The Round Year

Every time you put effort and energy into an task, ask yourself: ‘What will this accomplish?’It doesn’t make much difference whether your endeavor was useful, financially rewarding or simply meant to entertain: whenever you engage in an activity that requires work, there should be an expectation of results.People who are familiar with sorting their tasks by importance and urgency know that activities that are neither important nor urgent should be ignored (which they never are), but the next two quadrants are the ones where lives are truly wasted: the urgent activities.Many of them are reviled by companies, which have black listed them as productivity killers. The list is too long to mention, from last minute developing extra project options just in case, to the ad hoc meetings demanding progress reports to see where the project stands, to the worst offenders, paperwork simply meant to make one look busy.Nothing is ever that simple, because there is often a reward associated with these alleged time wasters: people feel that acting busy makes them look more valuable.Offering last-minute options might be a person’s way of agreeing to whatever a client wants to make them happy.That progress report nobody asked for may be someone’s attempt to increase one’s visibility in a group.There is no way of knowing whether something was worth doing other than obtaining the desired result.If you did, your effort was well spent. If you didn’t, your preparation, planning and regularly updated progress charts were a waste of time.Life is too short to explore every blind alley. Stop trying to persuade the unpersuadable.Stop doing things because you have the skills and stop working really hard on things nobody wants. Stop trying to shoehorn uncertain futures into rigid schedules that are unfit to contain them.The method, the structure, the organizational chart, the five-year plan are completely pointless time wasters when things turn on a dime and the factors influencing a project are unexpected, contradictory, yet to be determined or dependent on circumstances out of your control.How to know if what you are doing matters, then?1. Is the result even possible? Or are you trying to please an authority figure, while being fully aware the expected outcome won’t happen.2. Is the effort allocated to the endeavor proportionate to the reward? Or are you digging through bare rock to plant your garden?3. Are you building your sandcastle in a tide zone?4. Do you really care about what you are trying to accomplish? I know this is an obvious question. You’d be surprised how many times the answer is no.5. Will the outcome fit into the larger plan of your life? And if not, is it worth the sacrifices necessary to accommodate it?6. Will the result matter in a month, a year, a decade? Not to oversimplify this, butAny project requiring effort whose shelf life is shorter than six months should be scrapped right off the bat.Life throws curve balls all the time: the detailed plans we make for your future are easily undone by technological challenges, acts of God, personal crises, and sudden shifts in priorities, but people rarely regret doing the things that matter to them, even when those things fail or earn them public disapproval.Society has created algorithms for every task it is able to anticipate. There are tried-and-true ways to do just about anything you can think of. Find those algorithms first, and if they work, use them. They will be strongly recommended to you by default and you may second guess yourself when you feel they’re not a good fit for you; trying them anyway, against your better judgment, is the perfect example of an activity guaranteed to waste your effort and yield no benefit.Last, the important and urgent category is a unicorn. Unless the End Times are imminent, nothing truly important is urgent.Truly important things, the things that matter, need time to build their ecosystems, connect to other things that matter, sink below your reasoning threshold to become a part of who you are. Their progress is incremental; they grow in layers; they take wrong turns all the time and need to correct. They run into luck, or unexpected blocks, and you should expect both. They don’t live and die on a deadline.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* Unimportant tasks are time wasters whether or not they are urgent.* Society has created tried-and-true ways to do just about anything. Try those ways first, if you feel they might be a good fit. Don’t second-guess yourself if you believe they don’t apply to your situation.* Life is too short to explore every blind alley. Stop trying to persuade the unpersuadable. Stop doing what you’re good at if nobody wants it. Stop working really hard on projects that are dead on arrival.* Stop trying to shoehorn vague futures into rigid schedules that are completely unfit to contain them.* Do you really want the result, and is it worth the effort and sacrifice?* Is what you’re trying to accomplish possible, and will it survive its infancy?* Any project whose result has a shelf life shorter than six months is a waste of your resources.* Things that fit into the important and urgent category are exceedingly rare. Important things, the things that matter, need time to develop and don’t live and die on a deadline. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

We waste untold amounts of time and energy on things of no consequence. We don’t see that in the present, as the situations always present themselves as urgent, critical, and dire.Very few tasks are truly urgent and most things are fixable; those that are not are often outside our control. All of them take up real estate in your mind and emotions, however, wearing you down while yielding no benefit. They are energy wasters.In an environment that constantly instills a sense of emergency, how do you protect your peace?People give the mechanism of detaching from the illusion of crisis different names, centering, grounding, me time, but it works more or less the same way, by disconnecting you from the stress source.Whether you do that through meditation, visualization, personal rituals, focusing on something that holds meaning to you, enjoying a relaxing hobby, praying, it doesn’t matter.What all these activities have in common is they alter your state of mind. They take you to another reality, one which is quiet, pleasant and fully within your control.Take some time to see the current situation from the perspective of a few years, months, weeks, days. Would it still matter then? You will be surprised to realize most of the problems that wear you down and keep you up at night will not be relevant even a few short months from now.Look into your past, five, ten years, at all the problems you were struggling with then and assess how many of them even register as a memory now. This is what most of our daily grind looks like. Life is full of fake emergencies and problems that never happened.In no way am I advocating the abrogation of one’s duties, which is the burden of every responsible adult, just know that most of the dire emergencies are not, and a lot of the worries you carry are about things that are outside your control.I’ll illustrate the latter with an example we’re all familiar with: the plane is being delayed because of inclement weather, and every minute that passes brings you closer to missing your connection, a very important meeting, or the exciting event you were traveling for.This is something you can’t control, and no amount of stress will help you wind back the clock to fit your plans into the shortened time frame.As a wise person once said, you can’t should have done something yesterday.Most of the things that stress us out regularly, dire news, antagonistic political views, hypothetical or far away disasters, conflicting health or parenting advice, other people’s opinions of us, have literally no connection to our lives, and while it may be useful to be educated about them, they don’t warrant the expenditure of psychic energy.A quick exercise can eliminate most of these false crises. Ask yourself the following questions the second you feel the tension in your stomach, or the cortisol drip burning your veins:Is this my problem?Does it matter?Will it matter a year from now?Do I have to address it immediately, do I have to address it at all, and if yes, when?Putting anything on a schedule relieves you of the pressure of having to carry the worry of an outstanding task.You would be surprised how freeing it is to set a time for an activity, commit to respect it, and put it out of your mind until then.Determining whether a problem will be relevant some time from now helps you scale and reframe it.Here is another example: a deadline. It is your responsibility, and it is relevant in the present, but it will not matter a year from now. If you have enough time, you can deliver it as planned, and you should probably start working on it immediately. If you don’t have enough time, you could try to push for a delay. If you have more time than the task requires, there is no reason to let it take up space in your brain: put it on a schedule and out of your mind.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* Most of the things that stress us out regularly have no connection to our lives, and don’t warrant the expenditure of psychic energy.* No matter how important the task or event you are late or unprepared for, you can’t wind time backwards. You can’t should have done something yesterday.* Detach from the illusion of crisis by disconnecting from the stress source.* Activities like meditation, visualization, prayer, personal rituals, focusing on something that holds meaning, engaging in hobbies, alter your state of mind and take you to a place you can control.* The second you feel stressed, ask yourself the following questions: is this my problem?* Does it matter? Will it matter a year from now?* Do I have to address it immediately, or at all, and if yes, when?* Assessing whether a problem will still matter a year from now helps you get a true sense of its scale.* Putting the task on a schedule puts it out of your mind. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

Who are we, without even knowing it? How many people speak with our voices, think with our minds, quietly guide our beliefs and our actions?If we dig a little deeper into our identity, we’re likely to find our parents’ convictions, our friends’ preferences, our mentors’ codes of conduct, the faith of our spiritual role models.We are all aware of this, of course, maybe take it for granted, and don’t realize that our core identity has been molded by countless generations, through the socio-cultural past, farther back in time than we can possibly imagine.We function as repositories, securing the convictions, knowledge, and moral development that earlier generations deemed essential to preserve and hand down.Everything we are has been touched by another, sometimes in the present, sometimes across centuries, often against our will, and the voices of our inner council leave and change with time, using our minds like large and rather disorganized meeting halls, where congress is kept in small groups, according to the various topics, priorities, and moods.Your ancestor from the 1800s and your high school guidance counselor convene to discuss your choice of profession.Your grandmother confers with your new best friend to help you find the perfect balance of ingredients for your baking.Your genetic heritage silently impacts your preferences, expressing itself through choices and motivations beyond your conscious awareness.We unknowingly carry the legacies of our ancestors, encompassing fears, dreams, and biases that persist despite the passage of time and the emergence of new concepts.Wisdom is kept alive in oral traditions which morphed to adapt to modern and incredibly sophisticated social models.Centuries of experiences we never had speak through our instincts and get revealed in dreams.It’s a humbling truth that we are not living, but rather being lived by many. Along with this comes the responsibility towards them and the privilege of embodying their wisdom.We have been granted the honor to decide which aspects of their traditions, initiatives, and talents we are willing to take on and incorporate into our lives, one which adds profound richness and depth to our perception of reality.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* We are many people. They speak with our voice, think with our mind, quietly guide our beliefs and our actions.* We function as repositories of valuable thought.* Everything we are has been touched by another, sometimes in the present, sometimes across centuries.* The voices of our inner counsel leave and change with time, using our minds like large and rather disorganized meeting halls, where congress is kept in small groups.* We hold our predecessors’ fears, dreams, and biases far past the point when history would have condemned them to oblivion.* We are not living, we are lived by many, and have responsibilities towards them, as well as the privilege of carrying their wisdom. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

In physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction; the same applies to the realm of the mind.Every thought you nurture, especially profound beliefs and openly expressed convictions, will create both its intended result and its conceptual opposite, and will somehow manage to attract both of them into your reality.You can think of this as reality testing you to see if you meant it, and outlandish as it seems, it works with incredible consistency, and in ways too blatant to miss.I don’t know why that happens – the principle of balance, unconscious resentments from opposing thought groups, contrarian reactions, good old-fashioned spite.The important point is your thought will always bring its outcomes into your life, and also an opposing view of equal strength.That opposition, that resistance, will challenge you directly.If you embrace pacifism, you will gather a following of peace-loving individuals but have no other choice than to wage war.If you spread a message of love, you’ll resonate with love in the world and also find plenty of reasons to despise people.Being open-minded draws in like-minded people, but it can also unknowingly steer you towards embracing prejudiced ideologies.Choosing certain individuals over others is inevitable if you promote equality and strive for social justice.The concept that we draw both our karma and its opposite, regardless of our actions, is not comforting, however, recognizing this can help soften the irritation of having our thoughts mirrored back to us, both as expressed and in the negative, especially when we believe them to be virtuous and valuable.How to defeat this perverse feature of reality? I’m not sure we can, or should. Reality managed to keep itself in balance despite our hubris and delusion that we can make it better, and progress, when made, is slow and delivered in homeopathic doses.Knowing this happens will keep you humble, so when you invariably become the opposite of everything you believed yourself to be, even briefly and in insignificant ways, or when the perfectly crafted theoretical model you devoted yourself to yields less than palatable unexpected results, you’ll treat yourself with kindness and get back on the wagon of enlightened thought without surrendering to self-loathing.The world is filled with complexities and unintended consequences, but if you persist in your intention, things will eventually align in your favor.The metaphor of changing the course of an ocean liner comes to mind, together with the understanding that changing the course of the latter is an action requiring continuous effort, focus and control, and it encounters constant resistance.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* Every thought attracts into your life its physical consequences and its theoretical opposite.* Resistance to your thought is commensurate to its power.* The underpinnings of society are unconsciously primed to test you, to see if you value your core beliefs and moral principles as much as you claim to do.* Expecting this to happen will keep you from running amok with your theoretical concepts and losing touch with the practical consequences thereof.* Consistency of thought eventually triumphs over the constant and equally strong opposition every one of our ideas and intentions attracts, but it does so slowly and requires sustained long term effort. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

Focus is the ability to ignore all signals save one. Your mental capacity stays unchanged, but it’s solely focused on one objective.Focus runs on emotions and excitement, not willpower. If you need to force yourself to pay attention, your subconscious is telling you the task doesn’t interest you enough.That’s why people often struggle to focus on their tasks while unrelated trivia lingers in the background.It usually implies that the chosen subject of concentration hasn’t managed to hold their attention enough to drown out the surrounding noise.Remember all those hobbies and interests that made you lose track of time, forgo bodily needs, and put off everything else?The computer game that, by any reasonable standards, is just entertainment, but of which you can’t let go until you clear the current level?That quilt you can’t put down until you figure out the right way to put the pieces together?Even, for some weird people, I won’t name names, putting together IKEA furniture.That’s real focus.Reading the same wordy paragraph for the fifth time because you can’t zero in on its meaning is not.Focus is fired by interest and motivation, with reward, which is the most common reason for its application, coming in a distant third.The report you need to write in hope of a promotion pales in comparison to your genuine passion, whether it’s collecting stamps, handicrafts, or social media posting.Life is a collection of all the things you give your attention to, and its goal is understanding and experience, which is why your unconscious mind filters out things it deems unimportant.Your reason may tell you they’re worth the effort, but your instinct discards them with the efficiency of a sorting machine.Focus is subservient to your emotional side.If you want to dedicate all your mental capacity to a subject, you must love it passionately, everything else will only yield mediocre results.If focus were noise-cancelling headphones for your brain, your problem is that the music you’re listening to is likely boring and the traffic noises are filled with the wholesome sound of life.Focus is dead without passion. When the latter is present, time passes so effortlessly that you become oblivious to it. When it’s not, five minutes feel like forever.What if you have to focus on something that doesn’t hold your heart and soul, but it’s vital to your life plans?You have my sympathies.You can make yourself focus on a subject, but remember your heart won’t be fully engaged, and you should expect only 60% of the results, which is still better than nothing.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* Focus is the ability to ignore all signals save one. Your mental capacity remains the same, but it’s all dedicated to one goal.* Focus runs on emotions and excitement, not willpower.* It is fired by interest and motivation, with reward, which is the most common reason for its application, coming in a distant third.* Reward motivated tasks don’t hold a candle to subjects that pique your genuine interest; you can force yourself to pay attention to a subject, but you will never achieve maximum results.* The summation of all the things you’re paying attention to constitutes your life, which is why your unconscious decision center will not allow you to pilfer focus. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

Those born with exceptional traits often remain unaware of them until adulthood, as we tend to take our own mental and physical capabilities for granted and assume everyone else is the same.What is a gift? It is an innate skill, sense, or ability that is so second nature to you that you’re oblivious to others not having it.Do you possess a heightened sensitivity to your surroundings, easily detecting overlooked details and connections?Do you possess a special musical ability to recreate concerts and symphonies in your head, with all the instruments?Are you able to mentally multiply large numbers as quickly as a computer?Do you have a green thumb? A gift for healing? A deep understanding of how others feel?Gifts can take on various forms, some familiar and others so unusual that they can’t be labeled, but you’ll instinctively recognize your gift. You may deny it, but you’ll never doubt it, because that’s how gifts work.You underestimate the value of your special gift, dismissing it as common or worse, unnatural, and fail to realize it is probably the reason you exist.Gifts don’t wait for you to guess what they are. They won’t leave you alone until you grab that brush, that pen, that psychology manual, that watering can.It is near impossible to deny a gift.They are persistent, loud, and will drown you in guilt for ignoring them, and your life’s purpose.Don’t expect your gift to benefit you financially and set you up in a comfortable life. They rarely do that, at least for you.We’ve diluted the meaning of valuable to only signify things that have monetary worth.Empathy, intuition, artistic talent, a sunny disposition, dexterity, social intelligence, an unusual memory, even unique events in your life that have not and could not have happened to somebody else, those are your special gifts to express.Being able to orient yourself in a new city with almost magical ease is a gift.How to do right by your gifts? First, do not ignore them.If your heart compels you to draw, take charcoal and a piece of paper and get started. We are all so conditioned to do things for social approval, the very act of rebelling against what would people say will be a boon to your life.Dance, if the spirit moves you. Even if somebody is watching.Once you start seeing your talent as an expression of your own being, rather than a way to engage socially, it will truly shine.Many revelations and deep understandings of the world emerge from allowing yourself to practice your talent and give it a special place in your life.Second, don’t dismiss the insights your gifts reveal to you just because you don’t like them. The unexplored part of you, where all talent originates, is incapable of dishonesty. Whatever it tells you, it’s probably useful and true.Third, if you can’t resist the social pressure to give up an idea or practice that others don’t approve of, it’s better to keep them to yourself.No one goes to their grave regretting they didn’t conform more.Never give up on anything that brings you happiness or a sense of purpose.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* If you are born with unusual qualities, you may not realize you have them until adulthood, because you assume everyone is like you.Your gifts, while constituting your raison d’être, may not result in financial benefits.* Certain talents, such as music or art skills, physical dexterity, or technical abilities, are easily identifiable, while others are too unusual and distinct to be named.* Denying a gift is nearly impossible; it will manifest in your life through any means available, often unconsciously.* Don’t reject the insights your gifts provide just because you find them unappealing. Those unplumbed depths of yourself from which those revelations come don’t know how to lie. Whatever they tell you, it’s probably useful and true.* If you can’t resist the social pressure of abandoning an idea or practice everybody doesn’t approve of, keep them to yourself. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

Intent is not precise, nor is it linear, it loosely aims for the direction you plan while bringing about many echoes, counterpoints, and unintended results.Their effects continue long after the flame of their original intent has died out, often surprising the author, who has already moved on to something else and forgotten the purpose of the initial action.Every project comes with child themes, effects that blossom around it, coexist with it and further its intricacies, a result of the greater context coming together to create your desired outcome.Nothing happens in a bubble: all ideas, all creations, produce their own patterns.Their unexpected scions never follow your plan, and keep growing in complexity like sprawling tomato plants, until they require too much effort to produce.They start to fade away when their initial motivation fades.Sometimes the number and magnitude of offshoots dwarfs the original idea and humbles it with their life-changing outcomes (apps, electrical appliances and antibiotics are good examples), while at other times, they drown it in a spawn of unnecessary and bizarre derivatives.In either case, a whole range of objects, exuberant in its variety, comes into existence, just like a new species.Ideas are like rabbits: keep them around long enough and you’ll be overrun with the results.This progeny gets surrounded by a large number of related concepts, specific tools and amusing asides, which eventually split from their source to lead their own ironic lives, often at odds with it: fish tacos, dessert pizza, adult coloring books, his and hers items, grapples, valet trays, tea cozies, labradoodles, sporks, glamping, none of them echo their original purpose.These unexpected oddballs come packaged together with the desired result, like the salt and pepper you must always buy together, even if you don’t need the salt.They are the action hero figurines to your movie, the seldom used tureens to your soup bowls, the extra hardware to accompany furniture with assembly required.You may not have asked for them, but they will arrive anyway, because, albeit unexpected, they are secondary outcomes of your intent.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* Every idea generates many sub-themes which split off to exist separately from the concept that birthed them.* Ideas crossbreed to produce surprising hybrids.* The offshoots of an idea can sometimes be much larger and more useful than the original.* You can never anticipate all the outcomes an intent will produce: echoes and variations that were not initially planned for form as the bigger picture comes together to achieve the desired outcome.* Nothing happens in a bubble. Ideas form their own fractal patterns.* The unexpected effects of your plans are unavoidable; they are secondary outcomes of the original intent. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

