learning

A Day in the Life (4)…

The famous Socratic adage rang clear and true every day, every year. Deep down he had never changed. He had remained faithful to his love and devoted to his dreams and child-like joy for approaching the world with open eyes and open arms.

Unlike his child-like joy his wise adult self succumbed to the child’s surprise. It succumbed to the strangest things. Slavery instead of freedom, whispers of trapped prisoners in dark cells instead of the glorious screams fresh air, fields, and sunshine. He ran on a treadmill instead of country paths. But all the while he fed the small child in the gilded cage inside his mind.

He was older now, if not wiser he was more aware. He realized that courage did not come at a high cost. It required honestly and nothing else. Acceptance was the real expense and he had paid. Always knowing, he had paid. Even after the debt was freed from his shoulders he had paid. Even after…

But now he was loosening the chains from the gilded cage and freeing the small curious child that had waited patiently in the darkness for his freedom.

If You can…

Temper yourself so that you don’t always search for the easiest, but rather the best.

Learn to rise above ignorance, short-sightedness, entitlement, and the acceptance that will inevitably surround you.

Push yourself to learn, to be better, not necessarily the best and not necessarily everything.

Choose wisely and have fun! Understand that happiness is fleeting and that to search for it is futile.

Keep your body and mind as fit as possible because they are truly the only things you have.

Be fair. Be honest. Be understanding but be stern and reasonable.

Don’t accept anything because it becomes acceptable. Don’t be lackadaisical with right and wrong.

Happy

Happiness is an ambiguous word like “love” or “intellect” and because of its vague nature it is often misunderstood. The irony is that we search for happiness without really knowing what it is or what it takes to be happy. Some parameters might help.

  1. Learn to differentiate from those things and people needed from those that are not and choose accordingly.
  2. Although happiness is often thought about as an emotional state, as such it will be fleeting and dependent; it will be insubstantial. Happiness must be a good in itself; it must be the end-goal.
  3. We must rid ourselves of the need to impress others. We must learn to disregard the unwarranted opinions of others, even of those we love.
  4. We must be curious and passionate about learning. we must accept the pitfalls and frustrations that come with actualizing knowledge.
  5. We must never fall prey to gadgets and toys constantly offered to us by consumerism and so-called culture. Happiness will not be found in a thing.
  6. We must do those things that make us better persons. And as we do those things we must learn that doing such sets us up to do be happy in a meaningful and substantial way.

Genius

Richard Feynman’s approach to learning is famous in some circles. What it amounts to is work. But work relies solely on the ability to focus. I recently ran across a useful definition for genius in Scott Young’s book, Ultra-Learning.

Genius: is the ability to focus intently over long periods of time.

It’s a paraphrase but the point is clear. We spend an inordinate amount of time speculating, practicing, and contriving ways to be more efficient, fast, better, in order to become better off financially. However, our ability to focus is slipping away.

The definition above puts many things into perspective. First, it reminds us that what we do is in most cases not important as how we do it. Secondly, it reminds that no matter what our goals or ambitions are they will always be determined by how we thing rather than what we think. Our greatest tool is our mind but we must be willing to use and perhaps nowadays, protect our minds.

Focus is a lifelong goal. Something that demands our time and is difficult. For those reason many will make excuses for their inability or unwillingness to do such “impractical” things. But for those of us who find value in learning we must remember:

A fool walks away in ignorance. A wise man simply walks away.

Philosophy Revisited

If there were two concepts that define a healthy, happy and high quality life for all of us those concepts would most likely be happiness and truth, both philosophically difficult but important enough to warrant the work it takes to achieve and understanding of them.

Aristotle’s definition is a great start, but really a test of happiness rather than a definition: happiness is a good in itself.  If we really want to be happy then we must look to understand what it is to be happy.  If your happiness is reliant upon someone or something else it is not truly happiness, but a lesser version of the happiness that we all so desire.  A high quality of happiness is a good in itself.

Truth is perhaps a bit more difficult, but I’ve come to a definition of it that through the years I’ve found is helpful.  [T]ruth is:

The quality of the relationship between the idea of a thing and the thing itself.

So, [T]ruth comes in degrees of quality.  Through the years I’ve claimed that philosophy is the most important human endeavor and have been looked at with incredulity.  But, given this definition of both happiness and [T]ruth and their importance to the quality of our lives philosophy is the only path by which we can understand the quality of those things that we deem most important to us.

The conclusion of this is simply that we must understand the quality of our relationships.  This has the funny and further inductive property of applying to all of our relationships, political and personal; an interesting consequent in itself.

A Paradise of One

Self-sufficiency is often defined by a determined belief that freedom is defined by individualism.  This is simply not true.  To be self-sufficient, others are necessary.  It does not matter that we view our societies as slowly evolving towards, even progressing towards, our dependency upon others in the modern world; this has always been the case.

