Being a reader in the modern age can often feel like grasping at vanishing bits of information. I want to make sense of it all with a new project: a commonplace book.
Read moreTurning Inwards
I recently finished my first year of law school. As that recognition sank in, I came across feelings that were nowhere to be found when I finished my freshman year at college. I felt pangs of nostalgia for the rapid learning process of the first year and its many formative moments. I swam in a pool of regret, interrogating myself to see if I had worked hard enough to squeeze ever ounce of worth out of the year.
Those who are close to me know that I am not one interested in getting stuck in the past. I’m a dogged adventurer in search of the elusive present and I view nostalgia and regret with suspicion. From my view, they are the poison-tipped weapons of time past. Wary of their toxins, I’ve spent a lot of time since the year ended trying to sort out the feelings of nostalgia and regret.
To make sense of those feelings, I decided to get extremely close with them. From my own experience, you cannot truly understand what’s going on in your mind unless you are willing to sit with it all for a while, even when it gets uncomfortable. If you can weather the storm, you might just make it to its eye and see things a little more clearly.
With fits and starts, I got close – and found that the feelings dissipated. Regret and nostalgia were simply veneers; something different sat beneath the surface.
It was not the feeling of regret for what was left undone in the past that was pulling at me; it was a fierce commitment to learning and growing in this moment and the next. I was not regretting my navigation of the first year of law school, I was trying to gather the lessons about focus, balance, and care in order to bring them to bear on today. It was a reaffirmation of the virtuous hustle for worthy ends. I wasn’t lost in the past, I was only finding my bearings and making sure I was still moving in the right direction.
It was not the emotion of nostalgia that I was feeling; it was the pressure of a bursting soul. The year’s end finally offered a moment to turn inwards, unencumbered by the distractions of the day-to-day, and, in a flash, I witnessed all the energy I had taken in during months past and subsequently made my own. While I’ve felt a lot of confusion and doubt this past year, plagued by questions of whether law school was even right for me or what should come next, I’ve also slowly built a process of becoming, the sort that Kurt Vonnegut pushed us to chase after. I mistook the opening in the present for the growth of the last year to show itself for a longing for the process of growth itself.
Stripped of these veneers, I had a clearer sense of what was swirling in my head. With that clarity in tow, I re-read both a journal entry from the midst of my first quarter and an essay on capital-H Hope I wrote in the wake of the death’s of Michael Brown and Eric Garner – all the more relevant after the tragedy of Charleston – and noticed that in both cases I was mulling over the same wonderful language from Victoria Safford’s “The Small Work in the Great Work”:
“You know I cannot save them. I am not here to save anybody or to save the world. All I can do — what I am called to do — is to plant myself at the gates of Hope. Sometimes they come in; sometimes they walk by. But I stand there every day and I call out till my lungs are sore with calling, and beckon and urge them in toward beautiful life and love…
There’s something for all of us there, I think. Whatever our vocation, we stand, beckoning and calling, singing and shouting, planted at the gates of Hope. This world and our people are beautiful and broken, and we are called to raise that up — to bear witness to the possibility of living with the dignity, bravery, and gladness that befits a human being. That may be what it is to “live our mission.”
I am wondering and wandering into a sense of how I might stand at a gates of Hope. I feel in myself an intensity that I have touched before but am only now systematically feeding. Where that intensity takes me, I still do not know. As I wrote in that journal entry, I’m not due some clarifying realization. To be honest, anyone who tells you that they do know is fooling themselves. I revisit Paulo Friere’s words often – “We make the road by walking.” – because they hold so much truth.
Far from regret and nostalgia grabbing at me from the past, the feelings brought on by the close of the year were instead rooted in the present: a commitment to the hustle today and tomorrow and a thankful witnessing of my growing soul. As the next moments tumble into one another and the steady beat of my footsteps slowly carve out the road ahead, I would do well for myself to regularly pause, turn inwards, and not lose sight of the true feelings underneath it all.
A Poverty of Listening
I am energized by good conversation. It is often how I make sense of the world. Solvitur sermondo: It is solved by talking. (A dismal adaptation of Solvitur ambulando: It is solved by walking. I apologize in advance to anyone who actually knows Latin.) I have good intentions when I speak my mind. I am curious and interested in different perspectives. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that I contribute to a poverty of listening.