Maintaining control over your mind when the latter is challenged in the battle of influences, inducements and restrictions we call daily life is a critical survival skill.People fight to win this battle because they don’t understand eliminating mental spam shouldn’t take any willpower at all.Just because someone makes a conjecture, that doesn’t mean you have to entertain it.We flitter away a lot of emotional energy in trifling mental brawls with no consequence.Remember, when these intrusions occur, that no matter what the background noise is that day, your truth did not change.I say your truth, and not the truth, because we all live in personal bubbles and can’t behold absolute truth. We don’t have access to it.From the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep, irrelevant blather constantly bombards our minds.While we easily ignore thoughts with neutral emotional value, the ones that have negative connotations weaken our focus: our brain treats them as emergencies, and dump cortisol into our systems in anticipation of fight or flight.These thoughts, which can be anything you find unsettling, but usually cluster around insecurities, regrets, failures, personal tragedies, health concerns, dominance issues and relationship problems, will consume all the bandwidth you have available for processing and leave no room for you to think.Thought challenges serve a singular goal: to split your focus. Treat them like you would the malware that floods your computer system with inconsequential requests until it crashes.The key word is inconsequential. Don’t use your energy to fend them off; the useful reaction is not processing them at all.All the thoughts that make a difference to your life have been catalogued and sorted by you the moment they came to your attention. Everything that appears out of the blue is probably a drain on mental capacity.You can label them trash and erase them without checking their contents, the same way you do with junk mail.Create a sorting mechanism for every thought that enters your mind:* Is this thought mine* Is this thought relevant to my life* Is this thought beneficial to my goals* Is this thought true and* Is this thought worth storing to process later?It seems cumbersome and time consuming, but in reality, this analysis is lightning fast, and deftly clears the mind of clutter.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* Maintaining mental control in the face of irrelevant thought challenges is a critical survival skill.* No matter what the background noise is that day, your truth did not change.* Negative thoughts throw you off balance and weaken you, because the brain treats them like emergencies and starts preparing you for fight or flight. They only have one purpose: to split your focus.* Treat mental spam like you would the malware that floods your computer system with inconsequential requests until it crashes.* Sort thoughts the moment they enter your mind to check whether they’re yours, relevant, beneficial, true and worth storing for later. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

Where are you right now?You may think you are at home, tending to mundane activities, but part of you is still at work, unable to let go of the problem you’re trying to solve, at the beach, dreaming of that tropical vacation, across the street, unable to extricate yourself from the rumble of a passing motorcycle, at the restaurant, choosing what to order for dinner.Our minds are in the future, creating many versions of our lives, and in the past, holding onto memories, we are here and in all those other places at the same time.The world in front of our eyes is just one of the many we create for ourselves.We are conditioned to believe our inner worlds don’t matter, that they’re just an idle pastime, and they denote lack of focus when the only thing worth effort and attention is the here and now. Nothing ever improves in the here and now. Here and now are finished products of your mental activity, and as such, not subject to change.We don’t think up our present: all the mental effort is devoted to the future.Our inner worlds are prototypes for that future, model alternate realities of how we perceive our life should be. Not only are they not idle time wasters, they are essential if we want to set and accomplish any goals.We make ourselves fictional realities where we can deal with emotions without meddling, brainstorm ideas without limitations, escape suffering and pity, boast impossible goals without judgment.Our inner worlds allow us truly to be ourselves.Not all inner worlds have a practical purpose: our minds birth environments and events that don’t and can’t exist, spring up creative expressions we can’t even understand, which inspire us to make poetry and art.And then there is the wonderful world of dreams, and they’re higher representations, the vision quests, just as much removed from our willfulness and rational meddling as reality itself.How many inner worlds should one have? As many as one can make, but at the very least these four: a vision for your future, a memory palace, a place to dream free and a sanctum of immutable truths.Why one needs the first three is obvious. The fourth one makes sense in difficult and chaotic situations, when keeping your mind straight about what you believe to be true and what matters to you is essential to your survival.Share your inner worlds. They are beautiful expressions of your soul. We make reality one thought at a time, and sharing this creative process with others can be a wonderfully fulfilling experience, but you should have at least one mind place, one world, that is yours alone.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* Your body may be in one place, but your mind is in many places at once: the world in front of our eyes is just one of the many we create for ourselves.* Our vision of the future, our memories, our dreams, our fantasy worlds, they are all real worlds, and are no less valuable than our real circumstances.* Creating and exploring your inner worlds is essential to your creativity and emotional health, and vital for setting goals.* We don’t mind the here and now. Here and now is a finished product, no longer subject to improvement. We mind our future worlds, the many versions thereof.* In dreams, fantasies and visions, our minds create worlds that don’t and often can’t exist, but inspire us to create poetry and art.* One should have at least four inner worlds: a vision of one’s future, a memory palace, a place to dream free and a sanctum of immutable truths.* Sharing your inner worlds with others can yield wonderfully fulfilling experiences, but you should have at least one world that is yours alone. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

Understanding is a tough mistress who makes you deserve her favor: it demands focus, effort, humility, time and patience.Whether gained through years of painstaking trial and error or learned from other people’s experiences, there is no shortcut to knowledge.Life always makes you earn it.The discernment that makes a fundamental difference in one’s life can not be faked, purchased, transferred or taken away.This is one of its perks, actually: it makes the world transparent to your wide-open eyes in every way, big or small, good or bad, so you can see the truth.Wisdom will not make you happy. That’s not its purpose. It just lifts you up to a broader perspective.Nobody regrets understanding the truth, however harsh and unforgiving the latter, living in a childlike state of fairytale bliss based on limited knowledge and choice feels demeaning in retrospect, but it does shatter the illusions we build our lives upon, along with their limitations and artifice.Gaining this knowledge is the hardest thing one can ever do, and many people go through entire lifetimes avoiding the monumental effort required.Though life seems to flow easier this way, it does not.Having fewer choices never translated to having better choices.Reality limits our reach and won’t permit us to function beyond the threshold of knowledge and skills we have earned. We can’t even see past our level of understanding.True understanding trains fundamental skills like effective communication, setting worthwhile goals, forming meaningful relationships, fast learning techniques, understanding patterns and the connections between events, and the highly undervalued skill of ministering to one’s body.Wisdom yields longer, healthier, more interesting and more accomplished lives, not easier ones.It is a constant quiet struggle against the trifling, futile concerns that pilfer one’s time and energy for no discernible benefit.Understanding and discipline often, but not always, go hand in hand.Sometimes people spend decades in fruitless effort, only to have wisdom dropped on them all at once, sometimes in their sleep, like a miraculous revelation.That’s life’s way of telling them they’ve earned it.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* Acquiring wisdom requires focus, effort, humility and patience: it has to be earned.* Understanding can’t be faked, bought, transferred, or taken away; it removes the veil of illusion so you can see the truth.* Life limits our reach and won’t permit us to function beyond the threshold of knowledge and skill we’ve earned.* Understanding doesn’t make you happy, just lifts you up to broaden your perspective.* In retrospect, nobody regrets gaining understanding: having fewer choices never translates to having better choices.* Wisdom yields longer, healthier, more interesting and more accomplished lives, not easier ones.* Awareness and discipline often, but not always, come bundled.* When knowledge is revealed unexpectedly, all at once, it is the cumulation of decades of patience, learning and effort. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

We call them omens, signs, kismet, synchronicities, and they simultaneously hearten and distress us, because they dismantle our illusion reality is random.We call it God’s will and surrender to it, or fate, and fight it at every turn, proud to withstand its unfair grip.We never think to just sit and listen to what reality has to say.She is not your enemy. It’s a partner who enjoys offering guidance, especially when you’re distracted and frazzled and can’t be bothered with nonsense. Most of the misfortunes of our lives come from our failure to listen.We like to think life whispers softly, and sure, sometimes that is the case, but it could blare at you through a megaphone and you still wouldn’t hear it because it’s not something that belongs in your frame of reference.It speaks to you through dreams, passing references, inspiration, feelings and memories, sudden changes in plans, meaningful encounters, strikes of luck and intractable circumstances.It stops short of putting a label on those, saying, ‘here, take this, this is yours’.It draws attention by using your favorite things, and irritating pet peeves, to make sure you got the message, and you get it, because you’re emotionally programmed to pay attention to it, but discard it like unsolicited mail.Once you realize you’re in an interactive environment, where you send out a signal and get back a response, you ask yourself what is it reality wants from you. Who is to say it wants anything? We always relate everything in our environment to ourselves.Most of the time it just puts up a giant sign to remind you, ‘I’m here, don’t dismiss me’.You’d be surprised how many times we remove what is from the equation, focused as we are on what ought to be. We all aspire to bend circumstances to our will, but here’s the secret: nobody puts effort into reshaping the irrelevant.What is matters.Treat it like it matters.Yes, the blinding flash of the obvious.We end up fighting it, eventually. It’s human nature to take luck for granted and find misfortune unfair, but what life keeps patiently telling us is some goals and expectations are like fancy ill-fitting garments; they cost you a fortune and just make you look bad and you have permission not to wear them.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* Reality is interactive: you send out a signal, and it sends back a response. Read the response.* Feedback comes through dreams, chance encounters, inspiration, feelings and memories, meaningful connections, sudden changes in plans, luck and unavoidable circumstances.* Emotional associations are powerful attention grabbers; your likes and dislikes often highlight important details.* Nobody wastes energy on wrestling something irrelevant into submission. What is matters. Treat it like it matters.* Some goals and expectations waste your energy and don’t fit you and you have permission not to pursue them. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

