Author Archives: Life In The Jazz Lane

“Eastern philosophy.” Oh, boy. Here we go.

In keeping with my perennial theme of weeding out non serious people by referencing books like The History of the Peloponnesian War, or using terms like Episodic Future Thinking, today’s topic is similarly weighty, if not vastly weightier:

The Tao Te Ching.

Right away, I’ve confused some of you. Yes, the “Ts” are both pronounced “D.” No, I don’t make the rules here. No, you cannot speak to a manager.

The Tao Te Ching is the foundational text of Taosim, attributed to Lao Tzu, a man who lived in ancient China roughly 2,500 years ago, supposedly a contemporary of Confucius, who, legend has it, declared that Lao Tzu was “a dragon.” I will grant the presumption that Confucius was speaking figuratively.

I was introduced to this text, oddly enough, during my freshman year of high school. We did Chinese history, of all things, during our first semester. The only thing I remember from the course, however, was reading and becoming instantly enamored with the Tao Te Ching.

It was wise. It was cryptic. It was insightful. It was laconic. It seemed to be animated by an effortless mastery of life and all it’s governing and competing forces, seen and unseen: whoever it was who wrote this ancient text clearly got it – the ability to define, with the appropriate subtlety, the scope of what can and cannot be said, what can and cannot be known, and the best way to convey both without inviting a two dimensional reading.

Many years later, in 2022, I came back to this book with more than a casual interest: I set myself the goal of memorizing it, which I achieved in 162 days. For several months after that, I would repeat the entire text, out loud or silently, every day.

Sometimes I did this in one sitting, like a ritual to start the day. Other times I would do it in batches, grouping the 81 chapters into 3 groups of 27. Sometimes I would use a random number generator to prompt me to do the chapters out of order.

Why did I do this?

One word comes to mind: wisdom.

I knew that wisdom was in the text, in literally every stanza, and I also knew that I was unwise. I knew I was unwise, and I also knew that something rash had to be done to disabuse me of my lingering arrogance, immaturity, selfishness, willful blindness, moral weakness, and my willingness to disappear when holding the line was inconvenient.

I had to straighten out my life, and become someone solid and sincere all the way to the core. And, I knew that hammering in these exact words, until they could be recited verbatim without glancing at the text, would set me on that path.

So, I memorized one chapter every two days, learning 81 chapters in 162 days. Then I set about making sure I had all of it rock solid, backwards and forwards.

I have better things to do than spend all day complimenting myself, but I do feel grateful to my previous self for conceiving and executing that plan. It changed my life for the better, and set in motion many of the changes that have brought me to where I am now, which is a place in which I’m happy to be.

What I’d like to do today, then, is take some lines from the text and elaborate upon them. Why? Because wisdom is what we are after in life. Having it makes everything better, but lacking it makes everything worse. In many ways, your life is only as good as you are wise.

No situation is so bad that it cannot be redeemed by wisdom, and no situation is so good that it cannot be brought to ruin by ignorance. I have seen both take place, by my own hand, and so I know what I say when I speak this way.

In many ways, this entire project being undertaken here could be reduced to the following goal: to make wisdom more attractive. Let’s see how we do today.

In light of the above “mission statement,” let’s start with Lao Tzu’s first protracted description of a wise sage, which constitutes the entirety of chapter fifteen.

The ancient masters were subtle, mysterious, profound, responsive.
The depth of their knowledge is unfathomable.
Because it is unfathomable, we can only describe their appearance.
Watchful, like men crossing a winter stream.
Alert, like men aware of danger.
Courteous, like visiting guests.
Yielding, like ice about to melt.
Simple, like uncarved blocks of wood.
Hollow, like caves.
Opaque, like muddy pools.

Who can wait quietly while the mud settles?
Who can remain still until the moment of action?
Observers of the Tao do not seek fulfillment.
Not seeking fulfillment, they are not swayed by the desire for change.

When I say there is a lot here to think about, I say it as someone who repeated, and dwelled upon, and summoned up those words on a daily basis for probably over 365 consecutive days.

He is telling you exactly how a wise person behaves, and appears to a “normal” person like you or me.

Let’s go through it one line at a time, which is how I memorized it in the first place.

The ancient masters were subtle, mysterious, profound, responsive.

Note the way he intentionally places the image of the wisest of us in an undefined point in time – “ancient.” This is no accident. It is effective to think of the ideal as something abstracted from our daily life, suspended in a “somewhere out there.” So, he makes it clear that these were real people, but that their time has long since come and gone.

This is not trivial. Were he to frame the ancient masters as angels, it would only reify the idea of an afterlife. That is not the project here. An exceptional human is a viable role model that we can be moved to emulate, while supernatural beings represent an unattainable level of perfection: we can only submit to them in our inferiority.

Subtle, mysterious, profound, responsive.

The meaning of the first three adjectives is expanded considerably by the fourth. “Responsive” suggests that the subtlety, mysteriousness, and profundity is all a measured response to events unfolding in the present. The ancient masters are not withdrawn into an unseen world to which we have no access: they see the same world we do, are party to the same events, conversations, and relationships.

