An endless fascination with learning

It’s a bit like reminding yourself over and over you’re alive right now. The issue is the moment always folds into the next one, and the one after, and….

A better way to feel present is to experience discomfort with boredom. This is what I run from. My body internally convulses and reaches for any entertainment. If you can be more still with boredom, you’ll be more present. You’ll feel that which you’ll do anything to avoid.

In a few decades there will be boredom groups and boredom coaches who host boredom retreats. Novels written about how boredom changed the very fabric of one’s life.

Still, it’s a useful exercise-sitting with boredom. Or fear. Or anger. Or whatever bubbles up. It’s the only way to remind yourself you are right now right here.

Not too long ago, the world likely imparted few lessons on humanity. And those imparted lessons almost certainly skewed towards survival. Advantageous for the ones who survived when their brothers and sisters did not. Cook this for longer. Hold the bow more upright. Humidity means storms. Seek shelter. There were implicit more than explicit.

As time goes on, and we separate ourselves from fatalistic circumstances, the mind grows bored and desires action. We no longer need fear tuberculosis, but we don’t know what to do with ourselves. And at that moment, we realize simplicity does not satisfy. We create complexity for no other purpose than relieving boredom. We create mazes with straight lines are in front of us.

Everything is a lesson everywhere now. Fired? What did you learn? Destroy your marriage? Lose your home? Go down a scary water-slide? Lessons galore. And we must share them. Always we must share them-for what are lessons now if we didn’t tell others about them? We are awash in lessons and wisdom and we plead for simplicity, when we ourselves designed a maze that you cannot escape.

We have hit a point where everything we do is in service to something else.

“I work out to ensure I live longer and am able to play with my kids.”

“I read business books to understand the way people made mistakes so I don’t make them.”

“I cold-plunge because to evidence to the rest of humanity that idiots still very much do exist.”

Everything, anything now, is in service to some other thing. We do not, any longer, do the thing for the pleasure of the thing itself. Does the renaissance happen if painting and sculpture were in service of something other than an almost unstoppable compulsion to create something beautiful? Canals, art, poetry, music. All of these things are, or rather were, done for the thing itself. For the pleasure it brings. For the sense of wonder and mastery and craft and beauty and call to God that flowed from the very act of bringing the thing into being. They were never done because of some other “good” thing that would result.

We have lost the script in that way. All actions are now either mundane (waking up at 4 am to meditate every day to check the thing off the list) or as part of some greater responsibility (100 burpees and a mile long run to destroy yourself) to be “better.” In this fog of productivity and effeciency, we have managed to overspecialize. We have managed to suffocate what makes us human. What makes us tender. What creates and fosters the individual in all of us.

We have yet to understand the unbelievable importance of cutting the cords of efficiency. We’ve yet to give ourselves permission to disavow. Disavow productivity. Disavow struggle without knowing for what we do so. How much art has the world lost because we’ve been so busy running on the hedonic treadmill? How many paintings haven’t been painted? Dreams dreamt. Worlds created?

The cure to the mundane world which we find ourselves sits in front of our faces. We need only open our relaxed eyes.

I’ve been thinking about the purity of a child’s life and their love. How freely they give it away. How little expectation they have of anything coming back. It is apparent that this is the basic original condition: love. If you provide a home, provide space, provide presence and provide warmth, children flourish. They flourish because these conditions allow their original condition of love to appear. There’s no blockage. No hesitancy. Like a river without anything in it’s way. In the spirit of that, some examples of love below.

1. A mother and a newborn.
2. Watching the sunrise.
3. Your favorite sports team, winning in overtime…in a championship game.
4. Visiting a country you’ve always dreamt of.
5. Coming back home after a long time away.
6. Finding the person of your dreams and committing to them. And then being with them 50 years later.
7. Watching flowers bloom in the spring.
8. A dog sleeping across you.
9. Graduation. Looking across the podium to find your child. Knowing what you sacrificed to get them there.
10. A simple, or exquisite meal you prepared for people you care about.
11. Friends at dinner.
12. Giving to charity that you care deeply about.
13. A redone home that you carefully planned and built.
14. Finishing a painting you’ve been working on for years.
15. A final goodbye.
16. Eyes closed at your place of worship. Be that at Church or in nature.
17. An incredibly arduous workouts conclusion.
18. Coffee and rain.

