[MD] Overcoming the System

[X Acto]

Matt,
I employ philosophy every day.

I submerse my awareness in the now and do my best.

I concentrate on what I'm doing in the moment with all thought and focus.

where formally I would worry about tomorrow and regret the past while doing
a task or think about something other than what I was doing.

I see the objective "doing the dishes" as a performance of self maintenence
A value. 

when the dishes are dirty, I wash them, with care.

I really put this philosophy to use when I lost my job. I would, in the past,
let something like that clutter my mind with doubt and depression paralyzing
me.
I worked for my brother in-law, a person I did not like at the time, landscaping,
a strenuous, dirty exhausting job, but philosophy not only got me through it
I earned respect from my brother in-law by being a quality oriented worker
who "got into it".

The zen way is not to attempt to escape the task, ie by getting drunk
or agonizing over it
but to immerse yourself in that task with all your awareness, something
getting drunk makes difficult to do
and dogmatically consulting a philosphical system in regard to each
particular experience. A living philosphy is a approach to experience,
an attitude about it developed through moments of reflection and
practice over a lifetime just like how we learned objectivism and every
other way we look at expereince, reinforced over a long period of growth.
We practice and reinforce, we learn to break old agreements by making
new ones and reinforcing them. Not simply reading and reflecting.
Without practice and reinforcement they remain ideas.

-Ron