Pursuing Awareness

I haven’t worked out yet what level I need to break the sub-streams down into yet, and haven’t worked out how best to present the to-do list in a workable fashion.

An example – this blog. It sits within the bucket Craft – Own Projects. However, I have a few ‘own projects’ on the go, so ideally I would compartmentalise this project somehow. 

Going further, if I want to make the blog an actual thing, then I’m semi-aware that I need to have a few different sub-streams that I need to focus on. At the moment I’m just focussing on getting some writing under my belt, getting used to the process, trying to establish the routine of it, and trying to not care too much on getting perfection. That’s all well and good, but I’m thinking, at a minimum, a more comprehensive project would have streams that look something like:

• Idea creation
• Writing the content – actually writing the darn words
• Reviewing and editting 
• Content management – e.g. developing a system/process that means I can keep track of content, organisation, jotting ideas effectively, planning what I’m writing next, make it less daunting a task, recognising how long it takes to actually write a post and what a commitment it is
• Marketing – e.g. improving the chances of getting a first subscriber
• Learning – e.g. learning to make the writing the content better
• Networking 

I realise it’s all kind of like a tree. At the centre I have the trunk, my life, and stemming from that  I have branches that lead to smaller and smaller branches. The question is at what point is it worthwhile tracking these ever increasingly small streams?

The tension is usefulness to track vs. burden to track.

Specifically for the blog, I think the usefulness would outweigh the burden, as it allows for a complete view and exposes the holes in my progression. For example, in 6 months, do I still want to be e.g. 5% idea creation, 70% writing the content, 25% review and editing? No. Even now I want to have a little bit of learning thrown in the mix. In 6 months, I would want to start with a bit of marketing, and have developed a proper ‘content management’ system. Having this listed out somewhere would at least serve as a reminder that I do at some point need to do these things, even if it’s not the priority now. 

A work in progress. As always.

In the last post, for the first time ever I wrote down explicitly the different areas (or rather, sub-streams) of my life and also started a to-do list for my personal life, which I’ve created in a google sheet and added an app shortcut on the front page of my phone. I’m categorising the tasks in the to-do list by these different sub-streams. 

Downsides

It’s been both depressing and an eye-opener. It’s been a shock to the system. It has most likely added stress over the last few weeks with the realisation I have an avalanche of tasks, all which I want to get done (otherwise they wouldn’t be there) but I simply don’t have time to do.  

I now realise that I have so many darn things on my plate. I now realise I don’t spend enough time on certain areas. I now realise that I should think about what I want to actually do in various categories, otherwise I am completely reactive instead of proactive. It made me realise that I still haven’t found the time to work out how to get a handle on enhancing these categories. The zero-sum nature of it all really is bearing itself.

Upsides

Despite all the above, I don’t think it would be possible for me to set it aside and go back to how things were like before. The streams are imprinted in my head, and I recognise I would be better off grounding myself in a system that enables their maximise enhancement. I recognise that tracking tasks is as important as it is in the workplace, for the same aim – if it ain’t down, it ain’t done.

It gives me the space to reflect on ‘this sub-stream does exist. What should I do in order to move it forward’?

Yes, I can naturally gravitate to the most important task to get done without going through some ‘tracking’. That is what I have done for my whole life. However, there are lots of times when there isn’t something big and obvious to focus on. There are lots of times when the road ahead isn’t immediately clear. Then what? 

There’s a high chance things just gets forgotten, or I unnecessarily prioritise tasks to be done immediately at the expense of doing other things that, when in my head, are just floating in the ether. Big projects lose steam because the view of needing to do a task is gone. 

Another point, while adding to stress, it also feels a bit relieving. There’s just so much, it’s nice just knowing what there is to do and it is somewhere accessible.

