#94: What's a good commitment?
#Commitment #Authenticity #Simplicity #TimeAwareness #Connection
👋 Welcome to Pursuit, where we explore the art of living well. My name is Amir, and each week, I go over 10 hours of content about personal growth and mental well-being, bringing you four insights and thought-provoking perspectives from leading thinkers. I hope to have a tiny impact on your life and inspire you with the tools to lead a more fulfilling life. Join us on this journey of continuous improvement and discovery.
This week’s discovery:
🪢 What's a good commitment?
🫀 Trusting your inner voice
🌔 Counting our remaining moons
💞 Unraveling the mystery of true connection
If you’re interested in listening to this week’s newsletter, you can follow Pursuit’s podcast on Spotify or other popular podcast platforms. Here’s this week’s episode:
🪢 What's a good commitment?
Most of us grow up believing that talent or intelligence are enough. We focus on getting good grades, or winning prizes. We think that if we are good at something, it will guarantee our success and happiness. But I’ve slowly realised that isn’t true. It’s not enough to be good at something–you have to care about it, deeply, and you have to be willing to do the hard work, day after day, to bring it to life.
I know now nothing exists by accident. Nothing that truly lasts is built out of halfheartedness. Instead, it’s about committing to your particular vision of what you wish to send out, like a messenger vessel, into the foreign and shapeshifting world: with hope, velocity, a good dose of fear. Purposeful tenacity is what makes the world function. It’s what imbues everything with both utility and beauty. Focus is what makes commitment possible, and the best commitments make you feel more alive.
🫀 Trusting your inner voice
Your truest essence — the core of who you truly are — arrived with you on the day you were born and has never been eroded, erased, or damaged. It may feel hidden at times, but it is always there, in the very center of you, close enough to reach again at any time.
Waiting until you’re no longer afraid is often not an option unless you want to wait forever. Being afraid isn’t the same thing as not being ready to try.
Other people’s prescriptions for joy, success, connection, expression, anything at all, aren’t yours. You can trust what works for you. You can like what you like. You can move from your own center and let it guide you.
You are forever becoming. There is no landing place, no arrival. This will scare you sometimes, but learning to swim in the waters of the liminal is where you’ll come the most vibrantly alive.
Keep things simple where you can. Life is complicated enough on its own to make an entirely new recipe every single day. Routine can be a lifesaver.
This last one strikes a chord with me. I tend to lean towards overcomplicating life and subconsciously create chaos around me to bring them into order. We all have crazy tendencies 😊 don't we? But recently, as soon as I catch myself adding something new to my plate, I ask myself, "Does it matter? Is it worth complicating your life for?" Most of the time, the answer is no, and I choose simplification.
🌔 Counting our remaining moons
Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
💞 Unraveling the mystery of true connection
I love the Reflections of Life YouTube channel. They share videos of ordinary people discussing everyday life concepts. This particular video was about love and the genuine connection between an elderly couple married for many years. While finding a partner isn't the only way to enjoy life in old age, listening to this couple makes you yearn for a connection like theirs. Here’s where they talk about the vows they gave each other when they got married.
When we got married, we worked out a series of vows which we wrote out and said to each other. There's one that stands out quite strongly which we're embodying now - 'May our home be a place where people can accept themselves.' It was a beautiful intention, and I feel like we're really living that. Another vow was that we don't hide behind each other, that we have our own identity and are at one with ourselves. The hardest thing in a marriage is to realize that the person in front of you is very different from you. Embracing those differences, addressing daily challenges through communication and compromise, and finding ways to share meaningful moments together make our ordinary life extraordinary.
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🎵 Discovery for your ears
You’ll find mostly Ethnotronica, Organic House, World, Disco, and Organic Electronic here:
🎧 If you appreciate the music I carefully select and haven't followed my Spotify playlists yet, now is the perfect time to hit that follow button and join me on this musical journey! 🎶
🌒 Pano: Danceable and electronic obscure songs
🌓 Sisy: Ethnotronica and organic house
🌑 Berghain: Dark, minimal techno and tech house
🌕 Heide: Groovy soul and disco house
🌞 Sonntag: Afterhours shit
🌎 World: From Latin jazz to Turkish psych
🌚 Super Slow: For your intimate moments
Previously on Pursuit:
