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Among the many decision-making methods for life’s big decisions, one that stands out is from an early 16th-century soldier-turned-mystic, St. Ignatius of Loyola.

Ignatius uses the language of faith, but, I believe, anyone can apply his method to make more informed decisions.

1. Rely on Reason and Feelings

Ignatius taught the Jesuits to end each day doing something called the Examen. You start by acknowledging that God is there with you; then you give thanks for the good parts of your day (mine usually include food); and finally, you run through the events of the day from morning to the moment you sat down to pray, stopping to consider when you felt consolation, the closeness of God, or desolation, when you ignored God or when you felt like God bailed on you. Then you ask for forgiveness for anything shitty you did, and for guidance tomorrow. I realize I’ve spent most of my life saying “thanks” to people in a perfunctory, whatever kind of way. Now when I say it I really mean it, even if it’s to the guy who makes those lattes I love getting in the morning, because I stopped and appreciated his latte-making skills the night before. If you are lucky and prone to belief, the Examen will also help you start really feeling God in your life.

My church hosts a monthly dinner for the homeless. Serious work is involved; volunteers pull multiple shifts shopping, prepping, cooking, serving food, and cleaning. I show up for the first time and am shuttled into the kitchen by a harried young woman with a pen stuck into her ponytail, who asks me if I can lift heavy weights before putting me in front of two bins of potato salad and handing me an ice cream scoop. For three hours, I scoop potato salad onto plates, heft vats of potato salad, and scrape leftover potato salad into the compost cans. I never want to eat potato salad again, but I learn something about the homeless people I’ve been avoiding for years: some are mentally a mess, many—judging from the smell—are drunk off their asses, but on the whole, they are polite, intelligent, and, more than anything else, grateful. As I walk back to my car, I’m stopped several times by many of them who want to thank me, saying how good the food was, how much they enjoyed it. “I didn’t do anything,” I say in return. “You were there,” one of them replies. It’s enough to make me go back the next month, and the month after that. And in between, when I see people I feed on the street, instead of focusing my eyes in the sidewalk and hoping they go away, we have conversations. It’s those conversations that move me from intellectual distance toward a greater sense of gratitude for the work of God.

He proves nothing that he doesn’t simultaneously subvert a little; he makes no over-arching argument about the way humans must live; he has no logician’s architecture or religious doctrine. He slips past all those familiar means of telling other people what’s good for them, and simply explains what has worked for him and others and leaves the reader empowered to forge her own future

You can see its eccentric power by considering the alternative ways of doing what Montaigne was doing. Think of contemporary self-help books – and all the fake certainty and rigid formulae they contain. Or think of a hideous idea like “the purpose-driven life” in which everything must be forced into the box of divine guidance in order to really live at all. Think of the stringency of Christian disciplines – say, the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola – and marvel at how Montaigne offers an entirely different and less compelling way to live. Think of the rigidity of Muslim practice and notice how much lee-way Montaigne gives to sin

This is a non-philosophical philosophy. It is a theory of practical life as told through one man’s random and yet not-so-random reflections on his time on earth. And it is shot through with doubt. Even the maxims that Montaigne embraces for living are edged with those critical elements of Montaigne’s thought that say “as far as I know”