"The Only Fact We Have"

I routinely return to my commonplace book to review what I've read. It's a rewarding exercise that often reveals new thoughts and connections.

This past year, I read James Baldwin's immensely powerful The Fire Next Time. Reviewing my notes for the book, I was struck (again) by this passage in particular:

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.

Beyond its poetry, Baldwin's words offer a timeless perspective. The roots of tribalism likely stems from our fear of death. However, we can choose to respond with courage by "confronting with passion the conundrum of life." I'm enamored with the idea of turning death on its head, transforming it from a cause of division to a motivating reality. It's essential that we halt the tide of fear by remembering Baldwin's reminder that we be "responsible to life," a notion that calls to mind another idea that I've committed to: carrying the fire.

Carrying the Fire

Growing up in a small town with a rich history, I dreamed of being a historian and pursued the stories of the past indiscriminately. The more I learned about the patterns of history, the more the current problems of the present made sense. My earliest conception of politics was informed by this childhood obsession: I saw politics as a battleground to determine not only a clear view of what had happened but for how we should chart our way into the future.

Over a stretch of years, my interest in the possibility of politics intensified. In the summer of 2004, I vaguely recall tuning into the Democratic National Convention. In accordance with that year’s nominee, the convention was nothing special. The keynote speaker, however, caught my attention. Those watching that speech saw a star being born in the nebula of a politics of hope. Later that year, I saw the news covering that same keynote speaker swearing into the Senate. Reabsorbing his funky full name in the post-9-11 world, I silently wished him good fortune.

A year later, I stood on the left side of my 8th grade English class arguing against the Iraq War. Our class had selected the topic for a debate. I don’t remember how I arrived at that position; if I had to guess, it had to do with some combination of my limited study of world history and the initial growth spurt of my skepticism towards authority.

My 8th grade English teacher was “refereeing” the debate. From the corner of the room, with its George W. Bush 3/4 life-size cardboard cut-out, my teacher placed his thumbs on the scale of the debate by feeding the twenty students in favor of the war information from his computer desktop. I labored against the war alone on the other side, save the class contrarian who occasionally chimed in. Predictably, he did more damage than good.

To my surprise, towards the end of the class period, one of my classmates walked from the cluster of desks on the right side of the classroom to the cluster of desks on the left side. I had, miraculously, changed her mind. Perhaps more likely, she was no longer convinced by her own camp’s position. Seeing someone cross that twenty feet of distance — what may as well have been a Grand Canyon of the mind — was electrifying. In that moment, I caught the bug of politics.

A few years later, that keynote speaker ran for president. At 16 during the Democratic primaries and 17 during the general election, I couldn’t vote yet. But I could volunteer. So, I found myself canvasing for someone who I thought offered something valuable to the Herculean task of politics. I was there at Barack Obama’s final campaign rally in Virginia; a sense of possibility warmed the cold Manassas air and I absorbed every bit of it that I could. Obama took my county, my state, and my country in a historic victory. Anything and everything felt possible.

Four years later, I organized in Pittsburgh for his reelection amidst a busy year in college. The hopes that many projected onto Obama had lost their shine. Still, I saw in him a dogged, pragmatic idealism that mirrored something inside me. In defense of that pragmatic idealism, I organized other volunteers and took to the diverse streets of the city, making the case one person at a time. Obama’s coalition held against a growing discontent. His reelection affirmed my belief that a politics of hope was not only possible but strategic and strong.

Donald Trump’s election strikes directly at the foundations of this belief. However, my commitment to a politics of hope isn’t shaken. To our country’s detriment, I did not see a robust advocacy for and defense of a politics of hope in 2016. Even as we enter the Age of Trump, my gratitude for growing up in the Age of Obama has only deepened. Eight years of a president who held a difficult office with grace, intelligence, and resolve was a tremendous gift to my budding mind.

That’s not to say that there haven’t been moments where Obama strayed from his own promise. Like any individual with such an outsized public influence, Obama is larger than life. His myth is often disconnected from his reality. Still, in that collective myth lies an instructive ideal.

