Does it work?

— Dad, the good mood is gone!
— Happy New Year, Sensei!
— I thought about what you said, and I changed my mind.
— People ask me, “You don’t drink? So what do you do?”
— Dude, write a book.
— I’ll spend my time intentionally. Thank you!
— Since I got back from Thailand I can’t stop thinking.

Fair question: does any of this actually work? A year ago I put my full trust in my insights and in the will of the universe. And checked along the way whether any of it makes sense.

We ignore what we don’t know. So here is something you can measure: my resting heart rate dropped from 70 to 51 over a year of freediving. Put your face in cold water and your heart slows down on its own. It’s the diving reflex, and every mammal has it. Calmer body, calmer mind.

Heart rate is just the easiest number to show. Everything else I checked the way a miner checks: does the reward keep coming? The mood I live in these days was mined out of ordinary practice: getting up at the same hour, meditation, the sea. Do the work and it comes. Skip a few days and it’s gone.

The strangest result is luck. I catch myself saying it out loud: what can I say, I keep getting lucky. Everything starts happening the moment I so much as stir. Events come so thick they pile on top of each other, and I barely manage to jump from one thing to the next. Friends around the world invite me to stay. Even bad news keeps turning out, months later, to be the best thing that could have happened. And in a contented universe things somehow tend to work out, because there are no failures.

We keep playing “How does this day get even better?” And the universe keeps delivering. It’s a shame to end the day. Something else might still turn up.

Proof of work is just another word for proof it works. Mine joy daily. It expires at midnight.

I get paid for doing what I love and making it better. And on top of that they sprinkle me with money. Not too much, so I don’t overload my brain at training.

I can’t prove it for you. You have to run the proof on yourself. The best I can do is pass it on.

So run it. This experiment has exactly one lab, your life. There are many like it, but this one is yours.