Remember the old maps with boundaries beyond which anything could happen? They always said here be dragons, even in the middle of the ocean.When we try to think past the limits of our understanding, we always assume we would envision a blank space, a vast emptiness, but that’s not what actually happens.We fill every gap in knowledge with weird versions of our familiar models.It works for everything, from imagining what alien life forms might be like to what lies beyond the edges of our visible universe.The answer always seems to be more of the same, but different.This goes a lot farther than people think. Not only can’t we imagine “different” we’ve never seen before, we can’t see it. We see variations on the theme of what we already know.The universe is infinite, therefore what lies beyond the edges of our sight must be more universe.We can’t conceive of a world without time, therefore before the universe began there must have been another universe.No matter how powerful our telescopes get, all we see is more universe, like people walking through a hall of mirrors see endless copies of themselves.From a historical perspective, whatever we extrapolate from existing knowledge has no connection to how things actually are: the foul humors theory did not come close to approximating microbiology, and the Flower of Venus is not an expression of the divine finding pleasure in beautiful geometry.There is no such thing as color, just variations in light wavelengths. Parallel lines eventually meet. Retro-causality is a genuine phenomenon, scientifically replicable. Light bends. Water can stay liquid below its freezing point.There is also the category of things we observe and take for granted, but don’t actually exist.The horizon is not where the earth ends. What we see as four stars may be just one, mirrored by gravitational lensing, nowhere near that location. Bicycle wheels don’t start spinning backwards at certain speeds. Stars don’t change color to cause the red shift.Two things our minds can’t process, nothing and infinity, so nothing had to become undifferentiated untapped potential for being and infinity always has a beginning and never veers off course.There is no guarantee Pi’s decimal digits will not start repeating eventually, or stop altogether (I just figured I’d trigger the automatic response that starts with you don’t understand math and ends with non-Euclidean geometry).Just a simple example of more of the same, but different.In short, we’re WYSIWYG.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* The mind can’t process nothing and infinity, so it turned nothing into potential and infinity into beginning and filled both with slightly weirder versions of its familiar models.* Just because we observe things, that doesn’t mean they are really happening, as seen in gravitational lensing, bicycle wheels seeming to spin backwards, the redshift, sunrise and sunset.* Not only we can’t imagine things we haven’t experienced before, we can’t see them. The mind replaces them with models we can understand.* Our mental models often have no relationship to the real thing, but we take them for granted and use them until offered irrefutable proof to the contrary.* We see what we think is there. What you see is what you get. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

Life works in probabilities. Everything is a gradient of maybe between yes and no. Since nothing is impossible, and nothing is absolute, life plans only make sense in broad strokes, and obsessing over their specific details is frequently doomed to failure.Events tend to cluster around coherent outcomes and we get drawn towards those clusters without even realizing.Between intent and outcome an entire tree of possibilities unfolds, whose branches intertwine with other people’s intents and probabilities, and the final outcome is not an instance, but a range of acceptable developments.Many of those are surprising and unplanned, because we don’t have enough data during the planning phase.In retrospect, our decision-making process looks more like this: there are things we would avoid at all costs, things we bitterly settle for, things that are alright, circumstances considered, lucky breaks, and dreams we’d do almost anything to accomplish.Circumstances are constantly in motion and subject to sudden changes, like a giant game of marbles with too many players.That doesn’t mean focusing on your intentions is pointless, quite the opposite: wishes and desires draw us closer to the clustering of circumstances with the highest probability of making them real.Of course, that highest probability may be less than their manifestation threshold, or worse yet, you may end up in the one percent of a ninety-nine percent sure bet.Nothing is certain until it actually happened, for good or for bad.If you want to guess where you’re going, track your past trajectory, which is no longer subject to change. This is a great way to test the decision-making theory above, and a good way to see the choices you actually made, as opposed to the ones you rationalize you made.Remember, you never choose your desires, or even your moral convictions. You always choose the higher value in a comparison game between evenly matched values.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* Life doesn’t work in certainties, it works in probabilities.* All circumstances are subject to sudden change and are continuously in motionWishes and desires get unconsciously drawn towards the clustering of circumstances with the highest likelihood of making them come true.* Nothing is certain until it actually happened.* The highest probability of something happening may be below the threshold that will make it manifest, or you may end up on the wrong side of almost certain odds.* If you want to know what your choices truly are, and, in consequence, where you’re going, track your past trajectory, which is no longer subject to change.* We never choose what we think we want, we always choose our values. Specifically, the higher value in a comparison between evenly matched competing values. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

What is a ritual? Any activity which carries or can carry symbolic meaning.Rituals appeal to our desire for recognizable patterns, our need to place ourselves into a familiar frame of reference that connects past, present and future and inside which we can anticipate and plan. They reinforce the knowledge shortcuts we create for ourselves to make sense of the world.A ritual never changes, and that is its power as well as its tedium. Through endless repetition, the tedium dissolves into muscle memory to appeal to deeper and otherwise inaccessible areas of the mind, below the threshold of our awareness.Rituals transform the most mundane objects and activities and imbue them with memories, values, intentions.A wedding dress, a favorite flower, a traditional greeting, typing a password, always placing the keys in the same pocket, these are conscious and unconscious rituals that make us feel safe and settled in our lives and reduce the number of details we need to remember in order to function.We instinctively impart important events in our lives with symbolic meaning, we wear special attire, we use special words and phrases, we create traditions around them. Traditions are nothing more than collections of rituals, born of the emotional life of a community and strengthened by their repeated use over centuries, often by many generations.That does’t mean rituals are foreign constructions that intrude upon us from outside. We create our own rituals all the time, with of without the awareness of this fact: the way we drink our coffee, our morning routines, the way we wash our hands, the way we check ourselves in the mirror, cooking habits, sleeping patterns, interacting with nature and pets.We comb our hair, we brush our teeth, we put our coats on the same way, day in, day out, without even realizing, such is the power of habit, of routine.Any routine can be actively associated with meaning, and thus become a ritual.This symbolic association is more than an intellectual exercise, it gets embodied, it sinks into our automatic responses in the same way we no longer have to make effort to remember motion sequences when we play the piano or drive a car. It becomes a shortcut for reframing perception.A true ritual is not a special activity, it connects to daily routines, the more it is repeated, the more its symbolic meaning connects to the deeper self and becomes a part of us. The words spoken, the gestures associated with it, bond to our emotions to become powerful and invisible psychological tools.Here is a simple exercise. People take off their ring or their watch when they wash their hands. Next time notice this gesture is automatic, the object is always placed in the same location, and always in the same way. Try to associate a sound, or a color, to this automatic gesture. Always remember to do it when you wash your hands. Soon your gesture of removing the accessory and placing it in its spot will become that sound and that color.If a mundane gesture can become a sound or a color, it can also become any abstract object you choose, from happiness to mathematical concepts, images, emotions, any mental content.If there is one thing worth remembering, is that the power of a ritual resides in its repetition and familiarity, which allows it to access the unconscious and shape emotions without a fight.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* A ritual is any activity that carries or can carry symbolic meaning.* Rituals work below the threshold of awareness. The tedium of their repetition dissolves into muscle memory to appeal to deeper and otherwise inaccessible areas of our mind.* Rituals imbue mundane objects and activities with emotions, memories, values, intentions. They are invisible but powerful psychological tools.* Any routine can be actively associated with meaning, and thus become a ritual.* A true ritual is not a special activity, it draws from daily life.* The symbolic association of a ritual gesture gets embodied, it sinks into our automatic responses like playing the piano or driving a car.* Rituals access emotions directly, without any interference from the conscious mind.* This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

The inability to share ineffable experiences is a limitation of our human condition, which makes us feel helpless and sublime at the same time. These moments are by definition impossible to put into words, but their characteristics and circumstances are broadly recognizable. They often attempt to find expression in metaphor – an open sky, an endless void, a pregnant silence, an all-encompassing presence – but they rarely emerge from it with their meanings unaltered.What unites these experiences is they are removed from time, with which they have no relationship, and essentially different from normal sensory perception, with which they can never be confused.They belong to a reality we can’t recognize, one for which we have no emotions or mental structures, and one which engenders awe, but defies expectations.Thus they are never frightening.They are unrepeatable, these ineffable moments, and not informed by one’s life experiences or emotional states at all; they seem to appear from nowhere, unexpectedly.They are life altering.A single instance of genuine awe can elevate one’s priorities, motivations, and outlook beyond decades of dedication and effort. They are often pivotal moments in one’s life.They are deeply personal.Like faith, love, or ecstasy, once experienced, they can’t be dismissed, forgotten, or undone. There is often a feeling of being initiated into a new state of being associated with them.They are unquestionably real.They feel just as real as this current moment, and sometimes more.They often hint at a broader context, a higher level of being, a much larger reality we can’t perceive in our normal lives, but whose existence becomes unquestionable henceforth.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* Ineffable experiences are removed from time and normal sensory perception. They seem to appear from nowhere, unexpectedly.* They inform our normal lives in ways that make them unquestionably real.* They are deeply personal and are often accompanied by an initiatory feeling.* They hint at a larger reality beyond our perception, but are never scary, because we have no frame of reference for them. They engender awe and defy expectations..* They are life’s pivotal moments. A single interaction with the sublime can elevate a person’s entire outlook on life beyond decades of dedication and effort.* This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

