I have to keep reminding myself that there is an ebb and flow to living. You don’t always get to do what you want to do when you want to do it. Sometimes, you don’t even (ever) get to do the thing that you wanted to do. And that is all alright. Time isn’t running out. If you were meant to do the thing, you will do it, eventually. If you don’t, you probably weren’t meant to do it. Sounds a little flippant, and some may say defeatist, in this world we have created where it is all about the ‘grind.’ I must confess, at some stage of my life, in the early days of pre-Musk Twitter, I was all about the hashtag #AfricansWeGrindHard.
But why must life be about the grind or the hustle. Work shouldn’t be all that life is about. Years ago, I read Tim Ferriss’ book The Four-Hour Work Week, which introduced me to the concept of ‘lifestyle design’. As a sidenote, there was also criticism of the book but I found - a generalisation, I know - that these came from taking the book too literal.
My key takeaway was the understanding that you can (and are allowed to) design your life any way that you want to and, since then, I have tried to be deliberate about the life I am living and the lifestyle I am building for my family. I wrote I Quit My Job For My Children around the time. I have tried to focus on working to live as opposed to living to work. It hasn’t always been easy and there have been multiple pain points along the way but, by and large, I would like to think I am better for it.
As important, on this journey, has been an exploration of living in the Now (as per Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now and other books on mindfulness, like Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Art of Living, which I am currently reading) and focusing on what I can control, which, for me, lies at the heart of Stoicism.
“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own . . .” —Epictetus, Discourses, 2.5.4–5 from The Daily Stoic.
I also recognise the privilege I have in being able to approach life in this way but I do believe it is accessible to us all, perhaps not in the exact same way. It is about looking at our life and finding the parts that will benefit from a different perspective, an approach different from the way we have been operating, especially those parts that are by remote control. And, if we continue living a particular way, let it be because we have deliberately decided that is the way, for us, individually, uniquely.
I often stray and it is often hard to bring myself ‘back’. Recently, having spent time trying to understand analytics for my podcast, particularly on YouTube, I ended up spirally into panic, trying to ‘fix’ everything. I was online checking views every hour, reading countless articles on how to improve engagement, views and view time, trying to come up with strategies to turn things around and, instead, got more and more frazzled.
It took me a few days but I, eventually, remembered that I can’t fix things in an hour, a day, a week, or even a month. All I can do is to rework my process of posting and promotion and to start doing some things differently, in a way that I think will improve what I consider the ‘inadequacies’. And remember why I actually have a podcast, which is to put a spotlight on interesting Africans who have a great deal of wisdom and knowledge to share. The rest is out of my hands.
I consider myself lucky to be in a position to actually access these people and share their stories in this form. I am fortunate to be in a position where I can actually produce the podcast and when it has run its course, it will have run its course and I will move onto the next thing. Or not.
Everything we are looking for, everything we want to experience, has to happen right here in the present moment. The future is merely an idea, an abstract notion. - Thich Nhat Hanh
Easy
Kojo