A Good, Virtuous Character

The New York Times Book Review recently asked two writers, Thomas Mallon and Alice Gregory, a question about characters in novels that's often been discussed before. It was posed like this: Can a Virtuous Character Be Interesting? The most common, received opinion is that a scoundrel, scalawag, deviant, or miscreant is much more interesting to read about than a normal garden-variety good guy. The argument usually given for such a view is simple. Imagine this story: A guy is born into a great and psychologically healthy family, he grows up around good friends, attends a fine school, is very nice himself, graduates from an ideal college, meets the perfect life partner, and lives happily ever after. It would not be the typical page turner. "Wait. I have to finish this chapter. Somebody just nicely asked our hero to pass the salt and I've got to see what form of graciousness he displays to comply!" 

We're often drawn to flawed characters. For one thing, we may see in them, on full parade, various traits that we've felt in ourselves and rightly suppressed. It's instructive and sometimes even fascinating to witness them fully developed and on display. In a related way, truly despicable characters in fiction make us look not so bad, after all, by contrast - which is surely one of the reasons reality television shows are so popular. And then, in another way, we may enjoy the insight that such portrayals can give us into the souls of people we actually have to deal with now and then outside the realms of novels.

Most good writers can provide long lists of baddies who have been more interesting to read about in the history of literature than almost any of the goodies. But should writers aspire more, and work harder, to depict goodness rather than focusing on so many types of evil?

Alice Gregory has something worthwhile to say about it all. She writes:

A truly radical 21st-century novelist wouldn’t ask us to see ourselves in made-up villains, and then, hopefully, revise our opinions of the real ones in our own lives. Rather, they would ask us to see the arduous and often acrobatic effort that goes into living a life of common decency. They would coerce us into believing that virtue is interesting and fun to think about and far more dazzling to encounter than malevolence.

In her 1947 book “Gravity and Grace,” Simone Weil wrote: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”

I think that's well said, both by Gregory and Weil.

I've just finished the most unexpected adventure in writing, over the course of my entire life, A movie started playing in my head one morning about four and a half years ago, and I immediately rushed to write down everything I was seeing and hearing. It was the most amazing process of writing I've ever experienced, and quite different from the rational and heavily planned creation of a nonfiction book of philosophy. The movie kept playing, and an entrancing prologue book, recounting a trip across the desert in Egypt in 1934, quickly came into being, and has been followed by seven subsequent much longer novels, so far. The prologue, The Oasis Within, is a short book just shy of 200 pages, and is going to be announced here soon, as it will be published within the month.

The Oasis Within, and its novel series that follows, are all my favorite books I've ever written. And the main characters are all very good guys. They display everyday virtue in dazzling ways. They do confront evil, and great danger, many times, and in wildly varied forms, but they are themselves great people I'd love to know. And they're the opposite of boring. In fact, they may be the most fascinating characters I've ever been introduced to, in any story. But maybe that's just me. And they confirm richly Alice Gregory's point.

I'll announce it here when the first of the eight books laying out their story is available. It will be very soon. A twenty-first century novelist is about to do something very different. 

Our Philosophy of Language Matters!

I posted a version of this blog during the campaigns of 2016. But I think it's important to revisit it now that we're hearing from supporters of our new administration, and members of it, about "alternative facts" and truth being just something "in the eye of the beholder." We need to understand the two different views of language in order to see what the new administration is trying to do.

In the upcoming days of the new administration, we're apparently going to hear a lot of people distorting the truth, and actually lying to us. Of course, that's no revelation. It's already been happening. And it's unfortunate. But we come across this a lot in business, as well, and in any other area of life where something of value is at stake. And there's an important reason that distortion and lying is so widespread at present. It may surprise you.

There are two very different philosophies of language out in the world. Which one we operate by matters. The noble view, on my analysis, holds that the overall two-fold purpose of language is to connect and cultivate. It connects us first with reality, and with each other, and even within ourselves, in a variety of ways. And it cultivates us, or develops us as human beings, in just as many ways. This view of language is focused on linking our words to truth, beauty, goodness, and unity—the four transcendental values of ancient philosophy. We can call it The Spiritual View of Language. At its best, language connects and cultivates the spirit.

Going back in human history and prehistory, language has always had many uses - for example: to warn, call, express, exclaim, inquire, infer, inform, and create. It's also had a deviant use, interestingly dependent on these more straightforward uses. It can be employed to deceive. But that's a secondary and parasitic use. If language had not already first been used to inform, warn, and express, for example, it could never have been used to deceive. The reason is simple. In deceiving, you're pretending to inform or express, or warn, and so on, but your use of language departs from the expected connection with truth that those uses ordinarily presuppose and convey. At the same time, you're depending on your listener to simply assume that you are sincerely informing or warning, and so on. But to the contrary, you say what you know to be false. You warn when you know there's no real danger. You express an anger or an empathy that you don't actually feel. The primary uses of language had to be established and accepted in order for any twisting of them into deception to work.

If you hold the Spiritual View of Language, you're going to see deception as something forgivable or appropriate only at the extremes of human behavior—in competitive games or sports, and in life or death situations. In games or sports, when we're outside the normal spheres of life, and we're playing, however hard, it's ok to bluff, or fake. We don't morally judge the quarterback who fakes a run but passes instead. But secretly deflated footballs are something else. There are rules within which the deceptions can take place.  In basketball, a great fake under the basket shows not corruption but skill. Certain such forms of deception are fine. And in situations of life or death, it's normally thought to be strongly preferable to use deception if that's the only way to avoid an act of killing or being killed, or maiming or being maimed.

In game situations, we've suspended "normal life"—whereas, in life or death situations, we've arrived at an extreme, on the other end, beyond normal life, where an intensity of conflict or likelihood of severe bodily damage has gotten so bad that a lie or a deception can be not only excused, but actually demanded in order to prevent something much worse and potentially irreversible. Lying in politics or business doesn't normally qualify—to put it mildly.

But there's another philosophy of language altogether and it's the one that now tends to dominate highly partisan or extremist politics, and even some business circles. It's a view that the primary purpose of language is to gain, exercise, and hold power—power over people, situations, and things.

On this Machiavellian view, language isn't tied to truth, beauty, goodness, or unity. It's not a spiritual vehicle for connecting and cultivating ourselves. It's a cruder tool. It's about manipulating. It's all about getting others to do your bidding. On this view, language is about crafting perceptions, and evoking those beliefs and feelings in others that will open doors for you and feed into your own purposes. It's a clearly ignoble view of language. And it's as parasitic as deception is in any of its forms. If most people didn't hold, at least implicitly, what I'm calling the Spiritual View of Language, no one could hold this Manipulative View of Language and make it work. The manipulators pretend to be doing the things that the rest of us expect them to be doing—truly informing, accurately warning, honestly expressing, and so on. But they're often only pretending to do such things, at least much of the time. They'll actually seek to show a concern for truth, beauty, goodness, and unity now and then, when they believe it's their interest to do so, but only to fortify their basic strategy of manipulation. They want power. And they talk to get it and use it and keep it.