The round year is an ideal that got lost in our modern experience of time, but which is so deeply embedded in old spiritual systems, it often goes unquestioned.It is a simple concept, really. We don’t live years; we live the Year in perpetuity. When the Year ends, the Year begins again. The concept of round time.People attuned to the cycles of nature, who spend a lot of their life outdoors, have a deep instinct about this way of experiencing time, and feel its truth to the core of their being, because they are closer to its patterns and can’t help seeing them repeating.Keeping a nature journal especially helps one see how precise the changes of the seasons are, worthy of the most sophisticated clockwork in existence.The movements of the planets and stars create exquisite embroideries in the night sky, completing and restarting themselves with delicate precision, and if you have any idle time, I recommend taking the look at the petals of Venus, one of the most beautiful planetary orbits you will ever gaze upon. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

People picture their memory as a large body of water in which they’re immersed, one which challenges their sense of control, as they struggle to swim against its currents, or allows them the enjoyment of floating, relaxed, on its calm surface when the influx is pleasant.Frequently, its driving currents drag the unfortunate mind into a whirlpool it can’t control, and drown it in weakening and defeating feelings.The thoughts you are compelled to host against your will diminish and controlyou.Fighting them only gives them more power, and trigger the consciousness stream to which they belong to call up more of the same quality. They will use your mind as their power source, draining you to grow stronger, and leave you cored out and structurally damaged inside.Think of this as replacing an object that sits on a pressure plate connected to an alarm with its equivalent weight, thus bypassing the trigger.The process requires some planning, because you need to have replacements lined up before the toxic mental streak descends upon your mind like a Harpie. While you’re in its throws, you won’t be able to conjure anything else on the spot, much like a drowning man has no other option than taking the next breath before another wave pulls him under. Things are just a little better if there’s a raft to hold on to nearby.I call this planning process the building of a memory library, and it’s something that needs to be done during quiet and happy times, when remembering wonderful things comes easy.Anything that qualifies as a happy moment belongs in it.The moments you pick to populate this library should be constantly refreshed, to keep them in your active memory, and painted in such exquisite detail that bringing them to the forefront of your thought becomes effortless.Better yet, they should be connected to the unconscious workings of your mind, to record their smell, sense their ambient temperature, minor ancillary details associated with them, the sounds in the background.Having multiple points of access, especially of the kind not accessible to the rational mind, where all the caustic blather lives, is especially useful.Those mental objects should feel as real as the physical things and circumstances which surround you right now.No happy memories? No problem. Make some up. The mind doesn’t distinguish between an actual memory and an artificial one. Clean up your memory banks to feel less encumbered.Despite unconscious body language, like gazing left instead of right, depending on remembering or imagining something, your mental processes are the same for both of them.It’s bad enough when circumstances like serious illness, hardship or grief don’t allow you a single breath out of the pain, why suffer through the pointless daily sludge of irritating thoughts as well?Externally imposed, innocuous, chit-chat driven memory attacks, are relentless and insidious, and overwhelmingly negative, but even for those unavoidable situations there will be enough material in your memory library to refashion the meaning of what was said and reduce its toxic load.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* Actively navigate your memory instead of being caught by its rip currents.* The thoughts your mind hosts against its will weaken and diminish you. Fighting them gives them more power, and they drain that power out of you, making you more vulnerable to their attacks in the future.* Keep replacement memories on standby for immediate availability during a defeating mental attack.* Those thoughts should be selected ahead of time and reinforced until they rise to the surface automatically.* Make the memory library components painstakingly detailed, sensory connected and fresh, and give them several access points, independent of the rational processing if possible.* They should be vivid enough to overpower what they’re replacing.* Don’t restrict yourself to real memories, create what you wish.* The mind can’t tell the difference between processing an actual memory and an artificially constructed one.* There is only so much stuff you can remember at once. Fill up that space with content of your choosing and there won’t be much room left for random negative thoughts.* Use your memory library to refashion the meaning of toxic allusions and dental drill chit-chat. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

Whose thoughts run your head? That is a strange question. We take for granted we are the ones who think our thoughts, when in fact they are only in part our production, if at all. This article is a perfect example of that.We act like resonators for other people’s minds, contemporary intellectual currents, commonly held unquestioned beliefs, willful influences, and overpowering models.Our thoughts are socially constructed composites inside which those mental influencers weave themselves around our personal circumstances and general zeitgeist.This is a truth we keep parked under normal circumstances. Thoughts are thoughts; whether you think them or they’re visiting, how are you going to function without them?They were designed to be useful, and evolved to present themselves as such, even when they are obsessive and defeating. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

There are truly powerful forces at work in our universe, forces so awe-inspiring our minds can’t comprehend them: giant black holes of near infinite gravity, invisible waves that propagate through vast expanses at speeds that bend space and time, energy rays which permeate all the matter in their path, enormous forces in something as small as a neutron, patterns that organize entire galaxies with impeccable precision.If there is anything we humans understand, is power. We run our lives by it, struggle to negotiate it, acquire it, maintain it. Power rules everything that is made of matter.In the unseen realms of reality, the subtle currents which shape life, society and progress, the equivalent of power is will.Will is the guiding force of sentience, and it’s frequently confused with power, since we fused these two words into one, and now use will and willpower interchangeably, but that is a misunderstanding of the words’ meaning.We impose willpower on things we want in order to control them, because as yet, we don’t. We express our will through things we control without even having to think about them.Will guides gently beneath the threshold of reason. It senses synchronicities, recognizes unique opportunities, shields us from unapparent dangers.Will is the very purpose of one’s life, a purpose we often aren’t consciously aware of. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

Once upon a time, emotions were the key to our survival. They are fast, much faster than thoughts, and can assess a situation at lightning speed, before our rational analysis, before our senses even; they are a lost superpower we forgot how to wield.Unlike instincts, which are devoid of information, emotions are pre-analyzed: they’re shortcuts to things we already know, they make connections between seemingly unrelated data, and they’re rarely wrong.Much as we like to think of ourselves as rational, emotions still run the show silently in the background.Nothing that matters, nothing of value is ever achieved without their input, even if we like to make a big deal out of explaining them away in retrospect.What do emotions advise us on? Trust, danger, opportunity, odds of success, probability of future events, health, our place in society.It is emotion, not thought, that guides our purpose and empowers our will.We dismiss it at our peril, because it shows up to inform, and the information is usually related to fundamental issues: survival, life’s direction, goals, affinities and trust.Emotions are our primary drivers. There is no true self-control when they are ignored.People often mistake suppressing emotions with demonstrating willpower and are surprised to see the consequences of that attempt run opposite to what they were trying to accomplish.One can’t erase emotions and one shouldn’t try. They’re soul energy, and like all energy, they can’t be destroyed. Their powerful fuel can be channeled, sublimated and used, focused towards one’s goals. They are precious and powerful and they should be revered and protected.Pilfering away emotional power is like wasting time: you only have so much of it and once it’s gone, you can’t get it back.Wasted emotional energy results in a lack of willpower.Contrary to popular belief, these powerful levers are hardly outside of our control. They’re just as easy or hard to develop as reason, and they take just as long.One attends school for decades to gain the requisite knowledge, but one expects emotions to roll over on command at the drop of a hat.When you devote time and attention to them, you start to see their effects, expect them, and understand how to make them work to your benefit and not your peril.You make connections between the outcomes and their invisible causes, you cultivate the beneficial emotions and learn to amplify them at will. You find safe outlets for the negative ones and learn how to transmute their energy so it’s not wasted.Just like the wind, you can’t see your true emotions, only their consequences, and every lesson is learned the hard way, through life experiences.The markers of a healthy emotional landscape are never in your mind, they always lie outside of you, they are right in front of your eyes and all around you.They are reflected in loving relationships, physical and financial health, trusted friendships, enjoyable and peaceful surroundings, safety and long life.No amount of intelligence can make up for not having your emotions under control, and learning to master them is an elusive, life long process that is hard to put into words.The simplest way to figure out where you got off track is to look around you and notice what’s broken. There’s your emotional deficit, right behind that problem. As within, so without.If reason is at odds with emotions, emotions always win. We’ve all been taught that continuing to dig in the wrong place is a test of resolve. We are in fact throwing good money after bad, ironically increasing the frustration that kept us from our goal in the first place.Desire, loyalty, perseverance, admiration, inquiring spirit, aspirations, all the drivers of society are powered by emotions and by those who understand them and know how to use them.Negative emotions are a legacy of our ancestral survival instincts.Never dismiss them! They are a lot more powerful than positive ones and, left unchecked, manifest as destruction.It’s tempting to use negative emotions, because they are so powerful and fast their consequences can be seen immediately, and their active use doesn’t require time, knowledge, patience or trust.They’re usually deployed as weapons, loaded on top of other emotions, also negative, and their combined firepower inflicts exponential damage on both their user and the intended target.Because they work so fast and require no training, and because they feed upon themselves and all the ugly instincts and frustrations people shove in the dark corners of their minds to maintain a presentable persona, negative emotions end up running out of control, in a cascade effect of damage, tragedy and failure, like a wheel picking up speed while rolling down a rocky hill.There is always a cost associated with letting anger, hatred, and guilt run the show, a cost we incur as grief and loss.So, if they’re so destructive, why did we need to have negative emotions in the first place?They are useful in life-threatening situations when they instinctively kick in to bypass learned civilized behavior and increase our chances of survival.Love your life. Love your body. Love your family and friends. Love your home. What you love thrives. Love is the law. What you truly believe and feel manifests in reality. It is the ultimate lie detector machine.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* Emotions are faster and more powerful than reason and senses.* They are the guidance system to our survival. They detect danger, assess trustworthiness, orient us towards our goals, and define our life path.* You can’t see your true feelings, only their consequences. Your emotional life is not hidden inside; it’s right in front of your eyes, reflected in your circumstances, relationships, and even physical surroundings.* Don’t waste your feelings on trivial matters. They come in a limited supply, and just like time, once they’re gone, you can’t get them back. Most of the ills that drain our days are not worth the emotional damage we allow them to inflict.* Wasted emotional energy results in a loss of willpower.* Negative emotions are addictive, fast, and powerful. They require no skill to deploy, and for this reason they are always abused. This misuse of power eventually runs out of control in a cascade of failure, tragedy and loss.* You can’t dissimulate genuine emotions because their consequences manifest as real outcomes in your environment.* What you love and pay attention to grows and thrives. What you neglect withers on the vine. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

