“The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation… Never to get lost is not to live.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“On how one orients himself to the moment,”Henry Miller wrote in reflecting on the art of living, “depends the failure or fruitfulness of it.” Indeed, this act of orienting ourselves — to the moment, to the world, to our own selves — is perhaps the most elusive art of all, and our attempts to master it often leave us fumbling, frustrated, discombobulated. And yet therein lies our greatest capacity for growth and self-transcendence.
Rebecca Solnit, whose mind and writing are among the most consistently enchanting of our time, explores this tender tango with the unknown in her altogether sublime collection A Field Guide to Getting Lost (public library).
Solnit writes in the opening essay:
Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I copied it down, and it has stayed with me since. The student made big transparent photographs of swimmers underwater and hung them from the ceiling with the light shining through them, so that to walk among them was to have the shadows of swimmers travel across your body in a space that itself came to seem aquatic and mysterious. The question she carried struck me as the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?
Illustration from ‘Where You Are: A Collection of Maps That Will Leave You Feeling Completely Lost.’ Click image for details.
Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the tale that has not yet arrived, is what must be found. It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, “live always at the ‘edge of mystery’ — the boundary of the unknown.” But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.
But unlike the dark sea, which obscures the depths of what is, of what could be seen in the present moment, the unknown spills into the unforeseen. Solnit turns to Edgar Allan Poe, who argued that “in matters of philosophical discovery … it is the unforeseen upon which we must calculate most largely,” and considers the deliberate juxtaposition of the rational, methodical act of calculation with the ineffable, intangible nature of the unforeseen:
How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us.
The poet John Keats captured this paradoxical operation elegantly in his notion of “negative capability,” which Solnit draws on before turning to another literary luminary, Walter Benjamin, who memorably considered the difference between not finding your way and losing yourself — something he called “the art of straying.” Solnit writes:
To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography. That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.
T and O map by Bartholomaeus Angelicus, 1392, from Umberto Eco’s ‘The Book of Legendary Lands.’ Click image for details.
The word “lost” comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private space conspire to make it so.
Taking back the meaning of lost seems almost a political act, a matter of existential agency that we ought to reclaim in order to feel at home in ourselves. Solnit writes:
There’s another art of being at home in the unknown, so that being in its midst isn’t cause for panic or suffering, of being at home with being lost.
[…]
Lost [is] mostly a state of mind, and this applies as much to all the metaphysical and metaphorical states of being lost as to blundering around in the backcountry.
The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.
Illustration for ‘Mapping Manhattan.’ Click image for details.
During a recent vacation, I went horseback riding on a California ranch, home to a tight-knit equine community. Midway along the route, my horse glimpsed his peer across the field, carrying another rider on a different route, and began neighing restlessly upon the fleeting sight. Our guide explained that the horses, despite being extraordinarily intelligent beings, had a hard time making sense of seeing their friends appear out of nowhere, then disappear into the distance. Falling out of sight held the terror of being forever lost. My horse was calling out, making sure his friend was still there — that neither was lost. Underneath the geographic disorientation, one can imagine, lies a primal fear of losing control.
Despite the evolutionary distance, this equine disposition bears a disorienting similarity to the duality of our own relationship to the concept of lost — losing something we care about, losing ourselves, losing control — which Solnit captures beautifully:
Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.
“Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. Hope without critical thinking is naïveté.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
To live with sincerity in our culture of cynicism is a difficult dance — one that comes easily only to the very young and the very old. The rest of us are left to tussle with two polarizing forces ripping the psyche asunder by beckoning to it from opposite directions — critical thinking and hope.
Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. Hope without critical thinking is naïveté.
Finding fault and feeling hopeless about improving the situation produces resignation — cynicism is both resignation’s symptom and a futile self-protection mechanism against it. Blindly believing that everything will work out just fine also produces resignation, for we have no motive to apply ourselves toward making things better. But in order to survive — both as individuals and as a civilization — and especially in order to thrive, we need the right balance of critical thinking and hope.
A plant needs water in order to survive, and needs the right amount of water in order to thrive. Overwater it and it rots with excess. Underwater it and it dries up inside.
I thought about this recently in observing my unease — my seething cauldron of deep disappointment — with an opinion piece commenting on Arianna Huffington’s decision to continue publishing necessary reporting on “what’s not working — political dysfunction, corruption, wrongdoing, etc.” but to begin giving more light to stories that embody the “perseverance, creativity, and grace” of which we humans are capable. The writer criticizing Huffington’s decision asserted, with ample indignation, that “to privilege happy stories over ‘unhappy’ ones is to present a false view of the world.”
Let’s consider for a moment the notion of an un-false view of the world — the journalistic ideal of capital-T truth. Let’s, too, put aside for now Hunter S. Thompson’s rather accurate assertion that the possibility of objectivity is a myth to begin with. Since the golden age of newspapers in the early 1900s, we’ve endured a century of rampant distortion toward the other extreme — a consistent and systematic privileging of harrowing and heartbreaking “news” as the raw material of the media establishment. The complaint which a newspaper editor issued in 1923, lamenting the fact that commercial interest rather than journalistic integrity determines what is published as the “news,” could well have been issued today — if anything, the internet has only exacerbated the problem.
The twentieth century was both the golden age of mass media and a century marked by two world wars, the Great Depression, the AIDS crisis, and a litany of genocides. Viewed through that lens, it is the worst century humanity has endured — even worse than the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages, for those deaths were caused by bacteria indifferent to human ideals and immune to human morality. This view of the twentieth century, then, is frightening enough if true, but doubly frightening if untrue — and Steven Pinker has made a convincing case that it is, indeed, untrue. Then, in a grotesque embodiment of Mark Twain’s wry remark that the worst things in his life never happened to him, we have spent a century believing the worst about ourselves as a species and a civilization.
