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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 163 (Nov 26, 2023) — Special Gratitude Edition
Sloww Sunday shares my latest and greatest creations and curations to 10,000+ students of life. If you enjoy this issue, please help grow Sloww by forwarding the email version of this newsletter to other lifelong learners.
🎉 Sloww hit 600 posts!
Gratitude & The Journey
Here’s a short summary of everything I learned from Sloww’s posts 501-600. I also updated the 10 most life-changing ideas I’ve discovered after 600+ posts.
This November I’ve been celebrating my 8-year existential crisiversary. But, “celebrating” these days has more to do with reflecting on the journey than throwing a crazy party. People often ask me what’s actually changed in the years since. Here are a few things that come to mind:
Then: It’s hard to believe I once lived the life of busy-aholic working 60-80+ hour weeks in a purposeless marketing career, experiencing lifestyle inflation and unconscious consumption/materialism, going to bed at 1-2am most weeknights, drinking alcohol every weekend, and not really reading or learning (certainly not for fun).
Now: I’m living my purpose as a self-education entrepreneur, experience full days instead of busy days, consciously consume and cut expenses, go to bed most nights between 9:30-10:30pm, don’t drink alcohol (200+ days now), and read and learn as some of the most fun things I do. The biggest change of all? I’m no longer subject to my socialized mind; I’m now aware of and able to observe/witness it. This makes all the difference once you realize everything else is downstream of your sense of self.
📘🌀 Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development
Gratitude & Appreciating Others
At some point, I started saving these 10 quotes on accepting and appreciating the beauty in who people are. Here’s one personal favorite:
- “When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You appreciate it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying, ‘You’re too this’ or ‘I’m too this.’ That judging mind comes in. So, I practice turning people into trees—which means appreciating them just the way they are.” — Ram Dass
Explore more: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🌎 Lighter Living
Gratitude & Food
I first read about the “Five Reflections” in the book Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism by Fumio Sasaki (Book Summary). Here’s how to be more mindful at mealtime:
1. Reflect upon how the food has come before you: How the food might have been grown, how it was prepared, and how it was brought to you as your meal. Consider how nature’s miracles and people’s hard work have culminated in the creation of the food you are about to enjoy.
2. Reflect upon your day and yourself: Contemplate whether your virtues and actions make you worthy of the meal in front of you. Be aware of the quality of your deeds as you receive this meal.
3. Observe whether your own spirit is pure like the food: A mind full of greed, anger, and ignorance cannot truly appreciate or savor the food. What is most essential is the practice of mindfulness. Focus only on the meal in front of you without rushing through it and without thinking any other thoughts.
4. Chew slowly and enjoy every bite: Good food is medicine and a way of rejuvenating and purifying your fatigued body. Appreciate this food which sustains the good health of your body and mind.
