I want to enumerate why journalling is a good habit, mainly because I want to make it a stronger habit for myself.

1. Self Reflection

The unexamined life is not worth living Socrates

“Know thyself” is the oldest advice in the book. Our life can be unconscious if we choose. The automaticity of thought and daily life can result in an almost trance like state, where you just drift from day to day without really asking the big questions. Who am I, what are my desires, what are some of my personality traits that maybe are harmful?

Humans are conditioned. We are influenced by our environment, our genes, cultural and social memes etc. This is of course inevitable.

The problem lies when this is all unconscious and unquestioned. It is when you don’t question your beliefs and ideas (which of course you’ve just picked up from somewhere else).

So journalling is a way to question yourself. Is there a better way? It’s about living an examined life.

2. Think about things

We often don’t know what we think, until we write it down.

Often it’s just a fuzzy idea. With belief for example, we often make leaps in logic or we just wholesale adopt the belief or opinion of someone we admire, without really thinking it through ourselves.

Writing is structured thinking. And with structured thinking you can more robustly make an informed point.

3. Nostalgia / Recording

I don’t typically look back, but I think that might not always be a good thing.

Psychology has shown that memory formation is flawed. We don’t see reality how is was. Often we are prone to biases such as looking back with rose tinted glasses. Maybe this is a good thing?

Journalling is a way to record day to day. What one did, thought, felt etc.

I’ve been trying to record more in general. Just take more pictures, videos, write. I don’t really go back and look at old photos, but people around me do, and its always nice to share a snapshot in time with someone else.

How I Currently Journal

I used to write in a paper notebook, but increasingly I’ve found using my phone or tablet is more convenient. I do both now.

At the moment, I use an app called : DayOne. You can record video, audio or write. It automatically saves the time and location. And I can write in it anywhere.

I sometimes dictate, because that way I can truly see what thoughts are coming up. There is less of a delay in typing and modifying. You can see the unfiltered reality of thought. It’s almost like having a conversation with yourself. It’s strangely therapeutic.

And what do you journal about? Any challenges during the day, how I can respond better, how I am feeling now. And longer term questions. Really it is personal. But I think the best format is to ask yourself questions. Be curious.

You can also you can just purely record what you are doing. Everyone has a different way of journalling.

But the most important thing I feel is to keep up the habit.

TLDR : Invest in your strengths

My sister is getting grief from parents, relatives and friends about ‘getting another degree.

This is intended to be some advice towards others, and also a reminder for myself. A degree is not the same as education.

Degree ≠ Education

For example, I think we all know some variation of this person. He/She was bad at school. But seemed to possess other skills like physical fitness, leadership, persuasion, sales skills etc.

They completely failed academically in school. Yet through educating themselves in their strengths, they became wildly more successful (than you).

What people seem to think is that having a degree means that you know about a topic. What it might mean is that you can pursue goal. But often people forget most of what they learn in a degree. It has become about signalling to employers that ‘I am the sort of person that can gain a degree’. That you can pursue goals.

This isn’t great. Pursuing goals doesn’t mean that they are the right goals for you.

The downsides of a degree

I don’t think everyone should get a degree. In Germany for example, apprenticeships are much more valued, and if they feel you can’t pursue A levels successfully, they push you towards apprenticeships.

In the UK, there are definitely plumbers/electricians making much more than white collar workers. Business owners don’t usually have a ‘business degree’, they just simply start.

I want to enumerate some of the pitfalls thinking about getting a degree.

• It means you are smart. No, it means that you can do somewhat well in standardised testing. This attitude (can be very subtle) leads lack of learning. If you feel like you are intelligent and already know, you cease to learn.
• You forget most of what you ‘learn’ on your degree (Krebs cycle meme)
• Most of what you learn to get the degree is useless. That time could have been spent on useful ‘life’ skills. How to be happy, how to manage money, how to find good relationships, how to be creative etc.
• Jumping through hoops
• Bankrupt your self/parents. Especially if doing a non vocational degree.

That said, there are obviously benefits

What is the value of a degree/university?

• Signalling to employers that you can pursue hard goals. Demonstrates long term thinking and delayed gratification
• Socialising (most important): being surrounded by a peer network of equally smart people. Potentially meeting future spouse, forming lifelong friendships.
• Independent living apart from your parents

Choose Fields that you find easy

I’ll talk a bit about my experience. I wish I had this advice in school.

I have particular strengths. I can focus single handedly on task, I can learn independently, I work well alone, I like to create and solve problems. Combined with the fact that I pretty much spent my childhood on computers, the logical option was to do Computer Science. A field that I actually find intuitive and ‘easy’.

Instead, I chose to study something that maybe didn’t suit my personality or inclination at the time. Didn’t get in to medical school the first time round.

