On peace

Alicia: How do you keep your life easy when it’s easy and stop yourself from over complicating it again?

Thank you for this great question, Alicia.

My teacher Maharishi once said, “Try to set up a life, as best you can, that’s congruent with the peace you desire.” 

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, how to set up my life in a way that’s congruent with the peace I desire. And for the last little while I’ve been running an experiment on optimising my life for peace.

I think you can optimise your life for growth, for money, for fun, for excitement, for status … for lots of things. It’s worth thinking about what your life is optimised for.

Right now I’m doing my best to optimise for peace. And it’s helping me keep my life easy.

Life has a natural entropy towards chaos and complication. Keeping it simple takes vigilance.

On my last personal retreat (every three months I spend a few days on my own in the bush) I came up with a fabulous new program I could run. It would be fun to deliver, easy to sell, make good money, and make a difference.

I then imagined all the dates going into my diary, and all the actions onto my to do list. And that didn’t bring me more peace. So for now it’s just going to remain a good idea.