The Self and The Dance.

After their best gig ever, the jazz trio report that it was like time evaporated and so did their self consciousness. They say their reflectively aware egos "disappeared." But the instruments didn't play themselves. And they didn't sound like someone else, but themselves at their best and fullest potential. Scotty Pippin, the Chicago Bulls basketball great, reported that in their greatest games, it was the same. Time slowed down, or almost didn't exist. There was no conscious thought. The ball was where it was supposed to be. Michael was where he was supposed to be. In the zone, what was to happen just happened, and he was aware almost as an observer but not making decisions or wondering or trying hard against the opponents, who themselves became just a part of the dance. When I was writing my novels, my deliberative mind that, left on its own will write a sentence seven times to get it right, and then delete it, that mind seemed to have taken a break and gotten out of the way, and the story just flowed with its own quick speed and power. I'd sit and type for six hours and it would seem like twenty minutes.

All our humanly created problems result from big opaque blundering egos out of control and in the way. "I want." "I need." "I'm mad as hell." All great solutions to problems seem to arise out of ego holidays, when the big bloated beast gets out of the way and allows the dance to happen, the dance that begins who knows where and bubbles up in the quantum field and reaches out in mental and spiritual ways to animate anyone whose egos have become more translucent, then transparent, and then even bow out of the way. The dance happens and we're there and not there and more there than ever and yet are conduits. We're the canvas on which the dance is painted, the floor on which it happens, the air through which it moves. We get out of our own way and make way for the way that alone will lead us well. So, when you catch ego rearing up and roaring, back it off, calm it down, soothe it and rock it to sleep so that something great and full of wonder can happen, like that jazz guy or that baller or that author or the mesmerizing teacher or that nurse who lights up the room with her dance. When the self can be free of the ego, it can dance.

Two Paths

Two Paths. There are two paths of philosophy, one represented by Socrates, one by Seneca. The Socrates path is one of critical thinking. The Seneca path is one of creative living. Both are important and in the end inseparable for a full and flourishing life. Imagine them as crossing every few miles. You can walk a stretch of one, then the other, and integrate what you see and learn.

Each path can be difficult at first, but general ease increases with the miles walked. Yet even for the seasoned hiker, there are still challenging stretches. Both paths insist that we overturn many of our habits of laziness, of fitting in, and worst of all, of self satisfied intellectual smugness. But to even mention these things and the difficulty that greets the novice to philosophy is to understand a bit why both Socrates and Seneca had foes as well as fans, and why both were sentenced to death for their efforts to improve those around them. We can do better in our time in our reception of the wisdom we need. We can help make their sacrifices worth making. Of course, they wouldn't think of it that way, already in their time fully convinced of the worth of their own paths, whatever the cost, but they would cheer us on in the endeavor. Let's explore both paths and find ways, like they themselves did, to join features of the two into one beautiful way forward.

By the way, the Seneca path is well represented these days in books by my friends Ryan Holiday and Donald Robertson, and many others writing on the Stoics like Seneca, and on other thinkers from the past like Thoreau and Emerson. My old friend Brian Johnson is also doing great work in helping people to find and walk this practical and innovative path. And my own work of the past three decades involves mostly this trail. The Socrates path has fewer easy to find popular guidebooks in our time. But one is perhaps Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow.” And family members are reading Adam Grant’s new book “Rethink” and liking it a lot, but I haven’t gotten to it yet. I hope to promote in my own work both careful thought and creative living. And I certainly wish both for you!

Two Greek Words

Two Greek Words. Ok, in English letters: Telos ("TEA-loss") means something like Real Purpose. Techne ("TECK-nay") means Rational Process.

Your telos is your true reason for being, the essence of who you are at your best, what you do when you’re in flow and flourishing, and why you properly are and do. It's your overarching aim and goal and calling in life that properly helps you select, organize, prioritize, and balance all other goals and interests. It’s the North Star of your wellbeing and best work.

Techne is the art, craft, and science needed to live your purpose and attain your goals. It's the toolkit for embodying your telos in the world. It's rational in the broadest sense of the word, incorporating logic, information, and intuition properly together, the head and the heart, which both have their reasons, as Pascal once said.