Again, they are not from an afterworld, nor have they sought refuge in one. They have mastered the real world. Our world.

The depth of their knowledge is unfathomable.
Because it is unfathomable, we can only describe their appearance.

To someone who has never eaten an apple, your knowledge of apples is unfathomable: no words can possibly impart direct experience, and the understanding that springs therefrom. What we can do, however, is look at the way people who have a specific form of knowledge seem to behave differently from those who lack it. Before disease could be defined, for example, an unhealthy person could be observed.

Watchful, like men crossing a winter stream.
Alert, like men aware of danger.

Watchful and alert. Treat this like an elaboration of the previous “responsive.” The sense of high stakes is important: treating everything like it matters. Nothing is casual – there is a difference between right and wrong, because there is a difference between safety and danger. There is a difference between crossing a winter stream and falling into it, the latter being potentially life threatening.

I take this to mean that all actions are undertaken with the awareness that mistakes have consequences, and that no consequences are trivial.

Courteous, like visiting guests.
Yielding, like ice about to melt.

The similes are so informative here. Let’s break them down to a level that is almost pedantic.

A visiting guest is not necessarily a friend or neighbor or relative, but an outsider who has temporarily come into the private space of someone else. Etiquette is how trustworthiness is communicated, and there is no place for overfamiliarity. When the encounter is over, each will return to his or her own life, of which neither other person is a part.

Why laboriously spell this out? Because it is the easiest thing in the world to forget that other people are sovereign over their own lives, and every encounter we have with other people is like momentarily becoming a guest in their presence.

A wise sage is someone who observes rules of etiquette and behaves courteously, because it brings out the best in his host. It reminds us all of the distance between us, making us more conscious of how we present ourselves.

Seeing others as outsiders to our lives automatically puts us in the role of representatives or ambassadors.

“Ice about to melt” is one of those many unforgettable lines that fill the text. About to melt – not melted! Not a pushover, not formless and in a state of unquestioning acquiescence, but about to melt. Solid, but not rigid. An ice cube resting on a surface that can be easily moved when force is applied.

Resistance only invites greater force. To yield is to make the continued application of force unnecessary. However, yielding does not equate to “capitulating.” Think of the difference between considering a request and granting it. To reference the previous line, a guest is not a slave! And yet a guest is not a master either. To walk this line at all times is to have self respect and the appropriate level of consideration for others simultaneously.

Simple, like uncarved blocks of wood.

An uncarved block is the inverse of the unmelted ice. An uncarved block has not yet acquired a shape that will both determine and limit its future use. It is a symbol intended to convey unrealized potential, and the flexibility to steer that potential toward the appropriate ends. The knowledge of the appropriate end to which one should direct his or her potential is only available to someone who is totally present to what is happening in the moment. The ability to become what one must in the face of reality’s demands is to be simple, but by no means simpleminded.

Hollow, like caves.
Opaque, like muddy pools.

I take these lines to mean that a wise sage is not harboring some private inner world, but is an empty vessel into which the reality of each moment can effortlessly flow.

Fair enough, you say. But why also “opaque?” Because you cannot peer into the mind of a sage. In this case, outer behaviors are not windows into something deeper. They are what they are. The sage’s behavior does reveal something: the subtlety of the situation at hand. It reveals nothing, however, about the sage’s “motivations.” The sage’s motivations are to live in reality: reality is the determinant of activity, not “motivations.” Thus the sage appears opaque.

Who can wait quietly while the mud settles?
Who can remain still until the moment of action?

These questions are immediately answered by the concluding lines,

Observers of the Tao do not seek fulfillment.
Not seeking fulfillment, they are not swayed by the desire for change.

Meaning that people do what they ought not to do, which is to act prematurely and incorrectly, because they are swayed by the desire for change. If you can accept the situation for what it is, you can do what must be done. If you cannot do this, then your actions will be driven by a self centered search for fulfillment.

Observers of the Tao, which simply means people who live correctly, do not seek fulfillment. Why not? Perhaps they are already fulfilled. They understand their own needs, and are capable of fulfilling them without imposing on others, or in ways that conflict with other pressing matters.

I want to close by elaborating on this.

When you know you are strong, your strength is available to help others.

When you are unsure of your strength, you want to prove it by defeating others.

Fulfillment, self confidence, accomplishment, the private cultivation of virtue – these allow you to remain still until the moment of action. Again, why? Because your worth is not at stake in each and every situation. Your worth has been built up, and power can now be expended and expressed toward worthy ends that become self evident to opened eyes with nothing behind them.

Imagine how you might conduct yourself if you were not swayed by the desire for change. Imagine what you might do, and, equally important, what you would have the power to cease doing, if you were freed from the pursuit of self fulfillment.

How do I free myself from this, you ask?
Start by contemplating the gap between your qualities and the sagely qualities described above. This is what I did, what I still do. You close the gap by staring at it, acknowledging it, and aiming for what you can glimpse on the other side of it.

