A Short Dog Tale

The World as It Is. A car sped down a rural road and what looked like trash was thrown from the window. The farmer mowing nearby stopped his work and walked over to pick up whatever paper had been thrown into his field so that the mower wouldn't shred and spread it everywhere. It wasn’t paper, but a puppy just a few weeks old, covered with bruises and now with a newly broken tail. The astonished man picked him up and took him home. A friend of his sent a picture to a friend of mine named Doug who immediately adopted him and called him Miller. That was two years ago.

Recently, Doug and Miller were at Lowe's Hardware and Miller pulled hard at his leash to get to a lady standing near an end-cap. Doug pulled him back in surprise. It was odd behavior for the ordinarily well behaved dog. They found their item and got in line. Miller pulled again and this time moved around behind Doug, who then turned to see what was going on. It was the same lady. Miller was instantly sitting next to her with his head leaning on her leg. She was crying.

"I'm so sorry." Doug had no idea what was going on.

"No, no. I had to put my dog to sleep a few hours ago."

Dogs know a lot more than we think. They understand and feel in ways we sometimes can’t even imagine. Honor the animals in your life.

And maybe ask them, "How's the stock market going to do tomorrow?" And let me know.

The opening picture above is of the puppy himself on his first trip to the vet! And now two years later, the comforter: A truly good dog.

The Piano Tuner

Adventure. The new. The unknown. Courage. Discovery. Personal Transformation. What people seem to be and what they truly are. These are some of the unexpected themes in a wondrous book I just discovered and read, called The Piano Tuner and written by Daniel Mason, published by Knopf in 2002.

The story takes place in the 1880s. The British are fighting to subdue Burma. A brilliant surgeon takes up residence in a remote fort, a small beautiful village, really, far from civilization, and seems to have uncanny success in bringing peace to the area of warring tribes. He leverages his success to request that the government send him an Erard piano, which is shipped and carried to him against all odds. But a piano in the jungle will have problems. So he asks for a piano tuner from London to come repair it. Thus our story begins.

What was supposed to be a three month trip from London to upper Burma solely for the purpose of fixing and tuning a rare piano turns into so much more than a brief writeup could even hint at. It’s a remarkable book on the human spirit, music, beauty, and the uncertain journeys of life.

Do yourself a favor: Grab it! Read it!

For the book on Amazon, click HERE.

A Dose of Goodness

I just finished reading Willa Cather's novel, My Antonia for the first time. It's rare that I close a book with tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat. The story, first published in 1918, is about a group of friends and neighbors in a small farming community in the Nebraska prairie during the nineteenth century. But more that that, it's a book about the beauties, wonders, sorrows, and transporting, transient joys of life that, paradoxically, can form us forever.

In our time of public ugliness and strife, it's nearly magical to be transported to a simpler time and place, and welcomed into lives that can remind us all of the most elemental possibilities for goodness in the world.

For the novel, click https://amzn.to/2CWjcuo

What is Existence?

I tend to blog on practical topics. But every now and then, we may benefit from diving deep. I was recently on a public broadcasting radio show where the host launched the hour of talk by asking "What is the meaning of life?" I said something like, "Wow, we're not going to start small here today." And, yeah, in case you're wondering, I told her the answer. But that's for another time.

My favorite Southern novelist asked me this week by email how I would define or characterize existence. And that's quite a question. To define existence is such a bear because, in order to be helpful, definitions have to be in terms of either more fundamental things or more familiar things. And what's more of either than existence? But what you can’t define or analyze into component parts, you can sometimes still elucidate or parse. And I'm willing to give it a try.

So: What is existence? Well. Let's try some things.

Existence is the wild unruliest child of thought, which thinks first itself.
Existence is whatever makes illusion possible.
Existence is the great grandfather of thought.
Existence is the domain encompassing all of necessity and a thin sliver of possibility, stirred and shaken.
Existence is the actualization of all the potential that just could not wait any longer.
Existence is the gossamer veil of reality that floats within the vast emptiness of surrounding nothingness.
Existence is the thick, rich, dense soup of the actual.
Existence is the play of divine creativity.
Existence is the actualized realization of potentiality.
Existence is the most basic quality everything shares, down deep, throughout, and shimmering on the surface.
Existence is the ontological moment, the evanescent bubble of being, the knife’s edge between the future and the past.
Existence is what bricks, dogs, numbers and rainbows have in common.
Existence is etymologically to stand out, to rise above the boiling yet somehow nonexistent abstract cauldron of mere possibility, breaking the thin eggshell of mere potential and emerging, whether for a brief moment or an eternity.
Existence is the sparkling foam from the roiling void beneath.

