Random Morning Thoughts
My thanks to those of you who sent me philosophical questions (see previous post)! Please keep them coming. I’ll have some answers for you soon.
If you’d like to purchase any of my books, I’ll fulfill all new orders in the next couple of days. Please be aware that orders placed after Monday, May 12th will not ship until the week of May 26 due to travel.
As always, thank you for your interest and readership, and a very special thank-you to those of you who generously support my work as patrons and/or donors. You make these writings possible.
—Guy
The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment.
Though the evidence suggests that most people are caught up on this frustrating treadmill of rising expectations, many individuals have found ways to escape it. These are people who, regardless of their material conditions, have been able to improve the quality of their lives, who are satisfied, and who have a way of making those around them also a bit more happy.
Such individuals lead vigorous lives, are open to a variety of experiences, keep on learning until the day they die, and have strong ties and commitments to other people and to the environment in which they live. They enjoy whatever they do, even if tedious or difficult; they are hardly ever bored, and they can take in stride anything that comes their way.
—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Almost every day I find reason to feel grateful for being a short sleeper and an early riser. Most of my days, whether at home or out camping, begin with savoring fresh brewed coffee in the quiet pre-dawn hours, soaking in the darkness and peace, watching details of the world coming slowly into view, celestial lights dimming and disappearing, colors materializing, morphing, some fading, some intensifying, daytime life awakening.
Predictably, neighbors show up at various times. In some seasons, a herd of deer will make its way across the field toward the junipers on the ridgeline in the soft light before sunrise. I know they will return in the opposite direction in late afternoon. As the days grow longer and warmer, they will eventually depart for higher elevations and will not return until things begin to cool down again. The resident pair of ravens is here year-round, showing up to scout for food each morning, making several appearances throughout the day, frolicking and cawing, sometimes harassing a raptor. When the field becomes awash in sunlight, prairie dogs emerge, then scurry around throughout the day exchanging loud chirps.
As it is early spring now, passerines are starting to arrive. Bluebirds, sparrows, meadowlarks, phoebes, and starlings have been around for about a month already, and some are busily looking for nesting sites or collecting padding materials. Finches and mockingbirds are more recent arrivals. Small flocks of scarlet ibises traverse the sky a few times each day en route to nearby ponds. Hummingbirds should start arriving in the next couple of weeks.
Various raptors patrol the area regularly. Wintering bald eagles had already departed but golden eagles hover high above throughout the day. Various hawks and falcons perch and hover here and there. A harrier (usually just one) skims the field back and forth several times each day. Sometimes in the dim light on the edge of night I may catch the dark silhouette of a great horned owl or a barn owl floating silently above the field, sometimes perching for a short while on a juniper tree. Soon, nighthawks will arrive for the warm season, too, and dart through the air with incredible speed and agility in the late afternoon hours and into the early night.
It had rained a lot yesterday and overnight, enriching the air with the intoxicating scents of wet earth and sagebrush. Rather than be content with watching the world through glass, I wrapped myself in a thick jacket and sat outside with my coffee to inhale deeply the smells along with the silence.
In these early hours of the day, I am especially mindful to not allow mundane or cynical thoughts to arise in my mind and spoil my peace and reverence, or steal attention away from the light, the scents, and the animals.
More rain is the forecast for today. There were times when this would have been enough to prompt me to abandon prior plans (on the uncommon occasion that I had any) and to leave the house early, ready for a night or two of camping in case I decide to do so on a whim, to face the elements, prepared (sometimes hoping) to become stranded by inclement weather. Or voluntarily. But not today. Not in a while, in fact. I don’t know whether I’ve “become soft” in my elder years or whether at some point I had unwittingly crossed a threshold toward feeling I no longer have anything to prove to myself by it. (I stopped feeling I had to prove anything to others many years before that.) Knowing I might change my mind at any moment, perhaps more than once, I think I’ll stay in today. I feel like writing.
What should I write about? More philosophical musings about how best to live? or why our psychology prejudices us in many ways against such wisdom? or the beauty of Nature, or the nature of beauty? Perhaps about how life, science, and perceptions of beauty emerge from and are ruled by mathematics? All these subjects have been on my mind in recent days, but I concede with some regret that writing about them may come at the cost of diminishing or even extinguishing some readers’ interest, perhaps also the emotions inspired in me as I’m mindful of all the things I mentioned in the previous paragraphs. I’d really hate to lose them. Especially with the smells of the wet desert still heavy and sweet in the air and as the light has now become bright enough to see out to the mountain ranges on the horizon, where low white clouds hang below summits now adorned in fresh vernal snow, and as an early meadowlark has just burst into song. Another day, then. For now, putting my stream-of-consciousness to words seems more appropriate.
