Life's Hard: Here is How I Go About It (Life Framework v0.2)
11 sometimes surprising guidelines to find peace and make our mark on the world.
We have all been given this one wonderful life.
And, let's be honest - we suck at it.
You are unhappy. You make others unhappy. You destroy our planet.
Same as me.
So for a long time I have been tinkering with different ways how I can go about my life in a good and wholesome way.
It's hard, and sorry, I haven't quite figured it out yet.
However, I thought there is little harm in sharing what I've got up to so far.
I shared my initial 'life framework' one and a half years ago, and here is my all new improved version.
My focus in this version 2 was to make it simpler and easier for me to practice.
So I've boiled it down to two aspirations each with a few guidelines to help realise them:
- Aspiration 1: Be at Peace.
- Aspiration 2: Express love.
I would love it if you come along on the journey and let me know your thoughts.
Peace: Why Seek It?
Humans are fundamentally designed to be dissatisfied with ourselves, the world and our current situation.
Thus, we are constantly driven to do something, to feel that wherever we are is not the right place and whatever we are is not the right person.
That is very dangerous.
Not only does it make our lives less happy, less content than they could be, it also makes us more likely to harm to ourselves, others and nature.
Why does a billionaire need more money? Why do we need a new and larger car? Why can't we just give ourselves a break?
While we like to make ourselves believe that our desires and dissatisfaction are logical and justified, they aren't.
It's our society that is built to make us exploit ourselves in the strife of ever greater riches and power.
The opposite of this striving I call peace. To just be happy with what is.
If we achieve this, actually, we are done. You are happy, what more do you need to do?
Peace: How to Achieve It?
Being able to be happy simply with the way things are is infinitely easier said than done.
First, we need to recognise there is only one time when we can be happy and content: now.
But how to do that?
Thankfully, as much as our mind has been made to torment us with jealousy, dissatisfaction, anger and a thousand other unwholesome thoughts, we have also been gifted with the ability to look at the world in the way of the greatest of sages.
The following guidelines have been accepted in ancient religions and modern positive psychology alike to bring us greater insight, happiness and contentment.
This is quite a long and comprehensive list, and I know that I stated my intention to make the framework 'simpler'. But I think enlisting as much help as we can in achieving peace is essentially, since it is an incredibly difficult task.
I like to think of these following guidelines as my trusty sage companions, helping me on a perilous journey, and who wouldn't like to have a little bit of extra help around?
Stop and Breathe
It sounds a bit silly but truly one of the most powerful things we can do to find happiness and contentment in the here and now, is to simply stop whatever we are doing and pay close attention to our breath.
This is how the great Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh describes it:
The way to maintain your presence in the here and now is through mindfulness of the breath. There is no need to manipulate the breath. Breath is a natural thing, like air, like light; we should leave it as it is and not interfere with it. What we are doing is simply lighting up the lamp of awareness to illuminate our breathing.
Just try it.
Put the phone away. Forget about all your to-dos. Sit down and say to yourself:
Breathing in, I know I am breathing in. Breathing out, I know I am breathing out.
I think if you can do this very well, you are a master at just breathing, you are almost all the way there in terms of achieving peace and contentment.
If you can do this for more than 3 or 4 breaths, respect to you. It is way harder than it sounds!
Thus we need a few more strategies to help us calm our mind enough for truly peaceful breathing.
Enfold with Tenderness
If you sit there and try to just breathe, your mind will in no time start to assault you.
💭 I just got a notification on my phone. I really should check it. Could be work.
💭 When I meet Joan tomorrow, what will she think of my new haircut?
💭 Why am I such a terrible parent, just sitting here doing nothing, when I could be doing some meal prep.
💭 My back pain is killing me. Why can't it leave me alone?
At first you may think: as the true master of my mind, I should simply redirect my thoughts. After all, I am in charge here, aren't I?
Doesn't work.
Instead, we need to recognise where the thoughts are coming from that torment us:
Fear, anger, jealousy, insecurity, and above all, judgement of ourselves and others.
And the best balm for each of these is to respond not with more judgement and harshness but with their opposite:
Love, compassion, kindness, tenderness, forgiveness, acceptance.