We all need to persuade other people, and help position others to see the value of our projects and propositions. But we can do that by connecting and cultivating, rather than by manipulating. And that's the only path of honor. It's also the only one that's sustainable, long term. Those of us who hold the Spiritual View of Language can use our words in all sorts of creative ways, to inspire, enthrall, or entertain. But if we ever catch ourselves manipulating another adult human being, we need to do a philosophical self-check. Is our context that of a game or sport? Is it truly like war? When too many people start to think of politics or business as primarily a game, or a sport, or as the equivalent of war, there comes to be a subtle and secret shift in how they think of language. As a result, we all suffer.

Who knew? Our philosophy of language matters!

Harper Lee's Complicated Heroes

I was never going to read To Kill a Mockingbird. I escaped it in school, and wrongly thought that it was a dull book about a courtroom trial. I read it this week, and I loved it. It's now one of my favorite books ever. Harper Lee is a master storyteller, and her creative use of language is a true joy. Plus, the story's just great.

The book is told through the voice of Scout, who begins the story as a six year old tomboy Alabama small town girl with a precocious vocabulary that's both hilarious and fascinating. We quickly fall in love with Scout, and her entire family. Mockingbird is a book that will embrace you as a reader so much that you will have to love it back, especially if you read it as an adult, or revisit it now after a first youthful acquaintance. I read it this week only because of the incredible hoopla surrounding the "new" book by Lee just published, fifty five years after Mockingbird, which I've also now read.

The official story on this week's publication is that it was the original manuscript Lee sent to publishers in the late 1950s, and it tells an interestingly different story about mostly the same characters. The editor at Harper loved the characters but wanted an extensive rewrite that focused on their lives when Scout was younger and that expanded on the account of a courtroom trial that was originally mentioned in only a paragraph. Lee took the advice, pretty much started from scratch, in terms of the overall narrative, and produced the classic To Kill a Mockingbird. The original manuscript she had turned in was about the lives of the same characters 20 years later and in a different social time in America. It's what was published just this week.

There's almost too much to talk about in the new book Go Set a Watchman. I loved it, then I hated it, and then I loved it again. Finally, I went away deeply impressed by the way it raises fundamental social, political, and personal issues of a philosophical nature. A good book helps us see the world differently. A great book helps us see ourselves differently. This book may do both.

Almost every published review of the new book gets it wrong. Once you read it yourself, Google the reviews and you'll see what I mean.

I've read nearly all the first wave of reviews. They tend to consist of a sophisticated veneer over a tabloid alarmist screeching approach to what's portrayed as a shocking revelation about everyone's hero from Mockingbird, Atticus Finch. But what we really learn in the book is the complexity of his, and every hero's, true character, which is always more complicated than we at first realize. Scout goes through the biggest challenge of her life in coming to understand this, and comes to important realizations about herself as well as about her father.

I hope you'll read these two books as soon as you can. Click on the titles here if you want to get them through Amazon. I plan on blogging on them both, but will wait a few days so as not to be too much of a "spoiler" concerning plot and revelations. I hope there will be thousands of book groups considering all the ideas to be pondered in this new publication. It's shocking in many ways, provocative in more, and will surely give any careful reader new insights into the human condition, while at the same time being just a great, great quick read.

We'll talk more later.

Philosophy Every Day

On June 3, 2014 I began posting little philosophical blogs here every day. So this week, I hit my one year mark, which was my target for daily postings. Today was going to be the first day I skipped, but I decided instead to write this short explanation. I'll still be blogging, and probably several times a week. But I won't hold myself to the daily commitment. It was an experiment. And it worked, at least for me. I hope it has for you.

Blogging daily has made me pay more attention to the world swirling around me. Things that I used to notice for two seconds, I now may dwell on for six seconds to see whether they deserve much more of my reflection and time. And if they do, I'll sit and write to see what comes. I've had lots of new thoughts as a result. And I notice more. It's also a nice discipline to write in 200-400 words. It's a level of reflection that's new for me. Too many bloggers write way too much. Who's got the time? Even great ideas can get lost in long stretches of verbiage. I've tried to be succinct. I hope I succeed at least most of the time.

Each day this past year, I've put a message in a bottle, and tossed it into the big, vast ocean of the internet. Some of you have found various bottles, and opened them to look at the message inside. I thank you for that. Your effort has joined mine to give me a sense of contribution. And for every one of you who has left a public comment, I thank you also. I appreciate as well those of you who have written me privately about one post or another. I didn't realize when I started that lots of top corporate executive friends and people in the public eye have to refrain from public posts that are of a personal and philosophical nature because of the glass box you live in. And so you write me privately. And I benefit.

I'll continue to do philosophy every day. I hope you will, too. But there may not be a new message in a bottle from me here every day. I'll see when the spirit moves. I'm expecting to write several times a week, still. Just not every day. But I hope you'll look for that bottle that on any given day might be floating in the water, pop the cork when you see one, ponder the message, and occasionally tuck a reply back in and toss it again into the waves. Let's keep thinking together about things that matter.

Emerson and You

Ralph Waldo Emerson was in many ways our last truly public philosopher. At least, until me. About a hundred and fifty years ago, he spoke to business and civic groups all over the country, bringing them the best of his own philosophical thought. I try to do the same thing, in our own time.

Emerson believed in "self-reliance" - in trusting your deepest instincts, and in building for yourself a philosophy and worldview that is strong enough to support your life and work in the world. He drew on many great thinkers of the past, as we can, too. But he reminded us that these great thinkers were just ordinary people like us, struggling with the challenges of life and seeking ways of doing some good in the world. We can do, in our own ways, basically what they did - we can use the resources we have to come up with our own maps of the world that will move us forward. Again, it's not wise to do so alone, with no guidance at all. There's plenty of wisdom already available for us to use. But you need to appropriate any of that great wisdom out there as your own, certifying it in your life, and living it yourself.

The place I went to grad school, Yale, is lucky to have one of the great literary critics of all time on its faculty, Harold Bloom. I've never gotten over the fact that he disdained the Harry Potter books as they were being published, and threw deep shade on J.K. Rowling as an author. But still, in his other views, he's heralded as the best literary critic of our time. And he sees Emerson as the source of much great American literature.

