The philosophy of focusing on a slow and loving existence in the quiet now

You can make resolutions. You can set goals.

The problem is, they don’t tend to last. Resolutions are forgotten. Goalposts move.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s good to make resolutions and strive for goals, but they’re subject to a fundamental problem: they change.

More troubling, they change for no apparent reason. Everything might be the same in your life, but in July, that New Year Resolution doesn’t seem important. And that goal you set at age 25? It might need a lot of tweaking, or even look downright foolish, by age 30.

You might want to focus on something sturdier than goals and resolutions. Maybe things that are a part of your personality, what it means “to be you.”

Dispositions

Although the term has been used in different ways, for our purposes here, dispositions are inherent qualities of your mind or character. They are to your personality what height, weight, skin tone, and hair are to your body: features that more or less can change, but don’t, unless a lot of time passes or significant events or efforts take place.

They are to your mental world what habits are to your physical. Perhaps they’re best described as “habits of the mind.”

We all have dispositions. They might be genetic; they might develop from environment; they might be a hybrid. We all have dispositions that guide our existence, whether we think about them or not. They’re just there.

You might want to try breaking down major areas of your life and asking, “What disposition is proper to each area?”

Below are five major areas of existence and the disposition proper to each. If you’re like me, you probably have a few of them and lack a few … Read the rest