#397 A New Year's Message from Sam

Don't you see how every experience, no matter how pleasurable or intense, gets distorted by your mental efforts to grasp it, to secure it, prolong it, rehearse, it narrate, it compare it, change it.

I think it is very powerful to put the finiteness of life at the center of one's thoughts, more or less all of the time. The question 'Would I do this if I knew I only had a year to live?' is quite clarifying of ones priorities.

Real meditation isn't something you do. It's something you cease to do. It is non-distraction. It is the freedom to notice what is already here.

When the world could really use a shining city on a hill that is a healthy liberal democracy capable of leading not merely by force but by example, we've decided to return a man to the presidency who refers to his fellow citizens, all the Democrats who didn't vote for him, as vermin and scum. We can't pretend that this is normal.

If your life is full of laughter and sunsets and sex and ice cream and rewarding work, you're probably not miserable. Though, you might be. Amazingly, you still might be miserable.

Unlike most periods in memory, if someone came from the future and said, 'Don't you realize that World War III started months ago?' that would seem, if not plausible, at least possible.

It remains hard to believe that were returning Donald Trump to the White House. There are just so many reasons why this seems like a bad idea.

It's worth reflecting on how much Wars January 6th 2021 could have been and how Trump played no role at all in preventing the worst possible outcomes.

I think we may as we'll ask the question that lurks behind every New Year's resolution, what is a good life? Or put another way, what makes life good? Or with a slightly different emphasis, what is life good for?