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There’s chaos, we better fix it
Batman noted that some men aren’t looking for anything logical like money. They cannot be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn. This personality is the exception, not the rule. All nihilistic face painting criminal masterminds aside, the majority of human beings are natural hackers and fixers and improvers. It’s one of the central ways that we rail against the seeming…
The only species out of work are human beings
It’s easy to get discouraged when we get so many rejections. Each time we hear no, it chips away another chunk of our confidence, making us feel just a little more insecure than the time before. And so, because rejection can take such an emotional toll us on, it’s our responsibility to restore the balance. To double down on rebuilding our spirits and buoying our faith during threatening times. …
Like grains of sand piled one on another
We want extreme change and we want it now. We settle for nothing less than a tornado of sweeping transformations and dramatic revolutions that come swiftly and broadly, leaving us permanently altered for better for always. Unfortunately, nature doesn’t care how we prefer to change. It has its own agenda. One that must be respected if we are to live in harmony with it. And in some cases, that…
Keep the oxygen of optimism continually in the process
Optimism is not about denying reality, it’s about discerning which reality to focus our energy on. It’s a choice we make in each moment. A simple matter of proportion, perception and principle. Let’s explore a few examples. Instead of eulogizing our negativity, we choose to see and build upon the good in every moment. Trusting that this is only the beginning and more is on the way. Instead of…
The naive time before the world sank its jaws into us
Carlin notoriously wrote that the innocent victim was an outmoded idea. That there are no innocent victims. And if you’re born into this world, you’re guilty, period, fuck you, end of report, next case. Your birth certificate is proof of guilt. It was always one of my favorite bits. All comedy aside, though, what the hippie dippy weatherman was hinting at was something terrifying that we rarely confront: We…
Belonging to the closest neighborhood of man’s being
Heidegger, the seminal existentialist philosopher, believed that language was the house of being. In his famous letter on humanism, he wrote: In this home of language, man dwells. Those who create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of being insofar as they bring the manifestation to language and maintain it in language through their speech. Insanely dense and abstract and difficult to read,…
You don’t have to invent it, you just have to redefine it
Einstein didn’t invent relativity, but he did create a new way of seeing information that was already available to everybody else. Darwin didn’t invent natural selection, but he did build a conceptual framework in which natural selection made sense. Newton didn’t invent gravity, but he did give a name to something that was already there, and that label helped people understand it. Gates didn’t invent the computer, but he…
The nature of the identification with self and other
A magazine editor once gave me brilliant writing advice. She said to be careful not to overuse the second person point of view in the work. It creates a separation between author and reader, and can appear preachy or bossy. Instead, try to write in terms of we and us. It unifies the reader and writer, becoming a journey that we’re on together, rather than an expedition that only…
Collect enough material to recreate the stars
Katamarithe most hilarious, bizarre and interesting puzzle action video game of all time. The plot concerns a magical, highly adhesive ball called a katamari, which rolls around various locations. It collects increasingly larger objects, everything from thumbtacks to human beings to monuments to baseball stadiums, until the ball has eventually grown massive enough to become a star. Who thinks this stuff up? Playing the game, however, is surprisingly satisfying….
Berating ourselves for not winning the game of life
Growth is not when we stop making mistakes, it’s when we stop beating the shit out of ourselves for making them. Once we learn to eliminate that hostile tendency, we become unstoppable. Not even our own inner critic can keep us down. Buddhists have a phrase for this response called the second arrow. The teachings tell us that the first arrow is what is. It’s something comes with the territory of…
