Here’s to a 2021 filled with new things! Here’re some things for you to contemplate if you’re up for it:

A silent mind is a happy one.

While imagination and conceptual thought are fun to indulge in from time to time, too much of it tends to wear us down, like how too much ice-cream gives you brain freeze. It’s like zoning out, but you’re actually aware that you are aware. When all distractions fall away, the innate peace in our being shines through not because it’s some exotic state of mind, it’s just that we are almost always too distracted to notice it.

Make no effort to quiet the mind, just let the distractions walk themselves out.

People aren’t afraid of dying, they’re afraid of not living well.

If you think about it, that applies to jobs, relationships, and any kind of thing that requires some degree of commitment. Probably also the reason why leaps of faith are hard to take; sometimes you just don’t know what’s on the other side, that’s when fear starts to cloud our judgement if we let it. The fear-fog was never there to begin with, you just believed and gave it all the credibility in the world.

What if you knew with absolute certainty that you were going to die tomorrow, what would you do?

Acceptance is the root of true power.

Surrender to what is is a radical acceptance of every moment as it is, no matter the shape or form it takes. Sometimes it entails a rejection of the psychological biases, heuristics formed from childhood experiences, and auto-piloting mental-patterns that tend to govern the flow of ordinary thought, which can be downright difficult in certain situations (e.g: preventing oneself from being identified with one’s viewpoint during a heated discussion/debate). And other times it comes as easily as breathing, where our conditioned responses happen to be the right ones for the situation (e.g: CPR, first-aid training, negotiation skills for tense situations etc.). There isn’t a one-size fits-all approach to any situation, but that’s what makes life interesting.

For thou who resisteth every situation and bend it forcibly to thy will, will thine stamina keep thou going eternally? Why not go with the flow instead?

Labels aside, is there really a difference between pleasure and pain?

Compare the intensity between intense, hard-core love-making and having deez nuts kicked in. Compare doing an accounting favor for a friend with an office job doing nothing but accounting. Compare the intensity between fun running in a marathon and running for your life.

What if there was no mental label to these situations? Would they be any different from one another? More importantly, do the labelling tendencies of our minds cloud our apparently “sane and 100% logical” judgement more often than we think? Finally, if there were no labels, would both pleasure and pain merely be intense vibrations felt in consciousness?

As always, I bid you a 2021 filled with peace and wisdom. May you find the answers that you seek and have a nice day.