Last week I asked readers to answer the question, “Where are you right now in life, at this moment?” Including emails there are almost 200 responses so far. Read them here.

Each person seems to be right in the middle of a pretty dramatic story. Certain themes emerged. A lot of people said they were in a difficult or unsure position, not sure where to go from here. A lot of others seem to have just passed from one stage of life to a new, unfamiliar one — just graduated, just left a relationship, just suffered a tragedy.

It almost seems like there is a disproportionately high incidence of worry and uncertainty. But maybe it’s more normal than we think. These tough moments seem exceptional while they’re happening to us, as if we can’t wait to get back to regular life, to what we often imagine is normal.

Normal could be a mirage though. When you run into someone you know at a party or something, and they ask how you are, what you’re up to, you probably have a tendency to “normalize” the answer — “Oh I’m still working at [X company], playing racquetball once a week now, planning a trip to Hawaii. Things are good.” You’ll probably leave out any angst you feel about where your life actually is, who you actually are, where you think you might actually be headed, even though those thoughts are a big part of life for most people.

If you read all those people’s different accounts of where they actually are right there, drama and uncertainty are normal, if the word normal means anything.

Even though I think I know better, I’m often guilty of believing that I’m about to “round the corner” and finally hit the straightaway of my life. It’s some kind of neurosis we seem to have — that there is a point to be reached in life when nothing significant is unsettled. Well I guess there is, but it’s the day of your funeral. The human condition can be managed but it has no real cure. That can be fantastically liberating news if you’re ready to let go of the idea of finally rounding the corner one day.

There are, however, breakthroughs. Sometimes when they happen they feel like “The Answer,” but that euphoria wears off when you run into your next bout of problems. They can change the trajectory of your life, though, leaving a permanent difference in how you deal with things, and stopping you from ever suffering a particular kind of pain again. It’s like “leveling up” your quality-of-life skills.

Breakthroughs tend to come in the form of forehead slapping moments where you realize that you’ve been creating a problem for yourself your whole life, and you realize you don’t have to any more. Often it’s a simple insight you read or hear someone say.

After a major breakthrough, familiar problems can look different, and some no longer strike you as problems at all. You can bring your new perspective to bear on every chronic issue in your life, and maybe it will solve it, maybe not. But things will change.

I had one recently that explains a huge amount of seemingly unnecessary difficulty I’ve had with life. I think it will be relevant to some of you. 

Struggle, explained

First of all I want to make it clear I don’t blame anyone for what happened to me. Nobody tried to harm me.

As a kid I guess I demonstrated exceptional intelligence and talent, and I was always being commended for it. The problem is that innate talent and intelligence are not things anyone earns. It’s a roll of the dice.

The kid who gets used to being praised for things he has not earned begins to understand that his success is a condition of “the way things are.” He will be successful because he is who he is, not because he does what he does.

Reader and fellow blogger Brian Kung posted an article a few weeks ago identifying this situation as a relatively common phenomenon, and that there are well-known behavioral problems that result later in life for kids who are praised primarily for their talents.

As I read through the list of typical consequences, my stomach caved in. It was me. Maybe it’s you too.

Turns out thes kids begin to associate success and failure with innate, unchangeable personality traits, rather than behaviors that work and don’t work. They become extremely risk averse because they don’t want to fail at something and be rebranded from “smart” to “dumb.”

They become terrified of failure and rejection because they believe that incidences of failure or rejection are direct evidence that they are failures or rejects. They avoid challenges, because challenges always present an opportunity to “become” a failure.

They can’t handle criticism, because they perceive it as a challenge to who they are, not to the way they’re currently doing something.

They feel threatened by the success of others. They can’t handle losing and so they avoid competition.

After years of these kinds of feelings surrounding accomplishment and goals, they begin to feel the world is deterministic and that extra effort is no substitute for one’s intrinsic capability.

This explained everything. It explained why I never applied for scholarships, why I quit sports, why I never attempted a career I thought I would love, why I avoided dating, why I wore drab clothing, why used to be frightened even to order pizza in case I screwed it up and embarrassed myself.

They “may plateau early and reach less than their full potential.”

I am so glad I read that. Again, I can’t blame the adults in my life for the encouragement they gave me. None of us could have known the bizarre side-effects. The point is I have an insight now that can unravel something that has been weighing on me for my whole life, and that makes me really excited for the rest of it.

Insight is not enough

An insight by itself doesn’t change how your life goes though. It has to manifest itself as a change in behavior for life to change, and that doesn’t happen automatically. For me this amounts to reducing an insight to a mantra or aphorism that triggers you to act differently in those certain moments when you were about to make your usual mistake.

The revelation was this:

It’s not who you are, but what you do.

That’s what has been coming into my head whenever I notice I’m taking something personally. Success and failure speak only to the validity of actions, not personalities. This will make some people yawn — they’ve been reading something like it on inspirational posters and in fortune cookies forever. So have I, but I didn’t get what it meant.

Whenever I failed, I couldn’t help but interpret it as a consequence of who I was. Somehow, I believed all my successes were direct consequences of my innate qualities and not my day-to-day behavior, so my failures had to be, too. If I screwed something up, it couldn’t just be that I decided to do something that didn’t work very well, it had to be a personal fault.

I was never responsible for any of them, successes or failures, only the world at large could deliver either to me. The world at large decided to kick my ass.

If I didn’t get a job, it’s because I was inadequate, not because they just didn’t hear what they wanted to hear from me.

If I got rejected by a girl, it was because there was something wrong with me, and not because that time I chose an approach that didn’t intrigue her for whatever reason.

If I always lived in drab, boring apartments, it’s because I’m an uninteresting person, and not because I never made a point of making a home I wanted in a neighborhood I wanted to be in.

The difference between people who suffer from that kind of “personality determinism” is understanding that you can switch out your approach the next time, and that’s all the adjustment that’s ever necessary.

“Who you are” is always fine. You know you’ll get it right next time or the time after that because you can try something else. I always assumed that if I failed at something, I needed to be someone else in order to succeed.

What an unbelievably huge miscalculation! It’s what you do, not who you are! And I’d been doing wrong it my whole life. Maybe you haven’t, but if this does sound familiar to you, things could be about to change in a big way.

I had life backwards. I figured who I am determined what I was going to do, what I could do. Because of who I was, I couldn’t do X, so I always had to do Y. That’s who I was. Turns out that what I do can change at any time, and that has a direct effect in changing who I am. I never danced because I was never a “person who danced.” Now it’s obvious to me that as soon as I dance in spite of the person I think I am, I quickly become someone who dances. That’s how people who dance become people who dance. They dance.

In other words, it’s behavior that makes the personality, not the personality that makes the behavior, and that revelation is priceless to me.

This means the personality is extraordinarily malleable as long as you don’t forget than not only can you do what’s out of character, doing what’s out-of-character is the only way to grow.

Still, all of us gravitate towards that which is comfortable, which is tantamount to gravitating towards that which does not help you grow.

