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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 208 (Jan 12, 2025) — Slower Urgency, Self-Actualization, Limits & Potentials, & More
The Sloww Sunday newsletter sends to 10,000+ readers slowing down to the wisdom within and downshifting into deeper living. If you enjoy this issue, please help grow Sloww by forwarding this newsletter to others.
New to Sloww? Here’s what it’s about in a nutshell (which mirrors the newsletter sections below):
🌀 Maslow on Self-Actualization
Last week’s newsletter kicked off a short series on Abraham Maslow’s late-life writings from his book The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (Amazon | Summary).
This week we’ll cover what Maslow said about self-actualization and self-actualizers. You’ll notice in the infographic below that I’ve presented the ‘hierarchy of needs’ as a ‘holarchy of needs‘ because Maslow never actually presented his work as a pyramid!
Sloww Premium members can also access the self-actualization synthesis (🔒) and my self-actualization self-assessment (🔒). The synthesis includes bonus infographics on: how to be a healthy self-actualizer & Maslow’s Being-Values/Metaneeds.
- “What do we really mean by self-actualization? … The self-actualized person is in a state of good psychological health: his basic needs are satisfied so what is it that motivates him to become such a busy and capable person? For one thing, all self-actualized people have a cause they believe in, a vocation they are devoted to. When they say, ‘my work,’ they mean their mission in life … Self-actualizing people seem to do what they do for the sake of ultimate, final values, which is for the sake of principles which seem intrinsically worthwhile. They protect and love these values, and if the values are threatened, they will be aroused to indignation, action, and often self-sacrifice. These values are not abstract to the self-actualizing person; they are as much a part of them as their bones and arteries. Self-actualizing people are motivated by the eternal verities, the B-Values, by pure truth and beauty in perfection. They go beyond polarities and try to see the underlying oneness; they try to integrate everything and make it more comprehensive.” — Abraham Maslow
- “They listen to their own voices; they take responsibility; they are honest; and they work hard. They find out who they are and what they are, not only in terms of their mission in life, but also in terms of the way their feet hurt when they wear such and such a pair of shoes and whether they do or do not like eggplant or stay up all night if they drink too much beer.” — Abraham Maslow
- “Let us think of life as a process of choices, one after another. At each point there is a progression choice and a regression choice. There may be a movement toward defense, toward safety, toward being afraid; but over on the other side, there is the growth choice. To make the growth choice instead of the fear choice a dozen times a day is to move a dozen times a day toward self-actualization. Self-actualization is an ongoing process.” — Abraham Maslow
0️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
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🐢 ‘The Times are Urgent, Let us Slow Down’
I just read the article A Slower Urgency from Bayo Akomolafe. Some highlights:
- “In ‘hurrying up’ all the time, we often lose sight of the abundance of resources that might help us meet today’s most challenging crises. We rush through into the same patterns we are used to … The call to slow down works to bring us face to face with the invisible, the hidden, the unremarked, the yet-to-be-resolved.”
- “Slowing down is thus about lingering in the places we are not used to. Seeking out new questions. Becoming accountable to more than what rests on the surface. Seeking roots. Slowing down is taking care of ghosts, hugging monsters, sharing silence, embracing the weird … The call to slow down reminds us that we do not simply act upon the world (as if the world were external to our actions, or as if we were external to it), we are the world in its ongoing action-ing.”
- “The idea of slowing down is not about getting answers, it is about questioning our questions.”
1️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
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🚪 Way Closing & Way Opening
The last two newsletters (here & here) have highlighted different aspects of Parker Palmer’s book Let Your Life Speak (Amazon | Summary | 🔒Premium). We’ll wrap up with one more noteworthy learning from the book about limits (‘way closing’) and potentials (‘way opening’).
These are two sides of the same coin called ‘identity’:
- Way closing (may reveal our limits): We must take the no of the way that closes and find the guidance it has to offer (requires thoughtful discernment). We must honor our limitations in ways that do not distort our nature. When I try to do something that is not in my nature or the nature of the relationship, way will close behind me.
