Elevating Resolutions for the New Year Inspired by Some of Humanityโs Greatest Minds
BY MARIA POPOVA
What if we could augment the bucket-list of typical New Yearโs resolutions, dominated by bodily habits and pragmatic daily practices, with higher-order aspirations โ habits of mind and spiritual orientations borrowed from some of humanityโs most timelessly rewarding thinkers? After last yearโs selection of worthy resolutions inspired by such luminaries as Seneca, Maya Angelou, Bruce Lee, and Virginia Woolf, here is another set for the new year borrowed from a new roster of perennially elevating minds.
One of the most influential poets of the twentieth century and a woman of unflinching conviction, Adrienne Rich (May 16, 1929โMarch 27, 2012) became the first and to date only person to decline the National Medal of Arts in protest against the growing monopoly of power and the governmentโs proposed plan to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. Although her poetry collection The Dream of a Common Language is a cultural cornerstone and required reading for every thinking, feeling human being, her lesser-known collected prose, published as On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (public library), pours forth Richโs most direct insight into the political, philosophical, and personal dimensions of human life.
In it, she writes:
An honorable human relationship โ that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word โloveโ โ is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.
It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy โ to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work.
In a latter chapter, titled โThe Unhappiest Man,โ he considers how we grow unhappy by fleeing from presence and busying ourselves with the constant pursuit of some as-yet unattained external goal:
The unhappy person is one who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside of himself. The unhappy man is always absent from himself, never present to himself. But one can be absent, obviously, either in the past or in the future. This adequately circumscribes the entire territory of the unhappy consciousness.
[โฆ]
The unhappy one is absentโฆ It is only the person who is present to himself that is happy.
I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Donโt search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
4. SUSAN SONTAG: PAY ATTENTION TO THE WORLD
In a terrific 1992 lecture, Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933โDecember 28, 2004) asserted that โa writer is someone who pays attention to the world โ a writer is a professional observer.โ But this observant attentiveness to the world, Sontag believed, is as vital to being a good writer as it is to being a good human being โ something she addresses in one of the many rewarding pieces collected in the posthumous anthology At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches (public library), which also gave us Sontag on beauty vs. interestingness, courage and resistance, and literature and freedom.
Reflecting on a question she is frequently asked โ to distill her essential advice on writing โ Sontag offers:
Iโm often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: โSeveral things. Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.โ
Needless to say, no sooner had these perky phrases fallen out of my mouth than I thought of some more recipes for writerโs virtue.
For instance: โBe serious.โ By which I meant: Never be cynical. And which doesnโt preclude being funny.
But these tenets of storytelling, Sontag argues, arenโt just writerly virtues โ they are a framework for human virtues:
To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.
To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.
When we make moral judgments, we are not just saying that this is better than that. Even more fundamentally, we are saying that this is more important than that. It is to order the overwhelming spread and simultaneity of everything, at the price of ignoring or turning our backs on most of what is happening in the world.
The nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention โ a capacity that, inevitably, has its limits but whose limits can be stretched.
But perhaps the beginning of wisdom, and humility, is to acknowledge, and bow oneโs head, before the thought, the devastating thought, of the simultaneity of everything, and the incapacity of our moral understanding โ which is also the understanding of the novelist โ to take this in.
5. BERTRAND RUSSELL: MAKE ROOM FOR โFRUITFUL MONOTONYโ
In a chapter titled โBoredom and Excitement,โ Russell teases apart the paradoxical question of why, given how central it is to our wholeness, we dread boredom as much as we do. Long before our present anxieties about how the age of distraction and productivity is thwarting our capacity for presence, he writes:
We are less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more afraid of boredom. We have come to know, or rather to believe, that boredom is not part of the natural lot of man, but can be avoided by a sufficiently vigorous pursuit of excitement.
[โฆ]
As we rise in the social scale the pursuit of excitement becomes more and more intense.
Many decades before our present concerns about screen time, he urges parents to allow children the freedom to experience โfruitful monotony,โ which invites inventiveness and imaginative play โ in other words, the great childhood joy and developmental achievement of learning to โdo nothing with nobody all alone by yourself.โ He writes:
The pleasures of childhood should in the main be such as the child extracts from his environment by means of some effort and inventivenessโฆ A child develops best when, like a young plant, he is left undisturbed in the same soil. Too much travel, too much variety of impressions, are not good for the young, and cause them as they grow up to become incapable of enduring fruitful monotony.
I do not mean that monotony has any merits of its own; I mean only that certain good things are not possible except where there is a certain degree of monotonyโฆ A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase.
6. URSULA K. LE GUIN: REFUSE TO PLAY THE PERFECTION GAME
Reflecting on various culturesโ impossible and often punishing ideals of human beauty, โespecially of female beauty,โ Le Guin writes:
There are a whole lot of ways to be perfect, and not one of them is attained through punishment.
[โฆ]
I think of when I was in high school in the 1940s: the white girls got their hair crinkled up by chemicals and heat so it would curl, and the black girls got their hair mashed flat by chemicals and heat so it wouldnโt curl. Home perms hadnโt been invented yet, and a lot of kids couldnโt afford these expensive treatments, so they were wretched because they couldnโt follow the rules, the rules of beauty.
Beauty always has rules. Itโs a game. I resent the beauty game when I see it controlled by people who grab fortunes from it and donโt care who they hurt. I hate it when I see it making people so self-dissatisfied that they starve and deform and poison themselves. Most of the time I just play the game myself in a very small way, buying a new lipstick, feeling happy about a pretty new silk shirt.
[โฆ]
Thereโs the ideal beauty of youth and health, which never really changes, and is always true. Thereโs the ideal beauty of movie stars and advertising models, the beauty-game ideal, which changes its rules all the time and from place to place, and is never entirely true. And thereโs an ideal beauty that is harder to define or understand, because it occurs not just in the body but where the body and the spirit meet and define each other.
And yet for all the ideals we impose on our bodies, Le Guin argues in her most poignant but, strangely, most liberating point, it is death that ultimately illuminates the full spectrum of our beauty โ death, the ultimate equalizer of time and space; death, the great clarifier that makes us see that, as Rebecca Goldstein put it, โa person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world.โ
With this long-view lens, Le Guin remembers her own mother and the many dimensions of her beauty:
My mother died at eighty-three, of cancer, in pain, her spleen enlarged so that her body was misshapen. Is that the person I see when I think of her? Sometimes. I wish it were not. It is a true image, yet it blurs, it clouds, a truer image. It is one memory among fifty years of memories of my mother. It is the last in time. Beneath it, behind it is a deeper, complex, ever-changing image, made from imagination, hearsay, photographs, memories. I see a little red-haired child in the mountains of Colorado, a sad-faced, delicate college girl, a kind, smiling young mother, a brilliantly intellectual woman, a peerless flirt, a serious artist, a splendid cookโI see her rocking, weeding, writing, laughing โ I see the turquoise bracelets on her delicate, freckled arm โ I see, for a moment, all that at once, I glimpse what no mirror can reflect, the spirit flashing out across the years, beautiful.
That must be what the great artists see and paint. That must be why the tired, aged faces in Rembrandtโs portraits give us such delight: they show us beauty not skin-deep but life-deep.
Our cultural mythology depicts love as something that happens to us โ something we fall into, something that strikes us arrow-like, in which we are so passive as to be either lucky or unlucky. Such framing obscures the fact that loving โ the practice of love โ is a skill attained through the same deliberate effort as any other pursuit of human excellence.
Long before the Zen sage Thich Nhat Hahn admonished that โto love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love,โ the great German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900โMarch 18, 1980) addressed this neglected skillfulness aspect of love in his 1956 classic The Art of Loving (public library) โ a case for love as a skill to be honed the way artists apprentice themselves to the work on the way to mastery, demanding of its practitioner both knowledge and effort.
Fromm writes:
Love is not a sentiment which can be easily indulged in by anyone, regardless of the level of maturity reached by himโฆ [All] attempts for love are bound to fail, unless [one] tries most actively to develop [oneโs] total personality, so as to achieve a productive orientation; โฆsatisfaction in individual love cannot be attained without the capacity to love oneโs neighbor, without true humility, courage, faith and discipline. In a culture in which these qualities are rare, the attainment of the capacity to love must remain a rare achievement.
