an independent, valuable part of society after years of crawling, one inch at a time, out of self-loathing and depression—an ascent that felt as knuckle-draggingly prolonged as humans' evolution from apes. I was for all intents and purposes doing a lot better, but I was not feeling better about the things I was doing. And I was drowning in spiritual texts and self-help books looking for answers everywhere outside myself. What I wasn't doing was living an empowered life, driven by my passions and guided by my gut instincts.
After years of obsessing over who I was, it felt empowering to shift my focus to what I was doing. Suddenly I was considering that maybe Twitter wasn't as superficial as I thought it had to be. It could be like tofu and take the flavor of whatever it's marinated in—and I could mix it up as my taste buds demanded. That's the beauty of Twitter: each tweeter decides which questions to answer, and they can be as helpful and meaningful as you make them. Asking the questions that shape our lives and exploring potential solutions—now that was something worth doing.
The simultaneous lack and abundance of answers is the answer.
I had lots of questions to answer: What makes a person happy? How can you live a meaningful life? How do you move forward after a poor decision or disappointment that eats away at your sense of possibility? How can you push yourself out of your comfort zone and live the life you dream about? How can you find a sense of security in a world with so many unknowns? The list was endless, really.
No matter what religion we follow, what politics we support, what family we were born into, or where we've placed our roots, we all deal with universal problems. Regardless of our differences, we all live our lives around the same questions. How we answer them dictates the choices we'll make and what kind of person we'll be from moment to moment. Some answers are clichés that look great on paper but don't actually breathe when we inflate them and try to find a pulse. Others seem implausible and yet make a world of sense when we step inside them and wrap them around our circumstances. And others still can feel absolute for what seems like an eternity until life cross-examines them and reminds us how fragile most answers are.
Was I merely regurgitating words that felt good or feeling good about doing something with them?
The reality is there are very few concrete, one-size-fits-all answers to the big questions. According to Socrates, accepting that is the foundation to true wisdom. There's so much we can't know, understand, or predict in life. Yet if we learn to listen to ourselves and then to stop listening long enough to simply be in the world, open and available, the answers can seem so clear—answer, really. The real answer is that there are an infinite number of possibilities that we can explore to be happy, connected, engaged, and free. The simultaneous lack and abundance of answers is the answer.
Tiny Buddha evolved from that idea—the prospect of exploring different possibilities and then doing something with them so we can learn for ourselves what's right for each of us.
They say we teach what we need to learn, and this has been true for me. When I started tweeting a daily quote through @tinybuddha, I addressed the questions that felt most paralyzing in my world. I looked for quotes about letting go of stress and anxiety because I'd carried so much around for years it oozed from my skin, like a little too much garlic. I read countless books, highlighter in hand, looking for insights about being happy in the present because I'd spent so much time obsessing over the past and worrying over the future that I disbelieved it was possible to liberate the now. Once upon a time, I thought mindfulness was a comforting illusion—something spoon-fed to me like Santa, the American Dream, and free lunches.
After a year of sharing these simple ideas in a one-day-at-a-time format, with the @tinybuddha follower count growing into the thousands (now more than two hundred thousand), I reassessed: What was I doing? Was I merely regurgitating words that felt good or feeling good about doing something with them?
I considered that maybe lots of other people just like me were sitting at their computers wondering if they felt proud of how they answered the question, “What are you doing?” Reading an inspiring quote doesn't guarantee inspired action, particularly in an information-overloaded world where many of us spend our days inertly glued to technology. Sometimes when we gorge ourselves on meaningful words, we fall into an intention coma—too overwhelmed by other people's thoughts to identify the right choices for ourselves.
So I developed TinyBuddha.com in September 2009, where anyone can contribute tips and stories about wisdom in everyday life. Since then, I've watched a community grow from one to more than I ever could have imagined (more than three million unique visits to the website and more than fifty thousand Facebook and two hundred thousand Twitter followers), all of us looking to learn and share wisdom—people of all ages and backgrounds from all over the globe united by the same sense of uncertainty and a determination to thrive regardless.
That's what brought me to this book: a fascination with the questions that connect us and the wisdom—conventional or otherwise—that guides the decisions we make each day.
WHAT YOU'LL GET FROM THIS BOOK
Nearly one thousand people responded when I began asking life's hardest questions on Twitter, planning to create a collaborative book. As I read through their responses, I realized the answers fell into distinct categories of ideas. While there were occasionally responses that didn't parallel anyone else's, for the most part, the tweets grouped themselves into sections.
I didn't influence the responses to fit an agenda; I shaped my exploration around the suggestions in the tweets. Just like friends of Tiny Buddha in all its forms have guided TinyBuddha.com, their insights form the backbone of this book. Since many of the tweets were quite similar, I chose a handful that aligned with each shared perspective. From there, I dug through the archives of my memories to weigh the ideas against my own experiences and then dived into books and articles that shed further light on these ideas.
Throughout each section, you'll find a number of tips and exercises to help you take action on what you've read. Now, I never do exercises as I read a book—not even when an author writes, “I know you probably don't usually do exercises in books, but please do these!” So I have a different suggestion for you: Highlight the ones that seem useful to you, and when you find yourself in a relevant situation in life, come back to them and take action then.
I'm not a huge fan of vague, flowery, New Age jargon, so I've gone to great effort to keep this book practical and rooted in reality. I recently read a blog post about succeeding in sales. The author suggested that the best way to sell anything is to position it as the magic bullet—the ultimate answer or method to doing something that we all want to do in life but don't want to work for, like losing weight, getting a fulfilling job, or finding happiness. He offered some supporting information to show that we more often spend money on worthless things that seem like quick fixes than on proven systems that require time and effort. Despite the advice, which I suspect holds some truth, I will tell you this book is not a magic bullet.
Sometimes when we gorge ourselves on meaningful words, we fall into an intention coma—too overwhelmed by other people's thoughts to identify the right choices for ourselves.
This is not a guide of absolute answers. It's crowdsourced wisdom, often supported by scientific, psychological, and sociological research, that may help you experience meaning, happiness, and peace right now, regardless of your circumstances. It's a reflection of and on popular opinion and an examination of the ways we can leverage what we know and what we don't for our individual and collective well-being.
Sharing parts of my personal journey was a lot like doing intermittent cart wheels naked on my front lawn—my stories might be brief, but I certainly put it all out there. In the spirit of that same authenticity, I want to be clear that I am not an expert on living wisely. I suspect that if I presented myself that way, I'd immediately convey my ignorance, because wisdom is a lifelong pursuit. I didn't write this book sitting at a cherrywood desk in my psychiatry office or in between personal development