Carl Sagan saw in books “proof that humans are capable of working magic.” The magic of humanity’s most enduring books — the great works of literature and philosophy — lies in the simple fact that they are full of hope for the human spirit. News has become the sorcerous counterpoint to this magic, mongering not proof of our goodness and brilliance but evidence of our basest capabilities.
A related point of cynicism bears consideration: Coupled with the assertion that giving positive stories more voice distorts our worldview was the accusation that Huffington’s motives were purely mercantile — a ploy to prey on Facebook’s algorithms, which incentivize heartening stories over disheartening ones. Could it be, just maybe, not that people are dumb and shallow, and algorithms dumber and shallower, but that we’ve endured a century of fear-mongering from the news industrial complex and we finally have a way of knowing we’re not alone in craving an antidote? That we finally have a cultural commons onto which we can rally for an uprising?
We don’t get to decry the alleged distortion of our worldview until we’ve lived through at least a century of good news to even the playing field so ravaged by the previous century’s extreme negativity bias.
As for Huffington, while we can only ever speculate about another person’s motives — for who can peer into the psyche of another and truly see into that person’s private truth? — this I continue to believe: The assumptions people make about the motives of others always reveal a great deal more about the assumers than the assumed-about.
This particular brand of cynicism is especially pronounced when the assumed-about have reached a certain level of success or public recognition. Take, for instance, an entity like TED — something that began as a small, semi-secret groundswell that was met with only warmth and love in its first few years of opening up to the larger world. And then, as it reached a tipping point of recognition, TED became the target of rather petty and cynical criticism. Here is an entity that has done nothing more nor less than to insist, over and over, that despite our many imperfections, we are inherently kind and capable and full of goodness — and yet even this isn’t safe from cynicism.
Let’s return, then, to the question of what is true and what is false, and what bearing this question has — if any — on what we call reality.
The stories that we tell ourselves, whether they be false or true, are always real. We act out of those stories, reacting to their realness. William James knew this when he observed: “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”
What storytellers do — and this includes journalists and TED and everyone in between who has a point of view and an audience, whatever its size — is help shape our stories of how the world works; at their very best, they can empower our moral imagination to envision how the world could work better. In other words, they help us mediate between the ideal and the real by cultivating the right balance of critical thinking and hope. Truth and falsehood belong to this mediation, but it is guided primarily by what we are made to believe is real.
What we need, then, are writers like William Faulkner, who came of age in a brothel, saw humanity at its most depraved, and yet managed to maintain his faith in the human spirit. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he asserted that the writer’s duty is “to help man endure by lifting his heart.” In contemporary commercial media, driven by private interest, this responsibility to work in the public interest and for the public good recedes into the background. And yet I continue to stand with E.B. White, who so memorably asserted that “writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life”; that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down.”
Yes, people sometimes do horrible things, and we can speculate about why they do them until we run out of words and sanity. But evil only prevails when we mistake it for the norm. There is so much goodness in the world — all we have to do is remind one another of it, show up for it, and refuse to leave.
“We hope. We despair. We hope. We despair. This is what governs us. We have a bipolar system.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
I do loveMaira Kalman. In 2009, the celebrated visual storyteller released a wonderful and quirky illustrated twelve-part meditation on democracy in her New York Times blog. The series is now released as an equally wonderful illustrated book.
And the Pursuit of Happiness begins with Barack Obama’s inauguration on Chapter One, with each subsequent chapter representing a month in Kalman’s yearlong quest to explore the underpinnings of contemporary democracy.
In February, she travels to both costs, so the respective chapter is dedicated to Abraham Lincoln. In March, she goes to an actual town meeting, the quintessential haven of democracy. In April, she visits the Supreme Court and the office of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which prompts a rumination on women breaking social barriers. For December, she concludes with a chapter on George Washington and a thoughtful reflection on happiness itself.
Brimming with Kalman’s childlike aesthetic, delightfully kooky typography and subtle wordplay, And the Pursuit of Happiness takes you on a playful yet philosophical journey into the human side of politics and democracy — a genuine treat for eye, mind, and heart.
“This is an extraordinary time full of vital, transformative movements that could not be foreseen. It’s also a nightmarish time. Full engagement requires the ability to perceive both.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“There is no love of life without despair of life,”wrote Albert Camus — a man who in the midst of World War II, perhaps the darkest period in human history, saw grounds for luminous hope and issued a remarkable clarion call for humanity to rise to its highest potential on those grounds. It was his way of honoring the same duality that artist Maira Kalman would capture nearly a century later in her marvelous meditation on the pursuit of happiness, where she observed: “We hope. We despair. We hope. We despair. That is what governs us. We have a bipolar system.”
In my own reflections on hope, cynicism, and the stories we tell ourselves, I’ve considered the necessity of these two poles working in concert. Indeed, the stories we tell ourselves about these poles matter. The stories we tell ourselves about our public past shape how we interpret and respond to and show up for the present. The stories we tell ourselves about our private pasts shape how we come to see our personhood and who we ultimately become. The thin line between agency and victimhood is drawn in how we tell those stories.
The language in which we tell ourselves these stories matters tremendously, too, and no writer has weighed the complexities of sustaining hope in our times of readily available despair more thoughtfully and beautifully, nor with greater nuance, than Rebecca Solnit does in Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (public library).
Rebecca Solnit (Photograph: Sallie Dean Shatz)
Expanding upon her previous writings on hope, Solnit writes in the foreword to the 2016 edition of this foundational text of modern civic engagement:
Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons.