EmailShareA breeze quickens in the middle of the forest, and all the tree branches turn in unison, revealing the undersides of the leaves and changing the color of the canopy. The birds startle and take flight together, suddenly, and your heart gets startled with them, surprised by their sudden motion.You look up at the sky through the branches, taken by their beauty, feeling the light dim as clouds pass across the sun, and instinctively monitor the fussing in the branches, relieved to hear it subside when the sun peeks out again from behind the cloud cover.We are nature, just like the birds, the clouds and the trees, we’re made of the same elements, we engage in a free energy exchange with our world when we breathe and when we eat, we’re tuned into nature’s cycles, we return our substance to the earth when we die.Once this realization kicks in, reality looks a lot friendlier, a kindred spirit of sorts, in whose essence we partake without even realizing. Home.We feel a storm approaching in the tense stillness that precedes it. We learn the movements of the sun so we can tell the hour and the season, we know higher ground by the direction of a stream.Poets said we are stardust, but we needn’t go as far as the stars. We are of the Earth, and that should be enough.We are attuned to the places we inhabit and synchronize with their rhythms, crops and weather; we unconsciously align ourselves with our surroundings, pick up on their subtle cues and act upon them without thinking, with a shiver, a startled gaze, a reaction to a sound.Because everything is made of matter, the things inside our world, as well as us, we tend to forget the other half of being, energy, which runs through everything, animating life and motion, and knows no boundaries in its endless movement, connecting all the components of reality, be they inorganic or alive, in its cohesive web.Pay attention to this energy exchange, to the heat of a stone baked in the sun warming your hands, to the spark of static energy you discharge when the air is dry, to your pruny skin, proof that your body has relinquished its water to the larger volume surrounding it.We share energy with the air when it’s too hot or too cold, or when we hear a sound.If you sit still with your eyes closed and try to feel the world around you, you may sense this invisible pulse of life surrounding you and passing through you.Our ancient instincts are still there, buried under centuries of civilized behavior, and we’re not that different from the wildlife when it comes to feeling the unseen shifts of energy around us: we still feel safer with our feet on solid ground and our breath still matches its rhythm to the wind.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* We share the same building blocks with everything in nature, be it life or inorganic matter.* We are constantly engaged in an energy exchange with our environment.* Our bodies unconsciously align themselves to their surroundings to live in balance: we adapt to the local weather, crops, daily rhythms, and landscape.* We are in nature, and we are nature.* Energy moves freely around us, through us, and through everything else.* At a basic level, there is no real boundary between us and our surroundings. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

We live in our own perception of reality, where our level of knowledge is the real constraint on what we can see. This is the kind of knowledge that makes us understand the sun, moon and stars are not really in the sky, but very far away, that roads don’t taper off to a fine point on the horizon, and what we think we see is not necessarily what’s actually there.We run on assumptions, because we’d be hard pressed to make decisions otherwise, in an environment that asks them of us relentlessly fast. We build mental models, shortcuts, categories and safe zones, in order to function, but that’s all they are, models, interpretations of our perception of reality, not accurate descriptions of reality itself.Nothing is impossible. Nothing is absolute.When our perception changes, reality follows suit, rushing to catch up with the new perspective, and then we have to accept things we’d have thought absurd only moments before. We are, in the deepest sense of the word, reshaping our world.Outcomes are not fixed in place. We live a dynamic range of possibilities which shift without notice and require effort to maintain.In this world where the merest change in thinking can completely overhaul one’s life, the only currencies we have are focus and will.Of course, we’re social creatures, and need approval, love and support to thrive, so we all unconsciously trade off some of the latter in order to gain acceptance. We all yield to currents of opinion and social norms and accept the current scientific views as valid, with various degrees of pliability, according to our temperaments.Soon, this social scaffolding of common opinions becomes more important than the construction it supports, which is our mind. We become too agreeable, allowing society to direct us to its common denominator, so we can ride its mainstream views to our graves, or too unyielding in our beliefs and we make it our life’s purpose to impose them on others at any cost.In the fast flow of ideas that defines our age, we are constantly dragged, both intellectually and emotionally, by strong currents – the points of view of people we admire or despise – and end up paddling in place just to maintain our position, exhausting ourselves.We forget the most important truth: our lives are personal experiences, and all we have are those experiences.We are not here to execute a pre-owned list of standards, we’re here to develop our own.Any choice, even a bad one, is superior to submissive quiescence. There is no progress in endlessly replicating thought processes that have already run their course.Consciousness should have no slaves and no masters.Any assertion of will is challenged by default, because society has a strong inertial drag on ideas that clash with the status quo. Whether that means revolutionizing propulsion or changing your hairstyle, it’s irrelevant: all new ideas are unconsciously evaluated for their threat potential and rejected.A plethora of assumptions and defensiveness emerges instinctively to preempt your dissent, and your wish for a hairstyle change becomes a recalcitrant idea and one you can’t be allowed to entertain.That’s why intentions yield the opposite result in the beginning (one can’t affirm this with absolute certainty, because there is no such thing, but it works reliably enough). There seems to be a threshold of resistance that must be overcome before reality yields to one’s will, and it miserly guards the door on small wishes and on lofty ones just the same. Persevere.Will is empowered by use, like training a muscle, and will be reduced to the strength of a wet rag if left idle too long.You make an impossible wish from your heart, one that does not track in reality, and because we’re all conditioned regarding what is and is not acceptable to aspire to, we sigh and soon forget it.That wish never goes away. It sinks below the threshold of consciousness and continues to exist in your choices, thoughts, and social interactions. It slips out of your mind and into the world, a surprising echo of your retired mental process.We don’t stay the same as we grow old, and neither does our focus. We evolve a constantly shifting perspective through time.Will is not intended to be a rigid thought prison, but a swift and maneuverable craft for life’s journey. Change your mind often. Being able to do so is an expression of will.The outcomes are often surprising, because the results of our wishes and desires rarely look in the world like they did in our head, but they stay within the range of the original intent.For good or ill, focus draws one nearer to one’s vision, and that is as true for negative results as it is for positive ones.People don’t think of negative emotions as free will, they consider them externally imposed and impossible to overcome.While social pressures and dissenting opinions help to shape negative expectations, fear and doubt are, in fact, expressions of one’s own will, and sadly, they are powerful.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* Intent will always be challenged by the ingrained societal instinct to keep things from changing. Persevere.* The will which is not exercised loses its strength.* Will is a personal tool, not to be imposed on or be wielded by others. No slaves, no masters.* Just because you rationally let go of a wish, that doesn’t mean its pursuit became an abandoned track. It may be out of sight, but it’s still active and your reality will reflect it in surprising ways.* Being able to change your mind often in response to changes in your perspective is an expression of will.* Intentions are imprecise, because reality rarely matches our mental model of it. Don’t aim for a specific outcome, but for an acceptable range.* Fear and doubt are also expressions of will, and they are powerful. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

A symbol is a stand-in for something else. What? Anything you wish and anything your mind can conjure: ideas, feelings, objects, events, shorthands, messages, memory aids.We use symbols to condense meaning into its smallest form, for immediate reference, portability, and emotional impact.The main purpose of a symbol is to evoke and reinforce memories and feelings at lightning speed. Even a casual glance will retrieve the message it was meant to convey.Unlike words and numbers, which are primarily designed to communicate meaning to our rational mind, even though they too can be used as symbols as well, the latter reach much deeper into our emotional core and evoke automatic responses often beyond our control. This is their power and their failure: once a symbol was associated with a certain meaning, it is nearly impossible to disentangle it from that meaning.When we hear the word symbol, we immediately relate it to the common language of symbols we are all familiar with, a cross, a ring, a heart, mean the same thing to everyone, in every language, but the most powerful symbols are personal. Personal symbols are subtle but powerful motivators, and their significance is usually shielded from the gaze of a casual observer. They act like emotional armor; they keep us confident and focused as we venture out into the world.Sometimes these loaded objects are valuable heirlooms, but most often than not they are just humble containers for the meaning we chose to pack inside them: a common pebble picked off a beach during a happy family vacation embodies more emotional power than a precious jewel.Symbols can be anything that speaks to the heart, although for practical purposes it helps if they are small and portable, so you can carry them with you wherever you go. Over time, personal items like religious pendants, wedding bands, heirloom rings, become so closely associated with the person who wears them they get infused with his or her personality and become expressions of it in and of themselves.Once a symbol is loaded with significance, its message delivery becomes automatic.This is the way symbols are supposed to work: they cut through the narrative to reach emotions directly. Their powerful trigger mechanism was not lost on faith, advertising, politics, and the military, all of whom extensively use symbols to create commonality of thought and evoke positive feelings about the object of their focus.Some symbols, like logos, religious artifacts, or insignia, are powerful motivators, used to sharpen focus and return the attention to the message they’re designed to convey, while others act in more subtle ways to evoke elusive feelings hard to put into words – a cozy blanket by the fire, a flock of seagulls, the sound of the rain.We rarely think of these as symbols, and that makes them even more powerful – they appeal to desires and emotions we’re unaware we have.I’ll quickly run through a few more examples, and as I do, I’m sure you’ll recognize them, because you saw them countless times, in stock photos, advertisements and social memes – a shell on a beach, rain on a windowpane, a campfire at night, a solitary tree, a lightning bolt, a steaming cup of tea, a Christmas decoration, joined hands, a budding branch, children playing with puppies.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* Symbols are compact carriers of meaning.* Once a symbol is loaded with significance, it’s almost impossible to dissociate it from its message.* Personal symbols empower and shield people emotionally, especially during difficult social interactions. Status symbols are very good examples of that.* Symbols are fast acting and provoke reactions before the rational mind has time to check them. The emotional response they evoke is usually beyond our control.* Personal symbols are usually small, inconspicuous and portable, and their meaning is kept private.* The significance of a symbol worn on the body increases in direct proportion with the time it was worn. Symbolic items bond with their users.  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

