If you have concluded that “Ignorance is bliss” and prefer to cater to your perverted appetite with your favorite predigested food, which is so tempting, so sweet in the mouth, so easy to gulp, so smooth to swallow, so stimulating, and so fashionable, then lay this book aside until you have learnt through disease and pain that it pays to adopt the natural and moral diet.

(via This column will change your life: must a year last 52 weeks? | Life and style | The Guardian)

Via brickartist.com

The great haiku artist Kobayashi Issa wrote this:

New Year’s Day–
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.

In all the year-end roundups on the various blogs, I enjoyed David Cain’s 16 things I know are true but haven’t quite learned yet. I already knew and practice #2 but several, like #s 1, 3, and 6 – I still struggle with those. (But substitute MacBook for smartphone.) It made me think of a few things I know that I am still learning are true for me.

• Getting up earlier makes my day go better. I’ve known this for years: getting up early, giving myself time to wake up, exercise, read, etc. makes me feel on top of the day. I simply feel less rushed when I’m able to do self-care, write, make a leisurely breakfast, etc. and so, when the world descends on me, I’m in a better mood overall.
• It’s about systems and processes, not goals. Relatedly, as I’ve been reading  for years from Scott Adams and Ramit Sethi, I need to put systems and habits in place to increase the chances that I’ll do what I want to do. I’ve restarted my 3x/week kettlebell workout and it’s good to know that’s pretty much on auto-pilot. But I don’t have a routine or system for those nights when I wake up at 3am or never fall asleep at all. I want to improve my sleep habits this month because I usually end the week feeling more and more tired, and this affects my mood.
• One thing at a time. One of my issues with my sleep schedule is that there’s always more I want to read, write, see, do, tidy up, etc. before going to bed. I simply can’t stop adding one more thing to the pile. Do I try to tweak that habit first? Or should I set a firm wake-up time? Maybe both? Maybe start clearing the decks earlier in the evening and turning off the computer by 9pm?  And this isn’t the only issue on my mind: what about my creative projects? My career? But fixing my sleep habits isn’t enough, I need to start that freelance thing. And buy the food for that diet and work out the meal plan for each day of the week. And look at all those novels I’ve put off reading! And so it goes…I know that there are 374 barns that are burning and my mind wants to take care of them all. But picking one habit to establish or one project to work on, and minimizing the multitasking – letting the barns burn because they aren’t really burning, are they? – usually makes my life better.
• Getting started #1: Use time-boxing to break down a project. I sometimes don’t start doing things because I don’t have the minimum 4.6 hours required to do it properly. What I’ve found at work is that small time boxes of 5 minutes, incrementing to 10, then 15, etc. are enough to help me just wallow in the material for a while till patterns start to emerge. Mark Forster’s book Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play has some good time-box patterns, like 5-10-15-20-25-30-25-20-15-10-5, which means you wind up working for several hours but it doesn’t feel like several hours. Often, it’s little tricks like this that can break a creative block for me.
• Getting started #2: Lower my standards. The first draft doesn’t need to be the final draft. Do it messy and clean it up later. Another workaround for my procrastination/perfectionism. I heard this advice from the poet Robert Bly on Bill Moyers’ “The Language of Life” series.

• It’ll all be OK. Worry and anxiety feel like the background radiation to my life sometimes. A career coach told me one time that my personality type – INTJ – likes having a problem to solve. And if I don’t have a problem, then it will create one. Actually, my life is blessed and I want to spend some time this year recognizing that fact and reveling in it.

• If it feels bad, I’m doing it wrong. This goes for sex and most other things in life. My first coach, PJ Eby, said this a lot and it’s one of his many comments that swim up from memory. I often accept feeling bad as “that’s how it’s supposed to be.” Well, no – if I’m hurting from the kettlebell swings, then I need to go back to basics. If I’m freaking out when I cook a meal, then maybe I need to lower my standards and take my time and renegotiate with myself what I’m trying to accomplish. If I’m feeling bad, it’s me making me feel bad.

• I like to take my time. One of my favorite analogies for my time in the PhD program was that I felt like I was yelling at a tree to grow faster. Except I was yelling at myself. Today, for example, I gave myself very few things I had to do. I also gave myself time to do the things I needed/wanted to do at the pace I wanted to do them.
• Reading books does good things for me. On our recent trip to Florida, I had some books on my Kindle and a hardback of How to Live. I would take a morning to drink my  coffee and read a chapter in the Montaigne book, which required relaxed and focused time. Reading a book can slow my mind down so it isn’t racing so often. And, books just have a heft that all the web pages I read cannot approach.
• Creating stuff feels good and is its own reward. I’ve noticed that when I’m not writing stuff – even blog posts – my mood darkens. Exercise helps my mood, sure, as does sleep. But sitting down to write a post or a story or even a letter to a friend makes me feel more useful and complete.
• It’s about creating and maintaining. Cairene, a coach I worked with a few years back, makes this excellent point. When life is all about maintenance, life gets dreary. When life is all about creating, the dirty clothes and dishes pile up and the car doesn’t get inspected. You need to come to an agreement with maintenance and find ways to do the drudge things that have to be done so you can free up the time and energy and attention to do the creating you want to do. For productivity nerds like myself, coming up with reminder systems for maintenance is fun but they can quickly take on a grotesque life of their own. The maintenance is there to support the creation, not the other way around.
• I know enough. I am enough. My friend Mike and I sometimes help out friends with their computers or writing projects. We’re usually surprised that others don’t know what we consider to be basic information. It’s easier for me to berate myself for what I don’t know and haven’t done. But it may be that, for the things I want to do in 2014, I already have all the information, time, and energy I need.

I also find it sad that because his book is filled with a whole bunch of nonsense, that’s why it’s a bestseller; that’s why we’re talking. Because that’s how you get on the bestseller list. You promise the moon and stars, you say everything you heard before was wrong, and you blame everything on one thing. You get a scapegoat; it’s classic. Atkins made a fortune with that formula. We’ve got Rob Lustig saying it’s all fructose; we’ve got T. Colin Campbell [author of The China Study, a formerly bestselling book] saying it’s all animal food; we now have Perlmutter saying it’s all grain. There’s either a scapegoat or a silver bullet in almost every bestselling diet book.

Unforeseen things will occur and you will inevitably deviate from your plan, this is organic, and it is a good thing. It is what keeps the game interesting.

[audio http://tempblogfood.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/tumblr_lxb1uvnmyj1qz6f4bo1.mp3]

austinkleon:

Kenneth Koch reading “You Want A Social Life With Friends“ (2000)

This was recorded by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, author of Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life. Here’s what she has to say about it:

One of my favorite poems appears in the book on page 144. It is called So You Want A Social Life With Friends, and it is by Kenneth Koch. In the fall of 2000, I had the privilege of recording Mr. Koch reading this poem in his Upper East Side apartment for an audio magazine project I was working on. I used a tiny Radio Shack tape recorder, and take full responsibility for the lack of high sound quality. (But I do admit I like the crackling and soundproof-lessness.) He was an impeccable, flawless reader—we were finished in two or three takes. Though he had been reluctant to agree to our session, once underway, he was a gracious, charismatic host. He had set up a nice tray with glasses of grapefruit juice. Fitting, because the whole thing was bittersweet. Mr. Koch died a year later. I believe this is one of his last recordings.

Amazing! One of my favorite poems, too.

I once heard a writer say that the only punctuation mark that we ever need is a period.

(via Christmas Is Kicking Ass in the War on Christmas - Conor Friedersdorf - The Atlantic)