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2. When we add additional discomfort and pain in our lives, it’s usually because our sense of self feels way bigger than it actually is.
A good antidote is mucking around with our sense of scale and realizing that we are both infinite and tiny at the very same time. Usually this does wonders in easing the intensity of how hard we are gripping the problems in front of our noses.
Click this picture above to go on a scale-expanding experience of just how big our solar system is. Doing this exercise is way more evocative than merely thinking “It’s really big.” How does your sense of self and the size of your problems change after the experience?
Click the box of paperclips above to be taken to a game that turned me into an existential phone-clicking gopher––and changed something deep inside.
3. The “game” Universal Paperclips––named one of the 100 best games of the decade–– has blown my sense of size and time and the laws of the exponential into a bazillion quadrillion million billion septillion paper clips. I’m not exaggerating, exactly. In offering this experience about 12 hours of my life, I came away with zero guilt about having wasted my time but rather with a strong and lingering sense of “bigness” and consequently how disproportionate most of my views are about what “a lot” means and how much time it will take to accomplish “a lot.”
People in my life noticed I was pressing my phone a lot during this journey. What are you doing, they asked. Making paper clips, I replied. A lot of paper clips. Who am I now that all the paperclips in the universe have been made?
4. Print out this chart, take a pencil crayon and fill in the boxes you’ve already experienced. What’s left? What will you do with your remaining boxes?
Not enough of you clicked on last issue’s musings by Derek Sivers. That was a mistake on your parts, so here’s the link again: Subtraction.