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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 125 (Dec 11, 2022) — New Learning Project, Listening to Life, Thinking in Systems, & More
Sloww Sunday shares creations from Sloww along with curations of fascinating finds to 10,000+ students of life. If you enjoy this issue, please help grow Sloww by forwarding the email version of this newsletter to others.
🆕 New News
Introducing a new lifelong learning project: 🌐Daily Wiki
I have 500+ Wikipedia pages saved that I want to read. For a couple years, I (inconsistently) read and shared one page per week in an ongoing Twitter thread called Wikipedia Wednesday. However, my saved pages continued to grow faster than I was reading them weekly. With Daily Wiki, I now read one Wikipedia page per day and create a new note of key takeaways. Each new note internally links to all mentions in prior notes to keep the wiki web going and growing. The 500+ pages will lead to at least 500 more, which means Daily Wiki will be at least a 3-year project.
Bonus for lifelong learners: Create your own Daily Wiki!
“All knowledge is connected to all other knowledge. The fun is in making the connections.” — Arthur Aufderheide
🌎 Lighter Living
Listening to Life Itself
At any moment, you can slow down and listen to what life is telling you:
“As you read these very words your body is performing a remarkable piece of coordination. Eyes are moving effortlessly, taking in images of black and white which are automatically compared with memories of similar markings, translated into symbols, then connected with other symbols to form an impression of meaning. Thousands of these operations are taking place every few seconds. At the same time, again without conscious effort, your heart is pumping and your breath is going in and out, keeping a fantastically complicated system of organs, glands and muscles nourished and working. Without conscious effort, billions of cells are functioning, reproducing and fighting off disease.” — Timothy Gallwey
“If we pay attention, we will realize that every moment around us there is a world that we do not create—that’s been there for 13.8 billion years—and there are trillions of cells in your body that are doing what they’re supposed to do, all of nature, everything. And, you wake up and you realize, ‘I’m not doing any of this. I didn’t make my body, I didn’t make my mind think, I don’t make my heart beat, I don’t make my breath breathe—yet I have this notion that I have to make things happen. Yet, all throughout the universe things are happening everywhere, and I’m not doing them. So, why exactly am I the one that’s in charge of what’s unfolding in front of me?’ And, what you realize at some point, is that you’re not. That the moment in front of you that’s unfolding is no different than all the zillions of other moments that aren’t in front of you that are unfolding in accordance to the laws of nature, the laws of creation. So, you start to practice saying, ‘I don’t want to check inside of me first to see what I want and what I don’t want. I want to pay attention to what the universe is creating in front of me—just like it’s creating everywhere I’m not—and let me see how I can participate in that, be part of that, instead of interfering with it with my desires and my fears.’ That’s living from a place of surrender.” — Michael Singer
Explore more: How do I design a lighter life (Sloww Stage 1)?
🧭 Higher Purpose
The day you find out why you were born…
These thoughts come from Eric Brown’s consistently great newsletter: Edge of Being.
- The Question: What is it about me that makes me fundamentally necessary to the world?
- The Answer: The unification of the two forces below is how you find out what you are called to do in this life (matching your jigsaw piece into the board of the world): 1. Truth of yourself (your personality, desires, strengths, weaknesses—self-realization writ large), and 2. Clearly perceiving the state of the world and what is most needed.
- Right Living: This process of weaving together your unique strengths into the tapestry of the world is known as right living—your dharma. Your inner dharma is to seek and discover the Truth of who you are and bring yourself into alignment with this Truth (This Truth is that your small self is the All Self). Your outer dharma is the path, work, and commitments you enact in the world to assist you in realizing and grounding your inner dharma.
- Note (from Kyle): This reminds me of Eckhart Tolle’s “awakened doing” which you can read about in this book summary or in the 🔒Eckhart Tolle synthesis.
“It is far better to perform one’s natural prescribed duty, though tinged with faults, than to perform another’s prescribed duty, though perfectly.” — Bhagavad Gita
Get the eBook: Ikigai 2.0: A Step-by-Step Guidebook to Finding Life Purpose & Making Money Meaningfully (+ Bonus Workbook)
Explore more: How do I find higher purpose (Sloww Stage 2)?
🧠 Mental Wealth
Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows
Donella Meadows (1941–2001) was a scientist trained in chemistry and biophysics (Ph.D., Harvard University), followed by a research fellowship at MIT where she worked with the inventor of system dynamics, Jay Forrester. Thinking in Systems is the top book on Amazon for “System Theory.” I originally read the book almost two years ago but have two updates to share with you this week:
- The public book summary has been completely overhauled (and it’s 75% shorter).
- A new 🔒Premium book summary (+ 3 infographics) has been published.
“We are complex systems—our own bodies are magnificent examples of integrated, interconnected, self-maintaining complexity. Every person we encounter, every organization, every animal, garden, tree, and forest is a complex system.” — Donella Meadows
Build mental wealth: Mini Mind: 365 Daily Emails of Bite-Size Brain Food
Explore more: How do I master the mind (Sloww Stage 3)?
☯️ Timeless Wisdom
On Saints & Sinners
It’s quite an epiphany when you realize everyone is both saint and sinner:
“The sinner exists in the saint, and the saint exists in the sinner.” — Osho
“The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.” — Oscar Wilde
“Observe the marvelous change that comes over you the moment you stop seeing people as good and bad, as saints and sinners and begin to see them as unaware and ignorant. You must drop your false belief that people can sin in awareness. No one can sin in the light of awareness. Sin occurs, not, as we mistakenly think, in malice, but in ignorance.” — Anthony de Mello
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“The sinner is not on his way to the state of Buddhahood, he is not caught up in a process of developing, although our thought cannot imagine things in any other way. No, in this sinner the future Buddha already exists—now, today—all his future is already there. In him, in yourself, in everyone you must worship the future Buddha, the potential Buddha, the hidden Buddha. The world, is not imperfect, nor is it in the middle of a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect in every moment; every sin already carries forgiveness within it, all little children already carry their aged forms within them, all infants death, all dying men eternal life. It is not possible for anyone to see how far any other person has come along his path. Buddha waits within the robber and the dice player, and the robber waits in the Brahmin.” — Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)
Explore more: How do I embody wisdom (Sloww Stage 4)?
🤯 Mind Expanding
Brain-Bending Numbers
One of my favorite things to do is revisit these stats on an annual basis. In my experience, understanding my insignificance seems to free me from fear to do something significant. Funny how that works. Pair these with the two quotes at the beginning of this newsletter above.
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Go with the Sloww,
Kyle Kowalski
Synthesizer & Solopreneur