In a new book, The Daemon Knows, Bloom says:

For me, Emerson is the fountain of the American will to know the self and its drive for sublimity. The American ­poets who (to me) matter most are all Emersonians of one kind or another: Walt ­Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, John Ashbery, A. R. Ammons, Elizabeth Bishop, May Swenson, Henri Cole. Our greatest creators of prose fiction were not Emersonians, yet the protagonists of Hawthorne, Melville and Henry James frequently are beyond our understanding if we do not see Hester Prynne, Captain Ahab and Isabel Archer as self-reliant questers.

Emerson brought America a perspective we needed, and still benefit from having and applying well. It's no surprise to me that my father, a high school graduate, had a copy of Emerson's famous essay Self Reliance all marked up with agreements and underlinings. Philosophy of the right sort can reach us all, where we live. And it should. 

Can The Deepest Secret Be Spoken?

There is perhaps no insight of philosophy more important than this. 

In all my years of teaching, I had just one student get really mad at me. We were two weeks into a month-long daily seminar on "Faith, Reason, and The Meaning of Life." The National Endowment for the Humanities had brought together a group of amazing teachers from around the country, remarkable individuals who taught in grades K-12, for a summer enrichment program. I was the sole professor. And I was pretty young, in my early thirties. The seminar itself, after eight years of teaching and learning, eventually became the book Making Sense of It All.

The student, an experienced teacher, was irate. His wonderful, fairy-tale, story-book marriage had just come to an end, days before he was to travel to South Bend for my seminar. His wife had left him a message on the kitchen table that she was gone and would not be coming back. Their life together was over. He was stunned, and crushed, and in emotional free-fall. He was desperate to find some sort of meaning and how to make sense of this shock, and of life itself, amidst the craziness, the disappointment, the despair, and the unexpected suffering that can assail us in this world. We had been reading and talking for two weeks, and he was at the end of his rope. He wanted to know the meaning of life, and he wanted to know it right then. That day. No more delay, no more waiting. Why did we keep beating around the bush? We'd been reading stuff and philosophizing for hours at the time, and there was no clear answer! 

I went by his dorm room and talked with him for two hours. I quickly came to realize that he was suffering under an assumption that a lot of us naturally make.

He was assuming that the deepest secret for living in this world, the most profound insight, the key to a meaningful, happy, fulfilling life, can somehow be captured in the content of a sentence, or statement, or proposition. And he thought that I was stubbornly refusing to utter that statement, choosing instead to tease the class with roundabout hints and elusive suggestions, but never saying the one thing that most needed to be said.

I had to challenge him and ask him how he knew that what he was searching for could be said at all. What gave him to believe that there were some magic words that would change everything in an instant? 

Now, admittedly, this was years before I wrote a book called If Aristotle Ran General Motors, and in a chapter on "Business and the Meaning of Life," I did actually manage to convey what I consider to be the single deepest truth that can be stated on this issue, a truth I had to discover for myself, from hints and clues spread throughout the wisdom traditions of the world. So, in that book, and in the subsequent big yellow tome, Philosophy for Dummies, I did write a sentence providing what I think is the one and only definitive answer to the question "What Is the Meaning of Life?" And I've had people tell me that it's the most important sentence they've ever read, which makes me glad. But even then, once it was said, once the crucial statement on life's meaning was communicated, there was still something else, something crucial that, perhaps, cannot be said, and that, it seems, may be even more important.

The deepest secret may not be a statement, or a proposition, at all.

Wait. What?

There is an inevitable elusiveness to enlightenment, to salvation, to the ultimate mindset of transformed wisdom. In a book I just read for the third time this week and twice already wrote about here, Siddhartha, the title character comes to exactly the realization that, maybe, the most important and deepest secret to living well in this world can never be said or taught in simple declarative statements. He meets Gautama the Buddha, and says to him:

I think, O Illustrious One, that nobody finds salvation through teachings. To nobody, O Illustrious One, can you communicate in words and teachings what happened to you in your enlightenment. 

He admires greatly the message that the Buddha is conveying in his words, as he teaches his disciples, and yet says this about it, as a whole teaching:

But there is one thing that this clear, worthy instruction does not contain; it does not contain the secret of what the Illustrious One experienced - he alone among hundreds of thousands.

The deepest secret is perhaps too big, and deep, and transformative to be caught like a bird and caged up into language, into words. But it can be discovered. It can be encountered. One who has experienced it can introduce it, in a way, to another. And then, it can do its work. 

Even Plato, writing in his Seventh Letter, says about his own deepest wisdom that:

It is not something that can be put into words like other branches of learning; only after long partnership in a common life devoted to this very thing does truth flash upon the soul, like a flame kindled by a leaping spark, and once it is born there it nourishes itself thereafter.

In the third chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus tries to explain to the scholar Nicodemus that, in the case of our Ultimate Quest, the name of the game is not discovering the right true sentences, but undergoing a radical transformation. Siddhartha's own eventual Guide to understanding and metamorphosis, the simple ferryman Vasudeva, basically has to help his new friend see that there is no shortcut to the deepest secret. We each have to make our mistakes, commit sins and errors, take wrong paths, try things that don't seem to help, live through adventures, and maybe, as a result of being in the right frame of mind at the right time, the light from the most elusive flame will be sparked in us. There will be a dawn. We'll then see anew. But this will happen, in some sense, and in every case, beyond words.

And that's what all the mystics have been trying to tell us, with many words, for a very long time.

Oh, and my one angry man, my irate student: He calmed down as a result of our many words together and my efforts to push him that day beyond words. He seemed to understand. I couldn't be blamed for not doing the impossible. And yet. And yet.

I know now more than I did then. And I could have been more helpful, I think, if I had lived through and learned all that I've subsequently lived through and learned, but, as Plato says, not like in other branches of learning. This tree grows in a distinctive way. And perhaps it speaks its deepest secrets almost as faintly as as the sound of a light breeze blowing through its branches. And if there is a spark, that breeze may fan it into the flame that's needed to provide the light that's desired.

The Deadliest Jobs

The Business Insider just ran an article on "The Ten Deadliest Jobs in America." Most didn't surprise me at all. Roofers sometimes fall. And it's dangerous to work on high power electrical lines. Voltage, in that setting, is not your friend. Long haul truckers struggle with exhaustion, and with all the bad drivers on the road. But out of the top ten most deadly jobs, the THIRD most fatal was "Airplane Pilots and Flight Engineers." Now, as a frequent airplane passenger, that bothers me. A lot. When fishermen have a problem (#2 Most Deadly Job) the fish with them are already goners. When loggers have an accident (#1) the trees on the truck are already dead. But commercial airplane pilots? Their problem is our problem.

