Raam Dev

Hello, future.

Notes: Correct Posture by Capt. Godfrey Rodrigues

Correct Posture - Its meaning and its results is a fascinating little book on posture published in the 1930s by a man who appears to have no selfishly-motivated interest in sharing his knowledge and his experience (this was the first indication to me that this book was worth reading: he was sharing this knowledge because he truly believed in it and saw its truth in those who applied it).

For me the most interesting part of his story is how he came back to the western world with this newfound knowledge after spending some time exploring India and speaking with practitioners of yoga.

The principles presented in this book are incredibly simple and I can tell you, after applying them for less than two days myself, that it's the real thing. Try it and see for yourself. The book is short and you can read the entire thing online for free here.

I'm including a few of my favorite quotes from the book below.

Physical strength is of value to a man or woman only when it becomes a medium for a better and fuller life, a life of constructive labor an achievement.

Muscles are not the outward signs of inward health of body and mind, but they are part of man's equipment to 'carry on' in the rush and tumble of the world.

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[...] misunderstanding is the world's worst disease with which man has to contend.

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Teachers should themselves be taught first the value of posture and air--then they can turn to teaching it to the children. Make it necessary as their book education.

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From the body of Arabian literature comes these words, as true today as when they were first uttered by some scholar in ancient Bagdad or Mecca: "He who has health has hope, and he who has hope has everything."

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"The only way for a rich man to be healthy is by exercise and abstinence: to live as though he were poor." - Sir William Temple

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"Refuse to be ill. Never tell people you are ill: never own it to yourself. Illness is one of those things which a man should resist at the onset." - Lord Lytton

Notes: Chi Running Video

While looking for YouTube videos that demonstrated examples of proper running and walking gaits, I came across this video on Chi Running.

I'd come across the Chi Running book many years ago, but I unfortunately never looked into it. (I could've saved myself so much pain and discomfort while running.)

I've been exploring barefoot running for the past few years and as a result of running naturally, I've been discovering just how out of whack my body has become after years of improper running and walking, spurred on by, and no doubt contributing to, my bad posture.

If you run, even just a little, I strongly suggest watching this short video so you can understand how you may be, quite literally, putting the breaks on your progress.

There is so much we're not taught about how our bodies work and a little knowledge goes a long way towards avoiding injuries and correcting existing pains.

Notes: The Strangeness of Everyday Things

Have you ever repeat­ed a word to your­self so many times that you begin to notice the strange­ness of the sound it makes? The rep­e­ti­tion begins to con­ceal the mean­ing of the word, so you notice what it actu­al­ly sounds like.

I’ve found the same thing hap­pens the more you learn about a sub­ject. As you bur­row in, the sur­face lay­ers of com­mon sense peel away until you’re left with some­thing stranger.

Strange­ness is a good thing. It means you’ve ven­tured into new ter­ri­to­ry, where oppor­tu­ni­ties can be found and false­hoods shed. I’d say my goal in learn­ing any­thing is to try to find this zone of strange­ness.

In a recent blog post, Scott Young writes about something that I've experienced for as long as I can remember, that point where a repeated word suddenly seems to change.

I've also noticed this happen when doing a repetitive task: I feel the task becoming so automatic that I can almost forget about it, but then something strange happens and I start screwing up, as if the task became more challenging right when I was getting used to it.

I found Scott's point about how we can use this sudden strangeness to guide our learning quite thought-provoking and the full blog post is definitely worth a read.

Notes: Letters to a Young Poet – Letter 1

When I met Lisa Rigano earlier this year she recommended that I read Letters to a Young Poet, and I'm really glad she did because these letters are a goldmine of wisdom.

Written between 1902 and 1908, "Letters To A Young Poet are ten letters written to a young man about to enter the German military. His name was Franz Kappus, he was 19 years old, and he wrote Rilke looking for guidance and a critique of some of his poems. Rilke was himself only 27 when the first letter was written. The resulting five year correspondence is a virtual owner's manual on what it is (and what is required) to be an artist and a person."

While you can purchase the book, you can also find the full set of letters online for free. I've been going through them slowly and keeping track of my favorite passage from each letter. I'll be sharing those passages here over the next few weeks.

Here's my favorite passage from Letter 1:

Don't write love poems; avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary: they are the hardest to work with, and it takes a great, fully ripened power to create something individual where good, even glorious, traditions exist in abundance. So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty Describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world's sound - wouldn't you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attention to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. And if out of , this turning within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.

Notes: Is this not true for all of us?

