Category Archives: inspiring ideas

To Sit Down, Think Clearly, And Execute Your Ideas

Quote from novelist Ayn Rand.

Image via Wikipedia

Today there was this thing by The Onion called “The Last American Who Knew What The Fuck He Was Doing Dies.”  

Although The Onion is devoted to satire, this little piece wasn’t really satiric. It was supposed to be, I’m sure, but it sounded like hard reality.

What it said that resonated for me was that Jobs was the last American who was able to 1. Sit down. 2. Think clearly and 3. Execute his ideas.

At the beginning of the summer I made this rather ambitious reading list, and wound up reading virtually nothing on it. Instead, for some reason, I decided to read Ayn Rand,. (Even though I was  a Lit major in college, I had never read Rand.)

I started with Atlas Shrugged and then went immediately into The Fountainhead.  Everyone I know was appalled that I was wasting my time reading Rand in the first place, and then doubly appalled that that I was actually enjoying her.

Nobody, and I mean none of my peers approved of Rand. But I loved her. (And I still do.) I know I probably shouldn’t love her, because I am a flaming liberal who doesn’t believe that (gravity notwithstanding), nothing really trickles down from the pockets of the rich.

What I do not understand is how Rand became the darling of the Tea Partiers and all the political groups that I find totally repugnant.  I think a lot of people misinterpret her.

The whole time I was reading Atlas, all I could think of was Steve Jobs as the present day embodiment of the Randian hero.

Steve Jobs is Dagny Taggart, Hank Reardon, John Galt and Howard Roark all wrapped into one. Steve Jobs is to Apple computers what Dagny Taggart was to Taggart Transcontinental, what Hank Reardon was to Reardon Metal, and what Howard Roark was to the whole field of architecture.

What Jobs had in common with all of Rand’s heros is that he was passionate about, and lived and breathed his work. His work was who he was, his identity. He wasn’t in it just for the money (but he made a lot of it). He didn’t give his money away, either, nor did he apologize for making a lot of it (And this is where a lot of liberals part ways with Rand, and where Jobs, too, finds his critics.)

USA Today, in its first piece on Jobs’ death, called him “mercurial” and said he could be merciless on people he didn’t think were doing their jobs, not simply firing them, but railing and ranting at them, cursing them out. My guess is he probably could not bear to see incompetence or laziness in any form.

He worked for what he earned. And his work was pure and noble and innovative. He did it for its own sake. His work and his life were the same thing. That’s what it means to live in integrity: think, feel, say, do–all the same thing.  The creative process drove him. It was his prime motivator. In that, he was just like Dagny Taggart and and Hank Reardon and Howard Roark.

He was clean. He wasn’t a fake or a hack. He earned it.  He wasn’t a second-hander. He wasn’t a parasite.  He never had his hand out, but offered the fruits of his work for the betterment of his consumers.  Without him we would still, to this day, be playing with sticks and abacuses and adjusting the vertical holds on our tv antennas instead of storing our music in the Cloud.

So when I read that Onion piece, it really reminded me of the three things I admire and strive for in my own work.  First, the ability to sit down.  Sitting  down in this context implies clearing the slate for creative work.  Jobs was a Buddhist. He probably knew something about the power of “taking one’s seat” and being quiet, and letting the mind settle into its innate freedom.

He also knew how to “think clearly.”  A unique skill in itself.  A skill that needs to be cultivated and honed over years and decades.  Mostly in silence. Like practicing any art.

And finally, and most importantly for me, he knew how to execute. Or as Seth Godin would say, he knew how to “Ship.”  Unless your ideas can be birthed into the world, they lie stillborn inside you, rotting, and putrifying your system.

I wanted Steve Jobs to live for a long time because I wanted to watch and learn from him.  I wanted to see what kind of rabbit he would pull out of his hat next. It is sad that one of the only true innovators of our time had to die so young.

As another quote I read today said: “Heaven just got a little more sleek, well-designed and profitable.”

Indeed.

RIP, Steve Jobs.  I, and the world, will miss you.

The Journey

Drink more water

Break a sweat everyday

Meditate

Learn to speak Spanish

Tend my own sadhana

Express gratitude

Get to 12% body fat

These are my “resolutions” for the coming year. But I don’t think of them as resolutions so much as things I need to do to get to My Best Self. I am excited to do these things,  find out about them, and to see what would happen if I actually could pull some of them off.