Solnit — one of the most singular, civically significant, and poetically potent voices of our time, emanating echoes of Virginia Woolf’s luminous prose and Adrienne Rich’s unflinching political conviction — originally wrote these essays in 2003, six weeks after the start of Iraq war, in an effort to speak “directly to the inner life of the politics of the moment, to the emotions and preconceptions that underlie our political positions and engagements.” Although the specific conditions of the day may have shifted, their undergirding causes and far-reaching consequences have only gained in relevance and urgency in the dozen years since. This slim book of tremendous potency is therefore, today more than ever, an indispensable ally to every thinking, feeling, civically conscious human being.
Solnit looks back on this seemingly distant past as she peers forward into the near future:
The moment passed long ago, but despair, defeatism, cynicism, and the amnesia and assumptions from which they often arise have not dispersed, even as the most wildly, unimaginably magnificent things came to pass. There is a lot of evidence for the defense… Progressive, populist, and grassroots constituencies have had many victories. Popular power has continued to be a profound force for change. And the changes we’ve undergone, both wonderful and terrible, are astonishing.
[…]
This is an extraordinary time full of vital, transformative movements that could not be foreseen. It’s also a nightmarish time. Full engagement requires the ability to perceive both.
With an eye to such disheartening developments as climate change, growing income inequality, and the rise of Silicon Valley as a dehumanizing global superpower of automation, Solnit invites us to be equally present for the counterpoint:
Hope doesn’t mean denying these realities. It means facing them and addressing them by remembering what else the twenty-first century has brought, including the movements, heroes, and shifts in consciousness that address these things now.
Enumerating Edward Snowden, marriage equality, and Black Lives Matter among those, she adds:
This has been a truly remarkable decade for movement-building, social change, and deep, profound shifts in ideas, perspective, and frameworks for broad parts of the population (and, of course, backlashes against all those things).
With great care, Solnit — whose mind remains the sharpest instrument of nuance I’ve encountered — maps the uneven terrain of our grounds for hope:
It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It’s also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings.
Solnit’s conception of hope reminds me of the great existential psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom’s conception of meaning: “The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure,”he wrote, “must be conducted obliquely.” That is, it must take place in the thrilling and terrifying terra incognita that lies between where we are and where we wish to go, ultimately shaping where we do go. Solnit herself has written memorably about how we find ourselves by getting lost, and finding hope seems to necessitate a similar surrender to uncertainty. She captures this idea beautifully:
Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.
Illustration from The Harvey Milk Story, a picture-book biography of the slain LGBT rights pioneer
Amid a 24-hour news cycle that nurses us on the illusion of immediacy, this recognition of incremental progress and the long gestational period of consequences — something at the heart of every major scientific revolution that has changed our world — is perhaps our most essential yet most endangered wellspring of hope. Solnit reminds us, for instance, that women’s struggle for the right to vote took seven decades:
For a time people liked to announce that feminism had failed, as though the project of overturning millennia of social arrangements should achieve its final victories in a few decades, or as though it had stopped. Feminism is just starting, and its manifestations matter in rural Himalayan villages, not just first-world cities.
She considers one particularly prominent example of this cumulative cataclysm — the Arab Spring, “an extraordinary example of how unpredictable change is and how potent popular power can be,” the full meaning of and conclusions from which we are yet to draw. Although our cultural lore traces the spark of the Arab Spring to the moment Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in an act of protest, Solnit traces the unnoticed accretion of tinder across space and time:
You can tell the genesis story of the Arab Spring other ways. The quiet organizing going on in the shadows beforehand matters. So does the comic book about Martin Luther King and civil disobedience that was translated into Arabic and widely distributed in Egypt shortly before the Arab Spring. You can tell of King’s civil disobedience tactics being inspired by Gandhi’s tactics, and Gandhi’s inspired by Tolstoy and the radical acts of noncooperation and sabotage of British women suffragists. So the threads of ideas weave around the world and through the decades and centuries.
In a brilliant counterpoint to Malcolm Gladwell’s notoriously short-sighted view of social change, Solnit sprouts a mycological metaphor for this imperceptible, incremental buildup of influence and momentum:
After a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many do so from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. What we call mushrooms mycologists call the fruiting body of the larger, less visible fungus. Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but less visible long-term organizing and groundwork — or underground work — often laid the foundation. Changes in ideas and values also result from work done by writers, scholars, public intellectuals, social activists, and participants in social media. It seems insignificant or peripheral until very different outcomes emerge from transformed assumptions about who and what matters, who should be heard and believed, who has rights.
Ideas at first considered outrageous or ridiculous or extreme gradually become what people think they’ve always believed. How the transformation happened is rarely remembered, in part because it’s compromising: it recalls the mainstream when the mainstream was, say, rabidly homophobic or racist in a way it no longer is; and it recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of center stage. Our hope and often our power.
[…]
Change is rarely straightforward… Sometimes it’s as complex as chaos theory and as slow as evolution. Even things that seem to happen suddenly arise from deep roots in the past or from long-dormant seeds.
And yet Solnit’s most salient point deals with what comes after the revolutionary change — with the notion of victory not as a destination but as a starting point for recommitment and continual nourishment of our fledgling ideals:
A victory doesn’t mean that everything is now going to be nice forever and we can therefore all go lounge around until the end of time. Some activists are afraid that if we acknowledge victory, people will give up the struggle. I’ve long been more afraid that people will give up and go home or never get started in the first place if they think no victory is possible or fail to recognize the victories already achieved. Marriage equality is not the end of homophobia, but it’s something to celebrate. A victory is a milestone on the road, evidence that sometimes we win, and encouragement to keep going, not to stop.
