“…we uncover the essential impermanence of everything that arises; and that of course includes ourselves. Once this is seen – truly seen, not just accepted intellectually to be true – then there is nothing more to fear. To watch this unfold, from breath to breath, all the timescales from pulse rate to year’s end to geological epoch, unpicks in a moment our own house of anxiety in which we have been taught to live. Our long schooling in the myths of progress and responsibility, the weight of the future, the despair of failure – all gone in the lightness of the breath, the flicker of sounds from beyond the window, the actual presence of our body’s warmth against the good floor.”
The only way I found that successfully dealt with the whole To Do/ Tasks/ Lists farrago was to get rid of them altogether.
No system, no lists, no problem.
I used to waste so much time faffing around with all sorts of apps and systems to absolutely no avail.
I find the things that really do need dealing with urgently tend to stay circulating in my head while the rest get automatically sorted by my mind without me having to do anything.
The things I remember get dealt with as and when, and what gets forgotten isn’t a problem anymore.
It’s not perfect but overall the benefit of all the time gained by not having to manage a Tasks/ Ideas system definitely outweighs the odd occasion when something does fall through the cracks.
The new Reeder app is an extraordinary product I can highly recommend.
A unified timeline of just about anything on the open web: RSS, the Fediverse, Bluesky, YouTube, Podcasts, micro.blog, Glass, Flickr, Comic Strip and Reddit (with more promised to come).
And all beautifully designed with an elegant yet simple and intuitive UI.
I haven’t seen Iconfactory’s Project Tapestry but Reeder certainly appears like a tough act to beat.
All the problems we face, ranging from the most intimate and private right through to the biggest issues facing our societies, all stem originally from our own unacknowledged and unresolved relationships with ourselves.
If one is constantly at war with the world, the chances are it is really a war with yourself in disguise.
It is perhaps the most important thing we can do – to really know ourselves rather than know what we think about ourselves.
“When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist. Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance.”
— Henry Miller
“Words, like the hands of a skilled bodyworker, can draw your attention to something previously unseen or overlooked. Something is illuminated, touched, revealed by the word as by the touch of the bodyworker—awareness floods the area, light comes into the previously darkened room, a flame is ignited in the heart. And then, throw that away, too. Don’t hold onto anything.”
— Joan Tollifson, Death The End Of Self Improvement
The complete yet ongoing experience that there is anything happening at all (whatever the flavour, tone or feeling) is enough, expresses everything there is to express, in and by its very occurrence.
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I am incredibly prejudiced.
When I see the ‘technical advisors and custodians’ of Free Our Feeds looking all slick, professional and LinkedIn, I get that awful feeling in the pit of my stomach and just think: ‘oh no, here we go again.’
Highly recommend this book of astonishing poems.
The Kissing of Kissing: Poems (Multiverse) by Hannah Emerson.
A direct descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson no less but her poems stand powerfully by themselves regardless.
“The mind chases experiences the way a dog chases squirrels: compulsively. The mind thinks (thinks!) that the more experiences it has, the smarter it is. So it stores them up, these experiences, until its memory bank is filled to bursting with remembered experiences. For relief from this self-created pressure, it looks for other minds to share experiences with. This, of course, involves A LOT OF TALKING. Overheard: “You must go there! You must do this!” Now, wisdom is very quiet. It’s the space between words, not the words themselves. Something else about wisdom: it has no memory.”
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