"Some of our dreams come true, others do not; some people stay close, others move away; some get sick and then better -- while others wither and die. Some people we love remain faithful and loving our whole lives, while others abandon or betray us. Relationships and friendships come and go, businesses succeed and fail, fortunes rise and fall, people we love will die, and we will grow old, get sick, and die. As William Stafford says, 'Nothing we do can stop time's unfolding.' In that inevitable, excruciatingly human moment, we are offered a powerful choice…;

Will we interpret this loss as so unjust, unfair, and devastating that we feel punished, angry, forever and fatally wounded -- or, as our heart, torn apart, bleeds its anguish of sheer wordless grief, will we somehow feel this loss as an opportunity for our hearts to become more tender, more open, more passionately alive, more grateful for what remains?" - Wayne Muller, A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough

I bought Wayne Muller's book on the Kindle today after reading this passage and I'm looking forward to digging into it during my one-week train journey across Australia later this week.

How I've Been Sweating the Little Things

I tell myself that I don’t sweat the little things, that I’m really good at letting things go, but if I’m frank with myself and I take a hard look at the evidence, it’s clear that I do hold on to lots of little things. Many small, rather insignificant things that prevent me from growing and moving forward.

I came across a column article called How We Get Better, written by Steven Pressfield. Steven tells the story of his friend Paul who recently had a writing breakthrough and accidentally discovered his writing voice.

Steven explains how we get better by sharing the observations he made of his friend’s breakthrough. The observation that I found most interesting was number four: “This new voice was not the ‘real’ Paul; it was the artistic Paul.”

When I read any of my old writing, especially the writing that I feel is good, it never sounds like me. It’s as if there was someone else writing it. Was it because I was writing with my artistic voice and not my normal voice (i.e., the voice that I identify with)?

And if there was an artistic voice within me, what was holding it back when I wanted to write? Where was the resistance coming from?

Intrigued, I started scanning my collection of old unpublished drafts. I don’t know why I started there, but intuitively something told me that’s where I should go next, so I listened.

Within a few seconds I came across something that I had written nearly two years ago about not sweating the little things. The draft included two incomplete stories of events that caused me to start writing the draft.

While the stories were incomplete, I immediately remembered the events in great detail and recalled the importance and impact of their lessons.

In both events I had run into situations that seemed impassable. There seemed to be no possible resolution that did not come with repercussions.

But instead of stressing out, worrying, and taking premature action, I took a deep breath and released the situation to the universe.

Almost immediately the situation changed in ways that I never thought possible and both problems were resolved, like a magical missing piece to a jigsaw puzzle falling into a place that I didn’t know existed.

As I read this old draft and recalled the story and the lessons I learned, I realized that the resistance I most often experience actually comes from getting in the way of the natural flow of things.

The problem isn’t that I’m incapable of making more money, producing better writing, improving my social skills, or learning how to cook. It’s that I’m holding myself back from progressing forward by spending valuable time sweating the little things.

When I’m trying to learn how to cook, for example, I hold myself back by giving credence to thoughts of insufficiency.

Instead of looking up recipes online, buying ingredients, and then experimenting, I choose to worry about making something that won’t taste good, or wasting ingredients, or that my being too analytical isn’t compatible with cooking.

(In the past few weeks I’ve overcome a lot of this resistance and discovered that I love cooking, but more on that another time.)

When I’m trying to write, I resist forward progress by holding myself back by giving attention to needless thoughts.

“What if people don’t understand what I’m trying to say? What if I don’t know what I’m trying to say? What if my point is missed and my writing is criticized? What if I do more harm than good in my haste to publish?”

These thoughts, these unrelenting doubts and worries and questions, never seem to let up. They appear to be waiting for one thing and one thing only: for me to give up.

I’m realizing that the key isn’t to challenge these things that present resistance but instead to ignore them, like a raging river ignoring a large rock and flowing around it.

We get better by not sweating the little things but by letting them go and moving on to the next step with fearless bravado. It’s only when we try to take on the whole world, to shoulder responsibility for getting every single thing perfect, that we hold ourselves back from getting better.

Don't Sweat the Little Things

When something happens and you realize, “Crap! this is gonna screw things up”, just accept it and move on to the next step. It is what it is. If it's something that's not in your hands—if it’s something that you can’t control—then let it go. You can’t control it.

Be confident that things will turn out OK. You'll live. The day will go on. The sun will rise again. People will die. People will be born. People will make money. People will lose money. People will find jobs. People will lose jobs.

Go and stare at the ‘deaths today’ meter for a few minutes (hopefully you won’t last that long). Try to picture each of those deaths. Yours will be one of those numbers someday. And then the next number will come and whoever is watching that clock will forget about your number.

The world is not going to change or stop or end because of this little thing that happened to you. Relax. Don’t sweat the little things. Take a deep breath and move on.