I didn’t focus on my strengths.

Luckily, medicine is a broad field and I also realised the importance of educating yourself. I read widely outside of medicine, realising that most of what I was learning was minutiae. There were other important things to learn too.

And now, deciding on specialty applications, what you spent the next 25-30 years of your life to make a living : I’ve chosen based on my strengths and interests rather than any outside expectation or coercion.

Interest alone is not enough too. You have to be good at it. I am fascinated by psychology and the mind. Psychiatry seems interesting, yet I know that I would be a terrible psychiatrist. It doesn’t suit my strengths.

So find what you are good at. What you naturally find easy, and are also good at. Something that feels less like work and more like play.

TLDR: Advice

What everyone needs to do is :

Identify your strengths - read widely, try lots of different things and pick up things that you naturally find easy and are also good at. Then invest time into them.

Grief is hard to put into words. I miss her every day.

On 6th October 2019, I lost my mother, aged 51. A completely unexpected, sudden death.

I’m not going to talk about her life, because words aren’t enough to convey how much I love her and will continue to do. They will never be.

I want to reflect on grief, the process of loss and how to continue when all around you, the fire of reality is beckoning.

Impermanence

But when I know that the glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious Ajahn Chah

This is a fundamental truth that we go throughout life ignoring. That everything fades. The sun will fade, the planet will fade, galaxies will fade, people will fade, experiences fade, memories and thoughts fade, emotions fade, each breath ends. There is only a river of experience. Change is the only constant and “This too shall pass”. Understanding this conceptually and seeing it an experiential level, are different.

I think we all know we are going to lose everything, but we ignore it. One letter by Seneca talks about imagining that one has lost something or someone in daily life. Therefore you appreciates what you have. Because its on loan. You don’t own anything. Everything is on loan. And this to me is a fundamental truth. Isn’t the difference between a plastic flower and a real flower, the fact that the real flower ends?

Similarly, impermanence is an essential truth pointed to in Buddhist philosophy. The problem arises when we cling to inherently impermanent states. We delude ourselves with the illusion of stability. We think that there is security. The truth is there is only a flux of experience. One can see this experientially, the fading of each moment at a deep visceral level. As Alan Watts, eastern philosopher said : “the only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance“.

We build castles in the sand, without realising that the tide will come in. We cling to it, make it part of our identity. “This is mine”, and this causes tremendous suffering. The other option is to ‘do and let go’. This is what Eastern philosophers mean by ‘non attachment’, another misunderstood concept. Non attachment is realising that it will change, and one must appreciate it in the present without clinging to the idea or thought of it.

But we forget this, thinking we are building towards something stable when in reality it is just scaffolding. We look towards some satisfaction in the future. Once I get ‘X’, I will be happy. This is the fundamental human delusion. One is simply reacting to a thought of the future, and missing out on an incredible experience found in the present moment.

On death and the present moment

Have you ever thought of making a cup of tea. Suppose you are washing the dishes, not particularly enjoying it. Instead thinking, “ah, once I get some tea, then I can finally relax”. Then you make your tea, and then whilst drinking the tea, you are simply lost in thought thinking about the next thing “need to do X work”. It’s always the next thing.

Maybe one doesn’t realise this, but if one looks at the mind, seriously with curiosity and without judgement, you’ll see that it constantly projects into the future or the past. Into memories of the past, or fantasies of the future. Once I get “X” I can finally relax. One has sacrificed an ‘idea’ of the future, for the real thing.

There is a constant trail of discursive thought that we just don’t notice. When one looks at a sunset for example, there is a narrator that is judging, comparing to the past or the future. It is possible to see without judgement, or expectation, and just experience it without clinging to any concepts. This is real internal peace.

Evolution and natural selection have not selected for contentment. We are driven by the forces of desire and aversion. But is there another way? It’s as if everyone is on a beach, running towards the tide when it goes in, and running away from the tide when it comes out. Constantly running back and forth, driven by desire and aversion. But as some traditions have extolled : it is possible to simply lie down and enjoy the waves as they go in and out.

This is again misunderstood as ‘not thinking about the future, and being a hippy and just sacrificing the future and making terrible decisions in the present’. No. It is to be aware that one is thinking about the future without being lost in it. Thought is a useful servant but a horrible master.

Is it possible to relax without any external conditions? This is a serious topic requiring tremendous attention. Is it possible to be content without being driven by the tyrants of desire and aversion? This is something that words cannot tell you. It’s experiential and one must go into it themselves. No guru or religion or dogma can tell you. They are all just concepts pointing to experiential truth.

