Edition 1: Clarity

MIND CAFE EDITION 1 - CLARITY

ON BEING PRESENT

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Welcome MAGAZINE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: EDITOR: DESIGN: FOUNDER:

CONTRIBUTORS

Adrian Drew Chris Sowers Lee Caple Adrian Drew

Megan Holstein, John Weiss, Marta Brzosko, Julia Pugachevsky, Leah Gummery, Nir Eyal, Spencer Sekulin, Matthew Kent, Omar Itani, Adrian Drew, Barry Davrett, Brianna Wiest, Kim Duke, Jordan Gross, Sean Kernan, Danny Forest, Michael Thompson, Remy Franklin, Paul Ollinger

PHOTOGRAPHY COVER: MAGAZINE:

Callum Shaw Toa Heftiba, Kinga Chichewicz, Annie Spratt

The word ‘clarity’ can mean many different things depending upon the context in which it is used. In photography, clarity might represent the absence of visual noise, or a crisp, high-resolution image. In music, perhaps clarity could be used to denote the sound of a harmonic melody, dancing along the stanzas of a pristine vocal solo. Or when talking about the weather, clarity might refer to a blue-skied day, void of clouds, with space for the sun to envelop the world in its warm embrace. In every context, however, the term clarity depicts the same underlying theme. That is, freedom from distraction.

In an environment of clarity, there are no disturbances. There is no humidity to fog the spectacles through which we perceive the space around us. Only when the landscape is clear are we able to see the world for what it truly is, whether through the medium of photography, music or the climate. Finding clarity, however, is not as much an external endeavour as the above examples might have us believe.

No, rather, even on the cloudiest days or the most distracting of circumstances, clarity can only truly originate from one place. That is, within ourselves.

To touch on the examples above, what use is a perfect melody if we’re too lost in thought to notice it? The birds sing the most beautiful of songs every morning, but how often do we stop to listen to them on our busy commute to the office? Or how about the last time we ate dinner in a restaurant - how present were we in noticing every flavour, aroma and texture? Instead of truly enjoying the world and all of its fruits, we so often lose ourselves to thought. Our minds have become the antithesis of clear, plagued with thousands of thoughts, worries and assumptions.

Yet what might our world look like if we could unbind ourselves from thought? Not stop it altogether, since that is impossible, but to simply quieten the noise and create space for more mental clarity? Well, life would be most enjoyable indeed. It would be far less stressful and far more peaceful. Perhaps, in the absence of excessive thought, we may even discover how to be truly present in our every pursuit.

But where does one begin on such an endeavour? Well, right here. This vessel through which we’re communicating aims to teach you exactly that - how to cultivate mental clarity; how to unfog the lenses and see life for what it truly is. That’s what this edition is all about.

C OV E R P H OTO G R A P H Y Callum Shaw is a lifestyle photographer, filmmaker and self-improvement enthusiast based in England, UK. You can check out more of his work at www.callumshaw.com

WELCOME

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In This Edition T H E B R E A D C R U M B S O F L I F E - P. 1 2

John Weiss explores the nature of happiness and how it is not discoverable in the lavish feasts and grand banquets, but rather, in the breadcrumbs of life. It is in the simple pleasures that we stand to find the most joy.

H OW T O S E L F - C A R E U N S E L F I S H LY - P. 3 3

Despite what we’re conditioned to believe, it isn’t selfish to put yourself first every once in a while - just try not to offend anybody in the process.

YO U A R E N O T YO U R T H O U G H T S - P. 4 3

As much as we tend to identify with our busied mind as if it defines us, this is not the case. Thoughts are separate from self, as Spencer Sekulin explores in this piece.

T H E S T O R Y B E H I N D M I N D C A F E - P. 74

Mind Cafe was born in the midst of adversity and personal struggle, and has grown to be more than its founder, Adrian Drew, could ever have dreamed.

M O V I N G W I T H C H A N G E - P. 9 4

Change is a ubiquitous part of life. Try as we may, we cannot escape the ever shifting nature of terrestrial existence - but we can become better at accepting it.

T H E WAY O F L E S S - P. 1 1 3

Minimalist Danny Forest renounced all of his material possessions to live a life of simplicity and clarity. In this story, he explains why.

Mind Cafe Media Ltd. 2020

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IN THIS EDITION

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On Being Present A S TO RY BY M E G A N H O L S T E I N

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n the spring of 2017, at the height of the #vanlife craze, I bought a van. It was a 1997 GMC Savana, complete with a high-top roof, sun-bleached paint, and a transmission that was on death’s doorstep. I bought it in Kentucky from a man whose son had the same kind of adventure I wanted to have, only to leave the van in his father’s hands when he ran away to Alaska. It cost $2000.

Once I bought the van, my father and I drove it from the seller’s house in Kentucky to northern Ohio, where it spent the next month and a half in my grandfather’s favorite workshop. It needed a rebuilt transmission, suspension, and braking system. These repairs cost $4,000. Everyone in my life, from my father to my friends, was eager to tell me how stupid this was. I was about to graduate college. If I wanted to travel, I should get a job, not immediately run away in a van that could barely drive. Maybe I could travel in a year or two, they said, after I saved up some money and bought a nice RV. It was good advice.

I ignored it anyway.

If my goal was to travel the country in safety, luxury, and have the maximum amount of fun I could, I would have followed their recommendations. If that were the case, an itinerary and a five-digit savings account would have been useful things to have. But traveling the world in safety and luxury wasn’t my goal. My goal was to learn how to be present.

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ON BEING PRESENT

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“Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child - our own two eyes. All is a miracle.”

A Q U O T E F R O M T H I C H N H AT H A N H

Prior to buying the van, my life had been, in many ways, the American dream. My father raised me to be a competent entrepreneur, self-starter, and autodidact. In middle school, I was a competitive golfer.

And I was good. I walked on to my high school’s varsity golf team as a freshman. This was no small-town high school, either. My high school was in Dublin, OH, a city internationally recognized for hosting the Memorial Tournament.

And then, at age 15, I started my first business. I called it Pufferfish Software, and we made apps for autistic children.

It took off like a rocket. First, I started to receive national attention for being a teen CEO. And then awards. Investors started competing for my attention, inviting me to pitch their accelerators and venture funds. At 16, an age where most teenagers are negotiating with their parents for a later curfew, I was spending my evenings networking at professional events. And when I finally did turn 18, large corporations began trying to lure me away from the startup life to work as a consultant on teams with people twice my age, people who had been in the business longer than I’d been alive. And I hated it. I was one of the lucky few... but I didn’t feel lucky. I felt trapped. My time didn’t belong to me anymore. My time belonged to my projects, to my professional contacts, to my contractors, and to my customers, but not to me. In my early twenties, most of the people I grew up with were out being young, having their first ill-advised romantic experiences, and generally just wasting their time. Meanwhile, I was bent over a desk, making yet another Gantt chart for a project I feared would go nowhere.

People call it the rat race, and it certainly felt like one; all of us just rats in a maze, racing to be the first to get the prize. And what was the prize? “Making it.” Being on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Getting a seven-digit investment from a VC. Hiring a bunch of people and renting offices. These prizes were stupid, and deep down, I knew it.

As I moved into my twenties, a time when I was supposed to be leveraging my early success into a chart-topping career in Silicon Valley, I just started to plateau. I didn’t care about the prizes anymore. Going to work began to feel pointless. What difference was any of this making in the actual world? Whose lives were we making better? I didn’t know.

ON BEING PRESENT

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So I quit. I spent all my money on a van that couldn’t make it 100 miles without breaking down, and I drove away.

When people hear I’ve spent time traveling long-term in a van, they assume my life was a constant fun-filled adventure. Maybe it would have been for someone else, but not for me. I wasn’t concerned with going places and doing things so much as I was with just seeing the world for what it was.

And the world - or at least, America’s interstate highway system - is empty. There’s nothing out there. The only living things for hundreds of miles were me and a couple of long-distance truckers. There were mountains in the distance, some abandoned shacks in between, and hours and hours and hours of nothing.

All I did was drive. There were days I did nothing but drive for ten hours. I only stopped to get gas, eat a cup of instant soup, and sleep.

Then I woke up, climbed back into the driver’s seat, and kept driving.

I wasn’t even headed anywhere. Every time I was near an interesting tourist attraction, I skipped it. I drove from Columbus, Ohio to Portland, Oregon and missed every single national park on the way. And I don’t regret skipping the national parks. I was looking for something more important. And in the empty highways of America, I found it.

I went on this road trip to learn how to be present. I chose to do this by traveling because travel forces you to be present. The newness of the experience strips you of all your preconceived notions. You’re left with no option but to take the world as it is. Traveling in a broken down van, not knowing where you’re going to sleep next or even if the van is going to make it through the journey, only makes this more true. In those conditions, you can’t even know what the next hour holds, let alone the next week or the next month. I was forced to be present because it was the only option I had.

I told you I learned how to be present. Well, here’s how you do it: you don’t worry about the fact that the check engine light is on again, even though you don’t have any cell service and the nearest gas station is one hundred and twenty seven miles in the direction you just came from.

You conclude you are either going to make it to your destination, or you are not, and worrying about it isn’t going to change anything. Instead, you look at the horizon and see mountains hundreds of miles away and abandoned shacks in between. And out there in the middle of nowhere, you finally see the truth: that the world is beautiful just the way it is.

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Toa Heftiba

L O C AT I O N

United States

“Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion.

What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time - past and future - the more you miss the now.”

A Q U OT E F RO M E C K H A RT TO L L E

ON BEING PRESENT

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The Breadcrumbs of Life AN ARTICLE BY JOHN WEISS

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uth probably knew that her time was short. The cancer, diagnosed less than a year ago, was aggressive. Her oncologist ordered another round of treatments, and my parents asked me to drive her to appointments.

I was home for summer break, having just completed my junior year at university. I had plans for tennis, the beach, and frivolous exploits with friends. I loved my grandmother but chauffeuring her to and from the hospital felt like an inconvenience. Sometimes the selfishness of youth is blind to unexpected gifts. Ruth’s nickname was “Nana.” My sister called her that when we were little, and the

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nickname stuck. On drives to the hospital, Nana and I would chat about everyday things.

She’d tell me about something she watched on television, and I’d share a few stories from university life. Mostly, I just listened to Nana as she was a talkative person.

Near the end of Nana’s treatments, I noticed she was uncharacteristically quiet on our drive home. She was gazing out the window in silence.

It was a beautiful day. I pulled into the parking lot and helped Nana out of the car.

The cool breeze carried the laughter of nearby children, enjoying the swings and slides in the park. “Where are we going, Johnny?”

Nana asked me.

“You’ll see,” I said.

I held her elbow and we walked through a wooded pathway lined with lovely flowers and plants. I pointed out squirrels on the lawn and Nana smiled. We strolled further and came to a clearing. There was a wooden building with a ticket booth, and I paid the young lady inside for two tickets. Nana looked at me quizzically, but then she heard the powerful air horn of a train.

“They have a miniature train here, Nana,” I explained. “I thought you’d enjoy a nice ride through the park.”

Nana looked at the emerging train and smiled at me. For the next hour, we rode all around the park as I pointed out the ducks waddling from a nearby lake. We steamed past

open fields of grass, watching a fellow play frisbee with his dogs.

We didn’t talk much on the train ride, but the smile never left Nana’s face. When the ride ended, I bought us both hotdogs and sodas.

By then, Nana was exhausted and ready to go home. It was nearly dusk as we strolled past the outdoor lights to the parking lot.

We drove back to her apartment, and she told me what a lovely afternoon she’d had. I gave her a big hug, told her I loved her and headed home.

The remaining summer vacation allowed time for beach trips, tennis, and parties with my friends. Then it was all over, and I was back at university. My senior year flew by, and before long, it was finals week.

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“It’s the small moments, not the big ones.”

A Q U OT E BY J O H N W E I S S

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After exams, arrangements were made for graduation. My parents drove up the day before and came to my dorm room.

There were hugs and congratulations, and then my father looked at me and said, “Johnny, I have some bad news. We didn’t want to tell you and distract you during finals week.”

I already knew what he was about to say, but my heart still skipped a beat.

“Nana passed away, didn’t she?” I said.

“Yes, last week,” Dad told me. “The cancer was just too advanced.”

We talked a bit more about Nana, and my mother said how glad she was that I spent time with Nana over the summer.

Graduation was a blur of speeches, awards, cheering, photographs, and a dinner celebration. Later, my parents hugged me

goodbye and embarked on the two- hour drive home.

I went to some graduation parties and collapsed in my door room around midnight.

Sitting in bed, I was unable to fall asleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about Nana.

Fast forward thirty years. It isn’t the beach parties of summer, the pomp and circumstance of graduation, or the subsequent dorm celebrations that have stayed with me.

It’s those vivid memories of my time with Nana - particularly that magical train ride in the park.

The experience taught me something profound. Such moments with loved ones reflect the meaning of life. And the meaning of life is found in the breadcrumbs, not the lavish feasts.

THE BREADCRUMBS OF LIFE

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Toa Heftiba

L O C AT I O N

Various

THE BREADCRUMBS OF LIFE

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It’s the small moments, not the big ones. The intimate conversations over coffee. Whispers of encouragement when you’re down, and a steady hand on your shoulder. It’s taking time to be present. To listen deeply. It’s the handwritten letter of thanks to your grade school teacher.

Or the silly cartoon you leave in your child’s lunchbox.

The other day I took a stroll with my dogs.

The news was filled with fear and uncertainty as the world battles an invisible enemy called COVID-19. A cool breeze danced through the tree leaves as my dogs sniffed and rolled in the grass. People strolled past us wearing face masks.

They waved as they passed by, and I could tell they were smiling by the crinkles around their eyes. I waved back. Walking home, I spotted a large rock beside the sidewalk. It was painted blue and contained letters that spelled, “Be safe.”

I mentioned it to my wife when I got home.

“It was in the news,” my wife said, “Someone is painting rocks and leaving them all over with encouraging words.” More breadcrumbs, I thought.

A few years after Nana passed away, my maternal grandmother Mary fell ill. She descended into the fog of dementia and rarely spoke. We moved her into our home, and my mother took care of her.

Mary was Irish, having emigrated to America when she was young. Mom used to place a large photo book about Ireland in Mary’s lap. Mary spent hours turning the pages, transfixed by the pictures of her homeland. I think it gave her peace.

Then one day, Mary collapsed. Dad and I carried her to bed. We lay her down comfortably. Dad held her hand and asked, “Are you comfortable, Mary?”