Your Right Path is the result of both, brought together well, in work and in life.

So to sum up: Real Purpose + Rational Process = Right Path. And that’s how philosophy should work. Simple. Deep. Comprehensive. Practical. If you agree and find this post helpful, please share it with friends. I did a shorter version on social media today, but this is the full deal.

Moral Memory and Wisdom

There's cognitive memory and muscle memory. That's well known. I suspect there's also moral memory.

Sometimes, cognitive memory is easy. You have an experience and you later remember it. Sometimes it's hard. I had to work for days to memorize the famous "To be or not to be" passage in Hamlet, and even longer to get the Saint Crispin's Day Speech down perfectly. You should have heard me motivating the troops as I drove to the grocery store, my "band of brothers" ready for anything. I did it over and over and over. And that's the recipe for muscle memory as well. There is a cumulative readiness in the nerves and musculature cultivated by repetition and awaiting the next spark for a nearly automatic flow of your tennis serve or golf swing or guitar chord progression. Moral memory I take to be similar.

It's all about wisdom and that part of wisdom known as virtue, though we can equally well and more traditionally think of wisdom as one of the virtues, even if perhaps wildly the most important one, since it may encompass all the rest, both generally and situationally. Yeah, I know. That won't fit on a bumper sticker or LinkedIn poster or get 2,000 "likes." But it's true. And the implication for us today is that your moral choices, to attend, to focus, to feel or to act, are cumulative as well. The sheer repetition sets up a memory in your soul making you more likely the next time to focus or feel in that way. Because of this, moral goodness gets easier with practice. But so does moral degradation and corruption, as we can see in the news daily. Every choice adds up. There are no exceptions. We’re never just doing, we’re always becoming. Small actions create small habits and they become big and deep traits of character.

With this in mind, take care to build your wisdom in little things, then you'll have it readily and almost automatically available in big things. It's something important to know and to remember.

The Necessity of Philosophy

From the time of Plato and Aristotle, astute philosophers have sought the wisdom to understand what makes people feel their best, do their best, and become their best. In our time of massive uncertainties and daunting challenges, every organization of people working together needs to put the most effective tools of such wisdom into everybody's hands and minds. That way, people become much more hopeful, more engaged, more committed, more creative, and more productive because they're truly more empowered.

Wisdom is a force multiplier. Unwise choices never lead anywhere good. Ordinary mindsets aren't optimal for extraordinary times. Only the best of wisdom can bring us the resources for transformative innovation and genuinely excellent work in all its dimensions. The best leaders understand this and do everything they can to introduce the most practical philosophy to all their associates. And I'm grateful for that understanding, because it's allowed me to have a wonderful career for decades as an independent philosopher, bringing people exactly that. The right sort of philosophy isn't after all an elective luxury, but a required necessity for that excellence consisting in and produced only by the inner happiness wisdom alone brings.

Partnering Up With Problems

There's so much great literature about the power of partnership precisely because it's so important in life. In fact, Aristotle's implicit formula in his book "Politics" for the peak of human good is "People in partnership for a shared purpose" (my words but his ideas). So The Iliad is all about partnership. So is The Three Musketeers and Dracula, surprising as that might be. My new novels are the same. People together can solve problems that were impossible to solve alone.

Yesterday, while doing a LinkedIn Live interview on video with the great Jan Rutherford, I had an epiphany. Jan asked whether struggles and difficulties and sufferings can strengthen and improve us. I said yes but added that it's in large part up to us how we use them. My insight, an idea I'd never had before, is that to benefit from a difficulty, we have to partner up with it.

That's quite a different sort of idea. How do most of us deal with difficulties or struggles? We seek to avoid them and when we can't, we seek mostly to endure them, often with lots of inner negativity. But what if we leaned in to our difficulties, our challenges, and even our struggles? What if we partnered up with them in a positive way?

Partnership is all about something beyond cooperation. It's about creative collaboration. All members to a partnership have to bring the best of their minds and hearts, their thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and energies into service to some purpose. Many ancient philosophers clued us in that difficulties can be opportunities well disguised. They come to us, often unexpected. We need to meet them creatively, embrace them, and not just run and hide and hope for the best. What does that mean? In a struggle or challenge, get creative. Open yourself to what the difficulty is bringing you and showing you and perhaps hinting about new possibilities. You'll have to be very active in meeting the problem to ferret out such stuff. Often it will take a further form of partnership with another person, or with a group of people. But it can be done.