[โฆ]
There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love.
The only way to abate this track record of failure, Fromm argues, is to examine the underlying reasons for the disconnect between our beliefs about love and its actual machinery โ which must include a recognition of love as an informed practice rather than an unmerited grace:
The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering. What are the necessary steps in learning any art? The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice. If I want to learn the art of medicine, I must first know the facts about the human body, and about various diseases. When I have all this theoretical knowledge, I am by no means competent in the art of medicine. I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice, until eventually the results of my theoretical knowledge and the results of my practice are blended into one โ my intuition, the essence of the mastery of any art. But, aside from learning the theory and practice, there is a third factor necessary to becoming a master in any art โ the mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern; there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art. This holds true for music, for medicine, for carpentry โ and for love. And, maybe, here lies the answer to the question of why people in our culture try so rarely to learn this art, in spite of their obvious failures: in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power โ almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving.
8. ANNE TRUITT: CHOOSE UNDERSTANDING OVER JUDGMENT
Perhaps because she was formally trained as a psychologist, artist Anne Truitt (March 16, 1921โDecember 23, 2004) possessed exceptional powers of introspection and self-awareness coupled with an artistโs penchant for patient observation. This made her diary, eventually published as Daybook: The Journal of an Artist(public library), a true masterwork of psychological insight.
In one particularly poignant entry, she considers how our preconceptions and our ready-made judgments are keeping us from truly seeing one another, erecting a perilous barrier to love:
Unless we are very, very careful, we doom each other by holding onto images of one another based on preconceptions that are in turn based on indifference to what is other than ourselves. This indifference can be, in its extreme, a form of murder and seems to me a rather common phenomenon. We claim autonomy for ourselves and forget that in so doing we can fall into the tyranny of defining other people as we would like them to be. By focusing on what we choose to acknowledge in them, we impose an insidious control on them. I notice that I have to pay careful attention in order to listen to others with an openness that allows them to be as they are, or as they think themselves to be. The shutters of my mind habitually flip open and click shut, and these little snaps form into patterns I arrange for myself. The opposite of this inattention is love, is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery.
Long before scientists had empirical evidence of the astounding ways in which our minds affect our bodies, French philosopher and political activist Simone Weil(February 3, 1909โAugust 24, 1943) โ a thinker of unparalleled intellectual elegance and a sort of modern saint whom Albert Camus described as โthe only great spirit of our timesโ โ examined the delicate relationship between our physical and spiritual suffering, between the anguish of the material body and that of the soul.
A few months before her painful yet stoic death from tuberculosis โ despite her diagnosis and her doctorโs explicit orders to eat heartily, Weil consumed only what was rationed to her compatriots under the German Occupation in a remarkable gesture of solidarity, ultimately resulting in fatal malnutrition โ she turned to the problem of pain in First and Last Notebooks(public library). In an entry from late 1942, Weil considers how our instinctive reaction to suffering often only amplifies our pain:
The way to make use of physical pain. When suffering no matter what degree of pain, when almost the entire soul is inwardly crying โMake it stop, I can bear no more,โ a part of the soul, even though it be an infinitesimally small part, should say: โI consent that this should continue throughout the whole of time, if the divine wisdom so ordains.โ The soul is then split in two. For the physically sentient part of the soul is โ at least sometimes โ unable to consent to pain. This splitting in two of the soul is a second pain, a spiritual one, and even sharper than the physical pain that causes it.
Weil extends this philosophy beyond physical pain and into other forms of bodily and spiritual discomfort that we habitually exacerbate by stiffening with resistance to the unpleasantness:
A similar use can be made of hunger, fatigue, fear, and of everything that imperatively constrains the sentient part of the soul to cry: I can bear no more! Make it stop! There should be something in us that answers: I consent that it should continue up to the moment of death, or that it should not even finish then, but continue for ever. Then it is that the soul is as if divided by a two-edged sword.
To make use in this way of the sufferings that chance inflicts upon us is better than inflicting discipline upon oneself.
10. JAMES BALDWIN: TELL THE WORLD HOW TO TREAT YOU
One August evening in 1970, James Baldwin(August 2, 1924โDecember 1, 1987) and Margaret Mead(December 16, 1901โNovember 15, 1978) sat together on a stage in New York City for a remarkable public conversation. They talked for seven and a half hours over the course of the weekend, tackling such enduring concerns as power and privilege, race and gender, beauty, religion, justice, and the relationship between the intellect and the imagination. The transcript was eventually published as A Rap on Race (public library) โ a testament to both how far weโve come and how far we have yet to go, exploring such timeless and timely questions as changing oneโs destiny, the crucial difference between guilt and responsibility, and reimagining democracy for a post-consumerist culture.
I remember once a few years ago, in the British Museum a black Jamaican was washing the floors or something and asked me where I was from, and I said I was born in New York. He said, โYes, but where are you from?โ I did not know what he meant. โWhere did you come from before that?โ he explained. I said, โMy mother was born in Maryland.โ โWhere was your father born?โ he asked. โMy father was born in New Orleans.โ He said, โYes, but where are you from?โ Then I began to get it; very dimly, because now I was lost. And he said, โWhere are you from in Africa?โ I said, โWell, I donโt know,โ and he was furious with me. He said, and walked away, โYou mean you did not care enough to find out?โ
Now, how in the world am I going to explain to him that there is virtually no way for me to have found out where I came from in Africa? So it is a kind of tug of war. The black American is looked down on by other dark people as being an object abjectly used. They envy him on the one hand, but on the other hand they also would like to look down on him as having struck a despicable bargain.
But identity, Baldwin argues, isnโt something we are born with โ rather, it is something we claim for ourselves, then must assert willfully to the world:
Youโve got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.
11. JOHN STEINBECK: USE DISCIPLINE TO CATALYZE CREATIVE MAGIC
Many celebrated writers have championed the creative benefits of keeping a diary, but no one has put the diary to more impressive practical use in the creative process than John Steinbeck(February 27, 1902โDecember 20, 1968).
In the spring of 1938, he embarked on the most intense writing experience of his life. The public fruit of this labor would become the 1939 masterwork The Grapes of Wrath, which earned Steinbeck the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and was a cornerstone for his Nobel Prize two decades later. But its private rewards are at least as important and morally instructive: Alongside the novel, Steinbeck also began keeping a diary, eventually published as Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (public library) โ a living record of his creative journey, in which this extraordinary writer tussles with excruciating self-doubt (exactly the kind Virginia Woolf so memorably described) but plows forward anyway, with equal parts gusto and grist, determined to do his best with the gift he has despite his limitations.
His journal, which became for him a practice both redemptive and transcendent, stands as a supreme testament to the fact that the essential substance of genius is the daily act of showing up. Steinbeck captures this perfectly in an entry that applies just as well to any field of creative endeavor:
In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration. Consequently there must be some little quality of fierceness until the habit pattern of a certain number of words is established. There is no possibility, in me at least, of saying, โIโll do it if I feel like it.โ One never feels like awaking day after day. In fact, given the smallest excuse, one will not work at all. The rest is nonsense. Perhaps there are people who can work that way, but I cannot. I must get my words down every day whether they are any good or not.
The journal thus becomes at once a tool of self-discipline (he vowed to write in it every single weekday, and did, declaring in one of the first entries: โWork is the only good thing.โ), a pacing mechanism (he gave himself seven months to complete the book, anticipated it would actually take only 100 days, and finished it in under five months, averaging 2,000 words per day, longhand, not including the diary), and a sounding board for much-needed positive self-talk in the face of constant doubt (โI am so lazy and the thing ahead is so very difficult,โ he despairs in one entry; but he assures himself in another: โMy will is low. I must build my will again. And I can do it.โ) Above all, it is a tool of accountability to keep him moving forward despite lifeโs litany of distractions and responsibilities. โProblems pile up so that this book moves like a Tide Pool snail with a shell and barnacles on its back,โ he writes, and yet the essential thing is that despite the problems, despite the barnacles, it does move. He captures this in one of his most poignant entries, shortly before completing the first half of the novel:
Every book seems the struggle of a whole life. And then, when it is done โ pouf. Never happened. Best thing is to get the words down every day. And it is time to start now.
