Summary
· Embrace What Is
· Amor Fati
· Hypothyroid
· Etty Hillesum
· Joy Versus Happiness
Quotes
Life is good, and there's no reason to think it won't be--right up until the moment when everything explodes into a fireball of tiny, unrecognizable fragments, or it all goes skidding sideways, through the guardrail, over the embankment, and down the mountain. This will happen (and probably more than once).
Michael J Fox
Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.
Dale Carnegie
Remember that sometimes, not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.
Dalai Lama
I try to look things straight in the eye, even the worst crimes, to discover the small, naked human being amid the monstrous wreckage caused by man's senseless deeds.
Etty Hillesum
I’m Glad You’re Here
Welcome to the Simple Ways to Have a Good Life newsletter, your monthly guide to cultivating the life you want without spending money on gurus, gimmicks, or influencers. Two decades of helping people change their lives has taught me that the best things are simple and don't require spending a dime. I use this space to share those things.
A Simple Way to Have a Good Life
This month's Simple Way to Have a Good Life is to embrace reality. It may seem self-evident, but I have often been amazed at our capacity to not only refuse to embrace reality but to deny it (and then be surprised at the consequences).
A refusal to accept and embrace reality is a fatal flaw. I can't tell you how often I have been talking with someone and realized that nothing would change in their life because they could not accept what was in front of them. I don't understand it, but as a species, we often think about how we wish things were rather than doing what we need to do to fix the situation in front of us.
I've gotten to be where I hate the phrase "if only" and its variations. When I hear something like that, I know it's the first sign that the person I'm talking to is invested in spinning their wheels instead of making progress. When I hear it from a client, I address it immediately. If they aren't willing to try to deal with things as they are instead of how they wish they would be, I do not take any more time or money from them until they are.
Accepting reality is important, and learning to do that takes time and maturity. Embracing reality, on the other hand, is a whole different animal, and it’s the key to changing everything in our lives.
An Example
My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not in the future, not in the past, and not for all eternity. Not only to endure what is necessary, still less to conceal it — all idealism is falseness in the face of necessity — but to love it...
Friedrich Nietzsche
I don't remember where I first heard it, but this quote deeply impacted me. It took me a long time to learn to accept reality. I spent my early life denying reality. It was good at it. I was chronically full of shit and could look something dead in the face and refuse to acknowledge it.
Take drinking, for example.
Once I had a few drinks, I would have a bunch of drinks. This happened literally every single time I drank. There was not a single instance where how much I drank was limited by anything except for how much alcohol was available. This was true 100% of the time. Yet, every day, I believed I could have a few drinks that evening and cut it off. This went on for years, so the number of times I refused to acknowledge this reality is hard to calculate.
Over the years, I learned to be honest with myself and to deal with reality. This allowed me to make a lot of changes, but it also led to a sort of resignation in the face of the things in my life. It was better than denying reality, but it didn't allow me to make the significant changes I wanted to make.
Nietzsche's Amor Fati quote was a ray of light through my brain. It changed my perspective on things in my life and how I dealt with everything around me. I even named my counseling practice after it for a while, but people told me it was too abstract to be good for advertising, and they were right.
The core of Nietzsche's quote is about taking the step beyond merely accepting reality and actually embracing it - grabbing it, hugging it, and loving it to where you understand that life could never be any way other than the way it is now. I think this might be easier for people who believe in something bigger than themselves, but the fact is that what we have at this moment is all there is, and wishing it were different is a waste of our time. We can accept it with a passive resignation or run toward it with excitement, determined to make it ours.
A Practice
This last month has been all about embracing reality for me. I changed the topic this month because I needed to hear this myself.
We don't know why, but I swung to hypothyroid five or six weeks ago. I had been feeling good, and then I just didn't. I went from having good energy and taking care of everything I needed to take care of to feeling like I am walking in 10 feet of water.
I'm exhausted all day, but I can't sleep well. When it first started, I had bad dreams that woke me up three or four times a night. My hair is falling out even more than it was, and I've put on 14 or 15 pounds despite being at the gym at 5:00 a.m. every morning. It's crazy how many things the thyroid affects, from digestion to painful and annoying skin conditions.
I've been super depressed. There's not anything that I enjoy or that I'm looking forward to right now. I don't want to watch TV, I don't want to read, I don't want to play a video game, and I definitely don't want to write. I usually have the entire month written and scheduled a week before the 1st of the month, but right now, it's 7:15 a.m. on August 31st, and I'm still trying to get this first post written (now it’s 3:20 and I’m editing it). I feel overwhelmed and panicky as I think about getting this edited and uploaded. It's evident that this is not my best writing, and that's difficult for me to accept, but it is the truth of this present moment.
I have embraced all of this. There is no other way it should be, and there is no other way it could be because this is my present reality. Embracing it has allowed me to do what I need to do without a lot of suffering. It's kept me from wasting time thinking about how I wish things were. I haven't wasted my energy blaming anyone or anything or being upset about it. This is my reality right now, and I'm grateful I have a consciousness to experience it.
Journal Prompts
In what ways do I deny reality?
In what ways do I accept reality without embracing it?
What would it look like to engage my current circumstances as though they could not be any different?
What opportunities might I be missing by wishing things were different?
Media of the Month
I've been reading An Interrupted Life, a book about Etty Hillesum. She was a Jewish woman living in Denmark when the Nazis took over. It's one part biography, one part history, and one part memoir in the form of her journal entries.