I recently read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road cover to cover during a long day of travel. Set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, the story is a brutal journey to the depths of despair. Despite its gloomy arc, I found that The Road offered a grand stage for the light of hope. In an essential exchange, the father and son illuminate the vast beacons of hope:

We’re going to be okay, arent we Papa?

Yes. We are.

And nothing bad is going to happen to us.

That’s right. Because we’re carrying the fire.

Yes. Because we’re carrying the fire.

This idea of carrying the fire through — and out of — the darkness is a powerful image that will stick with me. The other key element of The Road that left an imprint was its demonstration of the gentle strength of kindness. The wasteland is harsh and unforgiving. Even the smallest moments of kindness — between the father and son or, in broader sense, the rare respite of grace the two encountered — were like shooting stars: a sight to behold and savor.

Shortly after reading The Road, I received an email from two of my mentors — a dynamic husband and wife duo at Carnegie Mellon — sharing Naomi Shihab Nye’s enriching poem, Kindness:

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

This poem and The Road are oases in trying times. I plan to route the journey ahead to include retreats to their — and other sanctuaries’s — wisdom. It is one way of many to renew again the fire that we must all carry.

In a beautiful and reflective essay for the Atlantic titled “My President Was Black”, Ta-Nehesi Coates’s critical voice provides some insight for that difficult project. Though Coates colors the essay with an informed pessimism, his study of Obama is helpful. Towards the beginning, Coates begins to excavate Obama’s internal compass of hope:

This assessment [that Trump couldn’t win] was born out of the president’s innate optimism and unwavering faith in the ultimate wisdom of the American people—the same traits that had propelled his unlikely five-year ascent from Illinois state senator to U.S. senator to leader of the free world. The speech that launched his rise, the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, emerged right from this logic. He addressed himself to his “fellow Americans, Democrats, Republicans, independents,” all of whom, he insisted, were more united than they had been led to believe.

Coates finds that Obama’s optimism had consequences for his prowess as a leader:

Over the next 12 years, I came to regard Obama as a skilled politician, a deeply moral human being, and one of the greatest presidents in American history. He was phenomenal—the most agile interpreter and navigator of the color line I had ever seen. He had an ability to emote a deep and sincere connection to the hearts of black people, while never doubting the hearts of white people. This was the core of his 2004 keynote, and it marked his historic race speech during the 2008 campaign at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center—and blinded him to the appeal of Trump. (“As a general proposition, it’s hard to run for president by telling people how terrible things are,” Obama once said to me.)

Because of that skill, Coates poetically notes that “[f]or eight years Barack Obama walked on ice and never fell.”

Coates deftly explores the paradox of hope that Obama had to embrace to be a black president in a deeply unjust country — and how his upbringing uniquely prepared him for the task of “stand[ing] firm in his own cultural traditions and say[ing] to the country something virtually no black person can, but every president must: ‘I believe you.’”

Coates states bluntly where the current state of affairs has left him:

I still want Obama to be right. I still would like to fold myself into the dream. This will not be possible.

Confronted by Trump’s victory, the president, however, held firm:

[H]e said that his general optimism about the shape of American history remained unchanged. “To be optimistic about the long-term trends of the United States doesn’t mean that everything is going to go in a smooth, direct, straight line,” he said. “It goes forward sometimes, sometimes it goes back, sometimes it goes sideways, sometimes it zigs and zags.”

Despite his pessimism, Coates leaves us a triumphant image:

And I also knew that the man who could not countenance [more tragedy and fear] in his America had been responsible for the only time in my life when I felt, as the first lady had once said, proud of my country, and I knew that it was his very lack of countenance, his incredible faith, his improbable trust in his countrymen, that had made that feeling possible. The feeling was that little black boy touching the president’s hair. It was watching Obama on the campaign trail, always expecting the worst and amazed that the worst never happened. It was how I’d felt seeing Barack and Michelle during the inauguration, the car slow-dragging down Pennsylvania Avenue, the crowd cheering, and then the two of them rising up out of the limo, rising up from fear, smiling, waving, defying despair, defying history, defying gravity.