A famous parable in the New Testament is about a sower and seed. A farmer throws seed out onto the ground. Much falls on shallow dirt that won't support it, or into weeds, or gets eaten by birds. But some falls on fertile soil. I once asked a biologist what fertile soil is. He said, well, by contrast, sterile soil has no microbes, no bacteria, no worms, no life of any kind. Fertile soil is full of activity and life. When seed hits fertile soil, the soil partners with the seed for a great result, actively contributing to new growth. Consider that you are soil.

One of our most common tendencies when a big new problem arises is to try to evade it or squash it and get back to the way things were before it arrived. But that can be a big mistake. The new difficulty may be hiding a new path forward that won’t take us back to where we were but to where we need to be instead. Partner up with the problem to see how.

Are you in a time of challenge or difficulty? Lean in. Partner up with it. It's bringing you lots of clear negatives, so bring it some positives to balance the energy and break open new possibilities. New growth can result.

Pyramids in the Sand

In one sense, our highest achievements are like sculpting pyramids in the sand. The waves of time and change will eventually obliterate all the creations of our hands. So what's the point? Why all the effort at achievement? Why all the arduous endeavors to learn from our failures and finally get it right?

I've come to believe that what we become and help others to be as a result of our worldly efforts are spiritual things that will never be erased. A good deed for a friend, an innovation at work that improves things in some way, a social media post that informs or heals or encourages, those few minutes on Zoom or Face Time with a good person who needs your help can have ripples of positive consequence that never end. Plus, why should we think in the first place that impermanence itself drains things of all value? Perhaps it endows good things with a particular, zestful, concentrated value, however ephemeral in itself though lasting for us, to be fully savored as we can, and celebrated as the art we’re here to make. So build boldly in the sand, hear the ocean, feel the breeze, notice the little birds, and enjoy.

How Business Can Save the World.

Actually, let’s think about how we can change the world. This unpredicted and unprecedented time we're all in right now gives us the possibility of a big restart, a massive reset in our attitudes and outcomes around business.

Years ago, I often lamented that sport had become a business, that even law had turned into the same, that healthcare of all things had transformed itself in too many ways as well from profession to profit machine. And actually, that's the precise problem. It isn't that everything has become about business, but that we misunderstand what business is supposed to be.

Business is supposed to be about human flourishing, building a better world for us all. It's meant to be about collaboration and partnership, about giving people structures and processes for discovering their talents, developing those talents, and deploying them into the world for the good of others as well as themselves. It's not about money or power or status at all. We've turned it into that. None of those side effects of work done well are to be the essence of enterprise. It should be seen as our greatest creative engine for attaining and encouraging human well being across all groups, and healing our divides rather than increasing them. Understood properly, business can save the world, not destroy it. But it's up to us to use this disruptive moment to re-engineer our worldviews to make business what it should and can be, and to save it from what it's devolved into, so that it can then return the favor.

As we're all seeing by absence as well as occasional presence, even the best business community can't replace the legitimate roles of good government, done well. And bad governance can make good business practically impossible. There are some things that can be done only by all of us acting in concert through our freely chosen representatives, and the specialists and experts they can marshal through broad reaching distinctive structures and processes. There are things so big and comprehensive that only government at each of its ascending levels can get the job done right, when it's been itself made right. But that's a part of our challenge now. If we don't understand business properly, we won't understand government properly either. The same lens of human flourishing should be used to view and assess them both.

We're all in a position to approach our work more wisely, and vote with our energies and dollars to encourage those running businesses who do so, as well. In that way, we can help business to change the world, and governance to facilitate the process in the best ways, rather than serving as an obstruction or a warped booster of all that's wrong, which comes to the same thing.

