Raptitude.com

There’s often a short window between realizing the right thing to do and doing it, where a person goes crazy for a bit.

For example, I went temporarily mad the other day after getting home from the gym. The garbage truck had left the bin in front of my parking spot, so I had to get out and move it. I parked, unloaded my things, carried them up to my second floor unit on my wobbly quads (it was leg day), then I plopped into a chair to take a breath.

Then I remembered I had groceries in the trunk. I actually said “No!” aloud when I realized, the way you say “No!” when you drop a meatball on your pants.

I’ve made many exclamations like that, but this time, in the silence that followed, the absurdity of it struck me. Who was I saying “no” to? The groceries were still in the trunk no matter how I felt about it. I was scolding reality, like it was a dog that had misbehaved. “No, Reality! Bad! Don’t make me go down to the car again, Actual Situation!”

When you’re young, making a bucket list – things you want to do before you die — feels like you’re choosing prizes that will arrive in the mail later. I’ll take fluency in Italian, please, a 300-lb bench press, and a swim in the Nile. I’ll definitely want to drive a Ferrari on the Autobahn at some point. How about a PhD?

The most famous list like this belonged to John Goddard, who made a truly audacious one at age 15 (ride an ostrich, land a plane on an aircraft carrier, study these twelve primitive cultures, learn those five musical instruments, etc.) and then spent his entire life doing most of them. He did 109 out of 127, many of which were clusters of smaller goals:

113. Become proficient in the use of a plane, motorcycle, tractor, surfboard, rifle, pistol, canoe, microscope, football, basketball, bow and arrow, lariat and boomerang

I made my first list on an otherwise crummy day, after reading about Goddard in Chicken Soup for the Soul. I loved that you could sit down and design an incredible future like this. I made my last one in 2009, as my twenties were coming to a close, and by then I was feeling my first hints of doubt about the whole concept.

Last week I had a friend for dinner, and she convinced me to do one of her favorite activities afterward: lie on the grass in the park and look at the sky.

I was hesitant because I don’t like to lie down until nighttime, when the only goal is to end the day by losing consciousness. (My friend loves lying down for almost any reason.)

I also felt like I already know how that activity goes. Clouds drift prettily across the sky, sometimes looking like a face or a car, then turning into something else. Kind of neat but not worth making a special trip.

She insisted though, so we went, and it was the highlight of my week. I’ve been back twice since. Now I’m an evangelist for vertical sky-looking. It should be at least as popular as going to art galleries, scuba diving, or other kinds of recreational looking.

Here’s an experiment for a true daredevil.

Sit there for a three minutes, following two rules:

By “don’t do anything,” I mean don’t move, don’t fidget, don’t indulge any thoughts or daydreams. You’re allowed to breathe, and blink.

By “be content,” I mean be completely okay with your experience of doing nothing. Don’t try to change anything, and don’t get impatient with what’s happening. Be completely okay for three minutes.  

Try that now. See how long it takes before you’re dying for it to be over.

It’s oddly difficult to do nothing, and while you’re doing nothing, it’s oddly difficult to feel at ease. There’s such a strong urge to do something: look around the room, rehash a conversation, explore your incisors with your tongue, wiggle your toes, anything. When you stop doing everything and just exist, you almost feel like you’re dying.

This is a crazy thing to notice after having been alive so many years — that your existence itself is so much to bear. There’s always something wrong, even when everything’s fine. It’s as if you can only bear the present moment when you’re trying change it into something else.

This is the strange condition of the human being. It’s allergic to its natural habitat, which is the present moment. In order to cope with this allergy, it perpetually seeks things: feelings and experiences that are not yet present. It wants to always be getting the hell out of here.

When you die, you appear before a studio audience and they give you a standing ovation. The host then interviews you about your great successes and misses in life.

One thing you realize, when they review the footage, is that you didn’t really try most of the time.

You thought you had tried and failed to learn a second language, to make a million dollars, to get really fit. You made an attempt or two, but in hindsight you were not in any way determined to make it happen.

Fake trying is hard to see in real time, at least in yourself, but there are hints.

Five years ago, I signed up for a 10k race when I was in no shape to run 10k. I had months to get ready, so by race day I could easily finish in less than an hour.

There were setbacks. I injured my foot, so I couldn’t train for a while. When I was about recovered, we had a brutal heatwave, which made it hard to get enthusiastic about training. Then I had a minor medical procedure, which set me back another few weeks.

Ten days out from race day, I could barely get to 5k. At this point, running 10k without stopping was impossible. So I lowered my goal: get to the halfway point without stopping, then walk. This seemed like a sensible compromise.

On race day I felt fine. I made it to the halfway point and wasn’t dying to walk, so I kept running. By mile four I knew I could finish the race without stopping, and I did.

There was nothing special going on that day. I didn’t have a great sleep, I didn’t feel inspired. I certainly hadn’t trained well. The only difference from my training runs was that, in a race setting, with spectators and timekeepers, it felt harder than usual not to actually try.

I’m pretty sure the best answer to every problem can be encapsulated in one simple dictum.

You can use this dictum to meet all your problems, regardless of what they are, and create the best possible outcomes.

You’re not going to like it. It has different forms, but here’s one:

Do what has to be done, when it has to be done, and do it that way every time.

This is truly infuriating advice. The mind sputters and objects.

The night before you travel somewhere, order your favorite pizza, eat some of it for dinner, and seal the rest in a bag and put it in the freezer.

A week later, when you get home unexpectedly late, wiped out and ravenous, you’ll open your fridge to find only eggs, pickles, and condiments. Then, you’ll remember that your favorite pizza is right there in the freezer! 

In that moment, notice that alongside the joy of unexpected pizza, you also will feel love for – and will feel loved by — your past self.

A regular version of this is FlyLady’s recommendation that you shine your kitchen sink before you go to bed. This small, easy ritual has a disproportionate benefit on your morning. The version of you that wakes up and makes coffee next to that shiny sink will not only have a better day, but will feel respected and cared for.

It might seem like these actions are a kind of zero-sum, one-to-one exchange: you lose something now to gain something later. Your future self receives a gift, but it can only gain what your past self has given up.

I keep reading books from the 19th century and earlier, fiction and nonfiction, because I envy something about the lives of the people in them.

I don’t think I’d want to trade places. I’m too accustomed to hot showers and modern dentistry. But people back then seemed to live with a certain straightforwardness we no longer have. They could more easily just do a thing, more easily pick a course of action and see it through.

Now I think I know why: regardless of their class, those people had relatively few options in every area of life. There were fewer things they could do, fewer things they wanted to do, and fewer things to think about. Naturally, whenever they made a choice, they acted on it with more care and conviction, with relatively little to distract them from it.

I’m obsessed with the idea that a guy who wears jeans and drives a Jeep today is basically the same creature that wore animal skins and lived on hand-caught river fish 20,000 years ago.

Those beings had the same basic physical and emotional needs, but had to meet them with very few tools and amenities.

I’ve previously described my favorite illustration of this point: imagine a group of prehistoric hunter-gathers, who didn’t even have textiles yet, discovering a modern landfill. It would be an unimaginable sea of blessings: tools, materials, clothing, food, and ideas galore. The hundreds of circling seagulls alone would be a such a blessing they’d tell the story for generations. They’d build the first city there and write the great blessing-pile into their scriptures.

Modern people are accustomed to such an abundance of even better blessings that the hunter-gatherer’s great blessing-pile is actually our refuse — an embarrassing heap of dirty, relatively hard-to-use stuff that we bury in the ground.