As we transition to the next chapter, we must all take note of Obama’s resilience during his eight years in the White House. Perhaps naively, I still believe in a politics of hope.

Hope is an orientation. Hope is carrying the fire. In the deepest sense, I’m fired up and ready go. The work doesn’t begin now, it has always been before us. An unbroken chain of individuals and communities have carried the fire to this point. We’ll be okay as long as we continue to carry it.

My Favorite Posts from 2016

This year, I published 39 posts on this site. Here are a few of my favorites:

1. The Dark Side of Mindfulness
2. Identity
3. Trees Sitting Zazen
4. Always We Begin Again
5. Questions
6. Swimming Back To Reason
7. Quiet
8. Our Penny Universities

See the archive for more. What was your favorite? I'd love to hear from you. Thanks for reading!

Seeing What Could Be

There's a great scene in the movie Begin Again where Dan (Mark Ruffalo) hears Gretta (Kiera Knightley) singing solo with just a guitar at a bar. As the song progresses, Dan slowly sees the other instruments on the stage come alive and transform Gretta's song into something special. The rest of the bar pays little attention to the performance and the end of the song is met with a smattering of applause. Dan, however, is enthralled and immediately offers to produce her.

I really enjoyed the whole movie, though I resonated with this scene in particular. Dan doesn't just see what's there — he sees what could be. He's what Frederick Douglass calls a "picture-maker":

Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers, and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.

The rest of the movie involves Dan and Gretta working together in order to unlock Gretta's full potential as an artist. Where others only heard background noise, Dan heard something more — and he was right.

I wonder if we can't switch ourselves to "picture-making" mode more often. We would build up instead of tear down. We would embody charity in interpretation of another's actions instead of judgement. We would make the world a better place by closing the gap between what is and what ought to be whenever the opportunity presents itself. I can see this world in my head. Can you?

Praising Praise Music

On Sunday mornings, you'll likely find me en route to Devil's Teeth Baking Company to grab some breakfast sandwiches and beignets with Asha. There's a good chance that in the car ride over we will be getting our weekly sermon from Chance the Rapper's beautiful song "Blessings." The hook unapologetically resounds:

When the praises go up
The blessings come down

You'll find me — the self-proclaimed atheist — unironically singing along for the entirety of the song, one of many gospel-infused tracks on Chance the Rapper's excellent album, Coloring Book. In a later track, "Blessings (Reprise)," Chance proclaims "I speak to God in public." In a stirring musical tribute to Muhammad Ali, he makes it clear that he wants to wear his faith on his sleeves. I love Chance's genuine gospel music.

Does this present a contradiction? Alain de Botton's intriguing book Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion says no. He begins with a controversial statement: "The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.” I have some qualms with that, though I resonated with de Botton's overarching message. He writes:

I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths.

In short, my aversion to the supernatural shouldn't prevent me from engaging with the good stuff. So, I'll praise praise music if it resonates with my soul. I'll enter churches and reflect deeply on the nature of our existence. I'll walk the pilgrim's path in the mountains.

The religious might object to my secular participation in what they find sacred. That's okay — I'd understand. I'll take my chances at offense if it means that I feed my own becoming.

Quiet

On retreat at a meditation center, I inadvertently broke my silence on the last of five days of quiet. I hadn't faced much difficulty with staying silent on the retreat. There were, of course, moments where automatic reflexes kicked in and I felt an urge to utter an apology when bumping into someone. However, I quickly found myself dropping further and further into the Noble Silence.

Part of what made it easy to settle in had to do with the sense of temporary community at the center. Everyone arrived ready to respect the quiet. We took seriously our responsibility to collectively nurture the silence. Quiet is a public good mauled by the tragedy of the commons. To enter a community of intentional silence was a breath of fresh air. Or, rather, it was an earful of fresh silence.