A few days later, he spirals into self-doubt again:
My many weaknesses are beginning to show their heads. I simply must get this thing out of my system. Iโm not a writer. Iโve been fooling myself and other people. I wish I were. This success will ruin me as sure as hell. It probably wonโt last, and that will be all right. Iโll try to go on with work now. Just a stint every day does it. I keep forgetting.
And so he inches forward, day after day. As he nears the finish line, he is even more certain of this incremental reach for greatness:
Iโll get the book done if I just set one dayโs work in front of the last dayโs work. Thatโs the way it comes out. And thatโs the only way it does.
And yet even as he approaches the end, his self-doubt remains as unshakable as his commitment to finish:
I only hope it is some good. I have very grave doubts sometimes. I donโt want this to seem hurried. It must be just as slow and measured as the rest but I am sure of one thing โ it isnโt the great book I had hoped it would be. Itโs just a run-of-the-mill book. And the awful thing is that it is absolutely the best I can do. Now to work on it.
The book, of course, was far from run-of-the-mill. In addition to earning the two highest accolades in literature, The Grapes of Wrath remained atop the bestseller list for almost a year after it was published, sold nearly 430,000 copies in its first year alone, and remains one of the most read and celebrated novels ever written.
12. MARTHA NUSSBAUM: HEED THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE EMOTIONS
As scientists are shedding light on how our emotions affect our susceptibility to disease, it is becoming increasingly clear that our emotional lives are equipped with a special and non-negligible kind of bodily and cognitive intelligence. The nature of that intelligence and how we can harness its power is what Martha Nussbaum (b.May 6, 1947), whom I continue to consider the most compelling and effective philosopher of our time, examines in her magnificent 2001 book Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (public library). Titled after Proustโs conception of the emotions as โgeologic upheavals of thought,โ Nussbaumโs treatise offers a lucid counterpoint to the old idea that our emotions are merely animal energies or primal impulses wholly separate from our cognition. Instead, she argues that they are a centerpiece of moral philosophy and that any substantive theory of ethics necessitates a substantive understanding of the emotions.
Nussbaum writes:
A lot is at stake in the decision to view emotions in this way, as intelligent responses to the perception of value. If emotions are suffused with intelligence and discernment, and if they contain in themselves an awareness of value or importance, they cannot, for example, easily be sidelined in accounts of ethical judgment, as so often they have been in the history of philosophy. Instead of viewing morality as a system of principles to be grasped by the detached intellect, and emotions as motivations that either support or subvert our choice to act according to principle, we will have to consider emotions as part and parcel of the system of ethical reasoning. We cannot plausibly omit them, once we acknowledge that emotions include in their content judgments that can be true or false, and good or bad guides to ethical choice. We will have to grapple with the messy material of grief and love, anger and fear, and the role these tumultuous experiences play in thought about the good and the just.
[โฆ]
Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creatureโs reasoning itself.
She considers the rationale behind the bookโs title:
Emotions should be understood as โgeological upheavals of thoughtโ: as judgments in which people acknowledge the great importance, for their own flourishing, of things that they do not fully control โ and acknowledge thereby their neediness before the world and its events.
Perhaps the greatest perplexity of aging is how to fill with gentleness the void between who we feel we are on the inside and who our culture tells us is staring back from that mirror. The cultivation of that gentleness is what beloved writer Grace Paley (December 11, 1922โAugust 22, 2007) examines in a magnificent short piece titled โMy Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age,โ originally written for the New Yorker in 2002 and included in Here and Somewhere Else: Stories and Poems by Grace Paley and Robert Nichols (public library) โ a celebration of literature, love, and the love of literature by Paley and her husband, published a few months before she died at the age of eighty-five.
Paley writes:
My father had decided to teach me how to grow old. I said O.K. My children didnโt think it was such a great idea. If I knew how, they thought, I might do so too easily. No, no, I said, itโs for later, years from now. And besides, if I get it right it might be helpful to you kids in time to come.
They said, Really?
My father wanted to begin as soon as possible.
[โฆ]
Please sit down, he said. Be patient. The main thing is this โ when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.
Thatโs a metaphor, right?
Metaphor? No, no, you can do this. In the morning, do a few little exercises for the joints, not too much. Then put your hands like a cup over and under the heart. Under the breast. He said tactfully. Itโs probably easier for a man. Then talk softly, donโt yell. Under your ribs, push a little. When you wake up, you must do this massage. I mean pat, stroke a little, donโt be ashamed. Very likely no one will be watching. Then you must talk to your heart.
Talk? What?
Say anything, but be respectful. Say โ maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember.
โDo you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?โ Elizabeth Gilbert asked in framing her catalyst for creative magic. This is among lifeโs most abiding questions and the history of human creativity โ our art and our poetry and most empathically all of our philosophy โ is the history of attempts to answer it.
Friedrich Nietzsche (October 15, 1844โAugust 25, 1900), who believed that embracing difficulty is essential for a fulfilling life, considered the journey of self-discovery one of the greatest and most fertile existential difficulties. In 1873, as he was approaching his thirtieth birthday, Nietzsche addressed this perennial question of how we find ourselves and bring forth our gifts in a beautiful essay titled Schopenhauer as Educator (public library), part of his Untimely Meditations.
Nietzsche, translated here by Daniel Pellerin, writes:
Any human being who does not wish to be part of the masses need only stop making things easy for himself. Let him follow his conscience, which calls out to him: โBe yourself! All that you are now doing, thinking, desiring, all that is not you.โ
Every young soul hears this call by day and by night and shudders with excitement at the premonition of that degree of happiness which eternities have prepared for those who will give thought to their true liberation. There is no way to help any soul attain this happiness, however, so long as it remains shackled with the chains of opinion and fear. And how hopeless and meaningless life can become without such a liberation! There is no drearier, sorrier creature in nature than the man who has evaded his own genius and who squints now towards the right, now towards the left, now backwards, now in any direction whatever.
No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Donโt ask, walk!
15. MARTHA GRAHAM: EMBRACE YOUR DIVINE DISSATISFACTION
โResign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ยญbeing satisfied,โZadie Smith counseled in her ten rules of writing. But how does one befriend this perennial dissatisfaction while continuing to unlock, to borrow Julia Cameronโs potent phrase, the โspiritual electricityโ of creative flow?
To this abiding question of the creative life, legendary choreographer Martha Graham (May 11, 1894โApril 1, 1991) offers an answer at once remarkably grounding and remarkably elevating in a conversation found in the 1991 biography Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham(public library) by dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille.
In 1943, De Mille was hired to choreograph the musical Oklahoma!, which became an overnight sensation and ran for a record-setting 2,212 performances. Feeling that critics and the public had long ignored work into which she had poured her heart and soul, De Mille found herself dispirited by the sense that something she considered โonly fairly goodโ was suddenly hailed as a โflamboyant success.โ Shortly after the premiere, she met Graham โin a Schrafftโs restaurant over a sodaโ for a conversation that put into perspective her gnawing grievance and offered what De Mille considered the greatest thing ever said to her. She recounts the exchange:
I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.
Martha said to me, very quietly: โThere is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. As for you, Agnes, you have so far used about one-third of your talent.โ
โBut,โ I said, โwhen I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.โ
โNo artist is pleased.โ
โBut then there is no satisfaction?โ
โNo satisfaction whatever at any time,โ she cried out passionately. โThere is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.โ
True story, Word of Honor: Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island.
I said, โJoe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel โCatch-22โ has earned in its entire history?โ And Joe said, โIโve got something he can never have.โ And I said, โWhat on earth could that be, Joe?โ And Joe said, โThe knowledge that Iโve got enough.โ Not bad! Rest in peace!
Sir Winston Churchill had a phrase that he used at the start of each day and at the end of every telephone conversation: Keep Buggering On (Keep Plodding On if in the presence of a lady). The British Bulldog, Churchill was never one to back down. He was as tenacious as they come and would take a hit and get back swinging. Itโs that spirit that got England (and maybe in even the Allied world) through World War II. That tenacity is integral to anything important โ winning a war, starting a business, finishing a novel, raising a child, battling illness, making a living, running a marathon, learning the violin.