I read in the paper today that for most people, their New Years Resolutions are already toast.  (Today is January 8th).  They’re done and it’s back to business as usual. “Resolutions are stupid; I can’t do this.”

I think the big problem is that most people think of their their resolutions as skinny, treacherous tight ropes they have to inch across carefully and delicately, and if they fall: Game Over. They’re out.  (Thanks for playing.)

But what if, instead of a tightrope, we looked at resolutions as noble challenges deliberately placed along the way in a “Sacred Pilgrimage” we are making to the “Shrine of Our Best Selves”?

Because if you are on a journey, a journey that you may even think of as sacred, to find your True and Best Self,  what you now call your “resolutions” are simply part of the trail. If you do them, you’ll proceed faster and more efficiently, so you want to do them.  But if you don’t, you can’t abandon them.  That’d be stupid because progress would halt.

So when the inevitable happens, and you stub your toe, or get a blister, or it starts to rain, or you get lost, or a wild animal frightens you, you don’t say, “Fuck it, this quest is stupid, I can’t do this, I’m done.” No. You just get a bandaid, or put on a poncho, or consult a map, or carry a pointy stick to defend yourself.  That’s because you realize that the setbacks come with the territory.  You’re Indiana Jones for crissakes! You’ve got to get this job done! Even if it takes your whole effin’ life! (And guess what? It WILL!!)

Am I right?

(Of course I’m right.)

There is a Zen saying: Fall down 7 times, get up 8.

So let’s boot up and get this journey goin’!  Whaddya say?

The Power of Intention

Cover of "The Power of Intention"

Cover of The Power of Intention

It’s been disturbing me that I’ve gotten rather spotty in my posting here.  Every morning I wake up and check on myself, mainly to read (and cringe at) what kind of sleepy nonsense I managed to type into this space before I hit “publish” and then the pillow.

It’s just that it’s November, and I am not a fan of November. My skin is dry, my lips are chapped and I am already wearing down clothing, albeit just down vests at this point, but down nonetheless.

When it’s November I want to curl up and read all the books on my bed table. I want to join NaNoWriMo. I want to go to Springwater for a month and meditate. I want to wake up at the ass crack of dawn and do ashtanga with Christine again (but not feel ass-draggy all day as a result.)

I’m reading more these days (and writing less).  I’m reading Wayne Dyer’s the Power of Intention at the moment and trying to the apply its principles to my life: creativity, kindness, lovingness, beauty, expansiveness, abundance and openness. In that vein:

What if I am an infinite being in a temporary physical incarnation?  How does that change things? And what if my life is magic?  And what if everyone I contact and connect with is being brought into my life to teach me something, or point me in a particular direction?

And what if they’re not, but I pretend as if they are anyway? And what if I pretend as if everything I want is already mine (because it is)?  How does that change how I roll, how I operate, how I live?

This is the stuff I’ve been thinking about, so do you see how it might be hard  sometimes to sit down and write a blog post, especially at night, when I am newly home from my class, and tired?  Do you see how it might be hard to know where to begin?

I wonder what I’ll think of this when I read it at 5:30 tomorrow morning? Remember Rule #6, Kath.  Rule #6.

**Rule #6: “Don’t take yourself so damned seriously.”

Everyone Is Enlightened But Me

The weekend at the beach was perhaps the best time I ever had there.  The weather was perfect, the water temperature was 70 degrees warm, the surf was amazing–strong and forceful and foamy.

Our place was just “eh” but it was 100 steps from the beach and tucked away behind Rehoboth’s only Juice Bar, so I just walked down the steps to get my juice every morning: carrot, apple, ginger.  Yum.

In the evening I had a blast dancing to great music and met a great crowd of very fun people.

All the beach rituals were observed: sunrise, Starbucks Triple Venti soy lattes meditation, yoga in the afternoon, and dancing at the bar at night.

The beach was its typical “Where’s Waldo” crush of beach towels, umbrellas and dysfunctional families and I loved it all.   Jack Kornfield’s A Path With Heart was my book of the weekend, and at one point he suggested trying this exercise:

Imagine that everyone you see and encounter is enlightened–everyone except YOU. And all those people are buddhas, there to teach you something you need to know.  That would have included, for me, the crying babies, the whining kids, the sullen teens, the overbearing parents, and especially the people with no sense of personal space and boundaries. All of them were buddhas, all of them were enlightened!

