We are what we do ...

Paraphrasing Aristotle, "The unplanned life isn't worth living."  

The more I dwell on this, attempt to attain traits of character and skills that I value, the more the truth of Aristotle strikes me.

We are what we do.

I am what I do.

I may have grand plans, but they coming to nothing if my daily activities are not related to my goals.

I need to focus on the day, each day, and make that day a part of my vision for my life.

I saw in myself last week, two kinds of motivation to have myself do things.

1. One kind, the kind I have known most of my life, and can recall developing as a child, is becoming intensely focused on one thing to the exclusion of all else.  Distractions from achieving the one thing were painful. Steps toward the one thing were pleasant. (This must be psychological pain and pleasure.)
2. Second kind, that I tasted for the first time last week, was "observing myself" in the sense of Gurdjieff's teaching (see "In Search of the Miraculous" chapter VII, eleventh paragraph that ends with the sentence "Try to remember yourselves when you observe yourselves and later on tell me the results. Only those results will have any value that are accompanied by self-remembering. Otherwise you yourselves do not exist in your observations. In which case what are all your observations worth?"). Seeing the rapid shifts and fluctuations in who I am from moment to moment, feeling how easily my efforts are diverted from my intended tasks of the moment. Yet able to once in a great while bring myself back on track. Able to achieve the same objective results of the first kind of motivation discussed above, but without losing overall awareness of myself, my surroundings, and the context that I am working in.  The sense of this lasted only a couple of days, occurring just a few times each day, and it was very powerful. As the week progressed, it dwindled into a memory of something I knew about but couldn't do. (Would this be moral pain and pleasure? or spiritual pain and pleasure?)

How do I escape this prison of myself?

Send notes via my email or paper to my future self?  

How often, all the time, my self of the moment ignores and downplays the importance of directions written down in moments of inspiration!

Start with "activities of daily life."

They must support my aim, and my goals of who I will become.  They give me the memories and experience to shape me into who I would be.

Make commitments to myself that honored to the level of the commitments that I make to others.