Life

This month, Courtney and I drove from Phoenix to San Diego for a bridal shower and mini vacation. The drive is ~5 hours and relatively easy, minus the winding mountain roads during the final stretch (at which point you can just let your California native wife take over, and close your eyes as she whips the car around 90-degree turns, at elevations of 4,000 feet, believing any consideration of physics and its laws to be an excuse used by slow, bad drivers).

As usual on road trips, I was counting down the minutes until our arrival, excited about everything we would do. But as I sat behind the wheel, cruise control on, an open road ahead, listening to one of my favorite books with my wife, I wondered why I was in such a hurry to get there.

It’s something I never thought much about, it’s just what you do—get there as fast as possible. When you’re a kid you whine, are we there yet? When you’re an adult you already know you’re not there yet and you won’t be there for another 256 miles. Traveling is the inconvenient part of vacationing, the part you muscle through to get to where you want to be. 

But as Interstate 8 stretched on, I thought about what a great time I was having. Why am I rushing through a beautiful drive with my best friend? So I can get to the hotel sooner? So we can check in and head to the beach? So we can sit and enjoy each other’s company and do essentially the same thing we are already doing?

I realized I was already having the time of my life! What I wanted wasn’t over there, it was right here, just waiting for me to notice.

It struck me how absurd it was to think I could be present at the beach when I couldn’t even be present in the car. It reminded me…

If We Can’t Live In This Moment, We Can’t Live In Any Moment
When Thich Nhat Hanh would have friends over for dinner, he had a routine of washing the dishes afterward before sitting down to drink tea with everyone. One evening, his friend Jim Forest asked if he may wash the dishes. Go ahead, Thich replied, just remember there are 2 ways to wash the dishes: “The first is to wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes and the second is to wash the dishes in order to wash the dishes.” If we’re washing the dishes to get to the tea, we aren’t really washing the dishes. The rest of Thich Nhat Hanh’s assertion is worth quoting in full:

“What’s more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact, we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can’t wash the dishes, then chances are we won’t be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future—and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.”

You’re Exactly Where You’re Supposed to Be. Enjoy It
In Ethan Hawke’s beautiful book Rules for a Knight the protagonist, Sir Thomas Lemuel Hawke, recounts a time in his childhood when he went to see his grandfather to ask him for advice about how to live his life. His grandfather welcomed him warmly, happy to share his wisdom. The boy congratulated himself for coming, saying, “I knew I’d come to the right place.” His grandfather looked at him and said, “I’m glad you’ve come, Thomas. I’ve been hoping you’d show your face at my door for a long time, and I will happily accept you as my squire, if that’s what you want. But the first thing you must understand is that you need not have gone anywhere. You are always in the right place at exactly the right time, and you always have been.” He then paused and asked the boy, “Do you know why King Arthur’s knights could not see the mountain peak of Sea Fell?” Thomas said he did not. “Because,” his grandfather smiled, “that’s where they were standing.”

Books Read This Month

The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain De Botton is amazing. Each chapter comprises 2 things: a common, specific problem and a posthumous philosopher with the best solutions for it. From how Socrates dealt with unpopularity (and why it’s sometimes a good thing to be unpopular), to how Montaigne overcame his perceived inadequacies, it gives an abundance of excellent advice. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year. I read You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) and Real Artists Don’t Starve by Jeff Goins. I added both to my list of favorite books on writing and creativity, and both helped me understand that as much as art needs business, business needs art, and to not sell yourself short. I read Lord of the Flies by William Golding for the first time which was, of course, great. We listened to one of my favorite books, The Obstacle is the Way, by Ryan Holiday on our road trip. I read Ethan Hawke’s wonderful, philosophical gem Rules for a Knight and I loved it. I also read James Romm’s Dying Every Day, an awesome biography of Seneca during his time as an advisor to the unhinged Nero. It’s a great mix of drama, history, and philosophy.

In early January of this year, my parents’ 16-year-old cat, Quinn, passed away. Her final week had been gut-wrenching.

The day after she passed, I called my dad and cried on the phone to him. (I felt guilty about this—I should have been the one comforting him and my mom, not the other way around—but I couldn’t help it.) I can’t stop thinking about Quinn’s final week, I told him, and I can’t stop crying. My dad listened patiently as always. When he finally spoke, he said something that instantly calmed me, and has calmed me since. “Em,” he said, “you can’t do this to yourself. We had sixteen great years with Quinn. So we can think about the 1 week of sadness or the 16 years of happiness, you know? We can choose.”

