In my “Zero Attachment, Zero Anxiety” post, I commented on a contradiction between some of my earlier writing and what I have come to see as a constructive approach to creating your best life. The contradiction was about the concept of yearning. In the book The Joy Diet, I wrote that yearning is the internal map of the course your life was meant to follow. I believe I wrote something like, “Your destiny pulls you through life by the heart.” Last month I wrote that intense yearning is a form of attachment that can actually stop the thing you desire [...]

This week I sliced my thumb nearly to the bone, smashed my knee so hard my head exploded, bought $400 worth of software it turned out I did not need, and spent one long day griping at everyone I saw. This, gentle reader, does not fulfill my self-help motto “live it to give it.”

At the end of that awful day, bruised and bleeding from both my thumb and my bank account, I realized I had lost the life rhythm of my essential self. I was working flat out and accomplishing very little.

This is not a first for me.

Past experience [...]

For the past two weeks or so, every traffic light I drive through turn yellow while I’m in the intersection. Those lights are yellow for much less total time than they are either red or green, but I’ve become a yellow-light magnet. What’s more, as I drive under the lights, it almost feels as though my attention is being called: “Psst! Look! Another yellow!”

I have taken this as a hint to slow down. This is something I’ve been told approximately 3,968,452 times. Last month.

Seriously, I’ve been justly accused of overworking pretty much everything: my drawing, my writing, my body. [...]