addiction – Make Beautiful Choices

Make It Look Easy: how to become like water

I want to tell you about something strange that happened to me.

A few birthdays ago, I noticed a switch had flipped in my head. Not on the very day, but the morning after. It hasn’t switched back.

All of a sudden, everything in me said, “it’s time.”

I went from wanting to want the right things to wanting them. I stopped hesitating, and locked in on my life the way a tiger locks in on and advances toward some unsuspecting animal in a jungle.

Things changed quickly. Some very serious problems went away, never to return. I began to clean up, beautify, and expand my life, one day at a time. I got organized, made a plan, and, wonder of wonders, stuck to the plan.

What fueled me? Well, today I am fueled mostly by positive feelings of desire: I wish to see things come to fruition. I like hitting “publish,” “post,” “send,” and sometimes even “dial.”

I like the sound of my amplifier switching on, I like the monotony of weightlifting and cardio and roasting in a sauna, the monotony of maintaining my technique with the aid of an unrelenting and obnoxious metronome.

I like working on new music, preparing for a performance, bringing the gear back to the rehearsal space after it’s done, letting the sense of accomplishment digest.

I like noticing that I’m behind and knowing how to catch up, and then actually catching up and getting to spend at least a few hours in a state of “caught up.”

I like that my biggest problem is that I have to find a way to make more time for client outreach.

My friends, it was only a few years ago that my biggest problem was that I was habitually abusing drugs and alcohol, and hanging by a thread in every area of life.

I am modestly successful in an absolute sense, but relative to my own past, I really do feel like I’ve conquered the world. I crawled out of a hell of my own making, and I get to live the rest of my life as a free man upon whom such freedoms shall not be wasted.

But what fueled me?

You may have noticed I dodged the question earlier, speaking somewhat dotingly about my life now, and my cherubic inclinations to beatific edification.

But how did I get to the point of living a life that inspires a twofold approach of unrelenting ambition and delicate creativity?

Now is your chance to understand what my mother understandably misunderstands: I was fueled by an unimaginable intolerance.

Intolerance of problems. Intolerance of indolence, selfishness, wastefulness, immaturity, and everything casual.

I looked around at this gutted piñata of nothing that has accumulated around me, a suitcase full of IOUs called excuses, and I became, in a way I can only express in this way, consumed with a profoundly loving hatred.

A hatred of mediocrity. A hatred, if you can understand this, of cynicism. A hatred of all the ways I had failed to meet the world with love and commitment. My life did not look like the life of someone who loves life, but rather of someone who hates himself.

That became the object of my hatred: that I had somehow failed to exist in a state of self advocacy.

Something I told you about in another article: one of the plans I made and stuck to was the plan of memorizing the Tao Te Ching. This served me in many ways. Discipline is redemptive no matter who you are or what you need redemption from, but the Tao Te Ching was a supremely worthy object of my discipline.

Repeating and reflecting upon the words day in and day out, I truly saw the error of my ways. I saw them in every point of contrast between the perspective of a sage, which is conveyed in every line of the text, and the facts of my own life. Not just the facts of my deeds, but of my thoughts, attitudes, and emotions.

The Book Of The Way was like a filing cabinet that allowed me to finally organize my life and make it livable, even lovable.

I say all this to tie off the loose thread of my immense intolerance and hatred I spoke of before. The clear wisdom of Lao Tzu became the sword in my hand as I militated against my own selfish immaturity. It became the standard to uphold, the corrective mechanism that would kick in to stop me from doing or saying something destructive.

Little by little, the problems disappeared. I stopped creating, prolonging, and worsening them. They lost momentum and ground to a halt. Now they are strewn across some deserted wasteland like the ruins of some decadent civilization: poetic and beautiful only because they are in fact ruins.

With this in mind, let’s walk together through the garden of wisdom that is chapter 8 of the Tao Te Ching. Simple, subtle, nuanced and adaptable. Simple on the surface, incomprehensibly rich upon investigation. Not the stuff of dogma, but of depth. Let us be joined in the hope that some wickedness in you might come to an end in contemplating these ideas.

Let’s begin.

EIGHT

The highest good is like water.
Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive.
It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao.

In dwelling, be close to the land.
In meditation, go deep in the heart.
In dealing with others, be gentle and kind.
In speech, be true.
In ruling, be just.
In business, be competent.
In action, watch the timing.

No fight: No blame.

Let’s summarize what we are looking at.

A broad statement about the nature of nature, a series of injunctions that appear to follow therefrom, and a closing “punchline” that doesn’t quite make sense in relation to the rest, at least not right away.

I intend to give a satisfactory exposition of all 3 sections, which means I am obligated to explain why one should see value in kindness, justice, and truthfulness.

This is at once preposterous and gauche in its ambition. I am no Plato, no Nietzsche, not even a garden variety PhD.

What I am is someone who understands what happens when you ignore the value of these humble virtues, and has struggled mightily to reclaim them. They mean something to me, and this is the meaning I am entitled to articulate and impart.

The highest good is like water.
Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive.
It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao.

The language of the Tao Te Ching is deceptively simple. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard the whole “be like water” thing so many times, in so many patronizing feel good movies, that it’s become meaningless by now.

It’s not meaningless, but simply easy to say. It’s so easy to say that it’s even easier to say unthinkingly.

When people say it’s about the process, life is a journey, or, everything in moderation, it’s about balance, and so on, these are examples of people speaking without thinking: saying meaningful things in ways that render them meaningless.

So, why don’t we attack this claim that the highest good is like water, and truly come to understand it?

If you want to understand water, listen to Mozart’s piano sonatas.

Ceaseless, effortless continuity.
Continuously inventive, always varying itself yet always consistently itself.
Always perfect – so perfect that it seems light, delicate, and inconsequential.

It flows on, unceasingly, with enough repetition that it has coherence, and enough surprises and flourishes that it dazzles.

The flow of water is just like this. Go look at a river, a brook, a lake, the waves of the ocean meeting the shore or reflecting light from the sky. Routine, predictable, even logical in the broadest sense, but bafflingly complex when viewed more closely.

There is so much going on, and yet its movements are reducible to simple descriptions.

What causes this perfect expression of both simplicity and complexity? Water’s total embrace of its environment. As it flows on, over new surfaces and under continuously changing weather conditions, these changes are like new information for the water to adapt to. Except the changes happen instantly, so much so that even the word “adapt” seems misplaced (it is).

How can we be like this?

Well, we are told that water works miracles (giving life to the ten thousand things), but does not strive.

Will we, you and I, become miraculously perfect if we simply get out of our own way and just be? If we stop trying and just let it happen through us?

Absolutely not.

If Lao Tzu really meant this, if this were true, the world would indeed be run by innocent children. It isn’t.

You arrive at a state of unforced flow by striving until striving is no longer necessary or helpful. It is the fruit of both rigorous and vigorous effort, and not a way to bypass it.

Let me say a few things about effort. Only the people who never look for shortcuts actually find them. They find them over time as their skills develop and they can see more connections between things. They become remarkably efficient in this way.

If you are looking for a way out of putting in the work, you are a child who never grew up. I mean that straightforwardly: you still see playtime as the default state of existence, and moments of exertion as unwelcomed interruptions. You feel constantly put upon, and reluctantly, half heartedly comply.

Should you go all in on effort then, hoping to work your way to mastery?

Yes and no.

You’ll have to go through an unimaginable amount of trial and error.

You’ll think you’ve got it right, and maybe it’s right for a time, but eventually it stops working.

You won’t want to admit that it no longer works, because that means admitting it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

You won’t want to admit it because you’re under the illusion that a fresh start is a negation of what came before, which it isn’t.

The truth is that it takes a lot of repetition to get good at anything. It takes long stretches of focusing on something that isn’t quite coming together in the hopes that it will, only to see nothing happen and move on, in what feels like defeat, only to find the obstacle one day vanished, days, weeks, or even decades later.

Let me tell you a secret: you have to enjoy it enough to keep going when you can’t do it well yet, but you also have to be sufficiently dissatisfied with how badly you’re doing it now to actually push hard enough to get better.