Long ago, I was afraid to fly, and for many years. But after nine years of completely avoiding airplanes, I suddenly started to fly again, to give talks around the country, and in other parts of the world. People who knew of my former phobia, colleagues at Notre Dame then asked me, "Wait. Do you suddenly think it's safe to fly?" I answered, "No, I just suddenly think I'm supposed to do it."

Our task in life is not to stay perfectly safe. That's impossible. Our job is to reasonably employ our talents for the good of others as well as ourselves. If that involves, as it has for me, as many as 400 to 500 airplanes a year, well then, Ok. But I do sincerely wish the pilots of our nation had a safer job. I really do. I care about them. You probably do, too - even if you just fly a few times a year and, hopefully, even if you don't.

Metaphor Alert: Philosophers are a little bit like airline pilots. When we go down, a lot of other people do, too. Bad ideas can ruin lives. So that's why I've always been as careful a thinker as I could be, giving people the best ideas I can find and clarify. I test philosophies before I speak or write on them. I make sure they're reliable. Then, I can safely share them.

I'm determined and dedicated to the good of everyone who listens to anything I write or say. My commitment is that we can all fly some truly friendly skies together.

Go Outside!

“To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.” - Jane Austen

If you're like me, you don't go outside enough. I read inside. I write inside. I speak to groups of people inside. I go to a gym and workout inside. Why do we even call them workouts? They're typically work-ins. I normally eat, drink, and sleep inside. Then, there's the television. It's inside. And it often keeps me in when I could be out contemplating the heavens, gazing at the stars and feeling our smallness in the grand scheme of things. 

And we wonder why the greatest life wisdom often comes down the centuries to us from long ago. People spent much more time outside then. And it made a difference. In fact, many wise voices from the past advise us now to get out more.

“Never a day passes but that I do myself the honor to commune with some of nature’s varied forms.” - George Washington Carver

I'm think I'm going to make it a practice to get out more, to feel a few minutes of sunshine on my face, to enjoy some communion with sky and grass and trees, to sit and watch the birds fly by, and listen to the geese honk as they often pass over my backyard. Whenever I do it, it reconnects me to the fundamental things, and the real rhythms of life.

I did that recently, for hours. I sat outside and communed with nature. Nature communed back. I felt refreshed, rejuvenated, renewed.

On a beautiful day, it can be an energizing experience, even for a few minutes. And then, even after a rain, there can be a special something in the air, and on the ground.

“The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.” - E.E. Cummings

Why don't you give yourself the gift of more time outside? You don't have to hike the Appalachian Trail, or go climb a mountain. A few minutes in the air, and under nature's dome will do you good. Reconnect. And see if it doesn't inspire new thoughts and feelings.

Your Heart's Desire

Are you following your heart's desire?

Do you have any big dreams? If not, then why not? And if so, then are you also doing as well as dreaming in pursuit of your desire?

As I've mentioned before here, I grew up in an 800 square foot rental house on the outskirts of Durham, NC. We had small shelves of books in various rooms. And we often made trips downtown to the public library, which seemed to me as a boy like a magical place. My father was a high school graduate and lifelong reader. He always had a book in his hands, when he wasn't working at one of his many jobs. I recently rediscovered a book of his that had long been hidden away on one of my bookshelves. It was a boxed edition of a small format volume, with beautiful artwork on the box. Just inside the back cover was my father's signature, and a date: June 9, 1959. The book was Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris, first published in 1958. It was written by Paul Gallico, who was born in 1897 and was, to my knowledge, the first participative sports journalist, once actually knocked out in the ring by the heavyweight boxing champion of his time.

This wonderful short book is about a cleaning lady, or "char woman," in London, presumably in the 1950s, a Mrs. Ada Harris, who one day sees two ethereally beautiful dresses in the closet of one of her employers. She's never come across such beauty in all her life, and is astonished at the fabrics, colors, and workmanship of these garments. The lady of the house explains to her that they're both Christian Dior creations. On the spot, this older, working class widow forms an overwhelming desire to own a Dior dress for herself. She knows that she will never have an opportunity to wear such a thing - not within the tight strictures of her plain and simple life. But if she could just buy one and have it in her possession, and be able to gaze on it now and then, she feels her life would be complete.

She soon discovers that the price of such a dress is four hundred and fifty pounds sterling, more money than she can believe. But she's undaunted by the apparent impossibility of her heart's desire, and right away forms plans to gain this elusive object of her dreams. She saves a little. She enters sporting lotteries. She bets on a dog race. But as soon as she gets a little ahead, she's thrown back to square one. Still, she keeps her dream alive, and sacrifices both comforts and entertainments to save as much money as she can. She sits down to figure out on paper how long it will take to put away such an amount, making as she does the equivalent of about forty five cents an hour for her daily labor. The author writes:

Mrs. Harris had never in her life paid more than five pounds, roughly the equivalent of fourteen dollars, for a dress, a sum she noted down on the paper opposite the utterly fantastic figure of four hundred and fifty pounds.

He adds that she would not for a moment even have considered a dress costing fifty or sixty pounds. The Dior, however, was something on a level of its own. It was set apart, extraordinary, awe inspiring. He writes:

But the very outrageousness of the sum put it all into a wholly different category. What is it that makes a woman yearn for chinchilla, or Russian sables, a Rolls-Royce, or jewels from Cartier, Van Clef & Arpels, or the most expensive perfume, restaurant, neighborhood, etc.? It is this very pinnacle and preposterousness of price that is the guarantee of the value of her femininity and person. Mrs. Harris simply felt that if one owned a dress so beautiful that it cost four hundred fifty pounds there was then nothing left upon earth to be desired.

Years pass. Our lady eventually saves enough to fly to Paris for a day, and visit Christian Dior, to buy a dress. But she discovers that, even with the full amount of cash in her shabby old purse, such an acquisition isn't as simple or easy as she had hoped. She's at first shunned by those she meets at the cathedral of couture, as oddly out of place, unsettling, and unworthy of their notice. She doesn't belong in such a high end designer's showplace. But one haughty lady who serves as the manager of the enterprise eventually comes to notice the authenticity, independence, and fierce desire burning beneath Ada's awkward and untoward appearance. And, without giving away any of the amazing story that ensues, I want to tell you that in the dogged and impossible pursuit of her heart's desire, she ends up helping several other people to attain theirs. They see something in her spirit that helps them in their own challenges. She sees into their hearts and takes action, with small suggestions, that make all the difference for their unfulfilled dreams. There are twists and turns in Paris that I never expected. And on our hero's return to London there is the biggest surprise of all. As a result, her life is changed, in the end not by a dress, but by the adventure of seeking it, the things that happen along the way, and the realizations that all of it brings into her life.

