Spiritual Ancestors

Who are my spiritual ancestors?

I've been thinking about this question a lot recently. My self-identification as an atheist says very little about my spirituality. As I have said before, my lack of belief says something about me, but atheism isn't a philosophy of life.

The devout have a rich tapestry of thinkers and teachers to pull from. This deep and direct spiritual ancestry offers a history of thought and an evolving debate of meaning to explore. From this spiritual lineage, believers can learn to avoid the mistakes of the past and build a brighter future. That the faithful have figures to look doesn't mean that they are closed to the thoughts of others, it just means that their traditions have done some of the work of sorting out what it means to live.

As a nonbeliever, however, I used to feel adrift at sea. I can find fellow travelers throughout history, though their lack of belief was often obscured. Even when it is in the open, the spiritual side of it might not be. I felt that I didn't have anyone to point to and really say, "She is part of my tribe; she speaks for me."

I am no longer adrift. I realized that while we cannot choose our actual ancestors, we have the absolute freedom to choose our spiritual ones. The whole landscape of thinkers, doers, and dreamers are available to me.

Who have I chosen?

Whoever speaks to me. Whoever has something to say about the great questions of life. Seneca, the Buddha, and yes, even Jesus. J.K. Rowling and Pablo Neruda. Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. There are no barriers to join my fellowship. Those with something to offer are always welcome.

I am not adrift at sea. I am in the crow's nest, using every tool available. My spiritual ancestors each have something to say about navigation and I take their counsel seriously. I don't know where I am sailing to, though it has already been a beautiful journey so far and will surely continue to amaze and surprise me in the many moments ahead.

Broken

"He spoke in broken English, but we finally got around to understanding what he was trying to say."

I'm sure you've said something like that before. We use the word "broken" to describe someone's capacity for language. I think this is so interesting.

Implicit in this description is this idea: When we present our broken words to the world, we are giving the chance to others to repair us, to fix us, to heal us. We are presenting vulnerability in the hopes that another will show kindness and understanding. When we speak in broken words, two people have to transcend the limitations of a particular language by way of gestures, tone, and lots of patience. It can be frustrating but it is so human in its beauty. When we don't make that extra effort to understand, we leave the individual with their fractured language broken.

There's a Japanese art called kintsugi that takes broken pottery and repairs it using gold. The art is driven by a philosophy that breakage and repair are essential to the story of an object and that we shouldn't just hide this vulnerable past.

The same goes for people. We shouldn't hide our brokenness, we should repair each other with gold. Maybe when we are truly embracing the Golden Rule, we are practicing the art of kintsugi with people.

To be broken implies the possibility of repair. We all have the chance to engage in the beauty of reconstruction. Will you try?

Enough

I don't want more. I want enough.

Enough is the wealth of experience over things.

Enough is the stuff in your pack that doesn't weigh you down but gives you freedom, both physical and mental.

Enough is the set of commitments that stretch you just far enough to be uncomfortable but not so far to break you down.

Enough is downtime, margin, and space.

Enough is understanding what you do and do not know.

Enough is that careful meal where you savor every bite, sip the wine slowly, and let the evening deepen like someone settling into the groove of a hammock.

Enough is the moment of reading before bed where the words become hazy and forgetable and you tumble softly into sleep.

Enough is the amount of rest so that in the morning you smoothly greet the day, stepping carefully from dreaming to wakefulness.

Enough is the facial dance of a newborn finding his place in the world.

Enough is the breath, an ever-present tool of awareness.

Enough is the gentle insight that I am sufficient.

Enough is enough.

Before the Tree

In the last year, I've wrestled with my sense of direction. I came to law school with a roughly-hewed mission with the intent of sorting it all out upon arrival.

Turns out, the sorting is pretty hard. Many of my classmates have their futures neatly sequenced, their energies bent towards well-defined means and well-defined ends like law review, clerkships, jobs at law firms, and so on. I admire their laser-like focus. To see people living their mission is to be a rare witness to another's becoming.

My process, on the other hand, has been more nebulous. I am a decision-maker in a hazy fog. Etymologically, the word decision traces to the idea of cutting off. Right now, I stand before a vast decision tree and a sharpened saw, but I haven't made many cuts. In order for the tree to grow properly, I have to prune its branches so that it can reach further towards the sun. So far in law school, I've approached the tree and left it with a number of tentative, half-sawed branches of no's. But I've come up empty with yes's, the branches that I want to use to climb upwards.

