Monthly Archives: January 2018

This book had a genuinely profound impact on me. Having heard it talked about so often, I finally decided to give it a go and I have to confess I almost gave up after the first few chapters and it’s not the kind of storytelling I really engage with. Much like life, however, the power of the lessons in the book and the wisdom that it imparts is genuinely transformative.

This book is often mentioned in the same breath as Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, but where that book totally failed to connect with me, Siddhartha is already a book I know I’m going to read and reread time and time and time again. These highlights don’t do it justice at all, but are useful reminders for me of what I took away from the book.

Most importantly, a deeper understand of the value of everything in our lives, whatever it is. They are all a part of us, who we are, what we believe and how we see the world. Nothing and no one should ever be dismissed.

“That was how everybody loved Siddhartha. He delighted and made everybody happy. But Siddhartha himself was not happy.” p4

“We find consolations, we learn tricks with which we deceive ourselves, but the essential thing — the way — we do not find.” p15

“The rumours of the Buddha sounded attractive; there was magic in these reports. The world was sick, life was difficult and here there seemed new hope, here there seemed to be a message, comforting, mild, full of fine promises.” p17

“Opinions mean nothing; they may be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can embrace or reject them.” p27

“It is not for me to judge another life. I must judge for myself. I must choose and reject.” p28

“Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.” p32

“It was beautiful and pleasant to go through the world like that, so childlike, so awakened, so concerned with the immediate, without any distrust.” p37

“Why should I not attain what I decided to undertake yesterday?” p44

“From the moment I made that resolution I also knew that I would execute it.” p49

“He is drawn by his goal, for he does not allow anything to enter his mind which opposes his goal.” p49

“Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goal, if he can think, wait and fast.” p49

“He only noticed that the bright and clear inward voice, that had once awakened in him and had always guided him in his finest hours, had become silent.” p61

“I am not going anywhere. We monks are always on the way.” p72

“Now, when I am no longer young, when my hair is fast growing grey, when strength begins to diminish, now I am beginning again like a child.” p74

“I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace,” p75

“Was it not his Self, his small, fearful and proud Self, with which he had wrestled for so many years, but which had always conquered him again, which appeared each time again and again, which robbed him of happiness and filled him with fear?” p77

“The water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new.” p79

“The eternity of every moment.” p89

“‘You have suffered, Siddhartha, yet I see that sadness has not entered your heart.'” p90

“Siddhartha began to realize that no happiness and peace had come to him with his son, only sorrow and trouble. But he loved him and preferred the sorrow and trouble of his love rather than happiness and pleasure without the boy.” p91

“Could his father’s piety, his teacher’s exhortations, his own knowledge, his own seeking, protect him? Which father, which teacher, could prevent him from living his own life, from soiling himself with life, from loading himself with sin, from swallowing the bitter drink himself, from finding his own path? Do you think, my dear friend, that anybody is spared this path? Perhaps your little son, because you would like to see him spared sorrow and pain and disillusionment? But if you were to die ten times for him, you would not alter his destiny in the slightest.” p94

“Perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.” p108

“‘When someone is seeking,’ said Siddhartha, ‘it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal.'” p108

“Many people have to change a great deal and wear all sorts of clothes. I am one of those, my friend.” p108

“Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom.” p109

“The world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Sansara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.” p110

“Every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people — eternal life. It is not possible for one person to see how far another is on the way; the Buddha exists in the robber and dice player; the robber exists in the Brahmin. During deep meditation it is possible to dispel time, to see simultaneously all the past, present and future, and then everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman. Therefore, it seems to me that everything that exists is good – death as well as life, sin as well as holiness, wisdom as well as folly. Everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my loving understanding.” p110

“This stone is stone; it is also animal, God and Buddha. I do not respect and love it because it was one thing and will become something else, but because it has already long been everything and always is everything.” p111

Amazon link.

More about my reading list.

Having started the year with some Graham Greene, the next stop on my ‘books/authors I really should have read by now’ was Huxley and his rightly-lauded Brave New World. I found it hard going to start with, but it gets better and better as it goes on.

“A man can smile and smile and be a villain.”

“One’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.”

“One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.”

“Stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”

“Happiness is a hard master – particularly other people’s happiness.”

“Providence takes its cue from men.”

“The tears are necessary. Don’t you remember what Othello said? ‘If after every tempest come such calms, may the winds blow till they have awakened death.'”

Amazon link.

More about my reading list.

A Counterintuitive Approach To Living A Good Life

I adored this book ¹, and it’s one I really needed to read. I’m a people-pleaser by nature, always looking to take the path of least resistance and steer myself away from conflict because I’ve been terrified of people not liking me. This book helped me realise how pointless, absurd and unhelpful that is as a way to go about living life.

I want to be really clear for anyone reading this who thinks it sounds like a big, brash, “don’t give a sh*t about anyone” kind of American self-help book that it’s very much not that. Instead, the big lesson I took from this book was simply that you have to choose what you want to care about in life, and then follow up on that by not attributing disproportionate weight to the things that aren’t important.

“It’s what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as “the backwards law”—the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.”

“Albert Camus said (and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t on LSD at the time): ‘You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.'”

“You must give a fuck about something… The question, then, is, What do we give a fuck about? What are we choosing to give a fuck about?”

“You can’t be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others.”

“It then follows that finding something important and meaningful in your life is perhaps the most productive use of your time and energy. Because if you don’t find that meaningful something, your fucks will be given to meaningless and frivolous causes.”

“Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly fuckworthy.”

“We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change.”

‘Don’t hope for a life without problems,’ the panda said. ‘There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.'”

