Category: Daily Philosophy

Try to imagine your future. Any version of the future you like. Some far away dream about how things would be if you were able to do the things that you have always imagined would make you happy. One year. Five years. Ten?

I am guessing that in whatever future you are imagining you look pretty good, that you have more money than you do now and of course you are alive. Maybe not. Maybe you have already mastered the one skill you need to know to have a better idea of what the future will look like. Maybe you have read Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. If not I would highly recommend it. I have been on a non-fiction kick lately and this is one of the standouts. I found the book on Derek Sivers reading list and was not disappointed. I love the way Derek puts up the notes he takes while he is reading. It gave me a kind of mini preview so that I was able to read the book with some ideas already in mind.

I guess this would be a spoiler alert but I don’t think it will ruin too much for you, however you have been warned. Daniel Gilbert lays out a really good case that surrogation is the best of our available resources to see how the future might look to us when we arrive there. By this he means that we should ask someone who is in the thick of it right now. ( By it I mean whatever future you might want to experience) Don’t ask someone who has been through it in the past. Don’t ask someone who knows someone who is going through it. Ask the person who is experiencing your future right now. I wont go into all the studies and details but it makes a lot of sense if you just think about it. Asking someone who has a ten year old child (like myself) what it’s like to have a baby is asking for trouble. Ask someone with a baby. They are sleep deprived right now. I am not. They are changing diapers and feeding with a breast or a bottle. I am not. I only have vague images of what that time was like. I feel a lot better about it now that I can see what lies on the other side. But if you really want to know what that is like then ask a source you can trust, not a source whose memory is clouded by time and birthday cake. I bet that sleep deprived bottle feeder is dying to tell you how loud their baby can cry. But here is the kicker, you have to listen to the source. You have to heed their advice if you want the future you imagine to be closer to the real future that you will experience. ( In no way am I trying to discourage anyone from becoming a parent, just trowing a little heads up your way.)

A few years ago I decided to move to Austin from Los Angeles. Most of my family is from Texas and I had gone to SXSW a few years in a row and I came home and told my wife we should move. Just sell the house and go. I had been freelancing as a Pro Tools mixer and getting by and I thought that I could move to Austin and do the same. I thought the best course of action would be to fly to Austin and talk to as many people as I could to see what it was like there. I met a bunch of amazing people and ended up moving. But I ignored nearly everything everyone told me and tried to have the future that I imagined and not the one that the people I spoke with were experiencing. And it was a disaster. I remember one woman telling me flat out that moving to Austin with my Pro Tools rig and trying to make a living would be the worst mistake of my life. I don’t necessarily see it that way but I can tell you it wasn’t pretty and what she told me to expect was exactly what I found once I set up shop. It was ugly. I made some great music but making money there was hard. The woman who told me the truth knew that, she was going through it right then and there at the moment I asked her and my experience ended up mirroring hers pretty accurately. I just didn’t listen.

So. Now you know the trick. Ask someone in the trenches. Try not to ignore what they tell you and your future may look a little closer to the one you are trying to have. Just don’t be surprised to see yourself when you get there.

Discovery

The end. The end scares us. It scares because when we talk about the end, ultimately we come to talk about the end of life itself. Not in some great apocalyptic way but in the more certain sense that we will cease to exist. And when we contemplate this idea we have to face up to the mystery of our being. But do we need to fear it? Isn’t there a way to live our lives with a constant realization of this fact and instead of fear show gratitude? Gratitude for the gift of discovery. And it is on this journey of discovery that we all must embark in our own time and through our own eyes.

I went camping with my son a few weeks ago in the Sierras at a place called Saddlebag Lake. From what I can find it is the highest lake in California reachable by road. At the far end of the lake is a place called the Twenty Lakes Basin. When you imagine what alpine lakes look like you are imagining what we found. After a few miles of hiking at the end of a long day we came across this small lake and set up camp. We had the whole place to ourselves. The next morning it was very cold and the sun had just risen so we went over to the lake to watch for trout and that is when I took this picture. When I got home my wife pointed out how hard it was to tell what he standing at the edge of. Would he step off into the lake or into the sky. The beginning or the end. Many times they are the same thing, much like they are in the picture. I am sure you have seen pictures like this before but what makes this one stand out for me is the way my son is standing there in just the right place to blur the line between what we expect and what we are witnessing with our eyes.

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”  – T.S. Elliot.

This is another popular quote that you will find all over the place but it never gets old for me. At the end we will arrive and know the place for the first time. At the end. Where the lines blur.

Mind Training

I love reading lists and I will be putting one up here soon. But in the meantime…..I had the pleasure of sitting in a jury room last week, I didn’t end up having to serve but I was able to finish a really great book. I picked it up years ago and had forgotten all about it but books have a way of finding us when we need them. This one is called The Monk and the Philosopher  and it’s a conversation between a father and a son as they discuss the meaning of life. I will give a brief set up here but I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the really big questions that have faced generations of truth seekers. Both men do a great job of trying to understand the other and share a wealth of experience from both Eastern and Western cultures. The father is Jean-Francois Revel, a French Philosopher and the son is Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk who had previously been a molecular biologist. I marked many passages in the book but one of the early ones stood out for me. Here is the brief interchange:

J.F – (Father) OK, I understand that you applied the same rigor that you had used before to your research into the history and philosophy of Buddhism, the texts, and so on. But research in molecular biology over the last thirty years has been the field of some of the most important discoveries ever in scientific history. You could have taken part, but you didn’t.

M. – (Son) Biology seems to have been doing fine without me! There’s no shortage of researchers in the world. The real question for me was to establish and order of priorities in my life. Increasingly, I had the feeling that I wasn’t using the potential of human life as well as I could, but that day by day I was letting my life slip away. For me, the mass of scientific knowledge had become a major contribution to minor needs.

This really nailed it for me. We live in a culture of progress. Now there is nothing wrong with progress and the discussion that follows is well thought out on both sides but in life you have to make choices. And here is a man making a choice. For him science can only attend to minor needs. The really big stuff that we wrestle with, happiness and suffering, finding a way to be comfortable with who we are in the world and how we are supposed to act within it, these are the questions that arise when we contemplate the end. When we realize that our time is a gift and we should find a way to treat it as such. This requires a way to interact with the world that fits who you are and who you can become. One way to begin this journey is mind training. That is a phrase that Matthieu uses in a TED talk he gave in 2004 when he talks about happiness and meditation. I love the phrase because it seems to bring the idea of mediation into our daily life. In the same way we must train our bodies, we must train our minds. Train it to take full advantage of the present moment and to be ready when we reach the end and know the place for the first time.