How to live

Practice, practice, practice. We are creatures of habit. We work by doing what we did yesterday, modulo some tiny changes. To understand how to live, understand how to direct the contours of these daily deltas so that they tend towards happiness and beauty. This works by practice. We do a few (few!) simple things today, such that doing the same tomorrow and the day after and the day after leads in the right direction.

What is the right direction? Don’t worry about it. If you spend time today imagining and planning your dream life on paper, that’s just practicing the acts of imagining and planning, and that’s what you’ll end up doing every day. If living your current life while imagining a different life is your idea of happiness and beauty, then go right ahead! If not, don’t practice doing this!

Instead, make a decision right now about how to spend the next minute. Perhaps you will use this minute to tidy your space. Perhaps you will use it to meditate. Perhaps you will use it to keep reading this article. Whatever you choose, know that the consequences of your action may echo through the days of your whole life. What would be a great way to spend one minute of every day of the rest of your life? I just spent my own minute on a metta practice.

Now, don’t worry about setting a reminder to do this every day. Or perhaps you should! Should you? Consider: you’ll be practicing creating a new daily reminder on the basis of a blog post you just read. What kind of life does that lead to?

Now, we may wish to set habits beyond a minute long. For example, I want to create the habit of getting up early and working on research. But just now I’m on a meditation retreat, and it’s not the morning, so I can’t directly practice this just now. Perhaps you’re in a similar situation with respect to a habit you’d like to create but can’t literally practice right now.

But wait! Before you create a calendar reminder or add this to your to-do list, consider: you’ll be practicing creating calendar reminders and to-do lists! Is that what you need more of? Perhaps it is — that’s fine if so, go ahead.

Or perhaps what would be more beneficial that practicing creating calendar reminders and to-do lists would be practicing the art of trusting your already-in-motion practices. If so — and only if it really so so — consider spending one more minute on the thing you did above. Don’t change it just now, just do it again for one minute. I just spent one more minute in a metta meditation.

Now you’re practicing the thing! And look, you’re practicing self-trust and practicing practicing. This is a great trajectory to be on.

We find eventually that our whole life is patterns, including many that we are not aware of. Nothing at all changes except through this one mechanism of practice, so understanding practice is absolutely central to understanding how to live.