Existence is the gift of God, but a gift that's in the giver and giving as well as the receiving—that one unique metaphysical gift that calls forth the recipients one and all, inviting us to the party, and bringing us here with love and a fierce hope that we'll make the most of this most spectacular present.

The Joy of the Deeper Mind at Work

Joy awaits us all. When we work with the ordinary levels of our mind, everything's harder that it could be. When we clear away the clutter and get beyond the chatter of the normal conscious mind, joyous magic can happen.

I recently posted on social media that I had, a few days ago, finished the final major editing of the eight books that now exist in a series of novels that I've been working on for five years, since February 2011. It's the first experience of writing where I wasn't working hard in my conscious mind to think and compose. It was all a gift of the deeper mind, a layer of mentality or soul, if you will, that we all have, but that we don't often enough draw on, day to day.

These books and the stories they convey came to me, as I've said before, like a movie in my head, a translucent screening of an action and adventure story far beyond anything I could ever have created out of my ordinary operating resources. In fact, when I first started reading the manuscripts out loud to my wife, she interrupted to say, "Who are you and what have you done with my husband?" It was all that different from my nineteen previous books, all non-fiction.

One reviewer of the prologue to the series, The Oasis Within, suggested that a series of conversations between people crossing the desert wasn't that big a stretch for me, and not that far out of my comfort zone as a philosopher who is always talking about life wisdom. And he was right. But there are all these little details and plot points in Oasis that I never would have thought to develop. And there's a reason that The Oasis Within is a prologue to the new series and not a numbered volume of it. It's mostly great conversations. It prepares one of the characters for the action that's to come. And it prepared me for it, as well. But a younger reader, or a reader who just loves action can start with Book One of the series, Walid and the Mysteries of Phi, the book that's now recently out by the title The Golden Palace, which is full of action, adventure, mystery, and intrigue and brings us philosophy in an entirely new key. And all the other books are like that one in this regard, too. It's like slowly walking up to a door, and opening it, and what's inside takes you completely by surprise and launches you into an adventure that just won't stop.

Early in the process, when I learned to calm my conscious mind and just relax and release, the magic would happen. With the deeper mind at work, you feel more like a receptacle, or a conduit. I've mentioned here before, I think, Elizabeth Gilbert's new book Big Magic, where she tells several stories about this remarkable kind of creative experience. It's joyous and practically effortless in its level of self-perceived exertion. How often can we say of our job, paradoxically, that "It's the hardest I've ever worked" and "It's the easiest thing I've ever done" and "It's been pure joy" all at the same time?

This is a hallmark of the deeper mind at work. There is amazing persistence of accomplishment and a sense of ease, and an overflowing of joy to match. The joy is wondrous, deep and high, wide and focused, inner and outer somehow at the same time. It animates everything else you do. It's remarkable, and it's maybe meant to be our most natural state—when we've peeled away all else, all the accretions of consciousness and contrary emotion, when we get down, deep to our most fundamental resource, one that's both natural and transformative at the same time.

I heartily recommend working from your deeper mind and experiencing the joy that's there awaiting you. I'm hoping that another book will also come to me the same way. After a million and two thousand and five hundred and more words, I feel like I'm just getting started. And isn't that the way our work should feel?

Go Outside!

“To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.” - Jane Austen

If you're like me, you don't go outside enough. I read inside. I write inside. I speak to groups of people inside. I go to a gym and workout inside. Why do we even call them workouts? They're typically work-ins. I normally eat, drink, and sleep inside. Then, there's the television. It's inside. And it often keeps me in when I could be out contemplating the heavens, gazing at the stars and feeling our smallness in the grand scheme of things. 

And we wonder why the greatest life wisdom often comes down the centuries to us from long ago. People spent much more time outside then. And it made a difference. In fact, many wise voices from the past advise us now to get out more.

“Never a day passes but that I do myself the honor to commune with some of nature’s varied forms.” - George Washington Carver

I'm think I'm going to make it a practice to get out more, to feel a few minutes of sunshine on my face, to enjoy some communion with sky and grass and trees, to sit and watch the birds fly by, and listen to the geese honk as they often pass over my backyard. Whenever I do it, it reconnects me to the fundamental things, and the real rhythms of life.

I did that recently, for hours. I sat outside and communed with nature. Nature communed back. I felt refreshed, rejuvenated, renewed.

