Welcome, dear reader. Today’s letter is a bit different. The first attempt at what I intend to make into a tradition – publishing a “year in review.”
Here, then, are a handful of ideas I’ve encountered over the last twelve months that have impacted my life in a positive and meaningful way. As you will see in a moment, I’m going to take a single event, or a singular process I concluded during this year, and extract some meaning from it that I think is worth sharing.
Let’s begin.
Pursuing a goal can reveal the impossibility of the same goal.
I had mentioned in a previous newsletter that much of the positive changes that I made in the last few years were spurred on by a breakup. For many people, men especially, I imagine, this is a familiar story.
In this case, I set about making these changes, with increasing diligence and resolve as time went by, because I fully expected to “get back together” with the woman I’d been involved with. There were reasons for my expectations, and they are, obviously, private.
The point is that, eventually, it became evident that not only was this outcome unlikely to be fulfilled, but it was undesirable as well. This isn’t a gossip column, so I’ll leave it at that.
You might think that sounds like a bad thing. Yes and no. It hurt, it was disappointing, and it was terribly disillusioning. But it was some of the most productive discomfort I’ve ever experienced.
I ceased my pursuit and moved on, thereby closing a chapter of my life and turning it into something I could process and come to understand. It was not pleasant, or easy, but it was clearly the only right, sane, and dignified path for me.
The way I visualized it at the time was that I was climbing a mountain to reach some kind of shrine or pilgrimage site. I toiled upward, leaving a great many things behind me, and progressing into hitherto unknown terrain, and becoming quite a different person in the process.
When I reached the summit, so to speak, it became evident that the very notion of a shrine awaiting me at the top (the rekindling of this specific relationship with this specific person) was itself among the many things I had outgrown during the climb.
It’s not that there was nothing waiting for me at the top of the mountain; it just wasn’t anything like the thing I’d held in my mind and used as a driver to keep me going. The idea had served its purpose, but ceased to function in my life in a positive and constructive way the moment I reached the summit. To switch metaphors, it would be like pursuing a mirage that, while illusory, still took you in the right direction.
If that sounds dramatic, or far fetched, or hyperbolic, what can I say? I do, indeed, experience life on the kind of scale implied by the language I use.
There are many, many lessons tied up in the experience I’ve just described, and I’m going to explore some of them now.
1.
If you undertake a transformative goal, you will transform beyond the ideas that sparked the transformation, and part of you will have died. Imagine yourself as a butterfly, and mourn the death of the caterpillar that was once you. Mourn, grieve, and let go.
2.
Here’s a controversial and counterintuitive statement for you. It was supremely helpful to think of myself as unworthy of something that I had placed above myself. This goes directly against so much of the self empowerment rhetoric you hear these days.
I believed I had lost something because of my personal moral failings, and that the only solution was to grow in character.
With everyone telling you you’re perfect the way you are, suggesting positive affirmations and positive self-talk, there is much ambiguity about what it means to try to get better.
The truth is, yes, I did need to become a better person. I needed to place an ideal over myself, and strive toward it. For a time, I housed that ideal in the approval of a specific person. I do not recommend this, in the sense that if you were to have a menu of “possible motives for doing something,” I am not saying “pick ‘winning the approval of your ex girlfriend.’”
However, this is where life gets messy. If the caterpillar is destined to become a butterfly, this does not mean that it is somehow better off skipping the caterpillar/chrysalis stage. This is, pardon me, fanciful nonsense.
Nature knows naught of should, only is. The truth is, yes, I made this notion of someone else’s acceptance and approval and love into the chrysalis that dissolved the caterpillar so that it could become a butterfly.
(Dear reader: perhaps, one day, you, too, will be so comfortable with your masculinity that you can liken yourself to a butterfly with a mostly straight face. Do dare to dream.)
3.
The lesson here? You do not, in reality, choose your motivations. You discover them, or run from them. You leverage them, or you suppress them in judgment. I would submit to you that I succeeded because I embraced the motivations I actually had, even if I knew them to be flawed as I was leveraging them.
4.
Another lesson: do not disavow something when you outgrow it. I do not read at a kindergarten level anymore. I also do not disavow my time in kindergarten. I did not disavow my baby teeth when they fell out. Such behavior would be impossible to take seriously. Yet, how often do we deny our previous selves, rather than own them, integrate them, even proudly declare them?
