Happiness is Turtles all the way Down

I wrote of mastering the body-mind in my newsletter last month (all these ideas make more sense in order. I'll eventually edit this essay to include the whole picture, but why miss them as they come out? Join the journey to inner peace).

Mastery requires us to identify the areas of life that feel lacking and thus requiring a specific effort. The path is obvious - figure out where you need improvement, what you can do to get there, and why you'll even bother.

But how? And not the mechanical, what muscles to activate, how many hours each week, routine, schedule, habit tracking pla- blah blah.

That endless list of optimization supports maybe a third of all human activity, and of course they have their place. The rest is half what happens and half your reaction to what happens. This momentary and experiential "how" is what we're really asking for. "What is it like to be fully absorbed in a process, and how do I get there?"

"How do I start when I don't feel like it? How do I overcome obstacles? How would I react to criticism from myself and others? How much of that is constructive? Am I on the right track? With what beliefs should I engage in this practice?"

That last question is often unasked, even though our beliefs about any task at hand dictates:

1. What we chose (not) to do
2. Our willingness to follow through
3. The value we find in the process
4. The difficulty in confronting difficulty
5. The overall quality of our effort

Structure & Application

The systems of mastery are abstract. The application of it is as concrete as the present moment. We come to this moment by recognizing the process and getting the ruminating self out of the way. Then, the organism is free to engage fully in the experience of Now.

Total absorption in the present moment is meditation, no matter how you get there. There's no other "how" to meditation - there's nothing you need to master first. Here and now is the closest we can get to the bottom turtle* (The infinite regress of self: the "who" we think is thinking.)

In this state, we don't need a distinction between the structure of our being and its application. Having been built on stable foundations through mastery, the structure lends itself to enhance one's application. In the same way, tomato plants crawl up a trellis installed long before they need its support.

Unlike tomatoes, we have expectations. No matter how dark it is, a plant knows, "if I climb higher, I get more sun." It's humans that wonder, "Is there more sun above the trees?" We assume uncertainty, and these unfounded expectations of the future keep us from dissolving into masterful activity at any given moment.

If you love beer league hockey every week, are you there to win or to have fun? Obviously both, but there's no pressure to "achieve" either. There are no expectations of what will or won't happen, which makes the process of packing a bag, getting there, and playing frictionless.

That ease is telling. There's no undue pressure, only process. Time spent intentionally like this is the quickest way to develop any mastery you need. Expectations of sunlight just over this branch only get our way.

Detaching from any expectations of a return transforms the process into its own reward. Mastery is intrinsically valuable, whether engaging in what you deem worthwhile, figuring out what that is, or avoiding what you know isn't. So, time invested in mastery always returns a profit and recognizing this makes detached optimism a natural vibe in every exercise.

And yet, unless the activity is immediately pleasurable, there's resistance to intrinsically valuable activities because a payoff beyond the action takes time. The final point of "now I'm good at this" always feels far off and uncertain.

There's a conflict of interest here. We're inclined to favour little effort and guaranteed results over lots of action and uncertain outcomes. But everything we'd say is worth doing is only viewed as such because it demands an upfront cost with no guarantee of mastery beyond the basics.

We're afraid of "wasting" time on a process with no end, so instead, we waste the same time on anything that offers definitive returns, even if that makes next year worse! That's why everyone wants to master something, but practically no one does. It takes unreasonable obsession to pass up one marshmallow now in the hopes of 1000 marshmallows next year [1].

And this doesn't apply solely to a craft. Mastery of the body-mind affects every detail and pattern of life.

Life is Less Complicated Than we Make it

Most problems in 2021 aren't the need for quick reflexes (though practicing helps) but relationships between ideas. Emotional attachment to all of those ideas inevitably leads to turmoil. We're (un)consciously driven to harmonize our reality, and (frankly,) settling for the most accessible "yes" covers the problem for a day or two.

Mastery in the skill tree of life dodges the turmoil by relating to the relationships with a detached optimism. This clarifies the narrative that we've told ourselves we wanted. We're reminding ourselves of the trellis we've built.

The good feelings of a worthwhile activity are the most attractive variables for inspecting and altering our beliefs. I've found for myself that exercising and writing will always - undeniably and without exception - feel rewarding, no matter how much of a slog it is to get started.

But it's the expectations of an uncertain future that block the dissolution of self into masterful activity at any given moment. Changing the belief from "I have to do this" to "it's always rewarding" is responsible for more positivity than I could ever bring about by disciplining myself out of the first marshmallow.

We do it for the journey, not the destination. There's an eye on the hallucination of an end up to keep us on track, but if we disagree with the process, we'll only grow to resent both it and our desired outcome.

I move at my own pace not because success is guaranteed but because failure is. No effort - no result, no matter the metric you use. I do my best to do the right thing because the uncertainty of success is preferable to the certainty of failure if I don't.

I know where I am; I know where I want to be: I know how to get there. Filling in those blanks for yourself makes life a minefield of synchronicity and opportunity.

I'm currently writing a book that explores these ideas in greater detail. I'd love for you to join the journey to inner peace and receive content like this before it's published anywhere else.

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I share bite-sized wisdom, not financial advice, and banter on Twitter.