Anyway, things are blown wide open for me now. Long-neglected goals look fresh again. They’re going to happen. My personality can’t limit me any more, because I’m going to ignore it. I will do what’s out of character, I will surprise those who know me best. I will surprise myself.

Again, I know there are some people who never had this problem. They take on goals with confidence, knowing that who they are won’t limit them, and failure only means what they did wasn’t the thing that’s going to work.

Still, I know something has clicked here for some of you. I suspect that many, even most of us think our personalities really are pretty rigid blueprints and don’t allow for a lot of things we want. So I hope you do something out of character today and see what I mean.

***

Photo by Eole

I have no tattoos, but I’ve always loved them on other people. I just haven’t found anything yet that I’m sure I want on my skin forever. An English backpacker I knew, who had dozens of tattoos visible, told me over bubble tea that he loves his because each one reminds him of where he was in life when he got it.

Trying not to be rude, I asked him why he needed those reminders to be permanent features of his body.

His answer was that there was nothing more important to him than to never forget that his life used to be something really different than it is now, and that it was real. They remind him that right now is real, even though life will look really different to him when he looks at them a year later.

“If I’m going really let myself enjoy life and not stress I need to know at least that,” he said. “That I had a lot of lives already and still have heaps to go.” I didn’t quite understand and he seemed to sense that, but finally the right thought found him: “My tattoos make me remember I’m here.”

A year ago I asked a quick question of you and the response blew me away. I wanted to know where you are right now in life, what little “corner of time” you were in, and how you got there.

My corner right now looks so different than this time last year, including where I am physically, what’s on my mind, what’s on the horizon and what’s behind me.

It fascinates me that we’re all so complex and yet it’s so rare that we get someone’s own words about where they are in life right now. Everyone walking down the street has a complete setting and backstory for the very moment they’re in, and it’s always a total mystery to us. Except right now, if you’ll share with us.

So tell us, where are you right now? What is your corner of time like?

I’d love to hear updates from anyone who posted last time, and new storytellers too.

This is how you do it, as I put it last time:

Look away from the screen for a moment. Take a half-minute off from your blog-reading and look at the people and objects around you right at this instant. Get a good feel for the moment’s scenery and emotional tone, and when you’re done, read on.

(Do it now.)

So you’re here. First of all, where is “here” right now, physically, and how did you get to this moment in life? How does today feel for you?

What’s on your mind? What is huge for you right now? What keeps returning to your thoughts? Free association is fine.

Where does it feel like life is headed right now? What’s coming up? What seems to be exiting your life right now?

Even if you don’t normally comment, please do.

I’ll share mine in a bit.

***

Photo by danny hammontree

I hope your biggest revelation this year is that you don’t really know what you want.

We grow up thinking we know what we want, but we’re wrong. We all start with the wrong idea about it. Your whole life, society has told you what you want. Others know what they want you to want. Your family, your religious institutions, your politicians and your retailers know exactly what they want you to want. You’ll get everyone’s idea but your own, but these foreign ideas will accumulate, and in the absence of your own they get you chasing things.

And you’re not born knowing what you want, either. People assume they ought to know automatically what they want, which tends to be whatever the convention it is in your culture. For some that means marrying off to “a good provider”, for others it means achieving a senior managment position, for others it means a Personal Relationship With Jesus.

Then we become adults and, if we’re lucky, slowly learn that nobody can teach you what you want. You stumble upon it. But only if you do a lot of stumbling. Your parents didn’t know what you want, they figured it’s the same as what they wanted. The only ideas they can give you of what you ought to want are the wants they can identify with. Advertisers don’t know what you want, they fish for it. The only idea they can give you is what they hope you want, which is to buy something from them.

Your own idea appears only when you have the actual experience of what you want. You can’t know until you taste it. We all start with a false idea of what we want in life, inherited from others during childhood, before we gain any perspective about life. The false idea has to be given up and the real desires have to be discovered. They may make others uncomfortable. They may make you uncomfortable at first, because in inherited your comfort zone from others.

You will either recognize this and overcome it, or you will always pursue what other people want you to want, convinced it’s what you want. 

I am convinced that how happy a person becomes in life depends on how much time they spend learning what they want. Just to know what makes you glow inside is the work of a lifetime. Your real, heartfelt wants accumulate over the years, as you stumble into new experiences that electrify you.

How quickly that happens depends on how often you do what you’re not used to doing. That means travel hastens it, and habits stifle it. Doing scary and unfamiliar things hastens it, doing comfortable things stifles it. You can’t know what you want until you taste it. Do more tasting.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking what you want is just one thing. Each of our personalities is so intricate that we will resonate with thousands of categories of experiences, from the kind of clothes you feel best in, to the city you want to live in, to the person you want to grow old with, to the way you take your coffee. You may not know these preferences of yours yet, even if you assume you’ve known for thirty years. 

Your wants are always going to be more articulate than the ones you inherit from society. They are more specific. They make something tingle in your consciousness in a way that nobody else will understand. That’s why you can’t listen to anyone else when it comes to what you want in life.

I’m slowly learning what I want, and I only began to learn, really learn, once I discovered that I don’t already know what I want — that the things I’ve been chasing all this time have been other people’s wants.

A few things I know I want, even if nobody else wants me to want them:

I want more driving with the windows down and the radio off

I want fewer things from the dollar store in my house

I want more one-on-one coffees and lunches with friends

I want more walking

I want more savoring and less chugging

I want more metal possessions and fewer plastic ones

I want more plants

I want to wear clothes that make me want to stand up straighter

I want more time with a book in my hand and less time with a mouse in my hand

I want more talking and less thinking

I want less drink-nursing and more dancing

I want more greens and fewer starches

I want people to collect things I create

I want color co-ordination

I want things well-oiled and tuned up

I want baths with ambient music playing in the next room

I want to meet people with unconventional attitudes towards sex

I want to be a regular, with a usual, somewhere

I want to mingle with strangers, everywhere

I want to surprise people who know me

I want to change plans without fretting about it

I want to read one book at a time, instead of eight like I do now

I want to change the way you think about the important things

—-

What do you want? Tell me, but don’t answer too quickly.

***

 Photo by onesevenone

Last week sometime I was walking down a lively street in Queens with one of my favorite people, but I was barely there.

I had been stressing about a handful of looming problems, when an aggressive pigeon startled me from my funk. It jarred me lucid for just long enough to allow me to remember a peculiar, relevant fact about life:

Every problem I’ve ever had — every heart-twisting crisis, every fearsome responsibility, every breakdown of confidence or hope, everything I ever thought I couldn’t handle — was over. Except two or three things.

It’s always been like that. In my 31 years I’ve found myself periodically becoming consumed with some personal crisis surrounding my current job, relationship, financial situation or prospects. There have been a lot of those, and I was in the middle of one when the pigeon frightened me.

You know the kind. They take over the mind. Things seem to be flying off the rails, you feel sick with worry about how things will turn out, and you start to wish you were your cat, who only ever has to worry about whether he’d rather lay in the sun right now, or eat right now and sun himself later.