There is an old Navajo blessing that starts with ‘may you walk in beauty’, a reminder to appreciate what a gift it is to belong in the world. The beauty of existence runs deep beneath its surface, into its structure and even into our perception of it. Things aren’t beautiful because we perceive them as such. We perceive them as beautiful because they align with the way reality, and our own beings, which are part of it, organizes itself.Everything participates in this giant quest for harmony and order, everything, from our mental constructions to our visual patterns, to our emotions. Everything we perceive as beautiful just fits effortlessly into the larger frame of reference.Beauty springs secondary aspects by association, aspects like peace, love, virtue. We’re often unaware of those unconscious associations and we nod knowingly when they’re pointed out to us, still in the dark about the fact the associations themselves are an expression of those same underlying principles we call beauty.Walking in beauty is not a happy accident. It’s a way of being in which the viewer is in harmony with his or her surroundings. This harmony casts back upon the viewer the beauty we often see in saints, sages and artists. Such beauty is so overwhelming our souls can’t fit it all in, and it spills back into the world in creative form.People will object that beautiful things are so in different ways, that artful pottery, a sunset or a piece of music don’t share features. What they share instead is the underlying structure of beauty, the one we perceive before we’re even conscious of it, reflected in proportion, symmetry, consistency, scale, rhythm, function, balance, harmony. These are the verbs of reality, its connective tissue, the relationships between its many parts.Their orienting principles, which command instant recognition, are ingrained in instincts hundreds of thousands of years old, as old as our senses and our capacity to emote, and found artistic expression on cave walls and hill sides before the development of language.We walk in beauty every moment without seeing it, the beauty of a humble weed, the tiny dust particles hovering in a ray of light, a soap bubble. How can we be too busy for the only thing that matters in the world, the drive to evolve order that reality so generously lays before us in ways that align with our senses so we can understand it?In beauty we see more, first because we’re naturally repelled by ugly things and second because we want to know beauty, we want to know what makes the image, piece of music, dance, or landscape extraordinary, so we can recreate it.We yearn to replicate beauty, whether or not we realize it, we always want more of it.Reality started with the most basic building blocks, which allow us to share essence with the rocks and the air, and from this essence it built different types of things, and refined their characteristics until the things themselves could not be thought to belong together anymore, but at the core of this drive to refine complexity there is always the same principle: things can not embody an essence different from that of the material of which they were made.Beauty rebuilds that bridge of unity inside of being, with invisible connections between its seemingly unrelated parts, so we can see the world as a continuum of transformation, not a discordant jumble of discrete parts. Is there any difference then between beauty and organization or structure? Isn’t there beauty in chaos too, sometimes?There is no chaos, my dear friend. Everything is order, just not the kind that you’d expect.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* 1. Beauty reflects the organizing structure inside things and inside our perception of things.* 2. Our concepts of beauty are hard-wired in our brain, they are not a matter of individual choice. We use our unconscious understanding of the way things fit together at a basic level, which we call beauty, to orient ourselves in the world, just like we use our senses and emotions.* 3. Perception is a two-way street: what we touch with our senses touches us back. When we recognize beauty, we become its mirrors in the world.* 4. Things can not embody an essence different from that of the material from which they were made. Beauty is an intrinsic quality of reality.* 5. Beauty brings up the desire to make more of it.* 6. At the most basic, there is only one creative principle – evolving complexity from simple forms – and we understand it as beauty. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

We’re all many people, spun together in a bundle of threads we call the self, a constantly changing manifold that gains and loses components like a branching river with tributaries and deltas.We don’t think about how much we change throughout our life as these pieces of ourselves get swapped and replaced. We never analyze their mix, which we unconsciously accept as our self.Every morning we wake up different people.We’re not the people we were the day before and we don’t even realize it, because the instinct to accept change at soul level is deeply embedded within our survival mechanism.We can feel those changes, though, which are too subtle for our reason, and turn to our emotions to transcribe them into the myths, metaphors, patterns and models, the denizens of the realm of archetypes.Those are the threads we weave into the ever changing fabric of our lives: the age of innocence, the stages of womanhood, the golden years, the prime of life.We exist as shifting clusters of archetypes, and we can’t even see it, for the same reason we can’t see our own eyes: they are the windows we look through in order to see the world.Where do they come from? I don’t know.Psychology says archetypes are common patterns of behavior, so old we feel like they’ve always been there, in the collective unconscious, fashioned from our basic drives and ideals; in real life they’re highly interconnected structures, which, like complex organic compounds, are often too intricate to sort out.A small but steady stream of these personality components carries us through our life changes; we call those our core personality.They are the reason we remain recognizable to our friends and loved ones as we churn through being different people, like mail sorters dispatch envelopes to destinations.Archetypal complexes are living evolving things.Just like biological entities, their thriving depends on a world of unconscious, simultaneous processes too fast and convoluted for our rational control.They are not abstract, inanimate objects by any stretch of the imagination, their number and structure changes all the time and, like all living things, they naturally mutate and crossbreed. The sum of their individual instances makes up its own species: the species of non-embodied drives.New members of this species are born all the time, and they get more sophisticated as time goes by, progressively harder to understand and virtually impossible to control.They visit your mind, they stay, they leave, they inspire, they destroy. They are loud, quiet, high-minded, and dumb.They cover the gamut of human experience.Their many threads shift like the weft of a loom, through the warp of your core personality, and weave the fabric of self, a beautiful tapestry of experiences and emotions you can only see looking back.They are your best friends and your worst enemies, your trusted allies, your muses, your teachers and your tormentors, and you can’t live without them anymore than you can live without breathing.You can’t chase them away, they are you, they are as much you as you’re ever going to experience as your self, that great mystery of life.We rely on this society of archetypal complexes to develop our thought processes, and pick up on subtle, silent cues, like body language, or facial expressions.They drive our affinities and dislikes and they are more powerful than we think because we have so little control over them.Your knotted and incomprehensible bundle of archetypes decides which you shows up for social functions and intimate experiences, which movie makes you cry and which words wound you, and the more you try to turn them away the more insistent they get, because they feel perfectly entitled to live inside your head, and they’ll leave when they feel like it, and not a moment sooner.It is an enchanting experience, watching the many sources of your self come together into a more or less harmonious and hopefully integrated whole, although you have to appreciate the irony your detached observer self can’t be as objective as you think, given it too is part of the set of archetypes and, as such, biased towards its kin.What is a self to do, lost in this imaginary meta-society that runs circles around the rational mind?Don’t worry about it.It will silently run your mind for you and make you who you are, and if you’re really good, it will let you watch.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* We are complex bundles of selves which constantly join and leave our consciousness in a continuous smooth flow.* These bundles are living entities, developing so many individual instances inside a set of common characteristics we can think of them as a species.* Their complex patterns of thought and emotion run the same on all human brains and that allows them to bind to people and to each other and facilitate deeper levels of understanding.* We become different people with each passing day, based on what components are currently in the bundle.* Who we are depends more on our affinity for specific threads than on our circumstances. It’s all in the chemistry.* Stable and long-lasting components make up our core, that which keeps us unique and recognizable through all the changes.* Just as there is no such thing as music, only a collection of harmonic frequencies assembled in a specific configuration, there is no you, only a uniquely assembled and wonderfully complex bundle of personality threads.* You can’t grow beyond their reach because there is no you outside of it. All the components of the set are inside the set. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

