#57: Loving and Letting Go

#Journaling #Friendship #Psychedelics #LetingGo

Feb 09, 2024

👋 Welcome to this week's Pursuit. My name is Amir, and each week I go over 10 hours of content in pursuit of living a meaningful, fulfilling and balanced life. I'm grateful to share my findings with you and hope I can have a tiny impact on your life. Subscribe now if you haven't already!

This week’s discovery:

⛩️ A Japanese Journaling Practice
👫 Friendship in Different Life Stages
🍄 Navigating the Maze of Consciousness (with psychedelics)
🫳🏼 Loving and Letting Go (Part I)
🗒️ A Quote I'm Pondering On
🎵 Music I'm Listening To

Lion’s Head above the clouds - Cape Town

⛩️ A Japanese Journaling Practice

Naikan method of self-reflection is a Japanese practice that involves asking yourself three key questions: What have I received from others or the world? What have I given? And what troubles and difficulties have I caused? The goal is to approach these questions with objectivity, focusing on facts rather than subjective feelings of gratitude. By viewing difficulties and disappointments in hindsight, you may discover hidden blessings. However, it's important to note that gratitude doesn't mean forcing yourself to be grateful for every painful event. Instead, it's about finding blessings in certain experiences. (read more).

👫 Friendship in Different Life Stages

This one is a bit long but I promise you it’s worth it ✨

Time for friends is a privilege but it’s also a matter of priorities. Amongst your friends, is there any correlation between the people with the most wealth and the people with the most time for friends? No! We used to be a society where the wealthy did not toil, but now we are a society where the more money you make, the longer hours you work. Not just normal work, but all-consuming work, slippery work, work that becomes the central axis of our lives, either out of necessity or compulsion. Another problem is Western individualism, which compels bourgeois Westerns to focus what small amount of energy we have either on optimizing ourselves (exercise, skin care, “self-care”) or on our very close familial circle (that amorphous, ever-expanding activity known as “parenting”).
Late 30s/40s: Reckoning with the state of friendship, attempting to rekindle ones that have gone fallow or let go of ones that feel toxic, a little more time and space to figure out how to show up for existing friendships. A bunch of seismic events (big losses, aging parents, divorces, illnesses) that challenge and clarify friendships….but still just not a ton of time/space for cultivating new ones. It’s more like: this is the time to figure out how to cherish and prioritize your existing ones.
Mid-60s and Beyond: Retired or nearly so and lots of time to mold to your whims — starting new hobbies or rekindling old ones, volunteering on a regular basis, being a person who can show up and help out (for your own family, but also for the community). More time to visit. More time to walk. More time to help out. More time for illness support groups and driving others to the doctor. More time for your family, sure, but more time for your peers — particularly if you live in a place with a bunch of your peers in close proximity, whether a retirement community or just a neighborhood with other retired-ish people. (read more)

I highlighted these two periods because most of us are currently in the first one, and we all have the last one ahead. Perhaps the last one will inspire us to live in the same neighborhood as our friends.

🍄 Navigating the Maze of Consciousness (with psychedelics)

Each time I’ve done psychedelics, I’ve had a distinct sense that they were not doing something unnatural to my brain or mind. Rather, they were helping me tap into something that is always there. A form of consciousness that can be accessed in other ways. Psychedelics, when done in an introspective context, open a door in your brain into a new form of experience. They show you another way your brain and mind can operate. Another way of seeing the world. Much as MDMA can show you how limited your awareness of your emotional states is, psychedelics can show you how limited your awareness of consciousness is. And once you’ve come to that awareness, you can work on developing a deeper relationship with your mind and consciousness through meditation. It’s considerably easier to navigate a maze if you know what direction the exit is in. (read more).

🫳🏼 Loving and Letting Go (Part I)

We must pay close attention to what we have when we have it. And not take it for granted. You can’t hold onto anything forever. Does that make you appreciate the small things more? Look at everything again slowly. Turn it over in your hands. Hold space for gratitude. In the briefness of its flame, in the elegance of its transit. In love, in life. (read more).

🗒️ A Quote I'm Pondering On

Ninety percent of success can be boiled down to consistently doing the obvious thing for an uncommonly long period of time without convincing yourself that you’re smarter than you are.