It was a great exercise for me because instead of getting peeved at some petty, trivial behavior, I had to adjust my normal, “Oh you are such an A-Hole judgment and think instead: Oh, rude little whipper-snapper, you’re just trying to teach me patience, or, you badly parented little kid having a tantrum, you’re trying to teach me compassion and acceptance.

Try it sometime.  It’s a very cool exercise.  Everybody is Enlightened but you.

The More Busy, the Less Creative

I have been running around very chicken-no-headish today, cleaning, packing, tying up loose ends, so that I can leave right after Yin Yoga class tonight and drive halfway to Rehoboth Beach,DE so that on Friday morning I can stand on the beach and wave to Hurricane Earl as he whooshes past.

Packing up and leaving, even for a weekend, is majorly “fraught.”  I always use my trip to India 3 years ago as the benchmark to shoot for in packing.  My suitcase for that trip was LIGHT!  Scandalously light, ridiculously light.  Someone advised me: “You’ll get there and feel like a tourist in your zip-off safari pants and will immediately buy India-appropriate clothes in the market for a few rupees.  Don’t pack much.”

I believed her, and she was right, …more or less.

But for this trip to the shore?  Omg.  I’m ashamed.  But apparently not ashamed enough to pare down.  Nope.

The other day I read this post on Zen Habits about the concept of underscheduling and it has been stuck in my head.  This is genius, but I think you have to be a maverick to implement it in your life.

Either that or a genius.

I’m going to share the post with you here.  Let me know what you think–or better yet, comment to the writer.  As the new school year begins I think it’s the perfect antidote to “busy.”

http://zenhabits.net/cultivating-passion/

Some thoughts about aging

I can remember the exact day my mother became old. One day she was walking around in stylish clothes, sporting a nice haircut, and the next day she came home from the beauty parlor with short hair and a hideous perm.

She suddenly started to talk about “acting her age.”   I heard her say “change of life” a lot to her girlfriends on the phone. My young vibrant, youthful mother turned old and dowdy in the span of a few months.  She stopped doing her nails, wearing makeup, plucking her eyebrows.  Her clothes started looking dowdy and matronly.  She was a yo-yo dieter her whole life, but now she completely stopped caring about what she ate and how much. A French cruller from the bakery was a scandalous treat one day, and the next she was polishing off a dozen donuts all by herself in front of the TV.

She stopped going out, and her whole life  became consumed by TV– mainly old movies and roller derby. She had always been an avid reader, and then, for some peculiar reason, she just stopped reading books.

I got an email forward today about aging.  It was by a woman talking rhapsodically about the freedoms of growing old and of how she was now eating desserts everyday and she didn’t care that she had a belly, or gray hair.  She had seen too many people, she said, become obsessed with chasing after youth at a time in their lives when they should have been relaxing into life, not fighting against it.

A big part of me wanted to champion that point of view, but then I thought about my mother and her ugly perm.

Back then there wasn’t HRT, or any herbal support for women going through what my mother’s generation called “the change.”  There were few, if any, models for how to negotiate the territory between old age with its inevitable loss of vigor and vitality, and what my mother was going through which was, as I now see it, a period of readjustment.  A person doesn’t have to surrender to old age like my mother did.  My mother’s aging wasn’t a function of time or birthday candles, but of choice.

Granted, back then there weren’t many role models for how to gracefully negotiate the new territory she found herself living in, but nobody has to get a perm, or eat a dozen donuts in one sitting. She just threw in the towel.

My mother never heard the word “prana” or “life force” in her day.  It wasn’t in the air then, like it is now. Nobody went to the gym or did yoga in my mother’s world. Good Housekeeping magazine didn’t run stories about how to stay vibrant into your 60s, 70s and 80s back then.  My mother never dreamed that she could maintain youthful vitality into old age with moderate exercise and a good diet.

So when I read this email today from the happy, self-satisfied woman with the big belly and the gray hair who is now free to eat  desserts everyday if she wants because aging has given her the freedom to be unconcerned with the opinions of others, I kinda recoiled.

This is not for me. The new paradigm of how to age, doesn’t involve being self-indulgent and self-satisfied.

The new paradigm says, in effect, “Hey, let’s see how long we can keep this party going!”  If we practice a little self-control with our food, get moderate exercise, reduce stress and keep our minds sharp, aging doesn’t really mean anything.

This new paradigm is built on staying mindful and taking responsibility for  “energy management” and being  meticulous about our fuel, whether that fuel is food, sleep or fun.