Centuries ago people depended upon their neighbors.  The community was a support group for the self-sufficient.  Your neighbor could fix the plumbing and you were a good gardener; working together kept both you and the community progressing towards both happiness and efficiency.

And although our communities are being redefined and molded to include more and more, larger areas, and diverse cultures, this one simple principle still applies: we need each other.  This is one of the simple truths that we must come to realize or we perish.

There is no such thing as going it alone; there is no paradise of one.

Ideals

Hopefully we all have ideals: those beliefs, those ideas that are just out of reach; those things that motivate us to act.  Ideals are often defined by what we do when no one is looking; what we think when no one is around.  Some ideals are lofty and unattainable, and sometimes the bar is simply set too low.

There is a correlation between ideals and happiness, and yet often our ideals can make us miserable.  We do not live up to the ideals that we have set for ourselves.  Failing to live up to our own ideals is worse than failing to live up to others’ expectations.  In philosophy those with less experience  often pose the question: “What is the meaning of life?”  There are problems with this question, but one of the main issues is that it does not answer the question that we all really want to know.

Our ideals often lead us down a path, a rabbit hole.  We presume to know the consequences of our idealistic actions, but we are often wrong.  We find, with time, that our ideals do not lead us to the one thing that we all crave: happiness.  Our ideals, ironically enough, can easily lead us to the sense of failure and doom.  Not only can no one else live up to our ideals, but neither can we live up to our own.

A conversation had of late reminded me of that.  If our ideals are making us miserable it is perhaps because we are not asking the right question.  As Daniel Dennett pondered, cranes must be built from the ground up.  In the same way our ideals must be built upon what makes us happy.  If we start from a belief that we can be happy, then our ideals will follow.

So, what is the meaning of life?  There probably isn’t one.  However, How can we be happy?  That is  an ideal that is up to us.

Letting Go

Early in the morning, every morning, the sky presents a new show.  The lights, the trees, the snow, the clouds play out a story complete with characters.  Sitting in front of the newly founded fire in the wood burning stove, the coffee is hot and strong, and black as the night before.

Taking a sip, the sun begins its pageantry through the leafless trees.  Everyday begins this way: summer, fall, winter, and spring.  Now it is winter here on the homestead; and it is cold.  The fire begins warming up the room as the thoughts begin to fill my head.  The past taking up much of the past, and the present taking up much of the day, now they both make a place for the future.

Another sip of coffee, the sun continually changing the sky and the rooster crowing in the background, the beauty is astounding, and yet not enough.  It is quiet up here, still like silence on the sea; a car goes by, the same car as yesterday and the day before.

When silence is ubiquitous every sound counts.

Another sip, another thought as I wait for the second car that comes some minutes later.  All of this will be missed, and as the night lets go to the daylight, we will also let go of another day.

Boredom

Much of the work done when we care becomes tedious and it is at these times that we notice, that we begin to think that what we do does not matter.  That is a mistake.  All things, all jobs, all activities are tedious when we delve into them in depth.  That is the nature of being in depth, of understanding the nature of doing things.

The tediousness does not keep our little voice busy; it does not keep our egos at bay;  tediousness is boredom with a different name.  Only that when we do something indepth we cannot afford boredom.  That is the secret of success and perhaps even contentedness: to realize that all things are tedious at some level.  Tediousness is not the problem, it is our attitude towards it that is.

First, to be content we must be motivated by something other than profit.  We must be motivated by the virtue of tediousness, the acceptance of boredom.  In order to do this we do lose something: our ego, our un-admitted reliance upon what others think.  We all care, but perhaps simply about the wrong things.

To enjoy the boredom in our lives is a learned character trait.  We dismiss this this simple possibility at our own peril.

The Spirit of Work

Cup of coffee in hand and looking out over the fields, it is difficult to muster the motivation to give up the fire and go out to work.  But, as always, there is work.  This is not bad thing, it is just that the grey mornings and rainy weather have a tendency to dampen the spirit of working.

That spirit to work, that drive to do something, something meaningful defines who we are.  Work is neither a right or a bane.  Rather, it is that intentional act to give meaning.  We do not have a right to work, we must simply work in order to have rights.  Work is not a heavy load to bear with a dreary mind, work is what we do no matter our attitude towards it.

There is always work, and work can always wait.  But why?  Why make the meaning in our lives wait for sunny days or better dispositions?  For those who do not understand the spirit of work, we are too busy.  For those who misunderstand the spirit of work, we are not busy enough.

And so the coffee finished and a final log put on the fire, I don the overalls and you (perhaps) don a suit and we both work in the spirit of making meaning in our lives one minute at a time.