One lesson from my time studying in India has stuck with me: listening well can require more energy than speaking. My group was working with a local non-profit that worked on rural development projects in agriculture, environmental sustainability, finance, and gender equality. A few weeks into our collaboration with them, they initiated outreach with another village in the area to explore the potential of a new partnership. The foundation invited us to take part in an exercise called a Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA).
A PRA is a tool rooted in a fresh-take on developmental philosophy: an organization brings together a representative sample of a community in order to get a sense of the community’s conception of its own needs. For the PRA I attended, women, men, children, farmers, businesspeople, students, and elders all gathered to share how they perceive their own space. Farmers explored the village’s history of crops; women described their average day of work; a hodgepodge of community members drew a map of their resources and problems. It’s a way of figuring out what the community truly needs and wants by flipping the script: they are the experts on what work should be done, not the people coming into the community. It is tough to embrace that role reversal and many times during the PRA I struggled with the format. The more we go to school and the more “educated” we become, the more we assume that it is us that knows everything. Granting that there are cases where substantive expertise is essential to good outcomes, one doesn’t have to look far to see the failures of supposed “experts”.
What’s the converse of this hubris? To listen, really listen. To give our attention to the act of listening is to unlock immense potential. Sincere listening encourages the essentials of good decision-making and growth: collaboration, innovation, and flexibility. It makes us better coequal partners in the greatest project of all, humanity. Through the act of listening, we are chiseled by others’ voices and made into better human beings. I witnessed the simple power of committed listening during the PRA as the community began to tell their own story: where they’d been, where they were, and where they wanted to go. Afterwards, I was given the best compliment I have ever received: one of the leaders of the exercise told the gathered community members that when we had broken into small groups for discussion, he didn’t need to translate as much for me because we had “listened with our hearts”.
What would happen if we were rich in listening with our hearts?
How would our interactions with the Social Web change if instead of seeing blog posts, Facebook updates, and tweets as objects of consumption we saw them as opportunities to connect, learn, and listen?
What would our relationships with our friends, family, and partners look like if we were to give all of our attention to the lost art of listening instead of constantly formulating our next comment or response?
In my future career in law, what would it look like if lawyers, necessary for translating the complexities of the legal system, were to commit to listening to their clients and community’s needs?
What would our politics look like if, instead of getting on the hamster wheel of cheap points and news cycles, our elected officials were willing to listen to their constituents and their opponents?
If we had really listened to the stories from people of color indicting our society with systemic racism, would these damning statistics continue to be true?
I have a hunch that, just as addressing economic poverty unlocks a number of problems, the world would be radically different if we were to take seriously the poverty of listening. How can we all take part in its alleviation? Let’s work towards a world rich in this forgotten skill.
What do you think? I’m listening.
How We Spend Our Days
I recently perused Daily Rituals, a compendium of the daily habits of creatives. I am fascinated by rituals and routines: they provide anchor points for our days. Naturally, I loved exploring how people went about the work of their lives. Over the course of reading the book, I took some time to think about all the things that I want in my routine.
At first, I thought about a regimented plan of attack: wake at this time, complete this and then that and so on. I had constructed my routine like a factory manager might construct an assembly line: in goes the serialized events to be executed and out goes the ideal day.
As I tried to maintain this factory, I quickly recognized its shortcoming: when one thinks about the day as a series of appointments, the joy of living fades. Life is not a series of calendar events, but a confusing and flowing river of experiences. Planning an ideal day of rituals using time proved foolish.
The answer, I think, is to imagine the ideal day of experience. I recalled an essential short essay from James Shelley: The Ideal Day. I re-read the piece and set to constructing an ideal day not through time but experience. Shelley provided a good starting point and I’ve borrowed liberally. Here’s what an ideal day might look like:
Wake up refreshed. Spend some quiet time in meditation, reflection, and gratitude. Be patient and curious with the learning of the day as to stretch the mind. Seek out invigorating conversation. Write something. Practice loving kindness towards others. Have space between commitments throughout the day. Spend time in nature. Move the body. Relax into the evening with value in mind: good art, cooking, and creating. Reflect and meditate again.
