Our Actions Matter

Our actions matter. All of them do. And that’s a lesson most often learned from the more unfortunate of our choices, rather than through the better things we produce. 

In the novel, A Place on Earth, by Wendell Berry, a father has long taught his son to farm, and the time has come to turn over a patch of land to the young man to let him plow and plant it on his own. The father is later reminiscing on the event, and ruminating on how much topsoil has been lost over the years to bad decisions—from mistakes he saw his own father make, as well as from his own misjudgments. He then tells what happened with his son:

“Anyhow, Virgil broke his ground farther over the brow of the hill than he should have. Like a boy, you know. Didn’t stop in time. But he got his rows laid off about right, and got his crop out—and I didn’t say anything, hoping he’d have luck and get that mistake free. Thought I’d show him later what he’d done wrong, soon as I could do it without hurting his feelings.

"But there was an awful rain one night after his crop had been out, I guess, two weeks. I heard it begin and lay listening to it, knowing what was bound to be happening. And the next morning I said, ‘Let’s go look at your crop.’ So we went, and walked all the way around it. It was hurt. Bound to have been. There’s no way to plow sideline ground so it’ll hold in a rain like that. ‘Virgil,’ I said, ‘this is your fault. This is one of your contributions to the world.’ That was hard for me to say. And he took it hard. I saw he was about to cry. And bad as I hated to do it, I let it work in him while we stood there and looked. I knew he was hating the day he ever thought of raising a crop, ready to give up. Finally I put my arm around him and I said, ‘Be sorry, but don’t quit. What’s asked of you now is to see what you’ve done, and learn better.’ And I told him that a man’s life is always dealing with permanence—that the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary. That, anyhow, is what I’ve tried to keep before myself. What you do on the earth, the earth makes permanent.”

I love the words: Be sorry, but don’t quit. What’s asked of you now is to see what you’ve done and learn better.

We can recover from most mistakes. But the world somehow records them all. And that’s a serious thought. Equally important is the idea that we’ll all make mistakes, and our job then is to keep going, learn, and improve. We’re not here with the expectation of perfection, only with the hope of improvement. Our actions do matter. One way or another, they're all permanent. And we have to live with that fact.

Eating a Fry Off The Floor in Public

There was a lone french fry lying on the carpeted floor almost under a table in the busy Sports Center Cafe. I pointed it out to my exercise partner. And I said, "There are people who would offer you money to pick that up off the floor and eat it, but I'm not one of them."

"Five dollars."

"What?"

"I'd do it for five dollars," he told me and sipped his coffee.

Of course, he surfs in the shark infested waters of North Carolina every day, for hours, and for fun.

Later that day I recounted the situation to my wife. "A million dollars," she said.

"Wow," I replied. "I was thinking more like a thousand."

That's a big gap, I thought, between five dollars and a million, or even a thousand.

Disgust and desire. We're all different in how we react to each. But we all do react. We find certain things disgusting, and others desirable. Disgust is usually associated with an underlying perception of risk, and desire with a lure of reward. A fry on the floor, I'd prefer to avoid. Money, I can always use to good effect.

Now, let's take a big step back from disgust. There's another, lesser, and much more common negative category - dislike. There are many things we dislike that don't in any way disgust us. We just find them unpleasant. They hold no intrinsic attraction at all. In fact, to the contrary, we'd rather not do them. But the problem is that we often have to, for the sake of some related need, or a greater good.

Suppose, for example, that you don't like to travel. But a job that could pay very well demands it. Is there a number, a salary, a financial scenario, that will make you take that job, despite its involving what you dislike? Or consider another possibility: You have an idea for a new business. But starting up a new company will demand almost all your time. You'll hardly see your spouse or your children, for at least the first two or three years. Is there a number that would motivate you to do it? Do you think there's a number that would motivate them to want you to do it? Your answers will tell you something about your values, and also how you think of theirs.

We make choices all the time. Life is just a string of choices. How do you make yours? What are you willing to do to get what you want? What would you give up? What would you take on? Do you decide and choose wisely? Do you consider the costs? The risks? The downsides? Or are you more typically just fixated on the positive possibilities? Too many of us get so mesmerized by what we desire that we take on far too much of what we dislike. And some people who make a life of doing that end up with a situation the eventually evokes their own disgust. Let's try hard not to be among them.

My friend sees a french fry on the floor and sees an easy five bucks. I just see grossness and germs. My wife apparently sees the Bubonic Plague. How you view the challenges and opportunities of the world says a lot about you. And considering such scenarios can be a path of new self knowledge.

I'd like to recommend that path. But I just have one question: Would you like fries with it?

Life While-You-Wait

Today I just want to share a powerful and profound short poem by Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012). It comes from her book Map: Collected and Last Poems. I came across it on www.brainpickings.org, one of my favorite websites. Read it twice if you can. The last two lines are particularly striking, in the context of the poem, and of our lives. I do grieve for some of what I will forever have done. Perhaps you do, too. But there is an alchemy that can redeem and reweave even our worst into a different and never expected best.

LIFE WHILE-YOU-WAIT

Life While-You-Wait.
Performance without rehearsal.
Body without alterations.
Head without premeditation.