Some of these catastrophes dominated my mind for weeks of my life, some just made for an awful afternoon, a couple spoiled most of a few months.

I don’t know how many of these derailings there were exactly. Maybe a few hundred pretty bad ones, and a maybe thousand that only consumed me for a day or so. It’s a robust collection of awfulness, a lifetime’s-worth of catastrophes. If I’d documented them all with my Nikon the collection would make a dramatic photo album of personal tragedy. Award-winning. We all have one. 

All of them, at whatever age they happened, came with the feeling that my life is now seriously wounded. Each one contained enough suffering on its own to darken my vision of my whole life, to make me wish I was someone else.

And that afternoon as I was trying desperately to enjoy walking down the street, in a place I love with a person I love, virtually none of them were bothering me one bit.

My awful summer of fruitless job-searching had worked itself out years ago. My disastrous statistics exam in college, which had shaken me to pieces at the time, did not enter my mind. Being ditched by a girl X years ago, a moment in which life itself seemed to be collapsing, didn’t seem problematic.

What was consuming me that day were three active worries on a heap of thousands of dead ones — an acute financial issue, uncertainty about a particular relationship, and the prospect of going back to the workforce after a four-month hiatus.

Worries writhe in the head like mutant plants, splitting into other worries, obscuring the light, choking wisdom. They germinate into a wall of negative thoughts, an imagined landscape of dire scenarios that makes you think that’s what your life is from now on. Dire and unworkable.

It’s amazing how good we think we are at predicting the future when we’re predicting a gloomy one. From within a catastrophe, the easy times seem to be over, at least for now, maybe forever. The bigger ones seem to be so poised to kill you that you forget that not one of them ever has, and that at any given time all but a few of them are dead.

The human mind, most of the time, is pretty childish. I want this. I want to get away from that. I don’t want to lose this. I am afraid that will happen.

We have flashes of wisdom, of restraint and acceptance. But mostly our minds are piloting our lives with very simple instructions and beliefs. Get more of what you want, get less of what you don’t want. Stuff I want is good, stuff I don’t want is bad.

Life gives us lots of what we don’t want. Maybe more of it than it does the other category. Worrisome developments descend on our consciousness as emotions — big, unweildy thoughts that take over parts of our body as they settle in. They tighten us at the solar plexus, around the mouth, in the eyelids. They can flush the skin, raise the body temperature, pull up the stomach.

The body responds to fearful thoughts as if it’s expecting physical danger. Wisdom seems to leave the room at this point, like experienced bargoers do when the younger patrons are starting to get rowdy and sloppy. And so the reactive part of the mind is left alone to assess things, which it only ever does with panic and shouting. It runs down the hall pulling alarms. Things are real bad! Oh God! This should never have happened!

Wisdom comes back when only you stop freaking out. It just can’t get to work on a panicked mind. Catastrophes push wisdom away when they descend on your life. The catastrophe, after all, isn’t a situation, it’s an emotional phenomenon. The same situation can yield two completely different experiences, depending whether you roll with the catastrophe response or not.

I have a hard time realizing it while I’m in the middle of one, but I need every little catastrophe I’ve had. The present moment is always the sum of everything that happened before now. Without every one of those catastrophes, I couldn’t be here. Each one looked like doom at the time, yet so few have any pull on my mind right now.

When looked at on the scale of your whole life, the typical problem is a solved one. Unresolved catastrophes are a rare exception when you consider how many there have been and how few have any meaning today.

It’s always been that way — every single disaster has inevitably given up its emotional hold, except that thin leading edge consisting of the two or three things that are really bothering you right now. And they’ll give way to something else soon too.

So maybe my issues-du-jour shouldn’t bother me that much, knowing that it’s not me but my problems themselves that are condemned. They’re doomed to be left behind like all their dead brothers.

Reacting to dilemmas with a sense of doom is highly conditioned for a lot of us though, so the trick is to recognize when it’s happening and remember that catastrophes are emotional states, not the situations themselves. That feeling of hitting a what I see as a roadblock usually makes me do all the things that make it worse: get angry, blame others, wish for deus ex machina to save me.

What I really should be doing is making sure I keep up the pace. I should walk into an unfolding catastrophe with the same sense of positive expectation as when I walk into a pleasant development. I’ve been doing this with smaller dilemmas and it’s amazing how it works. The dilemma itself — the uncertainty, the possibility of pain or cost, the scenario itself — doesn’t disappear right away, but its emotional status as a “problem” often vaporizes the moment I decide I’m not going to fret about it.

Before someone says it, yes Churchill make an overly famous remark about carrying yourself through ugly times: “When you’re going through hell, keep going.” But it’s a little more than that. You have to keep going anyway, no matter how upset you get. The clock will make you do something eventually. What’s crucial, as you stroll through hell, is how you walk. Posture, speed, whether your eyes are on your shoes or on the horizon — this is what makes living disasters into dead ones fast.

On the other side of every catastrophe is the good part of life. This is a perpetual truth. Disasters all lead eventually to pleasures, new and wonderful people, and satisfied feelings about yourself, and so we might as well recognize that to walk into an unfolding catastrophe is ultimately the same as walking into the good times beyond it. Seizing up, wishing and blaming only swells and prolongs the emotional storm surrounding the situation, and the emotional part is the only reason problems are so painful.

You are always walking into the rest of life, no matter what you do, and after all those thousands of worry-sessions about making things go exactly right, it’s a person’s gait that determines his quality of life, not what he’s currently walking through.

Yes, every one of my disasters were necessary to get me here, and here is still a remarkably advantageous place, given all the world-ending disasters that have happened to me. I have the good things I have because of all those problems, not in spite of them. There are no real roadblocks except (maybe) death, and at any time the only thing to do is to go do the next thing.

That’s simple enough to understand, but it still leaves wide open the question of how we will walk into the rest of our lives — whether we’re tentative with our steps, or whether we refuse to step at all.

The doom emotion just doesn’t make sense. There is no real doom in everyday life. None of your catastrophes have ruined you. They have made you. If you’re like me, when you see things going wrong, you want to slow down the pace. You don’t want to move forward because you don’t want any more disaster.

But disasters are made of paper. You make a decision or two, then walk in to them like you would a harmless corner store, and soon they’re behind you, on the enormous pile of dead and harmless disasters that once had you worried sick.

The sky has fallen a thousand times already.

***

Photo by Aussiegal

It’s been a year since my most successful experiment. I had given up animal-derived foods to find out what it did for my health. After 30 years of indiscriminate eating, I finally gave the ethical issue surrounding animal food some honest thought, and ended up going vegan completely.

It’s been the best year of my life, and I’m convinced veganism is a large part of that. I won’t gush about the details but I’ll say that I felt altogether better physically and emotionally and I’m never going back to the way I used to live.

However, I don’t want to call myself a vegan any more. I’m giving up my V-card.

I’m still off meat and dairy and eggs, I still won’t buy wool or leather, I still won’t use animals for my entertainment, and I wish others would do the same. But my philosophy on it is quite different than it was a year ago and I don’t want to call myself the V-word. I’ll tell you why.