Daily, hourly, one moment at a time.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.

-Jas

Welcome back. I’d like to jump right in: today, I’m talking about anxiety, and sharing the strategies I employed to overcome it.

Yes, I’m speaking in the past tense. This will already bother some of you.

Permit me a brief rant, for the sake of framing the proper perspective with which to consume the advice that is soon to follow.

In our current social climate, in our current climate of social discourse, we talk about problems as being lifelong companions that we have to “manage a relationship with.”

What I hear less and less often is talk of actually solving problems.

Well, let me qualify that: I quite often see wildly hyperbolic click bait headlines on YouTube thumbnails along the lines of

“Try this for 15 minutes and you’ll never struggle with procrastination again.”

But when you watch videos like that, you usually find a generalized strategy filled with caveats and disclaimers: no one is really promising you the moon.

What they seem to be promising, actually, is a robust new social identity as someone “living with X.” For example,

I read a book about fixing my handwriting, and it leads you to believe that you need to be writing out the letter J for an hour a day if you want to cultivate self love (no, I am not joking). The author, at one point, casually mentions that she’s been working on the letter Y for 20 years.

Why this raising of the hurdle, rather than lowering it? Isn’t that what help with a problem is supposed to mean? Not when you’re being sold advice by people who are trying to make a career out of marketing their content. They’re looking for subscribers, followers, and students. In other words, lifelong customers.

What the pharmaceutical industry has done to illness is exactly what the content industry, the “attention economy” has done to confusion and indecision: made it into something more profitable to “manage” than to solve.

I’ve dug up a larger topic than either of us want to exhaustively explore right now, but I think you see what I’m getting at here:

Problems do have solutions. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling renewable purchases.

As I go on to discuss a three layered approach for combating anxiety, then, always hold a clear destination in view: we’re not heading into the labyrinth of “working on yourself.”

This is continuing education: you have workable skills, but they’re limited. Better skills make you less limited, and expand the scope of your days and years.

The methods I’m about to impart, then, might require intensive focus and a large amount of time at first, if the problem is acute, but should reach a state of occasional maintenance once you’ve righted the ship.

Layer One:
Learn to see anxiety as your (error prone) friend.

Anxiety is something you have. It is not an event happening to you. You are not a victim of it. We evolved the capacity to feel anxiety so that we could manage risks. If we couldn’t feel pain, we wouldn’t know to withdraw our hand from the stove, and yet our skin would still burn. In exactly the same way, the person who feels no fear or anxiety is no less at risk just because he or she doesn’t perceive it.

In this way, anxiety is here to save your life the same way the pain receptors in your skin are here to save your hand.

So, anxiety is your friend in the same way that pain is your friend. But, as I mentioned earlier, our friend is prone to error.

According to Randolph M. Nesse, in a 2022 article for Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health, natural selection makes valuable features essentially impossible to “debug.” With all of our heritable traits, we cannot stop, wipe the slate clean, and begin again. We can do nothing to refine features and eliminate bugs. Natural selection is bound up with maximum gene transmission: all our traits are vying for renewal. Heritable traits don’t improve in response to environmental factors to which they are totally blind.

Your body thinks your life is in danger when really you’re just uncomfortable at a cocktail party with the friend group of your new girlfriend, or you’re late for work, or you can’t find your headphones and the Uber is leaving soon, or your apartment is cluttered, or your finances are a mess.

In all of these examples, anxiety would be maladaptive or simply pointless.

I am no stranger to feeling anxious. I know what it feels like to have nerves that won’t settle, a sense of safety and belonging that never arrives, and a need to fill the empty space with words, steering a moment rather than letting it be.

If this is something you struggle with on any kind of ongoing basis, meaning if you’re prone to suddenly having a freeze response, shortness of breath, elevated heart rate, jumpiness, and feeling unsafe, and you know that there is no real threat to you,

Then do what I did: tighten all the loose screws. Go through your life from top to bottom, and

Deepen what is shallow,
Strengthen what it weak,
Organize what is cluttered,
Systematize what is random,
Take inventory of what is uncounted.

Start with the big three: food, sleep, exercise. I’ve said plenty about all three of these, but here’s the bare bones minimum version of my advice, which I follow:

Sleep for 7.5-8 hours a night.
Walk as often as you can, ideally 30 min a day.
Eat single ingredient foods 80% of the time.

Until you can learn to respect your body, you don’t deserve to be free from its constant warnings. You need to heed its warnings and alter course. That’s step one.

Step two is to spend a few minutes cleaning and decluttering every day. Listen to podcasts or music while washing and putting away dishes, throwing away paper, filing paperwork, folding laundry, cleaning desks and sinks and mirrors.

Now your body is less angry, and your mind is less angry because your home environment is orderly, and conducive to thought.

Now that you’re handling these things, explore other areas of your life that need to be resolved into a system.

Every week, do a brain dump into a doc or a sheet of paper of everything currently unresolved in your life. I promise you, they all matter. Identify them, make plans for dealing with them, and put those plans on a time table.