Whatever bothers us, we respond to it as a loving mother would to her child: "My dear body, you give me back pain. I hear you. I am so grateful you carried me through all these years. I will look after you."
Thich Nhat Hanh once again describes it more beautifully than I ever could in his short work You Are Here:
If you feel irritation or depression or despair, recognize their presence and practice this mantra: “Dear one, I am here for you.” You should talk to your depression or your anger just as you would to a child. You embrace it tenderly with the energy of mindfulness and say, “Dear one, I know you are there, and I am going to take care of you,” just as you would with your crying baby. There is no discrimination or dualism here, because compassion and love are you, but anger is too.
That's what I call enfolding with tenderness.
We accept what gives us pain and wrap it in our love and understanding, with a kind smile.
We transform suffering into love.
Let Go of What You Treasure
As powerful as responding with love and kindness is, there is one danger we need to be aware of.
Love can create attachment.
And the more attachments we have, the less free we are, the more difficult it is to be happy.
In fact, it can be said, that we are only completely happy, content and free if we have no attachments and no objectives.
Thus, we need to identify our attachments and to learn to let go of what we treasure.
Not necessarily physically letting go, such as throwing your favourite piece of jewellery in the bin, but at the very least letting go of your attachment to it: If I loose my necklace, it will be all good, I will still be happy.
This is most challenging with our loved ones.
Here is how Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello explains how we can achieve it in a lecture captured in the book Awareness:
Perfect love casts out fear. Where there is love there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency. I do not demand that you make me happy; my happiness does not lie in you. If you were to leave me, I will not feel sorry for myself; I enjoy your company immensely, but I do not cling. I enjoy it on a nonclinging basis. What I really enjoy is not you; it’s something that’s greater than both you and me. It is something that I discovered, a kind of symphony, a kind of orchestra that plays one melody in your presence, but when you depart, the orchestra doesn’t stop.
Personally, I don't think I want to fully achieve this. But it is good to know that less attachments usually means more peace.
Abandon "I"
No single idea causes us as much trouble as what we commonly define as "I".
Anthony de Mello has a special obsession with helping us overcome what he calls our illusion of "I".
In Awareness, he first cautions us to be careful of our language:
You say, “I’m depressed.” But that is false. You are not depressed. If you want to be accurate, you might say, “I am experiencing a depression right now.”
Then he answers the question of what should replace our common perception of "I":
The important thing is not to know who “I” is or what “I” is. You’ll never succeed. There are no words for it. [...] As the Japanese Zen masters say, “Don’t seek the truth; just drop your opinions.”
That seems hard, and I think is one of the most difficult things in Zen to wrap your head around.
But it's worth the trouble. De Mello advises:
When the self dies all problems die with it. Where the self is not. Love is. God is.
I find this to be a very powerful idea. It's inevitable to experience pain, suffering, loss, anxiety, death, but all of it becomes so much more bearable when I look at these as "things that are happening" and not "things that are happening to poor me".
I know de Mello advises not to define "I". But my non-Zen master mind needs to have at least some directions to go by.
So when I think about what constitutes the deepest and truest part of me, I use as guidance one of the key insights of psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl:
Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.
Indulge in the Little Wonders
I already mentioned there is a lot of peace to be found by just taking a moment and appreciating the wonder of our breath, of being alive.
However, there are many other little wonders in our life that will unfold their beauty when we pay attention to it.
Taking a step. Washing the dishes. A cloud gliding in the sky.
Celebrated Christian mystic Meister Eckhart puts it very beautifully:
Nature's intent is neither food, nor drink, nor clothing, nor comfort, nor anything else in which God is left out. Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, secretly nature seeks, hunts, tries to ferret out the track on which God may be found.
So I like to think of these little wonders as anchors to a more enlightened way of being; what Christians would call the Kingdom of Heaven.
And we can literally step into it at any moment.
Surrender to the Vastness You Cannot Understand
In the beginning of our practice, every day concerns will come in our way to finding peace.
But eventually we will encounter a larger challenge.
We will ask ourselves: Why the heck am I there? What's all this for?
To find an answer is essential to find strength and happiness. As Viktor Frankl observes:
This is the core of the human spirit ... If we can find something to live for - if we can find some meaning to put at the center of our lives - even the worst kind of suffering becomes bearable.