Solnit examines this notion more closely in one of the original essays from the book, titled “Changing the Imagination of Change” — a meditation of even more acute timeliness today, more than a decade later, in which she writes:
Americans are good at responding to crisis and then going home to let another crisis brew both because we imagine that the finality of death can be achieved in life — it’s called happily ever after in personal life, saved in politics — and because we tend to think political engagement is something for emergencies rather than, as people in many other countries (and Americans at other times) have imagined it, as a part and even a pleasure of everyday life. The problem seldom goes home.
[…]
Going home seems to be a way to abandon victories when they’re still delicate, still in need of protection and encouragement. Human babies are helpless at birth, and so perhaps are victories before they’ve been consolidated into the culture’s sense of how things should be. I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good — if, after American slavery had been abolished, Reconstruction’s promises of economic justice had been enforced by the abolitionists, or, similarly, if the end of apartheid had been seen as meaning instituting economic justice as well (or, as some South Africans put it, ending economic apartheid).
It’s always too soon to go home. Most of the great victories continue to unfold, unfinished in the sense that they are not yet fully realized, but also in the sense that they continue to spread influence. A phenomenon like the civil rights movement creates a vocabulary and a toolbox for social change used around the globe, so that its effects far outstrip its goals and specific achievements — and failures.
Invoking James Baldwin’s famous proclamation that “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” Solnit writes:
It’s important to emphasize that hope is only a beginning; it’s not a substitute for action, only a basis for it.
What often obscures our view of hope, she argues, is a kind of collective amnesia that lets us forget just how far we’ve come as we grow despondent over how far we have yet to go. She writes:
Amnesia leads to despair in many ways. The status quo would like you to believe it is immutable, inevitable, and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view. In other words, when you don’t know how much things have changed, you don’t see that they are changing or that they can change.
Illustration by Isabelle Arsenault from Mr. Gauguin’s Heart by Marie-Danielle Croteau, the story of how Paul Gauguin used the grief of his childhood as a catalyst for a lifetime of art
This lack of a long view is perpetuated by the media, whose raw material — the very notion of “news” — divorces us from the continuity of life and keeps us fixated on the current moment in artificial isolate. Meanwhile, Solnit argues in a poignant parallel, such amnesia poisons and paralyzes our collective conscience by the same mechanism that depression poisons and paralyzes the private psyche — we come to believe that the acute pain of the present is all that will ever be and cease to believe that things will look up. She writes:
There’s a public equivalent to private depression, a sense that the nation or the society rather than the individual is stuck. Things don’t always change for the better, but they change, and we can play a role in that change if we act. Which is where hope comes in, and memory, the collective memory we call history.
You row forward looking back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the future. We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant for our victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future.
“I can conceive of no better service… than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive,” Zadie Smith wrote in her spectacular essay on optimism and despair. The illusion of permanent progress inflicts a particularly damning strain of despair as we witness the disillusioning undoing of triumphs of democracy and justice generations in the making — despair preventable only by taking a wider view of history in order to remember that democracy advances in fits and starts, in leaps and backward steps, but advances nonetheless, on timelines exceeding any individual lifetime. Amid our current atmosphere of presentism bias and extreme narrowing of perspective, it is not merely difficult but downright countercultural to resist the ahistorical panic by taking such a telescopic view — lucid optimism that may be our most unassailable form of resistance to the corruptions and malfunctions of democracy.
I can conceive of no better service in the United States, henceforth, by democrats of thorough and heart-felt faith, than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy.
Having lived and saved lives through the Civil War, having seen the swell of “vast crops of poor, desperate, dissatisfied, nomadic, miserably-waged populations,” having witnessed the corrosion of idealism and the collapse of democratic values into corruption and complacency, Whitman still faces a dispiriting landscape with a defiant and irrepressible optimism — our mightiest and most countercultural act of courage, then and now and always:
Though I think I fully comprehend the absence of moral tone in our current politics and business, and the almost entire futility of absolute and simple honor as a counterpoise against the enormous greed for worldly wealth, with the trickeries of gaining it, all through society in our day, I still do not share the depression and despair on the subject which I find possessing many good people.
Zooming out of the narrow focus of his cultural moment — as we would be well advised to do with ours — Whitman takes a telescopic perspective of time, progress, and social change, and considers what it really takes to win the future:
The advent of America, the history of the past century, has been the first general aperture and opening-up to the average human commonalty, on the broadest scale, of the eligibilities to wealth and worldly success and eminence, and has been fully taken advantage of; and the example has spread hence, in ripples, to all nations. To these eligibilities — to this limitless aperture, the race has tended, en-masse, roaring and rushing and crude, and fiercely, turbidly hastening — and we have seen the first stages, and are now in the midst of the result of it all, so far. But there will certainly ensue other stages, and entirely different ones. In nothing is there more evolution than the American mind. Soon, it will be fully realized that ostensible wealth and money-making, show, luxury, &c., imperatively necessitate something beyond — namely, the sane, eternal moral and spiritual-esthetic attributes, elements… Soon, it will be understood clearly, that the State cannot flourish, (nay, cannot exist,) without those elements. They will gradually enter into the chyle of sociology and literature. They will finally make the blood and brawn of the best American individualities of both sexes.
American Democracy, in its myriad personalities, in factories, work-shops, stores, offices — through the dense streets and houses of cities, and all their manifold sophisticated life — must either be fibred, vitalized, by regular contact with out-door light and air and growths, farm-scenes, animals, fields, trees, birds, sun-warmth and free skies, or it will morbidly dwindle and pale. We cannot have grand races of mechanics, work people, and commonalty, (the only specific purpose of America,) on any less terms. I conceive of no flourishing and heroic elements of Democracy in the United States, or of Democracy maintaining itself at all, without the Nature-element forming a main part — to be its health-element and beauty-element — to really underlie the whole politics, sanity, religion and art of the New World.
