Monthly Archives: November 2015

November 29, 2015 · 10:27 pm

Gratitude

Marcus Aurelius Meditations

In the spirit of Thanksgiving it seemed appropriate to talk about gratitude this week. We frequently can find ourselves confronted with a problem or obstacle that seems unfair or too difficult to have to face, but for many of us there are those out there who would be grateful to only have to face the types of problems we do. As conditions change for the better we quickly adapt to our new normal and things that once seemed to be desirable or were only minor annoyances can soon be come to be seen as real problems.

We tend to undervalue the things that we already have and overvalue the things that we do not have, but would like to have. We think that acquiring a new gadget or a new car will make us happy, but not long after acquiring them the novelty will where off and we’ll start thinking about something new we would like to have, leading to a perpetual cycle of buying. Regarding these things that we don’t have, but would like to have, there is an excellent quote from Marcus Aurelius in Meditations, Book Seven, Quote 27 translated by Gregory Hays as:

Treat what you don’t have as nonexistent. Look at what you have, the things you value most, and think of how much you’d crave them if you didn’t have them. But be careful. Don’t feel such satisfaction that you start to overvalue them—that it would upset you to lose them.

I found that the quote was more commonly referenced from another translation of Meditations which puts it a bit more poetically, but expresses the same idea:

Do not indulge in dreams of having what you have not, but reckon up the chief of the blessings you do possess, and then thankfully remember how you would crave for them if they were not yours. At the same time, however, beware lest delight in them leads you to cherish them so dearly that their loss would destroy your peace of mind.

If we were to suddenly lose the things that we currently have, but don’t properly value we would quickly learn how valuable they really were. We never know how long we might have something for, a natural disaster could come along and destroy everything that we’ve ever owned, or the loss of a job might force us to sell things just to survive. Even if none of that happens, time will inevitably take its toll, degrading, destroying or devaluing the things we once coveted so much. In the end we will likely find that thing that we just had to have and would do anything to get, was far less valuable than we’d initially thought. No matter what happens to us and our things, though, there is one thing that we will always have.

As part of Book Two, Quote 14 in Meditations, Marcus reminds us that the present moment of our life is the only thing we really have:

The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.

The past is gone and the future is not promised to us, everything we own can be taken away, except for as long as we live we will always have the present moment, it is the only thing we can truly own. We can become attached to possessions, but if you stop to carefully examine each thing you own and consider its true value, beyond any sentimental value it may have, most of your possessions would likely be considered to be junk, or worthless by a complete stranger, with the exception of your life.

Perhaps the best time to practice gratitude is before eating, since as long as we have the essentials for survival, including something to eat, we don’t really need anything else, the rest is really just nice to have. In Eight Weeks to Optimum Health Dr. Andrew Weil recommends taking a moment of gratitude before eating for whatever has given its life so that we might preserve ours.

Most of us eat three times a day or more, so there is no shortage of opportunity. Moreover, the act of eating offers a profound glimpse into the mystery of life and the strange interconnectedness of spirit and matter. Life lives at the expense of other life. It matters not whether you are a carnivore or a vegetarian; you perpetuate your material existence by depriving other organisms of theirs. The recycling of forms in this way is a useful focus for contemplation, and we have a chance to look at it squarely every time we eat. I find that a useful technique for raising spiritual awareness is to take a moment before eating to remember our dependence on other living things and our need to take life in order to sustain life.

Life, at least in the present moment is the one thing we truly can own, and we would fight in order to preserve it if sometime tried to take it away from us, yet we regularly deprive other beings of their lives for the continuation of ours without giving it a second thought. You don’t have to be a spiritual or religious person to express a sentiment of gratitude for a meal in front of you and the life that went into creating that meal. Being at the top of the food chain, we’re lucky to not have to worry about being preyed upon by another creature for its sustenance.

As long as we have something to eat, drink and shelter we have something we can be grateful for. If we do not have these things then we have something of true value to desire and can be truly grateful for them when we do have them. Anything beyond the bare necessities for survival we should also be grateful for, as there are many who don’t even have those. Finally, we should be grateful just to be alive, because we never know how much time we have left.

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November 22, 2015 · 9:38 pm

Specialization

I started reading The Sea Wolf by Jack London and was struck on just the second page by a quote on specialization. Even over one hundred years ago he was remarking upon how specialization allows us the time to pursue our own specializations instead of having to constantly focus on obtaining the bare necessities for survival. Of course once you stop to think about it, there have been different specializations for millenia, but the explosive growth of technology in the past century has resulted in many sub-specializations or increasing numbers of specializations within what were previously considered specializations in their own right.