Throughout this process, I've thought a lot about the way in which one should stand before the tree. First, I don't think that I should hide my indecision. Under the surface, many if not all of us are battling with self-doubt, so I do myself no favors pretending. I'd rather invite people in than suffer alone in my confusion.

Second, I think the process of cutting off branches, choosing one to begin the ascent, and climbing upwards requires playfulness. This playfulness demands two inextricably linked movements of wondering and wandering. To wonder is to enter a mental space with lightness and imagination. To wander is to indiscriminately explore one's surroundings, to search for lost, and to make the road by walking. Wondering and wandering might ostensibly be partitioned to their respective mental and physical planes; in truth, they bleed into one another. When we wander, we feed our wonder. As we wonder, we remove the mental blocks in the way of effortlessly wandering. We need to be playful as we approach the tree. Our capacity to wonder and wander fuel this play.

Third, standing before the tree can cripple you with uncertainty if you never get moving. Here, some of my favorite words from Seneca that I've revisted recently are apt:

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.

Only when we live immediately in the face of uncertainty do we even live at all. While I shouldn't pretend that I have everything figured out, I also shouldn't wallow in uncertainty. After all, the point isn't to stand before the tree but to feel the breeze at the top.

I don't have the answers. I don't think I ever will. What I do know is this: even as I make decisions, cut off branches, and begin my climb, other branches will grow, and I will have to backtrack in order to climb higher still. All I can hope is that I have joy in the process and have others with me climbing, laughing, loving, and growing.

Our Penny Universities

During the Enlightenment, the greatest minds were tweeting. Instead of utilizing the medium of the internet their network for spreading ideas were "penny universities." For just a penny — the price of a cup of coffee — diverse groups of people gathered in English coffeehouses to discuss news and debate the latest ideas in philosophy, science, and politics. The takeaways from these gatherings in the coffeehouses — dubbed “penny universities” — spread to others in the network through individuals called "runners." All of us today rest on the shoulders of those who sat in these penny universities, pushing the frontiers of ideas.

Fast forward to today and one might observe that the penny university model has ostensibly been replicated. In the digital town square of the internet, anyone — and everyone — can gather and engage in a wide-ranging conversation. Gone is the requirement of a physical space or the entry fee of the price of a cup of coffee. With the internet, we all have access to the world at our fingertips. Conversations pass through the varied modern penny universities of social media by way of the modern-day “runners”: shares, retweets, and links. Tapping into the potential of these modern-day runners means the chance that an idea can spread like wildfire and connect with a massive audience.

With that said, this picture is far too rosy. Yes, access has never been better and collaboration can be effortless. However, today's digital town square is woefully missing something. Those first penny universities were rooted in both a community of place and a community of purpose: the students were serious about contributing to the vibrant network of knowledge by way of gatherings over coffee in physical spaces. Only after intimate and fervent debate did the runners circulate ideas.

With widened access we've sacrificed an enviable signal to noise ratio. Often, people unwittingly choose to add noise. Our conversations in the hallways of the modern penny university can't just be about what's trending by virtue that it is trending. What is important may prove to be viral, but what is viral isn't always important. Technology isn't the problem; how we use it is.

We are all runners now in a massive network of penny universities When we pass something on, we are signaling its importance. Each of us has a small share of the responsibility to make our conversations mean something and to push the envelope yet again. A revitalized network committed to the project of the old English coffeehouses could demonstrate the impact of reasoned and intentional discussion. We could be on the precipice of another Enlightenment. Today, walk through the gates of our modern penny universities mindfully and take your role in the great debate of ideas seriously.

Commonplace Links #2

Background to this experiment in link-sharing here.

Photo credit: Elliot Engelmann

To start #2, think about Jedidiah Jenkins's question:

Are you ocean or mountains? Forest or desert? I am all of it.

Jenkins has a way of writing that quickly pierces the everydayness. Oregon to Patagonia has become one of my favorite blogs.

James Shelley writes about a piece of philosophy that very practically guides me every day in the essay "There are only two kinds of problems in the world":

There are two categories of problems:
Problems you can do something about.
&
Problems you can not do anything about.

I cannot tell you how essential this idea is. Simple, not easy.

TNC reflected on the internal liberal battle to renegotiate the possible. I loved this line:

But hope still lies in the imagined thing.