Early on in the war, the current Prime Minister resigned and Churchill was appointed Prime Minister. He held the position through the difficult war era, but lost the reelection in 1945, the sentiment being that his success during wartime surely couldnโt be repeated after. But Churchill kept buggering on and won reelection the in the next election and was able to hold the position until his resignation in 1955.
We all can take a page out of the Churchill playbook. Success and greatness takes work. It takes effort and it takes a great deal of just buggering on when the odds are against you.
Repost TY BENNET RELEVANT LEADERSHIP
Vivre Militare Est – To Live is to Fight
โThis phrase can be found in Senecaโs letter to Lucilium, it means โto live is to fightโ. Often it is considered as an antithesis for Ciceroโs โVivere Est Cogitareโ โ โto live is to thinkโ.โ
The Harvard Study of Adult Development has established a strong correlation between deep relationships and well-being. The question is, how does a person nurture those deep relationships?By Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
Turn your mind for a moment to a friend or family member you cherish but donโt spend as much time with as you would like. This neednโt be your most significant relationship, just someone who makes you feel energized when youโre with them, and whom youโd like to see more regularly.
How often do you see that person? Every day? Once a month? Once a year? Do the math and project how many hours annually you spend with them. Write this number down and hang on to it.
This article is adapted from Waldinger and Schulzโs new book.
For us, Bob and Marc, though we work closely together and meet every week by phone or video call, we see each other in person for only a total of about two days (48 hours) every year.
How does this add up for the coming years? Bob is 71 years old. Marc is 60. Letโs be (very) generous and say we will both be around to celebrate Bobโs 100th birthday. At two days a year for 29 years, thatโs 58 days that we have left to spend together in our lifetimes.
Fifty-eight out of 10,585 days.
Of course, this is assuming a lot of good fortune, and the real number is almost certainly going to be lower.
Since 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has been investigating what makes people flourish. After starting with 724 participantsโboys from disadvantaged and troubled families in Boston, and Harvard undergraduatesโthe study incorporated the spouses of the original men and, more recently, more than 1,300 descendants of the initial group. Researchers periodically interview participants, ask them to fill out questionnaires, and collect information about their physical health. As the studyโs director (Bob) and associate director (Marc), weโve been able to watch participants fall in and out of relationships, find success and failure at their jobs, become mothers and fathers. Itโs the longest in-depth longitudinal study on human life ever done, and itโs brought us to a simple and profound conclusion: Good relationships lead to health and happiness. The trick is that those relationships must be nurtured.
We donโt always put our relationships first. Consider the fact that the average American in 2018 spent 11 hours every day on solitary activities such as watching television and listening to the radio. Spending 58 days over 29 years with a friend is infinitesimal compared with the 4,851 days that Americans will spend interacting with media during that same time period. Distractions are hard to avoid.
Thinking about these numbers can help us put our own relationships in perspective. Try figuring out how much time you spend with a good friend or family member. We donโt have to spend every hour with our friends, and some relationships work because theyโre exercised sparingly. But nearly all of us have people in our lives whom weโd like to see more. Are you spending time with the people you most care about? Is there a relationship in your life that would benefit both of you if you could spend more time together? Many of these are untapped resources, waiting for us to put them to use. And, enriching these relationships can in turn nourish our minds and bodies.
You donโt have to examine scientific findings to recognize that relationships affect you physically. All you have to do is notice the invigoration you feel when you believe that someone has really understood you during a good conversation, or the tension and distress you feel after an argument, or how little sleep you get during a period of romantic strife.
In this sense, having healthy, fulfilling relationships is its own kind of fitnessโsocial fitnessโand like physical fitness, it takes work to maintain. Unlike stepping on the scale, taking a quick look in the mirror, or getting readouts for blood pressure and cholesterol, assessing our social fitness requires a bit more sustained self-reflection. It requires stepping back from the crush of modern life, taking stock of our relationships, and being honest with ourselves about where weโre devoting our time and whether we are tending to the connections that help us thrive. Finding the time for this type of reflection can be hard, and sometimes itโs uncomfortable. But it can yield enormous benefits.
Many of our Harvard Study participants have told us that filling out questionnaires every two years and being interviewed regularly have given them a welcome perspective on their life and relationships. We ask them to really think about themselves and the people they love, and that process of self-reflection helps some of them.
This is a practice that could help anyone. Looking in the mirror and thinking honestly about where your life stands is a first step in trying to live a good life. Noticing where you are can help put into relief where you would like to be. Having some reservations about this kind of self-reflection is understandable. Our study participants were not always keen on filling out our questionnaires, or eager to consider the larger picture of their life. Some would skip difficult questions or leave entire pages blank, and some would just not return certain surveys. Some even wrote comments in the margins of their questionnaires about what they thought of our requests. โWhat kinds of questions are these!?โ is a response we received occasionally, often from participants who preferred not to think about difficulties in their life. The experiences of the people who skipped questions or entire questionnaires were also important, thoughโthey were just as crucial in understanding adult development as the experiences of people eager to share. A lot of useful data and gems of experience were buried in the shadowed corners of their lives. We just had to go through a little extra effort to excavate them.
One of these people was a man weโll call Sterling Ainsley. (We are using a pseudonym to protect his confidentiality as a study participant.)
Sterling ainsley was a hopeful guy. He graduated from Harvard in the 1940s and then served in World War II. After he left the service, he got a job as a scientist and retired in his 60s. When asked to describe his philosophy for getting through hard times, he said, โYou try not to let life get to you. You remember your victories and take a positive attitude.โ
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The year was 1986. George Vaillant, the then-director of the study, was on a long interview trek, driving through the Rocky Mountains to visit the studyโs participants who lived in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Montana. Sterling had not returned the most recent survey, and there was some catching up to do. He met Vaillant at a hotel to give him a ride to the diner where Sterling wanted to do his scheduled interview. When Vaillant buckled himself into the passenger seat of Sterlingโs car, the seat belt left a stripe of dust across his chest. โI was left to wonder,โ he wrote, โthe last time somebody had used it.โ
Sterling was technically married, but his wife lived far away, and they hadnโt slept in the same room in years. They spoke only every few months.
When asked why they had not gotten a divorce, he said, โI wouldnโt want to do that to the children,โ even though his kids were grown and had children of their own. Sterling was proud of his kids and beamed when he spoke of them, saying they were the most important thing in his life. But he rarely saw them and seemed to prefer to keep his relationships with them thriving mostly in his imagination. Vaillant noted that Sterling seemed to be using optimism to push away some of his fears and avoid challenges in his life. Putting a positive spin on every matter and then pushing it out of his mind made it possible for him to believe that nothing was wrong, he was fine, he was happy, his kids didnโt need him.
He didnโt travel to see his sonโs new home abroad, because he didnโt โwant to be a burdenโโeven though heโd been learning a new language to prepare for the trip. He had another child who lived closer, but he hadnโt visited in more than a year. He didnโt have a relationship with his grandchildren, and he wasnโt in contact with any friends.
When asked about his older sister, Sterling seemed startled. โMy sister?โ he said.
Yes, the sister he had told the study so much about when he was younger.
Sterling thought about it for a long time, and then told Vaillant that it must have been decades since he last spoke with her. A frightened expression came over his face. โWould she still be living?โ he said.
Sterling tried not to think about his relationships, and he was even less inclined to talk about them. This is a common experience. We donโt always know why we do things or why we donโt do things, and we may not understand what is holding us at a distance from the people in our life. Taking some time to look in the mirror can help. Sometimes there are needs inside of us that are looking for a voice, a way to get out. They might be things that we have never seen or articulated to ourselves.
This seemed to be the case with Sterling. Asked how he spent his evenings, he said he spent time with an elderly woman who lived in a nearby trailer. Each night he would walk over, and theyโd watch TV and talk. Eventually she would fall asleep, and he would help her into bed and wash her dishes and close the shades before walking home. She was the closest thing he had to a confidant.
โI donโt know what Iโll do if she dies,โ he said.
A New Formula for Happiness
The happiness we seek may require investing earlier than we thinkโand may help us align our expectations and reality at the end of life.
