Everybody and everything invests their energy and time to experience an epic journey between birth and death.
Free from restraints.
Full of abundance and joy.
Case in point, I’m writing this post on a rainy day from my office that’s part of my apartment in Switzerland. I wouldn’t do anything that meant I couldn’t spend my days here whenever I felt like it.
Do a bunch of sales calls and make an extra few Swiss Francs? Not if it meant I couldn’t be here at 10:30am on a Thursday morning.
So why is it that the majority of word-users talk about making more money?
Surely we should spend just as much of our energy and time thinking about our lifestyle –- using the money as a means to create the lifestyle of our dreams. As opposed to the other way round. Not unless you want your money to run your lifestyle.
I’m not saying you should optimise your journey in some horrid Tim Ferriss kind of way. All I’m saying is simply pursue the journey you’re already on in whatever damn way you decide.
In the past, I didn’t think like this
For many years, I was guided by something I wanted seemingly more than anything else.
More
Before I knew it, or so it seems now in hindsight, I couldn’t tell you what I wanted more of exactly.
I just wanted more.
Money, time, traffic, subscribers, writing, published books — more, more, more — it felt like the chains of additiction, too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.
Not having learned active noticing yet, I turned a blind eye on the fact that more only got me into the habit of never being satisfied.
Perhaps it’s because I’m naturally ambitious, or because I never had any success or money growing up to write home about. Either way, I just got into the habit of always needing more overall.
This was a downward spiral, beyond the shadow of a doubt, as I was to find out just before it was too late to find out anything.
Never satisfied with anything is a bad place to be. Worse – because I hadn’t yet learned to envision a different future to aim for — there would never be an end to this curse of more.
When you always want more, how do you keep score?
As a result, I spent more years than I care to remember suffering from anxiety in different forms.
Follow your bliss
It was Joseph Campbell who first helped me resolve this, by talking about follow your bliss and that attachment is the root of all suffering
It took me a while to understand this.
Attachment to what?
Well, I eventually understood that to go from A to B, you must let go of A .
To follow your bliss, you must let go of what you’re attached to first.
It’s like a new bed. You’ve got to get rid of your old bed first.
What I eventually began to realise was that I thought of follow my bliss as something I would undertake in the future, just as soon as I was ready and just as long as no distractions were allowed to happen in between.
This lasted until I realised that the most important thing about the future is that it is not the present.
It follows that an epic journey of abundance and joy is right now, in the present.
Or to put it another way:
The present is the secret to abundance and joy
Only who is in the present exists eternally.
It takes accepting the world as it is, not as you wished it were, which cannot be done yesterday nor tomorrow. The present is the only way.
Now, I know that all sounds like a bunch of woo-woo nonsense.
But what I can tell you from personal experience, as opposed to from hearsay, is that I feel abundance and joy when I’m writing in my center of town office at 10:30am on a Thursday morning.
It’s easy to be present here.
It’s easy to accept the world as it is.
Wherever it is that you can be present — take it seriously
Don’t dismiss it.
On your journey, do whatever it takes to allow you to spend all your energy and time where you are right now as you’re reading these lines.
In the present.
You won’t regret it.
Just like you won’t regret reading “How to Outperform 99% of Social Media Users” and “The Magic of Vision”, my forthcoming books that will explain how all this is possible before the year is over.
