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One of Seneca’s most powerful metaphors is the slaveowner owned by his slaves, or the wealthy man whose vast estates lord over him rather than the other way around
Montaigne was perceptive enough to ask whether it was in fact he who was the pet of his cat.
We don’t need to get rid of all our possessions, but we should constantly question what we own, why we own it, and whether we could do without.
“If a man can reduce his needs to zero,” he said, “he is truly free: there is nothing that can be taken from him and nothing anyone can do to hurt him.”
It wasn’t the possessions that were the problem, he said, but the dependency.
There is also what we can term “comfort creep.” We get so used to a certain level of convenience and luxury that it becomes almost inconceivable that we used to live without it. As wealth grows, so does our sense of “normal.” But just a few years ago we were fine without this bounty. We had no problem eating ramen or squeezing into a small apartment. But now that we have more, our mind begins to lie to us. You need this. Be anxious that you might lose it. Protect it. Don’t share.
but the more we own, the more we oversee, the less room we have to move and, ironically, the less still we become.
Want to have less to be mad about? Less to covet or be triggered by? Give more away.
The best car is not the one that turns the most heads, but the one you have to worry about the least. The best clothes are the ones that are the most comfortable, that require you to spend the least amount of time shopping—regardless of what the magazines say. The best house for you is the one that feels the most like home. Don’t use your money to purchase loneliness, or headaches, or status anxiety.
A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness and that to seek it is perversion. —JOHN GRAVES
While Leonardo was working on The Last Supper, he would get up early and arrive at the monastery before any of his assistants or spectators, so he could be alone, in silence, with his thoughts and the mammoth creative challenge in front of him. He was also notorious for leaving his studio and going for long walks by himself, carrying a notebook and simply looking and watching and really seeing what was happening around him. He loved to visit his uncle’s farm for inspiration
and solitude.
It is difficult to think clearly in rooms filled with other people. It’s difficult to understand yourself...
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Sometimes you have to disconnect in order to better connect with yourself
Solitude allows you to reflect while others are reacting.
Who isn’t stiller in the morning, or when they’re up before the house stirs, before the phone rings or the commutes have begun?
In solitude time slows down, and while we might find that speed hard to bear at first, we will ultimately go crazy without this check on the busyness of life and work.
Solitude is not just for hermits, but for healthy, functioning people.
To pray and work in the morning and to labor and rest in the afternoon, and to sit still again in meditation in the evening when night falls upon that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars. This is a true and special vocation. There are few who are willing to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into their bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of their life into a living and vigilant silence.
Bill Gates has, twice a year for many years now, taken what he calls a “think week.” He spends seven days alone in a cabin in the forest.
He might be alone there, but he is hardly lonely.
libro—“Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.”
But despite this struggle, Gates emerges recharged and refocused. He can see further into the distance.
We need to give our bodies, as Virginia Woolf put it,
a room of our own—even if only for a few stolen hours—where we can think and have quiet and solitude. Buddha needed seclusion in his search for enlightenment. He had to step away from the world, go off by himself, and sit.
We will carry back with us the stillness from our solitude in the form of patience, understanding, gratitude, and insight.
The morning before the rest of the house wakes up. Or late in the evening after the world has gone to sleep. Grab these moments. Schedule them. Cultivate them.
It’s human being, not human doing, for a reason. Moderation. Being present. Knowing your limits.
This is the key. The body that each of us has was a gift. Don’t work it to death. Don’t burn it out. Protect the gift.
Research has shown that as we approach twenty or so hours without sleep, we are as cognitively impaired as a drunk person. Our brains respond more slowly and our judgment is significantly impaired.
A 2017 study actually found that lack of sleep increases negative repetitive thinking. Abusing the body leads the mind to abuse itself.
It’s the time when we turn off. It’s built into our biology for a reason.
According to Ericsson, great players nap more than lesser ones.
(He collected and read some twenty-five thousand books during his life.)
These activities were a relief from the pressures of politics, a challenge for which effort was always rewarded and with which his opponents could not interfere.
Let it relax you and give you peace.
It’s meditative to put the body in motion and direct our mental efforts at conquering our physical limitations.
On the job, we are busy. We are needed. We have power. We are validated. We have conflict and urgency and an endless stream of distractions. Nixon
Sitting alone with a canvas? A book club? A whole afternoon for cycling? Chopping down trees? Who has the time? If Churchill had the time, if Gladstone had the time, you have the time.
In his own words, Fante pissed away decades golfing, reading, and drinking, and by extension not writing novels. Because that felt better than getting rejected again and again. Because it was easier than sitting alone by himself in a room, doing battle with the demons that made his writing so beautiful in the first place.
The problem is that you can’t flee despair. You can’t escape, with your body, problems that exist in your mind and soul. You can’t run away from your choices—you can only fix them with better choices.
When you defer and delay, interest is accumulating. The bill still comes due . . . and it will be even harder to afford then than it will be right now.
Those who think they will find solutions to all their problems by
traveling far from home, perhaps as they stare at the Colosseum or some enormous moss-covered statue of Buddha, Emerson said, are bringing ruins to ruins. Wherever they go, whatever they do, their sad self comes along.
within. “Nowhere you can go is more peaceful—more free of interruptions,” he said, “than your own soul.”
Build a life that you don’t need to escape from.
A person who makes selfish choices or acts contrary to their conscience will never be at peace.
A person who does good regularly will feel good.
If you see fraud, and do not say fraud, the philosopher Nassim Taleb has said, you are a fraud. Worse, you will feel like a fraud. And you will never feel proud or happy or confident.
If we want to be good and feel good, we have to do good.
