I used to schedule time for presence. Meditation, journaling, and phone free walks all helped. They also felt like extra tasks.

Now I simply give full attention to one ordinary action. When I make coffee I only make coffee. I watch the water and notice the smell. The time stays the same. I am just not elsewhere in my head.
The same approach works with washing dishes or walking to the mailbox. These short moments of full attention create a little more space in the rest of the day. Urgency softens and the mental chatter has less grip.

Have you found that doing one thing at a time works best with ordinary moments rather than formal practice? What small habit brings you the same quiet?

Even self-satisfaction becomes satisfaction if you keep at it.

Enjoying the scenery as it unfolds, I keep walking my own path today.

What matters when middle-aged and older adults return to learning?

Break the you that is you.

It is important to let go of the idea that things have always been this way, or that you have always done things this way.

Because if you cling to the way things have always been, you won't stick with it.

Please don't use an eraser.

Ignore the lines on the page.

Start writing wherever you like.

You may tear pages out of your notebook.

And for this, use a mechanical pencil with thick, dark lead (1.3 mm).

When you're done with it, throw it away without looking back.

This is what it means to let go of the you that you have been.

Often I feel I don’t do enough. Feel like I should be doing more things and use by time more productively. So I started writing down what I did throughout the day. It helps to remind me actually a lot have happened. And my time didn’t just fly by.

Does anyone resonate with this?

What has my life amounted to?

Have I done nothing but lie in bed, playing with my phone while dreaming grand dreams? Nothing moves forward. Only time passes.

Before I know it, I find myself becoming one of those old men I used to see as a child.

I don't want my life to end like this. But is there a way to turn things around?

All I can think of is to keep doing what I have been doing all these years, without seeing any results.

But I don't know what lies beyond that.

In the twilight of my life, I pause for a moment.

When you want to calm yourself or being mindful, what do you stare at?

I feel like most millennials can probably relate, but I'm realizing that my thoughts and my actions really don't represent me. I struggled for a very long time on how to "meditate correctly". For me, I've found writing to be very meditative. I've tried writing letters to my past self and my future self. They definitely have their place in my journey <3. However, I realized no amount of writing to my past or future self is going to help me get 'unstuck' from the current feelings/situations.

Instead of trying to force myself into the present, try and sort through all the thoughts and feelings, I decided to embrace it. I was having a full blown meltdown trying to understand what it is that I'm meant to be doing/how I can accomplish my purpose. Thankfully, mindfulness has helped me be able to clock when I'm starting to spiral into these unhelpful and unproductive thought loops. So I took a step back, asked myself 'What's the problem?'

My brain was telling me "The problem is you don't know what to do or how to go about it." The problem felt much deeper than not knowing what to do about a hypothetical question. So I just embraced the suck for a little bit and it just hit me out of nowhere. "The problem isn't I don't know what to do next or how to go about it, the problem is I'm scared. When I was a kid, my dad taught me that always being busy was the key to staying safe. Always be alert, always know what could happen and how you'd respond."

Writing a letter to past or future me just didn't have that effect for me like it seemingly does for so many. I took some time to try and understand why writing a letter to your past/future self was so helpful for so many. It was a way for them to validate their feelings/fears that they are holding onto and releasing them. I believe the reason it didn't ever have that effect for me is because I was trying to write 'current me -> past/future me'. But 'current me' isn't the one who is responding. Current me isn't the person who is terrified. Current me does in fact feel safe, but that kid in me still feels very unsafe, uncertain, and lost.

Instead of trying to write to my past self, I let that terrified kid in me come out and write a letter to the current me. The current me is a safe person. I know this and I feel this with every fiber of my being. Sometimes my brain/OCD wants me to think otherwise, but I know even if I unintentionally hurt someone, it's just that. Unintentional. I would never go out of my way to try and actually cause anybody any kind of harm.

It wasn't easy, but I finally let that kid in me start expressing those fears. Expressing those thing I never was allowed to as a kid. I don't even have to do anything with it. I don't have to 'fix' anything because it's already happened. I'm just letting that 'past me' heal a bit by finally letting them say all those things they were too scared to say before because they never felt safe.

