Start Here: Not Taking It for Granted

I have spent most of my adult life trying to disprove three words.

M. Scott Peck opened The Road Less Traveled with them: Life is difficult.

I refused to accept them. I didn't want them to be true. I was determined to discover or create something which would make life easy, or at least not difficult. A framework, a set of steps that, if applied correctly, would finally dissolve the lie.

I read widely and searched, at times desperately, for an answer. I never found one.

Not because I didn't look hard enough, but because life isn't built that way.

I also assumed difficulty meant circumstance. But the years I found the hardest were not the ones with something tangible to blame. They were those where nothing had happened, but I just could not get out of my own way — and the absence of a reason for that became its own weight.

What I discovered was that my defiance of those three words was the problem.

While there is no single system that will make life easy, I have learned how to meet it with less resistance and discovered many different things that work when I need them to.

Disclaimer: I'm not a mental health professional. I’ve spent more than two decades studying how the mind works and testing what holds up when life inevitably challenges me, and on the many days when it doesn't. I’ve endured overwhelming loss and genuine financial strain. I’ve gone from freezing completely under pressure to showing up and coming through consistently, including when it matters most to me.

None of what I share here is theory. Only what has worked for me, and how.

Most approaches I’ve come across are top-down i.e. decide on your principles first, build them, admire them, then try to live up to them.

I tried that for years. I kept a pristine list of my own principles. I'd sit down every so often and refine it. Clear, well-worded, the kind of thing that seemed so impressive each time I read it back to myself. Yet I would then close the notebook and go on living exactly as I had before. Having a list didn't change anything. It was simply an idealised description of the person I imagined myself becoming someday who could navigate life effortlessly, rather than an accurate record or reflection of how I was living day to day.

This shelf is built bottom-up instead — I try something specific when faced with a real-life situation and see whether it survives contact. If it does, I keep using it. If it doesn’t, I let it go.

What eventually came to be my actual principles — those that held up, those I still reach for and apply often — were never written down in advance. I discovered in real time, when faced with unavoidable adversity, what worked, and only later realised it was a principle at all.

I'm creating this shelf, first and foremost, as a place I can return to, so I don't have to relearn each idea or principle from scratch every time life gets hard, or whenever a difficult situation presents itself again. If anything shared here helps you too, that's the best possible outcome.

The oldest idea on this shelf stems from the Stoics who had a practice called premeditatio malorum — the premeditation of misfortune.

Instead of taking the many things in my life for granted, I imagine them gone. Not to dwell in fear or panic but to return to what's in front of me with my eyes wide open.

My hands. My legs. My sight. A healthy mind. Food to eat. Water to drink…

These are gifts.

I didn't earn these — I woke up with them, the same way I wake up each day with so many things that quietly keep my life running.

I had known this intellectually for over two decades, but I have found that the value isn’t in the novelty of the idea. The value is in how often I deliberately rest my awareness on it – when it stopped being something I knew and became something I practised.

I don't have to wait for quiet moments to do this either. Opportunities are already built into each day and experience — the first bite of a meal, the water on my hands, when I lace up my shoes, when I walk from one room to another.

I catch myself often, during such moments, and deliberately notice: this, too, is something I have.

A gift.

Gary Van Warmerdam’s work has helped me greatly and he too opens his Self Mastery Course with the practice of gratitude.

This practice is not intended to generate guilt, or to try to convince myself life is easy because I have food on my table today. This truth doesn’t negate the reality that life is difficult. However, it does point to those good things in life which often go unnoticed.

Whenever I leave or enter my apartment, as soon as the door closes, I say to myself "thank you".

On those heavy evenings after a long day's work, when the sofa is so comfortable and the last thing I want to do is train, I press my hands against the sofa. I feel my feet touching the floor. I look down at my legs. I imagine my life without them. I get up. I train.

As I have kept practising this in various situations, it has eventually become a new way of walking through my own life and how I act day to day and do all the little things. It has made me gentler. It has made me stronger.

It isn’t about fabricating positivity as a mood.

It is about realising that the less I take something for granted, the better care I take of it and the more enjoyment I take in its existence.

The rest of the ideas on this shelf are intended to be approached in the same way. I have found they only do the heavy work when I keep coming back to them.

For me, everything else rests on this foundation: noticing the real gifts and changes available to me each day instead of imagining a life which may eventually come someday. Life is here now, and it's already leaving faster than we think, one ordinary day at a time.

The next piece is about how I survived a loss I never imagined I could.

— Brian