When you do something because you like doing it, you always find ways to get better at doing it. You make sure you do it often. You focus on the activity, not on how doing the activity makes you look, and this is how you can endure the awkwardness of always being a beginner at some new aspect of the activity.

You keep this up long enough, routinely maintaining your facility at something while routinely adding to your skills, and one day you arrive at fluency. The water-like ability to flow in the expression of your craft. This is giving life without striving.

In dwelling, be close to the land.

We are told, over and over again, to choose reality over fantasy.

“The land” is another word for what is real, what is rooted and grounded in sober observation and contemplation. Rooted in the physical: the body and its environment.

To quote the poet Wallace Stevens, “the Earth is a stone. It is not ‘like a stone.’” He means the physical thing is the real thing, and the image of a thing you hold in your mind, that is not physically before your physical eyes, is not a thing at all. The giant rock of the Earth is a physical stone, not merely similar to the memory of a stone that something else reminds you of (“like a stone”).

When I talk about the difference between hard substance and abstract reference, it might feel boringly obvious to you. On the other hand, if you have witnessed, in shock, the way your mind and the minds of others have completely mistaken imagination for substance, you should find this interesting.

Conduct an experiment sometime, and treat the world and everything in it as though it were utterly devoid of deeper meaning. That glance meant nothing, that tone of voice meant nothing, that lack of a response meant nothing.

Now, let me clarify that they all do mean something, but their true meaning is vastly less than the make-believe meanings you have saddled them with.

If you gradually discipline yourself to see objects and events as meaningless, trivial, and almost lifeless facts of nature, like rocks and clouds, your fantasies will die off from being starved of oxygen, so to speak. In this vacuum of invented, self-serving meaning, you can now investigate your life, the motives and behaviors of others, and the time delay between your actions and their results, in a more soberly analytical light.

There is much to be learned about the world, but you have to “dwell close to the land” to see it. You have to handle the stones yourself, rather than the toy marbles of your whimsy that are “like stones.”

In meditation, go deep in the heart.

The loneliest thing is to be physically close to another person and yet barely know them – to be lonely in their company. Therefore, when you have time to yourself, open up deeply.

Take an interest in yourself. Not as in self importance, but have some curiosity and a desire to know what is beneath the surface. Don’t assume you can see and hear and know it all from where you sit and observe now. Rather, assume there is more.

Let me now open a new path of thought. How do you get someone else to talk more? By saying something interesting, and then adopting a posture of interested receptivity toward your counterpart. Not merely hearing, but listening. Perhaps the text will occasion a more protracted discussion on listening later on, but, right now, think of meditation as listening to yourself.

The posture of meditation, the initial dimming of the lights and sitting down in such a deliberate and embarrassingly pretentious way, this is the interesting comment that gets the other going. The sustaining of the position, despite every urge to change or vary it, is the way you indicate to your self that yes, you are still listening. Still here. Still openly awaiting whatever more there is to be said.

This is the pinnacle of decency: inviting someone to say whatever it is they need to say. A self respecting person can offer this invitation to him or herself, and does so with regularity.

Imagine you have a perfect marriage. You notice some small change in your husband or wife’s demeanor, their tone of voice, the pause between the end of your statement and the beginning of theirs, a loss of appetite, anything, and you would adjust instantly. You would gently demonstrate in a way that made sense to both of you that you recognized the signs, and you’re now inviting the other to share what’s really going on.

Meditation is doing this for yourself. The routine of checking in. Maybe it’s difficult, maybe it’s easy, maybe it’s deep, maybe it’s lighthearted – but it’s real, genuine, seriously interested, and not a sham: when it’s time to get serious, you stay the course and don’t disappear.

You learn to do this, and your emotions and intuition will communicate forthrightly with your conscious mind. Over time, you will become attentive, insightful, and whole: your life will make sense. You will make sense to yourself.

This is what going deep in the heart means, and this is why you do it: so that you can legitimately say you are your own best friend, your own closest companion, your own most attentive and appreciative listener.

When you get this right with yourself, you get things wrong with other people so much less often and so much less seriously. It matters a great deal.

In dealing with others, be gentle and kind.

People often have difficulty seeing their own defensiveness, and antisocial behavior in general.

For one reason or another, it always feels perfectly rational and justified. But gentleness and kindness represents, in many ways, the opposite of a rational response: pretending like threats aren’t there. Lowering your defenses.

Yes, you’ve got it right: this isn’t exactly natural in all situations. What’s normal is to have your own survival in mind. To keep others, with their own self interested agendas, at an arm’s length.

What is implied, then, by being gentle and kind with others? That you do not fear them. However they present themselves, interact, and communicate, you are not creating impediments to a potentially flowing exchange.

I didn’t use the word “flowing” unintentionally. In many ways, we are still elaborating on what it means to be like water, what it means to say that the highest good is like water.

Close to the land: conforming to the shape of its environment or vessel.

Deep in the heart: water will flow into all openings no matter how small or remote.

Gentle and kind: “flowing” is also equivalent to “unforced.” We almost never think of water as tense, rigid, unyielding, or harsh.

A sage, the person we all wish to become, never resists, only responds. By being open with others, a sage invites them to offer their best presentation of themselves – rather than merely obliging them to manage his or her own resistance.

Give people a wide opening, a generous reception, and you’ll often see something similar in return. It diffuses tension. It lowers defenses. It promotes feelings of goodwill and magnanimity. It gives them the chance to flow freely.

And, I think this is sufficient. Being gentle and kind does not mean you infantilize people, treating them as though they were fragile simpletons. It also does not mean you do the work for them, or ignore their bad behavior. Gentleness and kindness cannot be offered by a pushover, someone who manipulates others by feigning defenselessness.

No.

Think of these as royal virtues befitting a king or queen: wherever we meet, even if it be in your own home, I treat you as an honored guest in my presence. I receive you graciously, I anticipate your needs, I give you space to think, to choose your words, and even retract them.

I invite you to share what’s on your mind, to present yourself in whatever way you feel the moment demands, and I respond with unflinching understanding and acceptance.

My complete acceptance of my own humanity is the basis for my unrehearsed and unmotivated acceptance of yours – I get to be me, you get to be you. I rather enjoy being me, truth be told, and the least I can do is make it easy for you to be yourself when you’re around me. And, lastly, if you don’t know how to do that, at least you have me as an example.

This is what being gentle and kind really means.

In speech, be true.

Hell is a real place, and you get there by lying and by doing things that self preservation requires you to lie about. I don’t mean you go there after you die. I mean you are there right now if you are a liar. I mean you wish you were dead when your life becomes an edifice of lies.

When you tell the truth, you have your innocence: something invisible to most until later in life.

When you tell the truth, your friendships are also true friendships.

When you tell the truth, you become a master of language: you understand the difference between tact and deceit, subtlety and euphemism. And, you understand this because you will find yourself in a world where people both expect you to tell the truth and are not always happy to hear it.

When you tell the truth, you will eventually end up telling truths about what you want, how you feel, and what you believe that lead you into unknown territory. Something in the familiar, the immediate, and the provincially self satisfied will simply no longer cut it for you. The call to adventure, as old as Abraham, and older, will animate your life if you simply refuse to lie about or deny it.

When you tell the truth, you know yourself. You trust yourself. You provide yourself and others with undeniable proof of your courage and character.

Why is the truth so important? Why is lying so destructive?

Because words are how we make sense of the world. The space in which we live out our lives can only be understood with words, or with thoughts that are not meaningfully distinct from words.

Even the most rigorous and well-intentioned efforts to understand the world, our selves, and how to best conduct our lives, are incomplete in serious ways. In the text we are discussing here, the Tao Te Ching, we are warned about this from the beginning:

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.

Our very best is incomplete, because truths that hold up on paper still have to be applied by real people, in real situations, in real time. They must be translated into action successfully, and the buck stops here, with you and me, because we are those translators.

Wherever you seek useful, truthful knowledge, you are the limiting factor in whether or not the information serves you.

In other words, the truth and hard won knowledge does not by itself make the world a better place: it is exactly half of the process.

And this is why lies are some of the worst things in the world: if our best attempts at truthfulness are still faulty, how much worse is it to give people information you know to be incorrect or deceptively incomplete?

