Don't ever make decisions based on fear. Make decisions based on hope and possibility. Make decisions based on what should happen, not what shouldn't.
— Michelle Obama
If you don't know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.
— Henry Kissinger
One day, against the advice of locals, Buddha wished to cross an infamous forest. In the forest lived a bandit famed for attacking way-goers, snipping off their fingers, and wearing them as necklaces.
The bandit’s name was Dom Cummings. Joke — it was Angulimal, which directly translates to finger garland. While crossing through this dense and dangerous forest, the bandit saw Buddha. And the chase began. The wicked bandit went left intercept Buddha, but Buddha was on the right. The bandit scrambled, sprinted, and clawed through the undergrowth, but Buddha remained just out of reach. When Buddha seemed close enough to tackle the ground, he slipped from the bandit.
Angulimal cried with exhaustion: “Who are you? Or what might you be? Every time you’re within my reach, you’re gone again. God or Devil? Foe!”
“You’re running, not I.” Responded Buddha, “I have not moved”.
With this, Angulimal stopped running. In doing so, he caught Buddha and wept at Buddha’s feet, becoming his disciple.
I scarcely need to point out the story’s message is we need to stop to learn who we are. We can find ourselves between obligations and listening so attentively to “out there” that we stop hearing anything of ourselves.
This sense of running out of time and missing opportunities will only worsen. Not only are we each getting older, and therefore we have less time to do things as each day passes (sorry to break this to you). But the world is speeding up, and we see the changes every day through the press and online.
In other times, most of the world’s activity would have happened outside our universe, beyond our orbit. Back in the day, one side of my family lived on the Dee Estuary in Flintshire, Wales. At the time of Napoleon, my family — who were cobblers — were presumably only exposed to the comings and goings of Shotton, their tiny town, and not to the palatial dramas of Napoleonic France. Now the president tweets from his bedroom.
FOMO is genuinely a problem of our times because, at other times, we would have been less informed and consequently less fearful of Missing Out. The first commercially successful newspaper in the UK was published in 1705, and it seems unlikely that cart-loads of newspapers were making their way to the Dee Estuary by the end of the century. More likely, there would have been an informational drought—a vacuum. Indeed, there was not the velocity of information we have today, screenshots of private conversations, nor the concept (really) of the unblinking “public eye”.
I say velocity because there is a speed — fast — and a direction — at us — which gives a certain weight to the waterfall of information. This fire-hydrant of news, false or just generated by GPT, tells us that other opportunities abound, and you — in your little life — are walking straight past them.
The bad news is you and I will miss almost every opportunity. We won’t live 99.99% of our potential lives. Good grief, the FOMO!! But this is okay. When we succumb to fear, we rush between many different things. Buddha suggested that Angulimal was not caching anything because he was running. We run because we believe we have a better chance of getting what we want. But the opposite is true. More often, by saying no, and stopping, we discover ourselves.
My week in books
I’m still offline. Porridge and lentils, lucky me, but no books!
Live well,
Hector
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Stop faster. Xx
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