I achieved something of which I am proud, and I corrected my course in life, galvanized by beliefs I could no longer hold today. Maturity is looking at that dynamic with understanding and acceptance.
5.
Let me say a little more about the nature of this “understanding and acceptance.” The measure of a journey is the distance traversed. The degree of change that has taken place. When Lao Tzu says, two stanzas before the famous line, that “a tree great as a man’s embrace springs from a small shoot,” he is making the point I am making now:
The most remarkable thing about that great tree is the smallness of its beginnings – the very idea that something can change that much.
So, to hide the fact that you were once a piece of coal is to miss the thing that really makes being a diamond incredible.
Do not look back and wish you had been different.
I’ve heard many, many people, mostly guests on podcasts who think they’re older than they actually are, talk about their younger selves. They reflect on the anger that used to drive them. Hating where they were at, being mad at their fathers, wanting to prove themselves to the world or to someone in particular.
These conversations always include some words of caution about using “the dark side of the force,” warning people not to use negative emotions for motivation and drive.
Forgive me, but this is a combination of amnesia and hedonic adaptation (taking your current state to be normal).
“I wish I hadn’t been so angry” smacks so much of the butterfly wishing it had never been a caterpillar.
The fact that you now know something shouldn’t turn into the idea that you somehow could have always known it, and yet, inexplicably, you failed to realize it for years.
It is not inexplicable that it took you so long. It is not baffling that you used to be immature, petty, resentful, philandering, ungrateful, spiteful, wasteful, and lost.
Something has to turn a coal into a diamond, a caterpillar into a butterfly, a seed into a tree, a fool into a sage.
Is it becoming of a sage to be confused, even deluded about the arduous journey the fool miraculously traversed to arrive at last at wisdom? No. A sage knows the way. If nothing else, a sage understands exactly this process of change that stands as the bridge between two disparate states. This is the entire basis of the value of his example: change is possible, so says the changed man before you now.
How does the sickness of ignorance truly end?
The seventy first chapter of the Tao Te Ching reads as follows:
–
Knowing ignorance is strength.
Ignoring knowledge is sickness.
If one is sick of sickness, then one is not sick.
The Sage is not sick because he is sick of sickness.
Therefore he is not sick.
–
You could remind yourself of that every day for the rest of your life. That’s how important those words are.
“The sage is not sick because he is sick of sickness.” Sickness is here defined as “ignoring knowledge.”
Wisdom, therefore, is the absolute refusal to tolerate the act of ignoring what one in fact already knows.
People who are halfway wise, then, see that they did know the truth all along. The missing half is the recognition that while they may have known it deep down, they ignored it.
If you just stop at the realization that, “oh, I knew it all along,” it feels good, but it doesn’t last. It doesn’t last because it is inadequate.
It is inadequate because it doesn’t address how someone who supposedly “knew it all along” came to be mired in folly, and in failing to address it, ensures that folly will once again take hold.
How many people can say, in absolute sobriety, yes, I knew it all along, and I ignored it? Who can say, I did the stupid, shallow, selfish, destructive, deplorable thing anyway, even though I knew better?
It takes knowledge of ignorance to say this! And that is strength. The most difficult thing in the world to own up to is the ignoring of one’s own knowledge, because to do so is to truly be sick. Who has the courage to own this?
Wisdom, then, is two things simultaneously:
1.
Knowing that you don’t know everything. Recognizing when you are at the limits of your own knowledge, and not pretending to have something you don’t have.
2.
The refusal to let any real knowledge go unutilized. To be in a perpetual state of accountability to one’s own conscience.
And one becomes willing to hold oneself in a state of perpetual accountability because of having become sick of sickness. Sick of being unaccountable to one’s conscience.
In closing,
Rather than wish you the usual feel good feelings, which I do of course wish you, I will you something more:
That you become downright sick of playing below your level.
I wish for you to own what you know, and own that you used to pretend that you didn’t know. I wish for you to embrace the parts of your life that aren’t Instagram worthy, or that don’t sound like good advice on some podcast but are actually true and useful.
Be a real person, live a real life, admit that you already know how, that you always did, and that you are sick of ignoring your own knowledge.
Thank you for reading, talk to you soon.
-Jas
Make Beautiful Choices 