Don't question it, just start writing. Don't analyze during. You might have 30 different thoughts going on and you don't actually complete a single one. That's okay <3. You don't have to, you're just giving that inner child in you the ability to finally let it all out. Most of the time children don't make much sense anyway when they are upset. They don't even know why they are upset 1/2 the time. YOU DON'T HAVE TO KNOW. JUST LET IT OUT.

Through this practice, I've started to learn that the adult me has spent their life trying to be everything little me needed then. Almost as a way to 'fix' it or make sure it doesn't happen again. But I'm not surviving anymore. I'm living. And I'm allowed to. I don't need to keep my survival methods up anymore. I'm able to breathe. I'm able to be human and make mistakes. I'm able to let that inner child cry and be irrational when they need to. I'm accepting that what once was, no longer has to be and it's so liberating.

I recently posted a question on Reddit about a strange burnt smell I sometimes notice after a large bowel movement.

I wasn't making a statement.

I was simply asking:

Does anyone else experience this?

About ten people commented, but the post received almost no upvotes.

Yet the views kept rising.

For nearly 48 hours, people continued to look at it.

The post is now approaching 50,000 views.

While it was still spreading, I began wondering about all those invisible readers.

What were they thinking?

I couldn't know.

So I added an update to the original post.

I proposed a possible physiological explanation for the strange sensation and even gave it a name:

“Shinichi's Depressurization Phantosmia.”

I don't know whether my explanation is correct.

It may be nothing more than a personal sensory experience.

But the experience made me think about something else.

We tend to measure human reactions by what people leave behind: votes, comments, messages, expressions.

But when someone encounters a feeling that has never been put into words before, they may have no words to give in return.

They may simply stop.

That stopping is itself a reaction.

Yet it leaves no visible trace.

Perhaps many of the reactions we never see are not absent reactions at all.

They are simply moments in which someone stopped, felt something, and then moved on.

We see the number of views, but not the people inside the number.

Maybe the most common human reaction is the one that leaves nothing behind.

When you feel stuck, take a break and sleep.

Assign a task to your subconscious mind, and you might wake up with a solution in the morning.

Realised recently that when I used to take breaks, I wasn't actually relaxing - I was just counting down until I had to be productive again.

Permitting myself to take a break and relax a bit without keeping score or expecting it to "recharge" me for better output made a huge difference. Rest doesn't need to have a productivity goal attached to it.

Worry brings the future into your mind early. Action puts what you can control in place and lets you push away the disturbing event much far way to distant future.

Edit - Worrying can make an event that is 10–15 years away feel like it is only 2–5 years away.

But taking small, practical steps on the things you can control can push the impact further into the future — maybe 25–30 years away — giving you much more time before it can really affect you.

Worry brings the future closer in your mind. Action gives the future more distance.

I'm a long time meditator who benefited greatly from a $2000 silent retreat that I consider to be the biggest lever for my relationship to mindfulness.

I'm also a mental healthcare professional and wish I could "prescribe" retreats but of course it's not something you can get insurance to pay for.

IDEA ---

I'm starting a trust of strangers where each person offers $1 a week with the goal of 1000 trustees, so each week, $1000 can be granted to people to support their mindfulness practice.

It can be to help fund part of a retreat, or buy meditation pillows, pay for subscription fees to an app, or even let you take some time off when you're burned out if you work independently and don't get PTO. People can apply for whatever they need.

Grants would be awarded by random selection of trustees who review up to 8 applications per cycle so no one ever gets burned out from reviewing applications. Kind of like a jury duty system.

The goal is to create a perpetual Dana trust financed by the community and managed by the community with minimal contribution, rather than a single board, that can exist in perpetuity.

Would anyone be interested?

At this age, and still without anything I can truly call an accomplishment, I don't want to end my life like this.

Maybe this is who I am:

building something day by day,

aiming for something,

and in the end, dying while still doing so.

The secret to sustaining success lies in how much learning you’ve accumulated from failure.

​What lies beyond success is how you deploy those "savings of failure."

​...But before spouting such lofty words, seizing a real success of my own comes first.

How we show up for ourselves directly impacts how we show up in our relationships. What is that one small daily practice that keeps you grounded?

Don’t make yourself seem bigger than you are, and don’t underestimate your own potential.

Somewhere between the two, just keep doing what you think is ordinary, in your ordinary way.

What you keep doing as something ordinary may, someday, become something uniquely your own.