The ease of settling in made my inadvertent breaking of the silence all the more memorable. During the retreat, I quickly adopted a routine of getting up early and making a cup of coffee before our morning sit. I found that the ritual not only comforted me in a unique way — the solitude of the dining hall was an even deeper kind of quiet found only at the bookends of the day — but also the energizing caffeine banished the haziness that too often can visit during morning practice.

Before dawn on that last day, I began walking down the path to the kitchen to brew a cup when the immensity of the night sky halted me in my tracks. Piercing, radiating starlight punctured my chest, swelled, and then I gently breathed, "Wow."

I've experienced wonder and awe many times in my life. The moments of rapture come in many beautiful shapes and sizes. The release of "Wow" in the starlight may have been the most pure expression of awe in my life as yet because of the quiet that preceded it.

Silence, solitude, quiet, sanctuary — whatever you call it — offers fertile ground. So much grows there: reflection, transformation, healing, tranquility. So much can flow from a rest in that space, too. As we move on from a moment of quiet, we carry with us the fruits of its fertile ground. Often, we don't even know that we still carry them. Resting in the quiet, we tip silent dominoes that fall for many moments in the future.

Where is your quiet? What grows there? How can you come again to that space as to nurture you for the road ahead?

Off to find mine.

Forward, Forward, Forward

I'm still in a daze after our country elected Donald Trump. I've been searching for something to hang my hat on. Eventually, I remembered an old ad from Barack Obama's 2008 campaign. The ad's source material comes from a stump speech that Obama gave in Fredericksburg, Virginia in the pouring rain. It's vintage Obama on full display: enthusiastic and full of promise. So much has happened since we first elected Obama, but I still find the ad a salve in these complicated times. It's sappy, I know. But I think the words are instructive.

Throughout his speech, Obama plays with literal and metaphorical references to the storm they are in:

I understand times are hard. This won't be easy. The storm hasn't quite passed yet. Sometimes the skies look cloudy. And it's dark. And you think, "The rains will never pass."

I definitely feel a fear for the future. So much feels unknown and what feels known already scares me.

But Obama doesn't stay in this despair for too long. Only as he can do, Obama pivots to the audacity of hope:

But here's what I understand: that as long as all of us are together, as long as we are all committed, then there's nothing we can't do. That's why we started off this campaign saying, "Yes we can."

Then, he brings us all into a community of hope:

That's why we understood that black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native-American, young, old, rich, poor — it doesn't matter, we're all Americans. And our destiny will be shaped by us.

I think the inclusivity of hope is so important and an antidote to the vitriol of the 2016 campaign.

He then turns to the young generation so crucial to his organizing and election:

And this young generation that's out here... The young people of America understand that the clouds, these too, will pass. That a brighter day will come.

I like to think that Obama is referencing one of my favorite adages: "This too shall pass." I'm sure folks have seen the map of how young people voted in 2016, showing that politics might look different in the future.

Crucially, hope is an active thing. Obama closes with his call to action:

That you if you are willing work for it. If you are willing to roll up your sleeves. If you are willing to lock arms and march and talk to your friends, talk to your neighbors, make a phone call, do some organizing, yes do some community organizing. Then I promise you, Fredericksburg, we will win Virginia. We will win this general election. And you and I together, we will change the country and change the world.

The only way out is through. Know hope and move forward, forward, forward.

Trump’s Anger and Clinton’s Mandela Moment

Martha Nussbaum opens her essay Beyond Anger with this claim: “There’s no emotion we ought to think harder and more clearly about than anger.”

This year's election vindicates Nussbuam. The campaign has shown the power of anger. As a candidate, Donald Trump effectively harnessed this dangerous emotion. It's a strategy that speaks to the devils in all of us with the potential for short-term success and a guarantee of long-term degradation. Clinton has an opportunity to lead with a response to anger that is more courageous, a response that is representative of who we are — and who we can be.

