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.
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I'm David, and Raptitude is a blog about getting better at being human -- things we can do to improve our lives today.
The ice cream example made me laugh. Even getting exactly what we wanted can turn straight into reaching for the next spoonful. Using just one inbreath as the starting point makes this feel much more approachable than setting out to “be still for twenty minutes”.