A good rule of thumb: try to do one thing every day that you have resistance toward doing. The resistance is what’s stopping you, but not overcoming resistance is causing the anxiety, which cannot be overcome. The cause must be removed. Every time, no exceptions.

Over the next several months, your anxiety will go down. You’re getting your life together. It should feel good, and it does.

That’s the first layer. Walk around the perimeter of your life and reinforce the borders. As it says in the Tao Te Ching, “the man who knows how to live…has no place for death to enter.” Do you leave openings for disaster in your life? That might be why you have anxiety. Set those aright and watch the bad feelings diminish.

Essentially, you feel anxious because you feel threatened by something you don’t feel strong enough to confront. You need more confidence. Confidence makes you inclined to confront your troubles, rather than run from them or play dead.

Now we go to the second layer, which is more targeted at the level of your body.

Breathwork, stretching, vigorous exercise, and exposure to heat and cold.

Strenuous exercise like calisthenics or weightlifting helps the body to break down excess stress hormones, increases the production of endorphins, increases energy and alertness, and has been proven to significantly reduce anxiety if made into a regular practice.

Stretching reduces muscle tension, increases blood circulation, increases serotonin levels, and helps with lymphatic drainage. It improves sleep quality.

Long deep breathing reverses the state of fight or flight response, lowers the heart rate, lowers blood pressure, reduces lactic acid, balances oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the blood, improves the immune system, and improves mood and general well-being.

Taking a cold shower for just 2-3 minutes can improve circulation, lower perceived stress, raise immunity, diminish depression symptoms, help with muscle soreness, and improve alertness.

Sitting in a sauna for 30 minutes lowers cortisol levels in the blood (the stress hormone) by as much as 40%, insulates the brain from stress-induced harm (by promoting BDNF levels), has an immediate antidepressant effect, and increases endorphins (just like weight lifting).

How frequently should you do these activities?

You can and should stretch daily. Five minutes after waking, five minutes before bed. You can do more, and more is better, but five and five is fine.

Ditto for deep breathing. A modest daily practice beats inconsistent marathons.

You can take a sauna and a cold shower seven days a week as well.

Weight lifting is different. I did 6 days a week for about a year, began regressing, and gradually scaled back to one session every five to seven days. I made a lot more progress that way, because my recovery capacity had a chance to build back up. Now I’m back to three days per week. Start slow and find what works for you.

My routines with all of these have varied over the years, but these activities, especially having all of them in your life on a weekly basis, are life changing. They will utterly transform what it feels like to live in your body. The brief feelings of discomfort that come with all these activities is a small price to pay for the feeling of being able to handle whatever comes my way.

Lastly, and this is our third layer, I want you to tackle anxiety by broadening your behavioral repertoire. You freeze up for two reasons, which are closely related but not identical: you don’t know if you can handle what’s coming, and/or you don’t know what to do.

To put it in perspective, I do everything in the first two layers, and that doesn’t mean that I magically know what to do all the time.

Weight lifting and decluttering and eating simple food does not endow me with the knowledge of how to fix a tuning issue with the bridge of one of my guitars.

What they endow me with is the predisposition for action, rather than avoidance. I’m more inclined to Google something, call the manufacturer, search for a YouTube walk through, or simply jump into motion in the assumption that the next steps, the proper solutions, will reveal themselves simply by engaging with the problem (they quite often do).

So, your homework is twofold:

Start by making lists.

Create a numbered list up to 25. Write a pertinent “what can I do about X” question at the top. Populate the list.

Examples:
What can I do when a conversation seems to be stalling out?
What can I do when I feel off track?
What can I do when I can’t think straight?

By the time you get to 25 legitimate answers, you should be excited to try them all out. Instead of feeling like you’re out of ideas, frozen in place, you now have 25 ways to choose your own adventure.

The second part is simpler:

Ask yourself, when you feel anxious: what would a perfectly normal person do right now? Notice how you immediately had an answer? The mistake everyone makes, aside from not asking the question to begin with, is assuming the answer that comes to mind couldn’t possibly be good enough. While someone else, including your own future self, might have better answer, this is the answer you have to work with now.

So, work with it.

Prove to yourself that you can summon from within yourself something that is good enough.

You can do this. You can decide on a way forward, implement it, and put the current scenario behind you.

To summarize before closing, I’ve put forth a three pronged approach, each building off the other.

Firstly, we need overall stability and health. Fix your sleep, fix your diet, and get moving every day. Attack clutter on a daily basis. Then attack “clutter” everywhere in your life. It always takes a lot of work at first, and eventually very little at all to maintain it.

Secondly, we dive deeper into your ability to manage anxiety at the physical level. Weight lifting, cold showers, hot saunas, stretching, and breathing deeply. You need at least two of these on a routine basis. Frankly, you need lifting and stretching no matter what. The other three are for people who really enjoy being nice to themselves.

