The human animal, like others, is adapted to a certain amount of struggle for life, and when by means of great wealth homo sapiens can gratify all his whims without effort, the mere absence of effort from his life removes an essential ingredient of happiness. The man who acquires easily things for which he feels only a very moderate desire concludes that the attainment of desire does not bring happiness. If he is of a philosophic disposition, he concludes that human life is essentially wretched, since the man who has all he wants is still unhappy. He forgets that to be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness. —Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
At the end of this video, Jason Silva asks a great question: Why shouldn’t we turn our lives into a work of art?
As he says:
I can decide that I’m going to see the world through rose-colored lenses. I’m going to be optimistic. I’m going to look for the beautiful in every possible experience.
That INTENTION, that agency, coupled with action…with editorial discernment…it creates a self-amplifying feedback loop. In other words, the INTENTION to be optimistic makes me stumble upon all these things that make me feel more optimistic and so on and so forth.
But that requires a boldness of character.
Yes, we all view the world through our own particular lens–and the lens through which we view the world has an enormous effect on what we see. Once we recognize that what we’re seeing is not “reality,” but a limited facsimile thereof, we can alter our perception. But wishing it or wanting it to happen won’t make it so.
After I finished clearing out my garage three weekends ago, the path ahead (my path, that is) suddenly became so much clearer.
The garage clearing was the culmination of a purging and cleaning process I started at the beginning of May. I went through every room and every closet or cupboard in my apartment, getting rid of things I thought I’d still be holding onto when I died, things I’d never, ever considered letting go of before. A few times I woke up in the middle of the night imagining the contents of a closet and thinking, “That can go, and that can go, and that can go.” The next day, all of it went. Into the garage.
I amassed so much stuff to give away it filled a quarter of my garage. I couldn’t park my car in there during the hottest month of the year. Animal Humane came to pick it all up in July, and I haven’t missed a thing. In fact, I keep finding more stuff to let go of. Now I keep a box in the garage for items I’m finished with. Once it’s filled, I drop it off at Animal Humane.
The whole thing started spontaneously one Monday when I glanced down the hall into my bedroom, noticed something, and asked myself why the heck I still had it. One thing led to another, momentum grew, and soon I was tackling areas I’d been avoiding for years. I even replaced all the shelf liner in the kitchen cabinets. I got rid of the contents of three two-drawer filing cabinets—and the cabinets. I tossed decades worth of personal journals, donated eight or nine bankers boxes of books, gave half a dozen flower pots to a neighbor, and found new homes for drawers full of art supplies that need to be used, not stored.
Just Do It!
It felt great to lighten the load. It also felt great to attend to all those nagging things, large or small, I’d been noticing several times a day (again, for years) that needed fixing or changing. I took care of all of them. I had a whiteboard in my office, and as soon as I thought of something or noticed it, I wrote it down. Had I been putting off making an appointment or checking something out? I put that up there, too. Sometimes I’d take care of something so quickly the ink from the dry erase marker was still wet when I erased it.
I had expected it would feel good to have accomplished so much. I had expected to feel a sense of satisfaction. What I didn’t expect was how much clarity getting rid of all this stuff would create in my life. I’d like to believe that if I’d known, I would have done it much sooner. But no one can see into the future. I don’t think I would have believed it if anyone had told me it would be like this.
Last winter, I came across this quote from Krishnamurti:
We think that through choice we are free, but choice exists only when the mind is confused. There is no choice when the mind is clear. When you see things very clearly without any distortion, without any illusions, then there is no choice. A mind that is choiceless is a free mind, but a mind that chooses and therefore establishes a series of conflicts and contradictions is never free because it is in itself confused, divided, broken up.
I wrote this post about it in February, but only now am I really getting it. Only now do I see that having all these messy, undone, or unfinished things taking up space in my head actually creates confusion and distortion. Suddenly, there are very few choices I need to make. I’m not having the usual mental debates about what to do or rationalizing why I’m doing or not doing something. The path ahead is clear. That doesn’t mean it’s easy or guaranteed. But it is clear. Clarity is a game-changer. It’s also a huge payoff to get for doing nothing more than taking care of business.
hidden agenda n
a secret or ulterior motive for something
Imagine what it would be like if everyone, everywhere on the planet, had a hidden agenda. Imagine these agendas are so well hidden, even the people who have them don’t know what they are.
Imagine further that everyone has multiple hidden agendas they don’t know about: your family members, the store clerks you encounter, your friends and neighbors, the people you work with, the other drivers on the road, your representatives in congress, all the way up to heads of state.
To make things even stranger, imagine that there’s no way to find out directly what those hidden agendas are.
What would that sci-fi world look like?
Actually, it would look exactly like the world we live in. Odd though it may sound, this isn’t fiction; it’s reality. And it isn’t the result of any kind of conspiracy. It’s just the way our brains work. The truth is that we have no idea what we’re up to most of the time. And neither do the people “at the top,” who are in significant positions of power.
As a species, we’ve managed to get this far without being aware of or acknowledging our hidden agendas. I can’t help but wonder how much better we could be—and how much farther we could go—if we did become aware of and acknowledge them.