We tend to conflate the idea of love as some feeling that can only be felt in only very special circumstances. Watching children makes one realize that not to be the case. You can find it most anywhere at anytime. You don’t have to create it. It’s always there. You just have to unblock the things that are stopping you from feeling you. You have to remove love from an artificial pedestal and bring it back down to where it belongs. Right next to you.

There is so much practicing these days. Practicing patience. Practicing gratitude. Practicing wonder. Practicing awe. Practicing stillness. What would it look like if these weren’t dualistic? If practicing gratitude did not mean that one had to stop what one is doing and practice gratefulness, but rather, as a baseline condition, just be grateful. Same for awe, stillness, patience and all of those good virtues we are taught. We unnecessarily complicate things when we separate them from ourselves. The thing does not have to be a thing where we add wonder; we just have to walk in wonder all the time. We need to stop being tasked with reminding ourselves all the time, and rather just be that thing.

One of the worst things you can do is feel awful for the incredible luck that you’ve experienced. The constant comparison of your situation to awful things leaves you stuck. You’re tethered to another realm of being that doesn’t exist. Some other plane where things are abysmal, even though in reality they are nothing of the sort.

Quite often these baseline horrors happen after traumatic events. A bankruptcy or a death. Something you’ll do anything in your power never to experience so long as you live. Initially, that fuel, that aversion, is a healthy additive to whatever motivation oyou may have. Slowly, though, the additive coagulates and starts making you work harder than you need to. There is simply no way you will experience that thing again based on your trajectory and yet you run faster and faster away from it. You desecrate the initial action from aversion. At some point, you don’t know what your even running from or running towards. That is the abyss. That is when you find yourself totally un-tethered to your actual circumstances and in an endless race against and towards oblivion.

In order to know what you want you must create the silence required for those thoughts to come. And, in order to do that, you must burn the boats. You must agree and accept that the worst of the worst can happen and you must nod at that reality and walk away from it. You do not have to apologize for the possibility of tragedy whilst you enjoy the good times. You must simply enjoy the good times and look to make things better.

For decades now, I’ve read every bit of philosophy and wisdom I’ve gotten my hands on. Russell to Hume to Seneca to Aristotle to Aurelius to Spinoza to Thoreau to everyone in between. Searching. Always searching. Then it came to me recently that I had no idea what it was that I was actually searching for. Was it a roadmap on how to live? The Talmud seems to be silent on the type of car I should lease. Was it a pursuit of happiness? How would I even know once I found it, and what if happiness was mostly genetically predisposed to someone. Was it thriving in business? Most philosophers (save, Seneca) were poor and didn’t touch on that. No, it wasn’t any of that-seemingly I was doing this simply to distract.

The one thing I continue to be unable to face is myself in silence. In other words, I cannot seem to answer what it is that I want. What it is that I’m searching for. I’m digging holes across the field but, even after all of these years, I’ve no idea what answers I’m even looking for.

A thought came to me the other day: Just drop all of it. Drop the searching. Drop the conflicting sage advice one receives in searching for wisdom. Allow the silence to take shape, and don’t expect anything beyond that. Stop moving around. See what comes up.

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of ghosts. When I was a kid, my parents were often at work, and I was alone in the apartment. Their bedroom was off to the left side through a hallway, and when it was dark outside, and the lights were on in that room, it felt as if something was there. Maybe it was just the fear of a young kid alone, or maybe it was more. That memory-the blackness of a room-has stayed with me to this day. I often wonder about whether or not energy remains in a place. Whether we leave some sort of trail behind; some electric pattern of being. I often think that this question gets lost in the religion debate. It seems almost irrelevant to discuss whether or not there is a “higher” power, when all you want to know is if memories have some way of lingering in the air.