Three Ways We Can Respond to Anger
At the beginning of her essay, Nussbaum digs deep into philosophy’s past for a definition of anger:

Aristotle says that anger is a response to a significant damage to something or someone one cares about, and a damage that the angry person believes to have been wrongfully inflicted. He adds that although anger is painful, it also contains within itself a hope for payback.

Agreeing with Aristotle, Nussbuam notes:

[A]nger does contain a sort of strike-back tendency. Contemporary psychologists who study anger empirically agree with Aristotle in seeing this double movement in it, from pain to hope.

But this tendency — this hope for payback — doesn’t make sense, Nussbuam urges. In arguing her case, she imagines a scenario in which her friend has been raped:

I urgently want the offender to be arrested, convicted, and punished. But really, what good will that do? Looking to the future, I might want many things: to restore my friend’s life, to prevent and deter future rapes. But harsh treatment of this particular wrongdoer might or might not achieve the latter goal. It’s an empirical matter. And usually people do not treat it as an empirical matter: they are in the grip of an idea of cosmic fitness that makes them think that blood for blood, pain for pain is the right way to go. The payback idea is deeply human, but fatally flawed as a way of making sense of the world.

However, Nussbuam argues that the idea of payback can make sense in a limited situation:

There is one, and I think only one, situation in which the payback idea does make sense. That is when I see the wrong as entirely and only what Aristotle calls a ‘down-ranking’: a personal humiliation, seen as entirely about relative status. If the problem is not the injustice itself, but the way it has affected my ranking in the social hierarchy, then I really can achieve something by humiliating the wrongdoer: by putting him relatively lower, I put myself relatively higher, and if status is all I care about, I don’t need to worry that the real wellbeing problems created by the wrongful act have not been solved.

These two responses — the hope for payback and the pursuit of ‘down-ranking’ — aren’t all that’s available. Payback and down-ranking are only two of three paths:

A wronged person who is really angry, seeking to strike back, soon arrives, I claim, at a fork in the road. Three paths lie before her. Path one: she goes down the path of status-focus, seeing the event as all about her and her rank. In this case her payback project makes sense, but her normative focus is self-centred and objectionably narrow. Path two: she focuses on the original offence (rape, murder, etc), and seeks payback, imagining that the offender’s suffering would actually make things better. In this case, her normative focus is on the right things, but her thinking doesn’t make sense. Path three: if she is rational, after exploring and rejecting these two roads, she will notice that a third path is open to her, which is the best of all: she can turn to the future and focus on doing whatever would make sense, in the situation, and be really helpful. This may well include the punishment of the wrongdoer, but in a spirit that is deterrent rather than retaliatory.

So, to put my radical claim succinctly: when anger makes sense (because focused on status), its retaliatory tendency is normatively problematic, because a single-minded focus on status impedes the pursuit of intrinsic goods. When it is normatively reasonable (because focused on the important human goods that have been damaged), its retaliatory tendency doesn’t make sense, and it is problematic for that reason. Let’s call this change of focus the Transition. We need the Transition badly in our personal and our political lives, dominated as they all too frequently are by payback and status-focus.

Trump's Angry Route to the White House
It's tough to read Nussbuam’s essay and not think of Donald Trump’s campaign for president. As an individual, Trump is angry. The GOP establishment, the media, and opponents did not take his candidacy seriously. Trump's obviously fragile ego can't handle these slights and as a result, a deep anger boiled to the surface. He shamefully and painfully sought to delegitimatize a fundamentally decent president with the disgusting birther lie. Far from uniting his party, Trump sowed disastrous discord in the GOP, constantly seeking to humiliate — and thus down-rank — those who dare challenge him. Outlets that don't give him friendly coverage get banned and he shows wanton disrespect for the freedom of the press.

His campaign is also a reaction to an angry America. Some of this anger is understandable. When folks are left out of the political process, they gravitate towards someone who they feel can listen to them. Other anger is less sympathetic. As our country pushes for greater racial and gender equality, the status of the white male is threatened.