Doesn’t that sound wonderful? More importantly, doesn’t it sound completely within reach, starting tomorrow?
I haven’t abandoned my love of routine. I’ve simply traded a foundation of time for a foundation of experience. Some amount of scheduling may inevitably follow from these idealized experiences. Maybe, for example, in order to wake up refreshed and have the space to meditate and reflect in the mornings, I have to make sure to budget for sufficient sleep and time. But what dictates this schedule is a principle of experience, not time.
I promise that this is a distinction with a difference. When we think critically about first principles, things begin to fall into place. How we ground our motivations for action in the day to day, the month to month, and the year to year profoundly matters. After all, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Find your ideal day for the current space and time you are in this moment and edit ruthlessly until you get there.
Meditative Nature
This past fall, I took my first trip to Yosemite National Park. I went for a weekend with a good friend, Jo, who I met while traveling through South America. We had made plans to explore Yosemite together when saying goodbyes in Bolivia and we were incredibly excited to journey such a renowned reserve of nature.
After a long drive from Stanford, we found ourselves in the park and in the midst of the first rainfall in months. California, suffering the crippling effects of the worst drought in over a thousand years, gratefully welcomed the active gray clouds. I, on the other hand, worried that the rain might spoil our adventures for the weekend.
I was wrong. The rain was a blessing, offering a heightened experience of both sight and smell.
One of my favorite words is petrichor. It’s a wonderfully specific word meaning “a pleasant smell that frequently accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather.” The word comes from Greek, a combination of petros (“stones”) and ichor, the fluid that flows like blood in the veins of the gods.“
The word first appeared in a Nature journal article from 1964 with an enticing title: Nature of Argillaceous Odor. Two researchers, Bear and Thomas, posited in the original article and a follow-up a year later that the unique smell was a result of an oil released by plants during times of duress causing a retardation of seed germination. In simpler terms, the oil is a way to prevent plants from trying to grow in a resource challenged setting, a stop sign for nature. As the oil is released, it, seeps into clay-based soils and rocks. During a rainfall, the water disperses the oil molecules into the air, producing the unique smell, one borne of a meeting between a survival mechanism and a quintessential component of our cycle of life, rain. (For a more visual explanation, see the It’s Okay To Be Smart Video, "Where Does the Smell of Rain Come From?”)
As Jo and I hiked the tough Upper Yosemite Falls trail the first day, petrichor greeted our nostrils. If there was a time to encounter petrichor, it was during a rainfall in the midst of a severe drought. The smell opened my awareness to the other senses and I began to notice something spectacular: the effect of the rain on my visual field. The greens felt brighter and the browns richer, as if the rain had unlocked a deeper layer of color. The rain had stripped the thin veneer of reality. Looking at the trail, the trees, and the sky, I felt like time was suspended.
Surely, this perceptual boost is an explainable one. It likely something to do with the reflection and refraction of light, that, when combined with dispersion, give us the phenomena of rainbows. Still, it’s tough to grapple with the experience with only the abstractions of science. Instead, maybe one of Jo’s great photographs can illustrate (for more great shots, check out his site):
river shot
Petrichor is a stop sign of nature, a defense mechanism. I think that petrichor and rain are also stop signs for us. Pause, petrichor says, witness the smell. Wait, rain beckons, take in the vivid colors. I wrote previously about the meditative life; perhaps petrichor and rain are meditative nature. Maybe they are gentle offerings of altered sensation. They are explainable and fascinating – the products of evolution and the properties of light and water – but they are best when they are experienced, not understood.
Today, take whatever gentle offering comes your way.
The Meditative Life
One of the most significant things I’ve done for myself — and, consequentially, for others — has been to start a meditation practice. A primary purpose of meditation is to cultivate mindfulness, which we can define as the intentional awareness of the present. Cultivating mindfulness allows one to see thoughts and emotions more clearly and experience the sensation of being alive moment to moment more fully. While I could espouse the tremendous benefits of a meditative practice, I think that ground is well-trodden.