The seasons, the revolution of heavenly bodies, the water cycle, circadian rhythms, the endless chain of births and deaths, the structure of the atom, reality is made of circles.Some are obvious and some are set to time frames that differ significantly from our lifespan, which makes them difficult to see.If you look at life from a distance, you are going to notice things repeating. Older people have the field advantage here, because they had a slightly longer running time for this experiment called life.Reality is stingy with its resources, it doesn’t like to waste energy (which gets recycled anyway, as you recall), so, when it finds a working structure it repeats it forever. Speaking of the Big Bang and the heat death of the universe, neither of which benefit from a before or an after, respectively, in the eyes of science. I’m going to go out on a limb here.Endless CyclesThings are fated to run in circles: you start something, you do it, you end it, and then you start it again. Look, it’s summer number forty-five, it’s Christmas number seventy-two, it’s sunset number eighteen thousand nine hundred and four.You’d think we’d be annoyed by the endless repetition of events, but we are not, we revel in anticipating it, the sense of familiarity we derive from it gives as confidence and makes us feel safe: we too run in circles and the recognition thereof makes us at ease in the world.Variations on a ThemeWe don’t get bored, probably because the circles have minor variations, no two are ever the same, and that slight difference, the surprise, together with our familiarity with the theme, makes us eager to experience them again.Repetition Equals StabilityWe record the number of repetitions proudly; they make us feel accomplished and wise, and they are ever more precious to us as our own cycle unfolds, like rare artifacts the kind you say they don’t make anymore, while in the back of the shop new batches of those rare artifacts are being produced as you speak.There is no end to energy and reality has all the time in the world, endless time; it never needs to rush, and it never runs out of resources. Everything it will ever need is available and everything it will ever create is of itself.We often mistake its drive for efficiency and its occasional fluctuations for lack, and forget that the end of a cycle always brings about the beginning of a new one.Coordinate SystemsThese cycles provide us with a system of reference; they help us orient ourselves and are part of the larger map of reality we slowly put together over the course of our own cycles – our lives.They help us remember things have a beginning, a middle and an end, and when that end comes there is a new beginning, just like the old one, but slightly different.They help us realize anomalies are natural occurrences in these cycles, which can be assigned a probability, and which we can anticipate, just like we do the hundred year flood, or the latest snow on record.They help us accept we can never wade in the same river water again, but that what flows around us right now is water just the same.Specific natural cycles impact our lives in meaningful ways, and as a result they have been attributed spiritual significance and found their way into the realm of legend, into the myths of creation.The circle of night and day became personified, and, as it is the case with everything there is, its symbols were assigned genders.The circle of the seasons became the ages of a goddess.The circle of life became the wheel of life and death.We celebrate meaningful moments in this round year we live forever, we landmark its times, for harvest, for planting, for breaking things down and for building them back up, and we rejoice in the knowing there is always a beginning.As we grow older, we start appreciating the subtleties of this endless repetition.We stop skipping through the boring parts to get to the good stuff and understand there are no boring parts, everything is an extraordinary display of order and directed potential if you take the time to really see it.There is an entire world of processes in motion in every mundane detail.Like pieces in a gigantic puzzle, we too are made to fit, while we travel our wheel of life and death, riding an ancient ball of stardust revolving around a star, revolving around a black hole, in a universal cycle that has been running for billions of years, and which, according to scientific estimates, is still in its infancy.We belong.In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?* There is no such thing as scarcity, existence can’t, by definition, run out of itself.* Reality runs on infinite time.* All energy is recyclable energy.* Every end brings a new beginning. Everything running in the present will end, eventually. Nothing ever stands still and all processes in motion are at specific stations in the cycle which can be assessed.* Our own life cycles intermingle with the ones that surround us in the fashion of wave interference: some influences are constructive, some influences are destructive. Ride the wave, so to speak. This is the meaning of being in harmony, or in balance, with the universe.* Some circles are so large we mistake them for straight lines.* Our experience of time is subjective: the older we are the more we put things in perspective and the faster and rounder lines get. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

By definition, order is the condition in which everything is in its correct or appropriate state. That is just one of the many meanings of the word, and a misinterpreted one. Our love for symmetry, our desire to complete the picture, created an expectation of order not held up by reality.Just as you can’t point to something and declare that’s the color blue, but you can easily identify all the blue objects in the room, you can’t describe natural order, which is elusive, chock full of obfuscating exceptions and impossible to maintain, but you can find endless examples of it working through every aspect of reality.Reality is MotionThat’s one of the few statements we universally accept as true, and one which, faithful to the paradoxical nature of reality, starts throwing exceptions before it leaves our lips. But what about the state before the Big Bang? But what about the heat death of the Universe? What about them?In the endless motion of existence, order equals high probability, events whose predictable nature yields relatively stable states.We consider those states permanent: planetary orbits, chemical elements, states of matter, the speed and direction of time, even if upon further analysis we immediately notice they are nowhere near unchanging. We need to hold on to high probability states as permanent in order to function.This thinking shortcut makes our life easier, but also blinds us to the true nature of reality and denies us the deeper understanding of its laws.No Absolute TruthsIn the reality continuum things get reshaped and transformed into other things all the time, especially the things we take for granted, like our bodies, continents, or stars.Elementary particles, light, spatial geometry, time, there isn’t one among them that yields to our concepts of order.Our mathematical models are exclusively abstract. A perfect circle is an impossibility, if there is such a thing as the impossible in existence. I’m not so sure about that either.Science begrudgingly lowered its expectations of order to indulge the whims of a natural world, which, for lack of proper instruction, constantly disregards its laws, but it did so only out of necessity and steeped in frustration.To reconcile two states of organization that seemed incompatible, science conceded there is such a thing as a self-replicating blueprint for nature, but stubbornly denied it the status of order and relegated it to a quasi-mythical state between dimensions we call fractal.Flaunting OrderIf order is the state where everything is in its right place, we live in absolute and perfect order at every point in time. Everything is always exactly where it’s supposed to be, otherwise it wouldn’t be there. You can’t let go of a glass and expect it to stay suspended in thin air, it will fall to the ground, shatter and make a mess: that is the perfect order for that object and that circumstance.The ironic thing is, the sun, which was held as the standard of perfection for thousands of years, is an object lesson in chaotic behavior, albeit self-contained.So, if absolute order is not available, what can we rely on?Skeleton PatternsIn everything there is, from the smallest to the largest scale, there is an underlying skeleton pattern, an organizing diagram.These patterns form a giant library of reality blueprints, which display significant similarities, such as evolving from the simple to the complex, comprising simple repeatable units which allow for great flexibility of assembly, a tendency to decay, commonality of substance, and requiring a threshold of energy, which is never zero, in order to function.These tendencies and characteristics are not bound to the pattern they belong to, they flow freely between systems and make the endless reshaping of reality possible.Energy ExpenseChange happens at an expense of energy, and that energy can come from various sources, ranging from nuclear power or sunlight, to good old fashioned elbow grease.Reality is parsimonious with its resources and never uses more energy than it needs. The rest gets recycled into other actions, not necessarily desirable from our point of view, like an overflowing bucket that spills on the floor, for instance. Reality has no outcome bias and puts all leftover energy to good use, yielding perplexing arrays of unintended consequences.It doesn’t care what energy source kicks it into action either: energy is energy, neither good nor bad. A black hole and a supernova are two states of the same exchange system and running around in circles will work just as well as a battery when it comes to turning your gears.Cut From the Same ClothWe extract energy from animals and plants all the time, and plants extract it from the earth, which extracted it from the sun, and we can go all the way back to the beginning of time this way, the point is all these substances and energetic patterns are compatible with each other, their substance is more or less the same, and they all coexist in a harmonious approximation of order we call nature in ways we find beautiful and awe-inspiring.Energy and matter, action and potential exchange signals and turn into each other all the time through the play of probabilities, but those, as we know, rely on the law of large numbers to make sense.Playing the OddsThere is no such thing as the probability of one instance. In individual instances we concede defeat and throw ourselves at the mercy of chance, and that’s where the crazy stuff starts to happen. How many tosses do you think it would take for a coin to fall on its edge? For the fans of the impossible, would it surprise you to learn it is only 1 in 6000? What will happen if you toss it just once? I guess we’ll never know.Some things are highly unlikely, of course, and not something we feel the need to dwell upon, but nothing is impossible.Everything in reality works at this level of precision, as far as we know, of course. (We may be surrounded by intelligent life which exists in the seventeenth dimension and vibrates beyond the wavelength of gamma rays for all we know. How are we going to check?)If you give up the expectation of precision, reality is pretty dependable in its approximate outcomes, and its patterns work consistently in all directions of time, which is why we can make predictions of future states based on past events.Black SwansThere is no such thing as zero probability: given enough repetitions of an event, the most bizarre, unthinkable outcome is likely to occur.What are the odds the sun will not come up tomorrow? Not zero. That’s all there is to it.We are always unprepared for these occurrences, not because we don’t believe them possible, but because their sheer craziness is so far out of our range of reasoning, we can’t think them at all.As an example, imagine people who had never seen a tsunami before, walking on a beach on a beautiful day, in disbelief the ocean had retreated hundreds of feet, leaving behind a treasure of marine life.This unreal image doesn’t trigger the fear response, as we all wisely want to believe, rather a frozen state of awe in which the brain struggles in an infinite loop with an option that wasn’t part of its programming.Assume NothingFaced with things that are just too improbable to have happened, we adapt by creating looser structures for organizing knowledge.Our minds, which are wonderfully plastic, construct logical systems that allow for options beyond true and false, free associate between things that seem to have nothing to do with each other, except for our perception of them feeling the same, create hierarchies based on frequency of events rather than abstract rules, prioritize response speed over accuracy.Our mental libraries get dumped on the floor in a giant messy pile and we scramble to re-shelve their contents based on cover color and frequency of use. If it sounds schizophrenic is because it probably is.In ConclusionAfter the geocentric model of the universe failed to bear true, biology disappointed us by endlessly mutating the building blocks of life and making sure no two are ever the same, and fluid dynamics turned out near impossible to model, after we deemed Euclidean geometry unusable even for basic things like creating accurate maps, and after reality darkened the pristine waters of physics with such unnatural stuff as the dual slit electron experiment and quantum tunneling, humanity finally saw reason and gave up its fairytale of mathematical precision.What are the points worth remembering?* There are underlying patterns to reality which work in the large and in the small, at low and high resolution, they are common to all systems, living and non-living, and energy flows freely between these systems, in a way which maintains reality in a mostly stable and cohesive state.* The building blocks of being are the same for humans, rocks, plasma nebulae and empty space. Everything is made of the same material.* Nothing is impossible, nothing is guaranteed. Everything exists in a range of probabilities greater than zero and less than one, but equal to neither.* There are realities out there we can’t know, because we don’t have the tools to observe them or verify them, and also there are realities which may be too strange for us to know but which, based on our perplexed observation outliers, turn out to exist.* When encountering the bizarre, assume nothing. Falling back on previous wisdom in such cases is akin to trying to use a compass in the Bermuda Triangle.* All change comes at an expense of energy. Energy is morally neutral.* No truth is absolute. The second you make a rule, several exceptions will instantly jump at you to contradict it.Welcome to the realm of magic.Wait!What?But there is no such thing!Here we go again.Let’s take this from the top, one more time. This is a public episode. 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