Trump's shameful denigration of the "other" is an obvious expression of down-ranking, appeasing those who feel their place in America is becoming more complicated and less privileged. Trump has insulted Mexican-Americans, Muslim-Americans, African-Americans, women, and people with disabilities. In response to Clinton's use of a private email server and a brazen example of payback, Trump has stoked the fire of anger by wildly threatening to jail his political opponent if he were to win the election.

In short, Trump's campaign is rotten to the core with anger.

Clinton’s Mandela Moment
In her essay, Nussbuam talks about how Nelson Mandela struggled against anger in South Africa:

[Mandela] often said that he knew anger well, and that he had to struggle against the demand for payback in his own personality. He reported that during his 27 years of imprisonment he had to practise a disciplined type of meditation to keep his personality moving forward and avoiding the anger trap. It now seems clear that the prisoners on Robben Island had smuggled in a copy of Meditations by the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, to give them a model of patient effort against the corrosions of anger.

Nussbaum relays a parable that Mandela used to tell people:

Imagine that the sun and the wind are contending to see who can get a traveller to take off his blanket. The wind blows hard, aggressively. But the traveller only pulls the blanket tighter around him. Then the sun starts to shine, first gently, and then more intensely. The traveller relaxes his blanket, and eventually he takes it off. So that, he said, is how a leader has to operate: forget about the strike-back mentality, and forge a future of warmth and partnership.

Mandela truly embodied this "patient effort against the corrosions of anger." Nussbuam details some of his acts of leadership: learning the language of his oppressors (Afrikaans), pushing the adoption of an inclusive national anthem, and rejecting opportunities to humiliate others.

Obviously, the context in this election is different from Mandela's story. However, Mandela demonstrated the courage one can have in leading with warmth when anger is understandable and the prospect of payback and humiliation is tempting. He chose a path in response to anger that was noble and pushed his country forward.

If elected, Clinton will have a similar opportunity. As president, she can respond to the anger of this campaign with divisiveness and further widen the chasm between fellow Americans. Or, she could chart a new path. I don't know if Clinton has the capacity to do so. However, I know that our country sorely needs a leader who can bring about reconciliation and cooperation.

Our Response
At the close of her essay, Nussbuam issues a clarion call:

Whenever we are faced with pressing moral or political decisions, we should clear our heads, and spend some time conducting what Mandela (citing Marcus Aurelius) referred to as ‘Conversations with Myself’. When we do, I predict, the arguments proposed by anger will be clearly seen to be pathetic and weak, while the voice of generosity and forward-looking reason will be strong as well as beautiful.

This election has been too much about anger. On November 8th, we are faced with a pressing moral and political decision in who we elect as President of the United States. We should, as Nussbaum suggests, clear our heads. I can only hope that the results on Election Day validate her idea that arguments made in anger are pathetic and weak and that the counterpoint will prevail.

We must choose that which is strong and beautiful, even if the vehicle for our becoming is flawed, broken, and frustrating. There will always be anger in society. It is up to us to decide how to respond to it.

Swimming Back to Reason

Recently, I had two challenges. Professionally, I didn't get a job that I wanted. Personally, I found myself in an Kobayashi Maru scenario. Both wounded me internally. In these two challenges’ wake, I’ve found myself catching up to reason, grasping at its salve.

In particular, the salve I seek lies in this essential and timeless guidance from the Stoic philosopher Epictetus in his Discourses:

The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals and not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control.

I take this sorting between what's within my control and what is not seriously. It's a mental model that I return to often and a wellspring for tranquility.

Unsurprisingly, I find myself drifting from this helpful perspective more often than not. Recent events are a good example.

With the professional set-back, I incorrectly labeled it as a failure. Stepping back, I was proud of my approach to pursuing the job. My application was crisp, powerful, and representative of my intentions to fiercely engage with the world. Still, even though the results of the process moved out of my hands the moment I submitted, the rejection stung.

With the personal situation, I unwisely extended my well-being to externals. How others perceived me. How others would act. Rather than keeping the locus of control firmly internal and focusing only on how I conduct myself, I tied my tranquility to variables out of my control.