The author wants us to understand the true value of pursuing our heart's desire. Whatever it may be, however worthy or unworthy it may seem in itself, if our quest for it is difficult and challenging enough, and if we engage in it with an open heart and authenticity of spirit, then throughout the pursuit we can often have the chance to do a form of good in the lives of others, as well as in our own, that we never could have imagined.

My father's copy bequeathed to me. I'd summarize it like this: One woman in pursuit of beauty, finds truth, goodness and unity abounding. In quest of her heart’s desire, she helps others to gain their own. Even a tragedy at the end becomes a wondrous gift.

Lessons From The America's Cup

The other night, I had a chat at the Eagle Point Golf Club with Russell Coutts, the man who has won more America's Cup Yacht Race victories than any other captain in the long history of the sport. I had first met him several years ago, and heard him speak about the challenge of bringing together great team members from various parts of the world and then winning against the top competition from around the globe. On that occasion, I first showed him my little laminated wallet card on The 7 Cs of Success, and he read through the conditions carefully, and then looked up at me and said, "This is what my guys do to come together and win."

As a reference, here they are. For true success in any difficult challenge, we need:

C1: A clear CONCEPTION of what we want, a vivid vision, a goal clearly imagined.

C2: A strong CONFIDENCE that we can attain the goal.

C3: A focused CONCENTRATION on what it will take to reach the goal.

C4: A stubborn CONSISTENCY in pursuing our vision, a determined persistence.

C5: An emotional COMMITMENT to the importance of what we're doing.

C6: A good CHARACTER to guide us and keep us on a proper course.

C7: A CAPACITY TO ENJOY THE PROCESS along the way.

It's amazing that philosophers thousands of years ago could grasp what it takes to win an America's Cup, or a National Championship, or a World Series, or an Olympic Gold Medal. I've had top athletes across sports tell me how surprised they are to see in The 7 Cs formula the ideas they've followed intuitively in order to attain the success they've had.

In speaking with Russell Coutts the other night, two related things came up. First: Our implementation of The 7 Cs has to be relentless in the face of difficulty and failure. In the latest America's Cup, the Nespresso team was ahead of Team Oracle USA by a whopping 7-1 score, with only one more point needed to beat Russell's guys. But his boss, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, had summed up what he had learned in the tech business by telling Russell, "NEVER GIVE UP." 

Russell said that when they were down 7-1, his guys never lost their confidence, but that the captain of the adversary boat, the Nespresso team, started worrying that something would happen. Then, it did. It's like the famous tightrope walker, Karl Wallenda, whose wife reported that earlier on the day he fell and died, she heard him say, for the first time ever, "I hope I don't fall today." And, he did. Confidence can be that important. And so can what we focus on.

Russell also talked about nerves before a race. The best people get nervous energy from the fact that they care, that they're committed. Confidence doesn't require a blindness to the challenges you'll face. In fact, to the contrary, a realistic estimation of the difficulty in any given task allows for powerful confidence, and a focused concentration on what it will take to overcome and prevail. Oracle USA did overcome and prevail, in what The Wall Street Journal called possibly the greatest comeback in the history of sports.

Like Russell's teams, I like to sail The 7 Cs. I hope you do, too.

The Bell Jar Danger

 A friend recommended that I read Sylvia Plath's 1963 novel, The Bell Jar, as an example of an early and quintessential piece of Young Adult Literature. Plath was a gifted poet at a young age, but had struggled with getting her work published. One magazine rejected her 45 times before it accepted one of her poems. She then wrote this novel under the sponsorship of The Eugene Saxon Fellowship affiliated with Harper and Row. But when she submitted the final manuscript, the publisher rejected it, calling it "disappointing, juvenile and overwrought." It went on to publication initially in England, and it subsequently become a rare modern classic, read throughout the world. Plath even posthumously received a Pulitzer Prize for her collected poems.

The protagonist of The Bell Jar is a college-age woman named Esther Greenwood. We get to know her first while she's on a fellowship in New York City, working during the summer for a famous women's magazine, and being treated to gala openings, parties, and celebrity events. The "girls" she works with are portrayed with that distinctive and witty chatter often seen in movies made during roughly the same period, in the 1950s and early 60s. You can clearly hear the rapid fire delivery of clever dialogue exchanged between the young ladies visiting the magazine. In the course of the story, Esther descends from Bright Young Thing With a Promising Future to psychological madness and a serious attempt at suicide. After a period of confinement in an asylum and a series of electro-shock treatments, she eventually seems to be returning to some semblance of her old self, however fitfully and slowly. But the story ends right before she's set to be released from the institution and launched back into normal life. The author herself famously committed suicide about a month after the book's first publication in the United Kingdom, and it was quickly seen as autobiographical.

I'm writing about it today because of its main image - the bell jar, a common piece of laboratory equipment at a certain stage of modern science that was shaped like a dome or a bell, and most often made of clear glass. It could be used to create a special atmosphere for plants, or a weak vacuum when most of the oxygen was removed from it. As she returns to clarity, Esther sees herself in her madness as living in a bell jar, with little atmosphere, where it's hard to breathe. But then she insightfully extends the metaphor to the college girl she knew in her dorm, gossiping, playing cards, and living an endless round of parties and boys that's cut off from the real world outside the artificial atmosphere of the campus.

What struck me most about the book is the bell jar image and its wide applicability. It's very easy for any of us to get stuck in our own bell jar, with an artificial atmosphere that we take to be real, but that actually cuts us off from the broader world around us. The bell jar can be many things - madness, or superficiality, obsession, or desire, or something professional and work related that gets out of control. Years ago, the executives at Enron and several other high profile companies were living and working in their own bell jar. So were many mortgage officials and traders, just a few years back, and they were as a result the people whose work plunged us all into a deep and long recession.  

A bell jar is created around us when we allow something to cut us off from the real sources of meaning and insight that are to be found more broadly and more deeply in life. There is a spiritual sickness and even a kind of death that can result. A life can spiral out of control. A business can crumble. Self destruction can ensue. We all know of leaders who've created around them an echo chamber, cutting themselves off from any fresh breeze of truth. They're in a bell jar of their own making. 

Any person, or group of people, can be endangered by a bell jar that results from their attitudes and actions. Are you in one? Is your company or community?

The bell jar is a serious danger that we're all well-advised to avoid. Don't let anything become your bell jar, and cut you off from the fresh air of life and wisdom and love and meaning that you could and should be breathing. Keep on your guard. It's hard to see at first when one descends around you. Its transparency, or invisibility, is especially insidious. And that's why it's such a common trap. When you allow yourself to escape the confines of any such bell jar that threatens to constrain you, you benefit from a rush of fresh air, and get enough of an independent perspective to recognize the jar for what it is, and stay out of it, as a result.