Thirdly, now that you have the capacity, the self credibility, and tenacity, attack your inability to take action, and concurrent tendency to freeze, are the local level: specific to the problem at hand. While you’re at home, feeling calm and collected, brainstorm 25 ways to deal with a specific problem. When you’re in the moment, simply ask yourself “what would the person who knows what to do be doing right now?” Lo and behold, you do know.

Put all of this into practice, and it is very hard to feel like a victim anymore. When you know you have your life together, and you feel physically strong and healthy, and know how to break through the fog of inaction, it is very difficult to feel anxious. When it arises, you know it is a signal originating within yourself, not a disaster happening to you.

Thank for you reading, talk to you soon.

-Jas

I recently went to see Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and The Heron.” The boy, Mahito, moves to a house in the countryside with his father, Shoichi, following the death of his mother, Hisako.

The sullen and grieving Mahito soon encounters the titular heron, a talking half-bird-half-man, who eventually leads Mahito into a parallel reality (or series of parallel realities) in search of Hisako.

Without spoiling the film (I recommend it), let me say that it shares some important qualities with another of Miyazaki’s films, Spirited Away: outlandish, unexplained occurrences.

The movie is filled with magical realism – fantastic creatures, sorcery, and supernatural forces that both operate within and govern from without the entire world-within-a-world that Mahito traverses.

Nothing is explained, and much of what is unexplained is not even named – you see things that defy the laws of our world that are not even acknowledged by the movie’s characters.

Even the ultimate resolution of the plot is shown in superficial glimpses, without the exhaustive summarizing clarity of, say, Hitchcock’s Psycho, where someone literally sits down to explain what you just witnessed. This is the opposite.

And, it worked. I enjoyed it, and, more importantly, many of its scenes and images still float through my mind.

What Miyazaki utilized here, something of which he is a master in general, is something called an open loop. Something introduced, perhaps even extensively developed, but not concluded. Click bait headlines and cliffhanger endings are both examples of open loops. The words “to be continued” create an open loop. The effect is perfectly familiar.

What you probably don’t know is that this phenomenon has a name: The Zeigarnik Effect, named after the Lithuanian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik who discovered it in 1927. To quickly summarize: recall of unfinished tasks is 90% greater than that of finished tasks. The famous example is of waiters who can remember complex orders right up until the moment the food is delivered. Once the food is delivered, the loop is closed, and information is almost entirely discarded from the memory.

As you’re about to learn, however, open loops are more than just an effective storytelling or marketing technique, more than a quaint finding to explain the behavior of restaurant workers.

An understanding of open loops can be nothing short of life changing. If you think I am exaggerating, read on.

Have you ever had a dating prospect ghost you? Have you ever felt uneasy as you waited for a reply to a text? Or while waiting to receive a letter of decision from a university admissions department? From an employer? The results of blood work? The results of a sporting event that you bet on?

Have you ever felt haunted by a conversation that you never had but needed to, and now the opportunity to do so seems lost forever? Have you ever abandoned a project, or given up on a hobby, or run away from a challenge, only to find yourself haunted by thoughts of what might have been?

These are also open loops. While they are a part of life, they can also build up to the point that they cause nontrivial emotional distress. Neuroses, anxiety, preoccupation – at the extreme end, these can cause workplace mishaps and car accidents.

More commonly, too many open loops cause people to procrastinate and feel defeated. The unresolved past is overcrowding your synaptic real estate, and there is little of you left to enjoy and contend with the present moment.

That’s life with too many open loops. Think of it like mental congestion. There is, however, an optimal amount of open loops to have in your life. The same way a good mystery keeps you engaged as the pieces gradually fall into place, you need unanswered questions driving you on. You need some unfinished business in your life to motivate you.

We are about to explore, then, the two ends of the open loop: how to open them, and how to close them.

How to create healthy levels of anticipation to keep you
motivated,
interested,
inspired,
focused,
and enthusiastic,

And how to clean up the past so that you can move through your days with a clear head and heart. Opening loops takes initiative, but closing loops takes emotional courage. We will discuss the cut and dry behaviors required for both.

PART ONE: OPENING LOOPS

How to open a loop: just start, don’t finish.

There’s no step too small for you to consider yourself to have started. The only step that doesn’t count is the one you don’t take. Do something. Do something, and leave it unfinished.

Here are some examples.

The bill arrives. You have to check your balances or possibly move funds around to pay it, but you also cannot procrastinate on it. Open the loop by writing out the check the second you open it, but don’t sign it or seal the envelope. Now you have something mid process nagging at you.

You receive a text you know you need to respond to, but can’t do so right now. Start typing a reply and abandon it mid sentence. It will be at the top of your messages.

You know you need to start prepping dinner? Open the refrigerator door. How long can you endure the fridge door left open?

If you’re a student, a writer, or someone trying to make more time for reading, use a pomodoro timer and stop mid sentence when your timer is up, for both reading and writing. It’s mildly annoying, and that’s the point.

I’ll bullet point some more ideas:

Put a plugged in vacuum cleaner in the middle of the room.

