What are the 3 Things You Need to be Concerned With in Life?

Stoic Philosophy states that every day, for every decision, we just need to do three things:

  1. Control your perceptions.
  2. Direct your actions properly.
  3. Willingly accept what’s outside your control.

That’s all we need to do.

Taken from ‘The Daily Stoic’ by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

Empowering isn’t it? Just three things we need to do in our lives.

I suppose we sometimes make our life more complex than it should be. When we take back control of what we have control of – our perceptions, which are shaped by our beliefs and thoughts, and discard the falsehood that we have control of our body, our surroundings and our loved ones, this is when we find happiness.

No need to ‘force’ anything or anyone – just surrender ourselves to the notion that sometimes, it is just the way it is.

Lovely Family of Otters

Expect the unexpected! Something which I just learnt on 2 August 2019 at a Brahma Kumaris workshop about Stress Management.

Wow, what a surprise! A family of otters came by at the canal near our block of flats.

They were playing and frolicking about on the ground.

I didn’t count the number of otters when I saw them. I was just wowed by the huge group. It looks like more than 10 of them.

Back at home, I googled for the earlier news of otters spotting in Singapore and noted that there is a Bishan 10 (so called because the otters came from Bishan Park and are a family of 10). I wonder if this is the same family as I watched a video online and spotted similar behaviour. However, when I counted the otters in my photograph, I think there are 11 otters. Has there been a new addition to the family? I suppose it wouldn’t be surprising since it has been more than a year since the otter news at Gardens by the Bay. If so, congratulations to the family 🙂

How to Handle Stress the Brahma Kumaris way

I attended a Workshop ‘Bid Farewell to Stress – Reclaim Inner Freedom’ on 2 August 2019. These are what I’ve learnt:

How to handle stress

  • Discover the inner space within you
  • Channel your thoughts and emotions
  • Understand your limits
  • Expect the unexpected
  • Realise that you are not alone, discover the one who is always on your side
  • Don’t give sorrow and don’t take sorrow
  • Be a trustee, do the best you can
  • Elevate your stage to be higher than the level of your problems

Spiritual path …

  • Build a strong foundation on which you can grow taller than your problems and groom others as well.
  • Practice gratitude for everyone and everything in life
  • Keep sending good wishes.
  • Make life journey joyful.

I especially wanted to highlight the sharing by the facilitator on the reason why we should and can be grateful. When we were born, we had nothing. But now, we have more than ‘nothing’, even if we feel we have little money and few possessions.

Sunny Seven

Seven Dimensions of Health

  1. Social: Contribute to community
  2. Emotional: Cultivate a positive attitude
  3. Spiritual: Mediate to find inner peace
  4. Environment: Conserve resources
  5. Occupational: Choose a suitable career
  6. Intellectual: Keep learning
  7. Physical: Exercise and proper nutrition

Summarised from Bridge, a publication by South West CDC, Singapore. Mar/Apr 2019.

Habits Make Us Who We Are

We are humans of habit. Habits make us. “We are what we repeatedly do,” Aristotle said, “therefore excellence is not an act but a habit.”

The Daily Stoic

Wow, this is so powerful. I was reading this book ‘The Daily Stoic’ by Ryan Holiday and Stephan Hanselman and flipped the book to the page with today’s date ’May 13th’.

The title of the article is ‘Fueling The Habit Bonfire’. It summarises aptly that we should review our activities last week and what we have planned for the day and the week ahead. Then, check it against the supposed actions that the person we would like to be, or see ourselves as would likely take.

Repeated actions form habit

In a way, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you want to be a healthy person, you cannot be eating junk food, not exercising and subjecting yourself to unnecessary stress.

Repeated good actions form good habits; the reverse is also true. So, if you act opposite to what you hope to do and wonder why you didn’t become the person, the answer is very clear.

Write daily to become a better writer

I have been telling myself that to become a disciplined writer and to keep my blog active and to grow my blog audience, I need to have a schedule of posting an article often.

I had this idea of posting just a short article of around 300 words daily, at least for the next 1 month. I want to see what this frequent posting could bring. Of course, nothing might have happened. However, there is always the possibility of something magical happening – my blog reaching other people and another person responding to my blog post.

However, there were always obstacles – I was too tired … I had nothing to write about … I had an idea of what to write, but I just didn’t have the creativity and resourcefulness to turn it into a short article within the 30 minutes and I didn’t want to spend the next 2 hours cracking my brain on this.

In short, I was lazy and giving myself excuses for not doing something. But to become a better writer, I need to write constantly. Even if it is just one word, getting down to the task of writing daily would eventually help me form a good habit. So, even though my bed seems a more welcoming place, I decided to just switch on my laptop and share this enlightening piece of knowledge that I have just read with anyone who this reading this blog.

Take action now!

May we become the person that we would like to be – not tomorrow but starting right at this moment. Now is the best time.