I’ve been in Denver for three months now.

Boy, has life changed since then. Not externally, although I did cancel my trip to Costa Rica, but internally — thinking in a new way, prioritizing different goals, and focusing my mental energy on other things.

Here’s a recap:

“We’re Part Of Some Grand Fucking Alchemy”

One of the central things that prompted me to cancel my trip was that I started thinking about death more. (Not in a suicidal way.)

This is also probably why I’m so popular with the ladies.

Anyway, I started visualizing death more partly because I don’t believe in an afterlife. I believe that, after death, everything fades to black. (I mean, sure there might be a heaven, but with that same logic, it’s just as plausible that there’s a parallel universe made entirely of sushi.)

At the end, the lights go off and it’s nighttime forever. Everything I ever knew won’t exist. I won’t exist. In fact, to take it a step further, there is no “I” or “me.” As one of my great friends said so well:

we’re part of some grand fucking alchemy. all the ‘new’ things around us are recycled from the elements of past suns and we’re just sitting here breathing dinosaur air, waiting for the iPhone 7.

So… what the fuck?

What the fuck am I doing with my life?

And why the hell am I doing what I’m doing?

Does the fact that we die create death or is our death merely punctuated by life?

And is there no “I” or “me?” Shit, maybe I’m just the dust and ashes from the billions of faceless people before me — I stare at the same Sun and Moon that Confucius stared at and I gaze at the same ocean that Magellan once sailed on.

Reading The Alchemist, I also start to ponder that everything you see around us came from the same place, that we’re all complicated matter that spawned from the Big Bang. One million years ago, we didn’t exist. One hundred million years ago, dinosaurs roamed the earth. (Which is why we’re breathing “dinosaur air.”) One hundred billion years ago? What existed before the Big Bang? Who the fuck knows?

Sometimes taking a step back and “breaking the fourth wall” opens new channels in your brain and your life.

Try not to be too careful in life. And determine if the things you want in life are the things that you really want.

In the meantime, I’ll just be here breathing dinosaur air.

Don’t Let Anyone Make You Think You Have To Do Something

In Denver, a lot of people go skiing and snowboarding. Some of the best slopes in North America are only a few hours (or less) away from Downtown and I’m glad they’re having a blast doing so.

There are, however, snow snobs who feel that if you’re not carving up such-and-such mountain on the weekends, you’re must be having much fun.

Ha.

First off, I’m from Los Angeles. To many Los Angelenos, being snobbish about Denver is the equivalent of bragging to your friends that you won twenty bucks in the lottery. (I don’t mean that sound mean; I mean that there’s no point in being snobbish about anything to anyone.) Second off, even in LA, I never surfed. Honestly, the ocean didn’t interest me much, let alone the parking and traffic just to hit up the beach.

Also, skiing and snowboarding doesn’t quite fit my lifestyle. Guh? Frankly, I don’t like possessing too many things. (I recently got a free shirt from MailChimp and, in response, donated one of my button-up shirts I bought in South Korea.) I would also rather invest the price of a ski pass, lessons, and equipment rental into a plane ticket, books, and lots of sushi.

But this isn’t just winter sports… this is everything. Don’t let anyone make you feel like you have to travel, live in mansions, or have kids. (And, especially, don’t let ME of all people make you feel that way. I’m a loon.)

The only exception, however, is reading and exercise. If you don’t do either, you probably should start that shit because it’s, like, really fucking good for you.

Whatever You Demand From Life, You Must Demand From Yourself

I wrote about this before, but it’s worth mentioning again.

If I want an amazing life, I better do some amazing shit.

If I want to surround myself with generous, kind, and ambitious people, I better become that kind of person first.

If I want to date a girl in great shape, I better get in great shape too.

Sure, there are exceptions to this rule, but it’s better to become better and reap all the consequences of your hard work.

Regain Your Freedom From Detachment, Not Options

In the pickup community, there’s a beginner problem called “one-itis.” Basically, it’s a phenomenon when an “average frustrated chump” (AFC) likes one girl — and only one girl — a lot and cannot for the life of him get her out of his mind. He starts stressing about what she texts, how long it takes for her to text him back, what she says to him, what he should say, what he should do, where he should go for dates, etc.

