Loved this, and couldn’t agree more about the want to escape.. back to when a moment was just that.. a moment.. a fully present moment of vivid colours and vitality and sheer wonder at the beauty of everything and everyone.. lsd, ketamine, mushrooms, dmt ,mdma, will sometimes get you partly there, sometimes it will almost feel you have gone right back into the amniotic fluid itself, depending on the strength of the drug ingested, but I believe it’s a futile exercise in the end. Thanks for sharing .👏✍️
James Clear just gave a nod to this in his newsletter as well with this quote:
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the value of daily surprises:
"Try to be surprised by something every day. It could be something you see, hear, or read about. Stop to look at the unusual car parked at the curb, taste the new item on the cafeteria menu, actually listen to your colleague at the office. How is this different from other similar cars, dishes or conversations? What is its essence? Don't assume that you already know what these things are all about, or that even if you knew them, they wouldn't matter anyway. Experience this one thing for what it is, not what you think it is. Be open to what the world is telling you. Life is nothing more than a stream of experiences — the more widely and deeply you swim in it, the richer your life will be."
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Thanks for the great reminder I need to compassionately staple to my forehead lol. 😅
D'accord, Kasra!! This excerpt is from someone with similar reflections to your own on ways to "make the world more mesmerizing," as it was in childhood ...
"The more our days are filled with new, unpredictable, and challenging experiences, the longer they will feel. And, conversely, the more one day is exactly like another, the faster it will pass by in a blur. Childhood ends up feeling so long because it is the cauldron of novelty; because its most ordinary days are packed with extraordinary discoveries and sensations. These can be as apparently minor yet as significant as the first time we explore the zip on a cardigan or hold our nose under water, the first time we look at the sun through the cotton of a beach towel or dig our fingers into the putty holding a window in its frame. Dense as it is with stimuli, the first decade can feel a thousand years long. ...
"It is sensible enough to try to live longer lives. But we are working with a false notion of what long really means. We might live to be a thousand years old and still complain that it had all rushed by too fast. We should be aiming to lead lives that feel long because we manage to imbue them with the right sort of open-hearted appreciation and unsnobbish receptivity, the kind that five-year-olds know naturally how to bring to bear. We need to pause and look at one another’s faces, study the sky, wonder at the eddies and colors of the river, and dare to ask the kinds of questions that open others’ souls. We don’t need to add years; we need to densify the time we have left by ensuring that every day is lived consciously—and we can do this via a maneuver as simple as it is momentous: by starting to notice all that we have as yet only seen."
"...You can go skydiving, or you can meditate for long enough that walking feels like skydiving...."
Beautiful.
Great piece!
this was such a great piece - I wanted a duel disk so badly too hah. but I gotta say Broly was my favorite dbz character as a kid
Loved this, and couldn’t agree more about the want to escape.. back to when a moment was just that.. a moment.. a fully present moment of vivid colours and vitality and sheer wonder at the beauty of everything and everyone.. lsd, ketamine, mushrooms, dmt ,mdma, will sometimes get you partly there, sometimes it will almost feel you have gone right back into the amniotic fluid itself, depending on the strength of the drug ingested, but I believe it’s a futile exercise in the end. Thanks for sharing .👏✍️
James Clear just gave a nod to this in his newsletter as well with this quote:
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the value of daily surprises:
"Try to be surprised by something every day. It could be something you see, hear, or read about. Stop to look at the unusual car parked at the curb, taste the new item on the cafeteria menu, actually listen to your colleague at the office. How is this different from other similar cars, dishes or conversations? What is its essence? Don't assume that you already know what these things are all about, or that even if you knew them, they wouldn't matter anyway. Experience this one thing for what it is, not what you think it is. Be open to what the world is telling you. Life is nothing more than a stream of experiences — the more widely and deeply you swim in it, the richer your life will be."
---
Thanks for the great reminder I need to compassionately staple to my forehead lol. 😅
That yugioh movie was so good!!! I saw it in theaters too :)
That was a great one❤️
D'accord, Kasra!! This excerpt is from someone with similar reflections to your own on ways to "make the world more mesmerizing," as it was in childhood ...
"The more our days are filled with new, unpredictable, and challenging experiences, the longer they will feel. And, conversely, the more one day is exactly like another, the faster it will pass by in a blur. Childhood ends up feeling so long because it is the cauldron of novelty; because its most ordinary days are packed with extraordinary discoveries and sensations. These can be as apparently minor yet as significant as the first time we explore the zip on a cardigan or hold our nose under water, the first time we look at the sun through the cotton of a beach towel or dig our fingers into the putty holding a window in its frame. Dense as it is with stimuli, the first decade can feel a thousand years long. ...
"It is sensible enough to try to live longer lives. But we are working with a false notion of what long really means. We might live to be a thousand years old and still complain that it had all rushed by too fast. We should be aiming to lead lives that feel long because we manage to imbue them with the right sort of open-hearted appreciation and unsnobbish receptivity, the kind that five-year-olds know naturally how to bring to bear. We need to pause and look at one another’s faces, study the sky, wonder at the eddies and colors of the river, and dare to ask the kinds of questions that open others’ souls. We don’t need to add years; we need to densify the time we have left by ensuring that every day is lived consciously—and we can do this via a maneuver as simple as it is momentous: by starting to notice all that we have as yet only seen."
An excerpt from Alain de Botton's "A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from the School of Life," via Sara Botton's blog, https://oldster.substack.com/p/how-to-lengthen-your-life