Metadata
- Author: cory zanoni
- Full Title: Changing Your Life Takes More Than Just Ideas
- URL: https://www.unzen.co/p/changing-your-life-takes-more-than
Highlights
- If you want to ruin someone’s day, ask them if they’re really living up to the things they value. (View Highlight)
- I value open and honest communication but I still catch myself dodging tough conversations. I’ve been an inconsiderate boyfriend (and date) because I wasn’t totally honest with myself and, by extension, my partner. (View Highlight)
- Charlotte Joko Beck, an American Zen Buddhism teacher with a focus on the intersection of Zen and psychology, laid out the challenge we’re facing:
There are many wonderful concepts and ideals, but if they don’t become who we are, they can be the most fiendish burdens. Understanding something intellectually is not enough; sometimes it is worse than not understanding at all. (View Highlight)
- Beck argues that ideas and concepts “cannot remain merely in our heads; [they] must transform into our being.” (View Highlight)
- The British journalist Oliver Burkeman takes it a step further in the best-seller Four thousand weeks, his exploration of mortality and time. “The things you pay attention to,” he argues, “will define what reality is for you.” (View Highlight)
- Attention just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. (View Highlight)
- Remember we are whatever we choose. Have you ever been on a beach when the sun rises, or on a mountain top at noon? Did you stretch your arms wide and breathe deeply, filling your lungs with pure, clean air, with unbounded immensity? Did you feel as if you were just the sky, the sea, the mountain? If you are too far away from the sea or the mountain, you can just sit cross-legged and breathe gently and deeply, and the sea, the mountain, the entire universe will enter you. (View Highlight)
- We are our attention. We are our actions. Thoughts are just that: thoughts. Powerful as they are, they’re fleeting. They can be a starting point but they can’t define our lives by themselves. (View Highlight)
- This can, of course, painful to think about. Is your understanding of yourself consistent with your actions? You can’t just say you love someone – you need to live it. And love is demanding. (View Highlight)
- You can’t just say you’re a good parent. You can’t just say you value nature, or care about animals, or want to get into photography. You can’t just read advice. Every value has a corresponding action. Every thought can be expressed. Without that action or that expression, they’re just passing moments in your mind. Tiny electric sparks made conscious. (View Highlight)
- All personal growth means giving up an equivalent amount of your old self. Even deciding you need to change represents means sacrificing your sense that you’re okay as is. (View Highlight)
- So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life. (View Highlight)