⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

💬 The Most Profound Comment Section on The Internet: In a world where comments trend towards the negative, this song from Aphex Twin has remarkably accumulated thousands of people sincerely pouring their hearts out. Read them here.

🎧 The Conversational Nature of Reality: David Whyte on The Tim Ferriss Podcast. Listen here.

🩻 Fixing Back Pain Permanently: An unusual link for this newsletter but I share it because chronic back pain can certainly be an impediment to living in a state of wonderment. 80% of people who use this guide tell the author it fixed their back pain permanently. Read it here.

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🎇 Image of The Week

This is a still shot taken from the Cassini Probe. You can see Jupiter’s moons Io and Europa passing over The Great Red Spot. Photographer Kevin Gill assembled these still shots into a video so you can see the motion of their orbit. Watch it here.

⌛️ Time Famine

I saw popular author and podcaster Tim Ferriss tweet this a few days ago:

"I need to get back to the slack.

To the pregnant void of infinite possibilities, only possible with a lack of obligation, or at least, no compulsive reactivity. Perhaps this is only possible with the negative space to—as Kurt Vonnegut put it—fart around? To do things for the hell of it? For no damn good reason at all?

I feel that the big ideas come from these periods. It’s the silence between the notes that makes the music.

If you want to create or be anything lateral, bigger, better, or truly different, you need room to ask “what if?” without a conference call in 15 minutes. The aha moments rarely come from the incremental inbox-clearing mentality of, “Oh, fuck… I forgot to… Please remind me to… Shouldn’t I?…I must remember to…”

That is the land of the lost, and we all become lost."

Then I listened to the On Being podcast episode (linked above) where John O'Donahue put it quite nicely:

"Philosophically, stress is a perverted relationship to time. So that rather than being a subject of your own time, you have become its target and victim. And time has become routine. So at the end of the day, you probably haven't had a true moment for yourself and you know, to relax in and to just be."

These quotes paired nicely to remind me of the common affliction of time famine: the widespread feeling of not having enough hours in the day, the pervasive sense of racing against the clock.

When I find myself in this place I try to remember that the way out is counterintuitive. I shouldn't race faster to try to get more done to finally shore up time. Instead, I need to introduce more slowness, some space to pause.

Taking this time, even if it is just 20 minutes, helps me rebalance so that the seconds don't feel like they are ticking in fast forward.

It's not that there isn't enough time, it's that there isn't enough time spent occupying a space that nourishes the soul.

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🌞 Our Light Frightens Us

Enjoy this passage from Robert Johnson and Jerry Ruhl:

“Much of what remains undeveloped in us, psychologically speaking, is excluded because it is too good to bear. This may seem silly, but if you look honestly at your life, you will find it to be true.

We often refuse to accept our most noble traits and instead find a shadow substitute for them. For example, instead of living with spirit, we settle for spirit in a bottle. In place of our god-given right to the ecstatic, we settle for temporary highs from consuming something or possessing someone. At first it is puzzling why we would look for our potentially best qualities in something or someone else. From the point of view of the ego, the appearance of a sublime trait or quality might upset our whole personality structure.

In going down into the underworld a person of integrity can draw the skeletons out of the closet fairly easily, but he will likely fight to the end of his neurotic strength to hide the divinity of his own being.”

Pairs nicely with this famous sentiment from Marianne Williamson

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do…

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Friluftsliv: A Norwegian word that means “Free air life,” signifying a fundamental understanding of the positive impact of being in nature

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked link from a previous edition of 🌀🐇

Am I a Bad Person? Navigating an Encounter with Your Shadow Self

Have you asked yourself the question?

You know the one I mean.

Maybe you said or did something out of character. Maybe you couldn’t even explain it to yourself. Maybe someone got hurt. Maybe you were hurt. Perhaps you were afraid of what you saw in you.

And then, before you could even begin to make sense of what happened, there it was. The Question.

Am I a bad person?

Rings a bell, doesn’t it? No, no — don’t feel bad. You’re not alone in your self-questioning. But let’s look at how you responded to the question.

Did you quickly dismiss the thought, afraid to find the answer? Or perhaps the question sent you spiraling down the rabbit hole of self-doubt?

No matter your immediate response, the question certainly must have shaken you to your core. You couldn’t unsee what you saw, and no matter how much you tried to push the question from your mind, the aftertaste of it lingered, tainting your perception of yourself.

The truth is, almost everyone wants to think of themselves as a good person, a moral person, a person who always puts their best foot forward and lives in the world with integrity.

But there is another universal truth that is much harder to digest: everyone — no matter how well-intentioned and pure of heart — has a dark side.

[Continue Reading]