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A contemplation on intentional living, the options flood, and the ancient art of beginning
by Paolo Peralta
Hello there, friend.
I want to tell you about a farm boy I keep thinking about.
He lived somewhere in the 18th century — England, maybe, or France, or the rural Philippines of a different era entirely. His older brother would inherit the land, so he had to choose a path. His family knew a blacksmith and a tanner in the next town. The seminary was a possibility if the parish priest found him worthy. Three options. Maybe four, if you counted the army.
He chose. He focused. He made something of his life with those modest coordinates.
I think about him on mornings when I open my phone and suddenly I am managing six platforms, two bands, a Substack, a coaching practice, a tattoo studio, a food blog, a podcast, tour logistics, and the beautiful, relentless hunger to write something true today — all before 7 AM.
The farm boy would have found me incomprehensible. Honestly, sometimes I find me incomprehensible too.
What Is Your Purpose for Existence? The Question That Changes Everything
John Strelecky, in The Cafe on the Edge of the World, asks three questions that have a way of landing very differently depending on which morning you read them:
Why are you here? Do you fear death? Are you fulfilled?
He calls it your PFE — your Purpose for Existence. And he makes a point I keep returning to: our limits today are far less about accessibility than we think. We have access to information, people, cultures, and experiences from all over the world. The limits that remain are mostly the ones we have agreed, quietly, to impose on ourselves.
That is worth sitting with for a moment.
Because here is the harder question: why do we spend so much of our time preparing for when we can do what we want, instead of just doing those things now?
The green sea turtle teaches this beautifully, in Strelecky’s story. When you are out of alignment with what you truly want to do, you burn your energy on everything else. And then when the right opportunity finally comes — the one you were built for — you have already spent what you needed to meet it.
Every day is a chance to do the things that matter. The morning is yours, right now, today.
The Flood We All Live In (And Why Small Problems Are the Real Danger)
There is a concept I keep coming back to, something a writer named David Cain described recently: the options flood. His idea is that modern people — all of us — are overwhelmed by abundance. And it goes way beyond career options or life paths. It is the sheer volume of choices for where to put our attention at every single moment of the day.
Every time we try to do anything with some real resolve, a hundred alternatives appear. The more roads there are into the future, the more self-possession it takes to stay on yours. The loudest, shiniest options always win out — the same way weeds take over a garden the moment you look away.
I read this and felt something settle in me, like a chord finally resolving.
Writer and computer scientist Gurwinder Bhogal adds something important here. He points out that we often fail to improve our lives simply because things are just unsatisfying enough to tolerate. When something is genuinely terrible, we leave. But when it is merely mediocre? We grind it out. Small problems, he says, often threaten our quality of life more than big ones — precisely because they never trigger the decisive action that real crisis demands.
The options flood creates exactly this condition: a life that is busy, full, even impressive-looking from the outside, and yet quietly out of alignment at the center.
Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Confine yourself to the present.” Seneca wrote: “Nusquam est qui ubique est” — He who is everywhere is nowhere.”
They were writing into the same flood. Theirs was just slower.
The Box Is Freedom: The Practice of Doing One Thing Fully
Cain’s remedy is simple and ancient: draw a box around one thing. One intention. One small universe. Put your head inside it completely and give that single thing the full quality of your presence.
The box is freedom. It is love toward the thing you are making.
Think about the mornings you have felt most alive in your work — at a guitar part that finally cracked open, at a paragraph that said exactly what you meant, at a bowl of Mapo Udon that came together in a way that surprised even you. In every one of those moments, you were inside a box. The world had contracted to the one thing in front of you, and you were fully, gloriously there.
That is presence. And presence is what every contemplative tradition — the Stoics, the Taoists, Ram Dass, all of them — has been pointing toward all along.
Deepak Chopra calls it the Law of Least Effort: when your actions are aligned with your dharma, they flow. Ease is a signal of alignment. Strain is a signal to pause and reorient. The box is where you discover which one you are experiencing.
Be here. Only here. Completely here.
Gene Keys, Dharma, and the Timeless Gift of Doing Less, Better
My Gene Keys profile carries Gate 5 — the Line of Fate, whose gift is called Patience but whose deeper name might be Timelessness.
What I understand this to mean, more and more, is this: the still point from which all good output flows is a place of full aliveness. Active stillness. The capacity to be so completely in the present act that time stops being a tyrant. The question shifts from How do I get more done? to How do I be more here?
Deepak’s Seven Spiritual Laws of Success offer a map for this. Pure Potentiality — your truest nature before the noise arrives. Dharma — the unique gift only you carry, the thing that, when you offer it fully, the world shifts around you. Least Effort — the signal that you are in flow, that resistance has dissolved into rightness.
