Author: Rebecca Toh

Stillness

blog, solitude & stillness, the quiet life

“Stillness is vital to the world of the soul. If as you age you become more still, you will discover that stillness can be a great companion. The fragments of your life will have time to unify, and the places where your soul-shelter is wounded or broken will have time to knit and heal. You will be able to return to yourself. In this stillness, you will engage your soul. Many people miss out on themselves completely as they journey through life. They know others, they know places, they know skills, they know their work, but tragically, they do not know themselves at all. Aging can be a lovely time of ripening when you actually meet yourself, indeed maybe for the first time. There are beautiful lines from T. S. Eliot that say:
‘And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.'”
—JOHN O’DONOHUE

A list of potential ultralearning projects

blog, learning, ultralearning

Here are some ideas on my own want-to-ultralearn backburner list:

– Making my own electronic music (releasing an album of electronic music, a la Lullatone)
– Editorial design (creating layouts for books and magazines)
– Illustrating and writing a children’s book
– Making a short film
– Creating an online course
– Creating an app
– Writing a book
– Building my blog from scratch

I’ll update this whenever a new one comes to mind!

Learning is about doing

blog, learning, ultralearning

Very good ideas from Scott Young about how to learn and build skills that matter:

Don’t just learn French, aim to have conversations with people.
Don’t just read a book on JavaScript, build a functioning website.
Don’t just watch lectures, do practice problems from the exam.
Don’t just read philosophy, write an essay or discuss it with someone else.

Relevant reading:
How to start your own ultralearning project (part one)
How to start your own ultralearning project (part two)

a collective hallucination

blog, meditation, mindfulness

I’m often pulled, together with others, into a collective hallucination. I know that sometimes I am lured into seeing the world in a way that has very little to do with reality. Reading the news and scrolling my social feeds, I often feel like I’m in a funhouse with endless traps—I’m never sure which way is up, which surface is a mirror, and which turn will drop me into a maze from which I can’t easily escape.

It’s always a confusing trip.

Since I got interested in how the human mind works, I’ve been amazed and appalled at the unreliability of my mind and how casually it succumbs to the forces of influence in the environment (not just news and social media, but also the ideas of the people we live with, the cultural and societal notions that continue to wash over us, etc). Add to that the in-built biases in our minds, and the heuristics we like to use to take short cuts in our thinking…

I’m beginning to think of myself as a most unreliable narrator.

That’s why meditation is so important. The practice, at its heart, is about seeing reality as it is, adding nothing and subtracting nothing.

At times like this I catch myself thinking that meditation is the one important thing I should do in my life, above everything else. (Reading books and continuing to learn about how the mind works is also helpful. Unless you don’t mind life under the blue pill.)

Overcoming writer’s block

blog, writing

I’ve realised that the best antidote against writer’s block is simply sitting down to write.

What do I mean by simply sitting down to write?

It means, even on days when I feel like I cannot write or have nothing to write about, I go to my computer anyway and I write.

When I do this I’m always surprised that I want to continue writing. I might be writing badly at first—first drafts are always bad—but once I get to editing, shaping and culling and trimming away at the sentences, I’m back in the mood of writing.

This is similar to BJ Fogg’s idea of building habits by starting real small. For example, if you want to start a daily meditation habit, you should make your habit so tiny that doing it is a no-brainer. So it might be, instead of doing a ten-minute meditation, simply taking two deep breaths in the morning.

Starting tiny helps you to actually do the habit. It also builds confidence and makes it easier for you to keep up the streak daily. What usually happens is that after awhile you will want to do more than two deep breaths. Before you know it, you will find yourself meditating ten or twenty minutes a day. All because you started tiny.

So it’s the same for writing. Writing can feel like a monstrous task in the mind, but it’s not really that scary (I say this now, but I’m always scared to death of writing BEFORE I start writing). Start by simply sitting down to write. Write badly. Then get to editing and rewriting. Before you know it a whole essay has been written. Ha! Am I making it sound too easy?

But it does work for me.

I’d love to hear about how you guys overcome your writer’s block!