weekly Go Flip Yourself

if you want to be able to briskly climb stairs when you are 75, you need to be in the top 95th percentile of cardiovascular fitness.

The distinction between the two modes I’m trying to define is that one side takes the position that being fascinated with something or someone in the world has a benefit that is self-evident. Being able to feel love towards something or someone is a gift in and of itself. The other side (the side that annoys me) orients fascination or association or effort towards a direction with the primary goal of having some kind of quantifiable reward. But if you’re really focusing on the moment, on something you love, on something in the world that feels like it’s made for you, you can’t be thinking about how it will benefit you, or how it will reflect back on you. These two modes are at odds with each other. True attention requires that you don’t view something in the world through the lens of “what can this thing do for me?”