5. Be thankful for all, and eat with gratitude: To make and eat good food is part of walking the virtuous path.
Explore more: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Higher Purpose
Gratitude & Self-Actualization
Here’s how Abraham Maslow described self-actualizers and transcenders related to gratitude:
On self-actualizers (Summary | 🔒Premium Synthesis):
- “You often feel gratitude for the good in your life no matter how many times you encounter it … Expressions of gratitude, or at least of awareness of their good fortune, are common.” — Abraham Maslow
On transcenders (Summary | 🔒Premium Synthesis):
- “The highest attitude toward individual differences is to be aware of them, to accept them, but also to enjoy them and finally to be profoundly grateful for them as a beautiful instance of the ingenuity of the cosmos—the recognition of their value, and wonder at individual differences … Overlapping with several of the above is the transcendence of effort and of striving, of wishing and hoping, of any vectorial or intentional characteristics. In the simplest sense this is, of course, the sheer enjoyment of the state of gratification, of hope fulfilled and attained, of being there rather than of striving to get there, of having arrived rather than of traveling toward … It is the Taoistic feeling of letting things happen rather than making them happen, and of being perfectly happy and accepting of this state of nonstriving, nonwishing, noninterfering, noncontrolling, nonwilling. This is the transcendence of ambition, of efficiencies. This is the state of having rather than of not having. Then of course one lacks nothing. This means it is possible to go over to the state of happiness, of contentment, of being satisfied with what is. Pure appreciation. Pure gratitude. The state and the feeling of good fortune, good luck, the feeling of grace, of gratuitous grace.” — Abraham Maslow
Gratitude is also mentioned in Scott Barry Kaufman’s book Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization (Book Summary):
- “There are a variety of transcendent experiences that differ in their intensity and degree of unity with the world. There is a ‘unitary continuum,’ ranging from the experience of becoming deeply absorbed in an engrossing book, sports performance, or creative activity (what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to as the flow experience), to experiencing an extended mindful meditation retreat, to feeling gratitude for a selfless act of kindness, to merging with a loved one, to experiencing awe at a beautiful sunset or the stars above, to being so inspired by something—whether an inspiring role model, virtuoso performance, intellectual idea, or act of moral beauty—that you have a ‘transcendent awakening,’ all the way up to the great mystical illumination.” — Scott Barry Kaufman
Lastly, gratitude is also one of the key virtues in Brian Johnson’s work with Heroic, formerly Optimize (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Synthesis):
- “Science says that there’s a universal top five set of virtues most robustly correlated to our eudaimonic flourishing: gratitude + hope + zest + curiosity + love. Of those five, zest, hope, and gratitude are the top 3 most highly correlated with your flourishing … You’re 25% happier simply by doing a gratitude journal capturing 5 things once a week for 10 weeks (oh by the way, you’ll sleep 30 minutes more a night, and you’ll exercise 33% more than people who aren’t happy).” — Brian Johnson
Explore more: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧠 Mental Mastery
Gratitude & Birth Lottery
Probably my favorite personal gratitude practice is thinking about and reflecting on the lottery of birth (Summary | 🔒Premium Synthesis). Over the last couple years, I think I’ve exhausted everything possible about it: top quotes, top videos, and top implications. Most importantly, I 🔒dissected my own lottery ticket and realized I’m lucky and humbled that I randomly got a winning ticket in the birth lottery that I continue to benefit from to this day. I’m grateful for the opportunity to give myself away doing what I love while simultaneously benefitting others (and while realizing that “I” am not doing any of it).
- “We are born without choosing to, to parents we haven’t chosen, into bodies and borders we haven’t chosen, to exist in a region of spacetime we haven’t chosen for a duration we don’t choose … I am excited to get up every morning, and I am grateful to go to sleep at night. And, I feel good about what I’ve thought about—what I’ve spent my day and my time and my neurons and my heart on in the day. To me, that is a pretty important and central part of the definition of ‘success.’” — Maria Popova (The Marginalian, formerly Brain Pickings)
Explore more: 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
☯️ Spiritual Seeing
Gratitude & Suffering
Gratitude lessons from The Way to Love by Anthony de Mello (Book Summary):
- “Think of some of the painful events in your life. For how many of them are you grateful today, because thanks to them you changed and grew? Here is a simple truth of life that most people never discover. Happy events make life delightful but they do not lead to self-discovery and growth and freedom. That privilege is reserved to the things and persons and situations that cause us pain … Every painful event contains in itself a seed of growth and liberation. In the light of this truth return to your life now and take a look at one or another of the events that you are not grateful for, and see if you can discover the potential for growth that they contain which you were unaware of and therefore failed to benefit from. Now think of some recent event that caused you pain, that produced negative feelings in you. Whoever or whatever caused those feelings was your teacher, because they revealed so much to you about yourself that you probably did not know. And they offered you an invitation and a challenge to self-understanding, self-discovery, and therefore to growth and life and freedom.” — Anthony de Mello
Explore more: 50+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