Courage and Your Philosophy

Courage has nothing to do with a lack of fear. It's all about how we react to the fear, worry, or anxiety that we naturally feel in the face of any danger, including the unknowns of radical uncertainty. Do we feed the fires of fear, do we allow anxiety to grow insidiously and uninhibitedly, or do we act inwardly to redirect our emotions, attitudes, and actions in more positive directions? Courage means first and foremost doing what's morally right for both you and others around you. It means prioritizing our values properly, giving up what's not necessary, and protecting what's most valuable.

Every one of us capable of extended thought is by nature a philosopher, whether we realize that or not. Every one of us has a basic worldview, however well or badly developed. The only question that remains is whether we'll be good philosophers or bad ones, which is to say, whether we'll live from the resources of a powerful and productive worldview, or a poor one. We all need a good philosophy of life, or a basic worldview that will allow us to respond wisely to the ups and downs of life with a measure of inner peace and calm. Anything positive that you think anxiety may help you to achieve can be had without its intervention, as a gift from wisdom alone, without the worry.

In our unusual time, we have the need and so the opportunity to examine our personal philosophies of life and ask whether they're up to the challenge we clearly face now, and that we could well encounter in different forms in future years. The courage to engage in self examination, to seek new self knowledge, and to work toward developing a robust philosophy of life that can give good guidance and inner peace will repay us in benefits for as long as we live, and perhaps even beyond those bounds.

Note: These issues are addressed more deeply and I hope helpfully in my Egyptian novels and in the new book Plato's Lemonade Stand, in case you want to explore them more fully. Just visit TomVMorris.com and click around.

Your Attention, Please!

YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE. The great spiritual traditions have all wanted us to pay attention to how we pay attention and to what. They've asked us to focus on what we focus on. Attention matters. Focus bring can bring us great good or terrible ill.

The philosopher and novelist Irish Murdoch even suggests in her little book The Sovereignty of Good that what we habitually pay attention to and focus on creates most of our ethical life. We build up through our focused attention, or lack thereof, structures of value and commitment that may or may not be healthy and helpful throughout our days. And when the time comes to make an ethically charged decision, the choice has often already been made by those freely but often unconsciously adopted structures of value and commitment.

Pay attention to what hooks your attention. Focus on what you habitually focus on. And ponder why. You may learn a lot as a result.

The Fantastically Improbable Meets The Providential.

I hope I get all the details right. So. One of the best people I've ever known had a very bad heart attack on SuperBowl Sunday. We first heard of it, and that, as a result of it, our friend and former pastor whom for present purposes we'll call Bob, since everyone does anyway, was then "on ice" and in a coma in intensive care in Raleigh, and that we should all pray for him. It sounded like the sort of story that would not normally end well, from a worldly point of view. But Bob had moved from the beach to Raleigh to lead a church there, and the area happens to have what may be the best cardiac care in the state (which is impressive, considering the facilities at UNC, Duke, and Wake Forest, as well as here in Wilmington and elsewhere). Updates trickled in that he seemed stable. Then news came that he was making small bits of progress, but would need a triple bypass surgery if he could ever regain sufficient strength and functioning, which he then quickly did within days rather than the hoped for weeks, and had the surgery successfully, and was then said by the medical staff on site to have had a truly "miraculous" recovery.

I was having breakfast with two friends yesterday and mentioned what looked like the providential care of Bob, if just in the fact of his location when the heart attack happened, and then I heard the story behind the story. You know the old real estate adage: Location, location, location. And the spot of the attack was vastly more significant than I had known, or could even have imagined. Bob was picking up his dry cleaning right before a planned two hour or more trip alone on the highway. And he suddenly had trouble trying to pull away from the drive through window. A guy in the car behind him noticed something strange in the movements of his car, which had now come to a full stop. The stranger put his own car in park, got out, walked up to the driver's side window of Bob's car, and saw our friend slumped over the steering wheel. The door was locked, so the man broke out the car window, determined Bob's condition, went back to his own car, pulled out a portable defibrillator that he happened to have with him (And really, who doesn't, on an average trip to the dry cleaner?), got Bob's seat reclined, shocked him back to a heartbeat, and waited for the EMTs he had already summoned to arrive.

