The Three Advocates

Riding the Intellectual Roller Coaster
A few months ago, Asha and I attended a conversation between Rebecca Solnit and Maria Popova. Both are insightful writers that I deeply admire. Throughout the evening of wide-ranging discussion, I found myself in the strange position of oscillating between heartfelt agreement and staunch disagreement. Strange as it was, there’s value in riding this intellectual roller coaster.

In a world where everyone along political, cultural, and religious spectra is at risk of epistemic closure, the work of exposing yourself to differing opinions has never been more essential for the healthy functioning of our democracy and society. The effort inoculates your own thinking against the expression of dogma and sharpens the edges of your persuasive endeavors.

A Model for Clear Thinking
I’ve formulated a model — what I call the Three Advocates — that aids this effort:

In order to effectively engage in public discourse, expose yourself to three “advocates”: the Angel’s Advocate, the Devil’s Advocate, and the Autonomous Advocate

The Angel’s Advocate
The Angel’s Advocate is part of your tribe and espouses your deeply held values with sincerity, clarity, and force. At the same time, the Angel's Advocate knocks down steelmanned counterarguments and criticizes with kindness. Listening to the Angel’s Advocate makes you think, I wish I had thought of expressing it that way. Though there are many who are on your side, the Angel's Advocate is a rarity.

The Devil’s Advocate
The Devil’s Advocate is like the Angel’s Advocate in every way, except they labor in support of the opposing viewpoint.

The Autonomous Advocate
The final — and perhaps the most valuable — advocate you should pay attention to is the Autonomous Advocate. In addition to pressing a point with all the tools that a good Angel’s and Devil’s Advocate uses, the Autonomous Advocate’s efforts place you on the intellectual roller coaster. You follow them in agreement only to lose them around a corner and feel like you've stumbled upon a different person. You are left uncomfortable and sometimes, confused. You're thinking.

The Dance of All Three
Each of the three advocates has a role to play. The Angel's Advocate equips you with the sharpest tools with which to press your viewpoint. The Devil's Advocate challenges you by poking holes in your thinking. The Autonomous Advocate keeps you just enough off balance in order to escape the traps of dogmatic thinking. You can use this model to dive deeply into a particular topic or to curate a conversation of voices on a diversity of questions. No matter the use case, I've found it essential to ask myself: Do I have my Three Advocates in order?

Angels I Believe In

For lots of reasons, I've always balked when I hear people use the word "angels." A newsletter from Jack Cheng uses the word in a way that I can get on board with.

Reflecting on a conversation with a friend, Cheng shares an enchanting definition of angels:

We both reminisced about the people who've come into our lives for only the briefest of moments, but who seem to nudge us off our orbit, and send us on an entirely new trajectory.
"There's a word for people like that," V said. "Angels."
"How does it feel then," I said, "to know there might be people out there for whom you're the angel?"
I don't remember her response, but I remember the quiet around it.

This exchange poetically brings the idea of angels down to earth: angels are the fellow humans among us that can set off a sea change. It also reminds us that amidst the chaos of living we have the capacity to beautifully contribute to the lives of others.

Today, remember that there are angels among us. You may even be one. Act accordingly.

Regret and the Fog of Life

Regret is a dangerous emotion. You can't act on it. What little you may learn from regret risks being fruit from a poisonous tree. Too often, regret pulls you into a space of despair.

The flavor of regret that I regularly feel is what I call "Groundhog's Day regret." The perfectionist in me fantasizes about perfectly executed stretches of time. If only I could carpe diem as Bill Murray eventually does in that classic film, I might fill a day like an expertly played game of Tetris.

But the truth is that we are actors in a hazy fog, the fog of war, the fog of life. Remove the fog with piercing hindsight and we are only watching a fictional and personal Groundhog's Day.

That is why regret is so useless — and so pernicious.

Not only can we not do anything about it, but it's a false view of the past we seek to change because no memory of the past is accurate without the fog. Without the fog of war, there is no messy battle and that messy battle is everything.

What can we learn? Is there anything we can do to avoid the poison of regret?

Maybe. Perhaps we ask ourselves some careful questions. Is there something I should have (and could have!) considered, but didn't? Could I have removed any small piece of the fog to reduce the uncertainty? Does the regret that I feel have any bearing on this moment, or am I, as before, caught in a fog and should only commit to making the best of the confusion?

In asking those questions, we ought to be mindful that we don't fall into the trappings of regret. However, if we navigate the introspection carefully, we just may find some fruitful wisdom free from contamination.

Elect a President Who Reads

A couple of years ago, I encountered a meme circulating: date a girl who reads. Best expressed in a letter from Rosemarie Urquico, the meme espouses the attractiveness of a reading mind.

It should be no different for the person we send to work in our highest public office. We should elect presidents who read.