On a beautiful day, it can be an energizing experience, even for a few minutes. And then, even after a rain, there can be a special something in the air, and on the ground.

“The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.” - E.E. Cummings

Why don't you give yourself the gift of more time outside? You don't have to hike the Appalachian Trail, or go climb a mountain. A few minutes in the air, and under nature's dome will do you good. Reconnect. And see if it doesn't inspire new thoughts and feelings.

Animals: Our Mystical Colleagues

In this week’s American Scholar, in a column on books that have influenced people's lives, a weekly piece called “Reading Lessons,” Sy Montgomery, the author of 20 books on animals and nature, discusses a book he once read that was formative for his career. And he quotes and comments:

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals,” Henry Beston wrote in his 1928 classic, The Outermost House. “For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.”

This week’s writeup is on a book subtitled “A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod.” Montgomery goes on to say:

Beston brought to his observations of the natural world all of his talents—not just his intellect, but his emotion and intuition as well. His book is, to me, a blueprint for how to open your soul to creation, how to see animals in a new, humbling, and revelatory way. 

A lady has helped us manage our home for nearly twenty years. Our dogs know when she leaves her own house across town to come to ours. Our cat has trained us in various ways to do what he wants us to do, and when he wants us to do it. How much do animals understand? What’s their thought and feeling world like? When I ponder this intensely enough, it makes me want to be a vegetarian. We’ve even had a group of wild deer years ago show that they knew when the kids would come home from school each day, and gather behind our house to wait for their daily afternoon treat of dried corn. Who was their timekeeper? Who called the meeting? One day, when we were late, the boldest of the deer, a young one, came across to our back deck, and walked up the steps to peer into the door, presumably to find out what was delaying things.

I’m sure you have your own stories. What is our place in nature, really? How much could we benefit and learn by opening ourselves to new insights? What do we need to learn from our mystical colleagues, the animals?

Maybe you should ask your dog or cat.

Fly Fishing Lessons for Life

"I've learned a thing or two about human behavior on trout streams. I've discovered that patience serves better than haste, that silence is a virtue, and concentration it's own reward, and that I, at least, like to fish alone; trout fishing should not become a contest." - From Charles Kuralt, America,and his time in Montana.

A friend gave me the book by Charles Kuralt,the great volume just quoted, America, in 1996. I'm just now reading it for the first time and enjoying it immensely. Kuralt had just recently retired from CBS Television where he was such a great teacher. He decided to travel our country, living for a month in each of many different places across the nation. He spends his first month of the new year, January, in New Orleans, then goes to Key West, Florida for a second month. Then he's on to Charleston, SC, and Connecticut, North Carolina, Alaska, Minnesota, Maine, Montana, and other great spots.

What's most amazing about the book are the people he meets and visits along the way, many of whom live in remote circumstances, and enjoy their lives in exemplary ways. The wisdom of ordinary people, and especially those who live outside the mainstream of pop culture, can be extraordinary.

I began with the quote I did because of what it praises:

Patience. Silence. Concentration. Solitude. And acting in a non-competitive way, doing something for its own sake, and for no intrinsic reason.

We need to incorporate more of these things into our lives. When we do so, we'll thrive and flourish, feeling a sense of fulfillment that's nearly impossible amid haste, noise, distraction, and an elbowing, pushing crowd of people trying to get ahead of each other, and us. It's hard to capture these elusive things in our world of hustle and flash. But they will bless us, when we make room for them.

So please remember today the benefits of patience, silence, concentration, solitude, and the rare art of doing for its own sake. Give yourself the room to just be. Then your natural joy, your proper bliss, can bubble forth and bless your spirit, allowing you to go on to bless others, in turn.

PS. And by the way: Search your shelves for some old book you haven't read yet. You may be surprised at what you can find within its covers.

The Rapture of Being Alive

I was just reading, on an airplane yesterday, a book manuscript by a new friend, and I came across a passage where he was quoting Joseph Campbell. Campbell, the great professor of mythology who popularized the phrase “Follow your bliss,” was surmising in the quoted prose that what most people are seeking for their lives isn’t necessarily a sense of meaning, but rather an experience of really being alive, and not just existing. The phrase that caught my eye was this: ‘so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.’

The rapture of being alive. Do you ever feel this? Do you ever feel something that could well be described this way?

I’ve felt this many times, in fact, too many to number. And it’s always a moment, or a time, of refreshment, re-invigoration, and even regeneration. When such a feeling comes over me, it’s almost like I’m being pulled back to a realization and a focus that I deeply need, but that I’ve drifted away from, silently nudged by the demands and vicissitudes of an active life. The suddenness of the rapture jerks me out of the everydayness of my ordinary sensibilities, and reminds me of the strange and mystical joy of being alive. And this, in turn, restores to me a perspective for everything I do.