Next steps

I do need to iterate. The system isn’t perfect, but the absolute essential is doing it in the first place. There are no doubt infinite numbers of next steps, but as far as I can tell, the most important to me are:

• Working out how to overcome the stress of having a tonne of tasks in front of me. I need to develop a system that allows for not having that overwhelm, or at least better management of it.
• Working out how to capture in one place all the recurring tasks I have / need, so I’m not listing them out each time, because there is a risk I don’t include them on the to do if I forget. Yes, they can and do go in the calendar as a recurrence, but I think it would be useful to see in a list format.

Okay so I thought I’d share my journey through this. 

In this post I said that I’d written out the main streams of my life. That’s not to say that I’m 100% doing all these things all the time. It’s just that these are the vague areas of my life that I do or want to do because I think they are valuable to me.

The first attempt at these streams looked like this: 

• Work (9 to 5)
• Own work
• Health
• Social
• Spiritual
• Home
• Self-care
• Learning
• Relaxation
• Family
• Pushing boundaries
• Sex
• Organising
• Money

I then came across Cal Newport’s 4 C zones for focussing on enhancing the deep life: 

Community (family/friends etc)

Craft (quality work and leisure)

Constitution (health)

Contemplation (matters of the soul)

This made me realise I should probably bring my sub-streams into main streams so I can see the forest through the trees. However, his streams didn’t fully work for my sub-streams, and recognising that there’s no set in stone solution, I made my own (for better or worse).

I don’t know if Cal’s categories should cover all aspects of life, or just those that focussing on would enhance the deep life, but I wanted to be holistic about all areas of my life because there’s a whole section of my life which is just admin shit that needs to get done and will take up time, but I wouldn’t necessarily gives my life deep meaning. However, I want to make sure I’m tracking that properly i.e. making sure the list is complete.

I then further iterated the list above to my current situation: 

• Admin – Home (e.g. taking out bins, food shopping, washing clothes, washing dishes, cleaning)
• Admin – Money (e.g. looking after money, saving, investing, budgeting)
• Admin – Self-organisation (e.g. doing the work of working this out falls under here, to-do list, calendar management, review of all this)

• Craft – Skill development (e.g. I’m currently learning to drive, I want to enhance my communication skills)
• Craft – Own projects (e.g. doing the blog falls under here)
• Craft – Work (my 9 to 5 – takes up about 10 hours a day including commute, so pretty time-expensive)

• Health – Body (e.g. exercise, nutrition/eating, sex, posture, grooming)
• Health – Mind (e.g. relaxation, being in nature, meditation, journaling)

• Self-realisation – Learning/Reminding (e.g. reading spiritual books, solitude) 
• Self-realisation – Practicing (e.g embodying kindness, love and understanding in my day-to-day life)
• Self-realisation – Adventure/awe/beauty (e.g. doing things that make me feel a sense of adventure and awe)

• Team – Partner (e.g. how I’m spending time interacting with my significant other, planning for wedding)
• Team – Family (how I’m spending time interacting with family)
• Team – Friends (how I’m spending time interacting with friends)
• Team – Community (how I’m spending time interacting with friends)

You can draw up these streams how they fit your life e.g. if you have kids then you would have a separate stream, or multiple, for kids. If you have a particular hobby, then you have that as a specific stream.

I’m more or less happy with these streams for now. I think Self-realisation/Spiritual and Team/Community, sit predominantly in Health – Mind, but I think for me it’s better to separate them out as specific areas.

I am thinking that leisure, relaxation, self-care all fit into Health – Mind, but I’m not sure if I’m going to draw them out of that into a separate bucket. I’ve also got grooming (shaving, haircut, brush teeth, shower) under Health – Body, but not sure if that needs to go under Admin. In any case, I can iterate if the buckets don’t work how I need them to. 

Also some activities cross multiple categories, which is also fine. Just pick one that doesn’t seem off the mark.

Do the 80%, forget perfection.

The Deep Life & Time Management

So after my initial attempt, I’m knee deep in Cal Newport’s stuff right now. I’ve watched a few more youtube videos here and here and read a few of his blog posts. I highly recommend his Start Here page.