The Other Side of Discomfort

I spent this past weekend learning a new language. Not a spoken language, but a programming language called Python. It was incredibly rewarding and it’s hard to believe that I almost paid someone to take that opportunity away.

A few weeks ago I came across a traveling programmer who had written some software to show a map of his travels on an embedded Google Map. He included a drop-down that allowed the selection of different maps, each map representing a different period of travel in his life. 

After being thoroughly impressed—and perhaps a little bit jealous—by his extensive travels and the simplicity by which he displayed all this data, I began to envision how I could do something similar on my own website.

His software was fairly straightforward: It looked at the contents of several Google Earth KML files, parsed the map data inside them, and then displayed that data on an embeddable Google Map.

Straightforward? Perhaps. But I didn’t even know what KML files were, let alone how to use Google Earth. The last time I played around with Google Earth was years ago. I had no idea how to create maps with it.

But I wasn’t going to let that stop me. 

I foresee myself traveling for years to come and I’ve been looking for a good way to track and display my travels for awhile now. I’m currently using the TravelMap plugin on my map page, but it has limited features and doesn’t scale for my nomadic lifestyle. This Google Earth solution seemed elegant, practical, and scalable.

So I downloaded Google Earth and learned how to create lines and points. I watched tutorial videos on YouTube and read documentation. I exported one of the test maps to a KML file and opened it in a text editor to learn about its format. 

I discovered that KML files were simply XML files (very similar to HTML). The locations of the points that I added in Google Earth were identified using its GPS coordinates; the lines that I drew between two points were represented by a series of coordinates: start-coordinates, end-coordinates, start-coordinates, end-coordinates, and so on.

With my newly acquired knowledge I set out building several Google Earth maps, each representing all my travels for the past two years, starting with my trip to India in 2010 and ending with my present location in Australia in 2012. 

It was around this point where I began to think about what the process of updating my current location with this system would look like on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis. 

I realized it would require opening Google Earth on my computer, editing the map with my new travels and adding new points and new lines, then exporting the file to KML and uploading it to the web server.

That seemed like a lot of work, especially when I was already recording my travels to some degree using geotagging on social networks like Twitter and Foursquare. 

I’m very suspicious of repetitive things when it comes to my time. (It all started when I calculated how much of my life each year was being spent simply looking at various notifications on my computer: 15 hours! I no longer use notifications for anything.) If I’m already recording my location online, why should I spend time recording it again in Google Earth?

How could I automatically update the Google Earth KML file with my latest location without spending any additional time?

After a bit of research, I discovered that Foursquare provides a KML feed for all my check-in data. So, I just needed to create a program that would automate copying the data from one KML file to the other and then updating the path line to show that I traveled from the old check-in to the new check-in.

With my limited knowledge of programming languages, I knew that Python was the best language for this job. The problem was, I knew practically nothing about Python. I was a PHP programmer and I knew that solving this problem with PHP would be both messy and time-consuming.

At this point I’d already spent a lot of time learning about KML files and creating maps in Google Earth. The thought of learning a whole new programming language just to get a travel map on my site was pushing the limits of what I expected to invest in this project in terms of time.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just hire someone else to do this final part? 

Never before had I hired someone to write a program for me, but for the first time I found myself taking the thought seriously. Was I getting lazy? Was this laziness the result of being able to afford to hire someone?

I posted the job on Elance with a maximum budget of $250— that’s what this program was worth to me. Within a few hours I began receiving bids, but with each bid I felt myself more and more disinterested with this idea.

Why was I paying someone to take away my opportunity to learn and grow? 

That’s when I realized something important: It wasn’t that I was being lazy. It’s that I wanted to pay someone to take away the discomfort of learning and growing. 

That one realization changed my whole thinking and instead of succumbing to the discomfort of learning something new, I decided to push into the discomfort and find out what’s on the other side. 

On Friday night I found a free Python tutorial online and began learning. I started with the very basics and ignored what I already knew about programming. I completed every exercise, from the very basic to the more advanced.

At first it was repetitive and boring, but as the hours passed I found myself muttering over and over, “that’s interesting”, every time I learned a new concept or understood how something worked.

This learning and exploration became so fun that I spent nearly the entire weekend indoors, peeling myself away from the computer only to eat, fulfill my running commitment, and watch the sunset.

By Sunday morning I began exploring beyond the Python tutorial and started searching the Internet for examples of using Python to handle XML files. There were very few examples specific to KML files and I couldn’t find anything that did what I wanted, but I continued experimenting.

By that evening I had finished a 248-line program in Python that did exactly what I wanted. It’s certainly not the prettiest code but the sense of empowerment and elation that I experienced upon finishing it was worth far more than $250.

