Introduction
I hope many of us have been able to travel a bit this summer. One of the lessons about traveling is we are often not in control of our time.
We wait in line at the airport, to check baggage, to go through security, to board planes. We find ourselves waiting in holiday traffic jams. We wait for trains and subway cars, and at hotels and restaurants. And it can be frustrating.
I have a little practice I do when I’m waiting alone. When I find myself waiting in a line, becoming increasingly impatient, making up those no-so-nice stories about the people ahead of me, I’ll stop.
I’ll stand there and instead begin silently reciting my mantra, which for me is simply the Hindu word “Rama”, meaning “God” or “joy.” I just standing there silently saying, Rama Rama Rama Rama.
This little practice invariably calms me down so that when I finally get to the head of the line I can be a little kinder with the people I encounter at the counter. After all it’s usually not their fault if the wait has been long. This little practice has become a bit of a spiritual Life Hack for me.
Origin of the Term “Life Hack”
Now I probably ought to say a little bit about the origin of the phrase, Life Hack. First the word Hack has taken on a rather negative connotation in today’s world, but in the computer science world it originally meant throwing together some code in a quick and dirty way to make work easier. A Hack is a good thing, a celebrated thing.
Then there’s the phrase Life Hack. I finally tracked down the first published use of the that word. Life Hack was created in 2003 by Danny O’Brien, a technology journalist. He was giving a talk at a computer conference. In a blog post he asked for help. He noted,
Everyone who knows me – and many of their therapists – knows that I am the most disorganised, undisciplined wretch on God’s green earth. I have a 159 things to do in my todo list; the oldest (“learn to drive”) is 15 years in the to-doing. Earlier today I managed to slam the “snooze” button on my alarm clock twelve times. I don’t know where my mobile phone is. The last I saw of it was in a cafe in San Francisco – maybe two weeks ago? I should cancel it. Hold on, let me add that to the todo list. There. It is as good as done.[1]
He goes on,
There are hundreds of little tricks, habits, desktop arrangements, and hacks being invented (and I suspect, reinvented) by people to organise their life using today’s technology. We very rarely get to see any of it, because we all assume no-one else would be interested in the dull rigmarole of our lives.
Because of my flawed nature, I’m really interested in these secrets. I find well-organised people fascinating, like aliens.
So Danny O’Brien sought out people to interview for these things he labeled life-hacks and gave his talk the next year.
And the phrase caught on, and gradually broadened from techie geeky things like shell scripts and web scrapers, to lazy susans in the fridge like we saw on the screen earlier.
A Hack Versus a Program
In using the term life hack, I want to make the distinction between something that is quick and simple to try, versus a significant life shift or a program. Suppose you want to get into shape. So for example, a big life change might be signing up at a prestigious gym and getting a personal trainer there to put you on a program, to compel you into going to that gym three days a week.
Now a life hack is simpler than that. One life hacker just placed his gym shorts and shoes right beside the bed, so that when he got up in the morning, he practically would stumble over his shorts and shoes and so he realized he might as well get dressed to go to the gym. And this simple hack works for him.[2].
Spiritual Life Hacks
In the same way we might make a distinction between a spiritual practice and a spiritual life hack. Traditionally, spiritual practices have often been seen these big, serious, time-consuming activities in our lives. I had a friend who joined a Buddhist meditation group and she and her friends got up at 4:30 every morning to meditate for two hours before breakfast. That’s serious commitment!
Or in my own life, when I was much younger, before Unitarian Universalism, I was exploring Christianity. I got onto one of those “Read the Bible in a Year” programs. Now if you’ve ever tried to read the Bible, I mean straight through, from cover to cover, you know that large parts of it can be quite tedious, if not incomprehensible, to the modern person. I don’t think I got much beyond Exodus, the second book of the 66 in my Bible. If even that far. Back then, I saw spiritual practice as requiring a big commitment, and I failed at it.
But suppose we do something different, and steal from the idea of life hacks? Suppose we make hacks in our spiritual life — we make small changes, little tweaks to our regular activities to improve our spiritual lives?
Spiritual Life Hack Examples
Here’s a few examples of spiritual life hacks.
One of my favorites is ”Three good things”. This is a gratitude practice, adapted from and greatly simplified from Ignatian spirituality. The idea is this: when you’re going to bed at night, take just a moment as you lay there before sleep, to think of three good things that happened that day. These can be, and often will be, incredibly small simple things:
My dog seemed really to enjoy licking my hand this morning.
My morning coffee tasted unusually good.
But sometimes these huge things:
– I finally sorted out that months old, messy billing dispute. Just enjoy laying there, dwelling in gratitude, for your three good things.
Some of you, Becky in particular, have picked up the practice of doing Zen tangle. It’s a kind of organized doodling, which often results in beautiful little patterns.
You can also buy a variety of adult coloring books that have simple, repetitive pictures to color in order to slow down and soothe the soul.
You might even make every day activities into spiritual life hacks. As most of you know I drink a lot of coffee. But I don’t make a pot of coffee in the morning at home. I make my coffee one cup at a time using a cone filter. I find this little activity just enough of an interruption to my work to give me a chance to re-center to focus on something physical and tangible.
Some of us struggle with our possessions — we have too many things to cope with. I appreciate that Marie Kondo has brought spiritual practice to decluttering, inviting us to hold things in front of us and ask “do you bring me joy?” But her Konmari methods are far too comprehensive to be a life hack.