The scariest part about the drifting away from Epictetus’s framework is that you don’t even realize it’s happening. Ego subtly pushes you away from safety and then, all of a sudden, you find yourself adrift in a stormy sea. Angry. Resentful. Injured.

As a result, I’m working to reassert reason and reestablish an internal locus of control. It feels as if I'm swimming to an island that I can see far off in the distance. The waves are against me. But I've made this swim before. Many times, in fact. Because of this, I know the safety that awaits me there. I know the promise of relief as I reach the beach, collapse, and recover.

Swimming back to reason is hard. But knowing that I’m swimming in the first place is probably more than half the battle. And the more times I swim back, the less likely I will drift in the future. All I can control is that I promise myself to just keep swimming.

The Art of Acknowledgement

As I discovered during my stay at a zen center, bowing is commonplace. You bow as you enter the dojo. You bow twice as you settle into your cushion. You bow when someone close to you sits down. You bow many times during the service after the sitting. You bow to the person across from you as you exit. You bow at the closing of a work session. You bow.

Some of the bowing I struggled against. I didn't love bowing to a statue of the Buddha. When I expressed my discomfort, one person framed bowing not to an external Buddha but the Buddha within. I found that helpful, though it didn't completely dispel my reservations.

In a larger sense, all the bowing is about acknowledgement. The bows at various points moving through the dojo were ways of creating increasingly sacred thresholds, both spiritual and physical. The bows to others are also acknowledgements: recognition of the spiritual work in process or the physical contribution.

I love how bowing in this way is an embodied way of acknowledging others. It reminds me of the Indian head-wiggle. This passage from Gregory David Roberts's Shantaram captures some of its depth:

No discovery pleased me more, on that first excursion from the city, than the full translation of the famous Indian head-wiggle. The weeks I’d spent in Bombay with Prabaker had taught me that the shaking or wiggling of the head from side to side – that most characteristic of Indian expressive gestures – was the equivalent of a forward nod of the head, meaning Yes. I’d also discerned the subtler senses of I agree with you, and Yes, I would like that. What I learned, on the train, was that a universal message attached to the gesture, when it was a used as a greeting, which made it uniquely useful.

Most of those who entered the open carriage greeted the other seated or standing men with a little wiggle of the head. The gesture always drew a reciprocal wag of the head from at least one, and sometimes several of the passengers. I watched it happen at station after station, knowing that the newcomers couldn’t be indicating Yes, or I agree with you with the head-wiggle because nothing had been said, and there was no exchange other than the gesture itself. Gradually, I realised that the wiggle of the head was a signal to others that carried an amiable and disarming message: I’m a peaceful man, I don’t mean any harm.

Moved by admiration and no small envy for the marvellous gesture, I resolved to try it myself. The train stopped at a small rural station. A stranger joined our group in the carriage. When our eyes met for the first time, I gave the little wiggle of my head, and a smile. The result was astounding. The man beamed a smile at me so huge that it was half the brilliance of Prabaker’s own, and set to such energetic head waggling in return that I was, at first, a little alarmed. By journey’s end, however, I’d had enough practice to perform the movement as casually as others in the carriage did, and to convey the gentle message of the gesture. It was the first truly Indian expression my body learned, and it was the beginning of a transformation that has ruled my life, in all the long years since that journey of crowded hearts.

Bows and head-wiggles have a simple, transformative power: they connect one person to the other through a physical gesture. They are the strokes of the brush in the art of acknowledgement.

I'd like to be a bolder artist and acknowledge others more. We are so quick to criticize. Our mental machinery runs so fast that we are already thinking of a response before someone finishes speaking. If I focus more on acknowledgement, maybe I can slow down my own internal race to engage, and welcome in greater patience and kindness.

That doesn't necessarily mean that you'll see me bowing and head-wiggling any time soon. Every culture has its own avenues for expressing the art of acknowledgement, which is at its deepest level a practice of the heart and mind. So, inside, I am bowing and head-wiggling. And from this space of acknowledgement, I see you.