It makes me wonder how I ever let this experience, this realization, this perspective, wane in the first place. It should be a constant, grounding sensibility underlying each of my waking moments. There should be a “Wow!” underneath and around everything.

It’s all about keeping the cosmic wonder alive. It should be the air we breathe, the ground we walk on, the magic we take in every second of every day.

I suspect that, to the extent that we can manage this, it will make everything better and easier - the choices, the challenges, the opportunities and difficulties. There is magic and wonder in everything. We can’t consider the biggest cosmic and metaphysical truths without realizing this. But to feel it, to sense it, and to live with the realization every day - to capture the rapture in the ordinary course of things - is to me not a substitute for a sense of meaning, but the only way to get a true fix on the deep and rich meaning there is to be found.

So, my advice: Go capture some of that rapture today.

A Royalty of the Spirit, Relevant to All

There are, among us, certain spiritual people who seem to be in touch with something more, something that lights them up and guides them and inspires them with love and compassion and wisdom, and even knowledge of an extraordinary sort. But it isn’t just a small group of spiritual adepts who have the ability to receive insight and guidance through meditative stillness and prayer, and an open heart of eager willingness. All of us represent a royalty of the spirit who have come into this exotically strange, terrible, and wonderful world with a birthright that we often don't acknowledge, understand, or assert. And yet, still, there are times when a man or a woman, or even, and perhaps more often, a boy or a girl, will be struck with a message from beyond the visible, tangible world of the senses, just out of the blue, and with no preparation or anticipation. It could be a word of encouragement, or direction, or even warning. When it occurs, it can seem to come from outside us, and yet at the same time, from deep within us.

This actually happens, I think, to all of us at some points in our earliest years, but we often later lose our memories of these experiences, because they’re not reinforced for us by the surrounding culture. We’re not encouraged to become all that we can be, in the full range of our capacities, or to do all that we can do. And so, some of our innate abilities, a crucial part of what I like to think of as our royal inheritance, will atrophy and grow weak over time. But they’ll never disappear. They can’t be utterly extinguished. That would mean the annihilation of the soul itself. And yet they can be hobbled and starved and buried under the debris of triviality and of those worldly pressures that we too often refer to as the practical demands of life – as if life has any demands greater and more practical than that we be the best of who we are. We too easily and commonly adapt ourselves to the lowest ways of the kingdom of this world, in patterns of activity and thought that are perhaps unproblematic in themselves, but only as long as they don’t eclipse what’s higher. And yet, we too often allow them to make us forget the royal palace of the spirit, and the aligned rights, duties, and priviledges that exist in connection with it, deep within us, even though it is they that most essentially define who we are.

Despite all this, those of us who do recognize and honor the realm of the spirit should never be too quick to divide the world between an elite group of higher functioning individuals, who seek to partake of everything within the spirit that’s available to us, and, on the other hand, the majority of humanity, who seem to live as self-imposed exiles from their own royalty, and act as if they are mere commoners of the spirit. There is, instead, a vast spectrum of openness and experience represented in the world. Truly spiritual, and remarkably advanced souls certainly exist, at one end of the sweep of human experience, with the most sadly dimmed and brutish personalities at the far end. An ordinary person, who’s never as ordinary as he or she might seem, to superficial and external appearances, is always capable of more depth and breadth than any casual acquaintance, colleague, or sometimes even a good friend, might expect.

There are depths behind depths, and layers beneath layers and, if we could only see all the people around us through eyes that know and remember this, the world would look so different to us, and more like it indeed most fundamentally is.

Making Little Plans

I got an email in my box just the other day with the big title, appropriately all in bold:

Make No Little Plans. Think Big.

And it struck me immediately how commonplace such a piece of advice is, nowadays.  A culture of hype, superlatives, and grandiosity has gradually developed around those of us interested in personal growth, self-improvement, success, and spiritual development. And in this culture, it's sometimes amazing what people will actually say with a straight face, or an enthusiastic one.

I'm convinced that the real truth in life is exciting enough. We don't need to cavort in fields of hyperbole and exaggeration in order to get psyched and excited about our genuine prospects in this world. Not everything has to be the equivalent of a high wire act over the Grand Canyon, or between buildings in Chicago. You don't have to become a billionaire, or change the face of the world. Sure, some people launch rockets. And some rockets explode. And not everybody should aim for outer space, in the first place.