I remember thinking how comfortable it was, this division of labor which made it unnecessary for me to study fogs, winds, tides, and navigation in order to visit my friend who lived across an arm of the sea. It was good that men should be specialists, I mused. The peculiar knowledge of the pilot and captain sufficed for many thousands of people who knew no more of the sea and navigation than I knew. On the other hand, instead of having to devote my energy to the learning of a multitude of things, I concentrated it upon a few particular things, such as, for instance, the analysis of Poe’s place in American literature–an essay of mine, by the way, in the current Atlantic. Coming aboard, as I passed through the cabin, I had noticed with greedy eyes a stout gentleman reading the Atlantic, which was open at my very essay. And there it was again, the division of labor, the special knowledge of the pilot and the captain which permitted the stout gentleman to read my special knowledge on Poe while they carried him safely from Sausalito to San Francisco.

By having a specialization we free others to pursue their own specialization and advance the rate of human progress, by reducing the amount of general knowledge each of us must acquire in order to succeed within our given niche. Now it’s important to define what is meant by general knowledge, it consists of both what is generally taught in school, such as history, as well as the knowledge we acquire outside of school through society and the media. Once we have attained this basis we tend to then focus solely upon digging further into our niche and stop, or at least greatly slow building of this general store of knowledge. Which reminded of a quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig regarding the problem that specialization poses, especially for one seeking to switch or explore other specializations.

It’s a problem of our time. The range of human knowledge today is so great that we’re all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely among them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him.

Once one has selected their specialization and built up a store of knowledge about it, it becomes quite difficult to change specializations without expending a great amount of effort to learn everything that is required to be considered a specialist within the new specialization. If choosing to make this type of change though, this is where a broad general base of knowledge shows its true value, providing a strong root from which to branch off into the new specialization, or just to start exploring another area of interest. I was also reminded of what Pirsig had to say on the reason for growing one’s root of knowledge.

I’ve heard it said that the only real learning results from hang-ups, where instead of expanding the branches of what you already know, you have to stop and drift laterally for a while until you come across something that allows you to expand the roots of what you already know.

Once you have attained enough knowledge to be considered a specialist there is relatively little left to learn within that particular branch. Once we know enough to be proficient at our particular task we tend to stop learning for the most part, as there is nothing left to need to know to perform the task sufficiently. Thus to truly learn something new, we must look outside the branch of our specialization. It is this study outside of our particular discipline that can have the most profound effects on our everyday existence, as we come across new ways of thinking about or doing something we thought we already knew.

One benefit of having a broad base of knowledge is that it allows us to more easily communicate with and relate to others, the more you know, the more you can draw upon to find common ground with someone else, especially when meeting new people.

In this age of smaller and smaller specializations it remains important to have a strong general base to draw upon. In school I was surprised when I was able to draw connections between something I’d learned previously in one subject and was now learning about in a different subject. Most subjects do not exist in isolation, so the more you know, the more you can see these connections. For example, if studying literature, or even just in general reading for pleasure, you’re likely to come across references to history, philosophy and classic works of literature and without a broad base of general knowledge it is likely that these references will be missed or not understood. The more you know, the easier it becomes to learn, as you don’t have to spend as much time looking up references or things you don’t understand.

While both society and an individual stand to gain from the pursuit of a specialization, society by having someone with a particular set of knowledge or skills to fill what might have otherwise been a void and the individual being able to earn a higher income or achieve a higher status through the use of their particular skill set; it is more so the individual that stands to gain by expanding their general knowledge, rather than society, as there will always be a surplus of people with a general skill set and a need for people with specialized skills.

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November 15, 2015 · 8:03 pm

News

For years I found myself gradually accumulating various websites that I would check daily to keep up with the “news” until I was spending hours a day reading. I eventually started to get tired of spending so much time on it, and trying to fit it in around all of the other stuff that I wanted to do as well. I’d finally managed to start narrowing down what I was reading, trying to only pick out things that looked important, but that didn’t really have as much of an effect as I’d hoped.

I read Eight Weeks to Optimum Health by Dr. Andrew Weil, during which it was recommended to try a news fast. At first the prospect of skipping the news for a day was worrisome, thinking about how much I would have to catch up on the next day. But as I started doing it each week, slowly increasing the number of days I “fasted” I began to look forward to the days when I didn’t read the news, as I could do other things I wanted to, without feeling like I was missing out on something, or being uninformed.

It was after weeks of news fasting that I finally started to gain control over my craving for news. As I’m looking at headlines now before I open something, I stop and ask myself if I really need or want to know anymore beyond what the headline already tells you, and most of the time, it turns out that it’s all I really need to know and I can move on.

