Walking makes you walk better

Set goals for yourself in terms of your own conduct – that define the type of person you want to be. Challenge yourself to do this by making some appropriate changes in your daily routine. 

 - Stoic Week 2014 (handbook pdf)

The thing that stuck with me most from today's reading of Stoic Week 2014 is that you can become whatever it is you want to be by acting it out in some small way in the present - and that is truly the funniest and I would say most effective way to achieve your goals.

So, what do I want to be and how can I achieve it?

1. Relaxed - deal with daily perturbances by remembering that what has already happened must be accepted and that which is in the future cannot be fully controlled.
2. Playful - I am very competitive and instead of trying to suppress this trait, I will channel it towards myself and and make achieving goals mini-games. I will do this by thinking of the smallest, non-obliging step I can take towards my goal and then do it, always wondering How can I make it fun? In this way, I will never feel overwhelmed by the size of some future challenge. The first steps might be ridiculously small, but anything is better then being stuck in situ.
3. Balanced - there are many things that steal my energy and I would like to avoid them. These are coffee, gossip, chit-chat, group work (turns out grad school is all about group work, unfortunately), darkness, and sitting down for too long. As much as I feel that I don't have enough time or that I need to do more work, it is absolutely necessary to invest time in activities that replenish my energy and make me feel more connected. These are reading books, taking walks, doing yoga, listening to music, and learning something for fun
4. Consistent - this simply means sticking to something by doing it even when I don't feel like it. Success is sometimes a matter of discipline rather than motivation. Motivation comes and goes, waxes and wanes, depending on mood and energy level, but discipline is much more stable and can be used at any time when one finds it necessary. For example, I am really happy that I am going through Stoic Week by contributing almost every day.
5. Accepting - being accepting of things that go wrong, plans that fail, people that annoy, imperfections that mock effort, and some of my own feelings that come up and I know don't have a rational basis for them.
6. Peaceful - I am always so loud and fast, perhaps it is time to learn how to be slow and more measured. As the Swedes like to say, lagom, lagom...

It will be interesting to see whether I manage to apply these to some of my personal goals :)

How can I make it fun?

Planting the seed of forgiveness

A man's character is nothing but a collection of his habits. You become what you want to be by doing it. If you want to become a writer, you write. If you want to become an athlete, you train. It's funny when you think about it, but you can be whatever you want to be right now, this very instant. If you want to become fluent in a foreign language, you speak it, you write it, you live it. It is much easier to replace bad habits with good ones rather than just to suppress the bad habit.

When I feel anxious about wanting to get to the future, I will feel pleasure in that very moment in the present.

When I feel the compulsive urge to erase an imperfection, I will remember that there is nothing shameful about them because they are a part of how I got to be here where I am, and even if they are, I must remember that it is not my past actions that define me, because I did the best I could with the knowledge I had, but what I am doing right now. And I am doing good.

If I could plant a kiss on every piece of surface that I have raised my hand against, my skin would be covered with a thousand kisses that wisper I'm sorry... I'm sorry... So hear my promise that I will be kind to it from now on, since the body is a temple and not a graveyard. It is a meadow of possibility instead of a machine of determinism. I am not slowly pacing towards death but I am forever rejoicing in life, because I am a wonderful and incredibly beautiful pattern of dancing energy.

Everything is okay and always will be.

Thinking them young, silly, and unwise

At my worst moments, my mind can be described as junkyard filled with giant heaps of waste that nobody will ever have any use of - everything from abandoned gym equipment to embarrassing stashes of porn collections, worn out clothes and roles, toothbrushes dirty with gossip and pettiness and all the content of every possible 'DELETE' folder I have ever made on my desktop. Because I know I'm no special snowflake, it terrifies me to think of what might be lurking in other people's minds. So I simply don't do that.

