This is Optimal Living Daily Episode 286. You must go do the next thing by David Kane of Raptitude.com. Get ready to maximize your potential with Optimal Living Daily, the podcast that brings you the best in personal development and productivity every day of the week. Your Optimal Life awaits.
Now here's your host, Justin Molick. Hello, old friend, and welcome back to OLD. This stands for Optimal Living Daily. I'm Justin Molick.
If you're new here, this is a very different podcast than you're probably used to. The premise is simple, really. I find amazing content, mostly in the personal development space, and I get permission from the authors, and then read that content to you just like an audio book. I mostly read from popular blogs like Mark and Angel, who I just read yesterday, actually.
Derek Sivers, Zen Habits, The Minimalists. Really great bloggers to help you optimize your life, and it's awesome that you're listening. This podcast has had a big influence in my own life, just from reading such uplifting, positive, and inspiring motivational posts to you. If you listen every day, it has to be helping you too.
Even subconsciously, I think about things in a different way now when something bad happens or even good after reading these blogs to you for almost a year, every single day. It really has changed my life, and I hope it has yours too. And I don't want to make this intro too long, so I'll leave it at that. Thank you for continuing to listen, and let's continue optimizing your life.
You must go to the next thing by daybecaneofraptitude.com. I had the privilege of being present at my father's death. It was not like I expected. With illness, you see the person, the personality fade over time, and you come to expect that death will simply be what you call it when there's nothing left.
In light of this, it's easy to imagine that a life can taper down to nothing without any hard edges, but death itself does come down to a single moment. He was breathing, and a moment later, he was not. Having been aware of his prognosis for five years or so, I had already envisioned the moment many times, but I had it all wrong. I expected it to trigger intense grief, hysterics.
Instead, I found it felt intensely happy for him. He had arrived the finish line, and I was there to witness it. It struck me, with all the suddenness of a lightning flash, that he was the only one in the room with no problems at all, not a trace. All his uncertainties, needs, and worries evaporated, while ours still filled the room.
I watched him tell me as he was freed from the enormous weight of simply being alive, an unbelievably heavy thing which I'd somehow lost track of until that moment. That heaviness is something I had never fully appreciated until I saw somebody being liberated from it. The four of us at his bedside very clearly still carried it. It hung in the room like wet laundry.
It was in the hallway too, in the nurses' faces, in the other patients, in their weary families, and we were grieving for who? The man with no more troubles. I do forget it sometimes that life is a constant, forceful mixture of push and pull, a ceaseless assault of needs and hopes. As pervasive as it is, we appreciate the weight of this tumult about as often as a goldfish thinks about water.
Life's current is heavy and unpredictable and bigger than us, and as long as we're alive, we are at its mercy. Altogether, I do think it's worthwhile to be in it for most of us most of the time. Not that we ask for it, but our fate is to dance with this immense force until it lets us go, so we better learn to dance. The insight that made very well marked the beginning of my venture into the study of quality of life came from the late author, Richard Carlson.
Remind yourself that when you die, you're in basket, won't be empty. We often live life as if the point of it is to finally untangle the whole mess, to resolve all of our needs, to get to the bottom of all of our problems, to check off all of our to-do items, to relieve all stress, to balance it all out. It should be plain to anyone that for every concern that is duly handled, another emerges to replace it. Yet we are so prone to looking on our list of worldly concerns as if it is something finite that we can conquer.
I suppose it is finite, but you really want to be done with it? Our progress in working through the details of life seems to be the one thing that is of absolute importance. The parade of concerns gives us a degree of urgency that never really goes away until the parade stops. Or is it?
As I very slowly get a little better at managing the stuff in life, I'm getting markedly better at being okay with everything's eternally half-done status. I'm getting better at coexisting peacefully with stuff that needs fixing, problems I don't know how to handle, opportunities I am mis-managing, and even my anxious moods. Peace with anxiety, anxiety with peace somehow. Now and then I can sit right in the middle of all of my uncertain and unfinished business and relax in the knowledge that everything really is in its right place.
Strangely, the more I'm okay with everything being not quite okay, the better I am at moving the little things along to a place where they do feel okay. Makes sense? Not really? That's okay.
If peace is only allowed to come when there's nothing buzzing in our minds, no worrisome thoughts or unresolved issues, then it's going to be a long time before we arrive at it. And from there, there's nowhere else to go. If we need to put every concern to bed before we can sit and be truly okay with the whole picture, then the world's football coaches and drill sergeants have been right all along. You can rest when you're dead.
Life doesn't stop until it does. Whatever has happened, if you are alive, you must go do the next thing. After the doctor's formal pronouncement, we lingered in the room for a bit. We said our goodbyes and gave our thanks.
While there was no conceivable rush to leave, eventually there was nothing else to do. We put on our coats, left the ward, and took the elevator down to the main floor. You just listened to the post titled, You Must Go Do The Next Thing by davidcainofraptitude.com. This episode is brought to you by Samsung Canada.
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You know how I know this podcast is changing lives? I don't mean that in narcissistic way, or look at me, I'm changing lives kind of way, more of a, I'm so amazed and thankful that you're listening in the first place, and it's awesome that you're changing your life kind of way. I mean, it's not my content, I'm just reading to you, so I don't take the credit. It's the authors that are contributing that are making the biggest difference.
But anyway, I know that it's working not only because of a nice email I might get from you now and again, but when I get an email from one of the authors thinking me, because you got a bunch of subscribers to his newsletter and he knows that it was referred through me. And that was J-Money of the Budget Star Sexy Blog, and he has a rockstar finance newsletter that keeps you updated. And that's why I love you as a listener of the show. To be that engaged that you'll go to his site and subscribe to his newsletter when you heard it on one of these posts and to show him some love for putting all this content out there for free.
That's so cool and I'm really happy and grateful that you do that. So just another thank you for being engaged and really listening to this podcast. It means a lot to know that I'm not just talking to myself here in the small room. By the way, I also have a newsletter, I'd love if you join that too, just visit oldpodcast.com, or you can text the word optimal to the number 44222.
And there's a lot more I could say about this and thank you for it, but I think this ending is getting a little long, so I'll end it there and save it for another time. Have a great rest of your day, thank you again, and I'll see you tomorrow where your optimal life awaits. Hey, this is Dan from the Optimal Finance Daily Podcast, which is a lot like the show, except more focused on personal finance. Justin handpicks the best posts he can find from blogs and authors like Remake Safety, Mr.
Money Moustache, and more, and I read them to you five days a week. So if you enjoy this podcast, come on over and subscribe to Optimal Finance Daily, too. And together, we'll optimize your financial life. You've been listening to Optimal Living Daily, be sure to hit the subscribe button to stay up to date on each new episode, and head to oldpodcast.com.
That's OLDpodcast.com for a free gift, as well as more actionable tips and resources to help you maximize your potential. Thanks for joining us, and remember, your optimal life awaits.