Holiness is a Choice

This summer, I rode the subway to and from work every day. I had a short, 20 minute commute on the C train. Though I often spent the commute with a podcast in my ear, occasionally I punctured my routine with some music or some silence. As the subway travels underneath the city, the intermittent, forced unplugging gave me the chance to reconnect with myself and my thoughts.

In those moments, the subway morphs into a pop-up temple of reflection as I join a fleeting, ever-changing community. Standing in the pews over the summer, one of the most important things that I came to realize that holiness is a choice.

Trains are often delayed and crowded and the swelter of a summer day can try even the most resolute. Echoing DFW, therein lies the holiness. But that holiness -- or, if you prefer, that sacredness, that tranquility, that transcendence -- is only accessible by choice. The temple doors don't open from the inside: there is no one beckoning you in.

The inferno of the subway can either be the breeding ground for the sacred or just another annoyance. On the subway and beyond, holiness is a choice.

See also This is Water

Our Young Teachers

I've had the pleasure of spending time with lots of newborns in the last year. Between Asha's and my family, four boys came into the world in a short three-month period. Two of the boys — Anderson and Kai — have young older sisters in Lexi and Maya respectively. All together, they're a heartwarming handful.

I'm not entirely comfortable around the littlest ones just yet. I'm still learning how to hold them naturally. I don't have the finely-honed intuitions to know what they need; veterans often come to my rescue cooing and swooping in with deft hands. I will get there, though probably too late to be of any help to the exhausted parents.

One thing, however, I'm learning quickly. The young — both the littlest ones and the toddlers — are great teachers of presence. A fantastic moment in Tim Ferriss's podcast with Josh Waitzkin, which I've linked to before, describes the real-life classroom better than I can:

Parenting has been the most fantastic learning experience I've ever gone through. So from when [Jack] was born, I tried very hard to not go into it with a lot of preconceived ideas and to be attuned to him, to listen to him. From when he was just days, weeks old, he was teaching me. You know, you talk about teaching presence. Our eyes would be connected and if I would think about something else, his eyes would pull me back. If there was any distraction that set in, he would pull me back. And as he got a little older, he would just take your face and pull it back in the sweetest way. So the depth of connection, you know, being deeply attuned to a young spirit that hasn't become blocked, that is in that state of unobstructed self-expression, that is just this unbelievably game learner, unblocked learner. . .

When not in the throes of inevitable growing pains, the young are a paradigm of wonder and awe. Rather than see them as students that we must shepherd through life, we can flip the script and open ourselves to their role as teachers. When I've become the student of the young in my life, I've been rewarded with the incredible gift of presence. No gift is greater. There is always — and only — now. We spend our lives clawing back to it, but it is all the young know until we teach them otherwise. Though they don't even know of their generosity, I'm grateful for the moments of learning they've shared with me in the past year.

Knowledge Work

I'm always trying to think about how to improve the signal to noise ratio for myself and for others. That's the important work of the 21st century, where everything is at our fingertips. My efforts in creating a commonplace book are a good example of a that. In some important ways, I think that I've found value in the process. For example, a recent commonplace links post created a nice web of ideas around the topic of questions and framing our interactions with others.

At the same time, I'm restless about the endeavor. Something about it isn't quite enough: I'm still just loosely collecting things, occasionally finding the links between them. I'm not fully appreciating things for their context and relationship with other things; I turn my attention to them and then move on. One potential remedy is an idea that I've been toying with: going a little deeper and beginning the creation of a zettlekasten, something like a personal knowledge wiki.

Why even bother? At my very core, I’m a learner. I love getting lost down rabbit holes. I care about building a diverse foundation of ideas. I want to know something about everything and everything about something (the latter is still undecided). But I’ve been turning over an idea lately. Knowledge — true knowledge — takes work. It takes process. We can’t just expect to handle the unending stream of information, consume it all, end up with wisdom. Wisdom requires applied knowledge and knowledge requires force applied to information. Something like a zettlekasten would be an opportunity to work with information and then network the resulting knowledge in a way that offers up new insights.