I have also asked you to try a one-day news fast this week. I do not want you to become uninformed about the state of the world, but I note that paying attention to news commonly results in anxiety, rage, and other emotional states that probably impede the healing system. I have given you many suggestions about diet, about nourishing your body. I think it is useful to broaden our concept of nutrition to include what we put into our consciousness as well. Many people do not exercise much control over that and as a result take in a lot of mental junk food. My goal in asking you to practice news fasting throughout the Eight-Week Program is for you to discover that you have the power to decide how much of this material you want to let in. I have no objection to your turning on the news for information you really need; I worry about people who turn it on compulsively or unconsciously, who are addicted to the news and the emotional ups and downs it provides. Observe any difference you feel in your state of mind and body when you opt to ignore the news. Are you less anxious? Less stressed? Less angry? Less fearful? When you get to the end of the Eight-Week Program, I will ask you again, and at that time you can decide how much news you want to let back into your life.

After trying the fast I still wanted to allow some news into my life, but I found that by skipping the unimportant stuff, the filler stories and click-bait, I could still stay informed in much less time. More often than not, before, I’d click on a story because it sounded interesting and would have no actual affect on my life, I’d mostly forget what I’d even read about after a day or two, so why waste my time on it?

Ryan Holiday in his summary of what he learned over the course of another year had this to say about the news.

Stop following the news—or most of it. It doesn’t affect you that the CEO of Twitter stepped down or whatever is in the news right now. It’s so liberating to not have an opinion about these things. Or at least, to not be riled up about them.

The media has more time and space to fill than actual important, meaningful world events can possibly fill, so much of what gets passed off as news is of little actual value to anyone, beyond those reporting on it for the sake of having something to report. In Walden, Thoreau already recognized most news for what it really is, gossip, well before our 24 hour news networks and the Internet giving us constant access to the news.

And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter–we never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip.

We now have entire publications and television programs dedicated to nothing but gossip, mostly about celebrities and people who become famous for no other reason than that they’re famous.

I’ve now managed to get my news reading under control, by taking the time to consider the potential value I can get out of something before reading it, and completely eliminating some sources that rarely published anything of substantiative value. What this means for me is that I now have more time to read articles with real informative content and books. I also find myself getting dragged down much less often now that I’m no longer reading about the worst things happening in the world each day, although of course bad news is impossible to avoid.

Now none of this is to suggest anyone should stay uninformed about world events, obviously there are some news stories that can’t, and shouldn’t, be ignored, it’s a responsible citizen’s duty to stay generally informed about the latest events in their country, and the world. But being more selective about what we choose to spend our time reading each day can leave us more time to do something with real value instead.

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November 8, 2015 · 7:51 pm

Procrastination

Recently I have been re-reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which has gotten me thinking about quality, and how the unchecked pursuit of it can result inaction due to continuous procrastination, as the things we are working on never quite meet our standards. I’d first decided that I wanted to create a website years ago, I bought the domain, but months later, hadn’t done anything with it, as I hadn’t come up with just the right site. When I finally got around to doing something with the site, I spent weeks crafting it before I finally felt that it was good enough to publish. I intended to go back and add new pages later on, but never did. It just sat out there, stagnant, for years, until I finally resolved to start writing posts.

It was rather difficult publishing the first post, as I kept going over it, wondering if it was good enough. I finally decided that it was good enough, and if I did find something wrong with it, I could always go back and edit it, it didn’t have to be absolutely perfect the first time. The pursuit of perfection can be paralyzing, in the end, we just have to do the best we can and hope that it’s good enough.

The answer, of course, is no, you still haven’t got anything licked. You’ve got to live right too. It’s the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting of the fixing of a motorcycle isn’t separate from the rest of your existence. If you’re a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren’t working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together.
But if you’re a sloppy thinker six days a week and you really try to be sharp on the seventh, then maybe the next six days aren’t going to be quite as sloppy as the preceding six. What I’m trying to come up with on these gumption traps, I guess, is shortcuts to living right.
The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate thing. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.

Procrastination as the result of a concern that a work is not good enough or of a certain quality is really due to anxiety. Anxiety that we may have missed something and if we only go back over it one more time we’ll find something that we missed before and needs to be corrected. Eventually these corrections no longer add anything of value to the original work and become work for the sake of having something to do as an excuse to not complete what we originally set out to do.

After enough iterations through looking for things to change, when you can go through twice without finding anything to change, that’s probably when it’s time to say it’s good enough and it’s time to finish. Later, perhaps day, months or even years later going back over our work, we’ll likely find thing about it that we’d like to change, or wish we’d done differently, this is a good thing. It means we’ve either gotten better at our craft.

Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. You’re so sure you’ll do everything wrong you’re afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than “laziness,” is the real reason you find it hard to get started. This gumption trap of anxiety, which results from overmotivation, can lead to all kinds of errors of excessive fussiness. You fix things that don’t need fixing, and chase after imaginary ailments.

