I'm glad you're working seriously. What I want to say today is about how that work should look from the outside — which is to say, mostly invisible.
There's a type of person who pursues philosophy as a form of display. The deliberately rough clothes, the ostentatious rejection of comfort, the beard worn as a credential. I understand the impulse — you've changed, and you want the outside to announce the inside. But it doesn't work that way, and it tends to backfire. People who might have been drawn toward what you've found are instead frightened off, because they think accepting one thing means accepting everything, including the theater.
Inwardly, we should be different in every respect. Outwardly, we should conform to society. Not because appearances matter more than substance, but because substance is what matters — and substance doesn't need a costume.
Plain living, but not penance. We may perfectly well be plain and neat at the same time.
The person who uses earthenware as if it were silver has achieved something. So has the person who uses silver as if it were earthenware. Neither the material nor its rejection is the point. The point is the quality of relationship to what you have — whether it owns you or you own it.
Today's thought, which stopped me when I encountered it: cease to hope, and you will cease to fear. This sounds like counsel of despair until you see what it actually means. Hope and fear are not opposites — they're the same chain, fastening you to an imagined future. The mind in suspense, fretted by what hasn't happened yet, suffers twice: once in anticipation, once in the event. And sometimes the event never arrives, so it suffers for nothing.
Foresight is one of the great gifts of a human mind. But foresight perverted becomes the torment of projecting yourself forward into every possible disaster, or every possible triumph, and living there instead of here.
The present alone can make no man wretched.
What is actually happening right now, in this moment — not what happened yesterday, not what might happen tomorrow — is almost always bearable. The suffering is mostly in the extensions. Cut them and see what remains.
Yours, here and now,