If your heart stops beating, you don't have very many minutes to survive the event. If you're alone on the side of the interstate in your car, a thousand other cars and trucks may pass you by before someone, at some point, thinks to stop, and then of course it will likely be too late, especially when you factor in the initial caution of anyone approaching an occupied car in the middle of nowhere, and then the eventual emergency call and the likely long wait to get professional help. There aren't even that many busy public places that would be ideal for a heart attack, if you were to have one, in terms of available people nearby who would have a clue what to do to help other than dial 9-1-1 and hope that emergency assistance arrives soon enough.

But there's my man Bob, who decided to go to the dry cleaner before hitting the highway, where otherwise his episode most likely would have occurred. And he happens to be in a parking lot RIGHT IN FRONT OF the ONE GUY in the state who happens to have a defib machine in his car, who of course had himself earlier decided to go to the SAME dry cleaner at precisely the time he'd be needed—not three minutes earlier or ten minutes later. He doesn't just honk his horn at the aberrant driver or merely pull around him. He goes to look, and BREAKS A WINDOW and gets down to business. And then of course, later, when they learned the details of what had happened, NO ONE KNEW who the mystery man was or how he disappeared into the traffic of Raleigh after tucking in his superhero cape and giving a pat to his favorite machine. Of course, the cumulative magnitude of intrinsic probabilities that this would all work out as it happened would be absurdly small to the vanishing point. Which makes it look like someone was looking out for Bob. And who knows, maybe you and me, too, despite how things sometimes might seem.

It's almost as if things are going on behind the scenes, between the lines, and hidden from normal view, perhaps all the time, which is a major theme that runs through my Egyptian novels, and is something that continues to impress me and deepen my own worldview. There are odd wrinkles in the affairs of this world that not even the best dry cleaner can press away. They're worth our attention as, perhaps beautifully revealing as to the ultimate fabric of reality.

My Own 80/20 Rule

Last night before falling asleep I had a fascinating thought.

I've never taught a good enough class. I've never given a good enough speech. I've never written a good enough essay. In fact, with one amazing exception, nothing I've ever done has risen to my own lofty expectations. The best efforts of my life so far have attained about 80% of the quality or excellence I had aimed for and worked toward, and have perhaps had at most about 20% of the positive impact I had imagined.

I've always done the best I knew how, with 100% commitment to the task and an enthusiasm and dedication that refuses to give up, regardless of the gaps in quality and impact that seem so stubbornly entrenched in my outcomes. I'm oddly proud of that form of 100%, rather than being simply disappointed about the rest.

The one exception to this rule seems to be the story that told itself to me over a five year period and insisted that I write it down and somehow get it out to the world. My only job was to look and listen and write. I had to quiet my mind and get out of the way and let the story unfold itself. I think that, with the second editions of the books that resulted, now out, I've hit about 98% of the quality I had aspired to attain in my transcription of the amazing tale. And so, I can be happy with about 2% of the positive impact I might have envisioned in the end, should the stories arise to that point in the world. This seems to be how it works.

But I may finally be at the stage in my life when I'm learning how to get out of my own way. The stories have begun to show me that, both in the way they came to me, and in their deep lessons. Fulfillment may depend on a sort of wonderful and all too rare spiritual emptiness that alone allows of an exuberant filling up that we ourselves could never have managed out of our best ego resources and energies. Perhaps when our personal presumptions get down to 0%, then our contribution can go to 100.

If you're curious about the stories, you can find out more at www.TheOasisWithin.com.

Goals and Problems

The secret connection of Goals and Problems don’t get talked about much.

The problems we face form us. Those that we choose define us.

Have you ever pondered the fact that when you set a new goal, you invite new problems into your life? Many situations around you and facts about the world that would have been of no special interest to you suddenly become problems when they stand between you and a goal you've chosen. Apart from that goal, they would not have counted as problems for you. Many of those situations you might never have noticed at all. Others would have come to your attention, but not as difficulties or hardships for you. They didn't impinge on you personally. Until you set the goal you wanted to pursue. And then suddenly, you begin to notice circumstances anew, as problematic, as obstacles, as irritations.

