Wheel of Will

Library

The Chambers of One Heart

For a life well lived, while you are here to live it.

Four chambers of one heart, one for each pillar of the practice: Self, Structure, Skillset, Service. The books that gather here will move through them, each following the same thread from the womb to the tomb, where the clock has been running all along.

The first book

Date Me Later

When I Am the Last Piece of Your Jigsaw Puzzle, Not the First.

Forthcoming

The arc has four acts. First you choose, on purpose, knowing what you are saying yes and no to. Then you tend, feeding daily what you chose, starving what you did not. Then you see, reading what the world reflects back, and learning to project rather than react. And then you are, the self, built, standing as its own mark. The seed, the fire, the mirror, the mark.

Act One

The Wheel of Will

CHEW.

A choice is more than a preference. A choice is an allocation of life, of the hours, the attention, the years that are yours and finite. Every choice takes up space that cannot also be held by an alternative.

Yet we make choices without knowing we are choosing. We drift into them, inherit them, postpone the choosing until the hour has chosen us. To chew is to slow the swallow, to examine the choice before it begins to be lived.

Act Two

Oxygen

COMPOUNDING.

A choice is a fire. A fire lives or dies by its oxygen. After the choosing, the practice begins: each day, you decide which actions get fed and which get cut off.

Compounding is what the daily fires do. The fed fire becomes a built life; the starved fire becomes an absence, equally compounded. Most lives burn without anyone tending the fires: some that needed putting out are fed for years, some that could have been everything are smothered before they catch.

Oxygen is the daily practice of tending your own fires on purpose. What you feed lives. What you starve does not. Both are decisions, made every day, made by you.

Act Three

Master Your Mirror

YUGEN + GREEN MONEY.

Everything and everyone is a mirror, your spouse, your children, your work, your body, your bank account, your morning. They are all reflecting something back to you, always. Yugen mirrors through the body, the spouse, the children, the work; green money mirrors through the bank account. Both read you back to you.

The question is not whether you are being mirrored. You are. The question is whether you are choosing what is reflected, or whether the reflection is leading you.

When the self has not yet been mastered, the mirror takes the lead. The anger you carry is read in the child’s face; the scarcity you carry, in the feeling that it is not enough, whatever the bank statement says. The reflection runs the life, not a failing, but what an unmastered mirror does. When you have mastered yourself, the mirror follows: what you carry calmly is what comes back to you.

Act Four

Being Your Brand

HAND IN HAND.

The first three acts are the path. The fourth is the arrival.

You are your own brand, not in the marketing sense, but the older one: the mark that names what is yours, irreducibly, before any audience; the thing that does not need to be approved or made acceptable to anyone. Your life is yours. No one else has to live it. No one else has to die in it. The freedom is total. So is the weight.

Faith, too, can be lived rather than followed: the teaching carried in the body, the way the one who first taught it lived it.

Time and money each stand on their own pedestal, and neither is worth more than the other. The fourth act is to honor both, for it is only when the two stand together that they form a platform broad enough to build a life on.

It begins with meeting yourself, so that when you take the last breath you can take it unapologetically, letting it all go, shedding it all. The way you take your last breath is the last gift you leave to the near and dear. What stays longest is rarely the money. It is how someone felt when your name was mentioned, or when they thought of you. Money is finite; yugen, the wealth you cannot count, is what people remember. Every life weighs one against the other.