Loneliness has a physical effect on the body. It can render people more sensitive to pain, suppress their immune system, diminish brain function, and disrupt sleep, which in turn can make an already lonely person even more tired and irritable. Research has found that, for older adults, loneliness is far more dangerous than obesity. Ongoing loneliness raises a personโs odds of death by 26 percent in any given year. A study in the U.K., the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study, recently reported on the connections between loneliness and poorer health and self-care in young adults. This ongoing study includes more than 2,200 people born in England and Wales in 1994 and 1995. When they were 18, the researchers asked them how lonely they were. Those who reported being lonelier had a greater chance of facing mental-health issues, partaking in unsafe physical-health behaviors, and coping with stress in negative ways. Add to this the fact that a tide of loneliness is flooding through modern societies, and we have a serious problem. Recent stats should make us take notice.
In a study conducted online that sampled 55,000 respondents from across the world, one out of every three people of all ages reported that they often feel lonely. Among these, the loneliest group were 16-to-24-year-olds, 40 percent of whom reported feeling lonely โoften or very often.โ In the U.K., the economic cost of this lonelinessโbecause lonely people are less productive and more prone to employment turnoverโis estimated at more than ยฃ2.5 billion (about $3.1 billion) annually and helped lead to the establishment of a U.K. Ministry of Loneliness.
In Japan, 32 percent of adults expected to feel lonely most of the time during 2020. In the United States, a 2019 study suggested that three out of four adults felt moderate to high levels of loneliness. As of this writing, the long-term effects of the coronavirus pandemic, which separated us from one another on a massive scale and left many feeling more isolated than ever, are still being studied.
Alleviating this epidemic of loneliness is difficult because what makes one person feel lonely might have no effect on someone else. We canโt rely entirely on easily observed indicators such as whether or not one lives alone, because loneliness is a subjective experience. One person might have a significant other and too many friends to count and yet feel lonely, while another person might live alone and have a few close contacts and yet feel very connected. The objective facts of a personโs life are not enough to explain why someone is lonely. Regardless of your race or class or gender, the feeling resides in the difference between the kind of social contact you want and the social contact you actually have.
It never hurtsโespecially if youโve been feeling lowโto take a minute to reflect on how your relationships are faring and what you wish could be different about them. If youโre the scheduling type, you could make it a regular thing; perhaps every year on New Yearโs Day or the morning of your birthday, take a few moments to draw up your current social universe, and consider what youโre receiving, what youโre giving, and where you would like to be in another year. You could keep your chart or relationships assessment in a special place, so you know where to look the next time you want to peek at it to see how things have changed.
If nothing else, doing this reminds us of whatโs most important. Repeatedly, when the participants in our study reached old age, they would make a point to say that what they treasured most were their relationships. Sterling Ainsley himself made that point. He loved his older sister deeplyโbut he lost touch with her. Some of his fondest memories were of his friendsโwhom he never contacted. There was nothing he cared more about than his childrenโwhom he rarely saw. From the outside it might look like he didnโt care. That was not the case. Sterling was quite emotional in his recounting of his most cherished relationships, and his reluctance to answer certain study questions was clearly connected to the pain that keeping his distance had caused him over the years. Sterling never sat down to really think about how he might conduct his relationships or what he might do to properly care for the people he loved most.
Sterlingโs life reminds us of the fragility of our connections, and it echoes the lessons of science: Relationships keep us happier and healthier throughout our life spans. We neglect our connections with others at our peril. Investing in our social fitness is possible each day, each week of our lives. Even small investments today in our relationships with others can create long-term ripples of well-being.
1968 changed my life in ways for which I am eternally grateful and from which I still learn. The previous year I had tuned in, turned on, and dropped out if you are old enough to catch my meaning. I was supporting myself by teaching skiing at a resort near Lake Tahoe. During this time I made friends with some climbers, who invited me to Yosemite. I showed up a few weeks later and dove headfirst into the climbing lifestyle. While living in Camp 4 and immersed in Yosemite climbing, I met some people who changed my life.
After a month of learning the basics, I left on an epic journey with Doug Tompkins, Yvon Chouinard, and Lito Tejada-Flores. We drove a van from California to Patagonia, picking up the ex-pat Brit Chris Jones in Peru. We made the third ascent of Fitz Roy in Argentina and Lito made two films, Fitz Roy and Mountain of Storms, about our adventures and interactions. It was one of the more significant climbs done in the world that year, and when I returned to Yosemite in the spring of 1969 I was a mini-celebrity despite my limited experience. It was a few years before I appreciated the true quality of my basic climbing instruction from some of the worldโs finest climbers and a few more years before I realized how the mindfulness of their climbing had affected the path of my life.
The word โmindfulnessโ was not common at the time, but mindfulness is as old as humanity, perhaps older, and mindfulness is as central to climbing as honesty is to integrity. Without it, things fall apart. The late Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh observed: โMindfulness practice is not an evasion or an escape. It means entering vigorously into life โ with the strength generated by the energy of mindfulness. Without this freedom and concentration, there is no happiness.โ
DOUG TOMPKINS
Doug Tompkins exemplified the mindfulness of joy and determination. His entire life was a celebration of climbing, skiing, kayaking, business, family, and friends. He was also doing his best to save Mother Earth from humanityโs overpopulation and destruction of Her finite environment. And Dougโs smile warmed, informed, and illuminated the path of mindful living for those fortunate enough to be in his presence. After co-founding The North Face, Doug left the business world in 1989. In the 1990s he bought and conserved more than two million acres of wilderness in Chile and Argentina. His goal was to save biodiversity on the largest scale possible. He passed away while kayaking in 2015.
LITO TEJADA-FLORES
Lito Tejada-Flores has expanded the limits of the possible in every activity and person he has touched. When we started the Fitz Roy trip Lito had a 16 mm Bolex motion picture camera and 200 pounds of Kodak color film. He had never operated a motion picture camera or loaded film into it, but the two award-winning works from that trip (Fitz Roy and Mountain of Storms) have stood the test of time. His climbing, skiing, kayaking, writing (including fine poetry), and cheerful, unique lifestyle have also helped expand the boundaries of the possible. Just before leaving for Fitz Roy, Lito was on the other side of the camera as a climber in Glen Dennyโs film El Capitan, which documents one of the earliest ascents of the Nose route in Yosemite. Shot in 1968 and 1969, El Capitan included a lapse in Litoโs mindfulness that came close to costing him his life.
YVON CHOUINARD
Yvon Chouinardโs childhood was shaped by the natural world of southern California. As a boy he trained falcons and learned to climb. This led him to Yosemite. The rest is history. He eventually took the mindfulness of the climbing realm into the business world. His company Patagonia is one of the most respected brands in the world. On the subject of mindfulness, Yvon has written, โIt was the most formative time of my life. When a 15-year-old has to trap a wild goshawk, stay up all night with her until the bird finally develops enough trust to fall asleep on his fist, and then train the proud bird using only positive reinforcement, well, the Zen master would have to ask, โJust who is getting trained here?โโ
CHRIS JONES
In 1965 Chris Jones, a recent college graduate, was living in London pursuing a traditional climb up the business ladder to financial stability and social status. He frequented Britainโs rock crags on weekends and spent three weeks each summer on the higher peaks and faces of Europe. He did not like what he saw in his future and was saved from it by following the directions of his heart. Chris quit his job, left England, and moved to Truckee, California where he climbed and worked menial jobs to survive. In 1967 he moved to Yosemite and Camp 4 where he found his calling. In the next few decades he put up hard routes throughout the continent, and his book Climbing in North America is considered a classic.
WARREN HARDING
There are way too many memorable climbers from the old days to make a complete list here, but in many ways, we were all circling the orbits of Warren Harding, Royal Robbins, and Chuck Pratt. They influenced all of us.
Warren Harding was the most beloved because his mindfulness was centered on his emotions. He climbed for the emotional ecstasy of the entire climb and the move at hand, and his will to persevere was as legendary as the routes he pioneered and his habit of drinking way too much.
ROYAL ROBBINS
Royal Robbinsโ approach to climbing was the opposite of Warren Hardingโs. His mindfulness was not centered in his emotions. Still, in other ways, the two men were very similar. They both had a powerful force of will that few could match. After Royal died in 2017 his daughter Tamara told Climbing Magazine, โMy father faced challenges in his climbing, his writing, his business, his role as a father and husband, and later in life in his debilitating illness. Through it all, he rose to the occasion, taking the challenges on with grace and humility. For that, heโs my hero.โ Tamara speaks for everyone who knew Royal, though on occasion he was also known to take on challenges with the hardness and hubris that conquers stone. Royal was not perfect but he was really, really good.