I like his presentation, I like that he’s to the point. I like that he’s talking about something that’s relevant to literally everybody and approaching it in a way that’s not woo woo. Basically he’s doing what I want to be doing, but just doing it better than I’ll ever do it. Sigh.

He’s super big on time management, task management and how that filters through into the life you want to lead. 

Anyway, some insights from myself…

Work system

At work I have a spreadsheet that I add tasks to, bucket and mark off as complete when I have completed them. I follow this ‘To Do’ spreadsheet religiously. I have been using this system for about 5 or 6 years. Yes, it works well enough in that I capture everything and it means I do everything I need to without forgetting. However, it doesn’t structure the day, week or month and I do often think ‘okay, what am I doing next?’, with a list of 100 items or so that stretch back over a 6 month period. Sometimes it’s difficult to select something from the list.

Upon review, maybe it’s time to evolve this system a little further so I can be more cutthroat than I currently am with my time at work. Maybe that takes the form of building in some formal review time. Maybe my bucketing system needs some form of ‘task-type’ e.g. chasing people, rather than the work stream, because it can get a little baffling at some points deciding what to do next.

I think it would be interesting to see if there is any time at the edges that I can reclaim for non-main work tasks, rather than me thinking about it as ‘from 8.30am-6.30pm that’s work time and you must strictly do that’.

Work vs. Non-Work

Strangely, I have this system which defines how I work, but in all aspects of life beyond work, I have nothing similar at all. I have no system of capturing tasks I need to complete. In my head I’ve been telling myself that I don’t need it. I don’t need that control because it will suck the joy out of life. I don’t want to be dealing with spreadsheets in my personal life, as I already have it at work. More screens. More obligatory work. I like spontaneity. I like fun. I tried to maintain a spreadsheet maybe 4 years ago and it lasted a day. Therefore it’s just not meant to be.

I’m becoming aware that maybe this isn’t entirely true. Maybe I could do it a better way. The way to prove it wrong is to actually try to maintain a to-do list and embed it into my life for at least a few months. If my life is better off, then keep it. If it’s worse off, ditch.

I set up the spreadsheet a few days ago and immediately added about 50 tasks, and in the next 3 days have added another 30. How could I possibly have kept all this in my head as well as do it, as well as work out that I need to allocate the time to it? Yes, I’ve managed to survive without it in my last 30 years which proves it’s not strictly necessary, but if I want to enhance my life, I do believe that this could be a foundation I need to build off. If I know what I’m aiming for, then I can focus on doing tasks that contribute towards it.

It’s a lifestyle

I think what Cal is actually proposing is nothing short of a lifestyle change. I have to change my personal lifestyle from one of an insidious form of ‘going with the flow’, where things pop up out my head and I deal with it immediately or let it linger whenever it comes back into my memory, to living a life of having things written down, tasks to complete, some kind of planning on when to complete it, some kind of short and mid term aims to contribute towards an enhanced life in each of the streams of life I do have. 

Discovery 

The other day I came across Cal Newport’s podcast. I’ve never read any of his books, but I’m aware of their existence and I probably have watched a Youtube summary at some point, so I thought let’s give it a go.

The episode I clicked on was how to change your life in 4 months. In it, he talks about the idea of the deep life stack, and then there is a Q&A (which I didn’t watch).

I then had a snoot around and found another episode completely on the deep life stack, which I then didn’t watch but Googled to get a gist of it in its wider sense (rather than just being applied to 4 months).

Deep Life Stack

These seem to be the main tenets:

1. Discipline – keystone habits, route (how are you tracking). Pick 3 keystone habits: professional, home, wholesomeness
2. Values – code, rituals, routines
3. Calm/control – Plan quarterly, let that feed through to weekly, let that feed through to daily
4. Vision – making things remarkable. 1 small goal to achieve this quarter, 1 larger 2 year project

You then phase them, working on the discipline first, then values, then control, then vision, phased in c. 6 week periods.

