Advice for Living

1. Get a library card and read hundreds of books. Read novels in order to analyze fictional characters in terms of how you relate or don’t relate to them. Reading is not just entertainment but free therapy. Psychoanalysis through literature. Great method for persons on a tight budget.

2. When you think you can handle it, read some nonfiction. Read the Dalai Lama's The Art of Happiness and William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways. Discover that HH and Bill might be the same person.

3. Accept imperfection – yours and others'. Accept that you just can’t possibly know what’s going to happen next. Accept that this is a good thing.

4. Make a mistake. A really, really big one. Love yourself for it.

5. Move. Take that anyway you like. Just move. Maybe all you can move is a chair around the living room. Maybe you’ll sell all your furniture and fly to Morocco or Brussels or Papua New Guinea. Whatever you can move, move it. Know deep down that the best case scenario is to quit your job with no notice and drive your pickup out of town. Drive as far as you can go for as long as you can afford to. Take a stack of library books with you and be gone long enough to accrue serious fines. Trust it's worth the cost.

6. If you choose the best case scenario, look me up along the way and come for a visit.

7. Write in that journal you bought at Barnes & Noble that’s collecting dust on the coffee table or bookshelf. (It’s much easier to do on the move.) Most of the time while writing, think, "Man, what a bunch of whiny stupid meaningless tripe." Feel embarrassed and hope that nobody reads it. Keep writing and don’t read it. A year or so down the road, go back and read. Read it like you're your own analyst, not you. Look for the bits that really stand out. You'll know what I mean. There'll still be a lot of whiny tripe in there, but these little gems will jump out at you and the first time you say “Aha!” at one of your gems you'll be sold, hooked, netted, in.

8. As long as you’re writing in a journal, put down a list of goals for the next 1, 2, 5, 10 years. Commit to the list and start plugging away. In three years you might begin to feel like maybe you’re actually making some progress. Possibly. But probably not. Do it anyway.

9. Make one of your goals getting 30 minutes of strenuous exercise every day. (You will never be able to, but you will at least get more strenuous exercise than if you didn't have this as a goal.)

10. Get rid of people in your life around whom you feel the teeniest bit bad about yourself. Shed them like a snake sheds its skin. Consider it molting. A kind of rejuvenation. (This is surprisingly easy.)

11. Even as you molt, don't say anything bad about anyone. (If you figure out how to do this, please post a comment.)