If truthful speech is the earnest attempt to represent the objective world, lies are the opposite: the construction of an alternate, private, subjective reality, and passing it off as the real thing. A bad map.

In ruling, be just.

We always speak of truth and justice together, because they are extensions of one another: to be just is to strive for objectivity. To let states of affairs speak for themselves, and to unflinchingly follow the rules regardless of who they favor – this is justice.

But to be a just ruler means something more than “fair minded.” A just ruler settles conflicts between disagreeing or otherwise opposed parties. And, in so doing, he or she must weigh the first, second, and third order consequences of the various forms of resolution available under the circumstances.

Such considerations can seem dizzying in their complexity and their gravity. You try thinking through all the possibilities, all the different sequences of events you could set in motion were you to be given sufficient authority, and soon you are sick to your stomach with worry. Soon, the idea of playing god looks more like a one ticket to a personal hell of anxiety.

And, rightly so.

Just about all of us should sit and contemplate the sheer weight of the mantle of justice, the weight of the sword of Damocles, until we turn back in sheepish embarrassment. Until we are nauseated by the thought of bearing any responsibility for the world. The odds that you, dear reader, are utterly unfit for such a burden is something close to 100%.

Why issue the churlish harangue? Because justice begins when you turn away from whatever inspires judgment in you. Wherever you seek revenge, you cannot rule justly.

Victims deserve justice, but a person animated by a victim mentality does not understand and in fact actively undermines justice.

Whatever you can only describe in terms of “they,” or “society,” the “status quo,” and so on, is simply not for you. Whatever you can only describe vaguely is, by definition, not your business.

Let’s dispense with uncomfortable and inconvenient realities right now.

Disparities are not evidence of discrimination.
Poverty is not evidence of oppression.
Rejection is not evidence of “phobia.”

And now a necessary twisting of the knife.

Sometimes people simply dislike you for who you are, and it has nothing to do with your “demographic markers.”

Sometimes, bad experiences, bad relationships, bad employers, bad treatment, and a bad life are nobody else’s fault but your own.

And now, the worst possible honest thing I could say:

Sometimes, “injustice” is what people call it when they realize the world doesn’t see them as special.

I’ve said all this for one simple reason: being a just ruler means ruling justly over your own life. Settling disputes and grievances in your own heart. If you are always ruling in favor of yourself, you are inculcating the habit of finding fault with others, and fault with “the world.”

But if you convict society, or men, or women, or whatever subcategory thereof, this already makes a mockery of your courtroom: how is the verdict and sentence enforced? How does the world pay you the fine of a better life after it’s been convicted of treating you unfairly?

If you must pass judgment, pass it on yourself. Because you can discover the error, the injury that followed from it, and the proper course of action to set things right again.

You can gauge the costs, you can estimate the time, you can even sentence yourself to community service if you see that as the wisest path to reform.

This is all undeniably within your power.

Aha, but here we are: the exercise of power must be cultivated! People prefer to judge the world, to judge people they cannot possibly punish, because to do so is the exercise of fantasy and whimsy!

Demand reform from yourself, and you will see, in horror and shame, the weak and spineless worm you have become through indolence and self indulgence.

To be just, look at the state of affairs, and make the proper demands of the party who can actually be held responsible: yourself. Work out whatever arrangement is both adequate and bearable, and get to work. Get to work, and put the world and its injustices out of your head. Follow the laws of your conscience, and see that it never drags you into court again.

In business, be competent.

If there is a miracle cure for whatever is wrong in your life, on any level, it is the cultivation of excellence.

Become more skilled, more effective, and more efficient, and watch your dreams come true. Watch your very dreams improve in clarity, achievability, and even quality.

Striving to be a better human being means striving to perform each and every activity competently.

What is competence? Having what it takes to do whatever it takes to get the job done. To produce a result. To meet the demand for effort, resources, or attention with the appropriate supply.

Life is demanding. Life is difficult. However, in just the same way that a person can grow stronger until what was once a heavy weight feels almost feather-like in the gripping hand, the difficulty of life itself can decrease into relative insignificance when you pay enough attention to your overall level of skill at the specific tasks life confronts you with.

The same way that water conforms, without the slightest resistance, to the shape of its vessel and the influence of its environment, a competent person conforms to an environment of expectations.

Unless we sincerely wish to each go our own way in the wilderness, we have to work together. That means considering the needs of others, and imposing some degree of structure in an effort to maintain the flow of exchange between us all – in other words, human civilization.

In view of what has been said so far about competence, I feel that something important is missing. A foggy cloud of “so what” hangs over it all. Let me try to burn it off with something a bit more personally relevant.

The heart of competence is the notion that you matter.
You are a subject exerting agency in the world.
You have the power to achieve a result.
You are a cause and not merely an effect.

You are more than a cog in a machine,
more than the person occupying your current address,

more than a man or woman
belonging to such and such ethnic background,
religious affiliation,
national identity,
sexual orientation,
age,
height
and weight.

You are more than a number or a pawn in someone else’s game…

…If you choose to be.

If. You. Choose.

You are a plot of land. Tend to it like a garden, or it will fill up all by itself, but only with weeds. There will be life, there will be activity, there will be community, beliefs, behaviors, friends, family, and all the rest – but it will all merely happen to you, and it will be mediocre.

The perception that it does all happen seemingly by itself can lull you into a melancholic stupor. Here I am, a product of circumstance. Unsure if I belong, unsure if I am worthy, unsure if I am necessary and good.

The world does not tell you that you matter. It doesn’t make room for you (it does, but you have never known a world without you in it, so you never saw the displacement caused by your arrival and sustained presence). It appears to go on perfectly well without you, to the point that you might even question if you have anything to contribute to it.

The reason why we need competence the same way we need truthfulness, fairness, kindness, self knowledge, and connection to what is tactile and tangible, is that life does not make sense without it.

See yourself as a cause, not an effect, and you will start to notice countless missing pieces in your world. Countless little spots in the garden where a flowerbed, or a fruit bearing tree, or shrub might go. You learn to identify and respond to vacancies: perhaps you fill them, perhaps you defend them from being filled, but you exercise power of your own in either case.

Now, life has meaning because your presence or absence has meaning. And, the more skilled you become, the more consequential your presence or absence becomes.

In action, watch the timing.

Timing is a necessary piece of competence: if what you do matters, then when you do it matters every bit as much. There is no what without a when, anymore than there can be musical rhythm without musical pitch. One requires the other and is literally unimaginable without the other.

To pay attention to timing is not easy: it requires focus. Response time is a proxy for focus. And, what does it mean to focus? Your attention is in one place. That place may be a ping pong table during a match, or it may be a thought in your mind. Either way, if you fail to seize an opportunity at the critical moment, you can lose whatever is at stake.

And there is that beautiful word: stake. Actions matter, and timing matters, because we are indeed at war. In every moment, hour after hour, day after day, victory and defeat are at stake. Everyone who loses an argument, the attention of a crush, another person’s trust, a match, a duel, or a war is someone who committed a critical error. An error of action, and an error of timing.

Similarly to my point about honesty, timing must be taken seriously because you can still lose your life even when paying perfect attention to the timing. In what world, then, do you have the luxury of flouting it?

Your wife tells you she loves you and you are silent. You tell your friend you’ll be right there, and 20 minutes go by in idleness. You tell someone “I’ll do it tonight,” but another month goes by. The baseball is thrown from the pitcher’s mound, the sword is drawn from the sheath, the car in front slams on the brakes… and you are somewhere else.

It doesn’t matter where your mind was – it wasn’t where it needed to be. One of many possible beginnings of wisdom is the realization we are all of us chattel slaves before the whip of time.

It is the most impressive person who has paid time its due so completely and so wisely that he or she can sit in quiet repose and engage in deep thought. Whether this occurs at the start or end of the day, space to truly think is afforded to the person with an uncluttered mind, which can only mean an uncluttered life.

Water flows, but not only water: life’s unceasing demands for a response, for attention. To the focused, humble, and responsive person, these waves of events are like the water at low tide on a calm beach, lapping at the shore.