THE BREADCRUMBS OF LIFE

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In a person’s lifetime there may be not more than half a dozen occasions that he can look back to in the certain knowledge that right then, at that moment, there was room for nothing but happiness in his heart.”

A Q U OT E BY E R N E ST I N E G I L B R E T H C A R E Y

Mary’s kind eyes looked up at my Dad as she softly said, “I am.” And then, the light in her eyes dulled, and we knew she was gone.

What a privilege to be with Mary that day. To know that her final moments were at home, with her family, surrounded by love. More breadcrumbs.

The breadcrumbs of life are all around

us. They’re the moments that remain forever etched in our memory. They’re the little, selfless acts of grace. Reminders that the best of humanity is found in love and kindness.

Take time to slow down. Look around. Listen closely. The breadcrumbs of life will speak to you. Reassure you. Remind you that life, with all its joy and sadness, is worth living.

THE BREADCRUMBS OF LIFE

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Kinga Chichewicz

L O C AT I O N

Porto, Portugal

Demystifying Meditation A S T O R Y B Y M A R TA B R Z O S K O

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indfulness has been the buzzword of the self-help world for a long time. But, as often happens when a complex idea enters mainstream culture, it became misconstrued along the way.

Moreover, amongst popular content on mindfulness meditation, some facts are often omitted while others wholly misunderstood. As someone who’s been meditating daily for almost five years, I know all too well that false information can make things incredibly confusing for beginners.

Many myths surround the concept of meditation. I’m sure you’ve heard several of them. “Meditation is about taming the mind,” for instance. I’ve also listened to a lot of people saying something along these lines. “I don’t think this is for me. I can’t seem to stop thinking, and that’s what meditation is all about, isn’t it?” No, no, and no.

Meditation is the practice of observing the mind, regardless of what it does, and trying to control your thoughts will only bring about adverse results. Mindfulness meditation is about changing your relationship with your thoughts, not erasing them.

Another common misconception is the idea that meditation will make you more relaxed, focused, or any other desired quality or feeling. I’ve seen many self-help headlines promising to “instantly relieve stress” through meditation. This frames meditation as a quick fix, which it isn’t. The most significant rewards come with consistent, long-term practice, as you gain insight into the innerworkings of your mind. In fact, in opposition to the above myth, mindfulness meditation may even appear to amplify your uncomfortable feelings at first - only because you’re becoming more aware of them.

I’ve even heard some people claim that meditation

makes you indifferent to life’s problems. They confuse the accepting attitude of mindfulness with tolerating harmful behavior. But equanimity towards your subjective experience doesn’t mean you tolerate external acts of injustice or violence. When you learn how to honor (instead of being driven by) your thoughts and feelings, you may simply become better at dealing with the external events in a more responsible way.

So, now that we know what mindfulness meditation is not, let’s try to define what it is. There are countless ways to explain it - so let’s borrow our definition from the classic icon of meditation, Jon Kabat-Zinn. In his flagship book, ‘Full Catastrophe Living’, he writes: “[Meditation] is the process of observing body and mind intentionally, of letting your experiences unfold from moment to moment and accepting them as they are.”

There are a few critical elements in this definition, including observing what happens to your mind and body in the present, holding an intention while you do so, accepting whatever’s arising instead of trying to control it, and withholding judgments about the experience. All these elements are rooted in Buddhist philosophy, from which mindfulness meditation originated. In modern times, the benefits these ancient practices can have on our mental health are confirmed by science. Instead of citing all the research (that you can easily find online), I want to show you an example of how mindfulness changed my own life.

As I was growing up, I always felt like there was something wrong with me. I couldn’t quite grasp what it was - I just felt like an outsider. One way in which this manifested was how I approached my relationships. Throughout my teenage years and early adulthood, I often got the impression that other people were bothered by my presence. They seemed annoyed, bored, or in other ways uncomfortable.

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Whenever I noticed this, I withdrew. After a few years of meditating (remember how I said that the most significant benefits of mindfulness come with time?), I identified the pattern. The real problem wasn’t that people were annoyed by my presence. It was that I unconsciously approached my relationships as if this was the case.

To put it simply, it was all in my head. I created this whole thing about “being the outsider” through the beliefs I held about myself - namely, that my presence bothered people.

Mindfulness meditation allowed me to see these ideas for what they were: thoughts playing in my mind on repeat.

How, then, can you practice mindfulness meditation to gain similar insights? Well, based upon my own experience, I have a few pointers - the first being to start small. If you’ve never meditated before, you can begin with daily 5-minute sessions. This way, you’ll be able to ease into the new habit 24

gradually without becoming overwhelmed.

It may also help if you practice in the same spot and at the same time every day. Meditating in a specific place and time primes your mind for the practice. Meditation becomes non-negotiable because you know exactly when and where your practice will take place. Additionally, wherever you meditate, ensure to minimize distractions. This applies to your phone and other devices, but also to the people with whom you share a living space. Simply ask them to give you a few minutes of uninterrupted time.

Once the conditions are set, settle into your meditation practice by taking a seat and finding the right posture. The posture that most meditation teachers recommend is one that’s both alert and relaxed - sitting cross-legged with a straight back. This way, you encourage awareness but don’t create unnecessary tension - no lotus pose required.

01. SIT

Find a comfortable seat in a location free from distractions, such as your bedroom.

02. RELAX

Get comfortable and relax your body, keeping your back straight.

Close your eyes.

0 3 . B R E AT H E

As you inhale and exhale, focus on your breath. If you get lost in thought, bring your awareness back to your breathing

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“Allow your mind to wander. Don’t try to stop it. Your mind isn’t used to this practice and it will drift away - so let it.”

A Q U O T E B Y M A R TA B R Z O S K O

As you sit, try to follow your breath. This is the most fundamental principle of mindfulness meditation. Find a place in your body where you feel your breath the strongest, and observe the physical sensations there. Rather than thinking about the breath, simply feel it in your body. Allow your mind to wander. Don’t try to stop it. It isn’t used to this practice, and it will drift away - so let it. Whenever you notice that you’re getting lost in your thoughts, gently return your attention to the breath. And, most importantly of all, go easy on yourself. You can’t force yourself into being mindful. Stay patient and don’t judge your meditation practice. In the beginning, the most important thing is to sit down and practice - preferably every day. This, in itself, is your first accomplishment. The rest will come in due time.

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Take a Forest Bath A S T O R Y B Y M A R TA B R Z O S K O

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nstinctively, everyone senses that nature has a soothing effect on our minds, bodies, and souls. We all know that calming feeling that comes from a woodland walk or a canalside stroll, but most urban dwellers have limited opportunities to experience these feelings in daily life. Sure, you probably see an odd tree here and there on your way to work, or you may grow houseplants in your home or appreciate the occasional bird chirping outside your window. But that’s not quite the same as immersing your senses in the sounds, smells, and sights of a forest. Or, as some like to call it, ‘forest bathing.’

This concept of forest bathing arose forty years ago in Japan. Known as shinrin-yoku, it became the government’s response to the rising stress levels and burnout tendencies of hard-working salarymen. Today, its benefits are validated by multiple studies. Taking a forest bath can decrease your stress levels, improve mental health, boost cognitive abilities such as concentration and memory, reduce blood pressure and much, much more.

But forest bathing isn’t just about leaving the city. To reap the full benefits of being in nature, you need to tune into it with mindful awareness. This means leaving your phone, your books, and other distractions behind so that you can be present, listen, watch, and sense the forest; to give up the urge to continually fidget with something, and allow yourself just to be. Done this way, forest bathing can help you restore and unwind like nothing else

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TA K E A F O R E S T BAT H

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How often do we take time to reconnect with nature - to reach down and touch the grass beneath our feet, or to embrace the morning air and the chorus of birdsong? For most of us, the answer is very rarely.

The reason nature has such a soothing effect is that it doesn’t demand you to react all the time. Its sensory stimulation is gentler than what you may experience in an urban setting. As freelance writer and researcher Jams Harrox put it, “Natural environments are rich in the characteristics necessary for the brain to replenish itself.”

The health benefits of forest bathing are so apparent that the UK’s Woodland Trust advised GPs to recommend it as non-medical therapy to boost their patients’ wellbeing. It turns out that we may not need expensive treatments for all of our problems. Spending time in nature’s company may just be enough to reset our mind. After all, as Dr Qing Li, the president of the Society for Forest Medicine in Japan, said - as humans, we’re designed to “listen to the wind and taste the air.”

More, forest bathing enables us to return to our most natural setting.

But how does it differ from an ordinary walk? Well, two additions make a forest bath special. They may seem like subtle nuances, yet they could just make all the difference. The first element is mindful awareness.

When you pay attention to what happens around you, you notice and appreciate all the pleasant sensations the forest provides. Additionally, you free your mind of rumination and worries about the past or future.

Tuning into your surroundings is easier in a forest, where there’s plenty to look at, listen to, and smell.

The second component of a forest bath is a deliberate intention.

When you interact with nature with an intent to improve your wellbeing, you engage with it more. For example, you may stop to smell a forest flower, touch the bark of an old tree, or lay down in a patch of sun on the soft moss, all because that’s what you set out to do.

You’re there to enjoy the natural world. That intention will drive you to appreciate it fully.

With mindful attention and deliberate intention, you can turn a mundane walk into a vibrant and healing sensory experience. Or, as Gary Evans, the founder of the UK Forest Bathing Institute, says: “A better way to frame forest bathing is mindful time spent under the canopy of trees for health and wellbeing purposes.”

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How to Self-Care Unselfishly A S TO RY BY J U L I A P U G AC H E V S K Y

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elf-care” has been a buzzy concept for a while, and on the surface, it’s a pretty benign sentiment—taking time to care for yourself. And while self-care intends to be a positive thing you do to preserve your mental health, there’s also been a backlash to the idea because some people use “self-care” to justify behavior that’s rude, inconsiderate, and selfish. Some people’s Wednesday night eye mask routines are another person’s refusal to be there for you when you need them, and the conflation of the two can (rightfully!) become confusing.

But self-care isn’t bad, at its core. Taking time off, doing things just for you, and being alone are all vital for a healthy, fulfilled life.

The key is to properly do what you need without harming other people in the process.

Striking that balance isn’t always easy.

Sometimes a friend might get mad that you don’t want to go dancing with them because you want a night in, or your choice to take a week off might coincide with you forgetting a close relative’s birthday. No one’s perfect, but

there are three general rules you can follow to keep your self-care centered more on care than on solely yourself.

A valid criticism of self-care is that it can be used as an excuse to ghost people or cancel plans with no real explanation or apology.

Because you’re looking out for yourself and giving yourself the space to do what you need to for your own mental health, ignoring other people can be seen as an acceptable, catch-all reaction to any mild inconvenience, promise, or responsibility.

The problem is, it can also hurt other people, or at the very least, make them feel undervalued, potentially driving them away for good. But that also doesn’t mean that boundaries are wrong—but walls that don’t let other people in at all can cause problems. A boundary is texting a friend saying, “I’m sorry to cancel a day before we go to this concert, but work’s been insane this week, and I’m not feeling up to it. Can we see each other on [later date]? Can I give you my ticket so you can take someone else?”

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Or it’s saying, “I’m sorry I didn’t respond to your text two weeks ago. To be honest, I was really depressed, but I feel a bit better now.

Wanna FaceTime today?”

A wall, however, is going AWOL for weeks or months, even though you know your close friends are worried about you and might start to think *they* did something wrong. While a boundary takes two people—one person to announce it, one person to follow it—a wall is an isolating experience that, while feeling easier in the moment, is likely to do more harm later.

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Plus, the beauty of a boundary (and someone respecting it) is knowing that the people you’re closest to value your needs. But you’ll never know that if you enclose yourself, brick by brick, in the name of self-care.

Just because it’s called “self-care”, that doesn’t mean it should always involve being alone. If spending a night in watching Married at First Sight and wearing a face mask replenishes you, then, by all means, go for it. But sometimes, the cliche self-care rituals, though physically comforting, can feel emotionally unfulfilling because they involve

cutting yourself off from other people.

I used to live with someone who—in the name of self-care—sat on the couch every single night. She wouldn’t bother making plans or taking us up on invites, almost always choosing Netflix and delivery instead. There would be nothing wrong with not enjoying parties or going out—except she also wasn’t happy. She’d complain if a chair was tucked in slightly crookedly, always fought with her parents on the phone, never asked how anyone else was doing, and never really tried to get out of the job she loathed. She was stuck, and a large part of that (I think) came from her also not bothering to connect with anyone, be it her roommates or long-distance friends. Connecting with other people has tons of benefits. According to Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, people who feel more connected to others have lower levels of depression and anxiety, as well as higher levels of self-esteem, empathy, and trust.

Involving other people in your self-care can take many forms, such as calling a friend while you paint your nails, FaceTiming your family, or taking a day off work to volunteer at a soup kitchen. It can mean taking a group pottery class, joining a community theater, or painting a portrait of someone’s cat as a gift. When self-care brings you closer to people, you gain even more. As author Rachel Wilkerson Miller said in her book, The Art of Showing Up, “You can’t show up for others if you aren’t showing up for yourself first.”

That said, self-care is not an excuse to shirk responsibilities or be ignorant of the world around you. A lot of today’s news—the ongoing pandemic, systemic racism, police brutality, climate change, politics in general— is rightfully upsetting. And it’s good to take mental breaks from reading Twitter updates.

But self-care becomes most selfish when any painful or scary news only prompts you to turn off your phone and pretend injustice isn’t happening, hoping it’ll just be someone else’s problem to fix because it doesn’t directly impact you. For instance, no one likes to think that gathering in crowds can spread COVID-19, but if you jeopardize other people’s safety because your version of self-care is brunch with your friends, that’s self-serving (and dangerous to others), not selfcare. If you have minimal knowledge of the inequality in your country, but posted a black square on Instagram before returning to your favorite TV show, that is performative, not empathetic.

The same goes for your personal life, such

as being there for friends or family who may need you right now. It’s not on you to fix every problem or to always be around, but if your expectation of a relationship is that any request is a huge burden, that’s not an equal relationship. One good way to do this is to recharge in small ways every day, whether it’s putting your phone on airplane mode when you go to sleep or going for an hour-long jog in the morning. Another, if you need a day or chunk of time to be on your own, is to know what you’re resting up for.

How will you determine that you’ve had enough time to relax? What will you focus on doing once you’ve given that time to yourself ?

You don’t need to put pressure on your selfcare being perfect, but it can feel a lot better when you have a purpose in mind. That way, when you feel rejuvenated, you can return to the world, ready as ever to be an active part of it.