Unfortunately, no psychological tricks or scientific theories will give us the answer.
Anthony de Mello says:
Reality, God, divinity, truth, love are unknowable; that means they cannot be comprehended by the thinking mind.
We need something larger than ourselves to find consolation and purpose in.
I loved the following metaphor from The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar:
[She saw] the entire gigantic metropolis, with all its residents crawling along their individual destinies like an army of ants pretending to be an army of giants [...].
We go about our lives not realising that we are an integral part of something infinitely grander than ourselves.
The more we let go of our illusion of self-importance and separateness, the more we see what a grand wonder the world actually is.
There are 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe.
We are born from them.
And we can behold their light.
Peace: Piecing it Together
For all the suggested guidelines above, I want to clarify that this is not a checklist or roadmap.
These are just some ideas that may work for you to find more peace and contentment.
And, to be honest, I have made this a lot more complicated than it needs to be.
Really, we can get all the way there by just sitting peacefully, breathing, and sending a smile out to the world.
In any case, as I have mentioned above, I think once we achieved peace, we are done. We are happy. What more do we need?
If you think to yourself: "No way! Just sitting around doing nothing, that cannot be the way!" Then, sorry, I have failed you. Let me know. I'll try to explain better next time.
Finding peace, I believe, is not one way to find true happiness, it is the only way.
Since without being fully at peace, we are driven by desire, and are by definition unhappy and discontent until our desires are satisfied.
But we have got a problem now. If we are at peace, happy, and content with what is, why bother doing anything?
Express Love: Why Pursue It?
If your way is just to be happy while literally doing nothing, go for it! Nothing wrong with that.
However, for many, once we have found peace, we will be filled with love, compassion, and connectedness with the world - strong feelings that want to express themselves.
This is very different from the usual way we want to express ourselves in the world.
Spiritual teacher Eknath Easwaran explains in his book Conquest of Mind:
[L]iving in freedom requires a complete reversal of perspective. Instead of asking “How much can I get?” we have to learn to ask, “How much can I give?”
But how do we do that, and especially in a way that doesn't put the peace we have attained at peril?
Express Love: How to Do It?
To recount, I have two key aspirations:
- to be at peace
- to express love
I have discussed the guidelines I use to achieve the first aspiration in the preceding sections.
Just like being at peace, expressing love is rather self-explanatory:
You feel the overwhelming desire to help. You do it.
However, just like finding peace, it is easier said than done.
Especially if I want to do so in a way that does not jeopardise your health and happiness.
How many successful people do we know that are not happy (even if they may pretend to be)?
How often do we slowly transform work that we love into a dreaded chore?
Thus, I once again look for guidelines I can use for expressing my love through work.
Here I present all that I have found so far:
Be Grounded in Peace
We need to be at peace to work with joy and make a positive impact.
De Mello warns us:
Because if you’re not at peace, believe me, you’re going to do much more damage than good.
We should not make compromises to being peaceful in the interest of success.
This implies giving ourselves space.
Not be consumed by ambition.
Don't rush.
Consider our health.
Daydream and waste time.
Not beating ourselves up when we don't work enough or aren't as successful as we hoped.
Don't Seek Rewards and Success
The great Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, provides some powerful guidance on how to express ourselves in the world.
One of the chief concerns discussed in the Gita is how to act in wordly affairs in a way that is in line with enlightened spirituality.
It's a story about a young prince, Arjun, who is faced with the difficult duty of engaging in a bloody war with his relatives.
The challenges most of us face in our non-regal work is thankfully smaller than those faced by Arjun, but the insights here provide useful guidance nonetheless.
The first insight is that we should not expect rewards for our work:
One has the right to work on anything they wish for, but one can never have the right to the fruits of work. One should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should one long for inaction.
The second insight is that we should not care if we are successful or not, only to try our best:
Be steadfast in the performance of your duty, O Arjun, abandoning attachment to success and failure. Such equanimity is [union with the Supreme].
This goes contrary to a lot of advice on 'success', which stresses being driven by what we want to attain.
However, I think we have all found that when we 'don't care', we often do our best work.
Consider this excerpt of a poem from the Taoist teacher Chuang Tzu (Tranxu):
When an archer is shooting for nothing
He has all his skill.
