A few weeks ago, Courtney and I were getting ready to go to a Mercury basketball game when I remembered a quote by Henry David Thoreau that I really love.
“Bubs.”
“Yeah.”
“Our shadows never fall between us and the sun,” I smiled.
“Which shoes should I wear?”
“Did you hear what I just said?”
“Our shadows never fall between us and the sun. Which shoes should I wear?”
—
Ah, Thoreau. The great philosopher and bucker of convention. His mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said that the ultimate morality is to be a nonconformist. Not in the sense of shirking responsibilities or being “different” for its own sake—that’s just silly—but in following your natural inclinations.
Thoreau lamented how a person works their whole life to earn the right to follow their calling, but by the time they’re able to follow it, they’ve lost the desire to do so:
“This spending of the best part of one’s life, earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have [become one] at once. ‘What!’ exclaim a million Irishmen starting up from all the shanties in the land, ‘is not this railroad which we have built a good thing?’ Yes, I answer, comparatively good, that is, you might have done worse; but I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt.”
The more I read, the more I see this same idea: living a happy life means living authentically.
What mainly stands in the way of living authentically is what Ray Bradbury called the enemy of life itself: self-consciousness.
—
In the 1980s, Leonard Mlodinow was beginning his career as a physicist at Caltech. He was given total freedom to research whatever he’d like. This sounded great at first—complete freedom—but it soon became clear he had a problem: he didn’t know what to work on. He became increasingly anxious to find a subject to research. String theory was popular, should he study that? What about that other theory that was gaining traction? That would be good to research, right? Desperate to figure out what he should work on, he sought out Nobel Prize winner and fellow physicist Richard Feynman to ask him what he thought. After some probing, Feynman finally said to Mlodinow, “Look, selecting a research problem isn’t like climbing a mountain. You don’t do it just because it is there. If you really believed in string theory, you wouldn’t come here asking me. You’d come here telling me.”
Knowing what to work on is often the hardest part. But at least there’s a good way to know if you’re on the right track: you won’t be looking around to see what everyone else is doing. You’ll have confidence.
That’s what Bryan Cranston, when he’s working as a director and hiring an actor, looks for. “This whole business is a confidence game,” he says. They need to have a little arrogance about them. Not in their private lives, of course, but in their work. Like an athlete who says, I got this, with the game on the line. “If an actor comes in, and I feel flop sweat and need from them, there is almost no chance I will hire them. Not because they are untalented, but because they haven’t yet come to the place where they trust themselves, so how can I trust they’ll be able to do the job with a sense of ease? Confidence is king.”
To not trust ourselves, to dismiss what we think, Alain de Botton said, is to unwittingly ignore the greatness of our own minds. This is extremely sad. He pointed out that Aristotle was peerless because he placed his faith in the fruits of his own thoughts.
Of course, it would be absurd not to read and learn from the wisest people to have lived. But to not supplement this learning with introspection is also unwise.
Take Montaigne. He believed that we could derive more wisdom from our own life than anywhere else. Relying solely on books, for instance, to explore our curiosity and intellect is detrimental; they cannot account for our own thoughts and feelings. “Were I a good scholar,” he said, “I would find enough in my own experience to make me wise. Whoever recalls his last bout of anger . . . sees the ugliness of this passion better than in Aristotle. . . . Even the life of Cesar is less exemplary for us than our own. . . . we are richer than we think, each one of us.”
In one of my favorite books, The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton quotes Montaigne in saying that great men and women are often not seen as great by their spouses or those who live with them. This might be because they see the private, less pretty moments of life up close. But it also might be due to our curious nature to not find interest in people too close in proximity and age to us. De Botton notes that Montaigne was not saying this out of pity, but as a way of pointing out the “deleterious impulse to think that the truth always has to lie far from us, in another culture, in an ancient library, in the books of people who lived long ago.”
The wisdom is right here, he was saying. In front of you and, more importantly, inside of you. After all, if wisdom begins in knowledge, it must first be perceived within. It’s why the truth always rings true. “In the minds of geniuses,” Emerson said, “we find—once more—our own neglected thoughts.”
It’s not that geniuses have all these great thoughts that the rest of us don’t have, de Botton says. It’s that they take them more seriously.
Again, this doesn’t mean we have all the answers or that we shouldn’t learn from others. That would be ridiculous. But we do need to trust ourselves more, especially with our own callings and aspirations.
We need to do, as Feynman suggested, less asking and more telling.
One of the best ways to live authentically is to grow in confidence. And the best way to grow in confidence is to take action. Do the thing now, not tomorrow, not when you retire. Wake up a few hours earlier if you have to.
There’s no shortage of pursuits that are comparatively good. But what’s the point of that? Why not pursue the ultimate good and follow your own nature? Why not start now?
—
We got to the basketball game earlier than expected, so we walked around downtown for a while.
Courtney checked her phone. “We still have time to kill.”
She must have noticed me tense up. “I know, I know,” she sighed. “We can’t kill time because time is literally killing us.”
I laughed. “Hey! Now you’re getting it!”
“Fill is what I meant to say,” she said. “We still have time to fill.”
Books Read This Month:
–The Writing Life by Annie Dillard is a short read on writing from one of the greats. One of the things she said that I keep thinking about is how all writing is hard—whether you’re writing a recipe or an email or a text message. All writing takes effort and concentration, so why not work on writing something substantial?
-I really liked Natalie Goldberg’s Writing on Empty, about a recent time in her life when she felt no inspiration to write, and what she did about it. I got some good stuff and enjoyed reading it. If you’re in a writing slump, it may be just the book you need to get you out.
The following books—all highly recommended by Ryan Holiday (he literally never disappoints)—were the best ones I read this month.
–Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi. Long before she became one of Japan’s most famous TV personalities, Kuroyanagi, adorably called Totto-Chan in her youth, attended an elementary school that was run by a teacher with a unique approach to learning. Expelled in the first grade from her previous school for her hyperactivity, she excelled in this new one. She tells her story through the eyes of her child self: each day is full of possibilities, everyone is a friend, everything is exciting. Her enthusiasm for every little thing is heart-warming, and it rubbed off on me. I just loved it.
–Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller. This is one of the best books I’ve ever read, period. It’s seriously so good. It might be too good. I told a few people they needed to read it, and when they asked me what it was about, I was a little stumped. It’s hard to put into words. But talking about it with someone who’s read it is a different story. Courtney (a tough critic) read and loved it, and we went back and forth. Oh my gosh, do you remember this part? Wasn’t that hilarious? Oh man, wasn’t that deep? Isn’t that the meaning of everything? Also mixed in is a bit of a murder mystery. Mary Roach called this book perfect. And I agree, it’s just perfect.
–In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger. Wow, what a crazy story. A few years ago, Junger was on the brink of death on the operating table. He describes his experience in gory detail and then meditates on the possibility of an afterlife. It’s a thrilling and hopeful read. I sent it to my dad and he loved it too.