The traditional solution to oneitis is very simple:

Get another girl.

Add another girl into the mix and it solves the problem. Suddenly, you think about the original girl in a much more detached way because you have options. (And like any skilled negotiation, power goes to the person with more options.)

In my younger days, when I got a girl’s phone number, my top goal was to get another one as soon as I could. Why? Well, I was already playing with “house money” — to hedge my investment, I could play the tables like an Arabian prince.

But now, I realized how flawed that logic is.

Because you’re simply replacing one problem with another one.

If you’re stressing about a girl (or a job, car, friend, etc.), adding another girl into the mix isn’t really fixing anything. Sure, you’ll feel a little more detached, but you didn’t change anything internally: when you’re back to one girl, you’re as fucked as when you started.

The real solution is to enjoy EVERYTHING and EVERYONE in a detached way. For example, I love my old friends, but when they’re not around (or in LA or back home at some other corner of this Earth), I’m not going to cry myself to sleep every night listening to “Right Here Waiting For You” by Richard Marx. And if I miss a workout, I won’t stare at myself in the mirror and say I’m becoming the Asian guy from The Hangover — I’ll just go the next day and workout harder.

“WHEREVER YOU GO… WHATEVER YOU DO…!”

I’m not saying to become aloof. I’m saying to enjoy and appreciate everything while understanding that things can be taken away at any moment.

With leads me to my next point…

Negative Visualization Is Awesome

I’ve been practicing a Stoic art of negative visualization: imagining that something horrendous happens. For example, I would imagine my car getting stolen and the havoc that would cause. There’s a lot to this exercise, but basically it teaches you to appreciate what you already have without taking it for granted. Here’s another example: my grandfather, who lived to be over 100 years old, spent the last decade of his life with poor hearing, vision, and health.

How would I know that won’t happen to me?

And if it does, why the fuck would I take those senses for granted. What if I go blind and can never see the sunset ever again? “Gee, when I was 27, I didn’t even have the fucking time to admire a sunset over the snow-capped Rocky Mountains because I was ‘too busy?'”

It also takes away the sting of bad things when they do inevitably happen. Here’s a great example: I was brushing my teeth in front of my bathroom the other day when I thought, “Could you imagine if the whole fucking thing broke? Ha, that would suck. Be thankful for a sturdy mirror.”

Sure enough, Wednesday morning, the mirror fell off, slammed on the counter, fell on my toilet, and punched a hole in the wall.

I laughed hysterically while calling the building’s repairman.

No biggie. (Although, in my imagination, glass shattered everywhere; in real life, no glass broke. Amazing!)

As my friend later said, “Life is good if that’s the worse thing to happen to you today.”

Four Years Ago, I Was Teaching English In Taiwan

Life changes so fast and drastically.

I shit myself thinking about how much has changed over the years. One of my buddy always cracks up when we talk about my blog writing because, if you haven’t noticed, I rarely talk about fitness now.

But it’s not the traveling that I’m focusing on, but the differences in “life stages.” At 23, all I wanted to do was travel like a bum, read books, flirt with pretty girls, and see how far from LA I could possibly go. At 27… well… some things have changed while, uh, most have not.

But I’ll be 30 fucking years old in three years.

That’s why I’m already saving up for a down payment on a house and my wedding (even though I’m single). Why? Because I know at that time — and regardless of how little I care about those things now — I’ll eventually start thinking about settling down, finding the right girl, buying a home, and maybe even starting a family.

The last thing I want is to turn the corner and think, “Why did I prepare for anything?!?! AHHHHHHH!!!!!”

In Life, There Are No Rewards Or Punishments; Only Consequences

I’ve been saying this a lot to myself recently and it really helps me detach myself from certain situations and people.

The idea is simple: there’s no real “good” or “bad.” Simply consequences. If you’re a kind person, there are certain consequences to that. If you’re mean, there are certain consequences too. Those consequences could include everything from poor relationships, “bad luck,” bad health, etc. It’s not really a punishment per say — it’s just the result of that particular set of behavior.

And no one can predict how those consequences will manifest itself.