Roughly one and a half years has passed since I began a practice and I believe that it has substantially changed my day-to-day experience of life. That must feel like a drastic overstatement. However, the simple act of sitting down for half an hour every morning has cultivated a disposition towards the meditative life that has spilled over from meditation itself into coffee, writing, and shaving.
Anyone who knows me at all knows that I love coffee. I can chat endlessly about varying brew methods, different taste profiles, and the intricacies of regional varieties of beans. I simply can’t get enough of the stuff. The process of bean to cup is, to me, a beautiful blend of art and science, not to mention the wonders of the complex tastes of a good cup and the subsequent rush of caffeine.
Despite all this, one of my favorite aspects of coffee is the ritual of making a cup. For a few years now, I’ve brewed my daily cup(s) with a tremendously versatile contraption called the Aeropress. It can make a cup that is espresso-esque, french press-like, or even on par with the profile of a pour over. Each method requires a slightly different song and dance, but they all have something in common: they put me in a meditative and mindful state.
I am there as the water boils to a crescendo. I am there as the beans whine under the pressure of the grinder. I am there as the earthy smell of the grounds rushes to my nose. I am there as the water clashes with the grounds, creating yet another pulse of olfactory sensation. I am there as the first sip tells a story of origin and of travel. Until the last sip, I am there, in the present.
The point here is that meditation need not stop when I open my eyes at the end of a sitting. In fact, it cannot end there if we are to take the lessons of mindfulness and contemplation seriously. One can find spaces for the meditative life if you find ways to carve them out and I believe we all owe it to ourselves to find anchors in the challenging sea of life.
An additional area where I’ve found a way to create that space has been with a return to the analogue. Now, I’m a proponent of technology as much as the next guy. I’ve seen what incredible work technology can do while watching the growth of my brother’s non-profit from a simple idea to real, measurable impact. Yet, in this fast-paced world of sometimes overwhelming connection, it is hard to argue that we need to slow down sometimes. It’s why, although I use a fairly robust digital task management tool, I still get great satisfaction and a helpful pause for reflection when I sit down every morning, with that fresh cup of delicious coffee on deck, a good pen in hand and a quality notebook. In this tactile environment, I write down my tasks and chart out the day. It’s why I’ve made an effort to send more handwritten letters to my partner, my family, and my friends. It’s also why, fittingly, I drafted this very essay with a great beginner’s fountain pen in a fresh notebook, a gift from my brother.
The movement of a pen across a page is an incredible sensory experience. When you notice these sensations and dip into that blissful state of flow, you’re entering a fantastic space for the exploration of the meditative life.
Shaving, too, provides a similar space. I unfortunately have pretty terrible facial hair. It’s uneven, patchy, and unseemly given sufficient time. This all amount to a persistent need to shave, and to shave often. I had come across old-school shaving and decided to try it after the almost universal guarantees of a better shave and some fun while I was at it. So, I ordered my badger brush, some shaving soap, a heavy safety razor, and a sampling of razor blades. The guarantees proved true: I did get a closer shave and it was an insertion of fun into an otherwise mundane chore (once, of course, I had learned how to not cut my face open). I was hooked!
What this return to the past art of shaving required, however, was more time. Prepping the brush. Creating the lather. Applying the lather evenly to my face. Carefully shaving as to not cut myself. Cleaning all the tools. These all take time. If created space for that time, though, I was equally creating an opportunity for the meditative life. However many extra minutes of time spent on this fading style of shaving was spent immersed in the present. A good shave with these tools required it. Often, I finish a long, leisurely shave with the same peaceful state of mind on offer from a sitting.
This is not to say that we all need to meditate daily, brew fussy coffee, handwrite letters with a fancy foundation pen, or shave with an old-school razor. (Though I think we would all be better to ourselves and others if we all committed to meditation.) These spaces that I think contribute to a meditative life are not the only pathways. There are days where I don’t sit for meditation, or I grab a coffee from a questionable percolator at a cafe, or I decide to fire off a quick email instead of sending a letter, or I use a cartridge razor for a quick shave. Those days provide ample opportunity for the meditative life, as all days do.