Put the book on the desk, opened to where you left off.

Turn the metronome on. That gets annoying fast.

Open the disorganized drawers. No longer “out of sight, out of mind.”

You’ll notice that this is a different approach from the “one and done” method of simply taking something all the way across the finish line in one sitting. Sometimes you can do that. Not every time. This method forces things into the front of your mind and raises the price of inaction. Open loops drive you nuts. Who was that man trapped inside the body of the heron?

PART TWO: CLOSING LOOPS

And that’s also why you have to close them. Having a small handful of open loops can make life interesting, challenging, and in a state of seemingly perpetual motion. There’s a fine line here, however. It’s really easy to fall behind. New things pile up quickly, but the unfinished business still sits there, eating up your mental energy.

Unfinished business from the past can weigh heavily on you. It can cause you to stagnate intellectually and emotionally, and make you unable to see the present for what it is – part of you really is trapped back there in an unfinished event from the past.

Here are just a handful of ways you might resolve some of them, freeing yourself to move on, removing the “bad debts” from your ledger.

Make a list.

This is simple enough. Spend a quiet afternoon writing down the various things you wish you had completed. Think of it as a brain dump: your job is to catalog as many unfinished things as possible, and nothing is too remote in time or too small. Dig it up, get it out, write it down.

That was probably exhausting, so take a walk to clear your head. Listen to some nice music. Smile at a dog. Remind yourself that there’s a whole world outside of your head waiting for you. We are clearing out the mental clutter, this time deep in the attic, for the sake of your participation in that world.

Come back to your list. Go through the items one by one and write down what a resolution for each of the items would look like. Only you know the answer. But write down the answer. And then assign a timeline to each of these items.

Put them into your calendar as tasks, and assign a reminder one week in advance, and then one day in advance, then the day of.

Spread these out so it doesn’t interrupt your life too much. Depending on what’s involved, give yourself a year.

Maybe you need to go through your closet and let go of a whole lot of things.
Maybe you need to repot plants,
clear out a drawer,
organize a garage,
repair or replace something,
address something from the past,
apologize to someone,
forgive someone,
pay someone back,
return something you borrowed,
or tell someone how you really feel.

In the words of therapist Adam Lane Smith, most people are just one serious conversation away from a better life. That conversation is probably long overdue, and you probably think about it often.

The subject of resolving what is unresolved from the past is a rather ambitious topic for the second half of a short newsletter. I barely scratched the surface here. Some people deal with this on an ongoing basis with the help of a therapist for years.

My attitude about it is simple: something is better than nothing, and you would be surprised by how capable you are once you get started. Over time, I’ve learned that things can be resolved. Sometimes that means formally declaring something to be finished. Nothing materially changes, and no conversation with another person takes place, but you say to yourself, this is where things are, and this is where I leave them. That is clarity. It defines the known unknowns, so to speak. It closes the loop: you are certain that no further action is called for.

In many cases, however, you can do something. You can fix things. You can go and do the thing left undone, in most cases, even if much time has gone by. And it feels good to do so. It lightens you, and reminds you that you are good, and effective, and that your actions have meaning. What you do matters, and it’s never too late to do the right thing and finish what you started.

If you were to tie up one loose end each month, for a year, how would you feel by this time next year?

There’s only one way to find out.

So to tie things up here, to close this loop, let’s review what we’ve discussed.

You need open ended questions driving you forward in your life. That is life. Life is about you moving forward through time in search of the thing that matters to you. You can systematically open these loops, these main quests and side quests, to direct the flow of your life.

You can also systematically go back and close the loops that were opened and abandoned for whatever reason. I dropped out of college in 2004. I went back and finished my degree years later. It felt wonderful, and I’m so glad that I did that for myself. Not just me, but for my parents as well.

I’ve repaid debts, apologized, forgave, and acknowledged the past to people who would never have brought these things up to me, but were very grateful that I took initiative.

What I gained from all that was peace of mind. And, in a very real way, permission to have a future. There was real energy and willpower of mine tied up in those unresolved events, and when I resolved them, I gained back that energy. Little by little, I was able to direct that energy toward future goals. I had the wherewithal, the credibility with myself, even a sense of moral worth, that had been lacking until the past was cleared up. I had no idea it was holding me back to the degree that it was.

I say this because while the past does not determine the future, your relationship to it does. As long as it matters to you, somewhere in your mind, then it’s real. You can’t talk yourself out of what your conscience tells you is important: you have to face it.

Do it, then, and watch the future open up to you. We only clean yesterday’s dishes to cook tonight’s dinner anyway. Get to it.

Thanks for reading, talk to you soon.

-Jas

I remember listening to a podcast by Glenn Loury (a professor of economics at Brown University) where he said that people don’t benefit from being given money as much as they benefit from “increasing their productive capacity.”

I think this is a profound insight, and something upon which I would like to expand here.

The basic subject of this newsletter is

How do I become a more action-oriented person?

How do I go from
waiting,
hoping,
fantasizing,
and pleading
to doing?