If I just throw in the towel and say, “Well, I don’t have to watch what I eat anymore, or exercise, or get enough sleep, or feed my mind because I am coming to the end of my life anyway so now I can coast and enjoy the ride,” what that says to me is that you had the wrong idea about what life is about in the first place.

Life isn’t about practicing painful austerities for most of your life, and then cutting yourself a break at the end.  Life is about amping your vibe.  Period.  And it doesn’t matter if you’re 18 or 80.  If you want to amp your vibe and then keep it jacked up, it’s going to involve putting enough, and quality “fuel” into your tank everyday.

This means quality food in modest amounts, enough sleep, daily exercise, and daily fun.

I’m going with Dylan Thomas on this one:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And for goddsakes, whatever you do, don’t get a perm.

Steve Slater

The internet is all abuzz with Steve Slater, the Jet Blue flight attendant who grabbed a beer and “took the chute,” but not before telling the woman who hit him with a suitcase to do go and do something biologically impossible.

At the latest count he has over 50 thousand Facebook fans, and musicians are singing ballads to him and posting them on YouTube.  He’s become  a contemporary folk hero, an “Everyman.”

And why?

Because he “took the exit” out of a  job he was clearly sick and tired of, and he did it with a flourish.

That’s it. That’s all he did, and now he’s a “hero.”

CNN says lots of people are “resonating with him” and because of this he is getting his 15 minutes of fame.

Just for losing it.  Just for publicly flipping out.

Lots of people would love to have the ‘nads to do what Steven Slater did.  Lots of people apparently fantasize about telling the companies and the people they work for to do the deed to themselves, and then flame out in a grand style.

I think it should never have come to this for Steve Slater, or for anyone who is unhappy with their job.

I know this sounds like me being the yoga teacher here, but I can’t help thinking, “What if Steve Slater had a yoga practice?”  What if he devoted just 20 minutes everyday to sitting quietly, dropping into his breath, breaking up tension patterns in his body with some nice stretches, and then setting an intention for his day?  Would he have then known clearly, and a long time ago, that the industry had changed, and he was no longer suited for this job?

Might this practice have sweetened him to the point where he could have developed some compassion for all the people in planes and their stress-filled lives?  Would grouchy, rude travelers have the same effect on him if he had taken care of his spiritual hygiene with as much dedication as most people give to brushing their teeth and shaving?

Did Steve Slater miss an opportunity to be a Linchpin?

Could Steve Slater have written a different story for himself?

I can’t help thinking what it would take, how someone would have to “train” in order to operate mindfully in a stressy job like being a flight attendant?

When I think of my yoga students, I know at least a few who are really unhappy with their jobs a lot of the time, but because they have a practice, the pressure gets released at regular intervals, so if they ever did decide that “enough was enough” they would be able to quit quietly, sanely, and have the understanding of their bosses.

Whenever people refuse to do jobs they are unsuited for, they leave room for what they are suited for to come forth.  It’s hard to leave the known for the unknown, but it has to be done for growth to occur.

I hope Steve Slater comes to his senses and sees this episode as something he did in a moment of temporary insanity: he reached his edge and jumped, instead of just quietly quitting a job that had become unsatisfying and impossible for him.

If he did it that boring way though, he might only have 50 friends on Facebook, and certainly no CNN reporters would be stalking him for a comment.

As it stands now, he’s probably going to spawn a whole rash of copycat “exit chuters” who will find spectacular ways to torch their own bridges at work, rather than work on ways of finding their true vocations, their highest calling.

Home Alone

I’ve been hanging out here by myself for the past three days and it’s been interesting to watch how I live when no one else is watching.

I go to bed at strange hours; I eat at unusual times; and I work in longer stretches than normal. I let my room get messy; I leave projects out overnight and they are there in the morning littering the breakfast table.

I once read this account of people who were deprived of light for long periods of time and had no concept of what time it was.  These people fell into natural rhythms of waking and sleeping that didn’t even come remotely close to what they did when there was night and day.  They would sleep for 14 hours at a stretch then stay up for 24 to 36 hours straight. That’s kind of what I do.

When I don’t have to consider any one else’s patterns, and can live more or less organically, doing what the spirit moves me to do, and when, I will steam up a big plate of kale for lunch and down it with a tumbler of San Pelligrino, and there is nobody to say: “Ew.”   And I can eat this meal at noon or at 2, depending on how I’m feeling and how the writing is going.

Because I have pets though, I can’t really live totally by my internal clock. Animals need predictability in their lives or else they’ll crap all over the floor, and I’d just as soon not deal with that, so I’m keeping them fed and walked at regular times.

