☕ saturday mornings - april 8, 2023

disappointment, fathomless mysteries & visualization

Happy Saturday!

I hope you’re having a lovely start to your weekend.

What I’ve been up to:

• I finished my final week of university classes (almost five years later) and headed home to spend Easter weekend with family.

Here's a recap of the most interesting ideas I've explored this week.

Enjoy.

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✍️ quote i’m pondering:

Glennon Doyle, American author, on disappointment:

Listen. Every time you’re given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else.

Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.

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📚 book passage i loved:

Listen to your life.

See it for the fathomless mystery it is.

In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

― Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation by Frederick Buechner

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💡 essay from me:

Impression, sunrise (Claude Monet, 1872)

Visualization is a powerful tool to achieve what you want. But, not how you'd expect.

I was introduced to the idea of visualization at an early age. My goalie coach, a leathery old man, eyes bright with warmth and wisdom, taught me to see myself playing my sport before stepping onto the ice. In other words, to visualize.

I would envision the rink stretched out in front of me, feel the slick ice under my feet, hear the buzz of the stands. Then, I'd see the game begin to unfold, play by play, where I responded to each demand of the game with near perfection, feeling agile, sharp, and focused.

The idea behind visualization is simple: Seeing it in your mind helps you actualize it in reality.

But, visualization doesn't just appear in sport. Many of history's most successful entrepreneurs envisioned their success years before it happened.

Estée Lauder: Visualize. If in your mind's eyes, you see a successful venture, a deal made, a profit accomplished, it has a superb chance of actually happening. Projecting your mind into a successful situation is the most powerful means to achieve goals. If you spend time with pictures of failure in your mind, you will orchestrate failure.

You create the picture in your mind, then work to make that picture a reality.

Research shows visualization works extremely well. Belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We tend to be capable of what we think we are capable of. We tend to reach the heights we envision ourselves reaching. We tend to live up to the image we create for ourselves. Belief precedes ability.

But, there's a problem.

While envisioning the future may be a powerful way to shape it, distress and emptiness come from spending too much time chasing the future.

You constantly operate in a state of lack. The gap between where you are and where you could be creates intense pressure. Deficiency nags at you like a splinter. So you keep on grinding, keep on striving, keep on pushing for more. It's a recipe for external success, but also a lot of misery and regret. I’ve seen hundreds of entrepreneurs across history go down this exact path, writing biographies on their deathbeds as cautionary tales to not do what they did. Is that success?

Greg McKeown: If you focus on what you have, you gain what you lack. And if you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have.

What we all seek is a fulfilled, calm, happy internal state. We often pursue external things to help us attain that state, but it's a fundamental delusion that changing something in the outside world will give us the fulfillment, calmness, and happiness we seek.

Visualization is a powerful tool to get what you want: money, accomplishments, promotions, "success". But, odds are, that want will only be replaced by more wanting. Desire is ceaseless. The things you want will always seem to extend just past your reach, always just outside of your grasp. Your hunger for more will continue to gnaw away at your psyche.

So visualization works, but it doesn't really work. Visualization may help you acquire external things, but not what you're looking for: happiness, peace, ease of mind, contentment, enoughness.

Visualization focuses on the external world. But, instead, what if we used the power of visualization to focus on the internal world?

Recently, I've been focused on visualizing internally. I've been visualizing the person I want to become. Rather, the person I'm in the process of becoming. Who I want to be for the people in my life. How I want to be remembered. What faint trace I want to leave behind.

Even my name is washed away with the tide of the generations and stories are lost in the river of time, just the fleeting feelings, moments of love and connection and joy, I inspire during my brief time on this planet.

I want to be a force for good in this world. Be strong. Carry the burden of being with dignity. Be worthy of my suffering, and relieve some of the suffering of others.

Dickens: No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.

Envision the highest possible good I could accomplish, the best person I could be, the most meaningful life I could live. Then become deeply committed to actually becoming this type of person. Continually learning, growing, loving. Stumbling off my path, then finding my way back to myself. Getting in my own way, then getting out of it. Being lost, then being found.

Boyd Varty: If you could track your way out of the burdens of modern life and create an existence that is much more an expression of who you are, then your own life could become a living mythology. One that could inspire others. Inside me I hear the wild self whisper, Live it into reality.

A few months ago, a friend asked me what I want my life to be like in 10 years. My mind skipped over money and work and material things, and landed on a feeling. An energy.

I want to live with presence and peace. Tread lightly on this earth, move with a slow patient efficiency, support those in need, work thoughtfully, breathe deeply, love abundantly, but, most of all, feel that nothing is missing and everything is complete. That my current life, in this moment, is full and enough and beautiful and, exactly how it is.

So instead of visualizing what I want to have, I'm visualizing who I want to be.

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❓ question i’m asking:

In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?

There’s a Charles Bukowski line I come back to often: “Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who to be?”

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📸 photo of the week:

pictures from Toronto, Paris, Barcelona

I think advertisers are making our world uglier.

Putting football field sized ads for new devices or high-end fashion, on beautiful, historical, and important buildings like the Louvre, Musée d'Orsay, and Basílica de Santa Maria del Pi.

It drives me bananas.

If you’re interested in this idea, I wrote a longer piece on how we’re selling our world to advertisers.

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Much love to you and yours,

Tommy