Wisdom

Because, at times, life will be good. Really good.
And you will need each other to share your happiness, to smile to each other, to rejoice together, to be grateful together.

Because, at times, life will be hard. Really hard.
And you will need each other to keep standing, to cry on each other, to mourn together, to recover your courage together.

Because you will be a purpose, a meaning for each other.
You will go on adventures that you couldn’t even dream alone.
You will force each other out of each other, and be each other the outlet for the other’s tenderness, kindness, selflessness.
As the world around you will change, you will change together.

And because, through all that may come, if you take care of each other, trust, respect and love each other…
...then you won’t be alone.

Apropos of Christmas:

Happy holidays!

Exactly!

That picture above is from a Japanese upscale convenience store. Yup, the Japanese have so refined the convenience store concept, called combinis in Japan, that they even have upscale ones. The sheer density and quality of combinis throughout Japan just boggles the mind. Did you know Seven Eleven is, since 1991, a Japanese company? And, at least in Japan, it’s the Toyota of convenience stores, of which there are many brands.

Compare with Europe, where, as far as I can tell, they simply don’t have the concept of convenience stores. Here in Spain they only have ugly, pricey, mom & pop dry good stores, called “Chinos” because they’re mostly run by Chinese.

Mexico itself has lots of convenience stores, better than the ones in the States I’d say, and there’s some interesting innovation going on of micro-supermarkets specialized in groceries, or pharmacies that are convenience stores too.

That’s the kind of thing that fascinates me when I travel, the kind of thing you don’t notice until you live with it, and that you never read about anywhere. The kind of mundane things that really change your day to day life, instead of the one-off, impressive, touristy things that you just see and its over.

I’m a strange kind of traveller, like a very slow kind of tourist, a be-ist! I prefer to stay at places for months and not focus on them much, just let them gradually reveal themselves. I like keeping place in the background, how it makes the fringes of my life (like city walking, shopping, eating, bookstore browsing, the new media…) interesting and new. But for the core of my life I really am very happy making stuff, it’s the thing I want to do most. Intensive travelling, where the place (and its people) are the very focus of your life is not that appealing to me, it’s too distracting.

Something changed,...

..I’m starting to feel like…

..I’m getting the hang of how to live!

Intermittently through the past 6 months, more and more often, and all over the past week, I’ve been glimpsing a day to day life that fulfills me, that I look at and say, yes, this day, this is the life I want to live.

I’m talking about the little things not the Grand Scheme of Life, the micro not the macro, the structure and weave of daily life—what to eat, when to sleep, what to do, what to work on, what to buy, how to relate to other people, how to love, how to exercise, how to rest, how to organize your time, how to fail, how to recover, how to improve, how to find peace and keep it, how to make a routine, how to be stable, how to find flow, how to live.

Of course I’m only starting, and know next to nothing, and have been far too blessed all along, but for the first time I’ve set it all up and all systems seem to be running smoothly. Exhilarating. Like being able to control your non-training-wheels bike for the first time, the wind rushing by.

One of the best books I’ve read: Theodore Zeldin’s An Intimate History of Humanity.

From Greg Egan’s Reasons to be Cheerful, one of my favorite short stories ever, an exploration into the meaning of happiness and, tangentially, of romance.

This rings so true it hurts.

In a historical moment for me, today marks the first day my computer is fully backed up on the cloud (using Mozy and loving it).

Funny how there’s nothing better than deep, painful scarring to make you take abstract dangers seriously: (Almost) losing all my data 2 months ago made me a backup fiend, missing one crucial note. Losing some important notes finally made me set up version controlling and start committing my notes file (~40k lines!) on a regular basis. And being data raped by the border patrol made me encrypt my computer and password-protect it and my iPhone (with a strong password).

And yet, even with the motivation of fear, I just dreaded having to learn all about backup systems, version control systems, encryption and security systems… And so I didn’t. I just found the easiest thing that could possibly work and learned the least I had to to set it up. I’m taking it from there, moving forward with just-in-time learning and the occasional fancy to learn more about this detail or other (which suddenly becomes so much more important when you and your stuff are riding on it).

“Time flies—but I’m the pilot.”
The point is not to be admired but to be admirable.
Achieving is far more enjoyable than consuming.
Discipline rarely comes naturally but is always crucial.

I want to be the light I long to see in the world.
(Oddly, I’ve long been motivated by something very much like that thought, but only recently I discovered the cliched but beautiful phrase to give it form. I can’t think of a more inspiring phrase, demanding nothing on the world, putting the responsibility for imagination and effort squarely on oneself.)