The best breakfast is a delightful book
In this era of massive data creation and consumption, if you’re not careful, you tend to fill your head with the garbage, the noise of society, which makes you incapable of thinking.
Your mind is miserable and unclear and you are assailed by superficial thoughts.
It is the mind which is tranquil and free from care which can roam through all the stages of its life: the minds of the preoccupied, as if harnessed in a yoke, cannot turn round and look behind them.
— Seneca
Uncontrolled thinking
- Notifications prevent thinking.
- When you scroll Twitter, someone else is thinking for you.
- When you read a book, someone else is thinking for you.
- Social interactions triggers uncontrolled thinking, be well surrounded.
Meditation
Meditation is growing popular nowadays, probably due to these many troubled minds, the idea behind meditation isn’t obviously to follow exactly what Buddhists do, it’s just about data fasting.
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone
— Pascal
Via Negativa
- Substract rather than add.
- Less rather than more.
- Knowledge is subtractive
And, as expected, via negativa is part of classical wisdom. For the Arab scholar and religious leader Ali Bin Abi-Taleb (no relation), keeping one’s distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man
Simplicity is hacking away the unessential. — It is not daily increase but daily decrease — hack away the unessential! The closer to the source, the less wastage there is
— Bruce Lee
We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move. We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable. We work with being, but non-being is what we use.
— Lao Tzu
A book as only breakfast
- Eating is tiring, fasting is energizing.
- A full stomach, a busy mind.
- Autophagy
A book as the first and only data in the morning, no phone, no music, no news followed by reflection (walk, workout, sit and think).
The idea of the Lindy effect is itself Lindy-proof. The pre-Socratic thinker Periander of Corinth wrote, more than twenty-five hundred years ago: Use laws that are old but food that is fresh. Likewise, Alfonso X of Spain, nicknamed El Sabio, “the wise,” had as a maxim: Burn old logs. Drink old wine. Read old books. Keep old friends.