CHUCK PRATT
Chuck Pratt, in my opinion, exemplified mindfulness more than anyone. His attention to detail while climbing was a pleasure to watch and he took that into everything in life. His favorite activities were climbing, drinking, traveling, and taking photographs of women he knew.
I always wished he had spent more time writing, as his few efforts at the craft are superb; but he made it clear that he would rather climb than write about it. A remembrance I wrote after his death includes this: โBy the time I arrived in Yosemite in 1968 as a novice climber, Chuck was an established master of a big wall and hard technical rock climbing, regarded by cognoscenti with a respect verging on reverence. I watched him climb but did not know enough to realize what I was seeing. He free climbed like a magician, a man born to vertical stone, comfortable where others struggled.โ
Mindfulness was a quality evident in every Yosemite climber I knew during the 1960s and 1970s. I see the same power of mindfulness in later generations of climbers including Lynn Hill, Alex Honnold, Jim Reynolds, Beth Rodden, Tommy Caldwell, Chantel Astorga, and many others. What I see now is similar to what I first saw in 1968. The power of climbing as a practice of mindfulness.
Dick Dorworth is a climber, skier, and outdoor philosopher. He is the author of Night Driving and other works of climbing fiction and nonfiction. He currently resides in Boseman, Montana.
Main image: Yosemite climbers caught in a moment of mindfulness during a game of chess. Pictured here from left to right โ Royal Robbins, Lito Tejada-Flores, Krehe Ritter, and Dick McCracken. This photo, by professional photographer Paul Ryan, was taken sometime in the mid-1960s in Yosemite.
โOneonde No Odoriko,โ Karitate, Fukuejima, Nagasaki Prefecture. Chankoko and Oneonde are ancient nembutsu odori (dance festivals with prayers to Amida Buddha), held primarily in the city of Goto, in the Goto Islands.
The French photographer Charles Frรฉger has travelled the world in pursuit of people in costume. He has devoted projects to both imagined characters and real-life figuresโroad sweepers, water-polo players, practitioners of Mardi Gras rituals in New Orleans and pagan traditions in Europeโinterested, always, in how people โlook the part.โ In his latest series, โYOKAINOSHIMA,โ Frรฉger catalogues the monsters, or Yokai, of Japanese folklore. Made between 2013 and 2015, and collected in a book published this month by Thames & Hudson, the pictures in the project form a colorful encyclopedia that displays figures of Japanese custom strangely removed from the world of their origin.
Frรฉger has lined up monsters from all over the islands of Japan: those who dance in hope of a bountiful harvest; those who come down from the mountains, sword in hand, to encourage a productive new year; those who comfort the souls of children who have died in famines. Their masks and costumes belong to varying traditions and festivalsโfrom the Toshidon festival, which takes place on New Yearโs Eve, to the Paantu festival, an exorcism ritual. But, as in all of Frรฉgerโs projects, the figures here are placed in a single, tightly controlled environment. His images are level and carefully arranged, the Yokai seemingly positioned against instead of within their environments. Each figure is brightly lit so that shadows never threaten the details of his costume, whether itโs made of banana-tree fibre or of mud.
Although the figures Frรฉger photographs are drawn from real Japanese custom, he refers to โYOKAINOSHIMAโ (meaning โisland of the Yokaiโ) as an invention, a place inhabited by monsters โthat does not exist beyond the photographerโs imagination.โ Here, at some distance from the individual traditions, we can take time with Yokai masks, hides, staffs, and instruments on a purely visual level, and, in so doing, perhaps get closer to Frรฉgerโs idea of becoming something else.
Woody Woodburnโs worn wear is warmly woven into the web of his worldly wanderings. Ventura, California. Photo: Scott Soens
Imagine a teenager looking in the mirror while getting ready for prom and seeing an eyesore pimple. Thatโs the kind of devastation I felt the other day when I put on my favorite pullover and spotted a small hole in the front.
Understand, I purchased this wool olive-green Patagonia pullover close to two decades ago and have babied it for the latter half of that period, trying to extend its life as long as possible. โOlโ Greenโ has remained my casual tuxedo, my power suit for when confidence is needed, my good-luck charm and four-leaf clover. A quick scroll through photographs show Olโ Green making more appearances than any other piece of clothing I ownโfor author talks and book signings, both my own and other writersโ; birthday celebrations and holiday family gatherings; local happy hours with my very best friends; even in the hospital room to meet my newly born granddaughter.
Keep it in play, double play. Along with his favorite pullover, Woody also had his classic 1969 Olivetti Lettera 32 portable typewriter refurbished, and now it types like a charm. Photo: Scott Soens
Suddenly, nearly tragically, the new blemish promised to retire Olโ Green from marquee billing. Still, I did not want the small hole to get stretched and pulled and torn into a larger one. โA stitch in time saves nineโ after all, but alas, my skill with a needle and thread is limited to sewing a button back on a shirt. I asked my wife if she could fix it, but she declined, saying the emotional pressure was akin to a surgeon being asked to operate on a loved one.
Olโ Green, better than new. Photo: Scott Soens
So, I asked my dear Betsy Rossโlike friend Kathy if she could perform her handiwork on Olโ Green. Darned if her darning isnโt masterfulโher needlework is nearly invisible. Key word: nearly. The jacket is perfectly imperfect, I thought, pulling it on in front of the mirror. Which led me to think about the Shakers who are renowned for their furniture design and craftsmanship, yet deliberately introduced a mistake into their work to show that humans should not aspire to the perfection of God. Flawed, they believed, can be ideal.
A traditional Dinรฉ loom. Dinรฉ knowledge holder Elouise Wilson explained that the bottom of the loom represents Mother Earth, the top Father Sky. The north side is morning, the south side is night, and the hanging string is rain. Photo courtesy of Elouise Wilson
Thereโs the Dinรฉ tradition of purposely leaving a single thread hanging from the edges of their traditional handwoven blankets, which they call the spirit outlet. As Elouise Wilson, a Dinรฉ knowledge holder who graciously explained the tradition via video call, says, โOur things are not just things. Theyโre sacred, spiritual. There has to be an opening [in everything] because you cannot just trap yourself in a block.โ Dinรฉ weavers also leave the doors to their hogans (weaving rooms) open while they work.
โWe come in from the doorway, go all the way around the room and back out,โ Elouise says. โThe free spirit has to go all the way around and out. In a block or in a circle or in anything that connects back together, you have to have an opening. If you donโt make an opening, youโre closing up your mind, closing up everything, all the good.โ Photo courtesy of Elouise Wilson
โUrushi is the sap of the poison oak tree,โ Takuya Tsutsumi, a refiner of urushi, explains. โIt is a precious gift of nature that can only be collected from a mature tree, 10 to 15 years old. Only about one milk bottle can be extracted. Plant the tree, grow it and receive the sap. If this cycle is not broken, urushi will not be depleted.โ Photo courtesy of Takuya Tsutsumi
And in Japan, the traditional practice of kintsugiinvolves repairing broken ceramic goods with gold-colored glues and lacquer (urushi) to honor and extend the life of the object. โBreaking things is normal,โ says Takuya Tsutsumi, a refiner of urushi at the Tsutsumi Asakichi Urushi shop in Japan. โKintsugi originates in the 16th century, when a servant of emperor Toyotomi Hideyoshi dropped an important bowl during a tea ceremony. It broke into five pieces, and Toyotomi ordered it to be repaired with seams of gold. But today, many people have forgotten. It is a lovely feeling to rethink skill and technique and use our hands more.โ
Start your own repair story by learning simple tricks of the fix. Learn more.
Just as the practice of kintsugi makes the object even more beautiful for having been broken, so too is it a lovely feeling to know that the life of my beloved pullover has been extended thanks to the skilled hands of a dear friend.