For the past 12 years I have been a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University, where I have taught a course called Skepticism 101: How to Think Like a Scientist, examples for which I draw from over 30 years of publishing Skeptic magazine and directing the Skeptics Society. I lecture on causality and determining truth, Bayesian reasoning, Signal Detection Theory, the scientific method, rationality and irrationality, game theory, cognitive biases, cults, conspiracies, Holocaust denial, creationism, science and religion, and much more (you can watch some of the lectures that I recorded remotely during the pandemic here).
In the final minutes of the final lecture of my final semester at Chapman a student asked what practical lessons for life I might share with them. I offered as much as I could think of off the top of my head, but since I have researched and written a fair amount on this topic over the decades (and tried to apply these lessons to my own life) I thought I would deliver a final lecture here, not only for my students but for anyone who is interested in knowing what tools science and reason can provide for how to live a good life and how to deal with entropy, problems, setbacks and obstacles, aka normal life. I have kept this short and limited to ten lessons, but I plan to expand each of these into chapter-length lessons and add a number more (possibly for a book). Watch for those in this space as well as in eSkeptic and on my podcast. To that end, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. All monies go to the Skeptics Society, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization.
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Lesson 1. The First Law of Life
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is first law of life, namely to expend energy to survive and flourish. That sounds rather anodyne, so let me unpack that briefly here, then we will see how it applies to all the other lessons.
We are physical beings living in a physical universe governed by the laws of nature. One of the most fundamental of all the laws of nature is called the Second Law of Thermodynamics, sometimes called “entropy”, which holds that in a closed system energy dissipates, disorder increases, and things run down.
A hot cup of coffee, for example, will get cold if you don’t do anything to heat it up again. Why? Because heat is produced by all the jiggling of the water and coffee molecules in the cup, and since energy decreases and disorder increases, over time the molecules will jiggle less and the heat will dissipate into the environment, like the air above the cup or your hand holding the cup (which itself temporarily warms as the heat is transferred). In this case, a microwave oven to re-heat the coffee is your way of fighting back against entropy by putting energy into the cup. Of course, the energy to run the microwave comes from electricity generated by power plants, which you have to pay for each month, so there’s no free lunch in the universe!
Humans are open systems. We capture energy from food and convert it to power our muscles to move and push back against entropy, like making coffee, cleaning the house, going to work, and so forth. This is what I mean when I say that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is the First Law of Life. Your purpose in life is to expend energy to carve out pockets of order that lead to survival and flourishing.
Examples of entropy abound: metal rusts if you don’t maintain it. Weeds overrun gardens if you don’t weed them. Wood rots if you don’t paint it. Beds stay unmade and bedrooms get cluttered if you don’t make and clean them. Your body will grow weak and flabby if you don’t stress it regularly with exercise. Your mind becomes fuzzy and confused if you don’t challenge it to think. Friendships and relationships must be maintained through regular communication. An empty bank account is what happens if you don’t go to work and earn money. Poverty is what societies get if they do nothing productive.
Entropy is not a “force” per se, like gravity. It’s just what happens if energy isn’t put into the system. Think of a sandcastle: There are a near infinite number of ways that grains of sand can be configured into an amorphous blob that resembles nothing in particular, but with just the right amount of water mixed with the sand there are a limited number of ways that the grains can be congealed into structures that resemble castles. What happens if the sandcastle is not maintained? Wind and waves and dogs and children erode it back into a featureless glob. There are simply far more ways for sand to be unstructured than structured. Life consists of building sand castles and maintaining them.
This also explains why failures in life are so much more common than successes: there are simply more ways to fail than there are to succeed. And the higher you aim the more obstacles there are going to be for you to get there, and entropy will push back against you along the way. Remember that the next time you fail. Like sandcastles, failure is normal, success unusual.
Lesson 2. To Thine Own Self Be True
In William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, the character Polonius says:
“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day.
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
To thine own self be true. What does this mean, exactly? Let’s begin with what philosophers call the Law of Identity: A is A, which means that each thing is identical with itself. The 15th century philosopher Nicholas of Cusa explained it this way: “there cannot be several things exactly the same, for in that case there would not be several things, but the same thing itself.”
Being true to yourself means recognizing and acknowledging that A is A, that you are you and not someone else. To try to be something that you are not, or to pretend to be someone else, is a violation of the Law of Identity: Acannot be non-A.
A is A means discovering who you are, your temperament and personality, your intelligence and abilities, your needs and wants, your loves and interests, what you believe and stand for, where you want to go and how you want to get there, and what matters most to you. Thine own self is your A, which cannot also be non-A. The attempt to make A into non-A has caused countless problems, failures, and heartaches in peoples’ lives.
How do you figure out who you are? By testing yourself, by trying new things, by meeting new people, by exploring, traveling, and reading, by trying different jobs and considering different careers. In time you will discover that most things you try, you will not be good at, but out of all those failures will emerge a handful of things that you are good at, a few people whom you are drawn to, and slowly the real you will emerge and thine own true self will come into focus.
Lesson 3. Be Antifragile
If the purpose of life is to survive and flourish in the teeth of entropy pushing back against everything you do, then you need to be antifragile, a word coined by the risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2012 book of that title, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, on how to live in a world that is unpredictable and chaotic, and how to thrive during times of stress and even disaster.
