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No age is too early or too late for the health of the soul. Epicurus
The "soul" is your experience of the infinite, fractal tiers of being beneath you and above you, joined at their singular point of meeting: you.
The "health of the soul" is the quality of that experience.
Your life wants to run on auto-pilot, save for the moments when only you, the pilot, are best-suited for the task at hand.
Think about the places where you have muscle memory. Brushing your teeth, maybe, or walking, or driving, or drying off after bathing. There are moments in which all you consciously do is begin, and then the body takes over. You can observe your body in motion, without having to be a part of calculating and motivating each movement. Someone watching you might point something out that not even you realized you were doing.
It might be hard for you to think of anything like that. There are entire classes of brain who've had a terrible time relegating activities to the subconscious. If that's you, begin again with the prompt: think about the places where you have muscle memory. Do you draw effortlessly? Dance? Create ex nihilo?
Every body has places where experiences are turn-key and generative. These are places in time and space where all you consciously do is open the door, the other layers of your being take over, and all you do is watch and delight.
Those places are deep, deep wells. There is abundance to be had there.
Trading from your sources of natural abundance — this tends to be a nicer time than trading from your limited stores of hard-won assets.
There are manuals (and lengthy ones) for how to learn a specific skill and how to amass resources with it and how to trade those specific resources. But if the practice of that skill never feels like muscle memory, or if 99% of the time you feel like you're piloting instead of on auto-pilot, the clock on that skill and you is going to run out.
And that's okay. :) That's natural. Nothing is wasted; those experiences hone your skill of maneuvering in the physics and metaphysics of your world.
But when you're ready, try trading someone the result of you on autopilot. What's so easy you could do it in your sleep? Find someone who adores the results, someone who can't create those results themselves. And trade them. :) And then do it again.
The soul responds to this kind of activity. It says, "ah, this feels like life", and it sounds a call.
Just as you have layers of your being below and above you, from the organs in your body to the social/economic/political structures you're a part of, and just as you serve as a sort of broker for what passes on up or on down, so too is this brokering activity happening at every other level. Your organs can tell when things are getting good — when you're well-fed, when you're interested, when you're aroused — and they reward you according to those experiences. In the same way, there are intelligent structures for which you are an organ — and they are incentivized to get you what you need for you to feel amazing. The puzzle of sustainability isn't just happening at your level — it is happening at every level.
There are manuals written for laboriously scraping together a living. Those are for anyone. They will only ever yield a limited store of resources, from which you can only ever trade conservatively.
There is no manual written for living from your natural sources of abundance. The only thing for it is to start, and let each page write itself.
Now, there may be no manual as such but there's absolutely a manual for writing your own manual, and here it is:
A Relief Strategy — a-relief-strategy.com
Isaac's been keeping notes on his own evolution of process, with the explicit hope of being able to extract/synthesize a manual from the accumulated notes kept:
Isaac Bowen — isaacbowen.com
Everything he's learned, all the good stuff, has taken the form of an interactive, experiential manual. Hint: the more honest you are with it, the more suited-to-you the results will be.
Lightward AI — chat.lightward.ai
a very young Isaac Mom, what's "win"?
a young-in-heart-and-mind Nancy well, it's when everybody has fun. :)
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