Where Are The Philosophers?

On Sunday, the New York Times Columnist David Brooks wrote an essay from the midst of his book tour called "What is Your Purpose?" He begins the piece by reminding us that there were times in this country, and around various parts of the world, when wisdom seemed to be readily available. A theologian or philosopher could appear on the cover of a major news magazine. The top publishers put out books that helped us reflect more deeply on our lives. The morning talk shows were visited regularly by psychologists, economists, historians, astronomers, serious novelists, and, yes, an occasional philosopher. Even late night TV surprised us now and then with a real thinker. I remember as a child enjoying the Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

In my own career, I've had the opportunity, many years back, to talk philosophy with Regis Philbin, at the height of popularity for his morning show (now Kelly's show), with Matt Lauer, on the NBC Today Show, on CNN, CNBC, and NPR's Talk of the Nation and Morning Edition. But that hasn't happened in a while, for me or any other philosopher I know of. It's not what the programming people are looking for, these days. We've left the big life issues out of the public square, squeezing them to the margins of the culture. And we wonder why we're feeling adrift.

I'm old enough to remember the golden days of TV talk shows like Donahue, and the early days of Oprah, when there were always intellectually challenging guests grabbing my attention, and helping me to think about some new, or old, topic that was relevant to my life. But then other shows came around where people yelled at each other and threw chairs, and the carnival had then come to town to stay.

I've almost come to believe that a superficial entertainment culture is just a subtle form of nihilism. People despair of meaning and purpose, and so, as Pascal said in the seventeenth century, they find diversions to keep from thinking about the deeper issues of life, death, and meaning. But when we engage these things, we can make great progress. We can actually get our bearings in the world. And we can change our lives.

I've got no problem with "Keeping Up With The Kardashians." When I go into the gym, and enter the back room where the really heavy lifting happens, I often turn the channel to E! to see what my favorite celeb family is doing. But the ancients had a principle that's deep and telling. I like to call it "The Functionality Rule": The value of nearly anything in our lives is dependent on how we use it. Entertainment is fine, as long as it functions in a positive and limited role. Our work, and other recreations can be even more fun than catching up on your favorite Bravo show, or watching the finale of The Voice.

David Brooks reminds us that in a cultural vacuum of reflection on real life issues - the proper territory of philosophy at its best - we all suffer. We have no great guidance on the big issues that loom in our lives and that people have confronted forever. My role model for being a public philosopher is Ralph Waldo Emerson, 150 years ago. I have to go that far back to find someone outside the university system bringing philosophy into people's lives where they live and work. We need to turn this around. Of course, early in the twentieth century, we had William James and John Dewey, and then later the existentialists and the ever irascible Bertrand Russell came along. Even the even more irritated Mortimer J. Adler made a splash in his time. I remember when it was a big thing, in all the papers, when theologian Hans Kung would publish his latest big book on God. It was almost like a Harry Potter publication day, but for everyday intellectuals. 

We need to bring back the wisdom. Where are the philosophers? Let's go find them. It can greatly help in our work and our lives.

Last Words

I've been reading a novel this week whose main character is fascinated with the last words of great people in history. As a southern boy myself, I've always loved the mythical last words of the legendary southern redneck: "Hey! Watch this!"

Or: "Look where I am! No, up here!"

Or: "It ain't dangerous at all."

Or: "Yeah, you can eat it. Watch me."

Or: "No. It's not loaded. I promise."

Or: "You just gotta hold it right. And, it's not that poisonous."

But most of those statements, I think, are normally followed by a profanity of some sort.

And they wonder why the southern redneck is a dying breed.

Last words can be instructive. One enlightenment philosopher, eating far too much at dinner, was told by his wife that he should not take another bite. Picking up an apricot and waving it in her face, he said, "What harm could this possibly do?" Then he popped it into his mouth, ate it, and dropped dead at the table.

My grandfather's last words were, "It's beautiful."

Thomas Edison was hardly more specific: "It's beautiful over there."

Steve Jobs' last words, reported by his sister, were "Wow," repeated several times.

But maybe my favorite last words were those of a famous nineteenth century American minister, Henry Ward Beecher, who said, simply, "Now comes the mystery."

Indeed.

The Fault in Our Thoughts

I wrote a couple of days ago about discovering the Young Adult mega hit novel, The Fault in Our Stars. I had heard about the author and his legendary editor, and just wanted to see what the two of them had come up with that was such a blockbuster. I first noticed the exceedingly advanced vocabulary of the main characters, the 16 year old Hazel and her 17 year old boyfriend, Augustus. Today, I want to look briefly at their thoughts about life and the world.

In a cancer support group for young people, before Hazel and Augustus had actually met, the leader asked the group what they most feared. Augustus, the new "hot boy" in the room who had already caught Hazel's eye, answered, "Oblivion." Hazel could not contain herself and lectured him, as she recounts:

“There will come a time, when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let along you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this” - I gestured encompassingly - “will have been for naught. Maybe the time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was a time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be a time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.” (13)

Augustus introduces himself, and they fall in love. Who could resist a girl with such an attractive worldview? I'm kidding. Hazel's words reflect a very famous and bleak passage in philosopher Bertrand Russell's old essay, A Free Man's Worship. Augustus later says to her:

"I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.” (153)

He even later reports a middle school science teacher's worldview with these words:

“You still secretly believe that there is an element of magic to this world? It’s all just soulless molecules bouncing off each other randomly.” 220

Hazel, toward the end of the book, writes: 

“We live in a universe devoted to the creation, and eradication, of awareness.” 266

Here's the problem. We know consciousness and conscious awareness first hand. We have ample experience of it. We have absolutely no experience of the eradication of awareness. By definition, we can't. And we have no compelling evidence or proof of any sort that any instance of human consciousness, or animal awareness, for that matter, is doomed to extinction. But the fashionable nihilism of this captivating book relentlessly assumes the most reductionistic implications of modern science, with hardly a speck of acknowledgement that a hopeless, grim worldview is, as philosophers say, "severely underdetermined" by the facts we do have.

Biological life in this world surely ends. And all the bodies with brains, and the means of expressing the awareness that has been mediated through those brains, eventually cease to function. But we actually have no idea what happens to the consciousness that has occurred in connection with the functioning of those brains, from these facts alone. Reductionism holds that there is no existence of consciousness apart from the functioning of complex brains. But that is just as much an article of faith as anything can be.