Every year, when spring arrives and winter comes to an end, the memory of the preceding months suddenly and viscerally feels to me like a long, surreal dream from which I had suddenly awakened. Not a bad dream entirely, yet marked with pervasive sadness, rumination, quiescence, austere beauty, and notably absent joyous forms of happiness. While not a stranger to euphoric moods such as those ensuing from joy, physical pleasure, even states of awe and rapture, none of these seem to me worthy of pursuing as life goals in themselves. To me, the most intense and life-affirming state of mind is not mere happiness but utter fascination.
In other writings I have extolled the virtues of flow—the state of mind ensuing from having attention consumed entirely by some activity, leaving none for such things as rumination, anxiety, anger, or guilt. When in a state of flow, paying no conscious attention to anything outside my immediate experience, I am liberated for a time from all sources of distress: worries regarding things that happened, or have not yet happened, or may perhaps happen in other times and places, even from physical pain.
Flow may arise from any activity, creative or tedious, from one’s professional pursuits or discretionary avocations, dutiful or playful, so long as one invests one’s attention entirely in this activity to the exclusion of all other preoccupations. Of all possible preconditions that may give rise to flow, however, to be utterly fascinated seems to me the most profoundly enjoyable and rewarding. I therefore am mindful to be (to the extent I have a say in the matter) in one of two states: either open and mindful as to notice something fascinating or being lost in fascination with such a thing when I find it. The thing may be anything: an object, a phenomenon, a work of art, an idea. Sometimes, not often, a person. Not necessarily a living one.
I consider it my greatest accomplishment to have attained—by effort and luck—the freedom to place myself in such states in most of my waking hours and on most days. I have always been perplexed by people who, having the means and opportunity to claim such freedoms, still chose the drudgery of routines they found tedious or meaningless. It always seemed odd to me to hear, upon asking why, such answers as “I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.” The thought always bubbled in my mind in response: I could live to be a thousand and fill every second with some interest and still feel like I did not have enough time for everything I wanted to do, learn, experience, contemplate, create.
Of the many reasons people may choose to stick with unfulfilling routines—to, as the poet Rumi put is, “stay in prison when the door is so wide open”—is not fear of change or the unknown (although these may certainly play a part), but because they come to associate certain attitudes and behaviors with their identity, and never stopping to wonder whether it truly is, or, if it once was, whether it still is. It is too common in our younger years to present ourselves to others as certain models of success we have been taught to pursue personally and professionally.
We signal to the world our successes in professions, titles, possessions, beliefs, and lifestyles we wish for them to associate with us. But then we continue to do so even as we mature and grow wiser and may aspire for different kinds of success. What will people think if we change course? If we “betray” our former identity and seemingly those who may consider us allies and colleagues in those forms of success? And so, we give up. When pressed, we may fall back to self-comforting rationalizations: “if I could start over, I would have done things differently, but I can’t.” No, we can’t start over. But in many cases, we can start anew. Like all choices, it will have consequences. But the same is true for all failures to choose.
“Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom,” wrote James Baldwin. He was not alone. Practically all existentialists likely would have agreed, and all in one way or another have made it their business to admonish the rest of us with infuriating snootiness, “and yet, here you are, free. What are you going to do about it?”
“To know how to free oneself is nothing,” wrote André Gide, “the arduous thing is to know what to do with one’s freedom.”
“Whatever it be, whether art or nature, that has inscribed in us this condition of living by reference to others, it does us much more harm than good,” wrote the self-obsessed Michel de Montaigne, “We defraud ourselves out of what is actually useful to us in order to make appearances conform to common opinion. We care less about the real truth of our inner selves than about how we are known to the public.”
“I have too much to lose,” you may think. But perhaps on occasion it may be useful also to think, “of all the things I have to lose, which is the least severe?” There may be little you can do about years you feel you’ve wasted, but what about the ones you haven’t yet?
There I go with the philosophy again. And psychology. That was not the plan. But I did write. That was the plan! I’ll call it close enough. It’s so beautiful outside. I’m going hiking. I might stay out for a night. Or two. Oh heck, I won’t have to decide for a few more hours at least. I’ll leave that one to you, future self.