The 1 week of sadness or the 16 years of happiness. We can choose…

Principles or People
If we bend the rules for one person, we’ll have to bend the rules for everyone. That was the position of Gavin de Becker’s client, a mid-sized city that was in a dispute with a former employee. The city had offered the ex-employee, who was retiring due to a mental disability, $11,000. The ex-employee refused to accept the offer because it didn’t include an extra $400 he felt entitled to. The city refused to pay the $400 because it was not approved beforehand and would therefore violate the rule. An ongoing dispute began, and the city hired Gavin de Becker to mediate. He advised them to pay the $400 (they’d already spent more than that fighting it) because it was an inconsequential sum and obviously a matter of pride. One day, the ex-employee showed up without notice and demanded to speak to the administrator who’d made the decision not to pay him. The two argued; neither side would budge. The ex-employee then laid two .38 caliber bullets on the admin’s desk and walked out. De Becker also learned that the ex-employee had recently shown his therapist a gun while talking about the situation. “Right is right, and right always wins,” he said. Still, the city refused to pay. It was a matter of principle—if they bent the rules for this employee, they’d have to bend them for everyone, they said. But, de Becker pointed out, that’s just not true. They wouldn’t need to make concessions for everyone—they’d just need to make them for the mentally unstable man who’d placed two bullets on the administrator’s desk and showed a gun to his therapist. “I don’t expect the city will be paying out on that policy too often,” de Becker said. By ignoring these red flags, the city was choosing principles over people. They were choosing pride over safety. Wisely, the city finally took de Becker’s advice and chose to pay the $400. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.”

Special or Happy
A highly-respected financier, who’d made her fortune on Wall Street, was beginning to feel as though her work skills were declining. She was in her mid-fifties and younger colleagues were becoming leery of her decisions. She wasn’t as sharp as she once was. Panicked, she reached out to social scientist and author Arthur Brooks. He asked her about her life and learned she was unhappy, had been for years. She “lived to work” and was constantly exhausted from the long hours she put in. Her marriage was in decline. Her relationships with her adult children were strained. And now she was terrified that her career skills were deteriorating. To Brooks, the solution to her unhappiness seemed obvious. He asked her why she hadn’t taken the time to revive her marriage, or repair her relationships with her kids, or cut back on work hours. “I knew that her grueling work effort had made her successful in the first place,” he said, “but when you figure out something has secondary consequences that are making you miserable, you find a way to fix it, right? You might love bread, but if you become gluten intolerant, you stop eating it because it makes you sick.” She thought about his question for a few moments, then looked at him and said flatly, “Maybe I would prefer to be special rather than happy.” Brooks was stunned. For a long while after, he mulled over what she had said. It reminded him of something, but he couldn’t put his finger on what. Then it hit him. Her reasoning—that she preferred being special over being happy—was not unlike the response given by a recovering drug addict when asked why he had continued to get high even though he was fully aware it was making him miserable. “I cared more about being high than being happy,” he had told Brooks. The financier, Brooks realized, was an addict, too. A work addict. Maybe I would prefer being special rather than happy. She was miserable because she was choosing her ego over herself.

Choiceless or Free
Dr. Edith Eva Eger, whom I’ve written about, is a Holocaust survivor turned world-renowned psychologist. We already have the key to happiness in our pocket, she says. The key is knowing that, in every situation, we have a choice. Sent to Auschwitz at the age of sixteen, she writes candidly about the horrors of her imprisonment. “But even then,” she says, “in my prison, in hell, I could choose what I held in my mind. I could choose whether to walk into the electrified barbed wire, to refuse to leave my bed, or I could choose to struggle and live.” This is the same message in psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s classic book Man’s Search for Meaning. Rabbi and author Harold S. Kushner summarizes what he believes is Frankl’s most enduring message:

Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you…Frankl would have argued that we are never left with nothing as long as we retain the freedom to choose how we will respond.

If the Stoics had to boil down their philosophy to just one idea, it would probably be the same as Eger’s and Frankl’s: we don’t control what happens, we only control how we respond to what happens. Our ability to choose our responses, the Stoics said, is what allows us to emulate the divine. No one has the power to take this ability from us. (“No thefts of free will reported!” Epictetus once joked.) And we can access it at any time, if we choose to.

P.S.
My parents have since adopted Piper, who’s now best friends with their dog, Minna.

Books Read This Month

It’s been more than 10 years since I’ve read a Malcolm Gladwell book, and I forgot how much I enjoy his storytelling. One of the things I took from Talking To Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know is how bad we are at reading people and how the flimsiest evidence often skews our judgments. For instance, people who didn’t know Hitler personally knew him better than people who had spoken with him for hours. I also read his excellent book The Bomber Mafia which highlights the complexity of morality, especially in war. I read and loved Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness, and Winston Churchill’s Painting As a Pastime. Finally, I read Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road, a nonfiction medical mystery about the Galvins, an all-American family with 12 children—2 girls and 10 boys. And 6 of the 10 boys were diagnosed with schizophrenia. Though sad, it’s also a beautiful story of love and family.Your Attractive Heading