Sometimes, it's good to make small plans. And maybe, the best thing you can do, in some situations, is to think small. And I'm not talking nanotech here. Because, in many circumstances, little things can make a crucial difference. Often, it's just the difference that's needed - in a relationship, in an office, at home, or with a client. Yes, we do live in a world of grand gestures and huge plans, with plenty of seminars, books and videos to tell us how to be gigantic, and enormously admired. But aren't we often touched and impressed with the little kindness, the small gesture, the tiny act of grace and love that might convey something deep and wonderful? And who's to say that small and quiet lives in this world can't capture the greatest spiritual beauty to be experienced? If they're lived well.

And that's what it's all about in the end, isn't it? Quality, not quantity. Magic over magnitude, grace over grandiosity. But if it's right for you, aim as high as you can imagine, and make big plans. In the end, the right plans for you end up being the biggest and best, however big or small they might seem to someone else.

Goodbye to a Great Old Dog

On Sunday, in Wilmington, NC, it was a gloriously beautiful sunny day, and our hearts were breaking, tears flowing down all the human faces in the house.

Our old dog had experienced a very difficult month of rapidly deteriorating health, and the past week had been the worst - with at least a couple of serious diseases in advanced stages, plus a bad form of cancer, she was barking pitifully on and off throughout the night, just feet from our bed. The medications that were supposed to help her no longer could. Our other two dogs, much younger, stayed busy trying to comfort her and lick her wounds. The cat was just perplexed, but hovered and stayed close, as if wanting to help.

As the new dawn had come, the old girl refused her favorite food, as she had, for the first time ever,  just the day before. And then, when she somehow made it out the door and into the backyard, barely able to walk on swollen and weakened legs, she did something very unusual for her. She snuck off alone to a part of the property that's more heavily wooded and lay down near the perimeter fence, looking out. This extremely social animal wanted solitude. This house dog wanted to hide in nature. She yearned for something beyond the confines of what she had.

I first saw her there from a distance, lying down, and looking through the fence. The broad yard and large fenced in area that had so long protected her and given her a place to frolic and play were now not where she wanted to be. She looked out through the fence as if she wanted to go beyond it, far outside it, and she seemed, at the same time, to be in a similar way looking beyond her failing physical body, wanting and needing to get outside it, as well. The physique that had made her tough and agile and great fun was now her great impediment. And she knew it. She needed release. So she lay there and looked through the fence as if, somewhere out there, somewhere beyond all that she had known, and had physically been, was the freedom from pain and growing restriction that she needed in order to continue to be herself.

The previous day, my wife and I had been at a graveside service for an elderly aunt who had lived a long and vibrant life before she began to suffer severe dementia, a fate that took her away in bits and pieces for ten years before her heart gave up. Her death freed her from a prison that had seemed to obliterate the person she was. The old animal at our house seemed to be aching for a similar liberation of the soul.

The dogs in our family somehow tend to end up with multiple names. This one, a female rescued eleven and a half years ago, at the age of one, was at New Hanover County Animal Control, on the day she was originally scheduled to leave this world, when our daughter woke up and had the urge to go there, and adopted her, hours from what would have been her leave taking from this life. Her name was Lexie, and that's what we called her, when we weren't calling her Boo, or DevilDog, or Debolt, or Dibs - all names that arose under certain appropriate circumstances. She was an entertainer. She was a bull of a dog. If you ever told her "No" in a serious voice, she would bark wildly and back away from you as if her life were on the line, no matter how gentle your correction might had been. And in the midst of the Mad Dog routine, all you had to do was say "Good dog" in an overly friendly voice, and she would instantly change back, wagging her tail and approaching for a hug.

And then the day clearly arrived. We cried all day, on and off. But we also talked of her being with her old sisters that she had grown up beside, other mixed breed rescue dogs that had been ours and had gone on years ago, far too young. We hoped they would soon greet her and introduce her to the other Morris dogs that they had known, and they, also, in turn. We have quite a pack awaiting our own arrival on the next shore.

And so, we worked to convince ourselves, what seems so sad could actually be gloriously good for the old girl and her former companions. May it be true. For them, and for all of us, their grieving owners, and great, forever friends.

The old girl at the vet, finally at rest, one minute after her spirit's departure, and a minute before I kissed her head one last time.

Difficulty, Struggle, Hardship, and Beauty

The greater the difficulty, the greater the glory.