- Way opening (may reveal our potentials): We must take the yes of the way that opens and respond with the yes of our lives. We must trust and use our gifts in ways that fulfill the potentials God gave us.
“If we are to live our lives fully and well, we must learn to embrace the opposites, to live in a creative tension between our limits and our potentials … There is as much guidance in what does not and cannot happen in my life as there is in what can and does—maybe more … There is as much guidance in way that closes behind us as there is in way that opens ahead of us … Each time a door closes, the rest of the world opens up. All we need to do is stop pounding on the door that just closed, turn around—which puts the door behind us—and welcome the largeness of life that now lies open to our souls. The door that closed kept us from entering a room, but what now lies before us is the rest of reality.” — Parker Palmer
2️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
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🧠 Unknown Knowledge
In a recent newsletter, I shared some favorite ancient proverbs. Now, let’s follow it up with some wisdom from unknown sources:
- “Wherever you go, there you are.”
- “Many die at age 27, but aren’t buried until 72.”
- “First comes a full stomach, then comes ethics.”
- “The hardest problem to face is that there isn’t one.”
- “When all is said and done, more is said than done.”
- “People aren’t against you, they are for themselves.”
- “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
- “Anything that costs you your peace is too expensive.”
- “One who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.”
- “Enlightenment is an accident, but practice makes you accident prone.”
- “When everybody is digging for gold, a few get rich selling them picks and shovels.”
- “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
- “You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.”
- “Any day is a good day for a midlife crisis. After all, you never know when it will be the middle of your life.”
- “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.” (Pair with “Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change.”)
3️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
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☯️ Alan Watts Late-Life Interview
I stumbled upon this 1972/1973 interview with Alan Watts which took place within the last year of his life. As expected, it’s full of gems:
- “We are not lonely, isolated egos inside bags of skin, but we are actually functions of the total universe. We are the universe, each one of us, observing itself. And we can’t know that directly. The puzzle here is, you see, that just as you cannot see your own head, and your head seems a blank to you … everything that’s absolutely fundamental to you—basic to you, your inmost being—must always seem a blank. But that blank is the same thing as the heart of the universe … This blank that we meet when we try to go back before we remember anything, and the blank that we meet when we think about going to sleep and never waking up, and the blank that we encounter when we try to see our heads, and the blank out of which the stars shine—is all the same blank. It’s you. Now, you can’t see it. You can’t pin it down, just in the same way that you can’t bite your teeth or kiss your lips or see your eyes. The empty thing, what we fear as so-called nothingness, is ungraspable, unintelligible, because it is ourselves.” — Alan Watts
- “The self that you think you are doesn’t exist. In other words, the ego has no reality, except in the sense that the equator has reality. It’s a social institution … When we find out that it doesn’t exist, the problem is solved … See, you cannot do anything about it, and you cannot do nothing about it. Because there isn’t any ‘you’ to do it, or not to do it—not in the sense in which we ordinarily think of ‘you,’ of one’s self. That is an abstraction. It cannot do something to transform itself, it cannot do nothing to transform itself. But when that is understood, the problem is solved. Because then, you see, what you find out is that although you, as the ego, do not exist, nevertheless you’re still breathing, still circulating your blood, your hair is still growing, life is still going on, the wind is still blowing. And you find out then that, instead of what you thought you were, there is a happening. And that happening is the whole universe going along. You are not its victim, you are not its puppet. Also, you are not pushing it around. There is neither fate nor free will. There is just this happening. There is nature going along, and that’s you.” — Alan Watts
For more Watts:
- 50+ Alan Watts Quotes on the Meaning of Life, Knowing Yourself, Slowing Down, & More
- 🔒 Alan Watts Synthesis: How to Answer the Ultimate Question of “Who am I?”
4️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
👣 Featured Product: Wise Walk: 365 Days of Enlightening Exercise
“If you understand, things are just as they are. If you do not understand, things are just as they are.” — Zen Proverb
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
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