Still, I know that the days where I make the effort to spend time in these spaces, ones that demand a little more attention and a little more time, I feel better. With these anchor rituals of meditation, coffee, writing, and shaving, I’m more there. And that feeling of thereness spills over into the rest of my day. That’s what a meditative life offers. I invite you to build one with me, one moment at a time.
Knowing Hope
The deeply institutionalized injustice in the news these days has profoundly distressed me. The unchecked deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner are only a sampling of a woeful pattern so evident that I no longer have doubts that there is something broken in our criminal justice system. Broken in the normative sense: the system is working as designed but not as it should be designed. To the those who still doubt: engage with Rawls’ original position and, if any conceivable resulting structural set-up results in the outcomes we have witnessed, please share your findings.
My doubt that the current set-up is broken is no longer up for debate and I have a growing sense that a lot of people feel the same way. Amidst this clarity of the brokenness, hope seems to be in short supply. The recent tragic murders of two police officers only exacerbates our weary collective spirit.
I have to believe that we can change this. I have to believe that we can overcome hidden mistrust. I have to believe that we can stop damaging assumptions in their tracks. I have to believe that we can budge a stubborn status quo. I have to believe that that we are not too far gone. I have to believe that there is hope.
In the middle of studying for my first set of exams for law school, I went for a run on Stanford’s campus early in the morning after the news of the grand jury’s non-indictment in the case of Eric Garner’s death. I was full of anger. I always run past the law school at the close of my runs, driven by a foolish notion the work is not done until I am past the learning, the buildings of the law school standing in for the “learning”. Cooling down and walking through the law school’s courtyard, I came across a bunch of fallen leaves:
Looking at the scene, I dwelled on the idea that, like us humans, leaves are in some existential struggle. Always a few must hold on in hope that new ones come to take their place and, as seasons change, continue the work of growing. The fall? Inevitable. The growth? Not so much, requiring sunshine and a dogged fight against gravity. Though gravity will inevitably throw us to the ground, we can still grow. We can still reach. We can still know hope. This belief in hope made me recall an essay by Victoria Safford titled “The Small Work in the Great Work” that I have returned to many times in recent months. Stafford writes:
I have a friend who traffics in words. She is not a minister, but a psychiatrist in the health clinic at a prestigious women’s college. We were sitting once not long after a student she had known, and counseled, committed suicide in the dormitory there. My friend, the doctor, the healer, held the loss very closely in those first few days, not unprofessionally, but deeply, fully — as you or I would have, had this been someone in our care.
At one point (with tears streaming down her face), she looked up in defiance (this is the only word for it) and spoke explicitly of her vocation, as if out of the ashes of that day she were renewing a vow or making a new covenant (and I think she was). She spoke explicitly of her vocation, and of yours and mine. She said, “You know I cannot save them. I am not here to save anybody or to save the world. All I can do — what I am called to do — is to plant myself at the gates of Hope. Sometimes they come in; sometimes they walk by. But I stand there every day and I call out till my lungs are sore with calling, and beckon and urge them in toward beautiful life and love…
There’s something for all of us there, I think. Whatever our vocation, we stand, beckoning and calling, singing and shouting, planted at the gates of Hope. This world and our people are beautiful and broken, and we are called to raise that up — to bear witness to the possibility of living with the dignity, bravery, and gladness that befits a human being. That may be what it is to “live our mission.”
Let me shout at the gates of Hope for a moment.
Days after that run, my class at Stanford took our first exam. Fitting, it was Criminal Law. I couldn’t help myself from, when answering a policy question on rape, going to war on the unacceptable gap between law in theory and law in practice.
An hour after finishing the exam, Stanford Law School gathered for a Die-In while the sky around us darkened with much-needed rain in a California severely wounded by drought:
As it was the first protest I’ve been part of, I know not of the efficacy or value of this kind of peaceful statement in the age of social media activism. Still, I showed up and am among the mess of bodies that laid silent for four and a half minutes. When the time had passed, we chanted “Black lives matter”, a chorus of voices strained by tragedy. Somewhere in the cascade of dwindling volume I heard whispers of hope, almost as if our discordant voices had softly merged into one powerful note. I will hold very tightly to that hope. It is why, although it easy to mock the idea of these Die-Ins as empty statements, I think these gatherings are important because they help us know much-needed hope.