I liked the sound of this idea a lot. A nice framework. Things make sense. It claims to be literally step-by-step. Listening to this stuff is like crack.

My attempt

That night, I set aside 20 minutes to try and apply it to my own life.

I sat down to write some keystone habits down. My pen hovered over the page for about a minute, but then I realised that I didn’t want to just set some keystone habits without first understanding what areas of my life there are. I’ve got some pretty good habits already. What further habits do I even want? 

I then had the epiphany that my life is like a project that needs to be project managed, and there’s different work streams within it, so I wrote down all the streams I could think of (around 14 came up) and then I tried setting quarterly A-grade goals in each area as well as B-grade goals and C-grade goals, although by the sixth stream I was 45 minutes in and out of energy for it. At that point I I looked at my notes, decided I was done and let myself bask in a sense of empowerment. Now I will change my life for the better. Now it will happen.

However, by the time I woke up the next morning, I felt annoyed because I hadn’t followed what the framework had said really, I’d set out some goals for the quarter that I wasn’t going to meet (make $1m???) and I didn’t really know how to proceed.

Initial reflections on my attempt

The annoying thing is, this stuff SOUNDS good. I bet if I actually followed it at least 80%, my life would probably look better. But who actually does the work and how do they actually figure out how it works? Put simply, why don’t I do the work and why don’t I actually figure out how it works? 

I’m someone who’s the type of person to watch this in the first place. If I can’t do the work, what about the people who also don’t watch the video? We’re all not doing it. In fact, there’s probably only a handful of people who actually do it. Cal must be doing it unless he’s not following his own advice. That’s one person at least.

What are the barriers? When I say barriers, I mean there’s a whole lot of friction (to take from Atomic Habits). So what is my friction? 

I’ll let you enter my thought-stream: I guess it has to do with finding the extended time alone and energy to critically self-reflect and knowing where to start and having self-doubt about it and there’s other stuff that I want to do right now and not knowing whether there’s any point anyway because what’s the ‘right’ answer and what about when I set my goal, is that really the goal I want and I’m probably going to fall off the tracks anyway at some point so it’s probably not worth the effort of all this other stuff. 

How does a mere mortal do this? 

How do I actually become this awesome version of myself? 

Instead of abstract concept I vaguely am familiar with, how do I actualise? 

How do I make it stick?

Where’s my incentive to overcome this friction? I’ve been cracking on with my life just fine without doing this, and will probably crack on just fine after not doing this. 

Final thoughts

I need to figure out what to do with the work I’ve already done (re writing out the life streams) because there is something of value there. However, one must recognise that this stuff is not easy.

Has anyone else actually done something akin to this framework to the point that their life is remarkably different to how it was before? Let me know.

I keep returning to this incredible thought that is so obvious yet so hard for me to grasp.

No matter what I’m doing, my body is always physically right here, always in the present. My body is right here. I am right here. My mind is a subset of my body, it is not separate. Therefore my mind is right here.

I’m writing on the laptop at the kitchen table this morning. My body is sitting.

I’m absorbed in work in the middle of the day. My body is sitting.

I’m cooking dinner. My body is standing and shuffling around the kitchen.

I’m in conversation with a friend. My body is walking and my lips are moving.

Even when my thoughts are running away with something, or I’m completely lost in some abstract concept, my body is anchored to now. 

Even if I completely forget my body, it’s still here, and I always have the option to return to it.  

Why is this important to me? Because this is where my life is happening, right here, where my body is. This is it. This is everything. Any planning that was done to get to this moment, it doesn’t exist.

Sometimes I push myself. I’m dissatisfied with everything. I want to be doing something else. I want my situation to be different. I want to feel something different. I’m in a rush. Time is of the essence. I don’t want to be just sitting here. I want to do something! I want to live a big life. Now, now, now!