 Cicero

Hardly anything worth doing is easy. But that’s ok. The harder we’ve had to work for something, the more we appreciate it once it happens. The great essaist Montaigne once made a related point when he said: “The honor of the conquest is rated by the difficulty.”

If you’re working toward a noble goal, something truly worth your time and effort, then don’t let it get you down when the process of realizing your dream takes a lot more time and work than you had imagined. Think about the sense of satisfaction that ultimately awaits you. And hang in there now. Satisfying success will justify your struggle.

"But what if I don't succeed after all the struggle?"

I'd be disappointed if you didn't ask. And yet, the answer is simple. If you succeed through struggle, you can grow. If you fail through struggle, you can grow. To grow is not to fail, but to succeed in one of our most important tasks in this life. So, if you struggle well, you can't completely fail. One way or the other, you succeed by growing.

Let me quote Elizabeth Kubler Ross:

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people don't just happen.

Difficulty, struggle, and hardship can create beauty, if we let it - beautiful results, beautiful growth, and a beautiful strength within. So, when you struggle, struggle with your head up, and your hope afloat. Something good can happen from this. Beauty can result.

Your Uncanny Power to Know

The world is an ocean of information. Waves of it surround us. There’s knowledge everywhere. You just have go be able to read it, to connect with it, to take it in.

Most people float, or, at best, ride a wave now and then. As you swim in this ocean, you should take some time to dive deep. We can know much more than most people think we can know. You yourself may sometimes realize that you know things that may seem impossible for you to be aware of, at least, through "normal" channels. You have hints, glimmers, intuitions. Sometimes, you ignore them. Often, you just wonder where they're coming from.

What's important is to listen. Feel. Really look, deeply. And take the hints you're given.

How does this work? We don't yet know. But that it works, we do. Don't cut yourself off from the currents and eddies of insight you may most need right now. There's always a new tide. Be open. And do what every great religious tradition, at its heart, advises: Pay attention. Then act appropriately. You may be amazed at what can happen. 

Our Desires

"Of our desires, some are natural and necessary; others are natural but not necessary; others, again, are neither natural nor necessary." Thus spake Epicurus.

This is something worth thinking about. We all have desires. And many of them properly lead to goals. But not all of them. There are some desires that should not be pursued. Many people make themselves miserable through a failure to understand this.

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus had a way of helping us to classify our desires. Some are natural and necessary. We should have them and must pursue them. Others are natural but not necessary. It’s perfectly fine to pursue them, but it’s also no disaster if they go unsatisfied. The last class encompasses those that are neither natural nor necessary. We don’t have to satisfy them, and it’s not even natural for us to pursue them. Too many of our desires in the modern world fall into this last category.

Epicurus wants to free us from the tyranny of the unnatural and unnecessary things we chase. There's nothing natural about fame. There's nothing necessary about it. Yet, people sacrifice all for it. There's nothing natural about having more resources than you could ever use. There's certainly nothing necessary about it. Yet, people aspire to it, risking what they do have in lotteries and in relentless jobs that take away their lives for the remote promise of windfall gains. 

The philosopher wants to help us to understand our desires better, so that we can manage them better, for our own good, and not allow them to manage to ruin our lives. Use his categories to enhance your own thinking today. It's both natural and necessary to do so!

A Happy Life

What is happiness? What makes for a happy life? Go to any big bookstore, and you'll find lots of authors tackling the question. Ring all those books up at the register and you'll likely end up very unhappy at the total.

The roman lawyer and stoic thinker Seneca once wrote: "A happy life is one in harmony with its own nature."

An unhappy person is out of step with herself.  A happy person experiences a large measure of inner harmony.  She lives in accordance with her own highest nature.

In his strange film Zelig, Woody Allen long ago masterfully caricatured the chamelion-like tendency that many people have to fit in. We dress in the right style and eat at the right places, drive the appropriate cars, talk in the lingo of those around us, and do as we’re expected to do, all in a misplaced search for happiness. The only reliable formula, Seneca believed, is to live and act in harmony with your own best nature. He believed, first, that there is a universal human nature that should be respected in all that we do.  But he also wanted each of us to be true to who we uniquely are, at our potential best - with our own talents and abilities honed in a way that's right for us, but also put into service to others.

Where are the tensions in your life? If you take an inventory of your own obstacles to happiness, I think it's likely that you’ll find places where you aren’t being true enough to your deepest and highest nature. The good news is, you can make the changes you need to make to live and act in a way that is more natural for who you are and distinctively can be. It is, after all, your nature. Embrace it and work with it. That's the path to happiness, according to the philosopher.

