Now that I’ve moved out of my apartment and technically have begun my itinerant stage, maybe not a bad idea to lay out what the heck I’m doing here. Or at least attempt to record some semblance of my mission and intentions, which of course will be subject to change.
My overarching mission on this mystic wander is to further my journey of life. I want to learn what there is to learn. I want to discover what there is to discover and what it is that I am best-suited to contribute to the universe. As I contemplate my mission, I’m seeing four themes emerge, three of which are tied to literary quotes that have been meaningful to me. (It’s always fun when I find a framework naturally emerge from my chaotic thought processes. As I started writing this post, I thought about my mission, and the quotes came to me; as I started organizing my thoughts, I realized that each quote represented a separate concept.)
1. My purpose
I’m inspired by a story that Jon Kabat-Zinn relates in his personally important book Wherever You Go, There You Are. Kabat-Zinn relates a story about famed designer, inventor, and author Buckminster Fuller. Fuller faced many failures early in his life, and he even contemplated suicide. But he eventually determined instead to live life as though he had died, and devote himself to the question:
What on this planet needs doing that I’m uniquely equipped to do, that probably won’t get done unless I do it?
This is a question I intend to try to answer as well.
Along similar lines, I’ve been thinking about this idea of living and acting “in my power” or “from my genius” (the latter term coming from the hugely resonant Finite and Infinite Games). There are behaviors and activities we engage in that are aligned with who we are and leverage our natural strengths and interests. And then there are behaviors and activities that simply do not. For instance, I feel very much in my power when I am interacting with the world from a place of groundedness, mindfulness, wisdom, patience, and kindness. These are times when I respond, rather than react. I know that there are many times when I do not act in those ways; times when I am judgmental, defensive, reactive, anxious. Upon reflection, I am acutely aware of how much out of my power and away from my genius I am in those moments. I wish to more and more understand my own genius and live in alignment with it.
2. Curiosity
Here, I draw on a quote from Saul Bellow’s last novel Ravelstein, which deals with death head-on. I read this book many years ago, and a quote continues to stand out to me to this day:
Before you were born you had never seen the life of this world. To grasp this mystery, the world, was the occult challenge. You came into a fully developed and articulated reality from nowhere, from nonbeing or primal oblivion. You had never seen life before. In the interval of light between the darkness in which you awaited first birth and then the darkness of death that would receive you, you must make what you could of reality, which was in a state of highly advanced development. I had waited for millennia to see this.
Simply put, we only have a very short period of time to figure out what the hell the universe is all about before we blink out of existence again. Might as well make the most of it.
3. Authenticity
A theme that is sure to permeate my writings (because it permeates my thinking) is the artificiality of our modern existence. The society we have constructed is so far removed from the biological and philosophical bases of our existences as animals, and it’s very important to me to grasp and remain in contact with the authenticity of existence, stripped of the constructs that surround us. In this, I am inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s experiment at Walden pond. I read Walden during my COVID quarantine, and it was such a delightful read in so many respects. Not only does he read humanity for filth in a way that is still wholly accurate to this day, and provide a frighteningly modern analysis of politics at the time in Civil Disobedience, but he also uses his words to paint a stunning and bucolic picture of the natural world and life in harmony with it that is completely enchanting and engrossing. (Let me just acknowledge the criticism that people love to make about Thoreau not actually roughing it and doing his laundry at his mother’s house; that’s fine and accurate and completely misses the point of what he’s doing. I’ll leave it at that.) Thoreau explains his mission for his own wander:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
Finer words are not to be found to describe my mission. “To live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” Yum.
4. Enabling goodness
It’s important to me to help others to live their lives with greater joy, less suffering, more power, more authenticity, more in touch with their own genius. More capable of passing along their own beauty and goodness.
At first, I thought I didn’t have a quote for this one, but shortly into writing this section, I realized I did. (Apparently I don’t have an original bone in my body, huh?) It comes from the famed Jewish scholar Rabbi Hillel (who died in the year 10 CE):
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?
It lays bare the tension of our human condition. On one hand, we must provide for and rely on ourselves (radical self-reliance, if you will), because at the end of the day, we are fundamentally alone. On the other hand, what am I, if I’m only for myself? Can I truly be human, if I am not caring for others? My hunch says no. And thus, if my mission is about fully living life and discovering all there is to existence, an imperative of my mission must be to live for others.
And so, this is my mission in four parts. It’s all fundamentally the same mission, examined from four angles. The tactical aspects of how I aim to pursue (not “achieve” – a mission is never complete) this mission will come in a later post. Wander on, my friends.