Also, I want to live a courageous life. I want to be kind. I want to be strong. I want to be the best partner I can be. I want to be the best son I can be. 

All of this. I want, I want, I want! I want to embody all these traits I view as desirable because I think they tie me into my end destination. My end destination is achieved right now in this moment if I’m embodying the traits that will maximise the probability of me feeling a certain way.

However, I think there’s some skill to this. As already talked about, I can only ever be in one place at one time. I’m only ever physically present in one circumstance, in one situation.

It leads me to the thought that maybe right here, there are some things I can do, or some embodiments that make more sense than others.  

I’m sitting on the couch, relaxing. Do I need to embody proactivity? You know, I actually had a pretty busy day. I think proactivity would push me over the edge. I actually think I need to really embody relaxation. 

I’m pouring a glass of water. Do I need to embody courage? Maybe not. Maybe I can just embody presence to really physically feel the pouring of the water.

I’m sitting writing this blog post. Do I need to embody kindness? I mean, I could write a dickish thing, but I would really have to be going out of my way to do that, and so I don’t really think I need to actively focus on embodying kindness. I think it would be better to embody focus and presence. 

Look, different present moments call for different embodiments. I have to accept that. If I don’t I will be eternally dissatisfied. 

Questions for myself:

• Given I am physically right here, what can I actually do?
• Given what I’m doing, how should I best embody? 
• Does this take me to my end destination?

When choosing in our moment to moment, we need to choose one path out of all the possible paths. Why choose one path over the other?

My framework:

The closer the path takes you to your end destination, the more you can consider it the ‘right’ path. If there are multiple paths that end up at the same point, then it doesn’t matter which one you choose (unless you have destinations you want to visit along the way). If you can’t see where the path leads, then all you can focus on in the present moment is what you have visibility over and base your decision on that.

So you just need to decide on your end destination. Easy.

What’s the end destination? My take.

Look, I wanted to give the answer for life, but I don’t think I can give one. I’ve scratched my head over this but it’s a long-term question that I’m not going to be able to get a suitable answer for in a few days just to get a blog post out. There’s just seems to be too wide a variance in what people want out of life and consider valuable, and I need time to put together a convincing argument for my way of thinking, that I’m still working on.

Last night I asked two different people ‘between now and the end of your life, if you wanted to live a great life, what would you do to consider it great?’

One said: I would surround myself with people who make me happy.

The other said: Isn’t it all meaningless anyway, so why does it matter? (They also said there must be a little bit of meaning because otherwise why wouldn’t you just kill yourself? They also said maybe it is fulfilment that provides meaning. They said a lot).

All I’m going to say for now is that my end destination needs to be time-of-death proof. I could die in a month, or I could die in 50 years, but in either scenario I want to be able to say ‘from that point where I decided I was going to live with my end destination in mind, I lived that way’.

For me, I don’t have an end destination of singular achievement. Nothing I do in life (at this point in time looking forward) I want to define my life. I do want children, but if I die in a month then that just ain’t going to happen, so I don’t want to have that as my end destination. That’s not the case for everybody. And maybe it doesn’t even need to even be binary. Maybe I can set incremental goals: ‘dying at 40, doesn’t include climbing Everest, dying at 50, does include climbing Everest’.

Currently I’m in a whirl of thoughts, but I think I want my end destination to be a life of feeling complete, by which I mean having a sense of wholesome contentment and belonging, experiencing my life to the full, ideally feeling deep love in my heart for everything rather than hatred and pain, really feeling this is a gift, and living up to my expectations of how I want to conduct myself. That, all bundled into one. Given it is mostly about feelings that can come and go as they please beyond my control, all that is within my control is to bring the horses to water by what I do and how I do it, hoping the horse drinks and the feelings arise.

So what about you?

