What do I want out of life? What is my goal?
I am plodding through life haphazardly and blindly. I have not discovered exactly what I want to do with my life. It’s as if I’m crossing a suspended bridge and not yet stepped off onto solid ground.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Normal people can be happy with a regular life. I was different. I felt there was more to life than just plodding through an average existence.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Choose sitting on that couch watching mind numbing, spirit crushing game shows, stuffing junk food into your mouth. Choose your future. Choose life… I chose not to choose life.
Trainspotting
So many people allow themselves to be dulled by their joys and worries and distractions of life, not realizing that thoughts which earlier meant a great deal to them in their youth turned into meaningless sounds. In the end they have lost all feeling for everything that makes up the inner life.
Albert Schweitzer
I knew what I wanted: something that would stretch me, mentally and physically, to the limits. I yearned for that intensity of feeling which would make each day be lived as though it was the last, full of zest and lust for life that seem so lacking in our society. In one sense too, I needed almost to dice with death (though I have never, and would never, take an uncalculated risk), because sometimes you simply have to live on the edge to appreciate the vitality of life.
Nick Danzigger
I need to construct a method which will enable me gradually to increase my knowledge and to raise it little by little to the highest point which the mediocrity of my mind and the short span of my life will allow it to reach. I need to construct a method in order to see clearly into my actions and to walk with safety in this life.
First Step
The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.
I want to change my way of life, to become virtuous, to lead a healthier life style, to become more educated through such disciplines as philosophy, physics and mathematics (see Philosophy Made Simple – Plato, Ethics), to study more, to organise my thoughts in a more coherent and consistent way (see Philosophy Made Simple, what a philosopher does), to become articulate, to develop both mind and body (What the Beep do you know?), to achieve my full potential. I want to achieve happiness. I want to dedicate my life to helping others.
I am confident in my own capacities, in what I still want to learn, in my work and in my health. Confident in my abilities to succeed in my goals, my ambitions and my aspirations, the hopes I place in life (see Golas.xls).
I am determined to win a portion of this world and happiness for myself. I never want to lose that burning desire of the soul to breathe in this world of light or the passing of a garden and know that the flowers blossoming in it are no longer for me. Not to lose that feeling makes up the inner life.
Life
How can anyone discover what life means? It is too deep for us, too hard to understand. But I devoted myself to knowledge and study, I was determined to find wisdom and the answers to my questions, and to learn how wicked and foolish stupidity is.
Ecclesiastes
For this is the deepest realization when we try to plumb the depth of life: what holds the deepest meaning in life is not what we hope for, nor what we wish from life, but it is the near and far people who are in need of us.
Albert Schweitzer
But from the point of view of daily life without going deeper we exist for our fellow man.
Albert Einstein
Method
I need to construct a method which will ‘enable me gradually to increase my knowledge and to raise it little by little to the highest point which the mediocrity of my mind and the short span of my life will allow it to reach.’ I need to construct a method ‘in order to see clearly into my actions and to walk with safety in this life.’
…and resolving to study no other science than that which I could find within myself or else in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth in travelling, seeing courts and armies, mixing with people of different humours and ranks, in gathering a varied experience, in testing myself in the situations which chance offered me, and everywhere reflecting upon whatever events I witnesses in such a way as to draw some profit from them.
But like a man who walks alone, and in the dark, I resolved to go slowly, and to use such caution in all things that, even if I went forward only very slowly, I would at least avoid falling, and those who go forward only very slowly can progress much further if they always keep to the right path, than those who run and wander off it.
…following the method I had prescribed for myself. I had experienced such extreme satisfaction since beginning to make use of this method that I did not think it possible to experience gentler or more innocent joys in this life; and discovering daily, by its means, truths which seemed of some importance and generally unknown to other men, the satisfaction I obtained from it so filled my mind that nothing else mattered to me.
Renes Descartes
I am also trying to make for myself a simplified and intelligible picture of the world, making this cosmos and its construction the pivot of my emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security…(see full text, how Einstein compares the life of a scientist, also see Bertrand Russell account, The Conquest of Happiness)
Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.
Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel
Action
I knew what I wanted: something that would stretch me, mentally and physically, to the limits. I yearned for that intensity of feeling which would make each day be lived as though it was the last, full of zest and lust for life that seem so lacking in our society. In one sense too, I needed almost to dice with death (though I have never, and would never, take an uncalculated risk), because sometimes you simply have to live on the edge to appreciate the vitality of life.
“A person needs new experiences. They jar something deep inside, allowing him to grow. Without change something sleeps inside us and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”
Frank Herbert, Dune
Choose sitting on that couch watching mind numbing, spirit crushing game shows, stuffing junk food into your mouth. Choose your future. Choose life…I chose not to choose life.