What needs to happen for me to make the fundamental shift of perspective from being in the stands to being on the court?

I started with the quote from Professor Loury because “productive capacity” is where the answer lies.

What do I mean by that?

When you center the matter of your productive capacity, everything falls into place.

When you scrutinize, encourage, promote, facilitate, and reward your ability to take action, your actions improve.

They improve in quantity, quality, and spirit.

The more you control and improve your actions, the more your results will satisfy you. By results, I mean the various states of affairs that constitute your life.

Your life is the breakfast you’ve just cooked for yourself. It is not a series of circumstances handed down by some higher power.

In Vasistha’s Yoga, an ancient book of Hindu Scripture of unknown authorship, Swami Venkatesananda’s translation (try saying that name five times in the mirror on a dark stormy night and see if you suddenly smell lamb korma), the following diamond of language is imparted to us:

“And the wise seeker knows:
That the fruit of my endeavor
Shall be commensurate
With the intensity
Of my own self-effort,
And no fate or God may ordain it otherwise.”

Dear reader, if you were to start every day, for the rest of your life, by saying those words, you would become an unstoppable force in no time.

Those words make up the mantra of the action-oriented person, the high agency person, the doer, the winner, the hero. To say there is no power in the world that can deny me the consequences of my actions is to center your productive capacity.

To be clear: of course there are circumstances beyond your control, that you did not choose and cannot change. It is my experience, however, that the only people who invoke such circumstances are those who do not take control of what can be controlled.

How to expand your productive capacity:

Step one: what to do when you don’t know what to do.

This could be an entire newsletter, or even an entire book: how to expand your range of behaviors to the point where nothing can cow you into passivity.

Being action-oriented does not mean that you always know what to do! Productive people do not have all the answers. But what they do have are go-to actions they deploy the moment uncertainty arises. Here are some of them:

Identify uncertainty.
If you can say, “I am unclear on this point,” you are already on the road to clarity.

Confusion has a flavor, so to speak. The moment you taste it, train yourself to stop. Stop, zoom in, and go back over whatever it was you were doing when that feeling hit you.

Maybe it was a word you missed, or misread, or didn’t understand.

Maybe someone glossed over a cluster of behaviors with an umbrella term, and you don’t know the composite parts it covered. Someone said “be more charismatic,” and you don’t know what that means.

You’ve gotten a few steps into a process and find yourself stalling, because you don’t know what to do next.

You have a problem that isn’t going away.

These are all forms of uncertainty. Whenever you don’t feel totally in control of yourself, or totally certain of what it is you’re doing, stop and interrogate the situation.

Uncertainty has two basic forms:

External: not knowing what something is.
Internal: not knowing what to do.

Confront uncertainty by naming it.

Whether you’re in a group or talking to one other person, as crazy as it sounds, you are allowed to say, “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand.” You can ask people to repeat themselves, you can repeat back the part you didn’t get, you can politely request that someone elaborate. It’s totally okay.

When you’re not sure what to do next, the process is similar. Here you are, someone who doesn’t know something. The easy, sensible thing would be to ask somebody who does know. That could either take the form of reaching out to someone or, more likely these days, by using the Internet.

One of the beauties of the “information economy” is that for everything you might be curious about there are at least half a dozen other people with dedicated YouTube channels on the subject. How-to guides are not hard to come by.

Get in the habit of referencing them often, even out of idle curiosity (what do I have to do to a surface before applying primer? What special cookware do I need to make a souffle? How do I pronounce souffle?).

Another benefit of going online for how-to help is that you can often get individual steps broken down to the granular level. In some cases, this is as good having someone working with you one on one, if you are sufficiently determined.

When a form of mentorship is required, however, you can’t let your own inhibitions stop you. Find someone who does something well, and buy their time in some way. If this feels awkward for you, don’t worry: you can own the awkwardness. When you call or text, just acknowledge that you feel awkward making the request. Explain what you’re trying to do and why, and give some context, briefly, about how and where you’ve hit a wall in your own efforts.

In my experience, people are not just willing but happy to jump in there and solve a problem with someone – what’s draining is being asked to do something for someone who is themself passive.

Show me that you’re trying, show me where you hit a limit, show me the failed attempts to overcome it on your own, and I can really see that my presence here is necessary. I’m being called upon, not taken for granted, not the enabler of another’s laziness or entitlement.

The other big obstacle to taking action is the fear of making a mistake

Since this is a topic done very close to death in self development circles, I want to give a novel spin on it, if possible.

Live your life like you’re putting together a puzzle.

You’ve got all the pieces in front of you on a big table. You’ve got an image of what the completed puzzle looks like on the lid of the box to keep you going, but mostly what you’re doing is an endless series of trials and errors.

You’re always looking for the missing piece to expand on what you currently have, and the only way to find it is to try however many pieces that don’t fit as it takes until, all of a sudden, you find one that does. And then what? Off to look for the next missing piece, somewhere among the pile of unsorted pieces.