The farm boy’s advantage was what his limited options gave him: the chance to be wholly in the one thing. The full gravitational weight of his attention on a single course of action.
We get to manufacture that kind of simplicity for ourselves, moment by moment, by choosing the box.
One morning. One platform. One sentence worth keeping.
This is what Starting Early has always meant to me — an orientation, more than a time. To arrive at the work before the world arrives at you. To claim the first hours for the deepest thing, the truest thing, the one most alive in you right now.
You Will Rarely Outperform Your Self-Image
James Clear wrote something that stopped me mid-scroll recently:
“You will rarely outperform your self-image.”
Six words. I keep them near the desk.
Because here is the thing: all of this — the morning practice, the boxes, the presence, the PFE — it only becomes sustainable when it is grounded in a self-image that believes the work is worth doing. That you are worth showing up for.
We set the ceiling on ourselves before the day even begins. The morning practice is, among many things, a daily act of resetting that ceiling upward. A quiet, consistent vote for the version of yourself who is already whole, already equipped, already worthy of the one true thing in front of you.
You are already equipped for this. Begin where you are, with what you have.
Luck, Rooms, and the Examined Life
One more thing that has been sitting with me. James Clear also wrote:
Luck flows through people and travels by conversation. The people you talk to determine the opportunities you find. Keep talking to the same people, keep finding the same opportunities. Start talking to new people, start finding new opportunities. If you want different luck, start walking into different rooms.
There is a view of intentional living that is entirely internal — the morning practice, the journal, the meditation cushion. And all of that matters deeply. And. The examined life also asks us to keep walking into new rooms. To bring our full presence into the world, on stages, in conversations, in the work we publish and share and offer.
Strelecky’s green sea turtle knows this too. Swim with intention. Conserve your energy for what you were made to do. And then, when the current is right, move with everything you have.
The best view of the game is from the stands. But that is the observer’s life, and you are here to play.
A Practical Invitation for Your Tomorrow Morning
Here is something I want to offer you, friend — always as an invitation, always.
Tomorrow morning, before anything else, before the world has a chance to present you with its five hundred possibilities, take three minutes and write down one thing. Just one. The one thing you would do today if that were the only thing you were allowed to do.
Then — and this is the practice — let that one thing be the first box you enter.
Give it thirty minutes of your full, rested, morning-fresh attention. Let it have all of you for that small window. You will be astonished at what is possible inside a small box, fully inhabited.
This is how the PFE gets lived. One box, one morning, one act of full presence at a time.
The Farm Boy’s Gift
I have come to think the farm boy had something genuinely worth admiring.
Yes, he had fewer choices. Yes, his world was harder in ways I can only imagine. And yet he had the luxury of simplicity, the experience of full commitment, the uninterrupted pleasure of being entirely in one thing.
We get to reclaim some of that. By being deliberate enough to enter our abundant, beautiful, complicated life one room at a time.
One morning. One platform. One song. One dish. One idea that matters.
Begin where you are, with what you have.
The box is waiting. The morning is yours.
With love and full presence,
Paolo
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a “Purpose for Existence” (PFE)?
PFE is a concept from John Strelecky’s The Cafe on the Edge of the World — the unique reason you are here, the thing that, when you are living it, makes life feel fully inhabited. Discovering and aligning with your PFE is the foundation of intentional living.
What is intentional living and how do you practice it daily?
Intentional living means making deliberate choices about where you put your attention, energy, and time — rather than reacting to whatever is loudest. Daily practice includes a protected morning routine, focused creative work, and regular reflection on what is truly aligned with your values and purpose.
How does Deepak Chopra’s Law of Least Effort relate to morning practice?
The Law of Least Effort teaches that aligned actions flow naturally. A morning practice — meditation, journaling, movement — helps you arrive at your work from a place of clarity and alignment, so that your effort carries the quality of ease rather than force.
What does Gene Keys Gate 5 mean for creatives?
Gate 5 in the Gene Keys system carries the gift of Patience, also understood as Timelessness — the capacity to do less, but better, from a place of deep presence. For creatives, this means resisting the options flood and committing fully to the single task at hand.
How can I start a morning practice if I am overwhelmed?
Begin with one thing. Five minutes of stillness, one sentence in a journal, one page of a book that feeds you. The practice grows from there. The point is orientation, arriving at the day from the inside out.
Make Pure Thy Heart is a daily companion for the examined life — personal essays, vegan recipes, and consciousness explorations from Brooklyn.
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Tags: intentional living, morning practice, purpose for existence, John Strelecky, Gene Keys Gate 5, Deepak Chopra Seven Laws, James Clear, conscious creativity, personal transformation, mindfulness, vegan living, Brooklyn creative life
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