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.
Objection 1: This doesn’t tell me anything! How do I know what has to be done? That’s the whole problem.
It’s really not the problem. Almost always you know what has to be done.
Just ask yourself what a wiser person would do, and notice that (a) you usually know, and (b) you are trying to not do that.
And that’s the real problem. The unwise part of the mind always hopes that this time, and every time, you can do something easier (and worse) than what really has to be done.
This unwise part wants you to make the phone call later, not now, which you know amounts to choosing a slightly worse future for you and the other party. It wants you to go to bed at a stupid time and live on less sleep. It wants the worst for you, or at least to deny you the best.
Objection 2: Seriously though, this advice has no content at all. It doesn’t say what to do.
Again, you know what to do, and you can just do that.
Occasionally, you need to deliberate about your response. So do that: deliberate, decide, and act accordingly. If you need to Google something, consult someone, or list pros and cons, that’s the thing to do.
Nine times out of ten you already know what to do. Your hesitation is almost never about not knowing.
Objection 3: Every time? That’s an impossible standard. How can I possibly follow this advice?
Well, you only need to follow it this time.
Follow it next time too – but worry about that next time.
Doing the right thing often causes spikes of trepidation, frustration, or discouragement, but mostly it feels like a relief. For once you’re not trying to get away with anything.
The answer to any tough moments is to follow the dictum again.
Avoiding what has to be done feels miserable. The world is against you, you’re against yourself, you know you’re creating future problems, and it feels bad.
Objection 4: Come on now, there has to be another way.
Aha! The existential problem addressed by the dictum is beginning to show.
Listen to what you’re saying: there has to be some way forward other than doing the right thing. Anything but that!
The great human curse isn’t that we are bad, but that we deny what’s true and obvious. It simply cannot be the case that I should do the thing I should do! There must be some mistake!
The mind insists that reality must be wrong. If you accept reality, then what? Well, you have to conform to reality, which means you have to change.
The dictum tells you exactly how and when.
Objection 5: I’m not uh… good enough… wise enough… I’m not… skilled enough to follow this dictum. I can’t live up to it. I’ll just be disappointing myself all the time.
The dictum doesn’t ask anything of you that you can’t give. It calibrates itself perfectly to your capabilities.
It doesn’t say “bench press 300 pounds” or “make everyone happy.” It says, “put your phone away and go to bed,” or “lace up your runners,” or “fix this mistake now so you don’t have to do it Saturday.”
All these things you can do.
Objection 6: But I’ve defied the dictum my whole life. How do I change all that?
You don’t have to. The dictum only applies to right now, which is the only time you can do anything.
Objection 7: Ok, you’re right. This is an important truth to reckon with. I will try to wrap my head around this and start Monday.
Is that doing what has to be done, when it has to be done?
Objection 8: Please leave me alone. Your advice is making me miserable.
You already know what’s making you miserable, and what to do instead.
The truth was always there, always known deep in your heart. It permeates the universe. Only the human mind can push it away.
Objection 9: Wait, is this like a spiritual thing?
Yes, exactly. You are getting a glimpse of Truth, Logos, Dharma, God. That which is everywhere present and fills all things. You can turn away from it, deny it, get mad at it, but you can’t really live without it.
The dictum, once its truth penetrates the mind, will force you to recognize your entanglement with the transcendent moral order behind everything — the mysterious, unceasing thing ever-beckoning you towards good, despite your hesitations. Meeting the unwavering truth like this is scary, but it will liberate you if you embrace it.
Objection 10: Whoa. I have some thinking to do.
Definitely. This is all very heavy. But you know what to do in the meantime, and every time.
How to live by the dictum in real life
I’m getting a bit cheeky here but I think I’ve made my point.
Living by the dictum is harder than anything, but paradoxically, nothing else creates so much ease and freedom so quickly. It exposes reality-denying habits like an x-ray machine, helping you drop them one by one as you see their absurdity.
The simplest tactic for living by the dictum is to say it to yourself a lot:
Do what has to be done, when it has to be done, and do it that way every time.
Say it when you’re driving, working, gathering laundry, scooping the litterbox. It points the way, from every moment.
Sometimes the mind rebels. It wants no part of this responsibility to recognize reality and act accordingly. It lashes out with absurd ideas: “We’re getting drive-thru on the way home,” it says. “I don’t care that a Big Mac meal is $13.99 now, and that we have leftovers in the fridge.”
The willful mind commits these acts of spite, then it feels bad and vows to change.
But by a certain point the cat’s out of the bag — the unwise part of the mind has glimpsed the Truth. All it can do is act out in spite of itself. The dictum is the answer to all of it.
I’m not good at living the dictum, but I can’t deny its necessity anymore. The only advice I have is not to treat it like a “wagon” you can fall off and get back on later. It’s not like a diet. It’s an ever-present light to see by.
You can return to it in a single moment, no matter what’s happening, with the smallest possible act.
***
When are you going to start?
Each of is putting off goals and dreams we consider essential to who we are.
We push them into the future, as though a better, more serious version of ourselves will take care of it someday.
In your heart, you know it doesn’t work like that.
You can do these things, but you have to approach them in a way that conforms to reality.
The way to pull off a big thing (for real) is to turn it into small things – sub-half-hour tasks – and start doing them immediately.
This is what One Big Win is, if you’ve never tried it.
***
I'm David, and Raptitude is a blog about getting better at being human -- things we can do to improve our lives today.
{ 2 Comments }
OMG, David – that’s the best advice you have ever given!!
David, I’ve been your reader for many years (we even had a zoom conversation once), and like several times before, I feel that you have exactly read my mind once again with this article.
I have had this inkling several times, including recently, that in difficult situations where I’m stuck and puzzling over what to do, actually the right thing to do is not shrouded in mystery, as the mind keeps saying. It’s actually quite obvious. In fact, it’s so obvious that once I see it, I hate that it’s so obvious, because I have some kind of resistance towards that answer. And usually it is that I am too lazy or too scared of doing the right thing. But it’s lame for the mind to plainly acknowledge that, so it manufactures a shroud of mystery and says, ‘oh my, what a dilemma, life is such a complicated enigma, how do I figure out what to do in this situation?’ The problem is often not that I don’t have the answer, actually it would feel almost better for that to be the case, than to acknowledge that I know the answer, it’s obvious, but I don’t like it because it is demanding some difficult effort from me.
Somehow it feels relevant to share an experience I had recently. I live in Brazil now, and I met an Irish guy who went to an ayahuasca ceremony in the evening, but didn’t like how he started feeling, and tried to escape the place by scaling the wall, and it was a whole thing. He told me, ‘I took ayahuasca, and would take it again, because I want to have more self-realization. But I didn’t like to take it at night. There were many negative energies swirling around in the dark there, I didn’t like the experience.’
Here is what I think of it. The reason that there is much about ourselves that we don’t know, and it takes psychedelics to pull it out, is because at some point we ourselves decided to hide it from consciousness. This is because there is something painful or difficult about remaining aware of it. So the mind itself puts up barriers against knowing more about itself. That’s why it’s not surprising that the process to uncover this self-knowledge is often deeply uncomfortable. If the mind could just have more self-knowledge any time it wanted, and the process was only happy and fun, like plucking a low-hanging mango, it would just do it, and we would not need these psychedelics. The reason that we don’t have that self-knowledge is because we have hidden it on the other side of a barrier of discomfort and pain.
Thank you again David for another beautiful article. Hope you are doing well. Any time you want to visit me in Brazil, you are most welcome!