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“You can’t show up for others if you aren’t showing up for yourself first.”

A Q U OT E F RO M R AC H E L W I L K E R S O N M I L L E R

H O W T O S E L F - C A R E U N S E L F I S H LY

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Turning Your Values Into Time A S T O R Y B Y N I R E YA L

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t doesn’t so much matter what you do with your time; rather, success is measured by whether you did what you planned to do. It’s fine to watch a video, scroll social media, daydream, or take a nap, as long as that’s what you planned to do. Alternatively, checking work email, a seemingly productive task, is a distraction if it’s done when you intended to spend time with your family or work on a presentation. Keeping a timeboxed schedule is the only way to know if you’re distracted. If you’re not spending your time doing what you’d planned, you’re off track. To create a weekly timeboxed schedule, you’ll need to decide how much time you want to spend on each domain of your life. How much time do you want to spend on yourself, on important relationships, and on your work? Note that “work” doesn’t exclusively mean paid labor. The work domain can include community service, activism, and side projects.

How much time in each domain would allow you to be consistent with your values? Start by creating a weekly calendar template for your

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perfect week. Next, book fifteen minutes on your schedule every week to reflect and refine your calendar by asking two questions: “When in my schedule did I do what I said I would do, and when did I get distracted?”

Answering this question requires you to look back at the past week. I recommend tracking these distractions, too, by noting your internal triggers.

If an internal trigger distracts you, what strategies will you use to cope the next time it arises? Did an external trigger, like a phone call or a talkative colleague, prompt you to stop doing what you wanted to do? (We’ll address tactics to control external triggers in part three.)

Or was a planning problem the reason you gave in to distraction?

The next question is as follows, “Are there changes I can make to my calendar that will give me the time I need to live out my values better?” Maybe something unexpected came up, or perhaps there was a problem with how you planned your day. Timeboxing enables us to think of each week as a mini-experiment. The

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goal is to figure out where your schedule didn’t work out in the prior week so you can make it easier to follow the next time around. The idea is to commit to a practice that improves your schedule over time by helping you know the difference between traction and distraction for every moment of the day.

When our lives change, our schedules can too.

But once our schedule is set, the idea is to stick with it until we decide to improve it on the next go-round. Approaching the exercise of making a schedule as a curious scientist, rather than a drill sergeant, gives us the freedom to get better with each iteration.

In this section, we’ll look at how to make time for traction in the three domains of your life.

We’ll also discuss how to sync expectations of how you spend your time with the stakeholders in your life, like coworkers and managers.

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Before moving on, consider what your schedule currently looks like. I’m not asking about the things you did, but rather the things you committed to doing in writing. Is your schedule filled with carefully timeboxed plans, or is it mostly empty? Does it reflect who you are? Are you letting others steal your time or do you guard it as the limited and precious resource it is?

By turning our values into time, we make sure we have time for traction. If we don’t plan ahead, we shouldn’t point fingers, nor should we be surprised when everything becomes a distraction. Being indistractable is largely about making sure you make time for traction each day and eliminating the distraction that keeps you from living the life you want—one that involves taking care of yourself, your relationships, and your work.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Kinga Cichewicz

L O C AT I O N

Munich, Germany

“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

A Q U O T E B Y N I R E YA L

ON BEING PRESENT

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You Are Not Your Thoughts WRITTEN BY SPENCER SEKULIN

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top! A thought just went through your head. Now, what was it? Got it?

Write it down and stare at it. Now let me ask you this: was that thought appropriate to who you are? Do you agree with it? Is it true? Is it right? Or is there something off? We’re often told that as we think, so we become.

And that’s true. Thoughts are things - and very influential things they are. They shape us over time, like the heaving ocean shapes a coastline. What we think plays a tremendous role in how our lives turn out, far more than circumstances, events, and that misleading word called talent.

Yet just as dangerous as thinking that your thoughts are not important is the idea that you are your thoughts - that they are in control, an indisputable decree of who you truly are. If that first thought you had at the start of his article was utterly unlike you, or something you’re not happy with, guess what? It doesn’t have to define you. Despite all their power, you are not your thoughts, and here’s why: you are much more significant than your thoughts, and to think that you are your thoughts is a total disservice to your real personal power. Thoughts exist to serve you, not the other way around, yet most people live at the behest of their beliefs.

Something pops into their mind, and instead of stopping and analyzing it as the meaningless thing it is, they take it at face value. They accept it as part of who they are and react as the thought inclined them to behave.

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Thoughts are information, reactions, subconscious responses to stimulation — they are not some magical connection to your truest self. More, our thoughts are often wrong or misguided, emotional, or lacking critical information, and the thoughts that pop into our heads are most often stories, not facts.

To illustrate, in one of my vocations as a paramedic, I come face to face with these so-called stories. Sometimes, when I make a mistake or fall short of my own expectations, the thoughts come in: “I’m a terrible paramedic, I should quit, I suck.” What are these? Not me. They are reactionary stories. “I made a mistake; I did X or Y wrong; I missed this on my assessment.” Those are facts, and they are much more useful. How did I arrive at those? By not jumping on those initial thoughts and instead choosing better ones that are not only true but more conducive to positive growth.

Thoughts are just like criticisms: we can take them one way or another, let them define us or not, let them affect our self-image or not. And just like criticism, we mostly take them too personally, too readily, and don’t mentally step in and say, “Wait a minute! Let’s take a closer look at this before I let it through the door.” In my case, if I treated all of my thoughts as being me, I’d never have survived a shift.

Instead, I treat my thoughts as what they are: information to be considered.

The same applies to you. Whenever something happens, your mind is stimulated by it, and from that stimulus comes an automatic response - a fact, a story, or a downright lie. But there is something else at play here: the space between what happens, which thoughts arise, and what you choose to do. Our thoughts are separate from us and only brought close when we accept them. Most people don’t see this, but you can, anyone can, if they try. That is, to choose which thoughts to believe, which ones are genuinely us, and which ones are false. Because, in short, we are not our thoughts, but the thinkers of those thoughts—the deciders of which ideas are worthy of us.

You are a thinker, a self-aware being with a powerful, wondrous mind, a brain that is the most fantastic work of potentiality in the universe. You are that, with the power, the privilege, and the pleasure of choosing which thoughts to live by. You are whatever you decide to be, to do, to act, to say. Ideas are only part of that. Just as between event and response exists space to choose, so too with your thoughts. If you are mindful of them, between them and your self-identity is a choice. As you think, so you become? No - as you choose to think, so you really become.

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Kinga Cichewicz

L O C AT I O N

Munich, Germany / Ljubljana, Slovenia

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Unplug Yourself A S T O R Y B Y M AT T H E W K E N T

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his morning I drove our family van to a shady, secluded parking lot near our house. I turned the engine off and sat in silence for an hour.

My phone was with me, but only in case of an emergency. It stayed out of sight. I wrote in my journal and read a few chapters of a book.

I gazed at the trees and simply let my mind wander. When was the last time you were fully unplugged from the devices that dominate your attention? The last time no fashionable AirPods were dangling from your ear? No LCD screens inches from your face? No phone in your pocket, creating a compulsive urge for a quick peek?

We live in a society where we are always plugged in. The entire world is available at your fingertips. The next exciting thing is forever just one swipe away.

The technology that we use has many apparent advantages, sure. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have adopted it. The problem is that the benefits are so obvious they obscure the costs. That being said, it’s time we started looking at the benefits of unplugging from technology. I don’t mean unplugging for good, just long enough to get to a place in which whenever you do choose to use a device, you’re sure it isn’t using you. My wife and I have three kids. Being a parent is great, but it’s also a lot of work. The hardest part isn’t even changing diapers or getting them to listen; the hardest part is the constant demands they make on your attention.

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During a recent lunch, the instant my wife sat down, my daughter asked her to get up and get something. Every parent can relate. Having someone make constant demands of you is exhausting. Well, every app on your phone is like a temperamental child screaming, “Pay attention to me!”

You might think that’s an exaggeration, but it’s actually baked into the business model of most companies. With social media, you aren’t the customer; you are the product. Facebook doesn’t make money by selling you a subscription. It makes money by selling your attention and data to advertisers. The more time you spend on the Facebook app, the more product they have to sell.

Not only do social media apps seek to dominate your attention, but they can also be the cause of unpleasant emotions such as anxiety and envy. Instagram is a big offender here. I like Instagram a lot, and at one point, it was my favorite platform, but you have to be careful with it. As a visual medium, Instagram is a popularity contest with people looking to show off their perfect lives. One implication is that the people with the most glamorous lives get the most significant reach. Another effect is that even people with ‘boring’ lives only show the most alluring parts to their followers.

I struggled with envy for a long time on Instagram. I had to stop following an influencer that I really liked. He was about my age, has the same number of kids, and shares a lot of my beliefs and values. But his life is just so damn perfect. These apps trick you into thinking that you’ll miss all your favorite influencers’ updates if you log off. I regularly get emails from social media companies saying, “Here’s what you missed when you were away.” The truth is that you don’t miss it. You’re probably happier not knowing.

The first time I noticed the impact of technology on relationships was a mere six months into my marriage. It was 2012, and my wife and I had just bought our first smartphones - two shiny new iPhone 4S’s. At first, it was hard to notice that anything was amiss. We had a lot of fun showing each other the fantastic things that our phone was capable of. We had even more fun showing them off in front of our friends. But I began to realize that these devices were changing the dynamics of our relationship. Was now a good time to get my wife’s attention, or was she too busy on her phone?

Sometimes I would be mindlessly scrolling and stumble upon an interesting article.

Just as I switched from killing time to concentrating, my wife would try to initiate conversation. For some reason, I would feel a surge of annoyance. Why? Seconds ago, I would have welcomed a distraction. I didn’t even know the article that I was now reading existed. Yet now, this tiny rectangle had a monopoly on my attention.

There’s a bizarre phenomenon happening in households across the world. When people spend time together, their eyes find their screens, not each other. Eye contact is essential for building a relationship. You look into a stranger’s eyes to figure out if you can trust them. You look into your lover’s eyes to give them your full attention.

You bond with your baby by spending time face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball. My youngest girl is five months old. Our relationship does include things like talking (in her case, babbling) and playing, but it mostly involves looking at each other and smiling. This isn’t to say that we need to get rid of our technology to have better relationships. But we do need to find a way to prevent technology from encroaching on time better spent on real human interaction.

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Toa Heftiba

L O C AT I O N

England, UK

Meal times are a great example. People have been gathering together over food for as long as there have been people. It’s a great time to connect and to devote your attention to those you care about. Phones shouldn’t be anywhere in sight. In my family, we try to abide by this rule, but I’m sad to say I broke it recently. We were having dinner, and I got up and brought my wife over to show her something, then checked some random app before putting it down. She picked up the cue and pulled out her phone, and we never recovered from the downward spiral.

Relationships are an essential part of life. You can make yours stronger if you are intentional about unplugging.

I was listening to a podcast one time when I heard something that has stuck with me since. I don’t remember what podcast it was or who said it, but it’s one of those moments that changed my thinking forever. They said that your inbox is a list of other peoples’ ideas about how you should spend your attention. It’s the same thing with your social media news feed. And your app notifications. Every time you turn around, there’s something external to respond to. If you’re not careful, you’re stuck being reactive all day.

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As humans, we learn by imitation. Most of our behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs are not really our own; we’ve just copied them from someone else. It takes real work to be original and authentic. Your mind needs space to operate where it is free from the distraction of others. Put differently, you need solitude. Of course, when you use a smartphone, you don’t have solitude, even when you are alone. You can expose yourself to the thoughts of countless strangers just by tapping an icon. To bring something that is uniquely “you” to the table, you need to unplug from the hive mind and look inward.

It was initially my idea for my wife and me to schedule time to unplug. I recognized after our third child was born that solitude was about to become rare and precious. But today it was at her suggestion that I get away. I was having a rough morning and wasn’t able to conceal my irritable mood. She was wise enough to recognize that the solution was not for me to try harder to have a positive mindset but to find an opportunity to recharge mentally. Our lives really have become a lot like the machines we use to run them. And, like machines, they work best if you unplug them every now and then.

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How to Think Like a Philosopher WRITTEN BY SPENCER SEKULIN

Life is not a straight line, and it was never meant to be easy. The path that we all walk is as Seneca once said: terrain on which thunder and lightning play. Life is uncertain at the best of times, and at the worst can seem chaotic, unbearable, where it becomes an act of courage just to live. History is replete with it: wars, famines, pandemics, upheavals, and all manners of disruptive times have come and gone — and will come still, in my life and in yours.

How do we come to terms with this daunting reality? How do we handle it? How can we possibly wrangle control over such an inherently uncertain thing as life?

The answer is we can’t.

Yet there is one thing we can always control, and it’s one of the most important factors in our lives: how we think. In times of uncertainty, how we think is everything, for as we think, so we become, for better or for worse. We can learn a lot from the greatest thinkers of history, and that is why I encourage you, wherever you are, to think like a philosopher. No not the abstract, nuanced type, but the practical, straightforward wisdom that has stood the test of time, from thinkers who lived through their own times of tremendous uncertainty and not only survived, but thrived.

Marcus Aurelius, one of the greatest Roman emperors, was born into an era of upheaval and war — and was handed the reins to the empire even though he didn’t want them. It was thrust upon him, and along with it the fate of Rome. Yet he accepted it, and all of its challenges, and went on to uphold the golden era of the Roman Empire as the last of the Five Good Emperors. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, one of the fathers of stoicism, did not choose to be born into an era where he would have to serve the likes of Emperor Nero, who would be his demise, yet he also chose to accept it and live up to his duties, even in the face death itself. Even Epictetus, born as a slave, did not bemoan that life should be so uncertain and painful, but instead soldiered on to gain his freedom and become a renowned teacher whose writings would later 52

inspire many of history’s greats, including Marcus Aurelius.

And therein lies the first pillar: in accepting that uncertainty and adversity are part of life. It’s the same for everybody, as Seneca said — we are all born into life, and must not be taken aback by what that entails: “One has to accept life. Things will get thrown at you and things will hit you. Life’s no soft affair. It’s a long road you’ve started on: you can’t but expect to have slips and knocks and falls, and get tired, and openly wish — a lie — for death.” — Seneca Who is better equipped to handle uncertainty? The one who thinks that life should be easy and clean? Or the one who accepts the hardness and grittiness that life involves? We both know the answer — and yet so many people act as though uncertainty shouldn’t exist, and rail against it! All to no avail.

