The Lifehacker article "Try a Writing Meditation If Sitting Still Isn't Working For You" reminded me of how I've never quite resonated with the popular advice to clear your mind, meditate, and be mindful. When people ask me if I meditate, the word makes me think of doing yoga or sitting zazen or taking deep breaths – none of which I do. Maybe I'll come around to those ways eventually, but in the meantime, let me share a few of the ways that work for me just in case they might help you too. =)

I generally keep my life low-stress. Frugality gives me a buffer from most of life's financial stressors. Low expectations and personal responsibility make happiness easier. Stoicism helps me focus on what I can control.

I do like relaxing and being more appreciative. Everyday activities like doing the dishes, cuddling cats, spending time with W-, and following my curiosity give me that sense of abundance and fortune. They also help me slow down my thoughts and bump into interesting ideas. This reminds me of the relaxing side of meditation.

As for becoming aware of and addressing my self-talk or my thoughts, writing and drawing do a great job of bringing those thoughts out there so that I can acknowledge them or do something with them. I think this is like the self-awareness side of meditation.

Still, sometimes something perturbs my calm more than I'd like. When I'm miffed at something, that's really more about me than about something else. It's a good opportunity to take a look at my thoughts to see where I was lax or mistaken. This is like the clarifying side of meditation.

So I guess I do meditate, but I don't do it in the stock-photography-meditation sort of way. Here are some other tools I use to shift my mental state:

Activities that move my body or my mind make it easy for me to move my thoughts, too. For example, walking gets me breathing fresh air and looking around. Cooking immerses me in tastes and lets me enjoy doing something tangibly productive. Reading takes me inside someone else's experiences. Helping someone shifts my focus from myself to someone else.

(In particular, walking to a nearby park will almost certainly result in seeing lots of really happy dogs. There's something about seeing a dog with a big grin and an even bigger stick.)

What is it that I'm really doing when I choose these activities? I think I'm quieting my brain enough so that I can think with less distraction. Then I can pay attention to the thoughts that I find odd or that I'd like to address, to see if I can resolve them.

In addition to responding to life as it comes, I sometimes think ahead about the way I'd like to respond to life. This is because my life has so far been pretty awesome. I don't want to take it for granted, and I also don't want to be blindsided by challenges. From time to time, I think about more difficult situations that I could find myself in so that I can try out different responses. This is the contemplative side of meditation, I think.

So that's how I "meditate," I guess. No relaxing music, no super-deep thoughts. Mostly just everyday activities and the occasional bit of reflection. Seems to be working for me so far. =)

If you don't meditate with a capital M, what do you enjoy doing instead? =)

Instead of using a generic title (ex: Top 10 Ways to …), pick your strongest point and put that in the title as a clear recommendation.

Now that I've gotten that promised tip out of the way, here's the reflection that prompted this post.

Many bloggers focus on improving their titles as a way to encourage people to click or share. Having repeatedly run into the limitations of my blog searches and index, I've been thinking about blog post titles as a way to make my blog posts more memorable – both in terms of retrieval (remembering what to look for) and recognition (recognizing it when I come across it).

That's why many of the usual title-writing tips don't appeal to me, even if they're backed by A/B testing. List posts? A focus on new or exclusive information? Mysterious headlines? While writing a post called “10 New Emacs Productivity Tricks That Will Make Vim Users Hate You – #2 Will Save You Hours!” is tempting to consider as an April Fool's Joke, that kind of title is useless for me when I'm trying to find things again. Any title generic enough to come out of a blog post title generator is too generic for me to remember.

Fortunately, there are plenty of role models on the Web when it comes to writing clear, specific blog post titles. Lifehacker somehow manages to do this well. Most of its posts start with a verb, even when linking to a post that doesn't, and yet it doesn't feel overbearing.

Here's a sample of Lifehacker titles for posts that summarize and link to other posts (ignoring posts that were original guides, product links, or fully-reposted blog posts):

Lifehacker title	Original post
Re-Read Old Books After a Few Years to Gain New Perspective	How you know
Agree On a Special Signal So Your Colleagues Can Reach You On Vacation	11 Valuable Tips for Handling Emails While on Vacation
Find the Best Thrift Stores Near You Using Zillow and Google Maps	How to Find the Best Thrift Stores in Your Area
Find a Hobby by Rekindling Your Childhood Passions	7 Strange Questions That Help You Find Your Life Purpose
Conduct a “Nighttime Audit” to Sleep Better	How to Spend the Last 10 Minutes of Your Day
Get Your Ideas Out of Your Head to Start Improving Them	6 Lessons from Pixar that Will Set You Up for Success
Focus on Discipline More Than Motivation to Reach Financial Goals	Forget Motivation, This is the Key to Achieving Your Goals This Year
Give Yourself a Creative Game Each Day to Boost Inspiration	The Importance of Personal Projects
Fix Your Bluetooth Audio in Yosemite With This Terminal Command	Commands to Make Yosemite Suck Less

Fascinating. Of the nine posts I looked at, all of them rewrote the titles from the original blog posts so that they started with a verb, making the titles more specific in the process. This makes sense in the context of it being a lifehack, of course. The concept has action at its core.