So here’s a clutter life hack used by friends of mine who seek to live more simply. They follow a house rule that for every non-perishable item that comes into the house, one item must leave the house. A blouse for a book, a screwdriver for a salad spinner. Something goes. This forces them to think about an item carefully before acquiring it.
The idea of a Sabbath is central to many religious traditions. But many of us have little opportunity to take a whole day’s break. But we might be able to build mini Sabbath into our lives, taking maybe an evening or even an hour free from certain habitual things. Maybe an evening where the TV is off, Facebook is closed, phone calls go to voicemail, so that we just have time to read or write or play games or draw.
I also find daydreaming to be a satisfying spiritual hack. Even in the middle of the night I’ll daydream. By that I mean I return to the kind of enjoyable fantasy thinking that many of us left behind in our childhoods. Not worrying, not planning, but just having rich, curious, even fantastic thoughts as most of us did when we were younger.
Pets and children can be sources of spiritual inspiration, for they often give us the gift of interruption. We get reminded again and again that what we’re doing right now is not the most important thing. The important thing is a belly rub, or watch me do this somersault.]
Generosity to others often pays back multifold to us. As spiritual life hacks, we might be generous to others in small, ordinary ways: holding the door for someone, letting the other car in at the merge, offering a compliment to a clerk.
If you like inspirational reading, you might seek out daily emails of poems. Search for poetry foundation, or for Joe Riley, who sends out spiritual poems under the moniker Panhala.
[I mentioned the mantra practice that I use, silently repeating some spiritual phrase. Now I imagine I could have used a non-spiritual phrase in that long line, saying to myself “moron, moron, moron”. I might get a different outcome! The hack works much better when we use a word or short phrase drawn from a spiritual tradition — either east or west that is meaningful to you. So example phrases might be: om mani padme hum, rama, or barukh attah adonai, or allah, or ave maria, or lord have mercy. In the practice, you repeat it silently to yourself at opportune times through the day.
INVITE AUDIENCE TO OFFER THEIR OWN SUGGESTIONS.
We’ll continue this discussion at our Spiritual Explorations small group, Wednesday Aug 24, 7 pm, here.
But, Wait, This is Not New
I’m sure some of you are thinking, wait, wait, none of this is really new. Mantras, Ignatian Discipline, this stuff’s been around for ages. And even the idea of Life Hacks — the secular kind — well, people have been coming up with neat hints and tips for years.
Take a a tip from Ben Franklin. Most of us are familiar with his little technique for making a decision. You make two columns, pro and con, and write down the elements supporting or opposing the decision. Franklin actually wrote about this early Life Hack in a letter to his friend Joseph Priestley, whom you may recall was a Unitarian.[3]
And some of you may know that Franklin also developed a kind of spiritual Life Hack. Every day, he tracked how we was doing on a set of thirteen virtues — things like Temperance, Frugality, Cleanliness, Chastity, making red tick marks on a paper when he failed at these. From what I hear of his life, I presume there were plenty of red marks in the Chastity ‘column’. [4] Just saying.
What’s Different
So perhaps the idea of Life Hacks, even spiritual Life Hacks, is not new at all. But I think there is a twist.
Consider, in the past, traditional spiritual practices were obligatory – you had no choice. If you were a Buddhist, you had to meditate in a certain position. If you were a Catholic, you were expected to go to Confession and Mass. There was no attempt to match the practice to the person. You did what was required, whether or not it actually helped you in your spiritual growth.
But Life Hacks, indeed, these spiritual life hacks, are different. They are intentionally voluntary and experimental. If they seem useful, try them — but you decide which ones to try.
See how they work out, measure their effectiveness on your life. If a particular life hack doesn’t help you live better, discard it. You may even find that as your life changes, as you go through phases of life, different practices are more valuable for you.
This is a subtle distinction. Rather than judging how well we effectively master a spiritual practice, we should instead judge how the spiritual practice feeds our spirit. We should be non-judgmental with respect to other people on the spiritual path, and we should especially be non-judgmental with ourselves.
We should avoid worrying: “Am I doing this right, Am I good enough, What do other people think of this?” I know — as you probably do too — that when I start to think about these judgmental questions they can draw me down into a whirlpool of self-doubt and self-loathing.
Instead, if we are playing with these little spiritual life hacks, we might, from time to time want to ask ourselves, “Is this working for me? What might I change?”
Even Benjamin Franklin eventually gave up tracking his virtues. Not because he became perfect — and he acknowledged he “never arrived at perfection”, but because the virtue tracking no longer served him.
This is my invitation to you, as Unitarian Universalists. We are given the great freedom to be heretics, to choose. So let’s choose. Let’s try things out. Let’s experiment, and learn what works for us, and grow.
The world of spiritual practice is rich with possibilities. Pick up a few and try them. And when you are done with them, let them go, and try something new.
Let’s claim our responsibility for awakening, for becoming better people. Let’s choose, and let’s live fully.
Notes:
1 http://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2003/10/22/life-hacks/
2 http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/how-to-motivate-yourself/
3 http://www.decisionsciencenews.com/2012/08/18/benjamin-franklins-rule-for-decision-making/
4 https://daringtolivefully.com/ben-franklin-thirteen-virtues