Welcome to Do Your Life Well

Welcome to my corner of the Internet.   My desire is that you were drawn here for a good reason to be of benefit to yourself.

The theme is doing life well, or being your best self, or making the most of life, or whichever way the same thought can be expressed. 

The world is full of books and words written about the subject, so there is much to be said.  What I have here is a very simplified model, because I really love one pagers.

Self Mastery 

When we talk about mastery, we usually mean something like the  comprehensive expert ability, knowledge, and skill  to rule and control an art, science, subject, etc.  

Self-mastery then implies we should know ourselves and we should develop the abilities and skills to manage ourselves.

Know Yourself

Know yourself is an interesting concept with wide applications.  Surely a monkey must know something about himself when jumping from one branch to the next - has he got it in him to make it, or will he fall short?   When we cross a street we must know whether we are fast enough to make it before a car hits us, especially if we are in our nineties!

 To do life well, we need to know as much as possible about ourselves on different levels.

We need to know the potential and limitations of our bodies.  What is good for our bodies and what bad?  

We need to know and understand our psychological make-up.  We must know the how and what of our thoughts, emotions, social interaction tendencies, and how to accept these as part of our being.  We must know our values and motivations, and how they influence our lives.

We must know where we stand with regard to spirituality, or a similar concept.  Do we stick to objective empirical evidence, or do we have experiences that convince us there is more to life and the world than meets the eye.?  What are the implications for us to do our lives well?

Manage Yourself

Can you manage yourself?  One view is no, you cannot.  You are pre-programmed and your life events are laid out for you in advance, so all you are doing is going through the motions.  Another view is that you have extensive capacity to manage your life and determine how you will live.  Either way, many things are clearly outside your control, but, if there is one thing that you can control and manage, it is your mind (unless you have a serious physical or psychological disturbance).  So, whether you believe in free action, or, if it is just part of your fate that you want to manage your mind, it is something you can do.

When we talk about mind, we usually mean something like the conscious and unconscious element or complex of elements in an individual that attends, perceives, feels, remembers, thinks, imagines, desires, intends, wills and originates some actions.

Mind mastery involves removing some of the thoughts and feelings, changing some and developing new ones.  There might be limiting beliefs, for example, that must be removed or changed, and new thought patterns to be established.  The essential part is that we must be able to take control of our minds and take them out of the control of external forces - we do not want to have handles that external forces can use to manipulate and manage us.

There is an old wisdom that says what we put in our minds, is what we get around us (As within, so without).

Master Passion Systems

We each have X number of minutes to live, so why not spend those minutes doing things that have meaning to us and that we enjoy doing?  Think about seven main categories of life - personal actualisation, social relations, health, recreation, career, assets, environment - and figure out what is our view or vision in each.   What would give us a sense of accomplishment, and what sort of activities would we want to be doing in each category.  Once we have clarity about these, we can organise our lives the way we want it to be so that we can say to ourselves we are doing life well.  

CATEGORY	VISION
Personal Actualisation
Social Relations
Health
Recreation
Career
Assets
Environment

Life has its own harsh realities, complications, unexpected life changing events, and curve balls, so it does take effort to live our passions.  Over time it can be done to a large extent, if not completely.

I had the 1964 edition of Seabury's book "The Art of Selfishness."  One of the things described in the book was the use of the satisfier-annoyer balance sheet.  This involved writing down things in three columns headed satisfiers, indifferent, and annoyers  that we find satisfying, annoying, or somewhere in between.  The idea is to work on the lists to reduce annoyers and increase satisfiers.  The lists are dynamic, items can move from one list to another and new items can be added as they crop up or as you think of them.

This seems a very simple piece of advice, but over a long period of time it can help enormously to move our lives in a more satisfactory direction. 

Master Obstacles

The heading is obstacles and it is used here as a very general reference to anything that can prevent, make it difficult, or delay progress toward an objective.  Obstacles can be internal, such as fear, anger, limiting beliefs, or external, such as broken computer, client who does not pay on time, shoelace breaks.  Obstacle includes things such as frustrations, obstructions, hindrances, impediments, difficulties, hardships, handicaps, hurdles, obstructions, stumbling blocks, and the current favourite "challenges."  Obstacles range from insignificant irritations to very serious matters such as death of a loved one or natural disasters.

I love obstacles.

Obstacles roll out all the time and we will encounter them on a daily basis.  A major part of self mastery revolves around the way in which we deal with obstacles.  We can greet obstacles with a warm welcome because they offer us opportunities to show our mettle, and, even more importantly, they are magnificent material to execute our self-mastery skills.

Obstacles are different for different people, so we must learn to welcome and deal with the particular sorts of obstacles we find in our careers, homes, and environments.  There are in many cases particular procedures, methods, processes, or techniques that must be applied to overcome internal or external obstacles.  Other obstacles require creativity and inventiveness.  Some are recurring and expected, and others come suddenly and unexpected out of the blue.  All of these offer opportunities for us to make progress in self-mastery.

We talked elsewhere about seeking out passion activities that give us a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.  Linked with obstacles, it really means that with passion activities we are seeking out those kinds of obstacles we particularly like to deal with and, perhaps, they are also obstacles we are very good at dealing with.

Here are two quick examples of how I deal with some sorts of obstacles.  I have read about both in a book by Joseph J. Weed "Wisdom of the Mystic Masters."  One is to slow down to slightly below the pace of the world around you.  If I get frustrated and angry in traffic that moves too slow for my taste, I calm down and handle the obstacles much better, if I deliberately slow down for a while to drive a bit slower than the traffic around me.  The other requires some practice to learn patience.  You throw all the matches out of a box and then put them one by one back into the box.  Then you do it again, and again.  So now, when the Law of Murphy strikes, and I have to do ten things in order to be able to do the thing I actually want to do, I think of the matches and I perform the required ten prerequisites calmly, methodically, and effectively to reach the thing I originally set out to do.

Enjoy doing your life well.

Bram