Green Oasis

This morning found me contemplating happiness. Most of my life has been spent waiting to be happy. Many of my thoughts followed the pattern “Life will be so great when         !” That blank space has been many things. None of them have fulfilled my fantasies of finally achieving lasting happiness.

On the other hand, I sometimes fall into nostalgia. “Life was so much better back when         .”

Both of ways of thinking mean that I’m not happy right now.

Life isn’t a path leading to happily ever after or leading out from the Garden of Eden.

I’ve recently found a secret to getting myself to do stuff. The idea of cringe busting my to do list has made me aware of the sneaky feeling of panic that makes me want to procrastinate.

Not only does each item on my task list threaten to freak me out, the whole assemblage drives me to fiddle with addictive games and madness. I take one look at my task list and my eyes glaze over: I don’t know where to start.

The obvious strategy is to start at the top. You know that and I know that, but my gut reactions don’t. They tell me to head for the life rafts and abandon all hope. “The list is too long!”

I have a homebrew task management system (cobbled together using big ass text files, Bash scripting, and Vim). I recently programmed it to be able to give me exactly one task at a time.

The effect is magical.

My task list has lost its power to intimidate. “Sure, I have 15 minutes to create that spreadsheet. Easy-peasy!” I find myself ripping through my tasks so fast that I don’t know what to do with all the time left over.

Multitasking is a moral weakness. One task at a time. One. Task.

Merlin Mann is a smart guy who spends a lot of time thinking about how to accomplish the important things in life (as opposed to checking your email inbox every five minutes). Here’s his presentation called Who Moved My Brain? Revaluing Time & Attention.

Albert Hofmann, the first synthesizer of LSD, died yesterday aged 102. Lest anyone imagine Hofmann to be a stoned-out hippie, the obituary noted that in “retirement, Hofmann served as a member of the Nobel Prize Committee. He was a Fellow of the World Academy of Sciences, and a Member of the International Society of Plant Research and of the American Society of Pharmacognosy.”

He leaves a large legacy to humanity. May his memory be a blessing.

“Through my LSD experience and my new picture of reality, I became aware of the wonder of creation, the magnificence of nature and of the animal and plant kingdom. I became very sensitive to what will happen to all this and all of us.” (Albert Hofmann)

Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life, gives an excellent introduction to mindfulness meditation to employees at the Google campus. If you’ve never meditated, but are curious what it’s all about, this is for you.

…the world and everybody and every thing becomes your teacher. And not in any grandiose new age bullshit kind of way—just obvious. Basic.

Sounds like my kind of guy.

(via 43Folders)