Other situations will develop as personal problems while you pursue your goal. You'll get yourself into hard places that you could have avoided. You'll face challenges that are of your own doing. But that's Ok. It's your goal, after all. And it's important to have goals, even though they bring problems. It's part of the package deal in this world. We'd have vastly fewer problems if we had no dreams, or aspirations, or goals. It's the purpose of our goals to stretch us and grow us. And they often do that through the problems they bring with them. And as the Roman poet Horace once said, we often find that, "The greater the difficulty, the greater the glory." We feel best about the success that comes out of challenge.

Therefore, hence, ergo. When you fall down, don't worry about it. Just pick yourself back up. Recall how the journey you're on may have brought you to this fall. You'd be back in your armchair without the goals you're pursuing. And you wouldn't be falling. But you wouldn't be going anywhere, either. And bouncing back from a fall may be just what you need.

So when you're facing a new problem, obstacle, or difficulty, ponder how your dreams and aspirations and goals may have brought it into your life. Embrace it with cheerfulness as a part of the process. Solving it may just give you the wisdom you need down the road. Even the sheer process of struggling with it might accomplish that same end. We're always becoming, never just doing. With the right attitude and practice, we can become great, falls and all.

Main Life Regrets

Main Life Regrets:‬ Buying too much stuff. Believing too many people. Being an idiot more than once. Often mistaking appearances for realities. Rationalizing. Confusing the easy way with the right way too many times. Saying yes to things deserving no and no to things deserving yes. Working too much. Not speaking up. That pair of bell-bottomed pants in 1970. Not bringing my own inner calm and joy to enough situations needing it. Thinking I looked dapper in a bow tie in 1990. Second and third servings.‬ Believing for even a minute that it's possible to live well with no regrets whatsoever. Thinking I could convince any other person to avoid completely any one of these things.

We can redeem our mistakes by learning from them. My philosophical conclusion is that it’s not just Ok but good to have regrets, as long as you don’t have them in a way and with an emotional intensity that you’ll … regret.

If you think a friend would benefit from my own little blush of honesty here on this issue, please pass this on to spark him or her. It’s never too late to adjust course and learn. Those who are wise do now what those who are otherwise never think to do.

Hills, Valleys, and Hope

If I recall him correctly, the absurdly prolix philosopher Hegel posited that history proceeds by a dynamic undulation of thesis, antithesis, and then synthesis: One extreme arises, then an equal and opposite extreme crops up, when next a mediating compromise comes to be. And it all then repeats.

Some simply speak of history being a pendulum swing, from one outrageous excess to its opposite, and then back and forth. There are cycles. There are seasons. Others who talk of hills and valleys suggest that when we find ourselves in a deep valley, we should prepare for our ascent up the next hill.

We are now in a deep valley. So it's a time to prepare and plan and look forward with that most threatened and resilient of human qualities, hope. But hope, in its fullness, isn't a passive fantasy or a refusal to be realistic; it's an active goad to real action. So in this season, in this cycle, in this antithesis and far end of the pendulum swing, have hope. And begin to think of how you will help us all to climb the next hill, where we may be able to see a new sunrise on its way.

The Coming Train

Near Clio, South Carolina
It's a clear fall day, 1960
and I'm eight and I've never
been so far from home.

I'm outside my uncle's house
that badly needs paint
in the hot dry country
that's desolate and remote.

And in his front yard,
if you can call it a yard
since it's all dirty white sand
and tall scattered weeds

There's an old railroad track
crossing the yard too close
to the porch and you can stand
on it and gaze for miles each way.

And then I see a distant train
coming toward me with its light
dim in the distance but I know
it's really bright and it scares me

And I want to cross the track
if I have time to get back again
on the side by the house before
the dark awesome force arrives.

It's an urge to run across that
no-boy's land if I dare, but why
should I care about it at all? And
as the train approaches closer

I feel the pressure inside me
to cross or not to cross.
Will I do it or try it, as the
opportunity rushes on by?

Can I catch it—the chance, not
the train—or will I wait a second
too long and dash just to be dashed
and end my world in that strange place?

And now I know I can cross tracks,
but it’s not always good, and not
ever healthy to wait too long to make
the choice if you might want to return.

Joy and Some Random Thoughts

Joy isn't properly viewed as an endpoint, but as an energy like no other, a fuel that can propel us to our best and highest achievements.