The lesson? When it comes to spending time or spending money, always spend the time if you’ll learn something that will save you both money and time in the long-run. 

And more importantly, when it comes to learning new things, don’t pay someone to take away the discomfort for you: lean into that discomfort. 

On the other side of that discomfort exists a world where you live with more knowledge and understanding than the present version of yourself. It may be hard to imagine that world right now, but push through the discomfort and you’ll get there.

I haven’t finished integrating the new travel map into my site, but here’s a working sneak peak of the Journey Map.

Universal Truths

A banana cuts like a banana no matter where you live. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in Boston or Sydney or Kathmandu: when you peel a banana with your hands and slice it with a knife, it responds in exactly the same way.

Does this seem obvious? It shouldn’t.

Think about it: you can travel across the entire planet to faraway places where language and culture become alien and where your previous understanding of the world no longer applies.

You can find places where cars drive in the opposite direction, where numbers suddenly change their meaning, and where light switches are on in the off position.

You can find places where a blanket is not just a blanket but a lifeline; where an empty bottle is a shower-head; a shaded sidewalk is a home; a large bucket of water is a source of life; and where cats and dogs are not just domesticated pets to be loved, but food.

Even how you define life and death can change depending on where you go. For some, death brings a sense of loss and represents a time for mourning. For others, death represents a time for celebration and funerals are a way of celebrating life.

But a banana still cuts like a banana. The water in your teacup still responds to your movements in exactly the same way. Birds fly through the air using the same principles of flight they used millions of years ago.

In my travels I can always find things that are different, things that don’t match up with what I already know. It’s not easy to accept those things, to lean into the discomfort of embracing the unknown. But the more I embrace the unknown, the more I find myself recognizing universal truths.

Laughter still feels like laughter no matter where I go. Kindness feels like kindness and authenticity feels like authenticity. It doesn’t matter who it comes from or how alien my surroundings.

The realness of those things doesn’t require thought or thinking; attempting to impose expectations of how they’re supposed to be only clouds the simplicity of their truth.

The truth is, when it’s real, you’ll feel it.

What universal truths have you felt?

Notes: Life is real! Life is earnest!

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
and things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art; to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Notes: Be Your Best Self

Scott Young writes about how we should not become trapped by trying to 'be ourselves', but rather we should strive to be the best version of ourselves, even if that means changing what's important to us:

I’ve always hated the advice to, “Be yourself.” What if you don’t like parts of your­self, does that mean you shouldn’t change them? Does it imply you can’t change them, so you’re bet­ter off just accept­ing your des­tiny?

Friends and fam­i­ly often don’t want you to shift the val­ues you have, because they worry (right­ful­ly) that it may change you as a per­son. If you’re intro­vert­ed, but you want to be more social, those peo­ple may resist your efforts to be more out­go­ing. If you’re over­weight and try to get in shape, they may resent your sud­den­ly dif­fer­ent, health-conscious atti­tude.

I believe the advice should be “be your best self.” That also means being flex­i­ble in shift­ing the things that are impor­tant to you when you real­ize your cur­rent val­ues con­flict with that ideal. Don’t be fake, but don’t let a rigid con­cep­tion of your­self pre­vent you from being a bet­ter per­son.

Notes: The Inner Artist and the Inner Businessman

I posted the following thoughts on Shanna Mann's blog post, My Art Is My Business-- And Now Both Are Stuck!, about how I've been dealing with my inner artist and my inner businessman since starting this Journal:

What I've been doing is listening to what works and what doesn't, keeping my artist and my businessman separate enough to learn from each other (as opposed to combining them and trying to find compromises). For example, late last year I started monetizing my creative writing for the first time and since then both my inner artist and my inner businessman have learned a lot.

The artist has learned that having people paying monthly for a subscription to my writing is actually a huge distraction: I feel obligated to create and publish at a certain frequency because people are paying me monthly and a lot of extra energy goes into overcoming that pressure and simply creating when I'm ready to create.

The businessman has learned that creation is an absolute necessity and that perhaps offering an annual subscription at a lower price-point would be more harmonious with the way the artist creates. It would also give the artist a huge block of time (one year) to create and to provide value in exchange for that subscription.

All of this, of course, is specific to the way I create. Others may be able to create and publish something every day. I know that I spend more time diving into topics in my head and reflecting on ideas before I publish them.

What I think is important is that the artist and the businessman learn to communicate and share information with each other. For some, that could mean the artist needs one full week of creativity to create his or her art, entirely free of business tasks. Then, perhaps the businessman or businesswoman comes in and switches to business-mode (or hires someone else to take care of the business and marketing aspects altogether).

It's important to continue experimenting, to continue trying new ways of assigning responsibilities and time to the inner artist and the inner businessman/businesswoman.