Previously, when I encountered particularly rude people, I’d wonder if they’ll ever be “punished” for that. But it’s really not for me to say. There are certain cause-and-effects for being a dick — and I cannot be held responsible nor will I protect them from what may result.

It takes the sting away from bad behavior and also falls back on what I said before: if you become a “good” person, you’ll open yourself to the consequences of that, good or bad.

Train Like A Beast

I haven’t wrote about fitness for a while on this blog, but for the past six weeks, I’ve been training about 12 hours a week. It’s been exhausting, but fuck, the results have been great. My goal is to get to 73kg (161lbs) and stay lean while doing so — thus, I want to exercise like a beast and incorporate a metric ton of strength training, work-capacity development, and aerobic conditioning.

What about overtraining?

Well, I’m still not there yet. But real work capacity takes time. I’m not talking about finishing a WOD — I’m talking about training at an insane level and being able to handle it. For example, look at the off-season training for professional hockey or football players: they’re training three to four hours a day, six days a week. But it takes years to get to that level where they can handle that workload.

Some of the people I train with could probably handle twice my current workload and be fine. Again, it takes years to get there.

But why is this “blowing my mind?”

Because that was the mistake I made last year when I put on almost 25lbs with far too much fat: I trained five days a week, but it only totaled to about six or seven hours max. That simply wasn’t enough caloric expenditure to keep the fat off and make a superhuman change to my body.

Recovery Is Just As Important As Training

Over the past few weeks, I’ve felt pretty burnt out. And as a friend said, “It’s the difference between knowing if you need to dial it down or tell yourself, ‘Stop being a little bitch.'”

In this case, I think it was the former. Since I started studying for my CSCS in October 2011, I haven’t taken real time off. Even when I was on “vacation,” I was actually testing if I could work remotely (which actually forced me to do more work than normal).

So, for the first time in four years, I actually took real weekend off. Holy fuck! I exercised, read, watched videos, and did my best to avoid email, Microsoft Word, and MailChimp. Over the past two weeks, I tried to either meditate or take a nap (sometimes both) after lunch everyday.

And after I woke up from my first nap, I felt like bear waking from hibernation. It was incredible.

It’s good to turn everything off for a few minutes and shut down your brain and sympathetic nervous system (the “fight-or-flight” one) to rest and let your parasympathetic system (the “rest-and-digest” one) run the show for a little. You’ll feel more energetic and you’ll be in a better mood throughout the day without any stimulants.

And Finally, The Meaning of Life

A few days ago, while I was reading a Stoic book, I started talking to random person. Suddenly, they asked me what I thought the the meaning of life was. Her answer, according to her, was based on her Christian theological education and the teachings of leaders hundreds of years ago: “Our purpose in life is to glorify God.”

When people ask, “What’s the meaning of life?” I just laugh. You know what that’s like?

They’re like a fish going to another fish and asking: “What is the ocean?”

We could spend our time outdoing each other in prose and erudition in our hopelessly futile attempt at explaining the world around us or, you know, we could just look.

Perhaps this is best encapsulated with Buddha’s flower sermon:

Toward the end of his life, the Buddha took his disciples to a quiet pond for instruction. As they had done so many times before, the Buddha’s followers sat in a small circle around him, and waited for the teaching.

But this time the Buddha had no words. He reached into the muck and pulled up a lotus flower. And he held it silently before them, its roots dripping mud and water.

The disciples were greatly confused. Buddha quietly displayed the lotus to each of them. In turn, the disciples did their best to expound upon the meaning of the flower: what it symbollized, and how it fit into the body of Buddha’s teaching.

When at last the Buddha came to his follower Mahakasyapa, the disciple suddenly understood. He smiled and began to laugh. Buddha handed the lotus to Mahakasyapa and began to speak.

“What can be said I have said to you,” smiled the Buddha, “and what cannot be said, I have given to Mahakashyapa.”

Mahakashyapa became Buddha’s successor from that day forward.

Life is ineffable. Any attempt to describe it with words (which are just noise and ideas) does it a sad disservice.

To me, the question “What is life?” is like a koan. It’s a rhetorical question that’s meant to create a deep silence and tranquility, not trigger a ceaseless academic debate.

Don’t waste too much time trying to decipher what you think life is.

Because you might just miss it.