#213 Comfortable dissatisfaction

ByLukas
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You’re dissatisfied with your social life, but not so much that you feel terribly lonely – so you don’t change anything.

You’re dissatisfied with your physical fitness, but not so much that you’re in pain every day – so you put up with slow deterioration.

You’re dissatisfied with your current job, but not so much that you’re dragging yourself to work – so you put up with unfulfilling days.

Being satisfied with some areas of your life is good.

Being intensely dissatisfied with some areas of your life is fine, too – because that unhappiness can be the leverage you need to make a change.

But comfortable dissatisfaction – that’s the zone where dreams and happiness go to die. And boy, have I spent a lot of time there.

So I hope you are satisfied with your life, my friend.

And if not, I hope you’re at least intensely dissatisfied.

Let that be the fuel you need to take action to change.

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    #243 Mending the Misunderstanding

    ByLukas

    We all live in a maze of mistranslations and misunderstandings about who we think you are and who others think we are.

    Now, by lack of a way to know who we truly are, misunderstandings can be comforting, my friend; there’s no doubt about that.

    But when you get so lost in the maze that it causes suffering, it might be time to start mending the misunderstandings.

    Could it be that mending is nothing more than making another mistranslation about who we are that makes us happier?

    After all, I can perceive myself as a struggling writer or a skilled wordsmith – both perspectives hold their truths.

    It’s the power of our misunderstandings that molds our reality.

  • |

    #274 On endings and beginnings

    ByLukas

    Does a day end, or does a new one start?

    Does the end of a book chapter signal termination, or does it serve as a gateway to an unexplored continuation?

    Maybe we don’t need to arbitrarily mark endings and beginnings in lives that consist of an uninterrupted flow.

    Maybe we’re just a tiny plot in a story spanning billions of years.

    Maybe we don’t grasp the bigger story anyway.

    Maybe it’s all the same.

  • #27 Appreciating the meaningless melody of a foreign language

    ByLukas

    Learning a foreign language is both a frustrating and liberating experience.

    We can focus on the frustration of not understanding the words the way we understand our mother tongue. Or we can realize that without the words, we are free to fall back on other ways of capturing and understanding meaning.

    A crying baby can be soothed by words it does not yet understand, because she senses what’s behind the sounds, lets the meaningless melody cradle her to sleep…

    Similarly, we don’t always have to know what’s behind the words, as long as we make an effort to understand the meaning behind the sounds.

    Hearing a foreign language brings us back to that wordless world the way we experienced it as a newborn, before we tried so hard to put everything within and around us into language.

    It makes us remember, there’s more to life than our words will ever allow us to express. And somehow, that’s a soothing thought.

  • #439 Resolve can bring you far

    ByLukas

    I can’t predict what will happen tomorrow – or even today.

    But I do know that today, I resolve to write.

    And tomorrow I resolve to write once again.

    And that resolve has brought me to 439 consecutive days of writing.

    439 days of writing, despite living in an unpredictable world.

    439 days of realizing most obstacles are excuses.

    439 days of proving that resolve can bring you pretty far.

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    #8 Musenküsse

    ByLukas
    klimt-the-kiss-musenkuss
    Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (1907-1908).

    der Musenkuss (German) The kiss of the Muse

    Creativity becomes much easier if you see it as a game of finding new ways of describing what has always been there.

    Observing, rather than inventing.

    It’s liberating. Because now the game changes from pulling ideas out of thin air to a game of discovery. Observation. Paying attention. Building upon what’s already discovered, then connecting the dots in way nobody else has.

    Most of all: listening, when the muse finally arrives and visits you for a kiss.

    There’s this voice in my mind
    Impossible to ignore
    And yet I fill my head with noise
    Drowning out
    What deep down I know to be true
    Do I even want to admit
    That this song in my heart
    Is not about me
    But about you?

    P.S.: I’ve observed the same principle in language learning (and wrote a book about the consequences of this mindset shift).

    Which begs the question…

    Where else would we do better if we observed a bit more, rather than trying to invent from scratch?

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