For the person who arrogantly chooses the private world of fantasy and ignores the world, dissociates from it, minimizes and dismisses it, the waves of the world are always crashing overhead. Frustrated employers, disappointed and disappearing friends, nagging girlfriends, a car that looks like someone is living in it – these belong to the person living in his head, fumbling handoff after handoff in the real world.

People who’ve never actually read “eastern philosophy,” or who approach it like a drug addict (thinking it will “make them feel good”) have hallucinated that it preaches unconditional love and acceptance. People make similar hallucinations about Christianity. This is rubbish. Why would the great sage tell you to pay attention and watch the timing if nothing really mattered, and, no matter what you do, everything is okay, and the Tao or some great spirit will always love you anyway?

Living life well means waking up to the fact that your life can be squandered. Through arrogance, through servility, through cowardice, through indolence, lack of focus and lack of earnestness.

Wake up, man up, and take this life seriously. Every single second counts. And, by seriousness I don’t mean drudgery. I mean, exchange the blissful ignorance of childhood for the hard won joy of a life hardened and sharpened by skills and commitments.

Learn to play this game of life to the point where you are retiring at the end of each day with something to be proud of. Set a high bar, but permit yourself every positive emotion at the reaching for and grasping and exceeding of that bar. Children think happiness is inherent, unconditional, and eternal. Adults understand that satisfaction must be won daily and even hourly.

As Leo Tolstoy once wrote, the most important thing can only be whatever and whoever is before you now, and the most important thing to do can only be to do him good. Therefore, watch the timing.

No fight: no blame.

The genius of this text is in what it promises: freedom from self-created problems. Not perfection, not bliss (I gag at the word), not the world living in peace – but you putting an end, once and for all, to the war between you and yourself, you and your own life.

If you don’t cause problems, nobody will hold you to account. Nobody will come after you, ostracize you, or punish you.

Now, of course, there are bad people in the world who will do all those things to you no matter what you do, precisely because they are bad people.

When you have done nothing wrong, and you know it, you can stand up to such people easily, because all the layers of yourself are in alignment – your mouth is not merely a press secretary in a perpetual state of running cover for a dishonest and incompetent politician. You are singular, hiding nothing beneath the surface that would contradict the exterior were it to be exposed. Whatever is beneath the surface is simply private, but not a secret. This is the only state in which you can stand up straight and face the wickedness of other people.

I said face it, not fight it.

If you find yourself fighting with people, you are to blame. Remember? No fight: no blame.

Someone who has accepted reality is, almost by definition, not in an active state of combat with it. Not adversarial! When you are at peace, you can tell when someone else is looking for a fight. You can spot it from a distance. And, being the person who values peace, you don’t engage with quarrelsome people.

Let them find each other.

Let them have to look far and wide before they find one, to the point that the fight goes out of them in the search for a fight.

But what to do when you inevitably encounter them?

One does not end conflicts by validating the impulse to seek conflict. However, conflict will quickly intensify when the aggressor feels dismissed or minimized. Conflict, then, comes to an end when it is recognized as unnecessary. Reframe the interaction, rather than seek to win the contest. If you win, you make a loser of your counterpart. A loser is someone with something to prove: the best way to guarantee a fight tomorrow is to win one today, and this is far from the worst possible outcome.

Making conflict unnecessary means lowering the price of significance for the other party.

What does that mean?

People want to get into fights because they want to prove that they matter.

People cannot live without the felt sense, daily and hourly, that their lives are significant: do not make anyone go to desperate and dangerous lengths to obtain it.

Validating someone else’s perspective does not mean agreeing with it! It means taking it seriously, responding in earnest, and actively, visibly striving to understand it. Not claiming to already understand it (this is minimizing), not refusing to try to understand it (this is dismissive), and not telling someone why they’re wrong (making them the loser of the interaction) – but thinking through their position, out loud, in real time. This is what tells someone else that they are worthy of consideration.

This has to be practiced intentionally. Usually, when we hear a differing perspective, we are tempted to assert our own. I am guilty of this far too often. Is there anyone who cannot say, “I could be a better listener?” Listening is so hard because we make it hard. We make it about giving away our power, forcing ourselves to behave in ways we don’t find natural, and least appealing of all, sitting there while someone else spews a whole bunch of nonsense that we instantly and intensely disagree with.

My friend, I am telling you, if the world of wars is going to come to an end, whatever you claim to find natural, that nonetheless actively and materially perpetuates the disharmony, has to be reformed by the application of method. You cannot, and I mean this – you cannot simply be. This is the difference between immaturity and maturity, a wilderness of weeds and a beautiful garden: the moderating influence of civilization. Are you civilized? Are you a paragon of virtue and civility? Or are you, pardon me, an insufferable and grating hyena? If it is the latter, I promise you, you know it. You know damn well.

In closing, whatever you resist, refuse, run away from, and refute, either in yourself, your life, or, especially, in other people, is the thing standing between you and a water-like flowing of focus and activity: the thing between you and the further cultivation of your highest potential.

However principled you may feel for shutting out what you deem to be beneath you, I submit to you that what you are really doing is rationalizing the avoidance of something that you lack the requisite skill to engage with productively.

To be blunt, in the hope of shattering an utterly unproductive wall of denial, it is you who is beneath what you claim to be beneath you. The person who is truly above something knows exactly what to do when he or she encounters it, and does so without reservation.

The highest good is like water.
Water gives life to the ten thousand things,
And does not strive.
It flows in places men reject,
And thus is like the Tao.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.

-Jas

Less Theory, More Practice: applying the Tao Te Ching to a modern life

Part 1: Mortality

When I was a small child, I was wildly imaginative (were you the same way?). I would draw, play with toys, or simply project my imaginings onto the sky while gazing up at clouds, or into the cityscapes visible through car windows as my mom or dad drove me and my brother around town.

Because I was raised by and around kind people who understood the needs of children, I don’t recall anybody ever interjecting “that’s not real!” as a way of rudely shattering the fantasy. I was free to indulge my imagination in its various aspects, knowingly moving away from passive observation of reality and toward willful embellishments.

Now, I’m no psychologist, but I think kids can easily return to objective reality when their reality feels safe. I wasn’t running away, but simply at play. Having fun. My mind might have been a hard act to follow, but my “real life” was filled with gentle people who loved and encouraged me. And, I would be remiss if I didn’t at least acknowledge my undying gratitude for that now.

It’s when reality becomes unstomachable, however, that fantasy slowly becomes a surrogate. A step parent. A delusion. Permanent, or at least the subject of an attempt at permanence.

But delusion is more widespread than anyone would like to think, touching almost all of us in some way.

How can I say that?

Because I can say that there are major aspects of reality that people have not come to accept, are not even on their way to accepting, and maintain their distance from them with the daily use of fantasy.

I’m talking of course about the reality of death. The impermanence of all life, and the utter insignificance of individuals and even entire species of living things against the backdrop of mountains and oceans, to say nothing of the birth and death of entire stars, planets, and moons.

The easy thing to do, what I imagine most of us do in some way, is meet all that with hand waiving – how can I possibly wrap my mind around all that? Why should I concern myself with it? It just makes me depressed (alternatively, with dissociative awe).

Well, is it any different to ask why a powerless child should face the reality that his or her parents hate each other and probably won’t be married much longer?

We can look at all kinds of ugly or disempowering realities and recognize that individuals fare best when they face facts, and take back their lives from the paralysis so easily induced by what is often called fate.

A compassionate and caring person can easily recognize that it may take years for a person in a tough spot to gather the strength, maturity, and will to make sense of their life, but that something critical has been missed if this work is never undertaken.

And so, the right thing to do, I hope you can agree, is to apply the same reasoning to the facts of life and death themselves. But, not in a grand sense: it must be completely personal, completely intimate. My one short life, my ultimate insignificance, my inevitable death.

Even typing these words now is difficult!

Even sitting here on a sunny afternoon idly typing my thoughts into a doc, I shudder at the thought and look for a way out – a way out of even saying it with my thumbs to the screen of a phone!

When he saw the body of his slain companion, Gilgamesh the great King of Uruk said, unforgettably,

Must I be like that? Must I die, too?

Yes. Yes.

