Elco

What if we can only work on our passion with X amount of time? We first need to be limited, to become limitless. What if you can find yourself, feeling free, enjoying people, conversations, without being trapped by your passion? Is that possible, to create projects where you inspire, in a way that all those involved are working really hard, not because they need to, but because they feel inspired?

Can you let go of outcomes, failures and imperfections? We have to find a process of working on our passion which is perpetual, unencumbered by result. To find ourselves in a state of constant creation, we first have to find a different way to continue that dream. We have to give up, because it is also about life and having life skills. We learn to be creative by looking at limitations, as a source of creativity. Then we continue to show up for the process and see what are the possibilities.

Looking for a new tattoo which represents time - any ideas anyone? x

"Man designs for himself a garden with a hundred kinds of trees, a thousand kinds of flowers, a hundred kinds of fruit and vegetables. Suppose, then, that the gardener of this garden knew no other distinction between edible and inedible, nine-tenths of this garden would be useless to him. He would pull up the most enchanting flowers and hew down the noblest trees and even regard them with a loathing and envious eye. This is what the Steppenwolf does with the thousand flowers of his soul. What does not stand classified as either man or wolf he does not see at all."  - Herman Hesse

Can we see? We view the world through ideas and concepts, but as long as we stick to these, the most beautiful things remain hidden to us.

"Light here, means awareness - to be aware of life, of experience as it is at this moment, without judgement or ideas about it. In other words, you have to see and feel what you are experience is, and not as it is named. This very simple opening of the eyes brings about the extraordinary transformation of understand and living and shows that our most baffling problems are pure illusion. Because awareness is a view of reality free from ideas and judgements, it is clearly impossible to define and what write down what is reveals. Anything which can be described is an idea, and i cannot make a positive statement about something - the real world - which is not an idea. I shall therefore have to be content with talking about the false impressions which awareness removes, rather than the truth which it reveals." - Alan Watts

Can we really see? To see is to be aware. Awareness comes from our ability to operate under uncertainty and question our truths and internal believe-system.

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Can we see the full spectrum? Our minds grow like trees, where each branch represents a different version of ourselves, branches can be in conflict with each other and that's ok.

"Conscience refers to presence, and you need to state of presence to be with another person, group, to have a more precise attunement, a higher degree of information we perceive in a relational context. It's presence, it's attunement, and it's the synchronisation of one nervous system with another nervous system, one body with another, one mental system with another, it creates an intentional space. Every nervous system radiates a lot of information. - Thomas Hübl

We reach the best possible version of ourselves by merging with the others. This start by seeing them and who they truly are.

✨

Thanks To Eli, Ana, Bruno, Lucas, David, Ilias and Lara for reading drafts of this.

Wake up, eat, sports, shower, metro, walk, coffee, croissant, co-working, desk, reading, laptop, pause... "look up". Everyone around you is part of the same machine — staring at their screens. Fighting off one notification after the other. We are calculating machines. We are unhappy creatures seeking happiness. The paradox is that we think we will find happiness by pushing ourselves through the unhappiness. But will happiness ever arrive?

To me the idea of happiness in the day-to-day is pursuing your goals with a decluttered mind and task list (from David Allen, Getting Things Done 2001), with freedom and time to invest in meaningful relationships around you, so that at the end of the day you feel you've grown and you feel enriched because of your experiences. Happiness in the long run is about discovering and finding the gifts of life, the emotions of love, fear, pain, loss you can feel, which make you appreciate all the small things we have. Love and affection, for our close ones and every other human being (as the Dalai Lama explains, if you focus on what you have in common with strangers, you can feel truly connected and feel love for them, then you'll never feel alone (The Art Of Happiness 2017). On a third (highest) level, happiness in a lifetime, is to truly see, to truly listen, to truly feel - it sounds like the simplest but it's the most difficult one to grasp. From Krishnamurti (The Urgency of Change 1909): This seeing is intelligence. Seeing is not the cultivation of intelligence. Seeing is more important than intelligence, or happiness, or unhappiness. There is only seeing or not seeing. All the rest—happiness, unhappiness, and intelligence—are just words.

Will you ever find happiness? Someone very close to me used to say that I was never satisfied. Perhaps that's why you always push for more. Sometimes I think that I am happy, other times I think that am not. It doesn't matter really, as I just try my best. I love this from Seneca (Hardship and Happiness 4 BCE–65 CE), “Wherever we go, the two finest attributes will go with us— universal nature and individual virtue. Fear less, love more. Try your best.