Antifragile means growing and prospering from randomness, uncertainty, opacity, and disorder, and benefitting from a variety of shocks. Here’s how my psychologist friend and colleague Jonathan Haidt applies the concept of antifragility to raising children:
Bone is anti-fragile. If you treat it gently, it will get brittle and break. Bone actually needs to get banged around to toughen up. And so do children … they need to have a lot of unsupervised time, to get in over their heads and get themselves out.
For example, peanut allergies were once extremely rare. A mid-1990s study found that only 4 out of 1,000 children under the age of eight had a peanut allergy. A 2008 study by the same researchers, however, found that the rate had skyrocketed by 350 percent to 14 per 1,000. Why? Because parents and teachers had protected children from exposure to peanuts. The lesson is clear: immune systems become antifragile by exposure to environmental stressors, and so too do our minds and bodies to the stressors of daily life.
One solution to this problem may be found in an old saying: “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.” Other idioms capture the principle behind the lesson of antifragility: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” Nietzsche famously said. “Tough times don’t last but tough people do,” my mother often told me. Here is what I wrote one of my students when she was going through a particularly difficult time:
No matter who you reach out to, ultimately it will come down to you and how you respond to your issues. There’s only so much other people can do. In the end, you have to help yourself. Whatever has happened in your life, you can’t do anything about that now as it is in the past and is out of your control. What is in your control is how you respond to it, whatever the “it” is, starting by deciding today that you are not going to let yourself be a victim any longer. It has to stop.
Ultimately only you can make it stop. Psychologists, family, and friends can only do so much. You must dig deep inside yourself and call up reserves you didn’t know you had, and from there rebuild your life, day by day, hour by hour, until it no longer is holding you back from realizing your full potential. What does not kill you makes you stronger. Whatever happened, it didn’t kill you. You are alive. You are engaged in the world. You are working on assignments. You will grow stronger with every accomplishment.
The current craze of overprotecting students from anything that makes them uncomfortable, including ideas that may challenge them, is making them weaker, not stronger, fragile, not antifragile.
Lesson 4. Be Self-Disciplined Because Action is Character
As the name implies, discipline comes from within the self. You are the architect of your life. You are responsible for what you do. So do it. How? Change your behavior and your cognition will follow. Change your habits and your thoughts will follow.
Everyone is looking for a hack, an easy way around the self-discipline problem. There is no hack and no way around being self-disciplined. External motivations, like motivating yourself with rewards for changing your habits, will not last. The motivation must eventually come from within. Internal motivation is the key to self-discipline.
You want to stop eating sugar and unhealthy food? Stop eating sugar and unhealthy food! Where? Here. When? Now. Self-discipline happens here and now. Stop eating bad food and start eating good food…here and now. Just do it.
Toward the end of his life the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “action is character,” by which he meant that what you do is who you are. Cognitive psychologists call this “embodied cognition”, in which action becomes character. My friend the science writer Amy Alkon wrote a book about this, colorfully titled Unfuckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence, with a chapter title that perfectly captures this principle: “The Mind is Bigger Than the Brain.” Here’s how Amy explains the principle in her humorous way:
Embodied cognition research shows that who you are is not just a product of your brain. It’s also in your breathing, your gut, the way you stand, the way you speak, and, while you’re speaking, whether you make eye contact or dart your eyes like you’re about to bolt under a car like a cat.
By acting and behaving a new way, you push out of your mind the old ways of being that you want to change. You are what you do. So act the way you want to feel. Be the person you want to be by acting like that person. As the Buddha counseled:
Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded. But once mastered, no one can help you as much.
In a culture of honor, each person has to earn honor and, unable to tolerate a slight, takes action himself. The big advance in Western society was to let the law handle serious offenses and ignore the inevitable minor ones—what sociologists call the culture of dignity, which reigned in the 20th century. It allows diversity to flourish because different people can live near each other without killing each other. As such, aculture of honor leads to autonomy, independence, self-reliance, confidence, courage, and strength of character.
The past quarter century, however, has seen the rise of a victimhood culture, where people are hypersensitive to slights as in the honor culture, but they don’t take care of it themselves. Instead they appeal to a third party to punish for them. A culture of victimhoodleads people to divide the world into good and bad classes—victims and oppressors. As such, a culture of victimhood makes one weak, dependent, timid, afraid, and lacking courage and character.
Yes, any of us can be victims, but how you handle it matters. In a victimhood culture the primary way to gain status is to either be a victim or to condemn alleged perpetrators against victims, leading to an accelerating search for both. An Oxford student explained what happened to her after she joined a campus feminist group named Cuntry Living and started reading their literature on misogyny and patriarchy:
Along with all of this, my view of women changed. I stopped thinking about empowerment and started to see women as vulnerable, mistreated victims. I came to see women as physically fragile, delicate, butterfly-like creatures struggling in the cruel net of patriarchy. I began to see male entitlement everywhere.
As a result she became fearful and timid, afraid even to go out to socialize:
Feminism had not empowered me to take on the world—it had not made me stronger, fiercer or tougher. Even leaving the house became a minefield. What if a man whistled at me? What if someone looked me up and down? How was I supposed to deal with that? This fearmongering had turned me into a timid, stay-at-home, emotionally fragile bore.
Here is an antifragile way to deal with misogyny and patriarchy, from the model and pro-nuclear energy activist Isabelle Boemke:
If your Spanish is rusty a biblical metonymy may be found in the command to “go forth and multiply” (with your mother).
So stop with the safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions, and especially the deplatforming and cancelation of speakers who may cause students to rethink their beliefs—you know, what colleges and universities were designed to do. It is turning young adults into fragile snowflakes instead of antifragile warriors.