And once this reality has been accepted (a subject far too big for not just a weekly newsletter but for a writer of my meager stature), a degree of make believe comes, at last, to an end.

The same way I no longer imagine Wolverine leaping out from behind a copymat as my mom drives me past it on the way home from school, I can no longer imagine, I can feel the illusions melting away as I reconcile myself to reality.

Rather than be caught between passive observation and active hallucination, observation goads to action.

What sorts of behaviors come to and, and what take their place, as reality takes the place of fantasy?

We are now ready to read chapter 7 of the Tao Te Ching, now ready to consider the answer offered by an ancient Chinese sage named Lao Tzu. I’m confident you will soon see why.

Part 2: Eternal Creation, Ephemeral Creatures

SEVEN

Heaven and earth last forever.
Why do heaven and earth last forever?
They are unborn,
So ever living.
The sage stays behind, thus he is ahead.
He is detached, thus at one with all.
Through selfless action, he attains fulfillment.

We could begin by breaking up the short chapter in 2 ideas: the first 4 lines indirectly remind us of our mortality, the second 3 lines tell us how a wise person would make use of this information.

Regarding the first 3 lines, there is more to say than you might think. By all means, stop to contemplate the natural world, the world beyond human sociopolitical affairs, and be moved to awe. Let it inspire you, relax you, and restore you. The world is vast and beautiful – don’t miss out on even brief and frequent moments of observation: it’s downright good for you.

But I would be participating in something quite dishonest to leave it at that – if I was to simply join the bandwagon of nature worship.

To experience nature as a kind of companion – wise, gentle, and transcending – is the greatest luxury and privilege imaginable. A luxury afforded to you and me solely by the achievements and industry of humankind.

Nature is not “calm,” “peaceful,” and “rejuvenating” to human populations without ways of dealing with food, shelter, disease, injury, and waste management, just to name a few things.

Only when we have something called civilization does nature become, by contrast, quieter, more meaningful, and somehow instructive.

If nature is static, fixed, and humanity is what changes, our perspective on nature is a necessary consequence of where we’re at with ourselves at this moment – at this phase in our evolution.

My point is simply this: we, through a combination of time, discovery, striving, ingenuity, dumb luck, perseverance, imagination, optimism, and obsession, have raised ourselves up to a point where nature is no longer an enemy but a friend, a teacher, a resource, and a reminder of what matters.

With that last paragraph in mind, do not denigrate yourself and humanity as a whole when you admire nature: your capacity for admiration is, for precisely the reasons I just explained, evidence of something legitimately admirable on your part.

What you should feel, rather than inferiority, is simply distinction. Difference. Contrast.

Let me now list many of the differences that will inevitably sound denigrating but are simply truths, truths that are inescapable when comparing ourselves to nature.

Nature is eternal, while you are ephemeral. Nature is overpowering and irresistible while you are weak and inconsequential. Nature is hard and unfeeling while you are soft and sensitive. Nature is steadfast while you are capricious and whimsical.

But do not stop there: nature is seemingly blind and automatic while you gaze in contemplation and weigh your options. Nature is ruthless while you have mercy, feel pity, and offer second chances. Nature consumes the weak while you cherish and preserve what would be obliterated without your interventions. Nature simply is, while you yearn for what you might become. Nature merely reproduces, while you fall in love. Nature kills, and so do you, but you alone bury and grieve and remember the dead. You may even call nature a god, but you alone seek and worship your god.

In many ways, you are nothing like the world. And by allowing yourself to perceive these differences without feelings of self recrimination, you can grow wise.

And this plays into what I want to say about the second half – what to do with a life that is by definition doomed to death.

Can I be a bit obvious, maybe even didactic? May I even risk being redundant? The point of comparison is to highlight differences. And, why highlight differences? One reason would be to better understand your own situation and needs. To make better sense of your life by understanding what you are and what you’re not.

Part 3: A Sage Does Not Compete

What does the sage do differently from the rest of us, as a direct result of better understanding both nature and himself? We are told that

The sage stays behind, thus he is ahead.

What do you do when you realize you’re not running a race? You slow down. And why can it be said that life isn’t a race? Because it is a farce to compete with people who are about to be annihilated, only moments before or after your own annihilation.

The sage is ahead of those still running, because he has finished the race, or rather is finished with racing.

Now, a word about competitive activities. As long as they have meaning to you, continue them. Their meaning may evolve for you, also. You may be in a place where dullness and indolence have to be burned up in some passionate striving. You may have to prove yourself, to cultivate yourself, to become capable of the rigor necessary to best your betters. So be it. There is great beauty and dignity in contests of skill, in discipline and sacrifice, and even in the yearning for glory and the hatred of one’s opponents. There is of course great ugliness in it, too. But both are united by greatness.

But a sage is something more than a great man or woman. You cannot become great without a persistent drive to do so. You have to want it, even to need it.

A sage does not need it.

A sage may do great things, but the attention is always on the quality of the work, the care and thoroughness of the work. The attention is never on the fame, glory, or leverage that could be obtained by doing great things.

A sage is ahead of others because he is not in competition with anyone. This is not fluff: there is so much more that can be done when you don’t need credit, when you don’t even need to be seen doing it. Like someone who paints over graffiti while everyone else is asleep or quietly supports others to help them achieve their own goals, there is an entire world of accomplishment and virtue that opens up the moment you drop the requirement of putting everything on a scoreboard.

Someone without the need to compete and win can do thankless but necessary work without tiring, since the will to continue is not supplied in the form of recognition or encouragement.

For example, when I renewed my commitment to reading books, I began by setting a goal of X pages per day, to make sure I finished each book within 7-10 days. I quickly realized this was arbitrary, impossible, and meaningless.

The point was to understand the ideas in the books as completely as possible, not to finish as many books as possible. I wasn’t reading to read, I was reading to become more knowledgeable and cultivated. To deepen my thinking and understanding of the world. This was not about chasing the dopamine of task completion, but the slow burn of maturation.

At some point I slowed down to clarify my motives: what mattered was that I established and maintained a reading habit, not that I crossed some random finish line by a certain date.

It also didn’t matter if I pulled ahead of some other randomly selected person, either.

Truth be told, I don’t want to become the most knowledgeable person about any subject, because I would be nothing but disappointed to receive confirmation that there was truly nothing left to do or learn: “the barrenness of the fertile thing that can achieve no more.”

I would hate to be trapped in a world so petty and small that it could be conquered by me.

Now I eat information until I’m full, so to speak, and then I rest my brain. I take it in. I let the revelations soak into the soil and grow the garden of my mind. I let the same waters of knowledge erode the sand castles of imagination and whimsy. It feels contemplative and earnest, not shallow and forceful.

By settling into a natural place, I have nothing to keep up with, no whip at my back, only curiosity backed by commitment. This is sustainable, sane, and kind.

Part 4: A Sage Is Not An Addict

He is detached, thus at one with all.

Words like “detached,” or the term “non-attachment” can be quite tricky to interpret correctly. The temptation to make a bit of a straw man and say, for example, “oh, so we shouldn’t care about other people, have relationships, or feel sympathy and empathy and compassion,” or some version of this, is understandable. It’s understandable because it’s easy to look at things in a binary way: caring or uncaring.

And, that’s the first problem: conflating non-attachment with being uncaring. In reality, the unattached person is the most sincerely caring person you could ever encounter or, hopefully, become.

Why?

Let’s answer this by explaining what we mean by “attached” in this context. Side note, if you’re up on attachment theory and relationship psychology more broadly: unattached, non-attachment etc refers to something closer to “secure attachment style,” not “avoidant attachment.”

Attachment is an insecure clinging. An unhealthy preoccupation. An addiction. Yes, ultimately what I mean when I say “attached” is that a person is addicted to other people.

A sage is not an addict, but “one with all.” He is one with all precisely because he is not addicted to any.

To understand this short sentence, then, is to understand addiction broadly: when someone cannot function without the presence of something else, something that they do not truly need but upon which they have nonetheless become dependent. Addictions are things we would be better off without. Stronger and healthier and saner without. They are not legitimate needs, but closer to a symbiotic parasite: they do something for us, yes, but at a cost only a fool would knowingly pay.

