“People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.” - Charles Bukowski
Hola! It’s been a while.
We just wrapped up our 5th annual summer retreat a few weeks ago. It banged.
It’s by far my favorite week of the year, but also takes a shitton of energy and always leaves me bottomed-out for the rest of August.
Which is why I’ve spent the past few weeks laying around and letting my AI agent manage the business while I re-watch Game of Thrones and slowly turn into a human potato.
Some would call this “self-care” and “healthy work-life balance” or some other lazy shit like that.
And although they would mean well, they would be wrong.
“Balance” has nothing to do with how much you work vs how much you rest.
It has nothing to do with how many hours you spend in front of the computer vs with your family, or how perfectly you’ve optimized your daily schedule.
Because balance is not an outer activity, it is an internal state.
Balance only happens when all four systems…
- Body
- Emotions
- Mind
- Spirit
…Are lined up and in sync with each other.
When:
Your body is open, relaxed and healthy.
Your emotions are centered and fluid, and you’re feeling them fully without repressing or reacting to them.
Your mind is calm and aware of itself, and not dominating and shouting over every other system.
Your spirit is clear and uplifted and connected to the larger force that has been running reality for 14B years with perfect precision, and knows exactly what we need far better than our tiny monkey-minds ever could.
That’s what balance actually is, and it’s a radically different state than most of us find ourselves in, most of the time:
Where our body is tight and tired, our emotions toggle between triggered and totally numbed out, our mind is so fried we can barely focus on this 3 minute email, and our spirit is so disconnected you didn’t know wtf I was even talking about earlier with all that larger force hippy shit.
Point is, there are many ways to find balance.
There are monks living totally one-dimensional lives in perfect internal balance.
And there are pathological optimizers who sync their self-care with their Whoop stats and are still so internally lopsided they don’t even know what real balance feels like.
No matter what your outer activites look like, if they don’t bring your body, emotions, mind, and spirit into a state of internal balance, you aren’t balanced.
Which brings me to the lesson of the past few weeks.
I’ve given myself time to rest and recover, but I’m still out of balance (and still not feeling properly rested) because of what I’ve done with that time.
Too much TV, too much YouTube, too much not actually allowing my mind to rest because instead of working I’m just filling it with other crap.
To be fair, I’ve continued meditating and training at a lighter volume.
But a morning meditation and a workout before lunch doesn’t undo the other ~22 hours of crap.
I should know better, and I do.
And, I’m probably making it sound much worse than it actually is.
After all, the solutions are simple.
I know exactly what to do (and what not to do), and so do you.
So I guess what I’m saying is:
Let’s go and fxcking do it.
- T
P.S. Missed you.