Imagine you are single, in a party with lots of pretty people. You are talking to a few, going around, trying to understand your chances and hoping something will go right.

All of a sudden you find yourself passionately making out with the person you were just scoping out earlier in the day. You are on a high. You can just chill with this person but then you see someone you were also checking out before, this person gives you good vibes.

You think to yourself, maybe they won’t see me, maybe I can get away with it. And you try. You nervously walk around trying to find the right angle to not be seen.

You post something to show the world how great your life is. You want everything and everyone. You dance with both of them at the same time and one is dancing topless. You tell them they have the same name, while in fact they have not. You fuck up.

You stay with the first one and you passionately make out. You want more and you push her away.

She goes home. Nothing was enough. When you are on a high, you want more, when you want more and admit to it, you won’t enjoy the actual moment, because you are already thinking about the next high.

Greed is a real thing - so it's important to regulate your natural dopamine.

To be fearless is a state of mind, which can be evoked by confidence, which comes from past successes of attacking fear.

Today I got struck by fear, it's a remainder from my days with panic attacks, sometimes I just feel a strong anxiety in my body - which let me to write this:

"Fear, fear, fear, hold me back, hold me down, make sit quiet, make me stop, make me pause, make come to a still stand. Let’s explore this feeling of this chill, which sits on my chest like a heavy armour but doesn’t protect me, instead wears me down. How do I take this weight off my shoulders and get back my fast pace of mind. It’s like I've lost the feeling, the feeling of movement."

I thought about the book "The obstacle is the way", specifically about the insight that whatever obstacle is in front of you is the most important thing to solve, that's the life lesson. So I took my time to think about what just happened. I wrote this down:

"This thing, of finding you groove after you think you've lost it, maybe I can rationalise why I haven’t lost it. I haven’t lost it, but even if I say this the feeling is not the same any more. It’s a feeling that comes from just being and feeling the vibe. How to stimulate the groove. Let’s get groovy. Play some sick tunes and chill."

I thought to myself, which strategies can I employ to get my vibe back. These are what I came up with:

1. Let my mind go to the next thing i.e. focus on a happier thought
2. Pause with everything that I am doing and listen to the sounds and movements around me, get grounded
3. Do something brave, to break the pattern

"There she was. A tall light-skinned Portuguese girl, bright yellow pants, looking beautiful. She was with 5 girlfriends. I walked up, excused myself and told her that I thought she was pretty cute, she blushed. We had some small talk for a few minutes and exchanged details. It doesn't matter what happens next, but what it did, is that it gave me confidence."

All of a sudden, my mind is on another plateau. It's like I can now meet, see, talk to different people and feel like I own the situation. I am on a high of confidence and the rush is making me fearless. Fortune favours the bold.

What does all of this mean? Should we constantly go out there and do things that make us feel uncomfortable? Maybe the best way to remove all your limitations is to attack fear every day, but confronting it, again, again and again. Then from the successes, which won't always happen, but when they do, will make you feel fearless.

When you notice how sunlight reflects upon leaves, showing golden rays upon the green and brown, you suddenly realise the importance of your every single moment. The beauty and exclusivity of a single occurrence reminds us to be more selective about what is important in life and that what is not.

Your brain is processing so much information every day that it becomes numb to these experiences. That's because the high sequence of experiences create little down time, to process and reflect on what these moments mean to us. Our daily lives are like a roller-coast ride, sometimes we don't know whether to smile to camera or to focus on enjoying the ride.

Your receptivity of the beauty of life is not a constant and some days you are more aware than other. Some days you exude an appreciation and excitement for life. People take notice and they smile back at you, laugh with you. But other days you are running to keep up with it all. When you are running, you often look at what's next. A fixation on the next thing has an opportunity cost, a lack of attention for the present moment. 

Your energy is a rare commodity, similar to everything in nature, one day your energy finishes. So if you don't choose very carefully how to distribute your energy every day, you might waste it. Choosing how to use it is a complex topic, because of path-dependency, your previous life choices have let you to where you are today. This sets boundaries on how you can use your energy.

While it may look difficult, no matter where you are today, life, job, love, etc, it's still malleable until the day you die. There's only one condition, which is for you to be aware of how you want to design your life. You can do so, if you want to. James Clear talks about the power of habits in "Atomic Habits". He says the first thing is that you have to decide the person you want to be.