The key word is “knowingly.” All addictions hide behind not only the benefits they procure but their mind numbing and deluding effects as well. Once a path has been walked with the help of the crutch or the cane of an addictive substance, the craving for it now arises in tandem with difficulties. All paths become unthinkably difficult without the crutch of this companion. In time, people forget what it feels like to stand tall on their own.

People can be addicted to other people, too: unable to stand upright without the supply of their approval, their values, their layers of identity in the form of ethnicity, culture, religion, politics, class, education, and profession.

In a very real way, people turn down the frightening journey of discovering their true selves for the comfort of a well defined place in the crowd, no matter how much they tell themselves they’re different, no matter how far to the margin of whatever completely mainstream group they find themselves.

I should clarify something: of course we are social creatures and live in groups. Of course it is perfectly natural that the group would convey culture to the individual on every level.

This is, undeniably, normal, natural, and healthy. But the group is simply an aggregate of individuals.

No matter how many questions of how to live life appear to be answered for you by society, you still have to act out these values all by yourself from one moment to the next, from one decision to the next.

In other words, yes the supply of “group think” is everywhere, but until you reduce your own demand for it, you are attached to it. Unduly supported it. Addicted to it. And as long as this is the case, there will be much within you that is both weak and unprocessed. And beyond that, it will be almost invisible to you.

This is something I have experience with: the need to labor toward self discovery.

I had to sort out for myself the difference between what I wanted and what I thought “they” would approve of.

Did I actually dislike somebody or was I merely uncomfortable or insecure around them?

Was there something in them I found intolerable, or did I see the very thing that I harbored within myself that I dare not reveal?

Was my rejection of others no different from driving out of the village scapegoat in ancient times, the killing of a sacrificial victim made to stand in for the sins of the collective?

Did I want to be close to others, or did I just want to relieve the discomfort of loneliness?

Was I there to give, or to get?

In this last question, the addictive nature should be seen clearly. In all of these little aphorisms, what is shown in selfishness, consumerism, self gratification. Attachment. There is no real interest in other people here at all.

To become a sage, at least to become more sage like than before, means to become interested in others the way someone is interested in a garden from which they cannot eat.

A sage stands tall in his or her individuality, not as an act of rebellion against the group, but as someone who has developed completely.

If I know who I am, and I’m not taking my cues from others, then the diversity of perspectives and temperaments out there is not confusing or maddening but interesting. I can see my own humanity mirrored in others. I can be happy for their happiness, their relationships, their stable lives, their accomplishments, their intelligence, everything that makes them exceptional, or average, or even agitated and dysfunctional. I can see it all and see a human just like me but simply tilted a few degrees in another direction.

When I suffered from addictions, my life shrunk to the size of the addiction: my world was a place where I purchased, consumed, experienced the world through the lens of and suffered on account of the substances.

Little by little they eclipsed everything: responsibilities, relationships, interests, ideas, and even self preservation.

My life did nothing but continuously shrink under their influence: even since I broke my attachment to them, and completely removed them, my life has done nothing but expand.

Would I say that I am now “one with all?”

Goodness, no. Run from the person who says, “I am one with all.”

Deny him parole. Don’t join his sex cult.

What I would say is I’m free to own my perspectival reality: right in some ways, wrong in others, with some ever widening level of wiggle room to become more right and less wrong over time.

Because I take responsibility for the direction of my journey and the spirit in which I undertake it, and because I know how much determination, earnestness, and maturity that takes (because I had to cultivate all three, and was born with none of them), I mostly leave others in peace. I leave them to the management of their own lives, for better or worse.

Nobody else can live my life for me. Why would I be able to live someone else’s for them?

You probably noticed I said I “mostly leave others in peace.” Mostly? Because making no interventions at all actually is the same thing as being totally uncaring and totally cowardly.

You see someone walking into the street with their headphones on, buried in their phone, and a car is coming – do you leave them in peace because you are nobody to interfere?

I hope not.

All of my improvements were, in some way, responses to the world showing me that I wasn’t measuring up.

Sometimes it did so gently, but mostly it was painful. I would not have perceived the need for change were it to be painless. Thank God, then, for pain.

I’m just as much a part of other people’s lives as they are of mine – it would be irrational to think others don’t need corrective feedback even though I do, and I benefit from it.

For most people, it is a mixture of attachment and cowardice that hides behind their “live and let live” slogans. They are filled with judgments, frustrations, and compromised standards and boundaries, but they simply do not know how to confront problems in their relationships, or excise people they find distasteful, disagreeable, or immoral.

They don’t know how to say no. They think being a good friend means saying yes, putting your feelings aside, and capitulating to the needs of the squeakiest wheel.

“One with all” means I do not fear you. I don’t live in fear of you disagreeing with or disliking or misunderstanding me or something I say or do.

I’m prepared both to defend a position and adjust when I see compelling evidence that an error was committed. It’s not that I’m so sure that I’m right – I’m willing to jump in, engage fully, and discover where and how I am wrong. Specifically. Sitting on the sidelines, afraid of the disapproval of others, you may know something is missing, but no one has found and integrated that missing something while merely looking on as a spectator.

Part 5: A Sage Is Not Selfish

Through selfless action, he attains fulfillment.

Weak, degenerative people seek fulfillment through self gratification (addictions in various forms).

Strong, healthy people attain fulfillment by contributing to the welfare of others. What they do for themselves is maintain themselves.

Life grows in scope, in value, in happiness, in meaning, by growing one’s capacity to contribute, and by repeatedly delivering those contributions into the lives of others.

Contributing to the welfare of others can take many forms – I will make no effort to enumerate even a partial list now. As a rule, however, it cannot damage or diminish another person in any way. Meaning, if you contribute by becoming a crutch that they lean on, because this makes you feel useful, it is not useful to them, because it is making them weak and dependent.

In my experience, being a good person means doing a whole lot of what looks like nothing. Minding your own business, but minding it well. Becoming meticulous, excellent, restrained, fastidious and frugal. There is more to say about human excellence elsewhere, but I want to focus on selfless action for the time being.

It is not going around and trying to be helpful. There is no “going around” at all. There is, in fact, nothing driving you to go do this or that at all – there is the perception of situations and events, the instinctive awareness of what is called for in that moment, and the fluid transition from observation to action.

The lack of self seeking is what makes it selfless: not some very flattering campaign of bringing flowers to the sick and kissing babies and letting people know “you’re here for them.”

Less letting people know, and more being there.

Less jumping in, and more watching and waiting.

Letting others find their footing, find their words, and find their way, but quietly keeping an eye on it all, so as not to miss the moment of action when action is called for.

It’s called for less often than you probably think, unless this person we’re talking about is your own infant child.

If you want to do nice things for others because you’re temperamentally inclined to do so, you shouldn’t be looking for permission from this newsletter: for God’s sake go and be good. But do it because it fulfills your nature, which is actually the best bit of all the good it does for you: to be you, through and through, and no one else.

That leads me to another important point.

Do good because you’re a do-gooder.

Do good because you wish to learn how to do good.

Do good because you need to know you’re capable of doing more than bad.

Do good because you want to find out whether or not it will make you happier.

Do good, actually, because you understand that you expect it of yourself and your own approval or disapproval is the single most important thing in your life.

But do not do good to make others like you, respect you, sleep with you, admire you, forgive you, hire you, or choose you over someone else.

It’s the “so that they will” that has to go. The neediness. The addictive craving. The manipulative, covert bartering. The resentment when they don’t do what you want, even though you bent over backwards. The contemptible, sniveling longing for recognition. This is trash. Trash.

The proper understanding of selfless action is that it is the fruit born of first ending your competitive relationship with others and then ending your unhealthy attachments to others.

How can you help people when you think their success is a threat to yours? How can you truly come to understand others, and their unique needs, when you derive your sense of self from their example?

When you find and lay claim to the path that is only available to you, competition ends.

When you cast off all forms of crutches and develop the strength to stand in your own nuanced and irreducibly complex individuality, attachments end, too.

Now you can see what others need, because they are struggling along a path you yourself have walked successfully.

You can see what would be helpful, what would be enabling, what would be superficially pleasant but ultimately irrelevant – you see a great deal, and you see it clearly: you are now, legitimately, a force for good in the world.