The sooner we accept this, the better we are able to handle it when it arises. Not, “Oh my god I can’t believe this is happening!” but, “This was always a possibility.” Sounds negative? It doesn’t have to be. It’s simply understanding how things are. We can hope for the best, but we must simultaneously know that sometimes the worst does happen — and that it’s up to us how we handle it.

This is the art of acceptance. Everywhere, at each moment, we have the option to accept what happens with humility. Yes, whatever happens. Marcus Aurelius had to cope with war on the frontiers, wars he often personally attended, the revolt of Cassius, the deaths of his wife, Faustina and his dear friend Verus, and the ultimate realization that his son and successor, Commodus, was not the man he hoped he would grow up to be — all of this, and yet in his writings to himself, he admonished humble acceptance of what happens.

This is not complacency or weakness.

It is the wisdom to stop fighting against that which is out of our control, which has happened, which cannot be changed. Upon accepting that this is part of life, we get rid of the burden of denial, of warring against how things are, of wasting our time and

PHOTOGRAPHY

Brooke Cagle

L O C AT I O N

Poteau, United States

energy resisting what we cannot possibly resist. Reality can be overbearing, and with this in mind comes the second pillar of thinking: not overthinking.

We all have fears, and when times are uncertain we often think too much about what might go wrong in life. While we must be aware of possibilities, that can be taken too far — to the extremes of complete mental paralysis. Instead, we can do as Aurelius encouraged: “Don’t let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole. Don’t try to picture everything bad that could possibly happen.

Stick with the situation at hand, and ask, “Why is this so unbearable? Why can’t I endure it?” You’ll be embarrassed to answer.” — Marcus Aurelius How many times have you worried yourself into a state of panic? Or let something that happened or something that someone said drive you up the wall? We’ve all been there — but only because we let our reactions take us there, and fall down a rabbit hole of overthinking. This is how a gentle reminder turns into a threat, or a little criticism explodes into an existential crisis, or upgrading to a new cellphone becomes an anxious dilemma. Therein lies the third pillar, knowing that our reactions to uncertainty and events can do just as much if not more damage than the thing itself, as Marcus said, “How much more damage anger and grief do than the things that cause them.” So true.

In uncertain times, don’t overthink, don’t let your imagination run wild on what can go wrong, and don’t let events sweep you off on emotional reactions. Instead, stick to what’s in front of you, focus on that — on what is, not what you think might be. No matter what might happen, you can only face it in the present, one moment at a time. You needn’t afflict yourself with it twice.

With just those three thinking principles we become far better equipped to handle uncertainty. We’re not wasting time and energy on ineffective thinking patterns, like complaining, denial, and panic. We free up all that RAM, so we can bring it to bear on productive thought instead — and as the fourth pillar demands, such thought must be focused on what you can control.

“There is only one way to happiness,” said Epictetus, “and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”

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“Winter brings in the cold, and we have to shiver; summer brings back the heat and we have to swelter. These are conditions of our existence which we cannot change.”

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One person worries herself to death about whether their house might get flooded again, while another simply buys flood insurance and mitigates. One person worries about whether there will be traffic on his commute, while another chooses to leave earlier just in case. The first worries about something beyond their control, the second simply about what aspect of it that can be controlled. And even if there’s nothing about something we can control, we can create a space between us and that thing — an awareness that worrying over it is fruitless, and that we’re of far better use to ourselves and others focusing on what we can control. Not only is that good thinking, it’s taking responsibility, taking action where it matters most.

Nonetheless, things out of our control are sometimes painful and disturbing. The fifth pillar is perception. Be it something as minor as the rain ruining your hair or something as large as a pandemic destroying your livelihood , you still have control over your mind and your thoughts.

“You have power over your mind-not outside events,” Marcus Aurelius said. “Realize this, and you will find strength.”

Strength over what? Perception. It is not the external event in itself that disturbs you, but your judgment of it — and you can change your judgment of it at any time. While this may not apply to everything, it certainly applies to most. You could also call it, “framing.” While one person frames a nasty rainfall as a misfortune because the drive to work will suck, another frames it as a pleasure, because her garden needs the water and she loves the smell in the air after a rainfall. What changed?

Not the rain. The perception. The judgment.

What if things get so bad that you can’t change your perception of it? What if you can’t ignore it? What if you cannot positively perceive it in the present? Here’s a way to think, a sixth pillar: by using your mind to distort time in your favor by projecting yourself. You can look into the future to the version of yourself who has overcome this trial, step into his or her shoes, and look back at this moment — and feel the pleasure of knowing that you won.

As Seneca wrote, “There is a pleasure in having succeeded in enduring something the actual enduring of which was very far from pleasant . . . when a man is in the grip of difficulties he should say: “There may be pleasure in the memory of even these events one day.”

Yes, even this. One day you may look back on this time of your life, this uncertain time, and smile. Not because you enjoyed it, but because you made it, you survived. And about your past? What have you already done that took courage? Seneca also encourages us to remember times when we were courageous, to recall all those finest moments, because they remind us that we can be courageous now too. In uncertain times, we can think like this: we can be our own spectators, our own applauding audience.

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What kind of man would Hercules have been if it hadn’t been for the monsters and wicked men he had to overcome?”

A Q U OT E BY E P I C T E T U S

Your way of thinking either makes you an ally or an enemy to yourself in hard times. The same can be said for hardship: what you think about hard times affects how it affects you. The seventh pillar is that hardship makes us stronger in most cases, and teaches us much. Not only that, but it brings out what is heroic in you . As Epictetus said, what kind of man would Hercules have been if it hadn’t been for the monsters and wicked men he had to overcome? Without hardship he never would have become the Hercules of legend. So too with you. Think, really think, that in your life’s trials are the flames that will temper you into something greater and bring out the best of you. Times of uncertainty are what your inner hero was made for — let that determine what thoughts you let direct your actions. Heroic, courageous, bold actions, or fearful, uncertain, bitter actions?

Last of all, you are only as strong as you think you

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are. If you sell yourself short in your mind, you will sell yourself short in life. Marcus Aurelius admonished himself, himself, in hard times that within him was something far more powerful and miraculous than all the external things throwing him about — and the same goes for you. You have something potent within you, strength unknown, limits untested, and your mind, with the right thoughts, can be stronger than any body, and far more powerful than all the uncertainties and ultimately small worries of life .

Times are uncertain. Life itself has few guarantees. It can be hard, unfair, downright painful, and can seem as veiled and doubtful as a military campaign in some remote border of an empire, or the wrath of an unjust ruler, or the affliction of slavery — and that’s okay, my friend, because we have the tool that enables us to make out of these times what we will.

Our minds. Our thoughts. Our intentions. Our actions.

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A Moment of Total Presence W R I T T E N B Y O M A R I TA N I

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t exactly 11:45 pm, we set off into the darkness. Up ahead of us was a bold mission: Ascend another 2,274 meters to reach the summit of Volcan Baru, the highest point in Panama, in time to watch the sun rising above the clouds and stroking the sky blue. We had precisely 5.5 hours until dawn and a 13.5 km trail ahead of us, and from the moment we set foot on that trail, an ever-so-slight incline was present - one that would only be getting steeper and more strenuous as we hiked on.

Yes, it was an exhausting overnight hike guided by a few flashlights, but as the four of us trekked along the path, I experienced moments that were too surreal to be true.

Moments of complete transcendence when my mind, my thoughts, and the entire world around me came to a full stop. And the first time it happened was when a friend stopped and exclaimed: “Woah! Guys, look up!”

We stopped in our tracks. Each of us leaning our weight forward onto our walking sticks and then gently tilting our heads upward. What rose above us was a world unknown to us - a blanket of stars so thick and dense, you wondered if it was a black void scattered with white stars or white stars weaved together by a black void. A canvas of stars so far, they were light years ahead, yet so vivid they felt within reach. Just four souls, standing still and silent, in an ocean of trees, amid darkness, not a sound in the distance, under the gentle light of the moon and the stars. Gazing up into infinity, baffled by the vastness of our galaxy, mesmerized by its beauty, humbled by our place in this universe and our profound connection to it.

In this silence and stillness, we experienced Satori. It’s a word used by Zen Masters to describe sudden enlightenment. It’s a moment of total presence, of no mind and no thought but a flash of insight and awakening of the light of our own consciousness.

You do not need to fly to Panama and walk a trail to experience Satori, because mindfulness is something you can invite into your life at any moment of any day. But you can only do so as you begin to slow down

and live in the now. That is the essence of mindfulness - a person reconnecting to the infinite consciousness of the world within her and around her by simply bringing her attention back to the present moment.

The challenge is that many of us are not aware of the positive impact that mindfulness can have on our lives. We continue to rush through our day-to-day, losing all sense of control over our own thoughts. We end up living in a constant tug between rumination of our past mistakes and ambitions or worries of the future. But if we look at it through an objective lens, we can conclude that the past is behind us, there’s nothing within our power to change it, and the future is nothing more than an abstraction of the mind. The future does not exist. We actively create it minute by minute as we continue about our day. The only thing that is ultimately real about your journey in life is this very step that you are taking at this moment. That’s all there ever is.

Think about it: What you do at this very next moment will come to define your next moment’s future. And so little by little, we are consciously or unconsciously creating our future.

So how does all this tie into mindfulness?

Mindfulness helps you find stillness. It trains you to raise your awareness so you can stop living on autopilot and start consciously choosing which thoughts you should give your attention to. And it’s through this practice that you start slowing down. You begin to see what you’ve neglected to appreciate in the absence of mindfulness: the musical symphony orchestrated by the morning chirping birds, the sound of water streaming down through a forest, the soothing smell of a garden of flowers; the stillness of a sinking sun, the whiff of wind stroking your face, the sentiment of a family gathering around a table for a Sunday lunch. In each of these moments, if you simply pause to reconnect with your breath, to breathe, and then breathe again, and again, you will experience life in the now.

You will tame your mind. You will observe your thoughts and let them pass instead of engaging with them. You will relieve yourself

of your struggles. You will feel, see, and hear the abundance of life and love that engulfs you. You will appreciate what is, and you will find a beautiful well of stillness within. And at that moment, you will experience Satori.

This is what Rumi describes in his words: “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.” We are all connected to everything we feel, think, and do. We carry our world inside of us. So the question is, will we choose to take the heaviness of our limiting thoughts and problems or the lightness of our expansive love and courage?

You are not a snowflake in the snowfall; you are the entire snowfall in a flake. You are not a rose in the garden; you are the entire garden in a rose. You are not a light in the universe; you are the entire universe in a light. You are whole. You are complete. This is the depth of mindfulness. It’s a presence, a connection with a higher consciousness beyond the constructed self. It’s a stillness that rises from the acceptance of what is. It’s connection, love, compassion. It’s enlightenment - the rising above our thoughts, even for just a moment, to realize that we are here. We are alive. We are breathing. We are exactly where we need to be because all that we have is this very moment.

What we do with it, what we feel in it, and what we create through it is forever within our power and control.

When you feel anxious, it’s because you’re in the here and now, but your mind and thoughts are swimming in the future. So catch yourself in the moment to reconnect with your breath, and you will feel calmer again.

This takes patient and constant practice, and the best way to do so is to build a habit of daily meditation.

So when you find yourself rushing again, slow down. Realize that there is no need to rush to because there is nowhere to “arrive to.” You’re here, right now, and that’s precisely where you need to be. Breathe. Look around you. Open your eyes to see what can only be felt with the heart, and you’ll taste the beauty of living slow. Be grateful, present, and totally immersed in it, and you’ll start living a more mindful, joyful life.

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Look Up A S TO RY BY A D R I A N D R E W

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alking in the woods has become a new favourite pastime of mine as of late.

There’s something about being in nature that recalibrates the senses and nourishes the mind. I don’t know what it is. Perhaps it’s the fresh air or the movement or the silence. Whatever the cause, the effect is undeniable - being outside just makes us feel good.

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Living adjacent to a canal in the British countryside, I enjoy taking daily strolls aside the water. In doing so, I often see dog walkers, couples and individuals out doing precisely the same thing as me - breaking up the day with a calming walk out in nature. Nowhere in the world have I encountered people as friendly and welcoming as when I wander along that canalside path. Everyone, young, old,

PHOTOGRAPHY

Annie Spratt

L O C AT I O N

New Forest, England

alone or with company, looks up, smiles and says ‘Hello!’ as they pass. It’s wonderful, and it’s so uplifting to be greeted in such a way in this busy, often hostile world of ours.

What I’ve come to realise, though, is that these people aren’t rare species that inhabit only the stretches of water that comprise the british canal system. Rather, these are just ordinary people. They’re the same people that sit solemnly on the London Underground, head craned over phone and reluctant to even glance at those they stand shoulder-toshoulder with. They’re the same types I see standing in front of me at local coffee shops and listening to music on the bus.

So what’s the difference? Why are those I see along the canal so friendly yet others so distracted? Well, I think it’s really quite simple. In the setting of the canalside, I’m not staring down at my glaring phone screen or reading a book or working from my laptop as I typically do elsewhere.

Instead, I’m walking along, looking up at the world around me. And the people I pass are doing exactly that, too. It’s a rare pastime in this tech-obssessed world of ours - looking up. We’re always busy with something, far too busy to gaze into the eyes of others and say hello as we encounter them; too busy to gaze up at the canopy of trees shielding us from the sun as we stroll through woodland; to see the sky, look at

the ticket collector on the commuter train, or take note of the people nearby while I’m sipping my cappucino.

In this modern age, the simple act of looking up can be rather life-changing. For one, it makes us much more approachable to those whom we encounter. It’s much easier to smile and greet a passerby that’s looking at you than it is to shout ‘Good morning!’ to a floor-gazing, headphone-wearing stroller in the hopes that they’ll hear you. More than that, though, looking up puts you in a better position to actually experience the simple pleasures of life. It enables you to truly see the sunshine as it cuts through the tall conifers surrounding you. It allows you to see the pretty flowers lining the path in front of you and the rolling green hills on the horizon. It gives you the opportunity to observe the millions of sparkling stars, piercing holes in the jet black cellestial blanket floating above your head.

So, instead of burying your face in your phone as we all do so often, lift your head and become part of your environment. Don’t let the many wonderful sights and moments that life has to offer go to waste. Look up, and be present in your surroundings. After all, they’re there waiting to be noticed.

