Kierkegaard – soulcruzer

Reconnecting the dots!

That’s thing about life, it doesn’t move in a linear fashion (ok well time does, maybe) but our life’s plan sure as heck doesn’t. It’s full of peaks and troughs and sometimes the peaks are really high and the troughs are really low. But I believe it all balances out in the end.

Pic from: A Compass for Life

I woke up this morning thinking it’s time for me to reconnect the dots because my life, at the moment, is all over the place. My mind is anyway. Maybe I need to practice some courageous stillness as Danielle Laporte wrote about in her blog recently:

Our society is addicted to productivity.
We think productivity increases our value as a human.
And we want to be valued and loved.
So…we become addicted to productivity.

Which means…

being still is an act of courage.

On one level, I know this, on another level, I can’t help but keep busy doing stuff because there is soooo much to do and soooo little time to do it (i.e. I have a limited shelf life on this planet and i’m trying to get as much done as I can before I go).

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” these words of Annie Dillard are worth reflecting on.

And Kierkegaard had this to say about being busy:

“Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work.”

Today I will pause, and work on getting my dots reconnected.

Here are a few more links on busy:

Being perpetually busy is a kind of laziness, says ‘4-Hour Workweek’ author Tim Ferriss

150 years ago, a world-famous philosopher called busyness the sign of an unhappy person

EPISODE 42: WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE BUSY?

Being Careful About Your Time

Playlist of the Day

I exist because I think too much

I seem to have an existential crisis every other week. At least I’m not alone. Someone in the Guardian asked, “What is an existential crisis?”

One brain box answered:

It’s what happens when the foundation of one’s most basic assumptions ( i.e. what one is living for, who one is, etc) is eroded to the point that nothing stands on it any longer. Once this happens, the person realises their entire life has been lived in falsehood, because what they were living for (if anything) was an empty purpose. This is what is called despair.

Now if you find yourself in this position, there are three things you can do (paraphrasing Kierkegaard here):

1. Attempt to continually distract yourself so that you never have to face the fact that your life stands for nothing.

2. Attempt to create a new purpose through right living, or

3. Attempt to find a new purpose in something external to yourself.

There is a fourth option, but I don’t recommend it, declare yourself an existential cartoonist, start a blog that nobody reads, and count the days until your wife kicks you out of the house.