Pillars

Health + Love + Curiosity → Love, Wisdom, Fulfilment

Living in a manner which supports these pillars and is directionally accurate to them is the best way to live a good life.

Living with the pillar of Health in mind requires several things. It requires time to be consistently devoted to the maintenance of the body: cardio, weights, stretching and sport. It requires a diet that will fuel optimal performance nutritionally. It requires control over vices that damage health: avoid the extracurriculars unless the tradeoff is worth it. It requires consistent, high-quality sleep. Just as a healthy body is essential to live in accordance with the pillar of Health, so is a healthy mind. A healthy mind is a clear mind, insofar as is possible. Practices that amplify this include meditation, maintaining a good information diet and abstinence from / control over vice. Keeping the mind young is a critical component of a healthy mind. Maintaining a spirit of curiosity makes it exponentially easier to maintain a young and healthy mind and has the bonus of being extremely fun. With a healthy body and a healthy mind the pillar of Health is kept in balance. One must also accept that there will be periods of better health and of poorer health.

A critical component of maintaining a healthy mind is the ability to accept the inevitable fluctuations that come part and parcel with the randomness and the variety of life. In times like this, doing what you can, no more and no less, is sufficient. Every man can perform well on his best days. It is the ability to show up on one's worst days and give what you can that separate the greatest from the good.

Living in accordance with the pillar of Love is simple: nurture your relationships and allow them to nurture you. However, sometimes the most simple of maxims disguise the greatest complexity and that is indeed the case here. Nurturing relationships requires time and communication. Spending time with those you love, and being present in those moments, without falling into the individualist trap and begrudging the time devoted to human connection as lost 'productive output'. This is one of the greatest tragedies of the achievement economy. We are so conditioned to believe that we must spend every waking minute "becoming" — becoming something to be renowned, respected, revered — that we forget that to be loved, and to be loved in return, is life's greatest joy. We must guard this sacred instinct against the unrelenting onslaught of the efficiency imperative, which will take everything you give it and push for more. In a society that profits from your fear, loneliness and isolation, choosing to love without limits, to love slowly, to love in the face of all manner of uncertainty, simply to love — is a rebellious act. Without love, we are nothing.

It's important to note that living the spirit of love should not be restricted to those you love. A great friend of mine, who I love dearly, has been talking to me recently about the power of the belief that all people are intrinsically good. Choosing to believe that there is good in the heart of everyone whom you meet, choosing to love at least that part of them, transcends all division. Even if you take the individualist stance and posit that we are all inherently self-interested and will only act to fulfil that self-interest, as another great friend of mine is fond of saying, you will arrive at the same conclusion. The more love that you see in the world and the more love that you give to the world in return, the more love will be reflected back at you from the world. Such the law of cause and effect applies to love, as to all of life.

Writing about living in accordance with the pillar of Wisdom is a bit more complicated as I can't claim to have attained much. As far as I have surmised in my 24 years, wisdom is a function of one's lived experience and the ability to learn from it. Therefore, based on my current understanding, amplifying one's lived experience and consciously choosing to "learn" from such experience is the best way to attain wisdom. In this way, curiosity is a predictor of wisdom.

It all seems to come back to curiosity. Choosing to look outside of one's own circle of knowledge and competence then to follow one's eyes and jump into the unknown, seems to significantly increase the surface area in which luck can strike.

The path to living well is simple and I feel grateful to be on it. I will continue to live with relentless curiosity, holding tightly to my health and to those I love. This is the path to lasting fulfilment.