ROYGBYTE'S 10 COMMANDS FOR A GOOD LIFE - Be comfortable feeling uncomfortable. - Lead by interest not ego. - Measure improvement incrementally. - Admit and learn from failure. - Make love from the inside out. - Have really good bad days. - Celebrate inspiring people. - Befriend despite differences. - About the commands ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Someone on IRC posted a link to Luxferre's phlog. I looked through it happily, finding many interesting articles on topics of life, minimalism, and computing. Two articles stood out among others. One waxes about a world beyond syntax highlighting. The other lays out ten commandments for living. Both elicited an immediate reaction of intrigue from me. Could these things change my life for the better? I sought to discover. First to code without color and then to understand mine own life's commands. Turning off syntax highlighting was straightfoward. I use emacs for most writing and programming. A single line to my config turned my buffers back to black and white: `(global-font-lock-mode 0)'. Finding my commandments to live by took a path of indirection. I needed to reflect back /and/ look forward. What internal or external directives lead to my best days? What can I do today to make tomorrow better? Happily, my first seven commands were ripe and ready to pick from the edges of recent experiences. The eigth command was borrowed (though rephrased) from a televsion show I admire. The ninth command I leave blank but annotate to mean "fill-up on emptiness". The tenth command doesn't exist. Indeed: I began this activity thinking I would arrive at ten commands to live by. But I never found anything to come after nine. Maybe there is a final command for me to /find/. Or maybe the tenth command is to /feel/ that there's something more out there just waiting to be discovered... Errata ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Luxferre's phlog post: [0|2024-02-26-luxferres-ten-commandments.txt|/posts/2024-02-26-luxferres-ten-commandments.txt|hoi.st|70] On "fill-up with emptiness": otherwise expressed as "less is more", "silence is golden", and so on. I integrate this command into my life with a cleaning activity beginning from the encouraging prompt "time to make some space!" |