“To deny one’s negative emotions is to deny many of the feedback mechanisms that help a person solve problems.”

“An obsession and overinvestment in emotion fails us for the simple reason that emotions never last. Whatever makes us happy today will no longer make us happy tomorrow, because our biology always needs something more.”

“What determines your success isn’t, ‘What do you want to enjoy?’ The relevant question is, ‘What pain do you want to sustain?'”

“The true measurement of self-worth is not how a person feels about her positive experiences, but rather how she feels about her negative experiences.”

“This flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that exceptionalism is the new normal. And because we’re all quite average most of the time, the deluge of exceptional information drives us to feel pretty damn insecure and desperate, because clearly we are somehow not good enough.”

“The Internet has not just open-sourced information; it has also open-sourced insecurity, self-doubt, and shame.”

“The rare people who do become truly exceptional at something do so not because they believe they’re exceptional. On the contrary, they become amazing because they’re obsessed with improvement.”

“People who become great at something become great because they understand that they’re not already great—they are mediocre, they are average—and that they could be so much better.”

“You will have a growing appreciation for life’s basic experiences: the pleasures of simple friendship, creating something, helping a person in need, reading a good book, laughing with someone you care about. Sounds boring, doesn’t it? That’s because these things are ordinary. But maybe they’re ordinary for a reason: because they are what actually matters.”

“Freud once said, ‘One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.'”

“Some examples of good, healthy values: honesty, innovation, vulnerability, standing up for oneself, standing up for others, self-respect, curiosity, charity, humility, creativity.”

“We should prioritize values of being honest, fostering transparency, and welcoming doubt over the values of being right, feeling good, and getting revenge.”

“Growth is an endlessly iterative process.”

“We cannot learn anything without first not knowing something. The more we admit we do not know, the more opportunities we gain to learn.”

“The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible.”

“It’s worth remembering that for any change to happen in your life, you must be wrong about something. If you’re sitting there, miserable day after day, then that means you’re already wrong about something major in your life, and until you’re able to question yourself to find it, nothing will change.”

“We can be truly successful only at something we’re willing to fail at.”

“The problem was that my emotions defined my reality. Because it felt like people didn’t want to talk to me, I came to believe that people didn’t want to talk to me.”

“If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.”

“Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.”

“Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it.”

“Absolute freedom, by itself, means nothing.”

“Ultimately, the only way to achieve meaning and a sense of importance in one’s life is through a rejection of alternatives, a narrowing of freedom, a choice of commitment to one place, one belief, or (gulp) one person.”

“Acts of love are valid only if they’re performed without conditions or expectations.”

“We’re all driven by fear to give way too many fucks about something, because giving a fuck about something is the only thing that distracts us from the reality and inevitability of our own death.”

“Without acknowledging the ever-present gaze of death, the superficial will appear important, and the important will appear superficial.”

“Our culture today confuses great attention and great success, assuming them to be the same thing.”

“You too are going to die, and that’s because you too were fortunate enough to have lived.”

Amazon link.

More about my reading list.

I’m trying to read more of the ‘golden oldies’ or at the very least more works by the kind of authors who are thought of or talked about as greats. I’m a bit embarrassed to say that Greene is one of those authors whose work I’ve never ventured near, so I thought I’d pick something (pretty much at random) to get started with.

I enjoyed this – it lulled a bit in places and isn’t quite what I’d call a page-turner, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Here are my highlights:

“Cynicism is cheap – you can buy it at any Monoprix store – it’s built into all poor-quality goods.”

“We have standards to which we do not always rise.”

“The confused comedy of our lives.”

“This is one of the pains of illicit love: even your mistress’s most extreme embrace is a proof the more that love doesn’t last.”

“Distance lends enchantment to the view. Mr William Wordsworth.”

“We have failed – that’s all. We are bad comedians, we aren’t bad men.”

“In port (she was the only ship there) the Medea seemed oddly dwarfed. It was the empty sea which gave the little boat her pride and magnitude.”

“I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.” Dark humour at its best.

“I felt the premonition of jealousy like the first shiver which announces a fever.”

“We can’t even talk to you, can we? You won’t listen if what we say is out of character – the character you’ve given us.”

“There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?”

Amazon link.

More about my reading list.

If you’ve followed anything I do online you’ll know I’m somewhat inconsistent in my publishing schedules, so I carry no illusions that this place will be updated on any kind of dependable basis, but I do promise I will try to keep it updated regularly.

2017 was a bit of a year of stagnation for me, it didn’t carry a feeling of moving forward, just of doing the same thing. Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust and I have no intention of stopping, but I know there is a creative itch I need to scratch.

I have a head filled with possibilities and last year I didn’t manage to make any of them come to pass, probably because I couldn’t narrow it down to one thing I could focus on enough to gain a bit of traction and get it over the starting line.

Laughter for Life in November proved that I can still make things happen. The entire gig came together over the course of just a few short months and was a roaring success, so I just need to be able to find that intensity of focus and delivery that I adopted there and apply it to the other things buzzing around my head.

So in 2018 I’m going to be trying to focus more directly on the things that I know I can do, and pushing myself to make them happen. I’m letting go of the more whimsical, overly-ambitious stuff (maybe more on that in another post) and embracing the still-ambitious but achievable side of the things I want to see in my life.

I’m also going to be paying more attention to my mental health and making time for myself: time to recharge, to properly rest when I need it, and to not let myself slip into the black cloud that descended at times in 2017.

I believe 2018 can be a great year, but I also know that great things don’t happen on their own, so I’m gearing myself up for the hard work and hustle that’s going to be needed to make this all come about.