Zen Habits

I have been feeling a bit stressed in general in the past few weeks and I have been feeling a bit blue a few times. I started to wonder: What for?

What is the remedy for this situation?

I rediscovered that the simple principle simplicity is in fact the most powerful principle.

Here is my version of how to live life simply.

1. Mindfulness of one task at a time. This means the one task would occupy our mind fully and completely, and this task would be our highest priority in the moment. When we are fully immersed in this task, we would be in a state of flow, we would not be aware of time and it would simply be an awesome experience.

The mantra would be one X at a time, One word at a time, one breath at a time, one key stroke a time, one step at a time, etc, when the mind is distracted and lost in thoughts, why not experiment with the magic phrase, one whatever-we-are-doing at a time.

2. Everything counts. Nowadays, equality gets so much media attention, be it gender equality or racial equality, suppose we apply “flip-it thinking”, why not experiment with the idea of “thingy equality”? This would mean that every thingy counts, applying full attention when printing one page at a time, putting away one out-of-place item at a time

3. Multi-tasking sucks. A colleague of mine pointed to me that multi-tasking eats away our ability damages our brain permanently. So, it’s skilful to be fully engaged in one task at a time.

4. Flip-it perspective. Instead of asking ourselves the usual “What do I need to now?”, try “What does the situation require of me?”, “What is the task asking of me?”

5. Honour Doing-nothing’ism. Nothing is a wonderful principle, nothing is like principle number 5 which is essentially nothing.

Summary

KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid!

On Libertarianism

I was introduced to the idea of Objectivism by Ayn Rand, I agreed with many principles by Rand.

To me, the following principles of Objectivism are important.

1. Rationality

2. Enlightened self-interest

3. The importance of philosophy

4. The nobility of individualism

5. The joy of thinking

Between the age of 16 and 20, I was really into Rand and I have read most non-fiction books by Rand and I liked to evangelise about the ideas of Ayn Rand to my friends and people in my social circle in general.

Gradually, I realised that thinking in a purely Objectivist mindset is not particularly healthy for the mind. It does need to be moderated actually.

Here is where Zen ideas would fit nicely.

I joined the Libertarian Party United Kingdom (LPUK) on 3rd April 2010.

I went to a Libertarian Party social meeting on 13 May 2010 in the evening, it was really great to be meeting like-minded people.

On Programming

Having done a Master in Computing and having worked as a programmer for 1.5 years, my love of programming has been going up and down.

Spring is a wonderful pattern.

Hibernate is a wonderful ORM tool.

(todo)