The first thing you notice when you go vegan is that everyone is mad, and they tell you you’re mad. You voluntarily enter the moral Twilight Zone. You discover a grotesque inconsistency between the beliefs people express and their behavior. You realize that we’re all highly irrational, and that it’s emotion that rules culture, and culture rules the behavior of individuals. No matter how much harm it causes, nothing we do needs to be justified as long as it’s popular enough.

Ask ten people on the street if they think it’s wrong to injure or kill animals for one’s amusement or pleasure, and nine or ten will say yes, of course. Chances are all ten of those people freely consume animal products, simply because they like to and they’re used to doing it.

A new vegan also encounters a bizarre compulsion in many otherwise friendly people to talk as loudly to you as possible about how delicious and juicy steak is. A certain contempt for you emerges seemingly from nowhere, and the most polite person can be overtaken by an urge to reiterate to you that they could never give up meat, because they just “love a good steak!”, presumably the way Michael Vick once loved a good dogfight.

For the recently converted, this inexplicable pseudo-hostility from everyday people can be alarming and it often triggers the kind of inadvertently sarcastic tone you saw in the last few paragraphs [Sorry! -D]. The effect is draining and alienating, and it’s hard not to feel a vague resentment for (or at least disappointment in) the ninety-nine percent of people who have no hesitation about exploiting animals if there is something enjoyable to be found in it. 

Tearing down the wall

Sometime last year I was listening to a vegan podcast in which the host announced that after months of examining her philosophies and liefstyle as a vegan activist, she realized she just couldn’t bring herself to dine with non-vegans anymore.

I understood where she was coming from, not that I’d ever do it. Imagine that everyone around you is indulging in something you think is horrible and unnecessary, and you’re supposed to be content to merely abstain from doing it yourself, and enjoy what you can about the surrounding social experience. Imagine realizing you’ll have to do this on a regular basis for the rest of your life. I can understand wanting no part of it.

But it didn’t seem right. Is this where veganism, as a personal commitment, inevitably leads — to a definite social divide between vegans and non-vegans? If so, the only hope for resolution is to nurture the vegan population to grow from the sub-one-per-cent level it is at now, to becoming as normal as being a non-smoker is today.

For most of the last year I felt that divide, not just between me and the omnivores, but the vegetarians too, who abstain from only one kind of animal exploitation. And not just the vegetarians, but the “vegans” who eat fish occasionally, or the ones who eat vegan but wear wool peacoats.

I even felt it between me and other vegans. I was an abolitionist, which basically means zero tolerance for any avoidable use of animals. But on the other side of the fence there were also welfarist vegans, who spent their time campaigning to improve conditions for food animals, encouraging vegetarianism or Meatless Mondays or other “partway” measures that make abolitionists cringe.

This alienation is real and I doubt there’s a single vegan (or vegetarian) reading this who doesn’t experience it. Right from the start it was always the hardest part of being vegan. It wasn’t the food cravings, it wasn’t the reduced clothing selection, it was the social weirdness that emerges when people learn you’re “one of those.”

In social situations — barbecues, parties and dinners out — people are generally polite and accepting, but they still can’t help but treat me as a special case with my special-case food. They probably can’t quite see me as a full participant. They make it clear that they have absolutely no desire to become a special case themselves, who isn’t “allowed” to do what normal people do. They are usually trying to be kind, but it still creates weirdness on both sides of the wall.

Now it’s clear to me that it’s the label that’s the problem. Not the labeling of food, or shoes, but of people. I think it creates animosity on both sides, it defines the wall itself, and that prevents that wall from moving much. It seems that generally, vegans love their label, and love to deny it to non-vegans. If you were to tell a group of vegans that you’re a vegan who enjoys a tiny cube of cheese once every leap year they’ll say, “Oh so you’re not vegan then.” And technically they’re right.

I think how we broach the issue with members of the omnivorous majority is extremely delicate, and most of the time it’s done badly. The word vegan has extremist connotations to most, and no matter how much the vegans think that’s undeserved, it is ultimately the omnivores who decide how quickly veganism is going to grow.

The end of us and them

So I tossed the label. I haven’t changed much about how I live, but I won’t call myself a vegan any more. It’s a handy label for classifying recipes, cookbooks, how certain products were made, but I won’t wear the badge any longer. Technically I don’t reach the bar anyway (as 99.5% of people don’t) because I ate two slices of pizza when I went to New York last month.

There are two main differences in how my new philosophy affects my behavior. They’ve made life so much easier on me, and have made me a better ambassador for the cause of moving away from using animal products.

1) I am careful not to harbor or express disgust for non-vegan food. When you learn about where meat, dairy and eggs come from, it’s hard not to feel disgust, even if you don’t change how you live in response. Most vegans feel some of this disgust whenever they look at those foods. Many won’t even acknowledge that it’s food.

I now see this disgust as a hindrance to the spread of animal-free living. The net effect of that disgust, more than anything, is that omnivores feel judged or dismissed by vegans, and begin to resent them. Staunch vegans might say “Who cares if they’re offended man, I’m doing what’s right.” — forgetting that souring people to veganism who might otherwise have become vegans is effectively erasing all the good they have ever done, and more.

A fellow blogger who calls himself Speciesist Vegan wrote a great piece here on why it’s so important for vegans to get over their disgust for non-vegan food, if they want veganism to grow.

2) I make the occasional exception when it comes to food and I don’t hide it from the omnivores in my life. There are three reasons I do this now. First, it demonstrates to them that I don’t think they’re disgusting or immoral, and that my philosophy on life is not categorically different than theirs. Second, by deliberately indulging in the odd act of exploitation, it eliminates the feeling of being permanently “outside” the world of normal people, by being someone who will die without ever eating ice cream again. And third, it shows them that how I live isn’t difficult, isn’t all or nothing, and is something they might actually do themselves.

I fully understand there are people who want absolutely nothing to do with having an animal food in their mouth again, and see no need to alleviate the social alienation by eating the odd non-vegan item, but I’m no longer one of them and I believe what I do does far more good than harm.

I also don’t go to great lengths to ensure a meal is vegan before I order it in a restaurant anymore. I will eat the free bread, with no investigation. Much more effective, I think, than nitpicking my way around every sprinkle of parmesan and every stick of egg-white-brushed complimentary bread, is to demonstrate that you can be a normal participant in everyday social activities while still avoiding animal products almost all the time.

A new vegan should realize relatively quickly that the vast majority of people alive today have zero interest in veganism and will never do it no matter what you say to them. The single notion of “no more ice cream, ever” is, I’m sure, an utter dealbreaker for the majority of people. Only a small proportion could potentially become strict vegans, and I think our energy is better invested in trying to get the larger proportion to experiment part-time with vegan options, rather than trying to get people to completely defect to the as-yet-tiny “other team.”

