Before I share this week’s excerpt from abetterway. using inner resources to create your own algorithm, I’d like to share a few inspiring podcast interviews that showed up in my algorithm this past week.

Both podcasts are interviews with people I stumbled upon early on in my journey in day.

Rich Roll interviews Ellen Langer, a psychology professor at Harvard. I got turned on to Ellen Langer in a 2017 podcast interview with Krista Tippet onbeing. I think I was looking for a general way to introduce the idea of mindfulness. Ellen calls it ‘active noticing’. Ellen began her career studying mindlessness. You can learn more by listening.

I was turned on to Steven Pressfield and his book The War of Art early on in my journey as well. I find this interview to be authentic and I love the contrast of the generational gap and a mutual appreciation of possibility.

And now for this week’s main event: Sunday Book Club. Prerequisite: Quiet Time.

Three reflective questions:

1. What do you love? Not ‘who’, but ‘what’ do you love – actions? conversations? environments? experiences? times of day, week, month, year? Can you slowly consider that which you love, and allow yourself to embody the feeling state as if it is present moment experience? Allow it without judgement, comparison, or criticism. Just do it. Allow it. Have the experience for however long it lasts. Don’t tell anyone. Then do it again sometime. And again. Can you be open to establishing a relationship with the state of possibility? It’s your own thing.
2. What scares you? According to Steven Pressfield, the thing that scares us is the thing we need to face, the thing we need to move toward, the thing we need to do. I assumed mine had to do with day.llc. And then something occurred to me and felt quite clear. Gulp.
3. I feel like to live is a constant contradiction. Stress: what I think should happen v what is happening. (Ellen Langer interview) What happens when one becomes the noticer of the patterns of contradiction? What happens if one OWNs (checkIN: Observe, Witness, Notice) the contradictory nature of existing? What if two contraditory concepts can both be true? How can we use this to expand our experience of day?