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ON BEING PRESENT

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Monotasking Over Multitasking A N A R T I C L E W R I T T E N B Y B A R R Y D AV R E T T

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n most job descriptions, you’ll find the following requirement: ‘Must possess the ability to multitask effectively.’ The keyword in that statement is effectively. Multitasking is possible in some circumstances. You can type an email while you’re on the phone, as an example, but you don’t perform either task as well. While you’re typing, you divert your attention from the speaker. When you answer a question from your conversation partner, you pause your typing as you transfer your attention to the caller.

Psychologists posit that we’re never really multitasking, we’re task-switching. The problem with task-switching, especially repeatedly, is that it impedes our cognitive efficiency. Each time we switch, it takes time to get back to where we were before changing tasks. By some estimates, it hurts our productivity by as much as 40%. If you’ve ever tried to multitask before, you’re probably nodding your head in agreement. The ability to multitask effectively is a fantasy. Science agrees. Not only does it impede productivity, but it also makes you more error-prone and more susceptible to distractions.

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You’re far more effective when you monotask - focus on a single task until you reach a logical stopping point - a point at which it makes sense to put your work aside. It may or may not be the completion of a task. A writer, for example, may stop at the completion of a draft, a chapter, or 1,000 words. A salesperson might set 100 sales calls as their work-effort target. The specifics may vary, but a logical stopping point is the common denominator.

In a perfect world, it’d be great if we could monotask all the time. But that’s not possible for most of us. We face deadlines and juggle multiple priorities. Still, that doesn’t mean we can’t take advantage of monotasking, but it requires us to change the way we approach work.

As a writer, I work best in the morning. I wake up at 5 AM, long before the kids can interfere with my concentration. If your responsibilities don’t allow for choosing an ideal time, take whatever steps you can to prevent interference: put your phone on ‘do not disturb,’

make your phone calls as you walk (instead of at your desk), keep your door shut. Do your critical work when you’re least prone to interruption.

Next, define your unit of work. Before you begin, explain in qualitative terms what you intend to accomplish. A writer may decide on 1,000 words on a particular topic. A salesperson might set a goal of 100 sales calls. Time-based goals, in my experience, do not yield the same benefits; they give you a time you can stop working, but don’t hold you accountable for achieving anything substantial.

Most importantly of all, eliminate distractions when you’re working. Work according to the critical tab rule never open an additional tab on your browser unless it contributes to completing your defined work effort. We don’t need to go over these, because, let’s face it - you know how to eliminate distractions. Everyone does. The key to being successful lies in making it difficult for distractions to tempt you.

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Multitasking is overrated - I’d rather do one thing well than many things badly. Quality supersedes quantity every time.”

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he final component of being productive during your monotasking is to avoid the getting-ready plague. In my first sales job, it took me four hours to call one hundred prospects. The most productive salespeople took an hour. My manager pinpointed the problem - I suffered from the getting-ready plague. I wasted time on a pre-work ritual of alphabetizing my leads, psyching myself up, and other wasteful activities. When I cut out these extraneous tasks, I was able to complete my work in half the time. Getting ready is nothing more than a distraction tool we use to avoid doing work that pains us. When you begin your work session, start immediately on your objective. Don’t waste any time preparing for the real work. If it’s not critical to completing your work, it’s not necessary. You can work for three hours and accomplish nothing. But if you force yourself to hit a meaningful target, you’ll not only achieve more substantial results; you’ll be motivated to complete your objective quicker.

Multitasking is a myth. What we’re really doing is task-switching. And every time you switch tasks, you lose a little bit of productivity. Monotasking enables you to get more done in less time with fewer errors. It’s that simple.

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An Interview With Brianna Wiest INTERVIEWER: ADRIAN DREW

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eet Brianna, author of ‘101 Essays to Change the Way You Think’, viral writer and former Editorial Director of Thought Catalog. In this interview, we speak with her about all-things personal development, getting to know a little more about her story, background and upcoming projects.

A: Where did your interest in personal development and writing originate from?

B: The first time I remember really being pulled into the selfdevelopment world was in high school. I had an English teacher who read a passage from The Purpose Driven Life each day before class started. I specifically remember the physical feeling that would come over my body - I was completely moved, deeply touched, and so many things made sense. I remember thinking to myself: Why isn’t this the work we study?

My interest in these topics continued to grow afterwards as I read more and learned more and found myself continually shifted and changed. I realized that there was another way to exist, a far better way to exist, but the only way to arrive there was to do some work of deep introspection. To answer your question exactly, it was when I was first exposed to a few classic books as a teenager, and it just grew from there.

A: I love that. So what inspires you to write?

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B: Nature, other people’s behaviour, my own behaviour, the feeling I get when I see something that helps life make more sense.

A: And what are you most curious about in life?

B: I am curious about the limits of human potential. I am curious about the concept of enlightenment, if it is achievable and how. I am curious about how much there really is to experience, and to enjoy.

A: The topic of this edition is mental clarity. What does mental clarity mean to you and why is it important?

B: Mental clarity is everything. I believe that your thoughts control your life, both consciously and unconsciously. When you are mentally clear, you are able to govern and navigate your life with less chaos and more ease. Every positive thing in my life has arisen from finding mental clarity about who I am, what I want, and what I plan to do. That’s all.

A: Imagine you’ve been given the task of educating a child about how to live a happy life, and your only tools to do so are three books of your choice. That’s it. Which three would you pick?

B: What an amazing question! I would pick ‘Resilience’ by Eric Greitens, ‘The Book of Truth’ by Paul Selig, and ‘Tiny, Beautiful Things’ by Cheryl Strayed.

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“Not everyone will like you. Not everyone will be kind to you. Not everyone will agree with you. That does not mean you have to be unkind in return.�

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A: You’ve written five books of your own throughout your writing career. Which one are you most proud of and why?

B: I would have to say my poetry book, Salt Water. That was the biggest leap I’ve taken. I never thought I could write something like that, and finding the courage not only to do it but then to share it with the world was something I will always be proud of. I would like to continue writing poetry throughout my career. It awakened a love for this genre that I didn’t know I had.

A: ‘The Mountain is You,’ your latest title, is set for release this year.

Tell us more about the book and why the world needs to read it.

B: ‘The Mountain is You’ is a book about self-sabotage: what it is, and how to overcome it. I believe that most people live the majority of their lives falsely perceiving that their biggest obstacles are external because they are visible. In reality, their biggest obstacles are internal, and invisible.

Now, the trick is that the very behaviors that we think are holding us back typically hold within them wisdom about our deep, subconscious needs. I believe that human beings are naturally self-preserving and self-serving, and so all of our actions, no matter how counterproductive they may seem, are actually assisting us in some way or another. This book helps people unpack why that is, how to overcome it, and step into the potential they were born with.

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The Story Behind Mind Cafe WHERE IT ALL BEGAN, BY ADRIAN DREW

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’ll never forget the first time I read a self-improvement book. It was ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’ by Normal Vincent Peale, and although the text is centred more around Christian faith than positive psychology, it set me on a path that would change the trajectory of my entire life. At that time, around thirteen years of age, there was a lot I didn’t like about myself. I think the same can be said by most thirteen year olds, to be honest. It’s a weird age. Regardless, I was deeply unhappy with the way I’d come to be - anxious, cripplingly underconfident and unable to break out of my own shell. Peale’s book made me realise something, a simple truth. I didn’t have to stay like this, and there were innumerable people out there who had overcome the same adolescent issues I was now facing.

It was around that time, whilst reading the book, that I found love. I know what you’re probably thinking. There’s no such thing as love at the age of thirteen, only high-school flings and short-lived romances. And perhaps you’re right, but this was different. That teenage romance turned into six and a half years of togetherness, companionship and memories that I’ll cherish for as long as I’ll live.

My self-improvement journey went hand in hand with my relationship. I wanted to improve not just for me, but for the girl I then expected to spend the rest of my life with. She inspired me to become better, for her as well as for myself, and so my quest continued. I read hundreds of books similar to Peale’s work and faced my insecurities one by one in lengthy battles of will.

By the time I reached eighteen, I felt I was pretty much exactly where I wanted to be in life.

With the aid of tools like meditation, reading and exercise, I’d managed to shake off most of the teenage issues that had held me down previously. Now, with a freelance writing career just about taking off and a relationship with a girl that could only be desribed as perfect, I’d reached a peak. Life couldn’t get much better than it was at that point.

But it could certainly get a lot worse. And unfortunately, it did. Out of nowhere, in February of 2018, my girlfriend started experiencing some unusual symptoms. Her ability to read suddenly began to falter, and as it did, other strange things began to happen. She found it increasingly difficult to understand basic words, and her eyesight started to deteriorate.

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“Confronted with adversity once again, but this time more formidable and testing than ever before, I knew only one solution.

Books. So I started reading.”

We knew something was seriously wrong when Charlotte’s was diagnosed with a condition called papilidema, characterised by a swollen optic nerve due to pressure behind the eyes. After an agonising evening of scans, tests and anxiety, the final devastating blow was delivered by a team of medical staff. It was brain cancer, and she had eighteen months to live.

Those eighteen months nearly broke me. In fact, I’m sure they probably did a few times.

Everything I’d come to love about life was being shattered with each waking moment. Every monthly hospital visit was a rollercoaster of worry, and every brain scan was an anxiety attack all in itself. There were highs, lows, and times where I didn’t even know how to feel.

In many ways, the shock of the situation took me right back to square one. This new life I’d created for myself alongside Charlotte was now being torn to pieces. Once again I was confronted with insecurities, some old and some brand new. How would I cope on my own?

Who would I be without Charlotte? What am I going to do with the rest of my life? Faced with adversity once again, only this time more formidable and testing than ever before, I knew only one solution. Books. So I started reading again, countless texts - memoirs on happiness, mindfulness, philosophy - everything. One key theme stuck with me from the many books I read.

It might be the only nugget of wisdom that truly resonated with me. It was a simple idea - that we should only focus on that which we can control, and we should forget everything else. And so that’s what I did. I read books on nutrition and cancer in order to take care of the part I could control - Charlotte’s lifesyle - and I tried to push her prognosis to the back of my mind, since that was out of my hands.

With so much time on my hands, what with all of the waiting in hospitals and sitting with Charlotte while she slept, I was thinking a lot about my future, too. How could I not? The pretty picture I’d envisaged the remainder of my life to be - marriage, children and a long, stable relationship - had been dashed within the space of a few months. What was I going to do now? Without Charlotte, or a degree or job or anything else, I had no idea where I was going in life anymore. The thing is, I needed something. Viktor Frankl’s ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ taught me that if I didn’t have something to keep me going once Charlotte passed, I’d crumble, just as those without ambition did in the concentration camps Frankl endured. I needed a purpose, desperately. And after months of toying with ideas, I landed on something. Here I was, learning all of this stuff about happiness and wellbeing, and keeping it all to myself. But what if I created a platform through which other writers could share their own stories, ones just like mine, to a wider audience? What if I could provide the respite that I found in self-improvement books to others facing adversity? What if I could combine my passion for writing with my own experiences and newfound knowledge?

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Adrian Drew

L O C AT I O N

Birmingham, UK

And that’s exactly where Mind Cafe came from. It felt right, it made sense to me, and so I went ahead and set it up, enlisting the help of my best friend, Joseph, to draft our very first logo - a basic ‘MC’ in white on a black background. Mind Cafe. A digital space where people could come, read articles about happiness and work to improve their lives. Like a warm, comfortable and inviting cafe, but not for the tastebuds or the senses. For the mind.

Just like that, Mind Cafe became official - a real, tangible online space. I ran the publication from my laptop as I cared for Charlotte. Juggling everything was a struggle, especially towards the end when scans revealed a second tumour, and Charlotte had become increasingly unwell.

But I managed, thanks, in large part, to my heroic co-editor, Reed Rawlings. Whenever things became too difficult to bear, Reed covered for me. He inspired me to believe in myself and in Mind Cafe, even as everything around me crumbled. He carried the baton forward whenever I couldn’t. And for that, I’ll be eternally grateful.

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A LOT HAS CHANGED

Now, almost a year on from that, a lot has changed. Charlotte is no longer with us, for one.

She passed away peacefully in August of 2019. That wonderful human being changed the entire course of my life. Without her, I’d still be enslaved to my own mind, and without somebody as kind, encouraging and supportive as her by my side, I’d never have developed the resolve to establish this thing in the first place. To Charlotte, I owe everything.

Since her passing, I’ve channelled everything into Mind Cafe - every hour, penny and resource I’ve had. Mind Cafe, or rather, ‘Mind Cafe Media Ltd.’, as it’s now legally registered, has become more than I could ever have imagined. For one, my vocation is now a legitimate, financially stable business. More, it’s home to hundreds of extraordinarily talented writers, 1.5 million monthly readers and almost 100,000 followers at the time of writing. It’s a multi-faceted media company, with six incredibly passionate members of staff, a YouTube channel, five social media outlets and now, of course, a print magazine. And it’s people like you that have enabled all of this to happen.

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Life doesn’t always go as planned. I learned that the hard way, as most of us do. When the going gets tough, many buckle under the weight of adversity and hibernate until the storm passes. One of the key lessons I took from Ryan Holiday’s ‘The Obstacle is the Way’ is that, as the title states, the obstacle is often the path to success. A runner doesn’t see a hurdle and turn the other way. No, instead, they jump over it, push past adversity and try to win the race. I guess that’s kind of what I did. Within the storm, I found an avenue for creation. I took the lessons from my own cirucmstances and created a space for other people to share their own. It hasn’t been an easy road - far from it - but now, two years on from Mind Cafe’s birth, I’m thankful I didn’t give up. It would be wonderful if Charlotte could see all that has happened since her illness developed, but regardless, I know she’s looking down and smiling as I write these words.

Without her, I wouldn’t be half the person I am today, and you wouldn’t be holding this magazine if she hadn’t inspired me to overcome my own struggles. Without Reed and the rest of my wonderful team, Mind Cafe might not have made it past its first year of running, and I might just have given up. But without you, this organisation would have nothing to keep it going, and this dream of mine would remain but a fantasy. And for that, I can only thank you - from the bottom of my heart.

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Riding the Wave AN ARTICLE BY KIM DUKE

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hen adversity crashes its way into your life, it doesn’t give you the luxury, courtesy, or kindness of a warning. One minute you’re thinking about what to cook for Sunday dinner or where you’d like to holiday this year. And then the next minute you’re hit by the tsunami of hardship which sweeps away in an instant everything that is normal.

The car crash, the diagnosis, the job loss, the words “I want a divorce” all cause you to gasp in shock and to immediately flounder and struggle. Life has forced you onto a dangerous journey and there aren’t any guarantees you will arrive safely. There’s really only one thing you can do.