I believe we are at what Seamus Heaney calls a “meeting point of hope and history”. Safford writes:
Once you have glimpsed the world as it might be, as it ought to be, as it’s going to be (however that vision appears to you), it is impossible to live compliant and complacent anymore in the world as it is… And so you come out and walk out and march, the way a flower comes out and blooms, because it has no other calling. It has no other work.
[…]
I am interested in what Seamus Heaney calls the meeting point of hope and history, where what has happened is met by what we make of it. What has happened is met midstream by people who are — among the multitude of things we are — spiritual beings and all that that implies of creativity, imagination, crazy wisdom, ancient wisdom, passionate compassion, selfless courage, and radical reverence for life. And love—for one another absolutely, and that love that rises out of us, for something larger than ourselves, call it what you will. I am interested in the place, the places, where history is met by the hope of the human soul, life’s longing for itself. I am interested in hope on this side of the grave — for me there is no other kind — and in that tidal wave of justice that could rise up if only we would let it.
I know hope. Not the hope that will effortlessly come to fruition because of some enlightened generation or the steady march of time. No, the hope I know lays bare the extreme demands of compassion. We all must be blacksmiths, relentlessly hammering the moral arc of the universe at the furnace, bending it towards justice. These injustices are impermanent only if we make it so.
Our failings are numerous and inevitable, but we have to keep feeling, keep discussing, keep learning, and, most of all, keep knowing hope. For we must know it. There is no other way.
An Open Letter to Carnegie Mellon's New President
Dear President Suresh,
I want to first congratulate you on your new appointment as the president of my soon to be alma mater. Carnegie Mellon is a wonderful place full of dynamic ideas and people and given my experiences here, I know you will cherish your time at the head of such a unique institution. I hope you come to appreciate the university’s quirks - its early-morning bagpipes, the always-decorated Fence, the sometimes hidden shortcuts that provide safe haven from the bitter cold - just as I did as I made my way through my time at Carnegie Mellon.
Your impressive background makes it easy to infer that you consider yourself a scientist. Just like your previous appointment at the National Science Foundation, you will surely find yourself at home among the brilliant scientific minds - young and old - that call Carnegie Mellon home. The university is world-renowned for its programs in engineering and computer science and I have no doubt that under your leadership, it will continue to be at the cutting edge of science and technology.
I, however, like the president who appointed you to your post at the National Science Foundation, hail from a different background: the humanities. Being at a school like Carnegie Mellon has given me a healthy dose of science that will certainly aid me as I try and navigate the road ahead. Despite that, at a school dominated by scientists, at times it can be difficult to see the importance of the work that we in the humanities do. However, more now than ever, science needs the humanities.
Two quick examples will bring this point to bear. The first is an issue that as head of the National Science Foundation you likely had to think about on a daily basis: climate change. President Obama recently gave a speech on the subject at Georgetown University and highlighted the oft-repeated fact that 97 percent of climate science studies assert that climate change is real and man-made. Yet we find ourselves in a national debate over whether we should do anything about it because there are those who dangerously and loudly cling to denial. The problem here isn’t the science: the science is settled. The problem here is one of communication. I’m sure you ran into this at your previous job: scientists aren’t always the best storytellers. Somewhere between Keeling’s first CO2 measurements and now, scientists lost the climate change narrative. Climate change is the biggest issue on the agenda, today and for the foreseeable future, and the necessary interdependence between the science and humanities in solving it grows with each passing day.
The second example is pulled right from recent headlines. Edward Snowden’s leaks on PRISM and the NSA have sparked a much-needed debate about the pervasive nature of technology and its relation to our rights, specifically our privacy. Here is an example where more technology won’t save us, but a real conversation about a philosophy of restraint and the trade-offs between security and liberty will. Technological advances will continue to roll out, but we are at a critical junction in deciding to what ends those advances are for.
