The election has happened. It is time for all of us to regroup. We can start to regroup by adopting certain daily practices based on kirist principles. Here are six daily practices that will help you move forward. Please give them a try! They will make a real, positive difference in your life.
1. Decide What’s Important
Ask yourself, “What’s important.” If your deepest answer is, “Nothing, really,” you must reply immediately, “That really won’t do.” And if you hear yourself say, “But that’s the truth,” you must again immediately reply, “Nope, that’s just me forgetting my job as a person. My job is to invest importance based on my values. If I believe that children shouldn’t starve unnecessarily, I have just identified what is important. If I believe that love is important, I have just identified what is important. If I believe that treating people fairly is important, I have just identified what is important. What’s important? What I decide is important. And I had better decide or else life will feel very empty.” Your daily practice: decide what’s important.
2. Encourage Daily Risk-Taking
Let’s say that you want to remind yourself each day that your life is your project and that aspects or features of that project involve risk. Maybe you need to speak up to a bully but you’re frightened. Maybe you want to sing the songs you’ve written but performing scares you. Maybe you need to change a long-held belief but that feels like inviting an earthquake. To help you do these things, things that you really want to do, start each day with the following brief visualization. Visualize yourself at the edge of a precipice looking down. Breathe. Say to yourself, “Life is risk.” Then go do a difficult thing. Your daily practice: encourage daily risk-taking.
3. Shrug Off Meaninglessness
Maybe long hour after long hour, nothing has felt meaningful. Not life, not your job, not your world, not any action you can imagine taking, not any thought you can imagine thinking, not your prospects, not anything. Nothing. Period. To do righteous battle with this common, natural, and completely predictable occurrence, you must say, “Oh, this looks to be a period of meaninglessness. Let me shrug it off.” You shrug. You really shrug. Maybe you shrug many times. Maybe you engage in an even larger gesture, like throwing off an imaginary heavy overcoat. Your new thought is, “Of course life feels meaningless some of the time! Have I forgotten that meaning is the sort of thing that comes and goes?” Your daily practice: shrug off meaninglessness.
4. Seize Meaning Opportunities
Say that life hasn’t been feeling all that meaningful. Well, you have choices to make. Which is more likely to provide you with the experience of meaning, checking your email again or writing a note to your ailing aunt? Checking the daily news or making your granddaughter a birthday card? Playing a computer game or dreaming up characters for your mystery novel? Isn’t it rather unfair to claim that life isn’t feeling meaningful if you shun meaning opportunities? Yes, you aren’t guaranteed the experience of meaning from writing your aunt, making that birthday card, or dreaming up those characters. But haven’t you at least given yourself a shot at meaning? Your daily practice: create, and then seize, meaning opportunities.
5. Factor in Inertia
In physics, inertia is the tendency of a body to preserve its state of rest or its uniform motion. So, as applied to human beings, inertia has two rather different meanings. If you are at rest, you tend to stay at rest. And if you are doing a certain thing, you are inclined to keep doing that thing rather than a different thing. Doesn’t that almost completely explain why it is so hard to live our life purposes? To live a life purpose means to get up and live it. But inertia stops us. To live a life purpose when we are doing something else means that we must change directions. But inertia stops us. Your daily practice: factor in inertia.
6. Recommit to Your Life Project
Say that you want to build a certain online business. But so much of the work is tedious, there are so many moving parts, so many uncertainties, and so many tech problems, the odds of success are long and the competition is fierce, and your offer may prove obsolete even before you get it to market. Really, why bother? Well, you know why to bother. But all that heaviness feels heavier than any lead weight, any anchor, any albatross. So: a million times over, you will need to recommit to bothering. Not once a year or once a month or once a week but a million times over; and maybe a hundred times on a single day. Your daily practice: recommit again and again and again and again to living your life purposes.
These practices will serve you in good times, in difficult times, and all the time. They are foundational practices for living a life that you can be proud to live. I hope that you will implement them and find them valuable.
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Learn more about kirism in Lighting the Way: How Kirism Answers Life’s Hardest Questions. Eric Maisel is the author of 50+ books. Visit him at ericmaisel.com and subscribe to his blog posts at authory.com.
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