I like the new titles more. I can imagine that remembering and linking to the Lifehacker-style titles would be easier than linking to the original ones.

Most of my posts don't quite feel like those, though. I noticed that most of my titles start with gerunds: thinking about, building, learning, exploring, experimenting. I think it's because I write in the middle of things, while I'm figuring things out. I don't feel comfortable telling people what they should do. I share my notes and let people come to their own conclusions. Starting a post with a verb seems to be too direct, as if I'm telling you to do something.

That said, filler phrases like “Thinking about…” aren't particularly useful as part of a title, since the reflection is a given. But changing “Thinking about how to make better use of Yasnippet in my Emacs workflow” to “Save time with dynamic Yasnippets when typing frequently-used text in Emacs” doesn't seem to accommodate the exploratory bits, although it could be a good follow-up post. Changing “Minimizing upward or downward skew in your sketchnotes” to “Minimize upward or downward skew in your sketchnotes” feels like I'm making a value judgment on skewed sketchnotes, when some people might like the fact that an upward skew tends to feel happy and optimistic.

So I use nouns or gerunds when reflecting (which is self-directed), and verbs when I'm trying to put together other-directed advice. This helps me differentiate the types of posts in my index and in my editorial calendar admin screen, and it also signals the difference to people as they browse. You might not be interested in my reflections and prefer to focus on tips, for example, or you might be tired of tips and want journal entries instead.

That works because those types of posts are generally quite separate. When I want to help someone learn a technique such as sketching quick ribbons, I don't go on an extended tangent about how I learned how to do that or how I want to improve. When I'm thinking about how I can improve my delegation skills, I don't expect someone to patiently go through all of that in search of three concrete tips to help them improve. I think that as I gain experience and become more opinionated (the latter probably being more related to this), I'll write more advice/instruction posts, possibly linking to those personal-experience-and-reflection posts instead of going on internal tangents.

In this post, I'm experimenting with a verb title while doing extensive self-reflection. It feels a little odd, as if you started a conversation with someone and then proceeded to talk to yourself, idly musing out loud. You'll have to tell me if I should never do that again, or if there's a way to manage the balance. But it also feels odd to use my part of the conversation to tell you to do stuff, solely drawing on other people's research or recommendations, without sharing my context so you can tell if something that makes sense for me might make sense for you. I figure there are plenty of other people out there who want to tell you what to do with your life, and I'm not completely fond of that approach anyway. And it also feels odd to natter away about my life like a self-absorbed ninny, making you do all the hard work of translating ideas into things that you can actually use. I still haven't completely figured out how to make personal blogs more useful for other people.

Could I make an idea sandwich: summary and research at the top, personal reflection in the middle, call to action at the end? Maybe that could work.

Still, I want to do something with my titles so that I don't end up with lots of “Thinking about …” and “Exploring …” and “Deciding between …” that blur in my memory. My ideal for these reflection posts, I think, would be a clear, concise summary of the key insight (perhaps saving it as an excerpt as well, if it doesn't fit in the title). If I followed that up with an other-directed post with a crisp title that started with a verb, made the recommendation, brought in some research and observations, and linked to my reflection, that would give me a good, logical, memorable, useful chunk that I could share with other people.

Right. That makes sense to me. If I address you with a direct verb or “How to …”, I should deliver a post that requires minimal mental translation for you to get good tips out of it. If I clearly mark something as a reflection, you know what to expect. I tend to remember them as actions I decided to take (“The time I resolved to…”) or the particular new thing I came to understand. I can take a few minutes to update the titles and summaries accordingly, which could help me years later when I'm trying to make sense of things again.

In Buckminister's somewhat strange book I Seem to Be a Verb (1970), he wrote:

I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe.

A verb seems too definite for me. I'm a gerund in at least two senses, I think: reflexive, the way “I read” is an act but “reading” is a noun that lets us talk about itself; and in the process of doing, not done.

Do you write other-directed posts that offer advice or instruction? Consider lopping off “How to …” and “Top 10 ways to…”. Start with a verb and give one clear recommendation. Do you write self-directed reflections? See if you can harvest the ideas for other-directed posts, and perhaps invest a little time into making your posts easier for you to remember. Do you write a mix of both, and have you figured out a good flow? I'd love to hear what works for you.

Ancient philosophy was designed to be memorized, so that it could be “at hand” when we are confronted with tumultuous situations like the one Stockdale found himself in. … The students wrote these maxims down in their handbook, memorized them, repeated them to themselves, and carried them around–that's the point of a handbook, so the teachings are procheiron, or “close at hand.”

