The Buddha says "Desire is the root of suffering" and stocism, via Epictetus says "Freedom isn't secured by filling up on your hearts desires but by removing desire.".

We feel some sort of pain, loss or lacking when we desire something. Desiring meaning it's not within our means, whatever those "means" need be to acquire the object of our desire. So we have no object, but only the desire of it.

And the space between what we have, and what we don't have, is desire.

How useless. And knowing it's of no use to us, why keep it? Throw it away, be done with it and push it aside.

It serves you in no good way, so if you must lose something in the time from now, til then- lose the desire to suffer.

Long-term thinking.

The phrase goes "take it one day at at time". Which is great advice, really is.

It means to focus on the "single step" in saying "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step". To not take on any more than that, because why would you? What does taking on more than is necessary accomplish?

It's certainly not efficient, or sustainable.

You take it one day at a time, like you focus on the single steps that make up the thousand mile journey.

So too you see, that today is one day in forever- not your forever- just forever.

That were you to frame, this day, in your life, against the backdrop of the infiniteness (as far as we know) of the universe- and everything that came before you, and will come to be and pass long after you're gone- you would live your life accordingly in humility, gratitude and freedom from the lanes, actions and ambitions of others**.

Your one day, live it now, live it wisely.

That it pales in any real significance against the inifite helps you not to take it too seriously.

**caveats obviously.

When you have lived long enough, you can look back and remember how many times you started again.

Another life, another relationship, another fitness program or schedule you used to keep.

I say "another" and not "a new", because by this stage "e leai se mea fou i lalo le la" (there is nothing new under the Sun).

You know what works for you, not because you've theorised it as a teenager, but you've done numerous seasons of this thing that got you the result and you've tweaked most of the "fat" off it, and it runs lean.

But you stopped doing it. For whatever reason.

So, we start again. Maybe this time reviewing our history, and helping the weight of that knowledge, those memories, help us forge it this time, in iron.

The known saying is "Perfect is the enemy of good". Which is good enough, I guess.

But there's so many things "lacking" behind this concept of wanting something to be perfect before you release it, post it, publish it, say it, share it.

Yes, there are things that need care and consideration ahead of release, but that list I'll argue is very small.

And the many things that get caught up in perfection really has no business, and benefits no-one with its delay.

Another saying that relates very well to this perfection idea is "there is no substitute for experience".

How is that even related?

This is not a new concept, and something I'm going to going over, repeatedly as I reconfigure my world currently.

When you focus on less things, you produce **more.

A certain amount of knowledge required to reach a "critical mass" which then produces something- an insight, a thought, an idea- that is deeply more valuable than anything else you could possibly create from a very superficial depth of knowledge on any given topic.

Always "doing more" actually ends up doing things "by halves" and ultimately, like multi-tasking, you become efficient at generating lots of low-worth, mediocre things.

Do less and get more.

** more = given you do the other necessary parts to make this true.

If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

In a world where delayed gratification is torture, and we are more and more stimulated across all 5 senses, constantly, every day. It's harder to accept boredom in any part of our lives.

Why do we even need to accept this? Why should it even be considered something we should tolerate?

Because it's a space in our ever crowded mental world to leave room to breath, to not think and not do.

But just be.

"The right thing, is the right thing"- subjective, but that's the gist.

In a world where we've let ourselves be conditioned by the whims and flows of our current society, from what's normal or acceptable, we're going to have a hard time once we snap out of this and realise what we're doing is not right.

And not in the "big" areas of our lives, but in the small every day choices we make that we know are not right. What we're eating, what we're watching or reading, or not reading. The time we waste on social media, or aimlessly browsing the web.

Especially in our thoughts and daily practices of self-control and perspectives. Are we making the right, or good choices?

Making things larger than they are is a great environment to feel pressure and "uncomfortableness" everywhere you go.

"Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius talks about being in harmony with nature and that everything happens exactly as it should so why should we feel uncomfortable with things as they happen?

Lately there's been a lot of "What" from a lot of people, and not enough "How".

It's too often "What" is wrong with the world, examples, citations and evidence ad nauseum of all the ways this world sucks and is failing us.

"E leai se mea e fou i lalo le la" There is nothing new under the Sun- is how I feel about all the "look!" and "gotcha!" proclamations on social media.

It takes an amount of cognitive load to do anything, and our reserves for this i.e. "willpower" is finite.

So why do we waste it on shallow endeavours?

To answer this question we must go deeper, or step back far enough to see the bigger issues at play for why we do this.