The Breathtaking Joy of Existence

Check out Albert Einstein musing on the faith of his birth and how he expands out from it:

Judaism appears to me to be almost exclusively concerned with the moral attitude in and toward life. […] The essence of the Jewish concept of life seems to me to be the affirmation of life for all creatures. […} There remains, however, something more in the Jewish tradition, so gloriously revealed in certain of the psalms; namely a kind of drunken joy and surprise at the beauty and incomprehensible sublimity of this world, of which man can attain but a faint intimation. It is the feeling from which genuine research draws its intellectual strength, but which also seems to manifest itself in the song of birds…

That one clause made me smile: "a kind of drunken joy and surprise at the beauty and incomprehensible sublimity of this world, of which man can attain but a faint intimation."

Here's what's both humbling and exciting to ponder: We can sometimes have a huge, intense, soul enlarging experience of that beauty and incomprehensible sublimity, a mystical realization coming to us unheralded, and stopping us in our tracks. I recently wrote on one such experience I had during a daily walk, some weeks ago (click here). And sometimes, like Saul, on the road to Damascus, it's a life changing experience that reorients everything for us, opening us up anew and turning us onto a path we hadn't really seen before.

Just like the Psalmist, we can feel that "drunken joy and surprise at the beauty and incomprehensible sublimity of the world." And yet, however great and overwhelming the experience might be, Albert E considers it merely "a faint intimation" of the true reality that encompasses us. Just think about that, and its implications.

Wouldn't it be great to carry with us every day that sense that we're living and working amid immensities whose grandeur and scope are so great that our highest mystical experiences capture only a glancing glimpse of the hem of its garment? Then, perhaps, we'd really have a new moral attitude, and an affirmation of all life that would make us lights in the darkness that so sadly seems to engulf many in our time.

Truth is a wildly blazing sun. Carry with you at least a small candle in its honor. Cast light in the darkness wherever you go.

Novel Insights: Part Two - The Life of Pi

One more day of insights from the novel, The Life of Pi, before I either donate my copy to the local library or find a more permanent place for it on a shelf here. I'm glad I looked at it before dropping it into a donation box! It's been nice to see my markings and annotations throughout. Let me share just a few more insights from it today.

Pi Patel, as you may know, the narrator, was going through a harrowing experience. He writes:

I would have given up - if a voice hadn't made itself heard in my heart. The voice said, "I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds, as great as they are. I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into a routine. The amazing will be seen every day. I will put in all the hard work necessary ..."

Too often, the voice in our heads give us worries, problems, and obstacles. It's unsure. It's highly anxious. It doubts. But the voice of the heart can be another thing, altogether. The heart is the most ancient metaphor for the inner core we all have, where perception, reason, intuition, and resilience reside. Listen to your heart, and you will often get just the message you need to turn the rare miracle into routine, and see the amazing every day. 

I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease.

Pi then goes on to describe how often fear begins with a small doubt in the mind, which grows into great anxiety in the emotions, and then moves farther into the body, gripping us in all ways. Reason itself is no match for it. He says:

Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you've defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.

What can we do? He doesn't say much, only characterizing fear as, in the end, a wordless darkness, and giving us this advice:

You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it.

Pop psychologists talk a lot about the power of positive self-talk. It's easy to dismiss this as simplistic hokum. But the deeper we go, the more we understand the power of words, well used, to counter the irrational. Speak to yourself in the quiet of your mind in positive ways, and you can dispel the fog of fear. It's not easy. But it can work.

The book is full of other insights, but these are probably enough for our purposes.

Why do we read? For entertainment, certainly, but also for wisdom. I'm always deeply gratified to find real wisdom in an entertaining book. It's rare enough. But when it comes, we can delight, and we can learn.

What Is It To Exist?

Today, let's just get wild. Let's be spooky. Let's dig deep.

I just got this email, which I quote with a big blush, since it's so nice, but it asks a very deep question, and asks it well. It will also give you an idea of the sort of emails I get that don't fit into the "how to run a company, build an exceptional career, or deal with daily life" genres, but that can keep someone awake at night.

Dear Dr. Morris.

I am a joyous follower and admirer of you and your work, both philosophical and otherwise. I think you are a wonderful human being, and a great philosopher and writer. As such, I am led to ask you a very deep and pressing question, and share with you a problem I've encountered dealing with it.

Questions: What exactly does it mean for something to exist? What is existence itself?