What would it look like? I'm not entirely sure. I have a collection of text files, notes from about 20 books I read in the last year or so, and an enormous Pinboard archive. One approach could be to be more forward focused and establish a process for dealing with incoming ideas while slowly working through the backlog, separating wheat from chaff, and connecting the ideas that rise to the top. I'm intrigued by the potential of using nvALT, a tremendous little plain text editor. More important than the tools, though, is the intention here to really dive into knowledge work.

I'm trying to figure out how to carefully and sustainably build upon my current understanding in ways that help me do what I do better and live a more meaningful life. At the same time, I want to run into the thicket of all the interesting ideas swirling around me and try to make sense of it all. Knowledge work in this sense is a lifelong balancing project of action and reflection and one that I hope keeps me sharp, curious, and excited.

Always We Begin Again

Much of living is just connecting ideas, knitting a patchwork of thoughts into something coherent so that we can navigate the day-to-day. Recently, I’ve been thinking about the fruitful tension between agnostic acceptance and active hope.

The idea of agnostic acceptance is best explored through an old fable. Go ahead and read it. It’ll just take a minute; I’ll wait.

Powerful stuff, right? The farmer carved out a space for tranquility: he decides what the world’s comings and goings mean and he decided that he doesn’t know what they mean just yet; he’ll reserve his opinion for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. In doing so, he created a bulwark against the changing tides.

The tranquility on offer in the throes of agnostic acceptance is a powerful tool to wield in a culture that constantly signals us to want more and to want better. From that space that we create by saying "I don't know yet what this means" we can view the promises of happiness if we just get the thing we are chasing with some skepticism.

At the same time, I want to be relentlessly open to the changing tide — and I want to be part of that change. It’s in my DNA to inquire into the nature of things and ask how we might do better. It’s a constant impulse, at times a noble and naive one, that has driven me to where I am today. I cannot simply say “We shall see” for I fear that in doing so I might lose the edge that pushes me to take part.

Some semblance of a resolution might lie in a benedictine phrase that I have kept close for many years: Always we begin again. Those words host the ideas of hopeful gratitude and fierce openness. Today, we begin again. Always, we begin again. There is an infinite possibility in now if you have opened yourself to it.

So I can work my way to the tranquility of the farmer, with his careful agnostic acceptance yet still unfurl my awareness in the present to what can be and take what action I can. We shall see yet always we begin again.

Commonplace Links #5

As there's no real theme to this collection, let's just dive in.

Walt Whitman on a playbook for life:

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Says about all you need to hear, right?

Relatedly, check out Jedidiah Jenkins on awe:

The first and truest spiritual practice is awe.

Let awe be my religion.

On how to push progress in a city:

Baltimore has plenty of problems with many potential answers, but all of them start, Harris says, with talent — the brightest and the best, the kind of people cities like New York and San Francisco take for granted. As the CEO of Baltimore Corps, his budding operation of about a dozen full-timers, Harris plays matchmaker between civic-minded idealists and the local groups who could use their brilliance. They are a mix of homegrown Baltimoreans and those attracted to the fellowship’s aspirational pitch of “The best place in the world to change the world.” In two years, he’s placed 45 “fellows” in leadership roles. Roughly 75 percent of the fellows’ have their salaries paid by their employers, while the other 25 percent are paid by Baltimore Corps.

I love this approach. It's smart and inspiring.

Frank Chimero on the pencil:

The pencil is the great equalizer.

I'm a big believer in the analog amongst the digital.

James Shelley on writing as a way of life:

You should be gathering, organizing, and developing your knowledge on the topics you care about most, as if you are conducting the research for your magnum opus. Build your archives and give definitive (albeit tentative) shape to the schematics of your understanding: then, as you move through the world, you will be able to bring everything you come across into the ‘mental laboratory’ of your mind for analysis and investigation.

I'm working on this myself.

Seth Godin on projects vs. jobs:

Projects are open-ended, chosen and ours. Working on a project opens the door to possibility. Projects are about better, about new frontiers, about making change happen. When in doubt, dare.

