1. My current favorite emotion is JOY. It’s light in the body and bright in tone, yet not overly so – a nice balance between happiness and excitement.
2. Big dreams, small steps.
3. When you feel lonely, it’s because you think nobody loves you or loves you the way you wanna be loved. But accept all love as love. Understand that no one knows how to love perfectly. And that at each point in our lives someone is always trying to love us. Accept the trying as being enough.
4. Enough is hard but always worth gunning for. (I have eaten enough. I have rested enough. I have worked enough. I’m loved enough. I have enough. Etc etc).
5. You can’t love everyone in the world, but you can love the ones you love harder. (Similarly, you can’t have everyone in the world love you, but you can ignore these people harder😂)
6. Wisdom accumulates in the person who tries their best to wake up from the slumber of life.
7. Money is just a game. Play it well, play it badly, it’s up to you.
8. The most interesting person you can be is… drumroll… your good old boring self.
9. Read fewer books but fall more deeply into each book.
10. Lesson #286 from skateboarding: If you’re coming down a slope, lean forward, look ahead and enjoy the ride. (If you’re still leaning or looking backwards, you will fall!)
11. Pay your bills on time, but apart from that, remain a kid at heart.
12. Whenever you can, be thankful for a seemingly ultra-trivial thing in your life. (Today I’m grateful that I can move my fingers and type this!).
13. Stop looking for your purpose in life. There is no purpose, but there is what makes your heart SING.
14. Nothing is scarier than empty beautiful photographs (or art).
15. If you find yourself saying “Aiyah cannot one lah” immediately change it to “CAN ONE LAH!”
16. Make no distinction between hard and soft, art and business, life and death.
17. Listen > talk.
18. We are not more special, but we’re no less special.
19. Wander aimlessly – it’s okay.
20. We all view the world through a particular lens. If you’re unhappy, change/discard the lens.
21. Force yourself to do hard things. Then enjoy the easy that comes after.
22. In the end, the highest goal is effortlessness.
Bonus 23. You or I can go anytime. We can lose everything, anything, anytime. There is no guarantee in life or death. Change is constant. Life is transient. It’s all impermanent. On this basis, let’s stop resisting joy. And may all the suffering in the world be transmuted by time. From dust, to dust. Let’s enjoy being here for now.
“Unless you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” – C.G. Jung
“Do not struggle. Go with the flow of things, and you will find yourself at one with the mysterious unity of the Universe.” – Zhuangzi
“Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
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