Making Time

“if we want to focus our minds on serious and difficult things, we may at points have to take some radical steps – and to do things that will strike some people as odd and or even unwarranted.”
~Alain de Botton, How to Think More Effectively

A few years ago I wrote about Gregg McKeowen’s Essentialism:

If it’s not clear what’s happening here, the length of each arrow is energy spent, the direction of each arrow is different things you spend the energy on. The total amount of energy is the same between the two drawings, but the drawing on the right, that energy is all pointed in the same direction. You are really getting somewhere.

When the Bodhi College Committed Practitioners Program finished last fall, I shifted into neutral pretty hard. It was wonderful. I read books, cooked meals, drew pictures. But by late winter I was itching to apply torque again; in March and April I attended my first Mahasi-style vipassana retreat at Tathagata Meditation Center in San Jose and… the first since the pandemic?… analog samadhi retreat with Leigh Brasington.

I’m home now and still very much in gear. Boobear and I have agreed on a schedule of one week each month for meditation retreat and one week each month for writing retreat. Nothing fancy, just car camping, still, an attempt to carve out chunks of life for contemplative and philosophical practice.

The first meditation retreat (CampTreat) was two weeks ago. It rained. so. hard. 😹 I’m writing to you now at the end of the first writing retreat (WriteTreat). There are five posts scheduled, this one is number six, three more in the queue ready for final draft, and a rough idea of the next handful.

Sorry about your inbox. Kind of. :)

“Why is this a worthwhile effort? Where will I be in a few years if this goes right? How is this connected with what fulfils me? What is the point here?”
~Alain de Botton, How to Think More Effectively