Etty had a troubled early life due to family dysfunction and other things, but through her relationship with a psychotherapist and a somewhat spontaneous spiritual awakening, she developed a deep belief in the beauty of the world and peace about the events around her, even as the Nazi occupation slowly clamped down on her people.
The slow descent from occupation to oppression to genocide is well-documented and hard to read. This is balanced by Hillesum's spiritual journey and awakening as she recognizes the beauty inherent in everything around her and refuses to hate anyone, including the Nazis. People like her always blow my mind and are the basis for what I'll talk about in the next section.
Here are a few quotes that have stood out to me:
"Not thinking, but listening to what is going on inside you. If you do that for a while every morning … you acquire a kind of calm that illumines the whole day."
"Thinking gets you nowhere. It may be a fine and noble aid in academic studies, but you can't think your way out of emotional difficulties. That takes something altogether different. You have to make yourself passive then, and just listen. Reestablish contact with a slice of eternity."
"… I am filled with a sort of bountifulness, even towards myself; … And a feeling of being at one with all existence. No longer: I want this or that, but: Life is great and good and fascinating and eternal, and if you dwell so much on yourself and flounder and fluff about, you miss the mighty eternal current that is life. It is in these moments – and I am so grateful for them – that all personal ambition drops away from me, that my thirst for knowledge and understanding comes to rest, and a small piece of eternity descends on me with a sweeping wingbeat."
"..systems grow too big for men, and hold them in a satanic grip, the builders no less than the victims of the system, much as large edifices and spires, created by men's hands, tower high above us, dominate us, yet may collapse over our heads and bury us."
"Klaas, all I really wanted to say is this: we have so much work to do on ourselves that we shouldn't even be thinking of hating our so-called enemies. We are hurtful enough to one another as it is. And I don't really know what I mean when I say there are bullies and bad characters among our own people, for no one is really 'bad' deep down. I should have liked to reach out to that man with all his fears, I should have liked to trace the source of his panic, to drive him ever deeper into himself; that is the only thing we can do, Klaas, in times like these … I repeat with the same old passion, although I am gradually beginning to think that I am being tiresome, it is the only thing we can do, Klaas, I see no alternative: each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others. And remember that every atom of hate we add to this world makes it still more inhospitable."
Toxic Positivity
I get it; toxic positivity is not a good thing.
Pretending that everything is OK when it's not, is not a good thing.
Giving people pretty little platitudes that don't mean anything when they are struggling is not a good thing.
Telling ourselves to count our blessings and suppressing suffering is not a good thing.
I do get that, but at the same time, I think that we have deprived a lot of people of one of the most important tools we have as human beings when we classify everything positive as toxic positivity. I think it's OK and necessary that we all learn to actively choose our perspective in every situation and engage every opportunity for honest gratitude no matter what is happening around us.
Understanding the difference between joy and happiness is essential in this. I bring all of this up because a bunch of people have asked me how I've kept a positive perspective over the last year with so much illness and so many deaths. A few have gently challenged me about my potential toxic positivity. I understand where they are coming from, and it does not bother me.
Here's the thing: I cannot say that I've been happy the entire time over the last year. It would be strange to say that I was happy in the midst of the panic and anxiety that came with the hyperthyroid, especially before I knew what was going on. It would be strange to be happy when my grandma died or through all the ups and downs with all the different thyroid issues and the things they've done to my body and mental health.
This is because happiness is dependent on circumstances. If I am excited about something and it does not happen, I am not happy about that. It can be something big like health isues or something small like looking forward to eating at a restaurant and finding out it's closed. This will not make someone happy.
Joy and peace, on the other hand, are not dependent on circumstances. I've definitely had times over the last year where there was less joy and less peace in my life, but that did not mean they had gone away. They were always running in the background; they were just harder to access at some times than others. They get quieter, but it is possible to have joy and peace no matter what is happening around you. People like Etty Hillesum and Viktor Frankl, who went through things that were much, much harder than anything I've ever been through, are proof of this.
Cultivate joy and peace; let the rest fall where it falls.
What’s Going On
It took 10 months, but my appointment with the endocrinologist was timed perfectly to address this weird flip to hypothyroidism. She said that my blood work over the last year was super confusing and she wanted a clean slate, so they pulled me off all my medication, and I'm scheduled to get a thyroid scan next week. It's been a long process, but I am grateful there is a process. I know there are places where I would be stuck trying to figure this out on my own, and that would be hard.
Being hypothyroid has made writing hard, so my production in that area has decreased. I need a way to fill my time, so I've been putting a lot more time and energy into working around the house and doing woodwork. I built a rolling woodworking bench and a little table for the backyard; both were fun projects. I'm working on patching some holes in walls and repairing some water damage in our ceiling, which is also fun. I think I'm going to build a tray to hold my notebooks next.
Memento Mori
All the death over the last year has been a good reminder of how quickly this all ends. There's not enough time in this life to wish things were different. What we have is all there is right now. By embracing this and leaning into it with intentionality and compassion, we may be able to change things in the future, but for now, things are exactly as they are.
Thank you for reading.
James
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James, your work continues to be the best content of anything I read--and I regularly read a LOT of material from a number of people who are writing about the same (or very similar) concepts and matters. While my vocational arena is spiritual direction/ministry, absolutely everything you say fits like a glove in that world--and more importantly, in my personal life. And by the way, my understanding or definition for God is REALITY. I've been a very long time coming to that understanding, but it's working for me, and this latest post absolutely fits.