A year ago, I shared a short excerpt about how Lincoln was a reader. Barack Obama is a reader. The man set to replace him isn't interested in books.

To be clear, simply reading books doesn't a good president make. However, understanding the way one thinks about reading illuminates how one thinks about leading. A recent interview affirmed the gratitude I have for the current president — and the importance of reading. On its surface, it's a conversation about books. In truth, it's a conversation about life. I'll pull from the transcript at length because it hits on so much of what makes storytelling and books powerful.

A younger Obama turned to books while traveling because the "idea of having these worlds that were portable, that were yours, that you could enter into, was appealing. . ." As a college student, he used "writing and reading and thinking . . . as a way to rebuild [himself]."

Reflecting on a period of life that he labels "hermetic," Obama notes a key discovery he found through reading:

[I]t reintroduced me to the power of words as a way to figure out who you are and what you think, and what you believe, and what’s important, and to sort through and interpret this swirl of events that is happening around you every minute.

Obama notes how the power of stories was evident in his earlier work as a community organizer, previewing who he would become on the national stage of politics:

The great thing was that it was useful in my organizing work. Because when I got there, the guy who had hired me said that the thing that brings people together to have the courage to take action on behalf of their lives is not just that they care about the same issue, it’s that they have shared stories. And he told me that if you learn how to listen to people’s stories and can find what’s sacred in other people’s stories, then you’ll be able to forge a relationship that lasts.

But my interest in public service and politics then merged with the idea of storytelling.

Throughout the conversation, Obama shares some thoughts on how reading helped with the difficult job of being president. On the value of cross-training as a reader:

But this is part of why it was important to pick up the occasional novel during the presidency, because most of my reading every day was briefing books and memos and proposals. And so working that very analytical side of the brain all the time sometimes meant you lost track of not just the poetry of fiction, but also the depth of fiction.

Obama relays that reading helped him understand the minds of others — and get out of his own:

And so I think that I found myself better able to imagine what’s going on in the lives of people throughout my presidency because of not just a specific novel but the act of reading fiction. It exercises those muscles, and I think that has been helpful.

And then there’s been the occasion where I just want to get out of my own head. [Laughter] Sometimes you read fiction just because you want to be someplace else.

On Shakespearean tragedies as a touchstone during his presidency:

[Digging into the tragedies] is foundational for me in understanding how certain patterns repeat themselves and play themselves out between human beings. . . It gives me a sense of perspective.

Another text that Obama turned to was a handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address in the Lincoln Bedroom:

And there have been times in the evening when I’d just walk over, because it’s right next to my office, my home office, and I just read it.

And perspective is exactly what is wanted. At a time when events move so quickly and so much information is transmitted, the ability to slow down and get perspective, along with the ability to get in somebody else’s shoes — those two things have been invaluable to me. Whether they’ve made me a better president, I can’t say. But what I can say is that they have allowed me to sort of maintain my balance during the course of eight years, because this is a place that comes at you hard and fast and doesn’t let up.

Lincoln was just one of many in a cabinet of the past that he turned to as a reader:

I think that during those periods, Lincoln’s writings, King’s writings, Gandhi’s writings, Mandela’s writings — I found those particularly helpful, because what you wanted was a sense of solidarity.

For Obama, books were a way of unlocking the power of story, a force in society whose necessity never diminishes:

When so much of our politics is trying to manage this clash of cultures brought about by globalization and technology and migration, the role of stories to unify — as opposed to divide, to engage rather than to marginalize — is more important than ever.

He continues, noting that the act of reading can be a rebellion against the pressures of the present:

There’s something particular about quieting yourself and having a sustained stretch of time that is different from music or television or even the greatest movies.

And part of what we’re all having to deal with right now is just a lot of information overload and a lack of time to process things. So we make quick judgments and assign stereotypes to things, block certain things out, because our brain is just trying to get through the day.

With an eye to the next chapter, Obama still finds a place for stories as an antidote to despair:

I think that what one of the jobs of political leaders going forward is, is to tell a better story about what binds us together as a people. And America is unique in having to stitch together all these disparate elements — we’re not one race, we’re not one tribe, folks didn’t all arrive here at the same time.

What holds us together is an idea, and it’s a story about who we are and what’s important to us. And I want to make sure that we continue that.

We should elect a president who reads.

"The Only Fact We Have"

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

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

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

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

Carrying the Fire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes. We are.

And nothing bad is going to happen to us.

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

Yes. Because we’re carrying the fire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Despite his pessimism, Coates leaves us a triumphant image:

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

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

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

My Favorite Posts from 2016

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

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

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

Seeing What Could Be

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

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

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

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

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

Praising Praise Music

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

When the praises go up
The blessings come down

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

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

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

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

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

Quiet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Off to find mine.