I asked thus because yesterday I was in a conversation with a friend, and he proposed that the only things that actually exist are those that meet these criteria:

1. Occupy space and time,

2. Be detectable by natural means,

3. Have some energy signature of sorts.

I tried thinking of objections to those criteria but was blank. The only such I offered was God, and abstract entities, which he said were the only things his criteria ruled out. (He's an atheist). So the question is, should existence be limited to things that meet those criteria, and if not, why not? And can you please provide a substantiative working definition of the term.

Thanks for sparing your time. Regards,

Shawn Wilson

MY ANSWER, PART ONE:

Hi Shawn! Thanks for your kind words! Let me get back to you later today.

But a quick initial consideration: My first thought is that your friend seems certainly adamant that, among the realities of the world, among the things that exist and with which we have to do are his own Three Criteria for Existence - for, surely, if they didn't exist, we wouldn't have to worry about them! But then, for them to exist, in accordance with their own demands, they must:

1. Occupy space and time,

2. Be detectable by natural means,

3. Have some energy signature of sorts.

Oops. There's an obvious problem here. Understanding that we're dealing with criteria, or requirements, which are intellectual things, rather than ink on paper, words in the air, or pixels on a screen, they seem to fail their own requirements for existing. And that's quite odd, isn't it? It's what philosophers call self-defeating, and therefore not possibly true.

More later! Tom

SECOND REPLY, HOURS LATER:

Hi again, Shawn.

One definition, from a theistic perspective would be this:

(A) To exist is to be an absolute creator or a creation.

Simple. But of course, your friend won't like that. Yet, that's no criticism of the definition itself, is it?

A more abstract philosophical conception would be this:

(B) To exist is to participate in causal or other metaphysical relationships.

An even more abstract definition could be this:

(C) To exist is to be differentiated in some way from nothingness, where that differentiation consists in something more than a mere contingent and fanciful conceptual configuration (ruling out such things as magic blue dragons in my backyard and kiddie-story unicorns  existing in the same sense as cars and dogs, and just by being conceived).

Clearly, these are tests that even current members of Congress could all pass with flying colors. And none of these definitions confines existence to the ordinary physical entities with which we're familiar, like tables, chairs, cars, dirt, and shoe laces. They don't rule out God, or spiritual beings, or abstract objects like numbers, or qualities, or intellectual conditions like themselves.

The challenge to your friend is to show how his criteria are superior to all of these. And he'll face a simple problem: He can't. Moreover, none of these criteria suffers the self-defeating problem that his three-fold standard confronts. They satisfy their own demands. They are generous and yet not vacuous. They're intuitive, and not prejudicial as to what wonders there might be that we have not yet even imagined. I hope this helps.

I want my ontology, or conception of what exists, to be, in principle, as broad and inclusive as this amazing, surprisingly rich reality in which we live. I want to acknowledge that love exists, and opportunity, and potential, and the soul - not just material things like grass and rocks and atoms. And no one has ever given me a sufficient reason to shrink my philosophy to fit the view that natural science alone gives us the inventory of reality.

Existing ... in your debt for a good question, I am

Your Philosopher,

TVM

The Necessity of Luxury

I have a suggestion that will strike you as either modest or outrageous. I hope you agree, but l'll certainly welcome any airing of a contrary perspective.

Traditionally, philosophers have distinguished between our wants and our needs. But the two categories are not exclusive. Most of the things we need, we also want, as long as we know we need them, and no contrary desires get in the way of the natural effect that knowledge would otherwise have. And if some needs are wants, it follows that some wants are needs. But there is a side of this that goes beyond what's logically demanded.

I contended in the book If Aristotle Ran General Motors, that we all need Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Unity - a sense of connectedness - in our lives, whether we happen at any moment to feel that we want all these things or not. But I'd like to suggest today an interesting extension of this.

Consider the two categories: Necessity and Luxury. Yesterday, I ventured to surmise that luxury is at its core about refined enjoyment and uncommon ease. In different social and economic contexts, different things can fall into this category. For people living very simply, there are simple luxuries that can be just as satisfying, in their context, as more rarified luxuries in another setting - your experience of a vase of flowers picked in the wild, a warm bath, cold water on a hot day, someone taking over a difficult task you were dreading, and lifting that burden from you, can count, when attended to properly, as luxuries.

Here's my modest suggestion today - or my crazy, outrageous idea, depending on your perspective: Some measure of luxury is a necessity in life. It's necessary for a full and flourishing human experience.

So, if I'm right, as you seek first to take care of the necessities of life, remember that among them  are at least a few luxuries. And when you indulge, you can explain that your philosopher told you to.