I know nothing of the role I play.
I only know it’s mine. I can’t exchange it.

I have to guess on the spot
just what this play’s all about.

Ill-prepared for the privilege of living,
I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.
I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.
I trip at every step over my own ignorance.
I can’t conceal my hayseed manners.
My instincts are for happy histrionics.
Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.
Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.

Words and impulses you can’t take back,
stars you’ll never get counted,
your character like a raincoat you button on the run —
the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.

If only I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,
or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!
But here comes Friday with a script I haven’t seen.
Is it fair, I ask
(my voice a little hoarse,
since I couldn’t even clear my throat offstage).

You’d be wrong to think that it’s just a slapdash quiz
taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.
I’m standing on the set and I see how strong it is.
The props are surprisingly precise.
The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.
The farthest galaxies have been turned on.
Oh no, there’s no question, this must be the premiere.
And whatever I do
will become forever what I’ve done.

Action, Opportunity, and Impact

We all know that personal action is required to take advantage of opportunities in life. Otherwise, they lie inert for us and then dissipate. But there's also a deeper perspective available. In Adam Bryant's New York Times column "Corner Office," Lori Senecal, Global CEO of ad agency C. P. &B. and CEO of the MDC Partner Network said something interesting this week while reflecting back on her own graduation from college and going for her first job. She got an offer and decided to take it without even realizing what all it involved. She comments:

That was a time when I embraced one of the philosophies that I go back to a lot today, which is that action creates opportunity. I didn’t know what the nature of the job would be, but I knew that if I took action, other possibilities would appear, and they did. Ever since then, I’ve often thought about action creating opportunity.

Bryant later asked her what advice she would give to new college graduates, and she said:

I talk to them about action creating opportunity. So dive in, and great things will come of it. The other thing I like to focus on is the importance of impact. You have to learn to prioritize the impact opportunities rather than just being busy. There’s an infinite amount of things that you can do, but focus on the things that will catapult the company and your career forward.

Action and opportunity - action and impact: Two vital connections. Taking action in reasonable ways, in ways that are right for us, creates opportunities, and then among those that arise, we should choose to act further on the ones that will have the greatest likely impact for good on the world, our businesses, and our own careers. Well directed action is the key, at both levels.

This is the philosophy I call activism. It's up to us to take action. Do things that matter, both by creating new possibilities, and by having impact. This is nice advice to keep in mind, not just for recent graduates, but for all of us along life's way.

Integrity

Integrity. It's one of those words we all think we understand, and yet, when asked what it means, we might find ourselves stumbling out partial answers. It's about character and being ethical. It's about doing the right thing, or aligning yourself with the side of good. It involves telling the truth, and keeping promises, and being dependable. Right? 

Well. These are all implications of integrity. But what, actually, is it?

The word comes from the same etymological root as integer, meaning a whole number. And there's a big clue. Integrity is somehow about wholeness. It's about not compartmentalizing your decisions and actions, walling off some from the rest of who you are. It's about acting with the wholeness or entirety of your beliefs and values, in every choice. 

But wait. A thoroughly bad guy, an immensely corrupt character, a murderous terrorist could act in every choice with and from the wholeness or entirety of his insane beliefs and perverse values, but we wouldn't call him an individual with integrity, would we? No. Of course not. Because integrity isn't just about consistency. It's a moral concept. And there's our second clue.

A rascal, criminal, or deranged psycho can be consistent in his actions, throughout the range of his conduct. That is to say, his actions can be consistent with each other, and with the false beliefs and skewed values he holds. But to have integrity, you have to display wholeness in another sense. You need the wholeness of health. Integrity is about moral health. And that's about more than just mere consistency among your actions. Your choices and action have to also be consistent with objective standards of health that are independent of your own thoughts and feelings - that are, in a metaphysical sense "out there" in the world.

What are those standards? I suggested years ago in the book If Aristotle Ran General Motors that they're Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Unity, understood properly. If your life, thought, and actions are all consistent, or at one, with Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Unity, then you are a person of integrity. You have integrity. Or better, it has you. Because there's an important sense in which you don't really possess it until it owns you. You can be good in fits and starts - a mostly good character, a decent soul, overall, even a kind person most of the time, but if there is not a higher calling that you've said yes to, in a deep and abiding way, perhaps because you really don't see any reasonable alternative, then you aren't yet a person of integrity.

That's a high standard. But that's because it's what integrity is all about. Most people admire it from afar. Some actually live with it. Many are apparently blind to it, and just don't get what the big deal is about it. But I'm convinced that it's tied in deeply with not only what I call "true success," but also true happiness, contentment and fulfillment. It's also a part of what it takes to make your best possible mark on the world.

Are you living with it? many of us try to embody it in at least most aspects of our lives, at least most of the time. But it calls us to live it wholeheartedly, fully, and consistently across everything we do. It's a high calling, and a hard calling, but it's the one true path to the best life we can live. As such, it's well worth working hard to attain.

Luck and You and Me

Are you lucky or unlucky? It just might be that this doesn't really matter - unless, of course, you're in Vegas, like I am today. Believe it or not, philosophy often happens here. Maybe even more often than good luck.