For my money, Ernest Becker’s book: “The Denial of Death” is a total encapsulation of man’s often fruitless search for meaning or purpose as a way to defeat death. And how do you try our best to escape death? Through control. Always beyond our grasp, control is what we strive for in everything we do.

Ram Dass has this amusing recording from 1999 where he discusses how things seem to be moving too quickly. Political, social, environmental upheaval made people exceptionally nervous and that nervousness-the lack of control-breeds fear. Fast forward to 2025 and it feels like that on steroids. How absurdly predictable we are as a species. We exercise harder, take more supplements, work more, consume infinitely more, worry more. Everything more. And we do all of this-all of it-in some outdated form of trying to control the uncontrollable. Always on the wheel, always spinning, never understanding what it is we are spinning for.

Meditation has been culturally prescribed as an elixir to this madness. As a way to escape these thoughts or, rather, control them. But just like any medication, when it’s not used for its intended purpose, it does not cure the ill. One cannot meditate if one cannot sit still, and 95% of the difficulty in meditating is the sitting still. One (I) cannot sit still, because of the constant fear that something must be taken care of. That this is not productive. That this will not help. That the you in you is not a meditator. That you have so much to do. That you can’t find the time. In reality, the quiet is the terror. The quiet tells you that all around you, life moves on without you. That your work, your goals, your striving, your concerns, your worries, your end games, your everything is meaningless. It is meaningless because everything is meaningless. Everything is meaningless because everything is impermanent. But this capital T truth is terrifying and so we spin instead. We contort and plan and scheme and cry and work and book trips and do anything you can to avoid staring at the abyss, even though we know it’s right in front of us.

The terror lives in ourselves. It needs nothing to survive. In fact it feeds off of our strict schedule of denying it exists. But what if we befriend it? That’s not a hypothetical question either. What if we actually befriend the terror. That would mean we shatter our ego in the process. It would mean that certainly our goals are not really ours. That our identity has been formed not through our own conscious attempts at becoming this thing, but rather as the reflections of everyone around us. It would mean we’d have to put down the hopes and dreams and struggles and complaints as not our own. And then we are left with what? With a perplexing lack of self and no closer to the meaning we are quite literally dying for. And while this is unsatisfying, it is likely the only real truth there is. We may find that when we crack our ego and ourselves, we may find love there, deeply hidden, ready to emerge. We may find that all we wish to do is give and receive love. That we want help and want to provide help and we want nothing other than to live. And may that be enough.

The problem with success is that it’s really tough to wean off of. You follow this linear pattern of up, up, up, and you don’t quite understand when you’ve actually made “it.” Thousands of years ago, you made it when you found a mate, or hunted food or gathered enough materials for a shelter. Now, not much is tactile. You no longer feel success, or see it in front of you. What’s worse, you often have to look to the left and right to see what your neighbors level of success is and compare it to yours.

The solution to this cannot simply be to step back and realize that success is amorphous anymore than telling a cigarette smoker that he should fight the urge to smoke by thinking about how silly all of it is. It’s deep in you, it’s got control, and it needs slaying.

What is your life if you’re not pointing to some far away goal? In what universe are you simply permitted to just “be”, rather than attain something. What if you can’t sit still? What if fear pervades any attempt to stop? How do you measure your worth? How do others measure your worth? What is life worth? What is your life worth? What does a good life look like? What if you just spend it goofing off? What if everything you know about yourself begins to implode because you can’t distract yourself? How does silence feel for you? What if there’s nothing to take care of right now? What if there is too much time and not enough time at the same time? What if this is all there is? What if these questions have no answers? Who do you become then? How do you compare yourself to anything? When if the lack of effort is the point? What if it all implodes?

Success, in one way or another, is a wonderful substitute for siting quietly and pondering those most uncomfortable questions we all are scared to us. It’s our cigarette that we’re all dying for, even though we know it’s probably not good for us and takes us away from the thing we really want.