Perfect days.
And how I 'manifested' my dream trip without doing much.
I’ve written before about the secret to balancing being vs. doing and about the avocado lady, whose quality of Being made her airport lounge guacamole divine.
But what is Being, actually?
And how do we ‘do’ it?
Without a proper understanding, we’ll end up like Jason Segel learning surfing from Paul Rudd in Forgetting Sarah Marshall—lying flat on the board for fear of doing too much.
On the surface, it would seem quite simple...being is, well…existing?
Ok. Existing, check. ✅
But everyone is existing, and few are actually capital-B Being—so what’s missing?
I didn’t feel like writing today, to be honest. Then I remembered my friend Kim telling me that when she doesn’t want to do something, she just switches into ‘vacation mode’ and the inspiration appears from her least excited state.
So on a rainy Thursday morning (self-employment FTW), I decided to get cozy and watch Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, a film about the routine life of Hirayama, who cleans Tokyo’s most architecturally awe-striking public toilets.
In other words, an entire film about being.
Technically, I’m writing this now, but I mostly just watched the film, jotted down musings, and watched them take the shape of something. It just kind of happened.
This is what’s meant by the Vedic expression ‘do least. accomplish most.’
Beneath all the busy-ness in Japan, there’s a layer of reverent quietude that pervades all aspects of life there. The Being layer.
Hirayama, through the quiet care he takes in his work and his profound quality of attention to the beauty in the seemingly mundane all around him, represents this perfectly.
Being doesn’t necessarily mean the absence of doing, and doing doesn’t necessarily mean the absence of Being.
Hirayama is Being when he’s meticulously scrubbing under the toilet seat with a toothbrush. He’s also Being as he sits quietly on the park bench eating his sandwich and taking film photos of the trees.
His underling, Takashi, offers a stark point of contrast. Takashi watches videos on his phone while he cleans the toilets with the other hand.
When silently admonished by Hirayama, Takashi replies, “Why bother? It’s just going to get dirty again.”
The implied answer, of course, is because how we do one thing is how we do everything. The process is the outcome.
It’s not about the toilet being in a perpetual state of purity, but the quiet inner joy we feel when tending to our work with a quality of attention that can only be described as Being.
Being is contagious.
Through our Being-ness, we can inspire others into Being, just by example.
Halfway through the film, I took a break to make lunch.
Inspired by Hirayama, I found myself doing so with a higher quality of attention.
In Ayurveda, the branch of the Veda concerned with life sciences, the number one principle of eating is the consciousness state of the chef and of the diner. That’s because the quality of attention, known as soma, is transferred from the chef, to the food, to the diner.
Being and Manifesting
After lunch, I checked Instagram (which can still qualify as Being, depending on the intent behind it) and saw my friend Sean in New York was looking for someone to move his boxes from LA to NY.
Over the last few weeks, I had been feeling strong charm toward a cross-country roadtrip, and here was the perfect opportunity.
I told Sean I’d drive his stuff, and within 2 hours, I was booked in a 25-foot CruiseAmerica RV for 8 nights across the country, for next to nothing, thanks to Sean covering the fuel expenses and ‘relocation specials’ I learned about on ChatGPT, whereby companies offer free rentals for specific routes when they need vehicles repositioned. There was exactly one route available, and it was the route I needed. I’ll set out from LA in a few days.
Do Least. Accomplish Most.
All told, I got the letter written and the roadtrip of my dreams materialized without doing much other than watching a movie, cooking lunch, and making a phone call.
This is Being in action.
When we relax into our least excited state, the mental noise quiets, and we’re more easily able to align with that which nature is trying to organize for us. Life is much easier this way.
That’s also how manifestation really works (sorry, Insta influencers in wide-brimmed hats), but that’s a topic for another day.
The Island Inside
When I think back on my life, it wasn’t the private jet trips, exotic lands, extravagant parties, or fancy dinners I remember most warmly. It was the the quiet Sundays spent doing laundry, vacuuming, watering plants, developing film, and listening to vintage music on good speakers that really filled me up.
I’ll never forget pre-learning meditation, sitting in a 5-star hotel suite during Miami Music Week, in between our label-branded stage at Ultra Music Festival and our club night, surrounded by materiality “in profusion” as Robert Plant would put it, and telling the owner of Club Space that I secretly wished I could just escape it all and start a new life as a simple barista on a remote island.
Each time we close our eyes, we make contact with that small island inside. The Being layer. And each time we emerge, a little more of it emerges with us, increasingly coloring our world.
Let’s discuss these and other ideas during Collective Effervescence, our online group meditation series, this Sunday June 22 at 12PM ET. Drop in for meditation only (first 30 min) or stay for discussion + Q&A on this and other life topics from the Vedic perspective. Join the WhatsApp group to receive reminders 24 hours before each session, or click Subscribe on this page to have all upcoming dates automatically sync to your preferred calendar.