It’s hard listening to Big Mind when you are running your life on your schedule, by rote, by your watch. It’s easy to numb out and do what you do because it’s what you do, but that can lead us to lives of quiet desperation or mornings of road rage or afternoons of wishing we were anywhere but where we were at that moment.

Here is, I think, one of the most powerful things my coach Katie Peuvrelle taught me, and I didn't have to do a thing. As soon as she said it, my mind shifted and my life changed. 

I want to stand up straight now because I get it. It's not to make other people feel better about me: it's so I can feel better not just about myself, but about the world. 

I was so inspired yesterday after writing about Jonny Parker that I went and wrote the book I wish I’d had as a child. Or as an adult. 

Dear, gentle reader. I beg you. Let your creative freak fly. It’s so fun to be with people who are making stuff. It’s like being in nursery school, back when the question was, “How did you do that?!”, back when the response to seeing art was throwing one’s self at a piece of paper or into a pile of dirt or whatever material is at hand and getting jiggy with it.

If you want to know what a dysregulated nervous system feels like, stand in the path of on-coming traffic, have three cups of coffee or however much it takes to give you the spins, and then look at your page-long to-do list.

I can’t believe how fun the last twenty-two days have been. My life was good before I started this 93-day project, but it has been wonderful since. 

Balance can be harder than extreme behaviors. It’s easier in some ways to starve yourself than to feed yourself, but I’m learning to walk the middle path. You can overeat; you can undereat, and you can eat.

Today, when I went for acupuncture to address my right eye that tires more easily than my left eye, the acupuncturist placed a needle by my temple in the large intestine meridian. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the belief is that the health of the large intestine affects the eyes. 

There’s been a lot of talk about failure in the last few years. There are college courses on it, books written about it, Ted talks tedding about, and it’s all in a positive light. Failure, these days, in this light, is not a big F word. Failure means you are striving, that you are trying new things, that you are willing to put yourself out there and fall down. 

A couple of weeks ago, I was walking back from the beach with my friend Antonia, and we saw a guy walking into his house. That’s Frosty Hesson, Antonia said. He’s a legend. He’s one of the two guys the movie Chasing Mavericks is about. He’s surfed the monsters.

There are two things my nervous system can’t seem to tolerate: not having money and having money.