I'll round out #2 with a song from Kendrick Lamar: "How Much a Dollar Cost". Kendrick Lamar is one of my favorite artists and this track off his most recent album has stuck with me ever since I first heard it. It demonstrates how hip hop can be a device for powerful storytelling and always kicks me into a state of reflection. I'd suggest that you check out the RapGenius annotations on the song as they reveal a lot of the depth in the song.

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The Dark Side of Mindfulness

Among friends and family, I am undoubtedly a broken record when it comes to my advocacy for a mindfulness meditation practice. Part of the reason that I often publicly comment on it is because it fortifies my commitment to a habit that is hard every day yet continues to be a source of sea change within myself.

However, mindfulness is not without its dark side. Being more aware of your thoughts makes you more aware of the things that your ego normally protects itself from: the slide into deep procrastination, the terrifying grip of anxiety, the debilitating fear of failure, the uncomfortableness of not knowing, and the frightening sense of lack of control. In the awareness of those emotions, there's darkness. I wonder to myself, Am I doing okay?

It's not really a complete darkness, though. With kindness and patience, I can push through these negatives to a positive because on the other side of these disconcerting moments of awareness lies clarity, resolve, and freedom. My procrastination might be linked to a fear of failure: I would rather handicap myself then try my hardest and fail. My anxiety could be a deeper unease about whether the values I find important are driving the life I'm living. That discomfort of not knowing may just be an unwillingness to admit that I know the truth but acting on that truth is hard. More often than not, gaining these insights is half the battle.

Ultimately, then, this dark side is a good thing for it teaches me something every time I'm willing to peer into the fog of these negative emotions. That doesn't mean that I always find my way out of the fog: a unintended effect of looking inwards is that sometimes I get lost in those negative spaces for too long, having lost my bearings in the game of awareness. Even with those potential pitfalls, it's worth it. When we risk the vulnerability of self-awareness, we also invite the potential rewards of true understanding. I'm no longer crippled by the shadows if I know the way out. I share this not because I have the answers, but because I think flexing the muscles of self-awareness has been immensely helpful for me. It might be helpful for you, too.

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If meditation sounds interesting to you but you want a little help kickstarting the practice, I have some vouchers for a month of a guided meditation serivce called Headspace. While I've since moved on to silent meditation without guidance, the service made getting started very easy. With the 10-day free trial and a month of sessions, you have plenty of time to install the habit. Get in touch if you'd like one!

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A Year in Reading (2015)

In line with my efforts to share more of my learning, here are the books I read this last year. Living next to a branch of San Francisco's public library has been fantastic for reading.

Through constructing this list, I began to see even more connections in the things that I read. Those connections will become more clear as I revisit the passages I copied down from many of the books. As I've done for some in this list, I may also attempt to push these insights in future posts. As a reader, I try to bounce between different types of books, though I unwittingly chose books this year that seemed to have tried to answer in some manner questions surrounding how we should live. Some common themes emerged: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the insights of modern psychology. Here we go, in chronological order of finished date:

William Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Art of Stoic Joy
I read this in the spring and haphazardly decided to change the subject of one of my class's research paper to how the philosophy of Stoicism can apply to the work of lawyer-activists. You can read a more universal piece conveying the thrust of that paper here. If you're at all interested in learning about Stoicism, this is a fantastic primer. I think the philosophy is battle-ready and incredibly valuable in the modern age.

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
Suzuki is the founder of San Francisco's Zen Center. I've always been fascinated by Zen and this book was a challenging yet rewarding exploration.

Jean Francois Revel and Matthieu Ricard, A Monk and a Philosopher
A father (the philosopher) and son (the monk) discuss Buddhism. They each have valuable insights in this dialogue-format book.

Alan Watts, Wisdom in the Age of Insecurity
I've listened to Watts many times before, but this was one of the first of his books I've read. Known to have been a pioneer in bringing Buddhism to the West, this book brings Watts's heartening humor to many important subjects. Valuable highlights here, here, and here.

Elle Luna, Crossroads of Should and Must
Luna's Medium piece went viral, and this book was its result. The crux: "There are two paths in life. Should and must. We arrive at this crossroads over and over again. And every day, we get to choose." Sometimes we just need someone else to tell us the thing we already know. I enjoyed reading this one and the illustrations throughout make it a real joy, too.

