“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
How we spend our hours are, of course, how we spend our days.
How we spend our minutes is, of course, how we spend our hours.
How we spend our seconds is, of course, how we spend our minutes.
How we spend our moments is, of course, how we spend our seconds.
Hence:
How we spend our moments is, of course, how we spend our lives.
So, in this deductive approach, what we should be asking if we want to have a good life is, “How to have a good moment?”
What is a moment?
A moment is made out of action, thought, and feeling.
What am I doing in that moment?
What am I thinking in that moment?
How am I feeling in that moment?
When these three components are aligned, we have a good moment, hence a good life.
The most straightforward way to approach a good life is by tweaking the action. This is pretty self-explanatory. We have a general hunch as to what is a good action versus a bad one. Here, to show that point, I will give you a list of good activities with one bad apple hidden—could you guess which one?
- Getting deep sleep every night.
- Hanging out with people you love.
- Helping the elderly cross the street.
- Slapping a kid in the face and taking a shit in your neighbor’s backyard.
Think hard. (Answer key provided at the end).
It also helps that it is easy to observe our actions, which makes it easy to have a check and balance.
But the question is, even if you are doing all the “good” actions, how good could a life be if your thoughts are shitty and you feel shitty?
Thoughts are very tricky
Whether you think in pictures or in words, thoughts happen nearly every moment. But unlike action, thoughts are more subtle—they are the filter through which we process each moment. Without careful observation, it is easy to forget that the filter exists. It’s like when you wear tinted glasses; after a while, you forget that the colors you are seeing are due to the glasses.
And we have been wearing these glasses colored by our thoughts from the beginning of our lifetime, or at least from when we started to learn languages as babies.
For instance, say a person cuts you off when driving; the thoughts could go many ways. It could say, “Fuck you, person!” or it could say, “I wonder why they are in such a rush. I hope everything is okay.” The same situation can be processed in so many different ways through the filter of your thoughts.
What is the easiest way to convince a person who is wearing tinted glasses but swears that they aren’t? It would be a mission and a half to verbally communicate that the red they are seeing is not red. But we can take their glasses right off, and they would see clearly. But you can’t do that with thoughts, at least not that easily. We must slowly take off the glasses by observing the filtering process in action.
When thoughts overflow, we lose the ability to see the world as it is.
Simple experiment:
Close your eyes and really try to hear everything. And by everything, I mean every single vibration of the sound waves. Can you hear everything? Or are you hearing your thoughts? Did it go something like this?
- car passing sound
- fridge making fridge noise
- bird chirping
- I wonder what that bird is?
- What should I eat for lunch?
- I wonder if that bird is edible?
- Well, I guess everything is edible if you try hard enough.
- Oh shit, gotta listen to all the sounds or whatever.
If it was, you stopped hearing by the time you started thinking about eating the poor bird. It turns out, while you are thinking, you can’t hear things. And hearing is just one of our senses—it goes for all senses. And our senses are what expand the boundary of ourselves.
If you see all the colors, your consciousness will be affected by the colors. Your self gets entangled with the colors. When you can hear all the sounds, you and the sounds merge together. But thoughts harden the skin and lock the self inside the box of our body. Think of America as the body, Mexico as the external world, and the thought as Trump, building a wall.
This is why I think we don’t need to worry too much about the binary of good thoughts and bad thoughts; I think it is more about thoughts versus no thoughts. From my observation, I think the amount of thoughts flowing through the mind is directly correlated to how strong the ego is. Because ego is a belief in a hard self, and when the border of our self loosens through becoming entangled with the external world, the hard self also loses its edge.
And then there is the problematic third child: feeling
Even if you are doing some Mother Teresa shit while having a tranquil mind, what if you are always feeling really shitty? Turns out, it feels really good to feel really good.
We as a society definitely overcomplicate things by coming up with random measures for a good life, like growing GDPs, getting high GPAs, or worshiping GODs. But at the end of the day, when everybody feels good every moment, we have a good world.
What makes it tricky is that nobody can quite figure out how to achieve this simple state of “feeling good.” Well, I guess people claim to have figured it out, whether that’s Buddha, Christ, or Andrew Tate. And that’s why these people have so much clout—we are all desperately gasping for the fresh air of goodness while drowning in the muddy water of shittiness.
Unfortunately, this blog will not be the place to figure out how to feel good at each moment. If I knew, I would have started a cult by now. I too am a helpless victim of the shittiness pandemic that is sweeping the world.
But I do have a couple of observations:
- Action, thought, and feelings are intertwined, and to align one, one must align the rest.
- Even though ultimately, feeling good is all that matters, it is impossible with a strong ego.
- Ego is hardened when thoughts harden the sense of self.
- Certain actions could also crowd the mind with thoughts and make me feel shitty, like when I watch porn.
Another observation is that examining my predicament with curiosity usually leads to better alignment. Trying to align them with sheer will and intellect is like burying a dead body with snow—it might work for now, but when the snow melts, the body will reappear, probably in worse condition. But observing my thoughts or how I am feeling with curiosity and almost a detached point of view, like how a zoologist would study an animal, Mahiro naturally starts to feel better.
So, truly, have a good day ;)
Answer key:
- Getting deep sleep every night. -> The highest leverage activity of all.
- Hanging out with people you love. -> I love you to all the dearest people in my life.
- Helping the elderly cross the street. -> They have lived so many years, I’m sure they can figure out how to cross the street.
- Slapping a kid in the face and taking a shit in your neighbor’s backyard. -> Maybe my hand was meant to be with his cheek. Also, free fertilizer.