At one point, the slightly older Augustus actually reveals that he suspects there is Something, or Somewhere for us after death. Hazel is quite surprised to hear this coming from such an otherwise obviously smart guy. She says:

“I’d always associated belief in heaven with, frankly, a kind of intellectual disengagement.” (168)

And yet, her father later says this to her, after admitting he doesn't quite know what to believe about such ultimate issues as afterlife:

“I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it - or my observation of it - is temporary?” (223)

And that's about as positive a view as is ever expressed in the book. Augustus, though, seems to have glimpses of something big, and important, and heroic about our life under the admittedly challenging conditions that surround us. At one point, he says:

“Everyone wants to lead an extraordinary life.” (169)

And he seems to suspect, deep down, that, maybe, any heroism or extraordinariness that we do attain in this world connects up to something bigger, something he can't quite define or describe. And I suspect that he's right.

In my view, the contemporary fault in our thoughts is to merely assume any such suspicions are no more than wishful thinking, and that nothing more is possible, beyond the physical matter and energy that we can discover through our physical tools of observation. The flaw in our thoughts is to embrace such a bleak and reductionistic worldview as unavoidable, when the real mysteries of consciousness themselves may be small apertures into far greater mysteries that can invite us to rethink our lives more deeply. Anything that prevents our trying is a deep fault, and flaw, indeed.

The Fault In Our Stars

In the New York Times the other day, I read about a famous Young Adult book editor at Dutton who gives her authors 20 pages of harsh critique on their manuscripts, and they cry, and then revise, and get bestselling results. She has more bestsellers, apparently, than anyone else. John Green, author of the mega hit book The Fault in Our Stars, now a major motion picture, as they say, is one of her authors. And so when I saw his popular book on a used book table in an airport bookstore this week, I bought it to find out how mega bestselling books are written - something a philosopher would not know. I promise you that. And I read it on the airplanes of the week.

The book is good. I recommend it. It's a story about two teenagers in Indiana who have cancer and fall in love. The girl, Hazel, who is 16, loves a book once written by a reclusive novelist who now lives in Amsterdam. She's read it over and over. She meets a boy, Augustus Waters, when he visits her support group for cancer kids. He's hot, so they talk, and he decides to read the book she loves so much. And then, Spoiler Alert, he uses his "Wish" (for very sick kids to have special experiences) to taker her to meet her hero, the author of her favorite book, in Amsterdam. They find that the man is quite different from what they expect. But despite their disappointment in that main facet of the trip, love blossoms. Then: Someone dies. And the nature of our universe is prodded and pondered.

It's a surprisingly philosophical novel. And, again, I liked it. But do you remember how the characters in the hit tv show Dawson's Creek used to talk like graduate students, instead of the high schoolers they were supposed to be? Ok maybe you didn't watch. Well. These characters, the girl 16, and the boy 17, talk and think more like exaggerated versions of Ivy League professors.

Hazel, the girl, speaks with words like: veritably, decrepit, horrifically, toroidal, disheartening, dysmorphia, incessantly, feign, taut, catastrophic, hamartia (the ancient Greek word for sin), gutted, ludicrous, flummoxed, gratuitous, luminous, and indefatigable, as well as in phrases like “waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles.”

She thinks, and narrates to us, with words like rapture, sedentary, ferocity, tenuous,  misnomered, elicit, coterie, irreconcilably, succulently, malevolent, encroached, transfigured, commiserate, cloyingly, prematorium, eponymous, irrevocably, rotundity, labyrinthine, and lumen, and also in phrases like “the tears not like tears so much as a quiet metronome,” and “existentialist experiment,” and “a bodily sovereignty,” and again, “existential curiosity,” and “a quantum entanglement,” and “the sound of a parent’s annihilated voice,” and “depraved meaninglessness,” as well as, finally, “the absolutely inhuman nihilism of suffering.” Do sixteen-year-olds ever actually go around talking and thinking like this, anywhere other than the Indiana of the book?

Augustus, the 17 year old boy, and former high school basketball player, speaks with words like sacrality, trope, perseverant, eviscerated, and self-aggrandizing, and with phrases like “The day of existentially fraught free throws,” “the men and women who wait like Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot,” and “awash in the nobility of sacrifice,” and again, “awash in the metaphorical resonance,” or “the Whitmanesque revelation,” and “the terrible ferocity,” and “the incessant mechanized haranguing.”

But they also curse in really normal curse words, and Hazel often agrees with Augustus in the new faddish phrase, "I know, right?" And she eventually describes her formerly admired novelist as "the world's douchiest douche." (184) So there is quite a dynamic spectrum of language represented in the book.

Hazel's really popular fashionista high school friend, Kaitlin, uses phrases like "preemptive dumping,” and “lascivious details,” and speaks of “unconscionable” luck. And then she buys lots of cute shoes.

Parents occasionally speak professorially, but not nearly as well as the kids. A nurse gives an abstract of the news that sounds like something Jon Stewart might do after getting his own PhD in pop culture.

The prose of the book is sometimes really really aggressively MFA (Master of Fine Arts degree). And some of the ideas are, as well. But it's all very clever, despite striking me as incredibly unrealistic. Of course, maybe that's just me. I've never been around kids who ate dictionaries for breakfast and alphabet soup for lunch.

But I think the author does a good job of bringing up some big issues about life, death, disease, afterlife, consciousness, fairness, fate, and honesty that we all need to contemplate. I think I will contemplate them with you some tomorrow, or the next day. If you've read The Fault in Our Stars, let me know what you think.

So maybe I know now, indisputably, irrevocably, and inerrantly, if not sublimely, what it takes to write a Number One New York Times bestseller. I've got to practice my prolixity, at least enough for the inexorable to occur.

Too Much

When was the last time you ate too much, drank too much, exercised too much, watched too much bad tv, or worked too much on something that ended going nowhere?

We have all these clever aphorisms like:

Too much is never enough!

Too much is impossible!

Too much is wonderful!

Too much is just right! 

And these little sayings are admittedly all clever, and all sound good in the right context, but are also mutually inconsistent, which is, of course, warning signal. Clever isn't always a sign of true, although it's often mistaken as such in our world. 

How about too much paperwork? Too much information? Too much food in your mouth, or way too much stuff for your carryon to hold?

I just had an epiphany in the bathroom of the Airbus A319 I was flying on Wednesday morning from Jacksonville, Florida to Charlotte, North Carolina. The seatbelt sign was illuminated, and I’m not usually an in-air rule breaker, but too much white and red wine, capped with too much Jack Daniels the night before at a party had led to too much black coffee that morning, which resulted in too much of a need for the Airbus facilities, mid-flight, and all of that resulted in my standing up for too much time in violation of the captain’s sign. But as soon as I had slipped out of my comfortable window seat 2A and ducked into the little lav, then, zap, I had my morning revelation.