Looking at the endless internet banter whenever the issue comes up, what most vegans seem to forget is that for somebody to go vegan, it means an omnivore has to see veganism as something more appealing than what they already do. Yet they insist on driving home how uncompromising and all-or-nothing it must be. If you don’t believe me, go post “I avoid all animal products but honey and silk” on a vegan message board and look at the responses.

I indulged in this smug partisanship too. There is an abolitionist blog I once really enjoyed, even though it consisted almost entirely of ripping into celebrity vegans who go back to eating eggs occasionally.

I believe that in the current social climate there are probably twenty times more people out there who would potentially go 90% of the way to veganism, given the health, environmental and ethical incentives, than there are people who would ever arrive at a day when they declare they’ve had their last ever Ben & Jerry’s. There’s way more ground to be made — which represents many more animals to be spared — influencing the former group than the latter.

Between my abolitionist days and today, the difference in the volume of animal products I consume is pretty small. A few more of my dollars do go to paying people for exploting animals. These changes may represent the difference between say, 99.8% of my total buying power, and 99%. (Despite what some vegans may tell you, it is unlikely anybody is able to live 100% vegan, but you can get really close.)

But if my more relaxed, undogmatic lifestyle convinces even one person that they could live without animal products, even 50% of the time, I’ve already prevented more many times more harm than I’ve caused.

What I want is for the world to move away from using animals for their pleasure or convenience. I no longer believe that growing a small but intense group of zero-tolerance advocates is going to do that. It is easier and mathematically more effective to convince several times the people to go even just halfway.

But more importantly, it invites a culture where a large proportion of people have taken some action to reduce animal use, and have been exposed to the reasons why it might be a good idea. Right now, most people don’t honestly believe it’s possible to even have a delicious vegetarian meal that doesn’t seem like a compromise. I think encouraging them to cook their first enjoyable animal-free meal is more effective than posting abused pigs on their Facebook wall.

I think we’re better off easing the general population into no-pressure experimentation with animal-free food and clothing than we are insisting you’re either carrying the V-card, or you’re part of the problem.

Vegans, non-vegans, in-betweeners, what do you think?

###

Vegan Tikka Masala pic by miikkahoo

While I was driving home from my appointment I couldn’t help but feel nervous that I would forget to do something: peel the price tag off a thing I just bought in case somebody saw how much it cost.

I pulled onto a sidestreet and grabbed the plastic bag from the back seat. In it was a puck-sized container of a high-end hair paste. I scratched the little white sticker off. It was $35.00, and now only I knew.

Some paranoid financial conditioning somewhere in my head had me thinking it had been an extravagant purchase. But I thought about it for a minute and realized that no, for what it does for me, it’s some of the best value I’ll ever get for thirty-five bucks.

I’m 31 years old and it wasn’t until I started going to a well-reputed salon and buying 35-dollar hair paste that I finally began to really like my hair. This was a year ago. My mop had always been a point of self-consciousness for me. I liked myself, but never got along with my hair. It had evolved over the years, from crunchy gel spikes to a #2 buzz cut to a polite crop, but it was always a liability. I felt faintly uneasy about it, all the time. That problem spread itself across many thousands of days of my life, taking a little (sometimes a lot) of enjoyability from each of them.

Thinking back, I can’t even guess how many completely useless 35-dollar purchases I’ve made in my life — shirts I never wore, books I never read, drinks I didn’t need to drink, restaurant meals I could have made myself. When I consider what it really does for me, this hair paste is an astoundingly good investment. 

One container lasts about six months, and every day of those six months I feel good leaving the house, when it used to be normal to feel self conscious. That alone — the sensation of liking the way my head looks — is worth vastly more than the 15 cents a day it costs me. And that’s to say nothing of the endless secondary effects of that very inexpensive confidence: smoother socialization, better posture, more attention from women, a more easygoing mood, and all the tertiary effects that arise from those improvements, and so on.

Considering the real-world value it delivers to my life, this stupidly expensive hair paste is one of the most worthwhile purchases I’ve ever made.

All purchases are investments

This is a pile of most of the receipts from the last three months of 2011. It represents thousands of dollars of retail purchases. Each slip is a date-stamped record of how much money I decided to part with there and then, and what products and services I got in return. Thirty dollars here, fifty dollars there — and there are fistfuls.

I can look at most and quickly identify the things that are no longer contributing any value to my life: magazines I bought at the airport because they were slightly more appealing in the moment than reading the book I already had with me, desserts I bought with my groceries because I went shopping while hungry, unhealthy lunches I bought because I’d rather sleep twenty more minutes than make something to take to work, and dozens and dozens of elaborate espresso beverages that gave me nothing more than a ten-minute dopamine hit for five dollars a pop.

Each line item on those slips represent an investment. For each, I parted with money in the hopes that what I got in return would add something to my life, in the form of nourishment, ability, pleasure, or any other quality that improves my days. Some were good, lots were bad.

When it comes to our money, we tend to differentiate between consumer purchases, and investments as if they’re functionally different. But they work the same. As long as there has been wealth, people have tried to grow wealth by investing. We put value into something with the idea that it will return greater value to us over time.

When we’re talking about normal capital investments, getting a 10% return on investment is traditionally the “fantastic” benchmark. Putting 100 units of value into someting, and getting 110 back over a year is definitely a success.

That’s not the area where we have the most leverage over our finances though. When it comes to our consumer purchases we can do way better than getting an extra 10% worth of value out of our money.

All you can buy is quality of life

Making more cash with your cash is the idea of financial investments, but we’re talking gains of a few percent over what you already had.

By comparison, when it comes to consumer purchasing, the value of what you do trade a dollar for can vary tremendously. Fifty per cent. Two hundred per cent. Five thousand per cent. Between the different ways you can spend twenty bucks, there is a comparitavely astronomical range of possible return on investment.

And that’s because the value those purchases return isn’t monetary value, it’s experiences.

I have a twenty dollar bill. I can spend it on a few lattés, which adds to my life a only a few minutes of actual sipping pleasure, and maybe an hour of the mild feeling of security that comes with having another sip waiting for me in my hand.

That twenty dollars, spent that way, returns little else in terms of real value and also comes with some liabilities in the form of empty calories and coffee breath. The net value is less than zero. I have nothing to show for it an hour later except the needless calories in my body. Terrible investment.

I could have spent that same twenty dollars on two yoga classes, and gotten real, lasting value out of it — the type of value that builds more value indefinitely.

Just the classes themselves are reliable oases of calmness, and come with a rare sense of assuredness that I’m not wasting my time or being indulgent. But the bulk of the value comes in dividends in the days between and after the classes. I walk around with better posture. I’m slightly fitter and more inclined to do more exercise. Fewer moments that week are spent lost in thought. I get that mild post-exertion muscle soreness that I like so much. I get a persistent feeling of optimism that can be felt in many of the hours between and around the classes. Good investment!

We just have to remember that it’s not the money that has value. Money has no value except what you can trade it for. Most of the time we’re trading our money for things — objects such as cars, shoes and microwaves. Most of the rest of it is exchanged for services — bus rides, massages, carpet cleaning. But we purchase those goods and services only for the experiences they can lend us — or spare us.