I recently came across a work by the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca, On the Shortness of Life, which serves as a wonderful reminder, that all we really have is time, and never know how much of it we actually have, so if we’re going to do something, we might as well start it now, because who knows if we’ll ever get the chance to finish it.

But putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.

You must set your hands to tasks which you can finish or at least hope to finish, and avoid those which get bigger as you proceed and do not cease where you had intended.

To help avoid procrastination, have a clear cut goal of what you must accomplish in order to consider a task to be done, before starting, then when you reach that goal, review your work and see if it meets your standards, is it good enough? The first time through, probably not, so go back over it, make changes, improve it and after a couple looks over, when you no longer see anything in need to improvement, consider it done.

The hardest part is really getting started, it’s best to start immediately, when an idea or inspiration hits you, to do something of value, before you let it sit and lose the initial motivation. Once the initial burst of inspiration dissipates, you’re much less likely to actually go back and complete the task you were inspired to do. Life’s too short to spend all of our time thinking about getting started on something and never getting around to actually doing it.

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November 1, 2015 · 7:10 pm

Fiction

Each year for the month of October I like to pick out a few horror, or in someway related to Halloween, books to read. This year one of the books I chose was, Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury, a novel about two teenage boys who visit a dark carnival that comes to their hometown a week before Halloween. I’d decided to read it just looking for a good Halloween story, which it was, but more than that it turns out. There were some standout passages in which one of the boy’s fathers philosophizes about life and being a good person.

Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin. There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light. The seal-barker, the laugh-shouter, half the time he’s covering up. He’s had his fun and he’s guilty. And men do love sin, Will, oh how they love it, never doubt, in all shapes, sizes, colors, and smells. Times come when troughs, not tables, suit our appetites. Hear a man too loudly praising others, and look to wonder if he didn’t just get up from the sty. On the other hand, that unhappy, pale, put-upon man walking by, who looks all guilt and sin, why, often that’s your good man with a capital G, Will. For being good is a fearful occupation; men strain at it and sometimes break in two. I’ve known a few. You work twice as hard to be a farmer as to be his hog. I suppose it’s thinking about trying to be good makes the crack run up the wall one night. A man with high standards, too, the least hair falls on him sometimes wilts his spine. He can’t let himself alone, won’t lift himself off the hook if he falls just a breath from grace.

Have I said anything I started out to say about being good? God, I don’t know. A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know, is bad, or amoral, at least. You can’t act if you don’t know. Acting without knowing take you right off the cliff.

Another book I read throughout October was The Stand, by Stephen King, about a super flu accidentally released which kills 99% of the population and an ensuing struggle to decide who will control and rebuild society. In addition to lessons about being a better person, there some interesting commentary on society as the characters were figuring out how to rebuild civilization and society after much of what we take for granted was damaged or destroyed.

Men who find themselves late are never sure. They are all the things the civics books tell us the good citizens should be: partisans but never zealots, respecters of the facts which attend each situation but never benders of those facts, uncomfortable in positions of leadership but rarely able to turn down a responsibility once it has been offered … or thrust upon them. They make the best leaders in a democracy because they are unlikely to fall in love with power. Quite the opposite.

Show me a man or a woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call ‘society’. Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare.

Many people read non-fiction because they want to read things that are true, but sometimes fiction can say true things much shorter and simpler than non-fiction. When reading fiction as you’re following along with the characters and sharing their experiences you can absorb ideas and feelings that may not necessarily being explicitly expressed in the words of the story, but are still conveyed through the character’s experiences and their reactions to them. While thinking about this I was reminded of a quote from V for Vendetta:

Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.

In addition to telling truths that may not otherwise be expressible, fiction can have it’s own lasting effects, just like non-fiction. Reading non-fiction can build up your knowledge and store of facts, reading fiction can build up your empathy, helping you relate to others better and easier as found in a study of the effects of reading various types of books. By spending time reading fiction and experiencing life through someone else’s perspective, we are better able to understand the perspectives of those around us in real life. Thereby hopefully causing us to treat others better or perhaps take a step back when someone doesn’t treat us so well and trying to see things from their perspective, hopefully seeing why they may have done what they did.

To maximize the benefits of reading it’s therefore important to read a variety of genres and include both fiction and non-fiction in your reading. If you only read fiction, try to find a non-fiction book about a topic you are interested in, perhaps something you’ve always wanted to know more about, a historical event, or even a person. If you only read non-fiction, try to mix in a fiction book every once in a while, see things from someone else’s perspective, and hopefully get lost in a good story. If you don’t read a all, start small, maybe a book a month, alternating fiction and non-fiction. And if you already read a variety of books, keep doing what you’re doing.

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