That is, to ride the wave of adversity.

You instinctively want to flee from that wave as fast as you can, long before it has the chance to sweep you off your feet. But when adversity strikes like this, you can’t run, as there’s no escape immediately in sight. Denial will quickly drown you in despair, and as much as you’d love to be magically rescued by someone, at this moment, you are the only one who can save you.

Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution would tell you that adaptation is the only way you can evolve through this mess. Those who adapt to their ever-changing environment tend to survive and come out stronger because of it. So, what can you do? Well, you can choose to evolve immediately.

Rather than struggle against the tide, the wave, or the dark current that threatens you instead, make a contrarian and awkward choice. Face this horrible thing and use its strength in your favour. Strangely, you face it by turning and pointing your feet downstream in the same direction that the water is flowing. You surrender to the force of what’s real and ride the power of the current. If you do anything less, you risk losing it all. For the time being, you release your resistance and go with the wave of adversity. Do not mistake this as being passive. Right now, this choice conserves your energy so you can catch your breath and get your bearings. You have only one job and that is to keep your head above water.

The entire time, you’ll look for opportunities to save yourself from this overwhelming situation. That is part of the skill of adaptation as well. But most often, you need to first ride this wave to calmer or shallower waters. It would help if you released your impatience, your plans, and expectations. Everything is about riding this out.

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“The best way out is always through.”

PHOTOGRAPHY

Toa Heftiba

A Q U OT E BY RO B E RT F RO ST L O C AT I O N

Cornwall, England

The poet Robert Frost said, “The best way out is always through.”

It’s a painful and yet comforting thought. Because with all things in life, there is an ebb and flow. Disasters don’t stay disasters forever - even yours. Getting through this calamity won’t be pretty, easy, or predictable. But you will lessen the stress of the hardship by using the energy of the wave to carry you. And it will carry you much further and in directions you never thought of or ever desired.

When the waters subside, you most definitely will have landed somewhere you probably didn’t and wouldn’t ever ask for. Because who ever willingly asks for adversity? You may not even recognize where you are. You’ll stand, bruised and battered, knees shaking, with tears in your eyes - because you are standing. And then a new wave washes over you, but this time it is the strange and untimely wave of gratitude.

There is an unexpected beauty that arises from destruction. It is called appreciation. That somehow, you’ve awkwardly and painfully survived possibly the worst experience of your life.

Strangely, the wave of adversity reveals a different perspective of yourself. Much of your old life is washed and stripped away. But there is something left that is beautiful, imperfect, and strong.

You. You are a survivor. And you have a new understanding that all survivors reluctantly receive.

That against all odds, your life is sweeter and more precious because of the wave.

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Finding Inspiration in Nature A N A RT I C L E BY J O R DA N G RO S S

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t’s difficult to find nature in New York City. Having lived here for the past three years, I can recall only on a single hand how many times I have been fully encompassed by birds singing, branches dancing, and water flowing. But when I have been given this gift, the results have been life-changing. My heart sings like the birds, my mind dances like the branches, and my ideas flow like the water.

I remember an early morning in which falling back asleep was simply an incorrigible thought. It was before sunrise, and although my mom would have objected due to my safety, I was now 25-years old and my life was in my own hands. I decided to throw on a light jacket and venture through the streets of New York.

Most often I walk east and south. But that day the air felt different, so I trekked east and north. I know, quite the staggering shift. I made my way to the East River, and I watched the sun rise just over the water. A truly majestic way to begin the day.

It’s quite strange to think that in almost three years in New York City, I would be navigating unexplored territory just by going about 20 blocks north of where I lived, but I guess I was never really a tourist in my own city. The further I walked north, the more foreign things became. And then finally, the path along the river came to an abrupt end and there was just a small entrance with bushes on either side.

There was a faded sign as well, but I couldn’t make out the words. I decided to enter. As I took this cement road to the unknown, I was surrounded by trees, flowers, bushes. I could smell the freshly trimmed grass. I certainly sensed the pollen, as my nose began to tickle, and I started to sneeze. Pollen is not my friend. But after the initial allergy attack and about 100 feet more of walking, I entered a natural palace. A small park filled with trees, bushes, plants, flowers, water.

It was a park filled with nature. And immediately, I was taken from my comfortable New York City life to a world of imagination, thought, and belonging.

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Just as I noticed the branches dancing, I also realized the birds were singing with great pride and joy. It was easy to tell how present they were in that moment, sitting atop whatever branch they were on, or playing in whatever stream or puddle they found.

Seeing these birds embrace the natural beauty of this experience allowed me to sing my own praises about my life. My heart was overwhelmed with deep feelings of love, connectedness, and gratitude. I thought about friends, family, opportunities, and where I was in my life. I thought about where I came from and where I was going. And even though I thought about both past and future, I knew that right there, right then, was exactly where I was supposed to be.

Bruce Lee stated, “You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup.

When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle.

When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot.

Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.”

This wonderful scene was also home to a number of fountains and small streams and puddles. As I watched the fluidity of the water, just as Bruce Lee said, I decided to become like water myself.

I began to formulate new opinions, new ideas, new beliefs. My mind was at ease, and this gave me the simplest, most appealing whiteboard possible to begin jotting down new ideas. With the openness of my mind and the gratitude from my heart, my ideas were eager to flow. Have you wondered why you often get your best ideas in the shower? Or why all your thoughts come racing into your head at night, just as you’re trying to fall asleep?

Or why perhaps when you are fully immersed by nature’s beauty, everything just feels safe and right? It’s because we’re able to synthesize our experiences and produce our clearest thoughts when our minds are at ease. Nature puts our minds at ease.

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Annie Spratt

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British countryside

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Once I noticed the inexplicable connection between my mind, my heart, and my ideas, I took a seat on one of the stone park benches, and I wrote. I came up with two new book ideas, five new article ideas, two new talks, and the foundational questions for a podcast interview. I wrote a 500-word intro in which the words flowed like my ideas and the water in the fountain in front of me. I looked at the artists with their large easels filled with green and brown

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paint. I looked at the photographers crouched low to the ground trying to get the perfect angle of the beauty around them. I looked at the boombox and the aspiring rapper and smiled at his willingness to talk to himself about the birds and the wind and the trees. I noticed the creatives and the creativity we all were practicing in this park in New York City. And I realized that nature is a breeding ground for inspiration. No matter who, what, or where you are.

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The Happiness Paradox AN ARTICLE BY SEAN KERNAN

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s babies, our parents and guardians look down and smile at us. They hope that we’ll go on to big things. They want us to achieve, be successful, and be happy.

We want badly to make them proud. I did everything I was supposed to do to appease my elders as a child. I went to school and got good grades. Next came college. Then a fancy corporate job. Later, a top MBA program and neartop distinction. Then I went to another fancier corporate job and continued my march. With every step, there was this hole in me. I was constantly at odds with myself. I’d wake up in the middle of the night due to stress. Rather than being happy, I wrestled with an existential crisis for years. Why didn’t I feel the way I was supposed to?

“This is my son, Sean! He’s a financial analyst at x!”

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“Hi. I’m Sean (and I’m miserable).”

The executives were the first and last to leave the building. Walking past their offices, I’d see them. Their faces were in a grimace. They looked exhausted, stressed the pressure was clearly getting to them. This was the place I’d someday be, the milestone so many aspired to.

Not all of them hated it. Some thrived. The ascendance to a high-power executive position requires a particular type of person. These people typically derive great value from multiple sources. Money does matter. But there is typically a lot more to it. They also care about the social currency that comes with job titles. They see it as a source of significance in their life. They want the respect that comes with power. It’s important to them. It’s a circle they want to be part of.

They are deathly afraid of failure. They see advancement in large organizations as a confirmation of achievement. People who only care about money will be out-competed by their peers in this world. They won’t be pulling value from enough places. Corporate advancement also requires a mindset that would make your stomach churn. I’ve been in meetings where people were spoken about like they are objects, pawn pieces to be moved around, or taken off the board on a whim. To become powerful and successful in that world, you have to look at human beings as pistons in an engine. Anything less isn’t enough.

This - among other reasons - was why I walked away.

I care about money. It’s important. But I didn’t like a lot of the things I saw. The social currency didn’t matter. Job

titles were silly to me. The politics grossed me out.

In many ways, I wasn’t compatible with the traditional model of happiness: work, conform, ascend, smile.

Unfortunately, many of you aren’t compatible either. You don’t know it yet. But you’ll find out soon.

Achievement and happiness aren’t perfect bedfellows.

They also can’t be easily extricated from each other. Most of us aren’t equipped to adopt the immaterial happy monk lifestyle. That requires very specific software.

Begin to think about what it is that will bring you the most value: achievement, charity, money, teamwork, independence, expression, consistency, work-life balance, freedom.

There’s a wide, wide swathe of variables that don’t involve money and job titles.

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For me, thinking about my legacy helped me break free from what I was doing. I was a writer on the side. Expression and ideas have deep importance to me. I was prepared to stand behind that as my life’s work - at the expense of other things. “I’m going to write. I won’t make as much money. I may not have the street cred. But I’m going to be happy.”

That proclamation has been justified ever since.

I’m one of the happiest people you’ll meet - because I’m doing what I enjoy. But I’m only happy because I went out into the world and learned what I hated. It’s given me gratitude: no terrible bosses, no pointless meetings, no having to deal with emails from directions or maniacal egos.

Even if you do everything right, happiness can feel like a

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slippery target.

The advice I’ll give you, and that I’d have given myself 15 years ago, is two-fold. First, actively monitor your overall satisfaction and all the why’s and why not’s that come with it. Continually assess, “What could I change that would make me feel happier?”

Second, develop an increasingly sharp eye for what it is specifically that gives you deeper value in what you do.

Your acumen for seeing this is so unbelievably important.

There isn’t an easy answer to this. This process may take time. You may need to go out into the wilderness and wander for a bit. But if you keep this top of mind, I’d wager that you won’t be lost for long.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Kinga Cichewicz

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Munich, Germany

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Toa Heftiba

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Moving With Change B Y M A R TA B R Z O S K O

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hange brings discomfort; there’s no question about it. We crave stability. When we face change, it puts us outside of our comfort zone. Feeling uncomfortable isn’t a bad thing, however. Rather, it’s a sign that a transformation is occurring inside of us. We’re breaking through an old shell - and yes, this may hurt sometimes. But what waits on the other side is often worth it.

One way to deal with change is to understand that it’s always present.

Sometimes, we just lose awareness of it. We don’t pay attention. We behave as if today is yesterday’s exact photocopy. But stability is an illusion. Ellen Langer, one of the world’s leading mindfulness researchers, reminds us: “Things are changing. And if we can appreciate that, the inherent uncertainty in everything - everything stays interesting to us.”

Acknowledging that change is the rule and not the exception can be liberating. It allows us to take interest in every moment by witnessing change as it occurs. When I first moved abroad, change was more apparent than ever. Suddenly, there were no routines or habits I could rely on. I got a job in a new industry and entered a new circle of friends.

I was in a foreign environment.

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I quit smoking, started cycling everywhere, and changed my diet.

On the one hand, it was unsettling. But it also gave me an opportunity to redefine all aspects of my life. Because I couldn’t rely on autopilot, I needed to make conscious decisions about everything. This sparked many new questions, the most important one being: What do I want my life to look like? When we experience change, there are more choices to make.

Those choices can create a gateway into a life we always wanted but never actively pursued. Ellen Langer says that when we make choices, we naturally become more mindful. Because the decision needs to be based on something, this “something” must first be noticed.

Naturally, your mind tunes in to the present moment to acquire relevant information. Change can make you more mindful. Not just of your surroundings, but also of what’s going on within. Yes, it may involve the discomfort of breaking through the shell of old beliefs. Yes, it may be painful and even heartbreaking sometimes. But if it allows you to know yourself better, maybe it’s worth it in the end.

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Seeking Mental Clarity A S TO RY BY DA N N Y FO R E S T

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was an insomniac. As much as I tried to calm my mind, I couldn’t help but go down the rabbit holes of my inner thoughts, preventing me from falling asleep. During the day, things would go well enough, but at night it was a torment of never-ending, mindless reflection.

I was always tired and had low energy. I functioned well in the morning but felt useless in the afternoon. If only I could calm my thoughts in the evening and get a good night’s sleep. I thought it could change everything.

At first, I cut coffee from my afternoon routine. I saw immediate improvements in my sleep. Then I cut electronic devices in bed, but also an hour before bed. The improvements were quite substantial, but still not enough.

The most important thing I did at the time that changed everything for me was that I started journaling. It was merely about dumping all these thoughts going through my head.

I never thought it would work. The first time I tried it, I figured I’d write for 30 minutes, be bored, and be done

with it for life. Well, I ended up writing for 5 hours that day. It was so successful that I kept journaling for at least 30 minutes per day for the rest of the month. Today, I still do it two to three times a week.

This habit helped me calm my mind, but I was still lost. Even though I had started five businesses by the time I established these good habits, I had been an employee most of my life. But deep down I knew it wasn’t for me. I was good at work, but all I could think about was my own projects. And the more I travelled, the more I wanted to travel. At the time, almost no employer would allow their employees to work remotely at all times. My desire to travel and to work on my own startup was burning so hot that becoming a nomad was a no-brainer for me.

People ask me all the time about how I found the guts to leave everything behind like that, and the simple answer is that I didn’t. The seed had been planted through years of taking short trips and building businesses on the side.

There was nothing I wanted to do more than travel while working on my startup.

People ask me all the time about how I found the guts to leave everything behind like that, and the simple answer is that I didn’t.”

A Q U OT E BY DA N N Y FO R E ST

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Getting rid of my job, my possessions, my comfortable life, as well as leaving my friends and family behind was only a necessary step to make this dream a possibility. I didn’t think twice. In my mind, there were no cons.

My nomadic journey took me to Cambodia, Spain, India, and Colombia. I spent at least three months in each place. It wasn’t a spiritual journey, but rather just a way to work on what mattered to me while feeding my inquisitive nature through experiencing different cultures.

I became more adaptable. I started being more sociable. I gained immense confidence, which was dormant inside me that whole time.

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I lost all of my insecurities and self-doubt. My business grew at the same time as well. Not to epic proportions, but just enough to make me feel great. I slept incredibly well and regained my long-lost energy levels.

Any negative self-talk I once had was transformed into a desire for challenge. If I could live anywhere in the world and grow businesses while on the go, what can the universe throw at me that I can’t handle? That has been my thinking ever since.