Value amounts to positive experiences. Wealth is ultimately the capacity to create worthwhile experiences in life, and to prevent bad experiences. There’s nothing of value except experiences, and assets that can continue to supply good experiences. That’s all money is good for.

If you can stay conscious of what the real-life value of your purchase really is, in terms of the experience it offers, then you can find enormous leverage in what investments you make. That’s where we can really profit, if we recognize that wealth is not actually money, it’s capacity for quality of life.

What really pays off depends on the person, but you can get a huge amount of mileage out of simply stopping to look at what form of value you’re actually getting. All of it is going to amount to feelings anyway, but what feelings, and how long do they last, and are they going to create conditions that help to make more in the future?

There’s way more to be gained by finding leverage in the kinds of experiences you spend your money on than there is in trying to increase your income, or trying to maximize your financial return on investment.

You can shop around all day trying to make 3 per cent on your savings instead of 2.75, and then go eat a forgettable meal at Applebee’s just because it’s Friday, and obliterate a year’s worth of gains.

It’s the same mentality shared by the people who drive across town to the gas station that’s selling fuel a few cents cheaper. They don’t know where the value lies. They react to numbers.

Lessons from chocolate

For most of us middle-classers, or greatest financial leverage is not in what mutual funds we buy, but in how we gauge the real-life value of our consumer purchases. You can multiply what you get out of your discretionary income by asking: what form does this value come in, in terms of experiences? How long does it last? Will it leave me with some kind of value-producing asset, such as a skill or a tool?

The cost of something is not limited to the amount of money you forfeit for it. Purchases often come with negative total value. Yesterday while at the grocery store I had a lapse, and threw a large bar of dark chocolate into my basket.

I am eating it as I write this, and I’m excited for it to be gone so I don’t have to look at it any more. It’s really not that great. I don’t feel good right now.

The best part was the first two bites, which in terms of actual value only yields about fifteeen seconds of pretty modest pleasure. But it’s here, and I don’t really feel like putting it back in the fridge.

The moment when I was in the chocolate aisle deciding which flavor to grab — that was a moment where I weilded a great amount of leverage, if only over a small amount of money. All I need to make far better investments in future scenarios like it is to stay rational when I feel urges to buy chocolate. I need to realistically assess the value of what experiences I’m actually buying.

I won’t argue with what chocolate adds to your life — some people swear some of their finest moments come while experiencing chocolate, but I know for me it’s a really terrible investment.

The net value is less than zero. I’m a little bit fatter, all its positive value is gone and I’m left with the liabilities. I would have gotten more net value out of throwing a two-dollar coin in the river than I did by eating a giant mid-quality chocolate bar by myself.

Don’t wait until you’re in front of the chocolate to make these assesments. Look through some receipts. What was the real-life value there? What form is it in? What remains of it? Would you rather give that value back, and have the cash in hand again? What liabilities does it come with?

You might think you already do this kind of evaluation, but it’s unlikely. We buy things for all kinds of reasons, and it’s usually quite unconscious. You put something on the grocery list because you’re used to having it and you’re out of it. Then you buy it because it’s on the list. The cycle renews itself without your ever considering what you’re actually adding to your life for that money.

Right beside my laptop, there are several fistfuls of receipts. A single wad of those receipts, which we tend to think of as near-garbage, probably represents the expenditure of a similarly-sized wad of cash, in twenties and fifties.

All that money is gone, and I hope my life still contains something to show for it. But most of it is probably gone without a trace. That’s good news though, because I know the next wad will leave a lot more behind — if I remember that all we can ever really buy is quality of life.

***

Photo by Nomadic Lass

Just a quick shoutout to a certain demographic. If you create as a habit, hobby or job — writing, visual arts, music, design, whatever — I think this will mean something to you. If you once did but don’t any more then it may be even more relevant.

I don’t remember where I first saw it but it’s been making the rounds in the social media channels:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

-Ira Glass

Your taste is why your work disappoints you.

I guess this is a fact of life for creatives and we ought to be relieved by all it explains. It’s why it can be so hard to put your ass in the chair and make something — it’s painful to make something that doesn’t meet your standards, and those of us who are new to our respective arts don’t often hit the marks we set for ourselves.

It also explains how some really untalented writers and musicians and are more confident and less inhibited about self-promotion than the good ones. Low standards, met easily. If you’re self-conscious about showing your work, good, there’s a reason for that. Bad artists are bad because they don’t know what good looks like. 

It explains why people quit even when at one time they really saw how good they could be.

The taste-ability gap appears to be an immutable law of craft itself, and those that partake will suffer from it in some form almost every time they sit down, at least as long as they’re unaware of it. In hindsight it’s obvious, but it never occured to me until I ran into this quote somewhere a few months ago.

As big a revelation as it was, I forget it all the time. I forget that most of the self-torture and that is known to come with creative work inevitably stems from that gulf between one’s taste and one’s artistic chops, and it has every reason to be there. Regular feelings of “I suck at this” are not a flaw, not a personal tragedy, not a sign of anything except that you know what’s good and what’s not.

So it’s another one of those points of natural friction in human life where our best choice is to defy our natural inclination as a matter of habit, and create even though it hurts or scares us. “When’s the best time to practice?” a student asks the Dalai Lama. “When you don’t feel like it,” he says.

It’s not the most appealing revelation, but it simplifies things to know that bad work is a) normal and b) necessary. The volume of work Glass refers to is not going to change. It just has to be gotten into and gotten through, and most of it won’t be very good. This doesn’t make a natural dovetail with my normal strategy of avoiding everything that makes me feel bad. Not sure how it’s affecting your creative life, but I feel confident that my misery has company.

Hypothetically, then, the healthiest mindset to approach work would be to do two things. One, to welcome bad work when it does come — to love it as we might love rotten children just because they’re our own, and without regard to how others revile them. And two, to sit down and make something more often, because we understand that making well-intentioned trash moves us just as quickly up the mountain as do strokes of brilliance.

Glass’s gap reminds me of an old metaphor about writing. It’s like panning for gold. Just by getting words down, you are panning for gold, and most of it will be sand. But there are gold flecks in there. You can’t help but get better at it, and soon won’t have to go through as much sand. But sand is normal. It shouldn’t worry you, shouldn’t irritate you too much, and definitely should not convince you you’re looking in the wrong place.

Today is Raptitude’s third birthday. I feel like I’ve always done this, writing, but it’s really quite new to me. Still toddler-aged. And that’s a relief.

All I’m trying to say here, to my fellow creatives, is that it will take a while before we’re good enough for ourselves, but we don’t get closer without making more work.

And so sometimes creative pursuits feel lonely. But you’re not alone; we all share it. We all bang our heads on the same wall. Nobody will understand quite why we do it. They won’t be interested in our “sand”, and they probably won’t know sand is a necessary part of the process.

But we should know it.

***

Photo by PhotonQ

Almost every day ends the same, with me lying unconsious on top of my favorite possession — my pillowtop queen.