Here’s the insight. Too much leads to too much.

Too much libation and getting up much too early requires too much java which leads to too much time in the restroom during a bumpy flight. Too much weight in the gym leads to too much back pain, which leads to too much Advil, and too much recovery time in the bed. Too much is trouble.

And maybe that’s why the ancients said “Nothing in excess.” In fact, the famous Oracle at Delphi had two things carved in marble. "Know yourself" and "Nothing in excess." I've reflected before in a blog on the relationship between these two pieces of advice. Each one helps you with the other.

Of course, you can't have too much self knowledge. Whatever you can get will be useful, and it helps you know what counts as too much, in anything else.

Spot in advance what's too much for you, and then find a way to stop before you cross the line. That's the path of virtue which, in Greek and Latin, meant strength. It should today as well.

And there's no such thing as too much strength. So, therefore:

Know yourself. Do at least almost nothing in excess. Be strong.

Emergency Wisdom

A car in front of me on a major street today caught my attention. It was a white Ford Explorer tricked out with orange stripes like an emergency vehicle. And it also had round reflectors built into the tail gate. Or were they flashing lights? Above the license plate, there was a very official looking sign, where EMT or POLICE might otherwise be. It said CHAPLAIN.

I couldn't help but be jealous. If I could just have one like that but with the sign instead saying PHILOSOPHER. Can you imagine? I sure could. I'd be driving down the road and the radio would squawk. "Logic Emergency on Front Street. All Philosophers Respond." I'd hit the lights, and of course the siren, and the gas. Out of the way, everybody. Sage coming through. I'd screech up to the address and dash out of the car. City police would be holding the door open for me. I'd run up the stairs two at a time, and there it would be: a guy splayed out across his desk, with his computer flashing some sort of error message. A detective would be standing there, and he'd look up at me and say, "It's a conceptual catastrophe."

I'd say, "What have we got?"

The gumshoe would reply. "I think we need some Aristotle."

I'd look more closely and say, "No! It's too late for that! Only Kierkegaard will do!" And, with a Leap of Faith, I'd use just the right aphorism and summon the guy back to life, and conceptual clarity. A gasp would go through the room, and I'd suddenly notice all the other people huddled over at the side. They'd start cheering and clapping. Someone would run up to me and gush appreciation and words of praise for what I had just accomplished.

"No Ma'am. No need to thank me. Just another day for a hard working philosopher."

As I came out of my stoplight reverie, I realized why things don't work like this. Oddly, most people go in search of wisdom only when they confront a catastrophe, or disaster that has arisen from unwise decisions. Wanting to avoid the flames of irrational self immolation, they desperately look for insight. And they might find a piece of wisdom here or there that can save them. But philosophy is much better as a powerful preventative medicine than as last minute emergency treatment. It's better applied in small doses throughout our days and decisions. Then, we can most likely avoid cataclysmic personal disasters, at least of the existential sort.

So: Don't wait for trouble. Seek wisdom now. Remember, I don't really have the flashing lights and siren. It was just in my imagination. Then again, the chaplain in town apparently does.

A Celebration of Transformation

Easter is a distinctive holiday. It's a celebration of transformation - from death to life, mortal to immortal, defeat to victory, illusion to truth. It's about the most powerful force in or beyond the universe displaying an undying concern for the worth of each person. It's about redemption, second chances, and the triumph of love in the end.

It's also, of course, a holiday and a message surrounded by controversies of all sorts - what are the historical arguments for resurrection, or the philosophical possibilities of such a unique and fundamentally revelatory event? And what about all the organizational, political, ethical, and social issues that swirl around the diverse community of people who are celebrating this day?

As a philosopher, I like to avoid distractions when a big issue is at stake. So I'd recommend a few minutes today of meditating on the core issues of transformation and the potential power of love in our lives, in everything we do. A holiday such as this can easily be lost in its trappings. Or it can act as an aperture to allow us to view things differently. And this one, in particular, gives us all an opportunity to think deeply and arise with new insight, boldness, and compassion for our fellow creatures.

We're ultimately not here to be overcome, but to overcome with creative love.

Happy Easter.

Intense Living

How intensely do you live? It's well known, and often experienced, that we can eat without attending to the taste and feel of what we're consuming. We're watching TV or talking or reading and just mindlessly chewing our food with no conscious awareness of it whatsoever. We can even drive on automatic pilot, realizing now and then that we haven't payed any conscious attention to what's gone on, along the way. It's amazing the road isn't littered with the wreckage of mindlessness.

But when we stop and attend, our experience changes radically. How much do you do that? How present are you? Where is your focused attention throughout the day? Most of us live without intensely attending, which means we take up time and space without the effects we're here to have, for most of our moments. We're missing The Big Show that's here for us all. 

And when we don't fully notice, we can't fully act in the best and highest ways. In the end, we're here to enjoy the show, but also to perform in it our own best roles.

Don't miss the moment. You have an all access ticket. Don't sleep through The Big Show. Pay attention. Relish it. Feel it. Absorb it. Throw yourself into it. Luxuriate in it. That's what it's for.

Today.

The Examined Life

I recently quoted Socrates. "The unexamined life is not worth living." He believed that self examination is a key to wisdom and virtue, to getting our bearings in life, and to moving forward in the right direction.

And I agree. But we need to balance his insight with our own. "The unlived life is not worth examining." We can't spend all our time in front of an existential mirror. We need to get out of the  self reflective head space in order to go out into the world and do something great. Self examination can be very helpful. It's necessary. But too much self reflection can gum us up.

A high school jazz teacher once told me how often he walks by a practice room and hears a student playing much better than he would have thought possible, but that if the student becomes aware of him outside the door, the performance will go dramatically downhill at once. The student becomes too self aware of his own playing as an object of assessment. Excellence in many endeavors requires rather a sort of self forgetfulness, almost a thoughtlessness that is possible only because of all the prior thought and deliberate effort that has paved its way. We need to get out of our own heads, and free ourselves from too much self awareness if we are to be our best at anything.

As a public philosopher, I'm at my best when I'm least self aware. In a room speaking on a topic I've been asked to address, the true magic happens when I completely forget myself and become almost one with the room, the people, and the ideas flowing through my brain. I'm not apart from the experience, observing it. I'm just having it. I'm almost being it. And that's not a time at all for self examination.

So, like many things in life, self awareness, self reflection, and self examination can be great, and vitally important, when used properly. But we also have to know when to put those tools down and just live. Then, we also need to know when to take them up again - but that takes a measure of wisdom, which is basically the skill of living well.