I let everyone, myself included, have all the junk floating around their minds as much as they want and never judge myself for its content. The only thing I do when a really nasty thought pops up is to pay attention to it, give a mental nod to it and allow it to exist, and then, starting from that point of accepting it there, I try to oppose it and I guess I developed special ways that work for me when dealing with different kinds of thoughts depending on the underlying emotion behind them. For example, when I think about something (or someone) that causes the rise of:

1. Pride - I think of all the ways in which I may be inferior to that person, and I can usually find plenty things to work with. I remind myself that I could have easily found myself in the same life circumstances as the person I am looking down upon, and that I doubt I would be much better.

2. Envy - if I start feeling envious of someone, I try to think of them as my brother/sister, and for some reason that turns the envy into happiness for the other person, because I know I want everything best for my brother. If that doesn't work, I try to ponder ways in which this person might be suffering and that we should all just live our own lives instead of bothering others. And if that doesn't work (wow, I just realized I might be very envious), I plainly ask myself whether this emotion is doing any good except for bringing me misery and destroying that very moment.

3. Lust - I find opposite sex friendships to be tricky because I am always afraid that my friendliness will be misinterpreted as flirting, so I developed a great yardstick against which I can measure my own as well as other people's behavior to see if it is in any way inappropriate. I picture the other person as my brother, and then if from that perspective the way we communicate is totally natural and normal, there is nothing to worry about. On the other hand, if I find that my projected sibling is acting a bit creepy, that's a red flag that the person is getting the wrong idea.

4. Anger - the quickest way to deal with it for me is to transform the wrongdoer into a 5-year-old version of that person and then they seem either ridiculous and endearing (if what they did was a minor problem) or unfortunate and somewhat tragic if what they did was really wrong. In the latter case, I start feeling sorry for them and want to protect them, instead of feeling angry at them. But the problem with anger is that it leaves a kind of echo after the first surge of it has subsided, so I tend to look back and think "How could you have done this to me? How could you? To me! How could you...", but I admit I still haven't figured out a proper way to deal with these residual waves of resentment.

The negative soundtrack

Today I paid special attention to my feelings. I tried to catch myself whenever I felt something negative and to see whether I have complete, some, or no control over what caused it. I learned that a lot of times the cause of my misery was not even my judgment of something as good or bad, but believing a thought to be unquestionably true just because it appeared in my head. For example, I managed to warp a friendly question about my name into a paranoid internal monologue about how I must look very foreign and stupid for not speaking the official language... I realized how damaging negative self-perception can be, because had I not stopped thinking that way in that very instant, I would have robbed myself of an honest experience of genuine human contact.

It felt so strange, ending such thoughts with the question But is it true?, as if I distrusted my own mind, because I am so used to allowing my perceptions to pretend to be objective descriptions. The answer I came up for this question was that, even though it is possible that some negative thought that emerges is true, it is simply stupid to make such damaging assumptions without knowing for sure. This is especially important when I am thinking about other people's behavior. It is much easier to assume that someone is rude and inherently mean instead of trying to think of ways they must be really tired, or sad, or hurt, or just conditioned to think and act a certain a way. When I re-orientate myself this way towards the imaginary enemy I actually start feeling sorry for them almost as if they are naughty children and I feel almost amused by their behavior. All that thinking ends in a matter of seconds, and I am left with the realization that the only person who ultimately causes and can end all pain is always me.

Changing perspectives

November is the worst month in terms of Swedish weather, I was told. Night seems to swallow a good part of the day so you wake up in the darkness while your alarm clock is trying to convince you that the day is well on its way. The morning haze hints at the possibility of full daylight it never develops beyond a teaser trailer, because it gets dark again really quickly. If you leave home early in the morning and come back in the later half of the afternoon, it may seem  like the night has never ended. Swedes even turned the experience in a song.

It is very easy to spiral down in an existential crisis under the cloudy skies of Sweden, but let's remind ourselves why darkness, cold weather, and wet feet are in fact, good. They are good because without them, the sun wouldn't shine as sweet when the first signs of spring emerge and birds start to sing again. It is good because it makes maintaining focus on studying incredibly easy for those like me who feel tempted to run outside and frolic in some flowery meadows at the first sight of sunshine. Also, there is something about returning to a warm home after a hard day that winter time makes even more special. And most importantly, let's not forget Christmas and all the magic that fills the air this time of year.