Let me quote Diane Ackerman, from her great book Deep Play, where she is exploring how even our hardest work can be undertaken as a form of play. While pondering the role of something like luck in the game of life, she refers to an ancient text and writes: 

"In the Sanskrit Mahabharata, for example, we find men, who represent the seasons, deciding the world's weather and crop yield by rolling gold and silver dice. But, aside from luck or the favor of the gods, the player succeeds by his or her own talents." 

What does she mean by 'luck' here? Maybe anything beyond human choice, the force or cluster of forces that brings things into our lives apart from our own contrivance. You could equally speak of fate, or destiny, or divine providence. But for the sake of understanding Ackerman's remark, let's stick with luck. Then, we can articulate what I take to be her insight. We can say it a number of ways.

Luck sets the course. We decide how to play it.

Luck arranges the obstacles. We figure out how to move around and through them.

Again, perhaps: 

Luck paves the road. We choose how to travel it.

We all have challenges. Everyone has opportunities. Sometimes, one situation is both. And, viewed properly, the world presents much more of this duality than you might imagine. An opportunity turns out to be, also, and perhaps unexpectedly, a problem. A problem is revealed, in the end, to contain an opportunity. This happens all the time. I like to think of this phenomenon as a turnaround. Things that come into our lives can be, ultimately, quite different from what they at first seem. It's up to us how to react, respond, and rearrange our expectations.

Of course, luck is also often referred to as chance. And there's an ancient perspective on this. Chance favors the prepared mind, the skilled hand, the creative spirit, and the person with lots of great relationships.

We need to remember, the world isn't here to give us what we want, but to help make us into what we can be. And I, for one, could use a little help.

What luck!

Anticipating the Future

The future is hidden by mist and fog.

Psychologists have recently been telling us that we're really bad at predicting how certain future outcomes of our actions will affect us and feel to us at the time they bear fruit. We ask ourselves, "If I do A, will that make me happy?" Or "If I do B, and C results, will that give me what I really want?" We try to imagine what a different or new or remote set of circumstances will feel like, and apparently, we almost always get it wrong.

There are two reasons we get it wrong. First, the future is uncertain. No one can really anticipate it, in all its details. Futurists have a history of howling failures. That's part of why they keep pointing us to the future - in the past, they haven't looked too good! Some things are predictable. Many are not, and they often interrupt our best planning and anticipating.

The second major cause of failure in anticipating the future consequences of our actions is that we're always extrapolating from the situation and mindset we're in, and that inevitably colors and distorts what we project the future to be. We view the future through present lenses. The problem is that hope and fear, desire and worry, along with ignorance and selective attention, can individually, or together, tint those lenses much more than we're aware.

This presents a problem. It seems to be the core of wisdom to think through the future consequences of our actions. But if our thinking, in so far as it projects future states, which imagining consequences always does, is inevitably flawed, then what are we supposed to do?

Fortunately, for understanding various possible futures, we're not forced to rely only on our own imaginations and projective abilities. We have the testimony of a great many people who have already lived through the consequences of every generally described action, or set of actions, imaginable. Although the details of life, society, and our options change continually, because of technology and politics, and for many other reasons, human nature has always been basically the same. That's why it's important to listen to people who have already experienced what we're thinking about doing. They can tell us how it actually felt to experience creating a small business, declaring bankruptcy, taking out a huge loan, getting married to someone very different from them, or very alike, having children, or separating from a friend or associate or family member who has changed in unfortunate ways.

Whatever situation you now contemplate, it's a specific instance of a general type that people have experienced before. That's why it's important to talk to wise people, and read the advice of wise people who have gone down this road before us. They can help tutor our otherwise unreliable imaginations, and guide us into the level of caution or action appropriate to our situation.

Wisdom is available. Use it well. That will help you in making all your most important decisions and will give you new lenses to help you see through the mist and fog up ahead.

Little Things, Habit, and Life

"Sow an act and you reap a habit, Sow a habit and you reap a character, Sow a character and you reap a life." Statement by Charles Reade.

“Just this one time won’t hurt anything.” Statement by Almost Everyone Else.

How often do we use this reasoning, The-Insignificance-of-One-Time? Well, here’s the news from ancient times: Little things add up. One deed is never insignificant. 

This is bad news for bad actions, good news for the good. We're always in a state of becoming. Every decision, action, or reaction, every thought we have or emotion we feel sows seeds for the future. Anything we do now will make it easier to go do likewise in the future. And as the great diagnostician of human character, Montaigne, once said, “Habit is second nature.” The bad exception thus infects us. But the good effort grows in us.

Positive actions, however difficult, pave the way to a better future. Our actions create our character, and our character creates our destiny. The ancient philosopher Heraclitus proclaimed that “Character is destiny.” And he was right. Do something about your destiny today. In some little way, with some decision or act of initiative, however small, build toward the future you desire for yourself and those you love. 

However hard the right thing to do might feel, it will create a tendency that will carry you on more powerfully toward the future you genuinely want. So remember that.

Today.