Yesterday I put a second coat of paint on the new shed, and got into the Zen of painting.  Easy, mindless, tasks give me an opportunity to watch my thoughts, or the lack thereof.  There was just enough to focus on to keep it interesting, but not so much that it became mentally taxing.  The surface I was painting was T-111 siding, and painting that kind of crappy wood  was like painting the inside of an English muffin: so many nooks and crannies!  I had to brush up and down, side to side, and then poke the bristles in to get at the deep recesses.

(I really got into it, actually, and was sad when the job was done.)

I think if I lived alone like this for an extended period of time I would have to paint a lot things.

There’s a great book called Drinking The Rain, where the main character goes and  lives in a little cabin on the coast of Maine for a year. She goes into town once a week for groceries, but after a while even the grocery store trip becomes too socially alien that she starts fishing in order to eat, and drinks the rainwater she collects from her roof, just so she doesn’t have to deal with people.

Me? I just avoid Walmart.

I think it’s therapeutic to be alone for extended periods of time on occasion.  It gives you a little look at who you are when you are not in “relationship.”  Relationships skew us, in a way (often in a good way).  It’s like if you never tasted bread without butter and one day you try it plain:  Oh, so this is what bread tastes like.  Good to know.  Pass me the butter, please.

But after a too many days of bread without butter, and water and kale for lunch, my “Fun Meter” starts to tend dangerously toward “Empty” and I need someone to embellish  my plain bread life, and echo my laughter.  Know what I mean?

Breaking A Streak

My longest streak lasted 428 days.  I did Holosync for 428 days straight and then it ended.  It was a deliberate end.  I didn’t just “forget.”  I ordered what I thought was the next level (Level 3) and when I opened the box, they had sent me just the intro cd.  My reaction was: WTF???!!

I was headed out the door to a training, and I  didn’t have time to call and straighten out the mistake before I left, so I just said, “Fuck it,” left the cd home,  got in my car and drove to King of Prussia.  That night I did not do Holosync for the first time in well over a year.

I didn’t die.  I wasn’t even that upset.  A few days later I took up with it again, but it has never become an “everyday” thing since.  I still do it, but only when I need to, or want to.  It’s not a “streak thing” anymore.

I have maintained shorter streaks of 100 days or more with the writing, and I must say I have been sad and disappointed when those streaks ended.  Most of the time I just forgot, or I let a vacation or some other distracting “life event” get in the way.

There is often be a big letdown when a streak ends. It’s hard to describe the feeling.  “Crestfallen” is a good word.   Sometimes you don’t even decide to break it, you just forget.  You take your eye off it for one second and boom, it’s the next day and you forgot to do your “thing”and your streak is over, done, caput.

“Shit.”

One way of dealing with this is to deny it, pretend it didn’t happen and soldier on, but that’s a lie, and you can’t sustain that.

Another way is to just forgive yourself, but that’s really hard.  If it was a private streak that nobody but you or one other person knew about, it’s a little easier to deal with than if it was a big, public, Facebook-y kind of streak.

The galling part of failing to sustain your streak in front of a lot of people is the feeling that they were expecting it, maybe even hoping for it.  There’s this concept called the “negativity bias” which means that people are more interested and attracted to bad news than good news, and more apt to read (and dig)  stories of failure than success.

For some reason, people like to see other people fail.  I think what they really want to see is not that you fail, but what you do after you fail.  Because that’s the problem we all want to know how to fix, right?  We want to know what to do when we mess up.

That’s because we all mess up.  Most of us don’t succeed. Most of us don’t rise up after failure.  Most of us make excuses, or we hide, or we slink into a corner and obsessively lick our wounds.

So when you break a long streak, this is where life gets really, really interesting.

When your streak ends, here’s what I think you should do:

1. Admit to yourself, and to anyone who is interested and has been following your streak, that it’s over.  Your Jenga Blocks are in a heap on the floor, your Pop Beads are rolling off in all directions, your spinning plates are in a million shards on the linoleum. It’s O.V.E.R.

2. Spend 24 Hours in deep mourning.  Cry.  Journal.  Beat yourself up.  You deserve it. Wallow.  Self-flagellate. Really get into it.  Have a big-ass pity party.

3.  After 24 hours the mourning is DONE.  Never mourn longer than 24 hours, then NEVER LOOK BACK.

4.  You must never talk about your old streak again.  Ever. It’s OVER.  Nobody cares that 2 years ago you wrote every day for 6 months. Nobody.

