Something I’ve learned from Taoism is that seemingly opposing concepts or forces are actually two halves of the whole. Without day, there’d be no night. Without the back side of a coin, there’d be no front side. As I progress with my inner work, I find it increasingly easier to remember this and notice that my enjoyment of life also becomes increasingly greater.
In addition to being leisurely productive, the days I enjoy the most are full of opposites. Times of working intensely punctuated with times of extreme leisure. Times of moving around a lot (unicycling, juggling, dancing) followed by times of hardly moving at all (lying down, meditating, floating). Times of busyness before times with nothing to do. Times of pushing myself preceding times of pampering myself. Times of being social and times of being in solitude. This way I rarely get bored and can be meaningfully productive while still having plenty of time to rest and enjoy my day.
My most challenging days are the ones that have one dominant trait: going nonstop. Instead of being leisurely productive, I have to get a lot of things done very quickly throughout the day and have very little time to rest. Those days are both physically and emotionally exhausting for me. I normally need at least a few days to myself to recover from those (fortunately rare) occasions and I hope to get my life to a point that they never happen.
I hope that my exploration of a slower, more intentional way to live, along with sharing it through this blog, helps make this approach to life more widespread. Everyone should be able to live at a comfortable pace. If more people did, then everyone would be better off. Less stress, more peace, fewer conflicts, more time to spend with loved ones, and fewer problems overall. Plus I’d get to have many more leisurely productive days and hardly any manically busy days. I think this type of shift in living is not only possible but necessary for the survival and well-being of humanity. That’s why I’ve dedicated my life to making it happen and work toward it almost every day, one breath at a time.