Love and justice should be the currents along which our spirits flow. Only those waters will take us where we need to go.

The philosopher Epictetus reminded us that we all need liberation from something. We're all chained down by something. Wisdom breaks chains.

Habits of thought underlie habits of action, and either can imprison us in a small dark cell, when the broad bright world outside awaits us.

If half the energy devoted to crime and scam was redirected toward productive good, the world would change quickly for the better.

We've always known that love is the most powerful force in the world. So why do our leaders proceed so often through threats that sow hate?

When will the world wake up to understand that anger and violence never themselves improve anything? They plant seeds for more problems.

The greatest gift you can give yourself is time to be quiet, relaxed, and peaceful. That gift, in turn, can give you all that you need.

The best doing arises out of the deepest being. Constant busyness will not allow for peak excellence or the highest joy. Learn to just be.

It's important to be able to calm your conscious thoughts, make your mind a blank, and get out of your own way now and then. Then, the magic.

Alec Baldwin on Redemption

I don't read many show biz books. But on occasion, they can tell great stories about people's struggles, failures, and successes, both in their work and in their lives.

In his new memoir, Nevertheless, actor Alec Baldwin tells a fascinating story that begins with his parents raising six kids in a small two bedroom house with almost no money for anything. His life prospects didn't look rosy. But I won't go into the interesting details. He has certainly had his ups and downs as a public figure and as a human being. And he's able to write about these things with an unexpected measure of self reflection and honesty. I found that the book was well worth my time, and it may be worth yours. It may even spark insights into the life of someone you know.

I'm bringing the book to your attention today mainly because of two passages I'd like to quote. Baldwin is speaking in general. But he's also reflecting on his own trajectory in ways that apply to things we all face. Here's the first:

I love second chances. I love the concept of renewal. I love to see people come back from some adversity, self-inflicted or not, and untangle themselves from a difficult situation. They may correct some perceived mistake they've made. Make amends, if you will. Consequently, they prove to themselves and to others what they're capable of, what they're made of. You can call it redemption, or choose another word, but most important, they find some real degree of peace, even happiness. (page 245)

Now the second and related passage:

I believe that things change only when we are truly ready for the change. We come to a situation or event that could be a great turning point in our lives having been prepared by both adversity and hope. And then, if you let it, the future just opens like a flower, becoming more beautiful every day. (page 209)

These are wise words, and sentiments that we can all embrace. We have our ups and downs in this world. We make mistakes, and sometimes big ones. And then, we most often have a choice about what to do with what we've learned. The alchemy of wisdom can allow us a great gift of transformation and renewal at any stage of the adventure. We should keep this in mind for those around us we see stumble, and for ourselves when we're at our lowest points. Change can happen, and as a result, the future may just open like a flower from here on out.

Resurrection: The Insight of Easter.

Resurrection. It's about radical transformation and new life. It's about disaster and even death as the doorways for redemption. It's about apparent failure and ultimate success. It's about vivid appearances and unsuspected realities. It's about having these treasures in earthen vessels.

The original disciples, our predecessors and paradigms of faith, abandon the one in whom they had hoped, and give up their aims in despondency—they flee the path and the project, in a failure of both understanding and courage, and thereby provide an example for all of us unfaithful, weak, panicked souls that we need not be shamed by our lack of sturdy steadfastness, but rather inspired that strength can come of weakness, that honor can come of humility, and that the plan for all things is a massive, wonderful turnaround.

In the darkest of times, the light still shines. Happy Easter.

What is Life?

What is life? A dream? A great illusion? The analogue of a computer simulation on a cosmic scale? A divine zoo? A gift? An accident? An absurdity? Or ...

Is it an experiment? A training camp? A carnival? A risky adventure? An action and mystery novel full of comedy, romance, and tragedy that we're all trapped in—or perhaps, that we each can help write?

Is it an extravagant test? A noble gesture? A celebration of possibility? A celestial play of primordial fire? A chance at, and a dress rehearsal for, the truly unimaginable, yet to come?

Could it be: Outward Bound for souls? A spiritual garden and surrounding wilderness for the highest form of growth? A place set apart where you can choose to crawl or fly? Is it much more or much less than it seems?

What, then, after all, is life?