Insurance broker, row house, and two-kid family aren’t your thing? You have a hard time finding alternatives? Sure you do! Because these are all great ideas. Home, family, and job aren’t randomly chosen concepts according to which the entire world has ended up living by chance. They are best practices confirmed and perfected by evolution. Living without them is very hard indeed and not advisable for 95% of all people. Still a job doesn’t necessarily have to consist of sitting through your time or sudorific, nerve wracking labor; a family doesn’t have to be father, mother, and child. How to keep your life colorful and happy by evaluating and considering traditional values – read it now in our new series A Vagabond’s Guide to Life. Not just for vagabonds! Today’s topic: home. Read the rest of this entry »
So, you wussie; been smoking too much again today? Been drinking a few glasses even though you promised to be the driver? Thinking about sex all day again? But it’s not your fault. You can’t do a thing when the addiction comes up. Or can you? Of course you can. So listen up closely to the following three principles that will help you poor victim mastering your life.
In order to break your ego completely and get you in the mood for rebuilding please listen to my old friend Gisbert zu Knyphausen.
Be strong
The first thing you’re going to do now is reformulating your problems. You are not addicted to anything nor dependent, you are simply doing it a lot. You don’t have to do anything, you don’t need it, but you do it. Having to, needing, addiction, dependency: All words that only serve to cover up your weakness. In this first step it is important to take full responsibility for your actions. It’s not the addiction doing anything, it’s you! You are the one that acts. You are always the highest authority. You keep the cards in your hand, the cigarette, and the glass. Formally, this alone vanquishes the addiction already. Yet these are just words, changing your behavior takes a little more.
Be conscious
Watch yourself. Watch what you are doing, how you are doing it and look for reasons. Even though most people are idiots, it can do no harm adjusting yourself to the rest of the world from time to time in order to forestall drifting off completely. Why did you drink last night in spite of everything? Because all your friends started drinking and you couldn’t resist it, or because otherwise you could not have borne sitting alone in the corner? Or is nothing coming to your mind? Think about it. If you feel base motives why not punish yourself a little. Torture yourself and your body by not doing what it says. Use stick and carrot. You can get used to everything. Even withdrawal can be addictive.
Accept
Accepting is key. Accept that you have a hard time getting into this way of thinking. Accept that it takes you a long time. Accept that your body is resisting. It is used to your old way of thinking and has to be gradually persuaded. Sometimes you satisfy his craving, sometimes you don’t. Someday you will both be used to the fact that moments of pleasure come and go. That you don’t have to force them. In its core this way of thinking is very similar to abundance mentality, even leading into the direction of enlightenment. A big piece of wisdom that you can put into practice right now.
The Buddhist view of karma is that of cause and effect. It doesn’t mean fate or anything like that, but refers to the effects that your thinking, speaking, and acting has on the world, and on your inner world in particular. The interesting thing is that karma makes people act in unconscious ways because of what they have done earlier (even in earlier lifes, though for me personally, this is more of a metaphor. More on that in another post.), and it makes the world treat you in specific ways because of what you have done. So it is often translated as cause and effect, but the ways in which it works are often so complex that the scientific notion of cause and effect is insufficient to describe it, and concepts like synchronicity seem more appropriate. An interesting view of karma is that it gives us a chance to learn. I have recently had the doubious pleasure of experiencing intense karma firsthand. In the next days I will publish three gruelling short stories that might illustrate what I mean. And yes, they are all about sex and relationships.
I’ve always dreaded these two words. Structure and discipline sound like concepts from another age. Bleak, boring, and grey, something that old men praise. Aren’t we supposed to have fun? Well, fun is another quite problematic term, but let’s keep that for another post. The thing with structure and discipline is that I have rediscovered these values, and am in the process of making my peace with them. Read the rest of this entry »
The horn of General Lee awoke me in a sunflower field near Angoulême. Hectic bureaucrazyness from home, delivered in a hurry at 0.59 €/minute. Not even 10 a.m., and the sun was hiding in a gloomy haze. In spite of this, the heat was punishing already. The past month had been frustrating and exhausting on many occasions, but we had always managed to go for a sunset surf. This was going to be the first day of many more to come that I would not see the ocean. Read the rest of this entry »
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