Philosophy for Life and other Dangerous Situations, Jules Evans (2013) – p116

Oh! Hence handbook – something small that you carry with you to guide your actions or remember principles when the craziness of life messes up your mind. This got me thinking about what might be the beginnings of my handbook: the little ideas that run through my life. Here are some.

• Happiness is a response. Happiness isn't something you buy or pursue, nor is it something that happens to you or that someone gives to you. This feeling of well-being comes from how you decide to respond to the world.
• It's just stuff. A common refrain when we're donating things to the thrift store, passing up on purchases, cleaning up after something breaks, and so on.
• It is what it is. Work with it.
• Life is short. Before, nothingness. After, nothingness. We know people for such a short time. This is okay; in fact, it makes life sweeter.
• Life is long. There's lots of things to learn, and you're going to run into similar situations again and again. You don't need to sweat over making the absolute best decisions, since you'll probably be able to try out different options. Still, giving things a little thought helps, because you can reap the benefits over time.
• “Enough” is in the mind. You have enough.
• Celebrate small steps. Because they're fun!
• Everything is part of the story. Especially the tough parts. They make the story interesting.
• Build on your strengths. Situations can often be transformed into similar situations that take advantage of your strengths instead of hitting your weaknesses. Likewise, you can translate your strengths into new ones.
• See the third way. When you think something is the only way, or when you're stuck with the dilemma of one or another, step back and see even more approaches. You don't have to accept the way the problem is framed; look for creative solutions.
• Choose what to assent to. Be careful about what you let into your brain. For example, just because advertising is compelling doesn't mean you have to be compelled.
• It's okay to be weird. Life is a grand experiment. If you zig when other people zag, you might feel weird, but don't worry – there are lots of people zigging in the grand scheme of things, too.
• Everyone's learning. Everyone messes up. Everyone has bad days. Everyone has awesome moments. Practise loving kindness.
• Share. Your memory is fuzzy and life is short. Get things out of your head and in a form that might help other people, and you could be pleasantly surprised by how it comes back.
• A safety net helps you fly. It's worth weaving a strong net so that you can take risks.
• Everything will be okay. Things always work out, although sometimes it takes some time, action, or perspective.
• Cats will be cats. There is no point in getting upset over out-of-the-litter-box thinking, throwing up, etc. Just tidy up and enjoy the purring and the fluffy cat-ness. The same can be said of much of life.
• How wonderful can it be? Let that be your guiding question. Make life better.

Ask me again in five years and I'll probably have added a few more. What's in your handbook?

I set aside Tuesdays and Thursdays for consulting. Fridays are for meetings and getting together with people. Saturdays are for spending time with my husband or having the rare party, and Sundays are for cooking and chores.

Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays are discretionary time. I could spend those days working. My consulting clients would love to have more time, and there are all sorts of other things I could work on as well.

I've been making myself find good uses of that time on my own, though. Depending on the projects I'm focusing on, I might spend those days coding, drawing, reading, or writing. Lately, I've been working my way through a stack of philosophy books from the library. Histories give me overviews and show me the relationships between thinkers, while treatises give me the context for all these quotes that have been floating around.

Hmm. Maybe that's what fascinates me about philosophy at the moment. I've picked up bits and pieces of wisdom through quotes and summaries. Now I want to learn more about the context of those sound bites and the thought processes behind them. I want to reflect on the maxims, choose the ones I want to apply to life, and learn how to observe and improve. At some point, I'll probably feel that I can learn more from experience than from books, and then I'll jump back into the fray. In the meantime, it's amazing to be able to condense centuries of thought into afternoons of reading. Not that I fully understand everything, but there's enough to spark awareness and recognition.

I'm not particularly interested in the big questions of metaphysics, epistemology, or logic. Ethics, maybe–small “e” ethics, not as much the Ethics of What Everyone Ought To Do. I want to get better at choosing what's good for me and doing it. The ancient Greeks have a lot to say about that, and some of the later philosophers also do.

I'm not an entrepreneur, or at least not yet. I'm using this space and capital to improve myself (or at least theoretically improve myself) instead of building a business. I'm not even focused on learning a marketable skill that I can list on my résumé, although I'm sure my interests will turn towards that at some point. In the meantime, it feels good to lay the groundwork for more clarity and better decisions.

What's the next step? Well, since I'm interested in applied philosophy, that probably means testing these ideas out in everyday life. On the personal side, there's living simply and thoughtfully. On the social side, maybe practising more loving-kindness. I don't think I'm cut out to be a pure philosopher, so I'll likely use my time to learn, code, write, and draw. I wonder what I'll be curious about after I build a good foundation in this area. Useful skills, perhaps? Design and aesthetics? Business? We'll see.

In the meantime, I'll give my mind enough space to unfold questions and learn from the notes that people have left for us.