Part 6: Conclusion

We covered so much today, and I learned a great deal in the process of finding the words for this article. I looked at the lines of Chapter 7 of the Tao Te Ching and I saw a great task before me: show everyone the through line that connects our mortality, the grandeur of nature, and the three characteristics of a sagely life laid out here – life beyond competition, beyond attachments, and beyond self interest.

The simple fact that our time is limited is enough to justify the undertaking of sorting this all out – how ought we to feel about our place in the world? How ought we relate to one another? What should we seek in the actions we take? What will make the difference between a life spent wisely and a life wasted?

I can now say this much: a life of denial, insecurity, desperate clinging, and petty one-upmanship just is certainly the latter. The former is the path of strength, dignity, and respect. Out of these three grow the virtues of acceptance, caring, and contribution.

I hope you will reflect on what we have discussed here today, and I wish you the courage to do so.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.

-Jas

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The Long Way Home: overcoming drugs and alcohol

Stay in school,
Eat your greens,
And say no to drugs.

Yup, this is the letter where I talk about drugs and alcohol, my path to total abstention from both, and why I recommend a zero percent participation rate for everyone.

Before I go on to outline exactly what it is I’m going to talk about, permit me to clarify in advance what I’m not going to do, and where it is that my statements are not coming from.

I’m not here to give some kind of “tell-all” story about my past, and everything I share about myself will be for the sake of making a larger point.

There are people who reach a place in their lives when they can no longer hold back some kind of terrible secret and have to bear their soul to the world to overcome their shame. That is not me, and this is no such performance.

I’m also not here to hound people who are simply living their lives and aren’t looking for a change. I’m going to be quite blunt, mercilessly at times, about my assessment of the effects of drugs and alcohol on people’s conduct, conscience, and maturity – if you were to feel personally attacked, you would be mistaken.

Alcohol has been part of civilization for millennia: the phrase “write drunk, edit sober” was not coined by Bukowski but by the Egyptians, according to the Histories of Herodotus. Similarly, there are all manner of psychoactive herbs that people have discovered deep in the forests and jungles, chewing on them and making teas, since as long as we have existed as a species.

It is an arrogant blowhard who judges the world and judges humanity. What I’m interested in is clarity of understanding, and I try to convey what it is that I understand in the clearest language possible.

With that said, here’s what you can expect in the paragraphs that follow.

A summary of my own history with D&A

The sorts of character flaws that made me vulnerable to an unhealthy relationship with D&A,

All the ways D&A made me a worse person living a worse life,

Everything that changed for the better as a direct result of completely quitting D&A.

Some general observations about the nature of substance abuse, and a guardedly optimistic finale.

So, consider this week’s letter as you and me having some “real talk” about life’s ups and downs, and what setting the world aright has looked like in my own life.

I leave it to you to reflect on my experiences and observations, assessing where you do and don’t find parallels in your own life or the lives of those close to you. This is, as the kids say, “my truth.” We may have much in common, or be worlds apart. That’s your own private assessment to make, and I assume nothing.

Part One: Why did it become a problem for me?

I’ve talked about this in earlier newsletters, but I used to be deeply uncomfortable in my own skin, and didn’t make friends very easily.

Plenty of people go through that at some point in their life, but they soon outgrow it. I didn’t. The root of it apparently went much deeper, or, perhaps, the mechanisms that usually kick in to move someone beyond it were short circuited in my case.

It’s hard to say for sure, but the result is that I adapted to, rather than outgrew the discomfort. I put very high walls around myself, neither letting anything in fully, nor fully issuing forth anything of my true self either.

A lot of my “intellectualizing,” while it later bore real fruit, was initially wrapped up in the search for tools with which to distance myself from other people, to feel superior, and in which I might bury myself so that I could avoid those uncomfortable feelings.

What I want to get across is the extent to which I was holding up a compensatory edifice. If it was born of anxiousness and self loathing, it only made for more of the same.

This would be an example of the ideal conditions for someone to respond abnormally well to alcohol and drugs (cocaine in my case). By abnormally well, I mean liking it a bit too much.

A normal person takes pain killers and just gets an upset stomach. A person in tremendous pain, on the other hand, feels euphoria. I felt euphoria.

It’s hard to say no to euphoria. It’s hard to push it away in favor of being left to grapple with an agonizing existential void, without any tools, understanding, or people around you who speak the language of self development.

Conversely, it’s easy to find people who want to get inebriated.

During a particularly bad chapter in my life, drugs and alcohol took hold to a greater degree than they ever had before. I had gone through a divorce, having been on the receiving end of verbal, psychological, and physical abuse for the better part of six years, only to jump into a new relationship way too quickly.

All that unprocessed baggage on my end culminated in acts of infidelity that ended the relationship and left me without a place to stay. As this coincided with me failing out of a Multilevel Marketing Company, I found myself out of a job as well.

It was as though my whole life had “bottomed out.”

My ex wife and daughter had moved in with her parents in San Francisco, but there I was, in Southern California, looking around at nothing but the wreckage of what had been my life.

So, I threw all my stuff in the car, abandoned the rest, and drove to San Francisco to co parent my kid. I lived in my car, and drove lyft 10 plus hours a day, six or seven days a week. I had 7000 passengers in 18 months, if that puts in perspective.

I say all this to say that I felt, and, in many ways, was completely outside society at that point. It felt like my life had split off into some parallel, alternate universe. I knew that, somehow, I would get out of this situation, but I had no idea how, and I didn’t make any plans.

Looking back on it now, of course it could have been solved relatively easily. I had tunnel vision, and lacked the courage to truly face the reality of my situation. I buried myself in the daily grind, avoiding larger questions and problems.

It was under these circumstances that drugs and alcohol gradually crept back into my life. I say “crept back,” and that’s probably confusing. They had been in the picture before, and I’d kicked them to the curb and kept them out for years, but the underlying issues were never truly resolved. Now, I was in the most vulnerable place I’ve ever been in, feeling like I wasn’t living a real life, and that I didn’t quite matter to the world in the way that others did. I felt like a complete failure, although I wouldn’t have had the courage to articulate that at the time.

So, they crept back in, and gradually took over. When I got rid of them this last time, I knew this had to be about more than just not using them. I had to remove the cause. The cause of my twisted love affair with them.

Here is something that I wrote, years ago, reflecting on that “love affair”

It feels like I’ve known you all my life

I met them at a party years ago
And they were so interesting
Interesting like when you hear
John’s solo on Giant Steps
For the first time.
Interesting like the first time
A girl puts your hand somewhere
And you don’t know what to do,
Yet surprised at your unhesitation.
We were fast friends,
Me and these interesting strangers.
They took me everywhere –
Introduced me to ex black ops
Operatives who showed me
Their black handguns,
Introduced me to ex pro athletes
With black curls tight as a drum
And speech as chiseled as their bodies once were.
Introduced me to women I’d always looked at
And could never talk to,
Sometimes three or four at a time,
Took me to house parties full of mid-six lawyers,
Rooftop bars, artists’ lofts,
Black cars idling in parking lots.
My friends were interesting –
Like an electric shock
Like an epiphany,
Like a conversation that
Blows your fucking mind out
Like jumping into bed with a girl
When the other two friends
She came over with
Are sitting and drinking at your kitchen table
And nobody cares.
We’d stay up all night, and when the sun rose
They were gone without goodbyes
But they always called again.
They were there
When she stopped texting back
When I had a bad day at work
When I had a good day at work
When a date ended early,
When a date went unexpectedly well.
I stopped being surprised when my new friends
Already knew them, and brought them along
When they I couldn’t find them on my own.
They stopped leaving at dawn,
Had nowhere else to go,
And maybe it’s because I too was interesting now.
But time went by, and I never saw them eating.
I asked them about it one day,
And they lifted up the hood,
Lifted up the rug,
Opened up the walls,
The bank accounts,
And my ribs,
And showed me
Everything they’d chewed through.