It's so hard to break out of the job mindset, but when you do, the potential of projects can be refreshing.

Finally, can we ever get enough of Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese"? I don't think so. The first line:

You do not have to be good

The Post Game Debrief

Writing is often really just a way to get something to stop bugging me. It doesn't always work: even after writing a post, whatever led me to write can still linger and demand attention. Recently, I wrote about the importance of a growth mindset and that idea stuck around my mind and recalled some memories.

When I was younger, I played a lot of competitive soccer. My sister and brother did, too. We played different roles on the field during a match, but the scene afterwards looked the same for all of us: we would get into the passenger side of the car and immediately debrief the game we had just played. I know my mom took me to a lot of games, but in my mind's eye the scenes play out mostly with my dad in the driver's seat.

The self-critique was often just a move of self-preservation. We had learned that it was a lot easier to work through our mistakes ourselves than to suffer through a brutally honest analysis from our dad. He was never angry about results; he was exclusively obsessed with process. He only cared about whether we had tried and gave it our all. These debriefs, with their focus on the potential to improve, made us all growth-oriented as players. At the same time, they provided a space for recognition of effort and progress.

By the end of my soccer career, it wasn't uncommon for my dad to reply to my self-criticism with an "Ok", signaling that I had properly deconstructed the game. Sometimes he would interject and tell me that no, I gave it my all on a particular play and that I shouldn't beat myself up over it. Whether those conversations involved praise or criticism, the post game debrief became part of my ritual as a player.

Some of my proudest moments came not on the field but in the passenger side of the car. I wasn't the best player out there, but I fought some good battles during my time. Afterwards, I would hop in the car and not say a word because I knew I had nailed it and given it my all. In those moments, my dad's matching silence meant more than words ever could. The post game debrief had taught us all about effort, about growth, and about recognition of a job well done.

Happy Father's Day, Dad.

Rediscovering Grit and Growth

When I arrived at law school, I didn't quite know what to expect. There are no lawyers in my family; anything I thought I knew about the experiences ahead were things that I had read online and digested with a healthy dose of salt.

I quickly found out that I was drowning. This wasn't like undergrad where I studied the humanities. If you love reading and are willing to put the time into writing (that is, revising) then you do okay. I love reading and writing; as a result, I did okay.

Law school is different. It plays to some of my strengths as a reader and writer, but I often felt like I was being told to use a muscle that I had just learned I had. So much of the curriculum and the pedagogy that delivered it felt unintuitive and foreign.

Part of the feeling of drowning undoubtedly had to do with the quality of my peers. Graduate school is a filter and I've found myself among some interesting and sharp folks in law school. At times, I felt like an imposter, drowning in the shallow end. More than once I was the definitive dumb kid in the room, a surreal experience for someone who prides himself on being in the know.

I've completed two years of law school now. I've found that there is a surprising pleasure in drowning, but the reward of that pleasure requires a renewed focus on grit and growth.

By grit, I don't mean white-knuckling it. I mean persistence and resilience. Grit is the willingness to use deep work to push the mind to new and exciting places. Law is an epic story that rewards careful and interwoven thinking fueled by grit.

But grit has to be paired with a growth-mindset. The mindset is a commitment to the idea you are always in the radical process of becoming intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. Imposter syndrome at its root has to do with a fixed-mindset: your perceived inadequacy in a particular moment is who you think you are. Embrace a growth-mindset and there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Mistakes are just milestones.

We have to -- we get to -- make choices about who we want to be every day. Grit and growth. That's what I'm about these days. How about you?

A Personal Government

What if your life was totally controlled by the government?

No, I'm not envisioning some dystopian future or referencing a distorted view of the present. Nor am I speaking about the pervasive and important influence that our local, state, and national governments have on our daily lives. I'm proposing a personal government, one formed by a three-way division of yourself.

First, you would need a constitution that sets up the fundamental structure for how you live your life. Maybe you want some things baked in: always take the stairs; find a way to tell the truth; navigate with a particular ethical precept in mind. Maybe you dream up an ideal day. Importantly, your constitution might install a division of powers between three branches: the legislative, the judicial, and the executive.