Acceptance of reality

Death and life, success and failure, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty, all these happen to good and bad alike, and they are neither noble nor shameful – and hence neither good nor bad Marcus Aurelius

Grief is painful because there is a disconnect between what we want (desire), and reality as it is. We want reality to conform to our desire, and this causes pain.

Ultimately, grief is selfish. We grieve for ourselves, because “I have lost”.

It’s the difference between love and attachment. Attachment is where you cling to an idea of the thing. Where there is love, there is appreciation of reality, there is no self referential thought. I noticed with grief : I “want” came up a lot. I want this to be different. This is where the problem starts. It’s a thought, not the reality.

I noticed when watching the mind, that is was painful when thought would project into the future. “What could have been”. But that’s just a fiction, a story. It’s an internal model, that one then clings to, and causes misery.

Similarly with regret. Regret is just a thought projecting back into the past. Particularly painful was “maybe I could have prevented it. Maybe if I’d just done X or whatever, I would have stopped it“. This is a story one can get lost in. But it’s just a fiction. Not the reality. And being lost in this without realising it is a thought, can cause real suffering.

The place then to come to is radical acceptance. This is not a directive, that you must do this. It’s an observation. I can’t tell anyone how to grieve. But it seems the rational response is deep acceptance of reality, not a ‘thought about reality’.

Reality has no notion of good or bad. It simply is. There is nothing good or bad to a tree. It is only in our mind that such notions arise. As Shakespeare said in Hamlet, there is neither good nor bad, only thinking makes it so.

Gratitude and Compassion

There is only this conscious experience and it exists on a scale or ‘human misery/suffering’ and ‘human joy/flourishing’. The rational response is to move towards human flourishing/ eudomonia as the Greek philosophers called it.

Really understanding that time is limited, you naturally develop compassion. How can one be cruel or say cruel things, when you realise that we are all on the same boat heading towards void? Death is the great leveller. Obviously you can forget in the moment, but once you remember, the only sane response is kindness.

Dependent Origination

There is this concept of dependent origination in Eastern philosophy. Which ultimately boils down to ’cause and effect’. It’s something I accept as an axiomatic truth. There are causes, and they lead to effects.

Reality is just a chain of cause and effect from the Big Bang till now; a series of particle collisions from the Big Bang till present. Each cause leads to an effect, and each effect is itself a cause, etc. It’s a complex web of interaction, all interdependent and connected. As Carl Sagan said ‘To first bake an apple pie, you have to make a universe’.

Realising this truth, should inspire awe. We are literally made from stardust and our every intention, thought, action contributes to this vast complex web of information exchange. As the old adage goes : intention leads to thought leads to action leads to habit leads to character leads to fate. When we pass, we leave behind a chain of effects(which are also causes, and they lead to more effects etc). It’s the old flap of a Butterfly’s wings causing changes elsewhere.

We are part of this cosmic web of interaction. Death is a part of this chain and when one passes, they leave behind all the chains of cause and effect they have contributed to. There is some legacy, they live on through the people they impact.

This is not to espouse an afterlife, as from an evidence based point, its a non verifiable claim and therefore pointless and even harmful in many respects to believe in. But it brings some level of awe to realise that existence is mysterious and there is a level of interconnectedness in the universe.

Self Awareness

The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end – you don’t come to an achievement, you don’t come to a conclusion. It is an endless river. J. Krishnamurti

It’s easy to ignore and distract oneself. But with grief, as with an experience. You have to observe it. Don’t have any preconceived notions of how it should be, but observe without judgement. Not even to get rid of it. But just with curiosity.

Maybe this made sense. I write this for myself, to see how one has processed it at this moment in time. But again this is all individual, all conceptual. It’s different to understand theory and to really understand it at a fundamental level.You have to continue to observe the mind without judgment.

Conclusion

This is intellectual, too intellectual. I’m in it, so maybe this is how I’m choosing to process it.

I think grief comes in three parts. Loss, losing and loosening as Frank Ostaseski says in his book : The Five Invitations.

The initial loss is agony. It’s hard to keep up with all the thoughts the mind generates. You push against reality. “I want this to be different”. Desire is suffering.

Maybe after some time, you can come to a place of partial acceptance. But still, in those moments, you lose them. When I want to talk about my day or when I come back home expecting someone to love me unconditionally, make food, someone I can make jokes with, I lose again. It is the small things that one realises they have lost.

Then eventually, there is loosening. You take it less personally, less seriously. Life becomes lighter. You still carry the burden, but it is simpler. At least for me, it is understanding the ‘truths’ I’ve verified for myself above.

We will all lose. There is no security. And that is beautiful. It makes you realise that every moment is precious, and it is possible to find joy, purpose and tranquility. It is all on loan.

Now go spend time with people you love.