Lesson 6. Don’t Eat the Marshmallow
When video of Admiral William H. McRaven’s 2014 commencement address at the University of Texas at Austin was posted online, the speech went viral. Millions of viewers will remember the core message summed up in his memorable line: “If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.” The Navy SEAL veteran explained the psychology behind such a simple task:
If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter. If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right. And, if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made—that you made—and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.
Admiral McRaven’s “life lessons” in his speech are, in fact, variations on a theme explored by the legendary psychologist Walter Mischel in his 2014 book The Marshmallow Test. The key to being a successful Navy SEAL—or anything else in life—is summed up in the book’s subtitle, Mastering Self-Control. Mischel begins by describing how, in the late 1960s, he and his colleagues devised a straightforward experiment to measure self-control at the Bing Nursery School at Stanford University.
In its simplest form, children between the ages of 4 and 6 were given a choice between one marshmallow now or two marshmallows if they waited 15 minutes. Some kids ate the marshmallow right away, but most engaged in unintentionally hilarious attempts to overcome temptation. They averted their gaze, covered their eyes, squirmed in their seats, or sang to themselves. They made grimacing faces, tugged at their ponytails, picked up the marshmallow and pretended to take a bite. They sniffed it, pushed it away from them, covered it up. If paired with a partner, they engaged in dialogue about how they could work together to reach the goal of doubling their pleasure.
In 2006, Professor Mischel published a new paper in the prestigious journal Psychological Science. The researchers did a follow-up study with the students they had tested 40 years before, examining the type of adults they had grown into. They found that the children who were able to delay gratification had higher SAT scores entering college, higher grade-point averages at the end of college, and they made more money after college. Perhaps not surprisingly, they also tended to have a lower body-mass index. That is, they were less likely to have a weight problem.
So, not eating the marshmallow is good for both your body and your mind. And all of life is a series of marshmallow tests.
Lesson 7: Directing Your Future Self
In an episode of the hit animated television series The Simpsons, Marge warns her husband that he might regret the drinking binge he’s about to go on, to which Homer replies: “That’s a problem for future Homer. Man, I don’t envy that guy.”
All of us, in fact, have future selves. Or, more accurately, there is no fixed self, but rather an ever-changing self, and the fact that we can project ourselves into the future means we can not only anticipate how our future selves might act, we can take measures today to alter how our future selves behave.
In the field of behavioral economics this problem of the future self is called future discounting, or myopic (nearsighted) discounting, and research shows that most of us discount the future too steeply, for example, electing to spend too much now instead of saving some for later. People are notoriously bad at long-term investing, as well as selecting smart retirement plans. The reason is that in the world we evolved in, and in all of human history until recently, life was, in the words of the political theorist Thomas Hobbes, “nasty, brutish, and short.” Why save for a fabulous 75th birthday party when the odds were high that you’d be dead by 50?
For most of our ancestors, a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush. In that world, it was better to eat one marshmallow now rather than risk the promised two marshmallows later that might be purloined or otherwise lost. A bumper sticker captures the temptation psychology: “Life is short. Eat dessert first.”
In today’s world, however, there is a good chance you will live a long life, so there is some justification to figuring out how to delay gratification, save for the future, plan for retirement, and expect your future self to be around for awhile.
The key here is projecting your current self into the future, asking yourself now what you want to happen then, and set up conditions today that you know will take effect later when your future self may not be trusted with doing the right thing.
That is, you don’t want to be Homer and say of your future self “man, I don’t envy that guy.”
Lesson 8: Be Your Own Financial Advisor
The comedian Woody Allen once joked, “It is better to be rich than it is to be poor…if only for financial reasons.” Well, yes, it is, and those financial reasons are not trivial.
Money may not be able to buy you love, happiness, or meaningfulness, but it sure can make life more comfortable and, more importantly, it can increase your opportunities for finding love, happiness and meaningfulness. How?
First, if you’re living on the margin—that is, your income barely covers your expenses and you have next to nothing left over for additional consumption or investment—your opportunities for doing anything else, from vacations to hobbies to retirement, are reduced to next to nothing.
Second, money buys you time, and that time can be put to use to make more money, as well as enjoy life by enriching it with additional opportunities for both business and pleasure.
How do you make money? Investments in real estate or the stock market (or both). I recommend a book called The Gone Fishin’ Portfolio by a financial advisor named Alex Green, who subsequently became a friend of mine. What Alex demonstrates is that no one can consistently beat the market. You may hear about people who do—for example, fund managers like Bill Miller, who in 2006 was declared by CNNMoney.com to be “The Greatest Money Manager of our Time” because he beat the S&P 500 stock index 15 years in a row.
But as my science writer friend Leonard Mlodinow calculated in his book The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, there are over 6,000 fund managers in the U.S., and so if you do a simple coin-flip calculation of the odds that someone in that cohort of 6,000 fund managers would beat the S&P 500 15 years in a row, it turns out to be .75, or 3 out of 4. As Len says, the CNNMoney headline should have read “Expected 15-Year Run Finally Occurs: Bill Miller Lucky Beneficiary.” And, wouldn’t you know it, in the two years after Miller’s 15-year streak, the story read: “the market handily pulverized him.”
When Alex Green says to “go fishin” what he means is that you should not try to be the next Bill Miller. Why? Because only after the fact can we pick out the winners. Instead, you should pick stocks in companies with a solid track record—or, even better, invest in mutual funds tied to, for example, the S&P 500—and then, well, go fishing; that is, leave your investments alone. For example, Green calculates that if you invested $10,000 in 1990 in a mutual fund tied to the entire S&P 500 and then went fishing, 20 years later you would have $90,000, not counting dividend reinvestment, which would push you well over the $100,000 figure.