5. Decide if your dead streak is something you want, or need, to begin again. Did it end because it exhausted its function or purpose?  Was it, like Holosync was for me, something you “got” and there was no reason to obsessively continue with it. Was its function in your life finished? When you get the message, it’s really okay to hang up the phone.

6. Maybe there is something else you’d rather streak.  If so, let the new thing germinate for 10 days and then start it.

7. If your dead streak was just an accident, a momentary loss of focus, start over the next day, but call it DAY ONE. Be honest. You’re starting over. It sucks, but it’s true.

A streak is something built on the platform of time, and more specifically, duration over time.  But you can only streak one day at a time.  The only day that really counts is this day.  And after this day is over, you simply file it, and move on to the next day.

And that’s how you build a streak.  And that’s how you build a life.

Happy Streaking!

The Benefits of Streaking

So if we define “streaking” as a daily practice of tending to a thing that keeps us aligned with our dharma, or our core values, or our life mission, it stands to reason that the doing of that thing is going to promote calmness in us.

Because when we are not in alignment, there is a constant “buzz” inside us that we spend a whole lot of time and energy trying to ignore.  We’re always feeling angst-y and discontent with the present because we’re off our game.  But as soon as we start tending to our stuff, the buzz quiets and there is an inner clarity and peace.

All the energy that was going into pretending it was okay not to do what we were put on earth to do, or to live in harmony with our “proclaimed” values, can now go into fueling the journey to integrity.  This frees up our prana (aka our vitality, ebullience, life force, enthusiasm) and we start to emit a vibe that can be felt and picked up by others who may be inspired to start tending to their own streak.

You will also find that if you spend part of your day tending your streak, after a while your streak becomes who you are. You become identified by what you consistently do.  “She’s the runner.”  “He’s the writer.” “She’s the one who trains dogs.”

And because streaks are not abstract concepts but actions in the world,– visible, empirical, sense-verifiable things, they can provide you with some powerful feedback.

There are 2 basic ways that streaks do this.

Streaks as Mirrors

You may think that your selection of a thing to streak was rather whimsical, or just some self-improvement project you took on as a lark.

But despite the seemingly lighthearted way you selected your “streak thing” the streak is going to reveal you to yourself in myriad and unexpected ways.  It will show you aspects of yourself you never saw before. It will give you a picture of yourself.

This picture develops over time, like a Polaroid.  The longer you sustain the streak the clearer you will become to yourself.  At first, there’s just a foggy nothing, but as the days pile up an image comes forth from the fog.  Blurred edges sharpen, more details emerge.  You get the “aha” moment of recognition: “So that’s who I am!”

And why is this important? Because once you know who you are (at least a little) you can start to make life choices based on this knowledge.  You will know, for instance, what people light you up, and why. You will know what kinds of work suits you best.  You will discover, finally, what you want to be when you grow up, because you are now lots clearer about who “you” are.

Streaks as Windows

Because streaks are not abstract ideas in your head but actions in the world, they will move you (literally and figuratively) out of the confining landscape of the usual and familiar, and place you in a new vantage point.

This vantage point is a lot like looking down at the ground from up in a plane. As you gain altitude in a plane, you suddenly see your town or your city from a new perspective. You see people the size of ants (if  you can see people at all) and tiny houses and little cars and ribbons of highways.  You know (because you live down there) that inside those houses mothers are yelling at their kids to hurry up and get ready, and in those cars people are griping about the traffic, or thinking about work. People are dying in hospitals, babies are being born, and kids are blowing out birthday candles down there.

From your removed vantage point in the plane, you start to feel a deep affection for these “ants” and their little ant lives, because you know that you will soon land and become one of them.

Then one day, deep into your streak, maybe a year or so, you start to seriously question the importance of keeping the thing going.  You start to see the running or the writing or the meditating or whatever your “streak thing” is as utterly insignificant in face of your essential “ant” nature.  You realize that it doesn’t really matter what you do.  The streak doesn’t matter. Nothing really matters.  Your an ant.

But instead of filling you with existential nihlism, this realization of your “ant-ness” begins to engender a feeling of great tenderness towards yourself and your fellow ants. And had it not been for your devotion to your streak, and the focus and calmness and self-knowledge it afforded you, you would still be cranky and grouchy and discontented, living deeply embroiled in the ant life without even knowing it.

(tomorrow: What to do when a streak comes to an end.)