Neil Gaiman, The Sandman (Volume 1)
This was my very first graphic novel. I absolutely loved it! Gaiman is a wordsmith and the art is outstanding. It doesn't hurt that the story really draws you in.

Charles Duhigg, Power of Habit
How do our habits work? Duhigg tackles that question, working to dissect the mechanics of the habits that run our lives. I'm an advocate for building up routines in life, so this book gave some great insights about how those routines actually work.

David Foster Wallace, This is Water
Not so much a book, this commencement speech is among the best. I'll try to re-read this often. You can find my commonplace book entry for this one here.

Shawn Anchor, The Happiness Advantage
Anchor argues that modern society has put the cart before the horse: being more productive wont' make us happy, but focusing on our own happiness can make us more productive. Though the writing surrounding the takeaways isn't always the most enticing, the book covers some research that I've worked to integrate into my daily life, like gratitude journaling.

Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit
This philosophical essay is on well, bullshit. It's a short read easily found in PDF form. I happened to find it as a slim booklet. It's an entertaining, refreshing read.

George Orwell, Animal Farm
I can't remember if I actually read this in high school or pretended as if I read it. Regardless, the short, classic read is worth your time. More here.

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness
Gilbert's fascinating point: we are awful at forecasting our future happiness. All your intuitions are wrong, and horribly wrong at that. I'll have to come back to this one in the future and figure out how to better integrate the book's insights into my own life.

Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project
It might've just been the timing of reading this one right after Stumbling on Happiness, but this one lacked a punch for me. The book is essentially a series of experiments the author conducts on herself to be happier. The author works to sell the reader on many things that I already bought into, so that perhaps slowed down the pace for me.

Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
This classic is wisdom packed. Seneca is a fantastic writer and his words have traveled extraordinarily well over the ages. Highly recommended. A taste of it: "What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately."

Sam Harris, Free Will
Harris argues (in my opinion, effectively) that our concept of free will is bunk. I'm theoretically on board with his conclusions and through the practice of meditation have experienced first-hand the foggy nature of self that we try to pin our decisions on, but I haven't quite wrapped my head around how to bring these conclusions to bear on day-to-day living or the way in which we should structure our laws or policy.

Maria Kalman, The Principles of Uncertainty
I don't really know how to accurately describe this one. It's a kind of illustrated journal covering all sorts of topics that can be consumed easily in one sitting. The style is distinct and arresting and I'll be looking for more of her work.

Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
This is big book comes in only 184 pages. Frankl, an Auschwitz survivor, details his experiences and his framework for dealing with it all. One idea in particular has stuck with me: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

Neil Gaiman, The Sandman (Volume 2)
As good, if not better, than Volume 1.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Hays translation)
Aurelius, a successful Roman Emperor, was the last great Stoic. This book, originally intended to be the private journal of Aurelius, contains his instructions to himself to be a better man. This was my second reading, though with a different translation that I found more accessible. Like Seneca, this writing is wisdom-packed.

Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle is the Way
Holiday's book works to export Stoicism by way of helpful historical anecdotes. In this quick book, his writing offers clarity and concise takeaways.

Gretchen Rubin, Better than Before
I'd heard lots of good things about another of Rubin's books, so even with the mixed experience with The Happiness Project, I decided to give this book a shot. Exploring different strategies to habits, I found this one a lot more interesting and it gave me a few things to think about.

Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
This book was valuable if only for the idea of thinking through the idea of resistance: the barrier between you and your work.

Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance
I read this on the very day of the Paris attacks. My long review of sorts can be found here.

Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
A guide to decluttering that somehow became #1 NYT best-seller, this one is a book after my own heart. I'm a minimalist through and through, and the insistence to get rid of anything that doesn't bring you joy resonated with me.

Margaret Mead and James Baldwin, A Rap on Race
Maria Popova's consistent high praise of this book encouraged me to check it out. It's an enriching read of a conversation between two brilliant minds. So many points had me pausing simply to reflect. A series of Popova's highlights here.

Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape
Harris takes on the idea that science has nothing to say about morality. He makes a few philosophical moves in the beginning that I find interesting, though these moves have not been without criticism. Rather than read the book, his TED Talk on the subject of the book is probably the best way to explore the material.

Gary Tuabes, Why We Get Fat
Why do we get fat? Modern society's intake of carbs. Read the book if you're interested in the science of it all. I was pretty convinced by it all, though I won't lay down any absolute claims just yet.