Your legislature would decide on the rules outside of the broad directives of the constitution. Every once in a while, you could brainstorm a legislative agenda: issues whose resolution would make your life better. You could, for example, do some research on diet and decide that you want to eat vegetarian or Paleo. Or you might set up some rules for the way you work so that you are always at the top of your game. Additionally, your "legislature" might determine what sort of goals you should pursue in the short and long term. These rules and decisions would come about only after careful consideration of the pros and cons. They would be treated roughly as final choices, subject, of course, to careful revision.

Your executive would carry out the laws "passed" by your legislative branch. This part of you involves the day-to-day planning and execution. You'd consult the rules and then engage in active living.

Your judiciary would assess whether your executive was faithfully executive the laws and whether the other two "branches" were adhering to the constitution you set up. Perhaps these checks come about through a regular process of journaling; any discrepancies demand a change of course. Alternatively, you might use the judiciary as a mental space for post-mortems, dissecting what went wrong and why you strayed from your principles.

The next time you have to make a decision, consult your personal government. What would make it through the rigmarole of your three inner branches? A personal government such as the one described above would only let the best ideas win and the best you express itself.

Kids these days...

Today, I went to the park to do a quick workout at a playground close to my apartment. Afterwards, I was sitting on a tree stump next to a small grove near the playground when a small boy ran in my direction. He's blonde, wild-eyed, maybe four or five.

His mom calls, "Where are you going?"

Boy: "Over there. To see all the pretty plants."

Mom: "Ok. Just be careful."

Boy: "Why?"

Mom: "It's damp. You'll get wet."

Boy: "Oh."

He runs in.

Commonplace Links #4

I found powerful this episode of OnBeing with David Whyte. Maria Popova helpfully points to some good parts of the conversation here.

One part that Popova doesn't touch on is Whyte's thoughts on the power of questions. Whyte reflects:

The ability to ask beautiful questions, often in very unbeautiful moments, is one of the great disciplines of a human life. And a beautiful question starts to shape your identity as much by asking it as it does by having it answered. And you don’t have to do anything about it, you just have to keep asking, and before you know it, you will find yourself actually shaping a different life, meeting different people, finding conversations that are leading you in those directions that you wouldn’t even have seen before.

I love this idea. Asking better questions is an underrated path towards transformation of both ourselves and others.

Relatedly, Jedidiah Jenkins writes about how another way we can shape others: highlighting what's best in them. Jenkins:

Saying what someone 'is’ is like witchcraft. For this reason, I tell people what is lovely, so that it becomes more of them.

Another way to put it: we are what others pay attention to. There's beauty in this idea of becoming through call and response, though we shouldn't forget James Baldwin's powerful admonition: "You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble."

Whyte's poem "Sweet Darkness," which he reads during the episode, offers a little help in the difficult process of choosing how to engage with the world. Its closing lines:

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you

Anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you. What an incredible way of sifting through yes's and no's in life.

Finally, Freddie de Boer on reading:

My recommendation to anyone, but particularly to anyone who wants to restart their habit of regular reading of book-length work, is a project book.

...

A project book is one that you want to take a long time with, often one that necessitates taking a long time with. And though so many of your instincts are going to militate against it, you should stretch out into that time. Get comfortable. Think of your project book as a long-term sublease, a place that you know you won’t live in forever but one that you also know has to come to feel like home. You want to take months, reading little chunks at a time. It might offend your bookworm nature, but I find it’s useful to make a regular appointment– for this hour, twice a week, I will read this book and ancillary materials about it. Think of it like appointment television, if that suits you. Learn to enjoy the feeling of not being in complete control over what you mentally consume all the time, a feeling that has become rarer and rarer.

I've been thinking a lot about reading and its importance to the both the mind and soul. I'm actively rebuilding my identity as a reader, which directly feeds my identity as a writer. A project book is a fantastic way of training that skill. I have a few ideas for one (perhaps Plato's Republic or DFW's Infinite Jest), though I think I will take one up this summer.

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Background to this experiment in link-sharing here.