From now on, instead of saving Olโ Green for red-letter days, I am going to embrace its repaired imperfection and wear it regularly. I not only plan to don Olโ Green when I hold my soon-to-be-born second granddaughter for the first time, but also when she spits up on me and when I play soccer with, paint with, and roll in the leaves with her big sister. When future holes appear, I may ask Kathy to perform her seamstress wizardry with kintsugi-inspired gold thread instead of perfectly matched olive. Olโ Green (and Gold) will be even more beautiful than ever.
A friend and I have a good back-and-forth with Sun Tzu quotes… and I today I had to laugh at the chaos life throws at a you, and all the opportunities within, just waiting. Most people are too comfy following what others tell them they should do and they’re missing opportunities to become who they want to be. I’m thankful for all the people I know who’ve helped me to realize that embracing what others fear makes you stronger, gives you more freedom, and reminds you that you are alive. So pack up your courage and ambition, and be ready for opportunity! #AlwaysBeReady#BeRelentless#BeYouby Becky Yackley
Some will cast you off your course for a moment. Others will take a lifetime to come back from. But if we all follow that deep whisper The way back isn’t through judgement. I remember one of my teachers a few years back saying, “Life is hard enough. Don’t make it worse.” And that’s what judgement does. It makes everything that’s already challenging 100x worse.โ The cost of procrastination is the life you couldโve lived โ โShe sat at the back and they said she was shy, She led from the front and they hated her pride, They asked her advice and then questioned her guidance, They branded her loud, then were shocked by her silence, When she shared no ambition they said it was sad, So she told them her dreams and they said she was mad, They told her they’d listen, then covered their ears, And gave her a hug while they laughed at her fears, And she listened to all of it thinking she should, Be the girl they told her to be best as she could, But one day she asked what was best for herself, Instead of trying to please everyone else, So she walked to the forest and stood with the trees, She heard the wind whisper and dance with the leaves, She spoke to the willow, the elm and the pine, And she told them what she’d been told time after time, She told them she felt she was never enough, She was either too little or far far too much, Too loud or too quiet, too fierce or too weak, Too wise or too foolish, too bold or too meek, Then she found a small clearing surrounded by firs, And she stopped…and she heard what the trees said to her, And she sat there for hours not wanting to leave, For the forest said nothing, it just let her breathe. ~ Becky Hemsley
While most common in the nineteenth century, the practice of โtelling the beesโ about significant life events endures, albeit in a different form, to the present day. The most pervasive and affecting depiction of this tradition can be found in the New England Quaker writer John Greenleaf Whittierโs 1858 poem โTelling the Bees.โ
An unnamed speaker returns to his loverโs abode after a yearโs absence. He describes his previous visit there in careful detail before noting that nothing had changed, not the house or the trees, save the family beehives. The speakerโs attention is drawn to these objects by the movements of a โchore-girl smallโ who sings a mournful tune as she drapes the hives with โshred of black.โ It is apparent from the actions of the chore-girl that something is very wrong here. This is a house in mourning, a realization that sends a wintry chill through the speaker, who then begins to listen intently to the girlโs lachrymose tune. He becomes aware that โshe was telling the bees of one / Gone on the journey we all must go!โ
His first thought is that his belovedโs grandfather has died, a conclusion that gives him comfort, knowing that he โsleeps / The fret and the pain of his age away.โ His thoughts are then interrupted by the sound of a dog whimpering. He looks up. There, in the doorway, is the old man, his head resting on his cane, very much alive. The chore-girl continues to sing to the bees, and now he can make out what she is telling them. She sings: โStay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence! / Mistress Mary is dead and gone!โ The poem ends with this communication to the bees, foregrounding their importance in a ritual conveying human grief.
Whittier himself was eager to locate the tradition of โtelling the beesโ within the folklore of rural New England. When he published the poem in the Atlantic in 1858 he included an introduction to the poem where he notes that this ritual that has โformerly prevailedโ was brought to America from โthe Old Country.โ That Whittier felt it necessary to include a note about this tradition indicates that, even in the mid-nineteen-century, the tradition of โtelling the beesโ was fading.
In an 1858 letter to fellow poet and Atlantic contributor Rose Terry Cooke, Whittier mentions that, following the advice of the Atlanticโs first editor, James Russell Lowell, he changed the title to โTelling the Beesโ and added a verse โfor the purpose of introducing this very expression.โ Whittierโs comments, and his introductory note, indicate a desire to preserve this particular folkloric ritual, to educate the unaware. The emphasis that Whittier places on this concept of delivering important information to the bees implies that there is a special relationship that exists between honeybees and humans that is essential to maintain.
This practice of โtelling the beesโ may have its origins in Celtic mythology where the presence of a bee after a death signified the soul leaving the body, but the tradition appears to have been most prominent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the U.S. and Western Europe. The ritual involves notifying honey bees of major events in the beekeeperโs life, such as a death or marriage.
While the traditions varied from country to country, โtelling the beesโ always involved notifying the insects of a death in the familyโso that the bees could share in the mourning. This generally entailed draping each hive with black crepe or some other โshred of black.โ It was required that the sad news be delivered to each hive individually, by knocking once and then verbally relaying the tale of sorrow.
Charles Fitzgerald Gambier Jenyns, a British Victorian apiarist and rector, in his A Book about Bees (1886) asserts that this message should be delivered to the hives at midnight. In other regions, like in Whittierโs New England, they simply hung crepe on the hive and then sang to the bees that, โSo-and-so is dead.โ Other variations include merely telling (rather than singing) or whispering the information. In some places they may say โLittle brownies, little brownies, your master (or mistress) is dead.โ
Tammy Horn, a literary scholar and apiarist, writes in Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation (2005) that in New Hampshire, the news of a death must not only be sung, but the verses must also rhyme. She provides a sample verse: โBees, bees, awake! / Your master is dead, / And another you must take.โ If the bees begin to buzz after this information has been delivered, it is seen as a good omen.
Horn also writes of another death custom associated with bees: that of โricking,โ a ritual that required the eldest son in the bereaved family to shift all of the hives to the right in order to signify that a change has occurred. Another take on this was to shift the hives so that their entrances faced the family home. This tended only to occur if the deceased was being waked in the home.
The consequences of not telling the bees could be dire. Another Victorian biologist, Margaret Warner Morley, in her book The Honey-Makers (1899), cites a case in Norfolk where a man purchased a hive of bees at an auction. When the man returned home with them, the bees appeared very sickly. It occurred to their new owner that they hadnโt been properly put into mourning after the death of their former owner. He decided to drape the hive with black cloth, and soon after he did, the bees regained their health. There are also tales of entire bee colonies dying if the family failed to notify them of a death.
Throughout the nineteenth-century and well into the twentieth, there were reports of rural people who firmly believed in this tradition of telling the bees. There is even a report of bees brought to a funeral, presumably after being told of the death. In 1956, the AP reported a strange occurrence at the funeral of John Zepka, a beekeeper from the Berkshire Hills. As the funeral procession reached the grave, the mourners discovered swarms of bees hanging placidly from the ceiling of the tent โand clinging to floral sprays. They did not annoy the mournersโjust remained immobile.โ According to a New York Times dispatch from Adams, MA, published on July 16, 1956: โNothing like it had ever been seen before.โ This curious case seemed to confirm the need to โtellโ the bees, further strengthening the conviction that there exists a mournful sympathy between bees and humans.
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The mourning practices of this area of New England were, as nineteenth-century folklorist Pamela McArthur Cole has commented, anachronistic even in 1894. These practices included the superstition that you must touch the corpse before burial, else the departed will reappear to the mourner in a dream. Cole observes that, by 1842, only a few individuals had actually witnessed the ritual of โtelling the bees.โ Although Whittierโs popular ballad would not be published for another sixteen years, the tradition, while not widely practiced, had clearly taken hold in the public imagination.
Unhappy events were not the only occasions that the bees were invited to participate in. The bees were in fact so integral to human rituals that Cole notes of a wedding: โThe little workers were to be informed of the event, and receive a bit of wedding cake.โ The hives were sometimes adorned with flowers to celebrate the proceedings.
Morley (the Victorian biologist) observes that, in Brittany, it was traditional to decorate the hives for wedding celebrations with scarlet cloth, while in Westphalia, Germany, the newlyweds must introduce themselves to the bees or else they will have an unlucky marriage. This homage paid to the bees during nuptials could be a way of compensating the creatures for the vast amounts of honey consumed during the celebrations.
