predicament we find ourselves in. Remember that in an emergency aboard a passenger plane, the capable must don their oxygen masks before they can reliably assist the incapable. The key thing is that many of us - though maybe not many who are reading this sort of message - have our masks on. If you're not just alive but comfortable, you have as much work to do as the most wretched among us, perhaps much more depending on your degree of comfort. A healthy culture of humans has very little room for complacency toward unkindness. Remember to treat others as you would wish to be treated. I'll see you out there at work. Keep in touch and stay true.