🟢 The 2 (contradictory) ingredients to happiness
Without both, your life would be out of balance (☯)
(2.5 min read)
It’s been a rough week:
Our cat got attacked on our deck by a strong unneutered male cat, and the vet prescribed various meds (because of the infection) and this bandage and a cone that she is now wearing on her head so that she doesn’t mess with her leg.
(Yes, I’m reminding myself of “The Old Man Lost His Horse” every day.)
Here’s what’s interesting.
Immediately after getting injured, and all day long ever since then, she has been whining at the door, begging us to let her go out to the deck again.
What a little thrill-seeker!
This reminds me of something that I taught when we ran our Soulmate Strategy business.
What we all want in life
We’re looking to feel both relaxed and excited.
These feelings are at odds, right?
Feeling comfortable and serene is in some way the opposite of feeling stimulated and activated.
In Soulmate Strategy, we taught people to look for a partner that helps them feel that magical mix.
It’s addictive and also healthy, which is a great combination.
In my own life, I simultaneously feel that Katie = “home” and cozy and understanding and safe and loving…
while also fun and interesting and inspiring and someone that at the end of each day I find myself saying “I wish we didn’t have to go to sleep because I want to keep hanging out!” Someone who I can’t imagine going on life’s adventures without.
Back to Baguette
You’ve heard the brave, energetic, adventurous side of Baguette.
The other side is that 3 times a day, she gets into intense snuggle mode.
First thing in the morning (usually a few minutes before our alarm would have woken us), then in the afternoon, and also around 9:30pm.
At each of those times, she makes it super clear that she MUST. HAVE. SNUGGLES. NOW.
The cutest is when I’m at my standing desk and she hops up to the lower part and then starts pawing at my belly until I lower the desk (converting it to sitting mode) and pull up a chair and let Baguette snuggle in my lap.
So, ~365 days a year, her life is calibrated how she wants it.
Plenty of feeling relaxed and coddled, and plenty of feeling excited and curious and wanderlustful.
But right now, while she is recovering, she has too much quiet. Too much stillness.
She is losing her mind.
She misses the outdoors.
Tony Robbins taking it further
Tony doesn’t use the words “relaxed” and “excited”, but he does teach that there are 6 core human needs.
1. Certainty: assurance you can avoid pain and gain pleasure
2. Uncertainty/Variety: the need for the unknown, change, new stimuli
3. Significance: feeling unique, important, special or needed
4. Connection/Love: a strong feeling of closeness or union with someone or something
5. Growth: an expansion of capacity, capability or understanding
6. Contribution: a sense of service and focus on helping, giving to and supporting others
They’re listed in order of importance.
Notice that the first 2 pairs contain contradictions, the first of which is the Relaxed vs Excited balance we talked about above.
Life can feel so difficult because there are tradeoffs.
Labeling those tradeoffs can help.
Calibrate your life intentionally.
The filmstrip of your life
If your life were already plotted out in frames on a movie reel, would you desperately skip ahead and peek at the final frames?
Do you want to know how your life pans out?
Probably not.
That would be like wishing to know the final score of a sports game and skipping the playing.
The point isn’t the destination. It’s the journey.
Why?
We love suspense
“Suspense” is a word that my therapist used recently, which stuck out to me.
If you feel in a rut, if you’re not jumping out of bed each morning, you may have veered into too much certainty.
Your routines are boring you.
You’re out of balance.
How can you add a little suspense to your day or at least your week?
What date nights can you plan?
What playful experiments can you run?
What new people can you spend time with?
What chances can you take?
When your mix of certainty vs uncertainty is out of whack, fine-tune by adjusting at least one of them.
And notice the improvement in your mood and overall outlook. 😁
🕙 What we learned in recent posts:
🟢 We got rid of all of our possessions
👀 Caught my eye this week:
How cool were those GPT-4o demos?
Now we just need the public to demand better governance of organizations like OpenAI, where Sam Altman has dangerous amounts of power.
I’m very pro-AI but very wary of people and organizations with ruthless ambition.
Thanks for clicking the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏
📣 Special thanks to:
for the referrals. Check out her beautiful, helpful publication: .
This was a good post, Ryan. Nicely formatted, took me through the journey. Used my senses and was relatable.
So much so that I’m consciously afraid of the next part of our journey - stopping full time travel.
I like the relaxed vs excited paradigm. That is a good model which will be in my head for a long time. It’s now time to figure out how I’m going to keep the excitement in my life as it relates to location.
Thanks for the mental preparation.
This was really interesting, thank you for writing about it. You’ve given me relaxed/excited food for thought. Plus I love the idea of finding someone you’re excited to keep hanging out with. Hope Baguette feels better soon.