There are exceptions, such as when I travel, where I end up unconscious on some other horizontal surface, but it’s as sure a rule as any that no matter what kinds of wild or unpredictable events happen during the day, the conclusion is quite predictable: me, horizontal and comatose.

I know it’s the same for you, and everyone else too. Just about everything else between us is different though. There are seven billion people in the middle of their lives at any given moment, whose days differ from each other in almost every respect. The events and thoughts that fill a normal day are so distinct to each individual that it’s probably impossible for any one person to imagine quite how it feels to live a day in the life of another.

The early-rising Chinese fishmongress couldn’t possibly guess what happens between dawn and dusk in the life of a Seattle studio guitarist, or vice-versa. But neither would even a close friend of yours have anything but the most basic idea of what a normal day is like in your shoes. The details of your job, your clothes-choosing process, the emotional feel of your morning routine, the recurring memories that comfort you or bother you — all of it is familiar to you and utterly foreign to everyone except you.

The waking part of each of our lives is necessarily different from anyone else’s, particularly given that most of our experience consists of what is completely private: our thoughts and the feelings that come with them. Yet with few exceptions, each of us will end the day by sinking willingly into some kind of surface, and letting consciousness finally run out of gas. 

Wherever your days end, once you find that resting place, the unique goings-on of that day begin to fade away and you slip into a well-practiced routine. You get comfortable almost automatically, flipping your pillow or tucking your feet under the blanket, or whatever you do, and putting your hands where you like your hands to be. Then the background noise settles in.

After those last few actions of the day, you become like everyone else, everywhere, once they’ve parked themselves for the night. No matter what the day held, talking is over, doing is over, you’re horizontal and still, and ready to resign yourself to unconsciousness.

Some thoughts probably appear. They could be lazy ones or fierce ones. But however long it takes for the mind to let you go, by that moment unconsciousness is already descending. It may be a minute or an hour, but you’ll never see the exact moment it arrives. You’ll just find yourself on the other side of it.

My pillowtop is four years old now, beginning to bow in the middle a little bit, but it’s still superior to almost all of the other surfaces I’ve experienced in recent memory — camping pads, musty hide-a-beds, frumpy floor-beds with no boxspring, creaky hostel bunks, couches, stiff hotel beds, and the odd carpet. Even after a relatively bad day, or on the night before something I’m worried about, that bed is still pleasing enough that I can’t help but feel grateful to be exactly there, of all places. It’s interesting that the events of waking life can make a given day feel like it’s going so unswervingly wrong, yet they always end the same.

Sleeping together

The first outbreath after I’ve stopped tossing into position serves as a trigger for a little ritual now. My mind starts to wander to other people’s last moments of the day. I think about who’s going to bed in the city around me. The girl who rang my groceries through and said “mmmm” when she got to the kiwis. The guy in the jacked up truck that was tailgating me on the bridge today. I wonder how they feel as they’re going to sleep, and what surfaces they end up on. Was it a good day? How does tomorrow look? Is it a worrisome sleep or a grateful one?

I never know. But I don’t often get to sleep without feeling at least a passing sense of solidarity with everyone who is also, at that time, giving up on consciousness for the day. Sometimes it’s a really powerful sense. We sleep together.

It’s an interesting quirk of Mother Nature — that she insists on taking us down to the ground like that, every day, no matter who we are. For all of us, the act of leaving consciousness is the same, it’s just our settings and situations — which bookend that unconsciousness — where we differ.

Some people are surrendering their consciousness in sleeping bags, straw beds, or hammocks, and maybe they’re just as comfortable as I am. Some of them are in fancy hotels, or crummy motels, or bamboo huts with termites audibly eating them. Some are on prison cots. Millions, actually.

There are people going to bed alone, wishing they weren’t. There are people falling asleep beside their true loves. There are people falling asleep next to someone they don’t love any more. There are people falling asleep on benches, in abandonded subway stations, or on piles of discarded clothes in a stand of trees in the park. There’s probably even someone out there falling asleep in a coffin.

No matter the setting, all these people are doing the same thing: just closing their eyes and letting themselves disappear.

There are people leaving their waking hours in hospital beds, in rowdy dorms or hostels, in vast gymnasiums turned into emergency shelters. There are people sleeping on their office floors in sleeping bags, which they roll up and hide before anyone else gets in. There are people going to sleep in shipping containers with dozens of others, hoping the good life is about to begin when they arrive in Vancouver.

Some are hearing rain while they fade into sleep, some are hearing sirens, some are hearing arguing next door. Some are hearing their neighbor peeing. Some are hearing crickets. Some are hearing rats.

Every single face you’ve seen today will find a spot somewhere, to call the day done and let sleep take them. No matter how your day goes today, I hope that when today’s talking and thinking and hoping and working is over with, your final place is a warm, dry one.

***

Photo by procsilas

All self-images are false. None of them match you. Any image that you’ve ever had of yourself, mental or visual, has been wrong.

That’s because an image is not a person. An image is an image, made of something totally different and vastly simpler than what people are made of. Images are made of things like pixels, or light, or even just thoughts, or all three. People are not.

At best images are crude symbols of real people, and they represent the real thing about as well as an ink-dot on a map can represent Los Angeles. Yet somehow we confuse our self-images with ourselves all the time.

Here’s an unexciting photo I took of my image, in the bathroom just now. 

So where am I in this picture?

Your first impulse might be to say the figure in the mirror, pretending to act cool and disinterested. But clearly, from that perspective, I can’t be on the other side of the mirror, four feet into the wall, because that would put me in my neighbor’s apartment.

I have to be on the near side of the wall, certainly. Nearer than every one of those bathroom details. Remember, I am the one taking the picture. Closer than the mirror, closer than the shower curtain. It has to be zero distance, really. So you actually can’t see me in the picture, just as I couldn’t see me as I took it.

In fact, I am always the viewer, the picture-taker. Every moment I’ve ever lived that’s been true. So I always have to be on the near side of every object I see, closer than the closest speck of dust that floats in front of me. I’m always zero distance from myself! You are always zero distance from yourself.

Images, on the other hand, are always at a distance — either physically in the case of visual images, or chronologically in the case of mental images.

Life is lived from zero distance

The humble question of “What is the self?” can lead to long, masturbatory discourses, and I’ll try to steer clear of that here. But it’s a good question with real-life implications and I think we have a mistaken idea of the answer.

We tend to think of ourselves as our bodies, part of which is the brain and all the things it does. That, plus the story of ourselves: how we got here, what we are good at and not good at, what we own and don’t own, and how we feel about the apparent state of our life stories.

All those details change constantly though, and eventually give way to something else. Our bodies certainly do that. They grow and shrink, shed and regenerate, rot, dry up and blow away. Your body is only the same “thing” throughout life on the conceptual level.

