Rules I Actually Live By

I think in terms of risk and reward. Not always, but generally yeah. It's the way my brain is wired. I think about probabilities of success and failure and the costs and payoffs of each. And usually I quantify all of that.

Most people conflate risk with avoiding loss, but I try to avoid that. My ambitions build in probabilities of failure. I just try and plan it so those are not catastrophic.

Jasmine

People talk about stopping to smell the flowers. I quite literally do that - stop and smell pretty flowers. Jasmine in particular holds a special place for me, as its scent triggers powerful childhood memories.

Up until the age of 5, I lived in India with my grandmother. Many Indians have small jasmine bushes outside their homes - they're easy to take care of, don't need a lot of water. After a hot Indian day, after sunset, the temperature drops twenty or thirty degrees and jasmine flowers release this awesome fragrance. You can smell it throughout your house, maybe even in the next house over, especially as all your windows are open to help your house cool down after that hot muggy 110-degree day. That's the memory that is involuntarily triggered when I smell jasmine flowers to this day. What's fascinating is there's some wild jasmine bushes on the west side of the Schuylkill that I jog by most summer days as part of a 3-mile loop.

If I'm jogging by those bushes in the evening when their scent is releasing, I literally can't help but stop running and smell them, totally screwing up my jogging momentum.

Reading

I read a lot, at all quality levels. My library of books includes everything from childhood series like Redwall (about anthropomorphic medieval mice living in an abbey) to high fantasy like In Legend Born (my favorite novel) to classic lit like Moby Dick. I also have some technical books on abstract algebra and computer programming.

Reading calms me. Also it reminds me that there are hella interesting people and worlds out there, both real and imaginary, that are beyond my little world of family, my job and my neighborhood.

Fitness

I work out a ton, mostly running but I also lift occasionally. My runs are typically 3-5 miles long, usually with the Fairmount Running Club, which I've written about before.

Running is meditative. Lifting is about competing with myself, both in getting stronger and looking bigger in the mirror (come on, we all do it). Oh and the higher energy I feel throughout the day when I'm in shape is an awesome motivator.

To Strive, to Seek, to Find

In one of my favorite poems, Ulysses, Tennyson finishes the poem with the epic line: "One equal temper of heroic hearts / Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." Probably the most epic finishing line of any written work in English - an author admitting he's weak and old and dying, but won't give up. Seriously, I wish I have that resolve when I'm in my 60s.

I'll finish with one thought. None of my life principles are original or profound: read, work out, have some joy in your life, don't give up. There's probably some long dead philosopher who probably wrote these exact same things down two thousand years ago, in fancier language. I just haven't gotten to reading him or her yet :p.