Week 10 Evaluation – Most Valuable Substance

Pushups (modified): 1512/1500

Sit-ups (modified): 1527/1500

Weapon form: 15/25

Hand form: 1/25

Completed my art homework but didn’t get any more sketches added to my sketchbook. It looks like I’m just finalizing my line work (re homework) and then next, I hope, is rendering. We’ll see.

Completed reading chapter 16 of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Read some more of Four Thousand Weeks.

Found the idea of the “Future-chasing mindset” interesting. It reminded me of the road to mastery. We can get so caught up in what we are working towards, that we forget to live in the now. Being present is important, however it is also possible to get too distracted by worrying if we are being present enough that it causes us to miss out on actually experiencing the now.

“Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up, but a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment… Life’s bounty is in its flow. Later is too late.”

Read some more of Digital Minimalism.  The author talks about what we can learn from Thoreau and says,

“Treat the minutes of our life as a concrete and valuable substance — arguably the most valuable substance we possess — and to always reckon with how much of this life we trade for the various activities we allow to claim our time... more often than not, the cumulative cost of the noncrucial things we clutter our lives with can far outweigh the small benefits each individual piece of clutter promises.”

This dovetails nicely with what I’ve been reading from Four Thousand Weeks, but it also made me think of the social media I’ve been thinking about dropping. You see I’ve not been on Facebook much over the past several years. There has been little benefit to it, even when I was using it. I’ve barely noticed its absence, and it used to consume a lot of my time, which as mentioned above is “our most valuable substance”. When I have tried to use it, the value was low, it doesn’t show the feeds from the people I want (so I’m not actually staying connected with my loved ones) and instead shows me ads (don’t even get me started on advertising these days!), feeds from people I don’t know and I’m not interested in, and endless clickbait. So why would I keep using it? The slight usefulness it has is outweighed by its cost in my time and attention. How does using something like that have a place in my life if I am on a path to mastery?

The book suggests three questions to ask yourself when screening your technology use (preferably after doing a one month digital detox):

1.      Does it serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough)?

2.      Is it the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it’s not, replace it with something better)?

3.      How will I use this technology, going forward, to maximize its value and minimize its harms?

Got some digital decluttering done. Mostly going through email inboxes, unsubscribing from a lot of stuff and dealing with others.

The Sil Lum  Seminar started today. Really enjoyed it! Got some new exercises to use for increasing my flexibility.

Course Correction

Since the week of exhaustion, I have found myself out of the habit of starting my day with doing some of my numbers. I need to correct that course and start in the mornings again.

Numbers for the Year:

Pushups (modified): 7858 / 50,000

Situps (modified): 7823 / 50,000

Weapon Form: 224 / 1000

Hand Form: 135 /1000

Random Acts of Kindness: 64 / 1000

Sparring: 84 / 1000

Kilometres: 205 / 1609

Memorize “Mastery”: Reviewed

Nurture Relationships: need to work on this more

Blogging: 21 / 52

Art Like it’s My Job: 39 / 252 days

Declutter my life: 21 days where some decluttering was done

Greatcoat project: still on the back burner

Improved flexibility: 14 days of doing something