In 1940, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator gave a scathing condemnation of the growing evil in the world. Many of the words in the stirring speech at the end of the film are still relevant today: the principles of democracy, the collective purpose of our short time here on Earth, and the idea that “more than machinery, we need humanity".
You are stepping into a unique position and an opportunity to make a great institution an even greater one. Carnegie Mellon could lead the academic world as a place of dynamic integration of the sciences and the humanities that the world’s challenges demand. We are all in this together and the need to learn how to work as a team is quintessential to confronting the big challenges ahead. As president, you have an opportunity to accelerate that transformation. I wish you the best of luck and hope that Carnegie Mellon continues to find itself a place of innovation and progress.
Sincerely,
Daniel Nesbit
The Three Beasts of Time
There are three beasts of time: the past, the present, and the future. Like wild animals, the future and the past react differently depending on how they are approached: they can either be companions or predators. Perhaps the most elusive of the three is the present, the one beast of time who tends to be shy, difficult to find and woefully afraid of the other beasts when they are on the hunt. However, no matter where you are in the world, one of these three beasts will be the reigning king of the moment.
On a typical day, everyone is dominated by the beast of the future. Take, for example, the wait at a subway station. Every time someone looks down the tunnel expectantly for a train, they are pulled further and further away from the tenuous hold that the beast of the present can manage and into the gnashing teeth of the future. Each look makes them more preoccupied with the future, with thoughts like “Now I’m going to be home half an hour later”, “I’ll miss my favorite show” or “It’s going to be tough to fit in exercise”. The tunnel continues to disappoint these future planners and they enter a state of constant reevaluation of their day’s itinerary. That state brings anxiety, frustration and worry: you can see it in their faces. The beast of the future tears has commanded the attention of all the waiting passengers.
In a moment like this, it’s worth it to make an effort to escape the hunt of the future. Maybe you leave the station and walk home instead. Maybe along the way, the timid beast of the present finds you and you stroll through the city streets together in harmony.
The beast of the past can be equally destructive. Just like the future, the past can become a hunter, poisoning its prey with regret. Regret is by far the worst of all emotions and a powerful tool of the past: there is no action that can work against the toxins of doubt that plague the victim’s mind. Other emotions like anger or jealousy have actionable remedies, but very few can escape the strangling nature of regret. Even the beast of the future can do little to fight against the past once its prey is caught in its jaws.
The beasts of the future and past are not always negative forces, though. The beast of the future, tamed properly, can be a helpful planner and shift from hunting you to helping you hunt down your visions of the future. Teach the beast of the future your strategy and it can navigate the timeline ahead and pull your plans towards the present where you can firmly grasp them. The past, removed of its dripping horns of regret, can bound into past memories and return with powerful ones that bring you joy and motivation When mastered, the beasts of the future and past become the companions of their shy brother and work in harmony with the quiet beast of the present.
The beast of the present is a fickle yet powerful creature. When the past and future are searching for prey, the present hides in the corner and only returns when it seems safe. However, when the future and past are tamed the present will flex its muscles. The companionship of the beast of the present brings comfort, new powers of observation and a freedom from worry. More than that, though, the beast of the present will do everything possible to amplify the positive memories of the past and make your visions of the future the reality of the present.
The three beasts work in tandem. The past fetches memories of the past and brings them to the present who can translate the past timeline into positive energy. The future attempts to drag ambitious plans closer to the eager jaws of the present, who, fueled with the positive foundation of the past, will temporarily reach outside of its comfort zone into the unknown and pull those plans into the present.
One way of looking at life is to see it as a struggle between the beasts of time. It is useful to wonder what the beasts are up to in a particular moment. When they all pull in different directions, the result is paralysis. When they work together, though, the beasts of time become an incredibly powerful team. The key to it all is finding the beast of the present, a creature of quiet but formidable power. Mindfulness is the humble search for the beast of the present and enlightenment could very well be mastering the beasts of time and maintaining the three brothers’ harmony. Because in truth, the divides between the beasts are only found at the edge of reality. Or, perhaps, there is only one beast: time.
