The Adventurous Mind

Where is your next adventure? What will it be? When will it happen? And, how?

In her book, Deep Play, the modern poetic explorer of all things, Diane Ackerman, writes: "People often ask me where they might go to find adventure. Adventure is not something you must travel to find, I tell them, it's something you take with you."

The adventurous mind is always on the lookout for the new and challenging and wild - something to be explored, tackled, or tamed. Adventure is an attitude, a dynamic inclination, a way of living and working. It's best found where you are. And then it takes you to where you need to be. It's always about what's next. It's the way curiosity moves through uncertainty with danger or delight.

Where do new things come from? The adventurous mind finds them, or makes them. It's the mindset of discovery and creation. It's also the soul of intentional becoming and growth. It's a spirit and a cousin of courage. Its enemy is inertia, armed with fear. It's up to us to cultivate it and free this wellspring of the new from whatever would chain it down and hold it back.

So: Where's your next adventure?

You carry it inside you.

Bring it to the world.

What I Learned at Yale

When I was a graduate student at Yale, I quickly came to realize that everyone around me was very busy pretending to know more than they actually knew. And once you realized how the pretense worked, you could see that they were investing a lot of energy in the deception. Intellectual posturing, or posing, in service to pretending, was one of the main activities on campus - at least, among my fellow graduate students at the time. No one would ever say, in class, "I'm not sure what you mean. Could you say more about that?" No brave soul would ask for a repetition or an elucidation or an explanation. Everyone made it seem as if he, or she, understood everything perfectly, on a first hearing, or even before. There was an enveloping fear of asking questions and thus revealing a weakness or gap in knowledge or understanding, which, of course, merely perpetuated every such weakness or gap there was.

And I came to realize, quickly, that one of the best things anyone concerned with excellence can do is to ask questions. It sometimes takes courage. It can be a heroic act of bravery in certain situations. But questions are breadcrumbs to truth and real understanding.

The most important thing I learned at Yale was to ask questions when everyone else was afraid to do so. And that's when I started to learn lots more.

So, ask. And ask again. Boldly, bravely ask, without a care as to what others think of you for asking, and thereby improve what you're able to think.

Today.

Defeat, Rejection, and Victory

"No matter how often you are defeated, you are born to victory." Emerson.

No one is in the world for the purpose of failure. No one was born because there was a need for more rejection, dismissal, and defeat.

Too many people operate on the old “Three strikes and you’re out” mentality. I once had a professor who gave me some unsolicited but very helpful advice about submitting articles to professional philosophy journals for possible publication. He said: “Don’t even THINK about being discouraged until you’ve been rejected at least six times!” Shortly after that conversation, my first book was rejected thirty six times. At that point, I must admit that I was thinking very seriously about being discouraged. It was an obvious option. Depression was even a possibility. But the thirty seventh publisher I approached said yes. And I was a published author at the age of twenty-two.

One author I’ve heard about has wall-papered his office with rejection letters. Some of the top all time hit songs have been recorded by performers who were told repeatedly that they had no chance at all. There are great actors whose first two or three or seven movies were all bombs.  We won't even speak of all the actors who dream about being in any kind of movie, even a terrible one, while they finish yet another long shift as waiters in LA restaurants, or clerks in stores there. How many times have they heard "No"? 

A professor out west mailed his prized manuscript to a major publisher hoping for a quick ascent to fame and fortune. A month later, an envelope arrived by return mail containing literally the ashes of his hard work.

Don’t let little defeats get you down. Even repeated defeats. As Emerson said a hundred and fifty years ago, we are indeed all born to victory. We can rise again from any ashes we encounter.

Novel Insights: Part Two - The Life of Pi

One more day of insights from the novel, The Life of Pi, before I either donate my copy to the local library or find a more permanent place for it on a shelf here. I'm glad I looked at it before dropping it into a donation box! It's been nice to see my markings and annotations throughout. Let me share just a few more insights from it today.

Pi Patel, as you may know, the narrator, was going through a harrowing experience. He writes:

I would have given up - if a voice hadn't made itself heard in my heart. The voice said, "I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds, as great as they are. I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into a routine. The amazing will be seen every day. I will put in all the hard work necessary ..."

Too often, the voice in our heads give us worries, problems, and obstacles. It's unsure. It's highly anxious. It doubts. But the voice of the heart can be another thing, altogether. The heart is the most ancient metaphor for the inner core we all have, where perception, reason, intuition, and resilience reside. Listen to your heart, and you will often get just the message you need to turn the rare miracle into routine, and see the amazing every day. 

I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease.

Pi then goes on to describe how often fear begins with a small doubt in the mind, which grows into great anxiety in the emotions, and then moves farther into the body, gripping us in all ways. Reason itself is no match for it. He says:

Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you've defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.

What can we do? He doesn't say much, only characterizing fear as, in the end, a wordless darkness, and giving us this advice:

You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it.

Pop psychologists talk a lot about the power of positive self-talk. It's easy to dismiss this as simplistic hokum. But the deeper we go, the more we understand the power of words, well used, to counter the irrational. Speak to yourself in the quiet of your mind in positive ways, and you can dispel the fog of fear. It's not easy. But it can work.

The book is full of other insights, but these are probably enough for our purposes.

Why do we read? For entertainment, certainly, but also for wisdom. I'm always deeply gratified to find real wisdom in an entertaining book. It's rare enough. But when it comes, we can delight, and we can learn.