Yet it is in mourning rather that in nuptial celebrations that the tradition of telling the bees lingers. โTelling the beesโ resonates in the poetry of twentieth-century confessional poet Sylvia Plathโs โbee poems,โ a poetic sequence in her collection, Ariel. Plath had direct experience with beekeeping: Her father was an entomologist who specialized in bees. Shortly before her suicide, Plath began to keep bees herself. In โThe Arrival of the Bee Boxโ (1962), she compares the โclean wood boxโ to a small coffin and refers to the beekeeping net as a โfuneral veil,โ thus drawing explicit connections between beekeeping, death, and mourning.
Today, with the bee crisis reaching alarming heights, we seem to have returned to a morbid intimacy with bees. In early June 2018, French beekeepers, many clad in traditional protective suits and veiled hats, held a symbolic funeral in central Paris to protest the use of pesticides that many see as being responsible for the death of thousands of honeybees. This problem is not unique to France, or even to Europe: In North America, colony collapse disorderโthe name given to the phenomenon where honeybees suddenly abandon their hiveโhas raised alarms about the environmental implications of diminishing honey bee populations.
While many nineteenth-century commentators on the tradition of โtelling the beesโ speculated that the custom would die out as more information was gained about beekeeping, the mock-funeral in France attests to its legacy.
In Paris, as beekeepers hovered over gravestone-like bee boxes and coffins containing beekeeper effigies, it was unclear whether the beekeepers were mourning for the bees or for the demise of their profession. Given that bees pollinate 70 of the 100 crops that feed 90% of the world, this mourning for the beesโand for the humans that tend to themโis fitting. It is more than likely that if the bee population becomes extinct, humankind will follow close behind. While the future of the honeybee remains uncertain, this staged funeral serves as a powerful reminder that our fate is inexorably linked to that of bees. If they were to depart, the journey โwe all must goโ will come sooner than we realize.
Eddie is a yoga teacher from NYC, currently pursuing a Masters in Science for Yoga Research at the Vivekananda Yoga University.
He runs a Hindu Temple in Soho, NYC where he also teaches Yoga, writes, and engages in scientific research on Yoga.
He lectures at medical, science, and Yoga conferences on the intersection between the spiritual disciplines of Yoga and their evidence based physiological efficacies, and has written protocols for scientific research on Yoga over the past decade.
While it is true that he met David Bowie backstage at a Madonna concert, he met me first, on the day I was born, and became his little sister.
You can find out more about Eddie, including his class schedule, on his website.
I hope you enjoy my brother’s piece on humming!!
PATTERNS
On a very fundamental level, our lives are made up of patterns. Some of them are ingrained in our nervous systems, such as the wake-and-sleep cycles, our digestive cycles, as well as our physiological patterns, e.g., how often we breathe, the speed of our heart rate, and the cycles of work and rest that our internal organs follow. We also have behavioral patterns: how we respond to stress or praise, how we perceive situations occurring in the world and respond or act accordingly.
Our patterns, including our physiological patterns, can be altered. They can be thrown off from a baseline of what we might identify as balance, and they can also be brought back into balance with a little bit of work. If we are tremendously thrown off, it can take work, but it can be done, especially with a bit of consistency, support, and resolve.
As you’ll see soon, humming is one way to restore ourselves to balance.
Children hum when they are happy and playing. Humming also keeps us company when we are alone. It is also a non-verbal signifier: we can convey a positive or negative, a non-committal, agreeable or non-agreeable feeling through a hum.
SIGHING
Over the past few decades, Iโve been fascinated by the different patterns that make up our respiratory and physiological systemsโparticularly our breath, which is the only pattern that we have a conscious control over.
When we change our breathing patterns, it can impact our body functions, emotions, and cognitive abilities. Take, for example, the sigh: We do that automatically throughout the day so the body can reinflate the tiny air sacs of the lungs that periodically collapse (itโs normal, donโt worry), but we also do it when we are feeling down, or when we need to release some stress.
The breath is therefore both an expression of our inner state and something that we can use to change our inner state. In the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, by Svฤtmฤrฤma, and other texts on yoga, the functions of the mind, and those which drive the breath, are considered one and the same. Breath and mind, mind and breath, are one in the same.
We all know this to be true because when we have someone in front of us who is visibly upset, or freaking outโthe first thing we tell them to do is breathe, by which we mean, slow down your breath, which has the effect of calming your body.
We learned this from the ancient Yogisโand while this might have seemed obvious to some, what was revelatory was the different practices they shared that heightened the inherent power of breath to lead to deep states of calm, clarity, and expanded awareness.
There is a fabulously complex substance created by our body, primarily in the paranasal sinuses, as well as the empty cavities of the head, just behind your nose, in the cheekbones, and forehead, which helps prepare the body to deal with hardship, called nitric oxide (NO).
It is a mild bronchodilator, which means it expands the breathing tubes (which can spasm in times of stress), an immunomodulator that increases or decreases inflammation levels in the body to fight off disease, as well as being an antifungal, antiviral, and antibacterial.
With humming we can say something without having to use words, and the person we are speaking to will get the idea.
Humming is a natural phenomenon that occurs spontaneously in human beings. We hum when we are thinking, or happy, or taste something delicious, or agreeing or disagreeing as a non-language-based mode of communication. We hum wordless melodies or along with our favorite songs.
Children hum when they are happy and playing. Humming also keeps us company when we are alone. It is also a non-verbal signifier: we can convey a positive or negative, a non-committal, agreeable or non-agreeable feeling through a hum. With humming we can say something without having to use words, and the person we are speaking to will get the idea.
Nature is not capricious, so if humans bear an innate capacity for doing something in a particular way, it must exist for a purpose. And not only does humming serve to help us express ourselves; it also has some amazing health benefits.
PRACTICE
I practice humming as a breathing practice almost every day.
1. Inhale comfortably through your nose, and as you exhale through your nose, allow yourself to hum as if youโre feeling really satisfied or happy.
2. Repeat once.
3. Is your sound high or low-pitched? If itโs low-pitched, make it a little higher. If you were very high-pitched, lower the tone slightly so you arenโt straining your hum.
Next, weโll make it a little more subtle and meditative.
4. Inhale high into the nasal cavity as though you are taking in a scent from across the room, any smell that you love, the first that comes to mind: the scent of a rose, or of brownies or bread baking in the oven, or perhaps the salty scent of the sea.
5. As you breathe in high into the nasal cavity, savor the imaginary (or real) smell, so that your breath lengthens. When you exhale, keep your awareness near your sense of smell.
6. Repeat a few times, then move on to the combination of these two practices.
Hereโs the final practice:
7. Breathe high into the nasal cavity, savoring your breath like your favorite song, and then โฆ
8. As you exhale, make a humming sound at whatever natural pitch comes out of your nose, and as you make the humming sound, keep your awareness focused near the sense of smell.
9. Repeat three to five times. When you feel youโve done enough, sit quietly and observe your state of mind, body, and nervous system.
If you feel even slightly calmer or centered after doing just a few humming breaths then thatโs awesome, youโre doing it right. The reason it works is due to a complex interplay of interactions the vibration of the sound is sending through your autonomic nervous system.
The ability to tune into the signals our body is sending is one of the key purposes of a spiritual, contemplative, or meditative discipline, but itโs also a basic function of being human. Many of us have become cut off from what we are feeling in our bodies and could use some help in getting back in touch with those feelingsโslowing down is a very important part of that process.
SLOWING DOWN
The humming practice is a very effective means of slowing ourselves down, which includes our minds, our breathโand with it our nervous systemโand our bodies. You can try this practice several times throughout the day. If you do a few rounds after you wake up in the morning it can help set you up before you start your day; a few rounds at night and it can help wind you down before you go to sleep.
There are no contraindications for it.
Just stop if you feel that you are getting tired or strained. Usually five to ten rounds are enough, but you can do up to 27.
For some reason this practice drives dogs nuts, but cats donโt seem to mind it.
Go figure.
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I hope you liked this piece written by my brother. Perhaps we’ll have more guest writers in the future…
And you? Will you try this humming practice, and do you hum on the regular?
I do. I didn’t even know it was helping my nervous system!
joie de vivre 