By contrast, if you tried to be actively involved in trading—buying and selling stocks and trying to anticipate what the market would do—you risk missing the biggest increases in that 20-year block. For example, if you miss just the 5 best days in that 20 years, your $90,000 account would plummet to $45,000. If you miss the 10 best days you’d end up with around $35,000. If you miss the best 25 days your $10,000 investment would only bring you only $19,000. And if you miss the best 50 days…you’d actually lose money.
Anyone can compute for you how much stocks have returned to investors in the past. No one can do that for the future. In the case of the S&P 500, since the 1920s it has returned an annualized average of around 10%. The returns for the NASDAQ, which is heavily loaded in tech stocks that have done so well the past 20 years, is significantly higher. Whichever fund you invest in, however, you should expect that your returns will not be significantly higher or lower than the long-term average, which in any block of time in a two-digit positive number. Here’s how Alex Green explains it:
History clearly demonstrates that no other asset class returns more than stocks over the long haul. Once you understand this—and accept the steep odds against timing the market—you’ve made the first step toward adopting an investment strategy that can generate high returns with an acceptable level of risk.
Here’s a chart showing the value of different assets over the very long run:
Lesson 9: Build Strong Social Networks
Diet and exercise are very important tools for living a long, healthy, and high-quality life, but believe it or not there’s something else you can do that produces even better results and it doesn’t require getting up at Zero Dark Thirty, doing push-ups, or eating kale. All you have to do is be sociable. Here are some comparisons of things you can do to lower your mortality risk based on the latest studies in longevity by scientists around the world:
Exercise lowers mortality risk by 33%. A happy marriage lowers it by 49%.
Eating 6 or more servings per day of fruits and vegetables lowers mortality risk by 26%. Having a large social network lowers it by 45%
Eating 3 servings a day of whole grains lowers mortality risk by 23%. Feeling you have others you can count on for support lowers it by 35%.
Eating a Mediterranean diet lowers mortality risk by 21%. Living with someone lowers it by 32%.
These numbers, and their implications for what you can do to improve your life, were compiled by the science journalist Marta Zaraska and published in her book Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism, and Kindness can Help You Live to 100. Here are some of her suggestions of simple things you can do, all backed by scientific research:
Engage in more physical contact with others: kiss your partner more often, hold hands with your kids, hug your friends, rub each other’s back, look others in the eyes.
Prioritize your romantic relationship and really commit to it. Read books and articles on how to be a better partner. Avoid contempt, criticism, stonewalling, and defensiveness. Talk with your partner about good things that happen in your daily life. Try new and fun things together and have some fun.
Invest in your friendships. Spend more time together, disclose your secrets, and don’t be afraid to ask for favors. When you’re with your partner or friends and family, put your phone away and focus on them.
Be more extraverted by greeting staff in a store, calling a friend whom you haven’t talk to in awhile, try a new restaurant or bar or café where you will meet new people working there.
In Zaraska’s words, here’s the bottom line:
It’s time we recognize that improving our social lives and cultivating our minds can be at least as important for health and longevity as are diet and exercise. When you grow as a person, chances are, you will also grow young. To Michael Pollan’s famous statement, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” I would add: “Be social, care for others, enjoy life.”
Lesson 10. Find Your Meaning and Purpose in Life
What, specifically, should you do to find meaning and purpose in life? Philosophers, theologians, and sages from spiritual traditions have been writing about this topic for millennia, and recently psychologists have undertaken scientific studies of people and what they do to find meaning and purpose in life. Here are some of their findings.
1. Love and family. The bonding and attachment to other people increases one’s circle of sentiments and a corresponding sense of purpose to care about others as much as, if not more than, oneself. A core principle of leading a meaningful life is to make it more than just about yourself.
2. Meaningful work and career. Having a passion for work and a long-term career gives most people a drive to achieve goals beyond the needs of themselves and their immediate family that lifts all of us to a higher plane, and society toward greater prosperity and moral progress. Having a reason to get up and around in the morning, and having a place to go where one is needed, is a lasting purposeful goal.
3. Social and community involvement. We are not isolated individuals but social beings with a drive to participate in the process of determining how best we should live together, for the benefit of ourselves, our families, our communities, and our societies. This is not just voting but, for example, being actively engaged in the political process; it is not just a matter of joining a club or society, but caring about its goals and the actions of the other members working toward the same goals. Get out and participate!
4.Challenges and goals. Most of us need tests and trials and things at which to aim, both ordinary, such as the physical challenge of sports and recreation and the mental challenge of games and intellectual pursuits, as well as extraordinary, such as striving for abstract principles like truth, justice, and freedom, and struggling through obstacles in the way of realizing them.
5. Transcendency and spirituality. Possibly unique to our species is the capacity for aesthetic appreciation, spiritual reflection, and transcendent contemplation through a variety of expressions such as art, music, dance, exercise, sports, meditation, prayer, quiet contemplation, religious revere, and spiritual contemplation, connecting us to that which is outside of ourselves, and generating a sense of awe and wonder at the vastness of humanity, nature, the world, and the cosmos. The idea that we live in a universe that is 13.8 billion years old, and on a planet that is but one among trillions of planets in our galaxy alone, itself one of hundreds of billions of other galaxies, in a universe that is possibly just one in a multiverse of universes, is so staggering a thought as to leave one speechless in reverence for the vastness of it all.
I will end this reverie on lessons for life with an inspiring poem that completely changed how I looked at my life when I first encountered it. It’s called Invictus, written in 1920 by William Ernest Henley, and is particularly poignant as he wrote it when he was terminally ill:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
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The Pencil-Driven Life 