Alan Moore, V for Vendetta
The story of this dystopian graphic novel is as timely as ever. Having seen the film before reading the graphic novel, the story's main flourishes were somewhat spoiled. Still, despite this and the sometimes hard-to-read print, I got lost in the post-apocalyptic world and the idealism of V.

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance
As I got the hang of a daily meditation habit, I wanted to deepen my practice. I came across Brach's teaching by way of Maria Popova. Ignoring the cheesy title, this book provides a valuable exploration of how we can use mindfulness to be better to ourselves and to others.

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Commonplace Links #1

Background to this experiment in link-sharing here.

Photo credit: Buzac Marius

To kick things off, James Shelley wrote a helpful essay on the nature of sharing. Channeling Cicero, Shelley writes:

Nothing that is truly beautiful can be left unshared with another. It is in sharing and co-experiencing that the beautiful becomes manifest. Nothing worth possessing is worth having to oneself alone. It is only by partaking and participating in life together that joys and sorrows of life make any sense at all.

This sentiment is one of many reasons that pushed me to share more of the things that I'm thinking about. If I can do the work of integrating something into the hierarchy of my personal knowledge and at the same time share the opportunity of insight with others, that's a worthwhile effort. With that said, the moment these laudable ends are no longer the focus of sharing is the moment I reevaluate what I'm doing.

As we grind the gears of the new year, I found this dense essay valuable. While I didn't agree with everything in the piece, the closing paragraph resonated with me:

Accepting the fatality of our situation isn’t nihilism, but rather the necessary first step in forging a new way of life. Between self-destruction and giving up, between willing nothingness and not willing, there is another choice: willing our fate. Conscious self-creation. We owe it to the generations whose futures we’ve burned and wasted to build a bridge, to be a bridge, to connect the diverse human traditions of meaning-making in our past to those survivors, children of the Anthropocene, who will build a new world among our ruins.

Relatedly, this Wait But Why post is a heavy dose of perspective about how we spend our time:

It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.

I believe that we should spend our time carefully. One immensely valuable source of thought on how we spend our time is a writer I've followed for many years, a professor named Cal Newport. His approach to academic work has been very helpful to my life as a student. Recently, he wrote about a commmitment to living what he calls a "deep life," one that involves three key pieces: 1) training your ability to focus, 2) building your schedule around pockets of employing that focus on important work, and 3) respecting your attention. Read the post for how these elements might take form.

Finally, I can't help but share this wonderful blog post from my mother, writing from Malawi. I read it almost as mindfulness poetry. The title itself, "It was a quiet day...full of noises" is pure music to me.

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Introducing: Commonplace Links

I've written previously about how I want to interact with technology. In short, I've come to realize that though I cannot absolutely extract myself from the powerful tools of modern society, I can engage in a mindful dance with them. Within this framework, I've also reflected on how I can better find meaning as a reader in the digital age.

I hinted at it in "Cartographer of Meaning", but the the missing link so far since I wrote it has been well, links. I'm generally wary of the overwhelming firehose of the Internet: it's too easy to get lost in what's urgent, the shiny things wrapped in trending nowness. These distractions are at the expense of the timeless and important. Still, there's a wealth of refreshing, thoughtful, and valuable things to discover out there. I want to share more and the proposed idea of creating a public-facing commonplace book was to solidify these refreshing things' place in my mind's structure and also pass them along for others, too.

What seems so simple -- the sharing of a commonplace book -- quickly met resistance and an internal debate on my end. On one hand, I think it's extraordinary that humanity has progressed to the point where the rapid spread of ideas is so easy. However, the moment I hand those little morsels to the social apparatuses that spread them further, I feel like they lose a bit of their worth. That moment of transition becomes not about what I'm passing along, but me, the sharer. How many likes and comments does it earn? Are people engaging with it? Does it make me look smart, thoughtful, eclectic?

All of that is just the garbage that comes along with a good intention: This is good, check it out. So, I'm going to try to avoid the garbage and try experimenting with a collection of links instead of attaching myself to the ball and chain of individual share points that are inevitably tethered to some sense of status. In these collections, I have the chance to offer a little bit of commentary, point out some good parts, and network what I'm putting down with what I already know. Hopefully, doing this minimizes the garbage. I'll call these collections Commonplace Links, a nod to the commonplace book. Look out for the first one soon.

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