I said this wouldn’t be some gut wrenching tell all tall tale. I’m dangerously close to breaking that promise, so let’s step away from the precipice. I hope I’ve conveyed the tone and tenor of the whole thing, the causes of my particular vulnerability I had to it, the sorts of pain it was medicating, and feeling of being robbed of one’s dignity that comes from being eventually ruled by an addictive substance.

Part Two: Life After Drugs

I don’t touch anything anymore. I put my foot down and got through it. More importantly, I got to the root issues. I’ve discussed all this in previous newsletters, but I’ll summarize here by saying that I gradually acquired tools with which I could face my own demons. It wasn’t with sheer courage, but frameworks.

Initially, I just needed regular doses, if you’ll pardon the word, of positivity. After years of running away, I was left in an empty windowless room with my own feelings of worthlessness. The advantage, however, of arriving at that confrontation later in life, after having lost so much in a vain attempt to cover it up, is that there was no longer any fooling myself: the resolution to this could be nothing less than total. The enemy had to be utterly annihilated, the reversal of course comprehensive, and the reforms unequivocal. There was no going back, no half measures, and no second thoughts. I had to become, as I have now said a handful of times, totally solid all the way to the core.

I started listening to positive affirmations, and guided meditations. For people who are interested in and receptive to this kind of thing, here are the links to the morning and evening meditations I listened to religiously.

I started exercising regularly as well, first at home, and eventually at the gym. I’ve only gotten more serious about the gym as time’s gone by. It’s fun, even if it does not look or sound like I am having fun. It looks and sounds like a horror movie, but now I look great naked, which is its own reward.

I discovered the joy of honoring myself, treating myself like someone who matters, and backing that up by keeping promises to myself. Doing what I set out to do, not doing what I said I wouldn’t do.

What I discovered for myself is the power of self credibility. I discovered the joy of earning my own respect and approval. Because I know what it means to live without both, I have a special appreciation for it now.

At first, I would defend it militantly. Now I’m a bit more relaxed and dare I say charming about the whole thing now. But, at first, I still had little bits of the gravel of the underworld in my teeth, still not totally sure if the nightmare was over.

I can now say that it’s over. The first time I quit, I was taken in by “the spiritual community.” The Kundalini Yoga people (did you think I just happened to be a non practicing Jew from Berkeley with no Indian ancestry and coincidentally named Jaswinder Singh? Guess again).

It’s not a bad way of life, but I traded in my hot mess of a life for dogmatic rigidity with the support of a religious separatist community. I was not holding this up on my own, and far from it. This is why the underlying issues never went away, even if they were dormant for many years.

The second time I quit, I did it all myself. I made use of resources, but not one human being lifted a finger or offered a word of support. I made sure nobody had the chance, or even knew of the undertaking. This had to be my own doing, every step of the way. I had to know every step of the road leading from insanity to sanity, ruin to accomplishment, failure to success, misery to happiness, unhealthiness to radiant vitality. I had to acquire an absolute command over myself, and my life depended on it.

So far, so good.

Progress begets progress. What began as just trying to get through a day without consuming soon led to more positive endeavors. I missed being serious about things, so I started reading books again, practicing guitar to a metronome, and taking every opportunity to clean up the messes I had made in the past.

Eventually, I stumbled onto the methodology that would change my life forever: spending the entire month of December to plan the entire following year. I’m on year 3 of using this system, modifying and refining as I go.

It was all driven by an insatiable urge to take my life back. And, once I had regained control of it, to fashion it into something that I could proudly call my life’s work.

That’s the project. That’s what we’re doing here: trying to win the game fair and square, but at any cost. The right thing, done the right way, for the right reasons, at any cost.

Part Three: impolite observations

This is where I rattle off some general observations about what drugs and alcohol seem to do to people.

This is also the part where I speak with judicious pitilessness when I deem necessary. You’ve been warned.

They destroy your credibility with yourself.

Cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, and a bad diet are all examples of things we know we shouldn’t do. If you wouldn’t want your own child consuming them, then you know damn well that you shouldn’t be either.

The result of this is moral compromise: on the most basic level, which is your relationship with yourself, you put things into your body that you know perfectly well do not belong there because they are poisonous.

I am telling you now, it is really quite simple: when you do things every day that you know you should not do, you do not respect yourself: “ignoring knowledge is sickness.”

It is probably also the case that you’ve walled off the acute awareness of that fact, because it hurts, behind a bunch of what we colloquially refer to as bullshit: rationalizing, excuse making, empty promises about someday, hand waving (“yeah, I know”), and willful blindness.

Again, not behavior anyone can respect, least of all you. Imagine having to live with someone who constantly lies, ignores problems, actively contributes to his or her own deterioration, and acts like none of it is a big deal.

They make you
selfish,
isolated,
impulsive,
arrogant,
and delusional.

They don’t call it “self medicating” for nothing. Drugs and alcohol turn you into a very self involved person, your energy and attention always directed toward yourself, your high, your buzz, your hangover, your comedown, your cravings.

Self serving behavior is isolating behavior. Whether or not you’re around other people, you’re not truly with them as much as you are using them. Using them to facilitate the experience, as an outlet for your disinhibited loquacity, and, most of all, as an excuse to engage in the behavior: you’re having a good time. Cut drugs and alcohol out of your life, and see how much fun those same people are to hang out with.

Just as selfishness and isolationism are linked, impulsivity and arrogance are also linked. Drugs and alcohol create the illusion of power: I can make these bad feelings go away with my magic potion, so why should I deal in a serious way with the root causes of bad feelings?

The root causes of social awkwardness, the surprisingly frightening nature of being presented with real love and intimacy, the discomfort of not knowing what to say or do, and the sundry causes of feelings of inadequacy, which are quite often valid (meaning, yes it is quite often the case that you are inadequate, because life is not easy and cannot be managed successfully without real depth and maturity, all of which must be obtained in the face of discomfort) – why grapple with any of that when I can numb myself to it all by simply consuming drugs and alcohol?

Here’s where the arrogance comes in: it isn’t that you merely aren’t aware of the consequences of the fact that you’re being avoidant: you know, and you don’t care.

And that means that you never truly deal with people as humans, but always as a kind of threat: are you going to stay within the bounds of what I can tolerate? Of what I find pleasant and agreeable? Or is our interaction going to bring something to the surface that will trigger a craving?

The mind of an addict says: I don’t have to listen to you, because I have ways of burying your signal beneath a mountain of noise. A high, a buzz – it is 100% noise.

The noise gives rise to delusion. Delusions, because you’re getting less and less signal from your environment, and you’re living more and more within a totally private experience of your own making, but over which you do not have any real control.

Your own little world of pseudo intellectual “insights,” wild experiences, and the sense of being cut off from and in some way superior to others.

All fucking rubbish.

Let’s end on a positive note, shall we?

The main reason substance abuse is bad, axiomatically, is because it cheats everyone of the person you might have been, had you chosen the path of courage, contribution, and creativity. It cheats your parents of a son or daughter they can be proud of, or at least stop worrying about. It cheats your teachers of the feeling of having actually elevated someone into a self reliant adult who loves to learn, grow, and achieve. It cheats you of the possibility of fulfilling your ambitions, your dreams, your yearnings for a life of deep connection and meaning.

It’s that potential that I want you to focus on. That’s what matters. That, if I may, is the purpose of life: to grow to full maturity. To find out what you’re capable of. To draw out the insights buried in the recesses of your mind. To see how you might build upon the achievements of your forebears if only you had read a little more about them and understood where their work has run aground.

Like it or not, someone is looking to you as an example of what is possible. Will you be a role model, a cautionary tale, or a corrupting influence? You have to decide. I had to decide.

You’re not a victim. Nobody did this or anything to you: your life is a series of events, none of which could possibly constitute an excuse for being a selfish piece of shit. I wasted far too much of my life being like that, despite having every opportunity laid at my feet, and being surrounded by loving and supportive parents and mentors since as long as I could remember.

What sobriety represents to me is the choice of life over death. The choice of what is real and shared over what is imaginary and private. The choice of being good over being clever, and the choice of seeing it through over quitting.

In closing, I want to say that if you stop treating yourself like someone who can’t handle life, you might be amazed by what your life can now become. I already am, and I’m just getting started. Give it a try.

Thanks for reading, talk to you soon.

-Jas