Side notes:

• It’s all very me, me, me, you may argue. Why should I focus on my end destination rather than on alleviating people suffering in other parts of the world? People even down the street? I think I would answer you have to start somewhere, and that first place is yourself, because no one else can do it for you.

• The way I can rationalise ‘why does it matter’ is the thought that life is just a series of present moments. If I’m in excruciating pain in the present moment, say in my abdomen, I can barely breathe with the pain it’s that all-consuming, and in this present moment, and in this present moment, and I have the option to not be in excruciating pain, then I would choose to not be in excruciating pain. Therefore it would matter to me that I’m not in pain. Therefore because something matters, it does matter, even if we’re only talking relatively, not absolutely.

Last night I’m watching the World Athletics Championships and BAM – Noah Lyles knocks out 19.51 seconds in the 200m. Very impressive.

After doing some googling, I come across an article that really has made me think and develop an important insight to reflect on in my own life – team.

Teamwork makes the dream work – who the hell is my team?

“You’d ask in an individual sport, ‘what is a team?’ But let me tell you it’s my family, my management, my coach, my agent, my doctor, my chiropractor, my massage therapist, my regular therapist, my sports therapist.

I read this in the article and it kind of struck me how life is also an individual sport but in the sport of life I don’t know what my team is or what it looks like. Noah knows what his team looks like. I don’t. Yeah I’m in a ‘team’ in my job but my life is so much bigger than just my workplace. I need a team for life. I need people around me who want me to succeed. I need guidance. I need people around me to help maximise the probability of experiencing joy in life. It’s a team effort and a team success.

The team members may change, the roles required may change, some teammates may cost money and some may not, but the team continues to exist. I think there should be clearly defined roles and responsibilities. I think there are roles to be filled on my team that I didn’t even know I needed to fill, and further people that are doing roles right now that are probably better not done by them.

Why do I even need a team?

Sure. I can do it all. The only thing is I can live one version of my life where I do it all, but I could also live another version of my life where I don’t do it all. I’m constrained by time. I’m constrained by what I like doing vs. what I don’t like doing, which means skewing my time spent on what I like doing vs. what needs doing. I’m constrained by my own experience, by not knowing what different experiences look like. I’m constrained by my specialisation and knowledge. I’m constrained by my energy levels. I’m constrained. A lot.

There’s a whole literature on how you can achieve so much more as a team than as an individual, and if you look at any organisation in the world, you can appreciate the power of that. Side note: that literature is all good but I’ve never really related that to my own life.

Also, conceptually, I don’t really have a choice in the matter. I already have a team in place (unless I was stranded on a desert island). I just don’t know it.

The Lyles team

I’m assuming every top level sportsperson has a big team around them, but seeing as I’m fanboying on Lyles right now, let’s use his team as a template (with my assumptions of what these people do – might be inaccurate):

1. Himself – executor, executive
2. Family/friends – provides emotional support, cheerleads, provides love/warmth/cherishment, informal mentors, provides downtime and play
3. Management – Organises and coordinates the logistics of his program and life
4. Coach – Guides executor specifically in their pursuit (what to do, how to do it)
5. Agent – Deals with the business side of things (media, contracts, money)
6. Doctor – Guides/practices on physical state
7. Chiropractor – Guides/practices on physical state
8. Massage therapist – Guides/practices on physical state
9. Regular therapist – Guides/practices on mental state
10. Sports therapist – Guides/practices on physical state

What’s the common goal of this team? To get Lyles to be an awesome world-class sprinter.

How do I apply this to my life?

So I basically need to do a writing exercise. A few key questions for me right now:

• What does my current team look like?
• How much do I do myself?
• What would my ideal team look like?
• How do I adapt my current team to make it better?
• Do I need to invest money in people who are going to take away the tasks I don’t want to spend time on (admin staff)?
• Do I need to invest money in people who are going to maximise the probability of joy (mentors, physical maintenance stuff)?
• What would be ideal frequency of team play?
• Do I sit on other people’s teams? What role do I fill? What are their objectives?