Memories Not For Sale
I’m a time traveler of sorts. You see, the other morning something strange happened. Alone on the farm, I woke up to nothing. A blanket of silence had enveloped my whole house, serving as gatekeeper to the outside world. The early birds knocked against the silence with their singing, only to have their calls return to them dejected. An unseen conductor waved his baton and a symphony of silence played all around me.
In a daze, I wandered through the house. Time had stopped, perhaps tired from its relentless march through the eons. As I stepped lightly across new carpet and worn wood, afraid I was going to break the tenuous magic of the moment, I began to see memories all around me. Infinite moments came crashing through my consciousness.
In my room I see many younger versions of myself dive into books on my bed. I am restless physically, fidgeting and rotating, but mentally lost in some far-off world. Racing through night and day, I hear words traded between top and bottom bunk occupants. An older brother, Josh, shares with me random musings. A sister’s eventual husband and I grow closer.
Back in the present, I peek into my brother’s room and am thrown around the past. I see Christmas mornings where a college-aged Josh is the last to wake up, blatantly refusing to adjust to a different time-zone than Stanford. I witness his shelves rearranging priorities: first brandishing soccer trophies but then moving to souvenirs from journeys around the world.
I mosey into my sister’s room and suddenly bridesmaids are all around me, helping my sister prepare for her wedding day. I look out her window and see her husband with groomsmen in tow walking towards the grand tree where they were to be married. I catch the faces of my brother and I among the groomsmen: proud and in a place of profound peace and joy. The wedding party fades and I hear my sister’s obnoxious oboe doing scales and an unkind voice - my own - telling her to be quiet. She laughs but then repeats, dedicated.
Emboldened by these forays into the past, I continue to explore the memories scattered throughout the house. Walking down the stairs I see many iterations of my brother, sister, and I scooting downwards in a Christmas ritual, cascading like the end of a computer solitaire game.
I descend yet again into the basement and peer around in the emptiness. The ping-pong table, still occupying its normal spot, becomes animated with players. My brother and I trade hits and conversation, losing track of time for hours. Over by the TV, movies, TV shows and video games flash by in the darkness. The people watching and playing rotate in and out, but when my mom appears she is always on the love seat. I find this fitting. The groomsmen appear again, sharing a quiet moment together before they head up the stairs for the wedding ceremony.
I follow the groomsmen upstairs and in the living room I smile as I see my grandfather napping on the ground with one of my dogs. My grandmother is on the couch with a book and a crossword puzzle. They vanish to be replaced by huge soccer ball beanbags and game consoles spread across the floor, with eager brothers and friends occupying them and engrossed in the action on the TV.
I walk into my dad’s office to hear important phone calls and the sound of creativity being transferred as he pumps out a few books on the computer. I see his kids play pranks on him as they scare him with his headphones on. A few feet away in my mom’s office I hear my her reassuring voice on the phone with her kids, asking them how their day went.
Dipping into the kitchen, I see her cooking thousands of meals for various combinations of kids. The kids grab a stool and a spot at the counter and dig into the simple goodness, growing bigger and stronger as they flash in front of me.
I turn my head to the big table and am rushed through Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with family. In the blur, I hear laughter and passionate debate. I feel the warmth all around me.
The door, a portal to these memories, opens and closes. Thousands of entries and exits flow by me like a river: family, friends and dogs stream in and out. I see the tired faces of kids after soccer games return gratefully home. I see my brother with bags packed and ready to go to college, with loving goodbyes exchanged. I see an excited pair - a mother and daughter - head out the door to go to Malawi for the first time.
I follow these memories out the door and am greeted by dogs being called to dinner, racing around the corner of the porch eagerly. I see cars pull in and out, kids learning to drive, Mom and Dad watching from the window.
Out on the lawn I see the lawnmower plodding back and forth, a fight to keep back the wilderness. I see a wedding tent erected and a grand celebration. I’m thrown back to a moment days ago where I see the “For Sale” sign at the beginning of our driveway for the first time. This home was a unique place, an open secret. Its physical frame is for sale, but the memories that have filled it are not: I have traveled all through the past and collected them. I will carry them with me into the future, the evolving now. The conductor takes a bow, the silence and magic of the moment is broken, and time wearily resumes its procession.