Lao Tzu famously said: “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” My first step was to reject my mediocre situation.

I had what every man wanted: an amazing wife and a high-paying job. While I did like my job, that wasn’t how I wanted to judge my self-worth. To me it meant nothing. I was still empty inside. My second step was to take control of my energy levels through better sleep and self-awareness. My third step was more of a jump. That’s when I left my world to become a nomad.

The mental clarity that I’ve achieved in recent years hasn’t come from a grandiose declaration of change or even through taking massive action. It came from moving forward, one step at a time. It came from being more

and more secure with my self-worth and slowly increasing the distance of my steps.

My journey is not over. Not even close.

It will never be until the day I die. And truthfully, that excites me. Some people ask me to mentor them, thinking I have all the answers. The truth is, my awareness comes from all the things I know I don’t know. I don’t have more answers than the people asking me to mentor them. The one thing I have more of is questions.

With experience, I didn’t get more answers.

I got more, better questions. That’s where the real mental clarity lies.

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Confusion is the Key to Clarity A S TO RY BY R E M Y F R A N K L I N

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ave you ever seen a Magic Eye image? The idea is to see a three-dimensional object amidst a chaotic computer-generated

design.

I spent a lot of time with these pictures when I was ten. My eyesight was getting worse, and rather than going straight to wearing glasses, my hippie mother brought me to a behavioral optometrist tasked with training my eyesight using exercises like the Magic Eye. At first, these were bewildering. But if I stared long enough and softened my gaze, familiar forms would eventually emerge from the chaos, piece by piece, until my brain could put it together: dolphins jumping through a hoop, a city landscape, a flower.

We all experience confusing moments at various stages in our lives. While this confusion can be valuable, it usually isn’t comfortable.

I still remember the feeling of staring at that Magic Eye sheet, searching in frustration and humiliation for meaning I couldn’t see. I wanted to stop. But week after week, I would stick with it until my focus adjusted, and the

image emerged. Over time, I learned that on the other side of that discomfort was clarity.

Two decades later, as a personal development coach, I’ve built my career around clarity. My clients want clarity about everything: what’s important to them, which direction to take their business, how to balance work and family life, what book to read next, effective communication strategies, how to make more money, what makes them feel good. The list is endless.

We all want clarity, but the longer I coach, the more I appreciate the power of confusion instead. As Kate Nowack wrote, “Confusion is ignorance leaving the brain.”

If you care about personal growth, you should learn to love confusion. “But,” you might protest, “I hate being confused. I want to be clear!” Of course, you do, and mental clarity will help you reach your goals. But more often than not, confusion will be part of the journey. If you’re interested in life-long learning, uncommon success, and personal or spiritual growth, you’ll do well to make confusion your friend.

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I first appreciated confusion when I was training to be a coach and noticed that coaching sessions often go like this: the client arrives with a challenge, they feel stuck and confused, then - aha! - by talking through what they don’t understand, they see something new and can move forward with clarity.

Gradually I realized that clarity follows confusion if we’re willing to explore it. My client, Karly, offered a neat example of this in a recent coaching session. In her midtwenties, Karly is a talented influencer and storyteller with a growing following of people passionate about the intersection of diversity and environmentalism. “I was just offered this job I applied for,” she told me, “but I’m not sure whether to take it. On paper, it’s just what I want to be doing, but I haven’t responded yet to accept it. I’m not sure why, but I’m just not sure it’s the right choice.”

As we talked about the decision, Karly saw that the job was appealing as a stable income source. Still, the thing she really wanted was something much scarier: to develop her personal brand into a consulting business.

This insight was a breakthrough for Karly,

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and she declined the offer to focus on building her own business doing similar work. Soon she was making part-time income as a social media strategy consultant and diversity trainer for environmental organizations. “I’ve dreamed of building this business for years,” she told me, “I can’t believe it’s happening.”

As a coach, I’m trained to look for confusion and unpack it, because this process produces the clarity we need to move forward with confidence. But over time, I’ve seen that pursuing confusion outside of coaching is also generative. That pursuit won’t always lead to clarity in the tidy way it did for Karly, but it will invariably teach you something valuable.

To quote Tom Peters, “If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention.”

When I say “confusion,” I’m referring to the emotional experience we have when our mental framework doesn’t match up with the outside world. We experience this all the time, both in big and small ways, and it’s usually uncomfortable. But that discomfort plays a vital role in cognitive development. Confusion tells the brain, “The current strategy isn’t working; let’s try something new.”

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Various

L O C AT I O N

Various

Think about a recent experience that left you confused. Perhaps a client gave you negative feedback on a report that you thought was effective. Or maybe you encountered an article titled “All white people are racist,” and you were confused because your white friend Alice is the kindest person you know.

In each instance, you’re experiencing a mismatch between your current ideas - about yourself, other people, or the world - and some external input. Psychologists call this “cognitive disequilibrium,” and it’s inherently dissatisfying.

Our brain hates not understanding, which is why confusion is so uncomfortable.

When we’re confused, we often respond in one of two ways: avoid or engage. The easier road, initially, is to avoid, usually by doubling down on our existing beliefs. “They don’t see how great my report was.” “I know lots of white people who aren’t racist.” When we do this, others will often perceive us as obstinate

or defensive.

The second option is to engage, which means becoming curious about your confusion. “I wonder what communication skills I’m missing?” “What do I still not understand about how racism operates?”

Engaging with confusion isn’t easy because it requires acknowledging what we don’t yet know. The brain thrives on making sense of things, so confusion feels like an existential threat. Not knowing can trigger fight or flight mode, and in that state, it’s much easier to be defensive than open-minded.

Our brain’s natural aversion to confusion may explain why researchers have found that people are more likely to show interest in confusing situations if they have a high level of the personality trait “openness.” Open people are imaginative and curious, and they show more interest in situations that are complex, novel, and difficult to understand conditions we often experience as confusing.

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One study had participants evaluate 18 works of art - some more abstract than others - and report the degree to which they were both interested and confused by each piece.

They found that people with a high level of openness were significantly more likely to be curious about works of art that evoked a degree of confusion.

Whatever your personality traits, you can intentionally cultivate the openness demonstrated by art viewers who were interested in the confusing pieces. Importantly, their confusion sparked interest. Rather than move on to a clearer, more approachable painting, they stayed a moment, curious about what they didn’t understand.

If we learn to linger in confusion, we’re likely to learn our life lessons sooner than we would have otherwise - and with a little more ease. But the present moment discomfort of not understanding is typically strong enough to make most people avoid confusing situations most of the time. This is especially true if clarity comes slowly. The skill is learning to stick with these situations long enough to receive the lessons waiting on the other side.

Can you think of a time in your life when you were very confused? Maybe you were learning a challenging new concept in school, or you were frustrated because you didn’t know what direction to take your career.

Perhaps you were questioning your religious

upbringing, or were unsure if you should stay in a relationship. What happened next?

I’ve found that essential milestones often follow periods of confusion. Before discovering coaching, I spent a very confusing year trying to figure my career out. I had just finished my master’s degree studying renewable energy solutions to climate change, and I wanted to change the world. But jobs in my area of expertise didn’t excite me, so I felt stuck between making a difference and doing work I love. This went on for months until, eventually, I started to ask myself some hard questions: What work do I love doing? What kind of change do I want to create? Through that process, I updated my idea about what it means to “change the world” and began considering options beyond renewable energy.

That shift in perspective allowed me to explore coaching and build a career I love.

I imagine you have your own version of this story. You felt confused, lost, or stuck facing impossible tradeoffs or multiple solutions that all seemed equally good. That confusion kickstarted an experience that - perhaps months or even years later - led to essential insights or a new way of thinking. The result was some life event that you’ll look back on, gratefully, as a pivotal moment. To quote Alain de Botton, “Feeling lost, crazy, and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty, and reason.”

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The importance of confusion may seem clear in retrospect. But what do you do in the moment, when nothing is clear, and you feel lost, stuck, or miserable? How can you learn to enjoy this experience as a meaningful moment on the path to personal growth?

The key is to cultivate that curiosity and openness that makes confusing experiences, questions, and conversations interesting.

This is a lifelong practice, but it starts with accepting confusion as valuable. Don’t underestimate this first step. In school, most of us were taught that confusion was bad, so we tend to think success means knowing the answer. As a result, we feel ashamed or humiliated when we don’t understand something.

But in life, avoiding confusion will hinder your personal development. When you find yourself confused, remember the curious art viewers from the study. Try adopting the disposition of an engaged gallery-goer observing something interesting. Use this metaphor to linger on the confusing topic a little longer than is comfortable. In doing this, you’re opening your mind to the learning available.

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Next, begin to pursue confusion actively.

One of my favorite questions in coaching is, “What’s not clear?” By asking this, I prompt my client to search out the confusion they naturally want to ignore. Ask, “What is the thing I don’t want to think about?” As you make a habit of seeking out confusion, you’ll be more likely to engage with ideas, people, and experiences that push you to grow.

The final level in your confusion training is learning to truly savor the discomfort of not understanding. If you ever visit a Buddhist temple in Japan, you’ll likely find the entrance flanked by two dragon-like figures carved in stone. These represent paradox and confusion, which guard the gateway to Truth. When I feel stuck or confused, I think of these figures and am reminded of how many people have gone through a similar experience before me.

We can find joy in discomfort when we learn to celebrate - rather than tolerate - confusion as an essential part of the human journey.

Whether or not you accept confusion as valuable, whether you choose to engage or avoid it, it will be part of your experience.

And when it comes, welcome it with open arms.

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The Way of Less W R I T T E N BY DA N N Y FO R E S T

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new iPhone is out! I must purchase it!’ ‘A new flat-screen TV! I must get it!’ ‘A new video game console - there’s no way I’m passing on that!’ I used to be a gadget freak.

Every time something new came up, I felt the urge to buy it. I’d rush online the minute it would go live and be the first to purchase it. I collected every gadget and every game I could get my hands on. I was materialistic beyond measure. I derived my sense of accomplishment from how many high-tech gadgets I owned. But if you look at the apartments I’ve had in the previous five years, you’d never guess I was once a hoarder.

The only gadgets I own now are a five-year-old Macbook Pro, my DSLR camera, and a Nintendo Switch. But it’s not only about the devices. I stayed a year at a previous apartment without buying any furniture. I had a mattress on the floor, and that was it. And it’s not that I was too poor to buy anything. I was making close to six figures. It just made me happier than being a slave to my possessions.

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“The wise find pleasure in using a product until it is no longer usable; the foolish, in replacing an old but still usable product with a brand new one.”

A Q U OT E BY M O KO KO M A M O K H O N OA N A

So, how did this seemingly impossible transformation happen? Simple - I traveled the world with no plans of ever coming back. In March 2015, my wife and I told our respective employers that we were quitting to travel the world for at least a year. They didn’t want that, so they gave us both a one-year leave of absence. We didn’t think much of it. Given that we never planned on coming back, we donated everything we possessed.

Do you know what the hardest thing to give away for me was? It was my massive collection of video games I had built over the past 12 years. But I did it anyway.

We left in June 2015. All we had was a plane ticket to Paris for a friend’s wedding. We had also booked volunteer work in Bangalore, India, for four months from then. But that was as far as our planning went. Our challenge was to figure it out along the way. My luggage during this entire trip was a 33-liter backpack and a tiny 10-liter one for my laptop. I had five changes of clothes, deodorant, my toothbrush, and my laptop. When you travel for a while, having so little frees you up to do many more things. You’re more nimble. Plus, I wasn’t afraid of anything

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being stolen, since I had nothing. As we made our way from west to east, we went to poorer and poorer countries. Thinking about my life back in Canada made me sick to my stomach. Why did I feel the need to own so many useless things? During our travels, we saw people that had literally nothing, and they seemed so much happier than I was. I lived in all sorts of places using Couchsurfing and Airbnb.

In many countries, they simply eat on the ground. I remember this shocking me at first. ‘They have a couch, surely they can afford a table with chairs,’ I thought. But I was ignorant. It wasn’t about money; it was about a culture of simplicity. They didn’t need the table. Who invented the need for a table, anyway? We also saw people eat very simple things. Toronto, where I used to live, is very much a foodie city, not unlike New York, Los Angeles, and London, for example. The rest of the eastern world didn’t work that way. You eat rice for every meal. Maybe some noodles. Who cares about the plating and oversized portions? It was simple, and it was great. A few effective spices, portions just enough to satisfy your body, and a good dose of love - that was the recipe for success with those meals.

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F RO M H OA R D E R TO S I M P L E M A N

Ultimately, I had nothing, and I was happier than I had ever been. We ended up coming back to our jobs a year after leaving, simply because we needed the money after traveling for a year. We moved into an apartment and bought nothing, and ate on the ground. We got all our food from Chinatown, using one pot and pan to cook Asian dishes for pretty much every meal. Our cooking utensils consisted of chopsticks.

Our friends in Toronto thought we were nuts. I guess they were right.

But guess who wasn’t stressed from what we call first-world problems?

That’s right - my wife and I. I lived in the most high-paced, stressful city in Canada, and I had never felt more zen. I was happy. At least, at first.

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But then the material world around me crushed me. Where was my simple food at restaurants? Why were people spending so much money on materialistic things while people are starving in other parts of the world?

My transformation was complete. I was officially not a materialistic hoarder anymore, but a selfless, simple man. Because of that, I couldn’t stay in the world I currently lived in. On November 11, 2016, a few months after coming back from our travels, my wife and I were sitting at a pub. Over a pint of Smithwick’s, I asked my wife, ‘Do you want to leave again?’ We both missed the simple life. To my surprise, she said yes.

We left in June 2017 to officially become nomads. She worked for Doctors Without Borders, and I worked on my business remotely.

We’ve lived in Cambodia, Spain, India, and Colombia. Every time we moved, I’d carry the same 33-liter backpack I used to travel the world earlier.

This backpack is my bundle of joy. It’s my reminder that all you need in life can fit in a backpack. This removes a massive weight on your shoulders, quite literally.

Life is simple, so why over complicate it? Happiness is, as I learned, in the simple things. Embrace the way of less, my friend!

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What Do You Truly Want?

W R I T T E N B Y PA U L O L L I N G E R

I make breakfast for my children every morning.

My wife thinks I dote on them, and she’s probably right because the truth is I do it as much for my nourishment as for theirs.

When I am cooking—if that’s what you want to call cutting up apples and burning toast—I know that I am exactly where I am supposed to be, doing precisely what I am supposed to be doing. In an uncertain world, that is a precious feeling.