Okay. Time to take my responsibility and start executing by working on team design.

Hands in. Everyone in one, two, three. TEAM!

Okay so now I understand that I’m always choosing, every moment is a choice. Okay, great. But what exactly am I choosing?

So, the definition per Google: an act of choosing between two or more possibilities.

Possibilities. Yes. We live in a universe of possibilities. While maybe not infinite, I have a choice set of an unimaginable size right now in front of me i.e. there’s thousands, millions of possibilities at this very moment. The catch is I can only ever ENACT one of these possibilities because my body and mind only exists in this time and this space right now. Damn man. Only one course of action is ever enacted, and therefore all the possibilities that we thought were possible never come to existence beyond our imagination (Quantum mechanics…pfff).

Importantly for me, possibilities denote future states. In the present, no other possibilities ever exist. Always the only thing going on is the action of the present. The possibilities exist in our imagination when we are doing the present action of analytically thinking about the future. Mindfuck. 

I think there’s two planes on which I can choose operationally what I am doing: 

1. What (actions) 
2. How (embodiments)

‘Action’ = Do. Move my limb. Talk. Whisper. Tap on a keyboard with my fingers. Okay cool. Reminder – we can only ‘act’ given the circumstances. We’re all physically limited by the virtue of being a human body, but it’s just to what extent. If I’m in the UK, I can’t physically be in the US with the click of the fingers. It’s not possible (yet). 

‘Embodiment’ is slightly more difficult. I have chosen ‘embodiment’ rather than ‘being’ because I think it has more physicalness to its meaning, but I guess that’s just semantics. To me it represents how physically and mentally you do the action, given that the mind is part of the body. It represents physical control and character.

I think we have agency (ability to choose) over both of these planes and they are equally important because we have the ability to control them. Imagine I was at the end of my life, I looked back at my life of cool-sounding actions but realised that I didn’t embody joyousness at all? I think that would suck and would mean I had not lived to my best potential. 

Here are some examples of the what/how in this very moment:

1. What – Sitting down
2. How – With good posture

1. What – Writing
2. How – With focus and creativity 

1. What – Chatting with partner
2. How – With lightness and relaxation

When I’ve been experimenting with this, I found that for actions that I am in the middle of, it is hard to track what I am embodying. ‘I don’t know’ is what I was writing a lot. Once I started asking the question though, I found that I wanted to know. 

That’s the point of having two dimensions. I can choose to drink water, yes fair, but how do I want to drink the water? Does it even matter to me how I do it? 

YES! I want to enjoy the water when I have it. I want to feel it in my mouth and my throat. I want to feel alive. I don’t want it to be a mere afterthought. Therefore I want to embody presence for drinking the water. Therefore I must choose to embody presence.

Similarly when walking to the shop the other day, I realised I couldn’t be anywhere else other than right there. I was right there, halfway between home and the shop, on the 22nd August 2023 at 17.47, walking. That realisation made me want to enjoy it – the motion of the walk, the feeling of the sun on my skin. I wanted to feel alive. I could only enjoy those things if I embodied presence. Therefore I chose to then embody presence.

I will continue to try out focussing on this way of thinking. 

Edits: 

• A side note, yes I understand that decision theory is a whole academic discipline devoted to decision making and statistics. However, what I’m trying to do is write about insights created from the tapestry of my own life, and so my writing will probably not tie into the serious stuff.

• There is a tension created from this, at least in my life. Yes, I want to live in the present moment and enjoy the show for what it is, but also, I need to use my analytical brain to help guide me, which doesn’t feel like presence.

• Also worth noting it’s purely semantics that ‘what’ and ‘how’ are separate. In reality, they are but one, but I think it’s easier to explain as though they were separate.

• ‘With’ as the connecting word only came to me at the end of this post. I think the connecting word could probably be better defined by ’embodied with’ or ’embodied by’, but ‘with’ is easier.