[...]
If he shoots for a prize of gold
He goes blind
[...]
Admit Ignorance
We often think we are doing good with our work, but may actually be doing the opposite.
Think of the mid-2000s tech enthusiasm of 'connecting the world' (Facebook) and 'organizing the world's information' (Google) and look where that got us!
Anthony de Mello already complained in the 80s:
We’ve made all kinds of technological advances. Has that raised the quality of our living by one inch? Want to know my opinion? No, not one inch. Oh, we have more comfort. More speed. Pleasures, entertainment—that’s right. More erudition. Greater technological advances. What I’m saying is, has there been any improvement on ending that loneliness and emptiness and heartache? Any improvement on eliminating that greed and hatred and conflict? Less fighting? Less cruelty? If you want my opinion, I think it’s worse.
So here we are - thousands, millions, billions of people - working hard every day in the belief that we make the world a better place, yet we only seem to make it worse.
The first step to being able to truly make a positive difference is to acknowledge that we have no idea what we are doing.
This is especially true if we don't observes ourselves closely and seek to understand ourselves deeply.
De Mello advises:
[T]he danger of attempting to change others or change things when you yourself are not aware is that you may be changing things for your own convenience, your pride, your dogmatic convictions and beliefs, or just to relieve your negative feelings.
Thus, be always willing to question what seems clear to you.
We are masters at finding justifications for what we already decided on, even if our original decision was based on scant evidence.
As Rory Sutherland, British maestro at finding justifications why marketing is useful, aptly puts it in his book Alchemy:
[P]eople [are] not using reason to make better decisions, but simply for the appearance of being reasonable.
So beware!
Gift Your Presence
As discussed in the previous section, we need to know ourselves if we want to have any chance at doing anything good.
But we also need to know others.
And the best way to know others, in a way that transcends our own misconceptions, is to listen deeply.
Thich Nhat Hanh suggests in The Heart Of The Buddha's Teaching:
The greatest gift we can offer anyone is our true presence.
Don't be with others to help them. Be with others to be with them.
Impact by Being
With all of the above in mind, how are we now going about making an actual difference? How do we work?
Let's start with with a story Thich Nhat Hanh recounted in The Art of Living:
When I was eighty years old, a journalist asked me if I ever planned to retire as a spiritual teacher. I smiled and explained that teaching is given not by talking alone but by the way we live our life. Our life is the teaching. Our life is the message. And so I explained that as long as I continue to practice mindful sitting, walking, eating, and interacting with my community and those around me, I will continue to teach.
I think there is some deep insight in this: the best way to create change, to help others, is not by preaching to trying to change others, but by living a life that is true to ourselves.
We shouldn't try hard. We shouldn't push. We should be.
Anthony de Mello provides a beautiful metaphor for this in Awareness:
I thought of a nice image for [effortless change], a sailboat. When a sailboat has a mighty wind in its sail, it glides along so effortlessly that the boatman has nothing to do but steer. He makes no effort; he doesn’t push the boat. That’s an image of what happens when change comes about through awareness, through understanding.
But while there is no effort expended to bring about the change, there will still be suffering.
Because change is pain. It is just our pain, not the pain of others.
Viktor Frankl describes this with another metaphor:
What is to give light must endure burning.
So What?
I am well aware there is an army of unquestionably smart people who will think all of this humbug.
After all, don't you just have to make money and then you have served the Lord?
That may be the right answer for some, but it's not for me.
I think the past decades have shown us we don't need more production or more technology.
Eknath Easwaran analyses in Conquest of Mind in the late 80s:
Millions of people of all ages and occupations, out of intentions which for the most part could not be called wrong, are entangled in activities that in the long run will injure their health, impair their peace of mind, inflict suffering on their families, darken their prospects, and eventually threaten the very life of our society – all because, in the depths of their hearts, they lack something to believe in that is loftier and more meaningful than personal pleasure and profit.
That is why, after much consideration, I choose to adopt the guidelines discussed above. Not hustle culture. Not effective altruism, not charity.
Am I right? Probably not.
But this is the best I could come up with for now.
Let's see, I don't doubt in another one and a half years, I will have something quite different once again.
For now, please contact me if you have any thoughts on the above.