Unfortunately, this sense of clarity eluded me for much of my professional career, which I have spent bouncing between digital media sales and the world of stand-up comedy. It’s not that all the corporate jobs were terrible. Much to the contrary, I have been fortunate to work at tremendously successful companies with colleagues who were not just brilliant professionals, but who were also good people.

The barrier to feeling, “This is where I’m supposed to be and what I’m supposed to be doing,” was

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working at one job while feeling called to do another.

If I’m honest, fear held me back from admitting I wanted to give stand-up my all. Even as I gained a lifetime of financial security, I didn’t summon the guts to dedicate myself to comedy full-time. I was afraid of failing and looking foolish. More, I was fearful of leaving the relatively massive money of the tech world on the table.

Hamstrung between the lucrative and the highly impractical, I wasted time for a year before making what appeared to be a logical, safe move and accepted another tech job. Ironically, it wasn’t reasonable or safe. The software didn’t work, and neither did the company. I lost both a year of my life and a substantial investment I made to demonstrate my commitment to the venture. As disappointing as it felt, the situation forced me to take a hard look in the metaphorical mirror and ask myself the question that needed answering: What do you want?

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It’s something we answer every day. What do you want for lunch? What do you want to watch on Netflix? What do you want to do this weekend? But in this case, I wasn’t specifying pizza toppings or selecting the color of a new rug. I was deciding whether I was going to continue to waffle between professional commitments or if – finally, at the tender age of 45 – I was going to listen to my heart and follow wherever it led.

Here’s the hardest part of holding yourself accountable to your true desires: it’s scary. It requires you to do hard work. It 122

requires you to take risks. It requires you to change the way you’re keeping score. It means embracing uncertainty and the massive opportunity cost of foregone salary, benefits, and an easy answer to the question, “What do you do?”

This will be true regardless of the context in which you’re asking the question. To get where you’re supposed to be in terms of your physical fitness, your relationships, or any personal development, you must not only hold yourself up to a rigorous truth-finding but also pay heed to the inconvenient answers that present themselves. In regards

to my career searching, the answer I came up with was something like this: “I want to tell the truth. I want to make others laugh, think, and see the world slightly differently.”

That result differed greatly from answers I would have gotten if I asked: “What will look best on my CV?”, “What will minimize risk and maximize income?” or “What will be most impressive to the people around me?” (who, by the way, are far too busy thinking about their own careers to give a damn about mine).

It may not be that you’re actively lying to yourself, but

you’re likely engaged in some selective listening. So if you feel a burning in your belly to make a change, look into the mirror and listen. Until you come clean on what you truly want, you are living someone else’s life.

Today, despite the negligible pay and the highly uncertain road ahead, I relish the feeling of clarity in my work. It’s not as fundamental as the feeling I have when I feed my children, and I am not as high on the ladder as I want to be.

But I’m on the right ladder, and it’s going way better than the job that was supposed to be safe.

W H A T D O Y O U T R U LY WA N T ?

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Toa Heftiba

L O C AT I O N

Tynemouth, UK

Live on Purpose S TO RY : J O R DA N G RO S S

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lle had just moved to a new city. She was an older woman, still incredibly strong, active, and lively, but she always had fluctuations in her weight. She had been a member of Weight Watchers for over twenty years, and with her new move, she would have to go to a new venue to weigh-in, have meetings with other members, etc.

It was Thursday, and meetings always fell at 10 am on Thursday mornings. Since it was going to be her first time at this new location, she wanted to impress her fellow members and the new staff who would hold her accountable for the foreseeable future.

She woke up at 6:30 am, took a shot of espresso, and hit the local gym. She did 30 minutes on the treadmill, slightly inclined, and 15 minutes of weightlifting. She finished with 15 minutes of leg work using various medicine balls and exercise bands. After a shower and a change of clothing, it was 8:30 am, and she was eager to head over to WW. Whether it was the adrenaline from the workout or the excitement of showing off her post-workout physique to her new friends, Elle realized she had forgotten to eat breakfast - and you were always supposed to eat something before weighing in.

Elle figured that she was driving to a shopping center and that there

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would be food somewhere in the area. She pulled in at 9:15 am, and her jaw dropped at the restaurant beside Weight Watchers. It was McDonald’s. McDonald’s breakfast had been Elle’s guilty pleasure for as long as she could remember. They call it a McGriddle. Two warm, soft pancakes serving as the bun. A fluffy egg in the middle surrounded by gooey cheese, crispy bacon, and a dash of maple syrup. And the aroma, don’t even get Elle started on the smells. It was like she was back in Canada as a little kid getting fresh maple syrup from a tree with her father.

McDonald’s was on the left of Weight Watchers, and to the right was a small restaurant called Very Berry Café. It served juices, smoothies, and small breakfast sandwiches. Everything on the menu was below 500 calories.

Elle parked her car in front of Weight Watchers, about 100 feet away. She got out and looked at the food options to the left and right.

Her stomach told her McDonald’s, but her gut told her Very Berry Café. Elle walked straight toward the Weight Watchers door. Maybe she could go inside and ask someone how the food was at Very Berry. If they said terrible, it’d make her McDonald’s choice more justifiable.

She grabbed the handle and pulled.

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Locked. This club didn’t open until 10 am. So she pulled out her cell phone to call her weight loss accountability partner. Maybe he could give her the necessary encouragement and help her decide. She clicked his name in her contacts. It rang. It rang. It rang again. No answer. Elle was on her own now. It was only her decision to make.

Should she live according to her values of health, vitality, and willpower? Or would she succumb to the almighty beast that is the McDonald’s McGriddle breakfast sandwich? She walked away from the WW door and opened another. She walked to the counter. She heard the workers making sandwiches in the back. She could smell the eggs. She spoke.

‘I’ll have one of your finest McGriddles, please!’ Elle smiled. The cashier looked confused.

‘Ma’am, this is Very Berry Café, McDonald’s is on the other side of Weight Watchers.’

‘I know,’ Elle said proudly. ‘Just give me whatever you think is closest to your version of the McGriddle.’

The cashier still didn’t really get it, but it didn’t matter. Elle had stuck to her values. She made a choice with intention. She lived on purpose.

Three minutes later, Elle received a scrumptious 450-calorie sandwich made of whole-wheat toast, egg whites, and low-fat turkey bacon. It was one of the most fulfilling meals she’d ever had.

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Toa Heftiba

L O C AT I O N

British countryside

Missing the Trees for the Forest S TO RY : S P E N C E R S E K U L I N

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ne of the greatest misconceptions in life is the idea that you need to chase something to be happy. In a way, we have become conditioned not to feel; conditioned to be afraid of stopping in this rat race and merely basking in the feast of life.

People like that are called lazy, idealists, whatever - anything to smear the person who isn’t hopelessly trapped in thinking of the future, preparing for the future, chasing after something, beating themselves up with the past, hating themselves for what they don’t yet have, worrying about losing what they do have, fearing what may happen, regretting what has happened, and so on.

But why are most people so unhappy? What are they missing? What have they lost in this rapid, ever-changing society that they are now endlessly searching for?

Long before this era of happiness prescriptions and innumerable ‘recipes’ for ready-made joy, Walt Whitman had answers to the questions above, seeing in his time the progressive loss of happiness with the advances of booming civilization.

‘If man is so generally less happy in the cities than in the country, it is because all these variations and nuances of sight and smell and sound are less clearly marked and lost in the general monotony of grey walls and cement pavements.’

What does this mean in plain English? Well, it merely means that most of us are unhappy and dissatisfied because we neglect to enjoy the simple pleasures of life. These ‘nuances of sight and smell and sound’ go unnoticed amidst everything else.

We’re always in search of something. Endlessly looking for the next big thing and ways in which we can secure a happy future. But the truth is that this moment is all we have, and yet most people let it slip by. We’re tempted by the thoughts of the past and images of the future - what we did yesterday, what we’ll do tomorrow, next month, next year - the somedays, yesterdays, and eventuallys.

And while it’s important to think forward and learn from what has been, there’s far greater importance in what already is. What ‘is’ can only be what is now. After all, the past is gone.

It has been irreversibly carved into history and time. It’s not going anywhere. And the future doesn’t exist yet. It’s a great void of potentiality - one that most people lose themselves in.

The only time that has actual substance, or indeed any capacity with which to shape your future, is this moment. Yes, you can envision the future, plan it, prepare for it, and so on, but do not forget to give yourself a gift every day. To, as Marcus Aurelius said, ‘Give yourself the gift of this present moment.’

No matter at which stage you are in life, this moment is all you have - this moment in which you’re alive, this moment which will never come again, this moment in which you’ll never again be this young. This moment that is, in itself, a miracle for which to be grateful.

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MISSING THE TREES FOR THE FOREST

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When were your happiest moments? For me, they were the ones in which I was present, totally lost in my senses - moments of hearty laughter with friends, moments surrounded by nature, moments of complete immersion in the smell of food and the gentle hum of background music, moments of feeling the texture of the pages of a book while I read, moments of watching snowflakes sauntering gently downwards like the white petals of cherry blossoms.

Life is short, a precious and fragile vessel filled with ever-ebbing water, and oh how easily it can shatter. No matter who we are, no matter what our plans for the future, we can all exit life at this moment. At any moment. There is no telling of our end - no certainty. There is only the present, and all of its immediacy. No matter where you’re heading, your five- and ten-year plans, however necessary, do not preclude the importance of where you are right now - for where you are is indeed the only place you can be. So wherever you are, it helps sometimes just to stop, take a minute, and give yourself the gift of this moment. You can do it right now. Plan your plans, dream your dreams, let the future be a promise, but don’t forget today. And don’t forget the importance of noticing it as it passes by - for it will pass whether you notice it or not.

We’re so often told not to miss the forest for the trees, but instead, we miss the trees for the forest. We ignore the intricate details of living and laser our focus on the immaterial and superficial. We fixate on the future, chase after wealth, and contemplate all kinds of catastrophic scenarios. We concentrate on the forest rather than the trees - the grand over the small.

So for once, let’s enjoy the trees as well. The forest will be there, but the trees themselves are fleeting. Those passing moments of joy, the small wonders of living, the ‘breadcrumbs of life,’ as John Weiss so eloquently describes them. Those are the trees.

No matter what we want for our future, or what happened in our past, we must remember to appreciate the present as well - that we’re alive, that we’re here, at this moment. The more we let ourselves feel, the clearer we can see ourselves and our world, and the better we can craft a life as opposed to merely drifting through one. That is, to live a fate chosen, rather than one given by default. To embrace the senses, to actually feel them intentionally, and go through a day as a truly feeling creature and not just someone lost in thoughts and actions and hopes and dreams and fears and doubts and worries and plans. To retake a piece of that natural joyfulness of being alive, and therein weave stronger the threads that enable happy living.

So wherever you are, stop and tune in to your senses, and give your body permission to do whatever it pleases. Return to the now. Because how could you ever be anywhere else?

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Afterword FROM ADRIAN DREW

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verything starts with an idea. But without mental clarity, those ideas will never make it from the lips of the muse into the canals of our ears, for our busied mind will only block the vessel through which new concepts come to us. The same is true of this magazine, and this organization as a whole. It all began with an idea, an idea that struck during a time of severe adversity and struggle. When that lightbulb moment arose in my head, a thousand different thoughts told me not to go ahead with the creation of Mind Cafe. ‘It’s not the right time,’ ‘Mind Cafe isn’t going anywhere,’ ‘There’s no money in writing anymore - it isn’t a sustainable career path.’ And, though I couldn’t stop those thoughts altogether, I found clarity amidst the noise. I went ahead in taking the risk of believing in myself, treating my circumstances as an opportunity to channel all of that energy into growth. And now here you are, reading my magazine. But it all began with an idea.

Without decision, there is no innovation, creativity, or opportunity for growth. We can plan and ruminate for decades, and many do. But when it comes down to it, personal growth all comes back to making decisions, whether we feel like it or not. Whether it’s asking an attractive girl for her phone number, delivering your first TED Talk, or even the mundane, everyday things like speaking up about your

concerns, only one factor will determine whether you grow or remain stagnant. That is, your decision to act. You might feel nervous, sure. The thought of rejection might scare you to the point of paralysis, but those who act anyway are those who achieve great things.

Ryan Holiday wrote about this concept extensively in his book, ‘The Obstacle is the Way.’ I know I mentioned the book earlier in this magazine, but Ryan isn’t paying me to market his book. I just love it. The concepts within it are timeless. He explains how some of the most revolutionary businesses were founded during times of great adversity.

People like Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett saw opportunity where others saw defeat. In many ways, I guess that’s what I did, as you read in the story section of this magazine. I was losing the most important person in my life, while my hopes, dreams, and idealized future were being torn to pieces. But within that storm, I realized what my vocation was. I saw a chance to channel those adversity-taught lessons into the creation of something new - a way to use my pain to help others.

Please, give me a moment to say that not a sentence here is coming from a place of pride or egoism. I’m not writing these words to receive your praise, but rather to teach through a personal example that great things can be achieved when we simply cease to hold ourselves back.

The moment we realize that our thoughts and self-limiting beliefs reflect nothing more than a pessimistic fantasy, only then can we begin to achieve our true potential.”

A Q U OT E BY A D R I A N D R E W

A F T E RWO R D

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Toa Heftiba

L O C AT I O N

Cornwall, England

The moment we realize that our thoughts and selflimiting beliefs reflect nothing more than a pessimistic fantasy, only then can we begin to achieve our true potential. For me, that’s what mental clarity is all about.

Not the absence of thought, but the objective judgement of it. It’s the ability to watch your chaotic mind in all of its madness, smile, and say ‘those thoughts don’t define me.’

Knowing, instead, that your actions define you, and your thoughts will do as they please.

Around two years ago, while holidaying in St Ives, Cornwall, I stumbled upon a surf magazine in a local convenience shop. I loved everything about it - the look and feel of the text, the work that had gone into its design

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and the quality of its production. There, I dreamed of one day owning my own magazine, and here I am, two years later, typing the afterword to Mind Cafe’s first print publication. When we start taking action and stop listening to our negative thoughts, we can achieve what most think to be impossible - even in the face of adversity. I’m living proof of that, and you can be, too.

All that leaves me to say is this: From the bottom of my heart, thank you. I wake up each day inspired to create and drive this mission forward, and it’s all thanks to people like you - people who believe in our journey. If it wasn’t for Mind Cafe, I’m not sure how I would have coped. And without you, I’m not sure where I’d be now. Thank you.

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