An endless fascination with learning

Midlife has born from it an industry hyper-focused on reinvention. There’s a lot of money on the line for those who facilitate some sort of a re-birth. This doesn’t negate the idea of the crisis itself, but it does shine a light on whether you’re experiencing an actual crisis or a manufactured one.

Carl Jung wrote extensively about the shifts that occur in the psyche around the age of 40. The personal scaffolding of the first 40 years of your life-formation and accumulation and trappings, etc., give way, rather violently sometimes, to the desire of integration. A level of wholeness. A discussion with your shadow. Buddhists may instead focus on release from attachment as you begin to comprehend you mortality more intimately. Scores of religions touch upon this, so it’s no surprise that you should now be fed infinite amounts of content instructing you that you need to leave the past behind and create a new you.

But what terror this brings. No animal, no species, was ever tasked with finding it’s purpose. We know of nothing in the world with our level of consciousness that must bear the yoke of self actualization. The duck does not weigh making the world malleable to him or to accept things as they are. The duck simply does duck things. It lives in the present by default. And we, instead, search in every crevice for answers that were never promised to us. We can spend our entire lives on this search and find nothing. What happens when the dog finally catches the car it’s chasing? What then? That, one can argue, is the real terror.

It is an abject miracle that we breathe. A miracle that we may walk. Life is a parade of innumerable daily miracles that blend into the background while we search for miracles.

Larry King(!!), well into his 90’s, did not and could not comprehend his own non existence. He believed in no greater power-no heaven or hell. He simply could not understand how he could not exist. We cannot understand how time existed before us or how it will exist after us. That’s because time, for each of us, is the most personal metric of observation. We experience our own time. Yes, we witness the time of others, but we do not know their time. We only know now that we breathe. And what do we do with this gift? Should, in fact, anything be done with this gift. Alan Watts thought no. He said the purpose of life is simply to be alive. How unbelievably beautifully simple. Being here to bear witness. Jews believe we are here to heal the world. How marvelously selfless. But all of these beliefs require wrestling with a truth that lives as sand and waves. You cannot really grasp any of this.

So, what, exactly, do you do in the face of this? In the face of non-existence? In the face of a million miracles a day? Perhaps midlife is merely an alarm that goes off but perhaps it’s an alarm that goes off in an entirely empty schedule. Perhaps you just witness the whole thing and hope you get to ride again. Perhaps you realize how unimportant you are. How small your sphere is. Perhaps this alleviates the guilt and the sorrow or helps illuminate the beauty of impermanence.

Perhaps that is the very best you’ll be able to do.

In the past several weeks I’ve been less engrossed with if I should open another bank account, and at what bank. I haven’t done the compulsive thing I often do where I weight what kind of car I should get by thinking about the financial impacts, the environmental impacts, and the love I’d have for it. I stopped spending much time deciding if I can get significantly more protein into my diet and how. There was nothing that necessarily caused this, but it’s helped me all the same. There’s a weight when you’re an internal quant. A weight that hangs heavy when you have to judge every decision on a number of factors that don’t mean much. It could simply be that whatever mirage surrounding longevity has passed me by for the moment. It could be that I’m more present or more tired (perhaps they’re not dissimilar.) Whatever it is, it’s nice. When you can walk down the street and not weigh if you’re giving enough to charity or if you’re spending your time wisely (these things are wonderful to weight, just not compulsively) you have more of an opportunity to weigh nothing at all. There’s a gap between being present and thinking about nothing. I think, recently, we’ve all been pushed into this direction of being present, which, in and of itself, is pressure. BE PRESENT ARE YOU PRESENT BE PRESENT. Much easier-much more natural-is the inclination to just be. To not solve problems. To not use walks as a way to rev up the brain. To not notice nature to tell yourself that you noticed nature. It’s simply being alive in all of its beautiful boredom. It’s nothingness. It’s shrug. I would often stare at sunsets as I do now, with inky puffy cloud skies surrounding me, and I would think “How absolutely beautiful this is.” And then I would think how lucky I was to see this. And then I would zoom out further until you hit nihilism. But whenever I did those things I did them as if someone was externally reminding me to remind myself to do them. Now, I’m just sitting outside and typing, and it’s quite nice. I’m not trying to leave a legacy with this post. Not trying to have my kids know me better. Not trying to outlast mortality. Just typing.

One of the most deceptive ideas in the past 50 years is thought for the sake of thought. We’re stuck in cycles of “distillification.” Of pretending thought is action, when only action is action. You cannot think your way to purpose or clarity, simplicity or peace. Every thought must be followed by some outwards attempt to either create the condition or to find the conditions necessary to create. One cannot move the earth with their mind. They must literally try and move the earth.

Much of middle age in the United States is some sort of a race of clearing the mind of old cobwebs and traumas and all in the interior sphere. In reality, the outside is screaming for attention, and the world demands action, and through that repetitious action, a speck of impermanent peace may be found.

It surprises me more and more how much my environment dictates my thoughts and actions. When I want quiet, living in quiet is a balm. When, however, I want culture, art, and frenetic energy, living in quiet is dystopian. Same goes for ambition. NYC, LA, Paris, and a few others cities are what they are for no other reason but that they provide a playground for ambitious types to meet each other and be ambitious in the same sandbox. This isn’t to confuse riches or finance with ambition. Ambition is a thing unto itself. Both a cause and an effect at the same time. Flowing through your bloodstream, demanding immediate action. Many times, when you’re meditating and you’re told to quiet the mind, you have to essentially ensure this tiger is temporarily asleep. But ambition is pacing around the quiet. It’s circling and circling and leering and waiting until the right moment to pounce. It can very much bide it’s time without issue or complaint. It’s a life force unto itself. It makes you feel alive and that aliveness stems from the physical vibration of the thing. The lack of this is death. Not the lack of more or better, but the inability to challenge oneself. To simply grow old and complacent.

It is utterly ridiculous and counterproductive to quiet the thing that lets you feel most alive. Instead of quieting it, you must ride it. You need not identify it or grapple with it. You must harness it and use it until the next stop, and the one after that. There is a reason that people return to Paris for centuries seeking “something.” It is that energy that they must tap into to know that they are still on this earth. No level of quiet will bring that peace or euphoria.

Much of what most of us do revolves around action. A calvinist ideal of pushing and pushing until exhaustion. Much of what the greater world has done-what the universe has done-revolves around inaction. The moon pushes and pulls the tide in and out. The sun heats the earth. Animals observe. Grass grows only when it’s time. We confuse, to our detriment, effort with ends. If we simply experienced-merely listened and watched-we would come to the point where we understood how little action need be taken to accomplish things. How much we can let go. How unbelievably terrifying that is.

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.