When you try a piece that doesn’t work, you don’t think to yourself, “oh no, I made a mistake.” You just think “this is not the right piece.” You drop it and resume your search. You trust yourself to recognize what two rightly paired pieces fitting together actually looks and feels like. You’re not in your head – you’re just trying things until something works.

Is there more to it than that? Of course there is. But you’ll never discover the “more to this than that” if you become discouraged and slow or even cease your efforts. Action is the source of results, and therefore action alone is the source of the information that gives rise to learning, adaptation, insight, and finally, wisdom.

The real mistake is quitting, not the mistake that makes you quit.

One last comment on this sub topic:

For the truly ambitious, imagine that you are starting something so big that it could not possibly be finished in one lifetime. Think of another person discovering your unfinished work and vowing to see it through. I think this way about the composers and poets that I cherish – that the questions that drove them are alive within me, disquieting me and driving me ever onward. Mistakes are inevitable, but quitting is inexcusable.

Last topic for today:

What to do when you make a serious mistake?

This is a separate question to answer, independently of the just do it ethos imparted above. After all, some things have a vastly narrower margin for error than others. Imagine a surgeon, a bomb squad technician, or a lifeguard having a flippant attitude toward mistakes, and just moving on to the “next puzzle piece” in the way I described above. No. Absolutely not.

The spirit of unrelenting effort and indefatigable optimism must never approach the sort of mania that makes someone indifferent to their mistakes. Care and precision are of the utmost importance. Not for the sake of your reputation, but for the sake of others. Everything you do is for someone. Not in a servile way, but simply in the sense that a verb has an object. A transitive verb. You do X to/with/for Y, do you not?

So, mistakes effect real people. Mistakes by definition expend resources unsuccessfully. Success must ultimately justify the cost of resources expended along the way (another reason why quitting is a serious decision).

Let me then arrive at a salient point:

If you want to stay in the game long enough to finally get it right and justify whatever it cost along the way, you must learn to own up to your mistakes. You must learn to acknowledge them by naming them, and, if necessary, describing them in detail, along with their causes, directly to the person or people impacted by them.

Let’s not sugarcoat this. This can be truly agonizing.

I know I was supposed to do X, and I did Y anyway.
I tried to do X and I failed, and Y was the consequence.
I didn’t ask for help or delegate it because I believe that I could do it.
I became distracted. I was preoccupied with Z.
I was emotional.

If you see what you should have done, outline that in equally clear detail. It really, really matters. Yes, it can be emotionally exhausting to do this. I’ve found that the stinging, burning discomfort of negative consequences, faced forthrightly, reforms behavior quickly and permanently. How many people have forgotten that you can’t touch a hot stove?

When you escape the pain, you escape the lesson, because the pain is the lesson. Bad things are bad because they cause unnecessary suffering. Good things often require momentary discomfort: experiencing each, fully, is how you discern the difference, and thereby come to make prudent choices on a consistent basis.

This point borrows from a central point of last week’s newsletter: it is madness to ignore your own knowledge. When you pay a high price for it, you tend to value it. Pain is a high price.

Tying it all together: why focus on obstacles, rather than actions?

This article promised a discussion of your productive capacity, and how to increase it. By now, it might appear that I have broken my promise.

Rather than give you the secrets to galvanizing yourself into motion, or the best way to collect data on your use of time, your effectiveness and efficiency, I’ve only discussed the ways to remove obstacles to the presumed instinct toward activity. Why?

Because responsiveness is innate. A tiger spends all day tigering. The tiger and its tigering-ness are one, inseparable, impossible to discuss as two different things. Being and doing are the same thing: a light shines. There is no coherent statement about something that is a light and then decides to go and do some shining.

And yet, somehow, people are lost in this navel gazing malaise.

Who am I?

Why am I here?

What should I do?

I submit to you that such thoughts are forms of illness, and you should manage them as one manages an illness: obliterate the cause, and witness a remission of symptoms. Get back to tigering, as it were.

You know what to do, in the sense that the you who is you, and the you who does what it is that you do are the same you. The interruption of this is madness.

You can walk fine – remove the thorn in your heel or the pebble in your shoe or the ill fitting shoe from your foot. Hence, I speak of the removal of impediments.

Responsiveness is innate.

You do wish to win daily and hourly,

you do wish to grow in skill, knowledge, and in the breadth of your behavioral repertoire.

You do wish to become more effective, subtle, at ease with yourself, and respected by others.

If the obstacles to your nature are removed, you need merely remain active in your own way over a long enough time for the desired results to come.

Begin by scrutinizing why you are insufficiently active. Begin demanding more.

Where are the results?

Where is the feeling of vigor, strength, mastery, and dominance?

Where are the big and small questions for me to answer, the missing pieces to find, the gaps in my knowledge, the thing that will soon need maintenance, repair, or replacement?

Where is the flow of inspiration, the bright ideas, the synthesis of carefully gathered information?

Where is the trash heap of discarded dogma, superstition, and fanciful nonsense?

Interrogate, interrogate, interrogate: your mind will confess soon enough.

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