Use the world well
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“To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn being in it.” —Ursula K. Le Guin
Welcome to a new season of CreativeBoost. Hope you had a restful summer.
One of the great tragedies of existence—one that seems to affect creative-minded people especially—is that so many of us waste much of our time on things that don’t matter much.
I’ve been guilty of that. Maybe you’ve done this, too.
In an act of poor stewardship to our talents and to the fact that our time is non-renewable, we dwell too easily and too often on negative forces or on difficult people. We confuse purpose with busy work. We get stuck in a story that just isn’t true—or worse—allow ourselves to get pulled back into one, well after we ought to have let it go (https://us4.campaign-archive.com/?u=89226eb68936fc712577977b8&id=4351058096) .
To use the world well, as novelist Ursula K. Le Guin implores, means having the courage to tell yourself a new story. Not some kind of fiction as emotional balm: an honest one that is at once compassionate, objective and designed to teach meaningful things to ourselves and others.
Knowing what you don’t want is a superpower.
We’re conditioned to believe that our experiences and education are designed to give us answers to things, including what kind of work we should do and who we should choose to surround ourselves with whether as a partner or colleague. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle and it explains why so many people reach a point relatively deep into their lives where they develop a deep craving for unnameable change. The more you think your job is to know things with certainty, the stronger even your most distorted beliefs can get.
Instead, you owe it to yourself to ask more questions: Do I enjoy this work? How do I feel about myself when I am in this particular social circle? What could I let go of and not ever miss again? When you are able to name something you don’t want, it’s much more tangible and can be a powerful, non-negotiable term to help you build a life that is of your choosing. But only if you allow it.
You set the terms on how you are treated by others.
Many of us are prone to the belief that we are responsible for the behaviours of others. We are not. That’s codependent thinking. However, our choices do set the terms for whether we allow ourselves to remain exposed to behaviours—particularly toxic ones. I’ve talked before about how there are three forces (https://us4.campaign-archive.com/?u=89226eb68936fc712577977b8&id=87ef0ac6d9) that keep us in unhappy situations: choice, contract or force. And it’s almost always choice.
At any point in any situation in life, you can do just one of three things: accept a situation, change it or walk away. That choice is yours: no one else’s.
Seek experiences that silent your biggest adversary.
The world is bigger and stranger and more beautiful than most of us realize. And yet we spend most of our time with our heads down. We conflate our sense of self with the accumulation of material things. And all that does is feed our biggest adversary: our ego. It wants gratification, not knowledge. It wants the distraction of entertainment, not the wisdom of stillness. You quell it with experiences: ones that teach how little we actually know about the world around us and invite us to embrace just how uncertain so much of this world really is.
I’ve spoken before about the Celtic belief in thin spaces (https://us4.campaign-archive.com/?u=89226eb68936fc712577977b8&id=f3008f9566) . I continue to seek out those experiences, and each time I’m struck by how hard I have to work to get there. Eventually, I reach a point where all there’s left is stillness and that’s where only in hindsight do I begin to understand what poet John O’Donohue was getting at when he once concluded “Because secret work has been done in us, of which we’ve had no inkling.”
So, |NAME|, understand that wasted time is an ancient problem. Our toughest ones usually are. Seneca understood this well over 2,000 years ago when he wrote On the Shortness of Life. When left to our own devices, we make it short, he said. So don’t do that. “Life is long,” he adds, “if you know how to use it.” So do better.
Very best, Patrick
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