1. Live as if each life decision is a brush stroke, knowing undaring art is decoration. Examine reality. What is not art? Look at the sky and try to conceptualize the limitlessness that sits just beyond it. Then dispel all bindings that came to be from worry, anxiety or self esteem.
Create your own future.
2. Treat every living being as you would an old friend. The abundant brilliance of human connectivity is available for the building of productive social networks, or for simple joy. To commit trespasses with the knowledge of harm to others is a full digression to a state of intellectual infirmity. His Holiness the Dalai Lama once said, Our prime purpose in life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.
3. Harvest a balance between yourself and your self. The duality in which thoughts buttresses with actuality are like spoken words meaning forever being drowned out by the wind. Nas penned, A baby being born, the same time a man is murdered, the beginning and end. Neglect your physicality at your own peril. Preserve the vessel the universe has bestowed upon you. Do not negate your world. Do not negate your body. Instead, become disenchanted with what leeches you from them. If beauty is a byproduct of your work ethic, so be it. But aim to enrich your soul, not your ego.
4. Find the innate creation in the things you take for granted. At a molecular level we’re all just space stuff. Elements forged in the furnaces of brewing supernovas, family trees bearing fruit for a millenia, the right and exact distant relatives surviving the winter so you can doom scroll through crap online. Perhaps this wasn’t the intended punchline, but I’ll be damned if it is not artful. I’ll be damned if it’s not evidence of grace. With regularity, readdress that you are simply the universe scrutinizing itself and life’s ills slip away like water in your fingers.
5. Master peace and embrace the still moments of life. There is data behind each breath. Being is free. Expectation and rumination wear heavy tolls. They cost you the solitary intangible you must have to exist. Time. Meditation, for instance, is where we find the opportunity for selfishness without the charge of ego. Approach it like a garden. Growth is not immediate, but with discipline it will keep you alive.
6. Do not harbor hate in your heart. Sever the sheets and set it adrift; forgotten, forgiven or elsewhere. Know that the volume at which you deliver your message does not correlate with its precision, and that convoluting anger and passion is a precursor to madness.
7. Spend your days in equanimity. Composure at precarious junctures is a currency traded upon by those whose legacies live on in perpetuity. Not that the objective is to be included in Encyclopedias. On the contrary, it may be to outlive the standards you have of your heroes. To flourish in compassion, and die with the clarity of honor.
