Ocean Framework

Should you spend your entire life chasing business opportunities, endlessly “optimizing” your life to be more efficient, constantly striving to move up in your career? Or should you go for the exact opposite, leave the big city life, retire into your inner Buddha, and be completely unaffected by the ups and downs of life? Can you make peace with the two elements coexisting in your life?

One way to think about this mind warp is to imagine your life as a vast ocean. On the surface, the texture of the ocean changes every day. Some days are calm and some days are windy. Every now and then a hurricane comes along. The surface of the ocean represents your day-to-day “struggles”; your ambitions to become a successful entrepreneur, become fit, get promoted, be a good husband, a worthy dad. It represents the day-to-day worries, the arguments you have with your colleagues, the problems with your clients, the endless opportunities and challenges bubbling in your mind as you go about your day.

You don’t have to fight to keep everything on the surface 100% calm at all times - in fact, it is very unnatural to do so. You can decide how to navigate the waves. You can surf them, you can watch them in awe. On quieter days, you can jump into an inflatable mattress and let them push you around. But in the grand scheme of things, on a cosmic scale, the more we think about this, none of these daily worries, or shapes of the ocean, really matter. We occupy a very small amount of space for a small amount of time. Soon enough, we’ll be gone, and in a few generations later, completely forgotten.

But below the surface top, the ocean is also a deep, vast, and permanent place that can act as your center. At its bottom, the waves on the surface don’t matter too much. In fact, the deep ocean does not even know or care about the waves on the surface. While you are kite surfing or snorkeling on its surface, cultivate the depth of the ocean, tens of meters underneath. Where it is much darker, quieter, and cooler. From there, you will realize how irrelevant that 20-meter wave that just broke to shore was. It was a joke, a “nothing”, perhaps a little vibration.

So perhaps one way to think about life is this: worry on a day-to-day basis, try to be better, try to take positive action in the world. Be the ocean’s surface that is active in the world. Swim, ski, snorkel, sunbathe on this fun surface. But also at the same time, cultivate a level for yourself that is untouched by day-to-day worry. A level that the surface world can’t get to. A level that knows that your worries are a trifle in the scheme of things. A level you secretly access to escape the storms.

The Ocean Framework concept was presented by @punk6529