So the figure I see in the mirror, and all the peripheral thoughts that it triggers — how I feel about that guy in the mirror, what I like about him and don’t like about him, what I expect will happen to him, what I wish had happened to him earlier — all that changes. It can be different at any given time. The impression I have of that image today is different to some degree from any one of the other thousands of impressions I’ve gotten from looking at him over the last thirty years. I find a different self-image every time I look for one, and that means none can be trusted.

The only thing that hasn’t changed is whatever is looking at that figure in the mirror.

So what’s doing the looking? The logical part of my mind — the bespectacled accountant-type who crunches the numbers tirelessly but never ponders their significance — figures the image in the mirror is the same thing that’s on this side. It thinks an object of similar proportions must be what’s doing the looking. Of course, that object has many wonderful qualities that aren’t visible from the image, but it is still just a thing, an animated stick of meat with a nice smile and big hopes, just like on the other side of the glass.

The other part of my mind, the intuitive part — the part that knows by direct experience, rather than concludes by pattern and association — understands that the figure in the mirror isn’t me. It’s an isometric mockup, an unreasonable facsimile, dumbed down a thousand-fold from my direct experience of myself as the observer of that moment.

If I suspend preconceptions about who I’m supposed to be, in that moment (and in every moment) I appear to be a clear, boundless frame that contains not just that whole figure, but the mirror and everything else it contains, along with the good half-bathroom that contains the mirror, not to mention its complement of sounds and reverberations, its unique, uh, scents, and some Radiohead playing from somewhere. And thoughts. Invisible, fleeting, chaotic, but definitely there and definitely real.

No matter what the scene, I’m what’s watching it. That’s the sole common thread in every experience I’ve ever had: that I’m experiencing it. Nothing else has stayed the same. Everything else is content. All that passing stuff is the show, I’m the stage.

None of the details are you

The beholder of all this stuff, which must be me, of course has no real details of its own. It’s empty. Details pass through it and leave it clean. Even the lanky, occasionally smelly mass that I think of as my body still can only be described as changing scenery. It’s changed over the years and I have reason to believe it will break down and begin to fall apart one day, all while I look on.

Thoughts, too, come and go, and I can watch them do that. So they can’t be me either, or I would have forgotten myself out of existence by now.

This is what it means to really experience yourself in the first person. You recognize that none of the details are you. Your body isn’t you. You can call it you, or even just yours, but you’re only going to be able to make an arbitrary claim that you wish were true — ultimately, it’s unenforceable. The universe won’t really respect your claim. It will take your body and what you believe are your possessions from you one day anyway, no matter how attached you are.

When you cut off your fingernail (perhaps to be found later on a hotel bedspread by horrified subsequent guests) is it still you? Or is it a part of the outside world? Wasn’t it always?

I know that the real me is the one who’s looking at that guy in the mirror with the Beatles shirt. The one for whom the counter is not reversed, the one who can look down and see Abbey Road upside down rather than backwards, legs pointing toward the top of the frame rather than the bottom, as they do in the mirror and (allegedly) in the eyes of others.

Where am I in this picture? Am I in that dull 4×6 print? Am I the crooken horizon of cotton garments with two black sock-obelisks rising in the distance? The hand? The Reagan-era floor tiles?

No matter what impressions I get of myself from other people, photos, and mirrors, I’m always the one doing the looking.

The sky is blue, but you knew that already

Like all talk on this particular topic, whether it’s in religious language or not, it will confuse most, mislead some, and click a light bulb for a few.

It’s hard to talk about this idea of experiential knowledge, or “intuitive knowledge,” because we tend to think of intuition as some kind of hunch — an emotional lean towards one of many possiblities. But that’s not it at all. Intuition is direct, subjective knowledge of an aspect of the present moment — knowledge by direct contact with the experience.

Knowing you plan to be awake at 9am tomorrow is conceptual knowledge, thinking-based knowledge. Recognizing that you are awake right now is intuitive knowledge.

Intuitive knowledge is experience, and conceptual knowledge is thinking that has you convinced that something is true outside your present experience. Both are useful, both can be fairly called knowledge, but they’re completely different.

Picture this: someone is dying to convince you that the sky is blue, and he’s got all kinds of proof, in charts, accounts from others, data on wavelengths of light and solar refraction, and swears he has no personal bias in the matter. He knows it’s true because the data could allow for no other possible conclusion.

But he’s never been outside.

You are outside, and the truth is plain to you, and it makes the idea of proof absurd.

Over and over again, in almost every spiritual path or philosophical venture into the matter, at the end of the day the “self” is found to be simply the awareness of experience itself. And that awareness itself appears to be nothing, with stuff happening in that nothing. You can look and look and look for some thing at the centre of your experience, some it, some indivisible billiard ball of an object that things are happening to, but you’ll never find it.

You can agree or disagree with that, and it makes no difference. Belief or disbelief in that assertion amount to the same thing, because it’s applicable only to your own first-person experience, so there’s no communicable evidence. You can’t learn if it’s true that way. Yet it’s absolutely possible to experience yourself that way — as consciousness, as capacity for detail.

Nonduality, being “one” with the universe, being God, emptiness, and all other seeming mumbo-jumbo talked up by hippy-dippy types and celebrity gurus — for all their fluffy pseudo-spiritual connotations, these phrases are perfectly reasonable attempts to describe the implications of what it’s like to realize who you really are. It’s accessible, entirely non-denominational, and entirely un-super-natural, but can’t be gotten at with logic, rhetoric or science. Those who depend on those tools alone will miss it.

I will recommend the works of the great Douglas Harding until the day I die, because I’ve never found anyone who’s better at using the english language to direct people to have that experience. Read On Having No Head. Or poke around here.

And I don’t mean to characterize it as something exclusive or even particularly spectacular. Just something refreshingly sensible, with astounding implications. Like Robert Beatty always says, “People always expect it to be like a great Tadaaaa! Like Vegas or something.”

Whether you’ve experienced yourself as emptiness (or whatever), or you haven’t but want to, or you think it’s all a bunch of bullshit, “All self-images are false” is a worthy mantra to remember. It supplies a dose of sense and perspective whenever you feel anxiety over one or more of the details of whichever self-image you happen to be preoccupied with in a given moment.

Whatever it is about your image that dissatisfies you is a transient detail within your experience, and you can come to terms with it much the same way as you come to terms with transient details of the outside world — bad weather, political strife, high gas prices. They’re the same thing, and to know that alone is a relief.

If you adopt that mantra, you’ll gradually begin to see the image in the mirror less as yourself, and more like a living scuplture that you’re pretty fond of. You’ll always want to trim it here and there, both its physical appearance and the story surrounding it. You’ll feel good when it looks good or when you add something to it, feel bad when it looks bad or when part of it breaks or withers, and it will never look or feel quite right for very long.

But the drive for perfecting it will gradually a) lose its feeling of supreme importance, and b) reveal itself as impossible anyway.

Once you really see it, the corollary to “All self-images are false” is inevitable, and now I can’t brush my teeth without thinking of it:

You are always on this side of the mirror.

***

All photos by David Cain. Original photo of David with brown hat taken by Bonky Rogers.

I’m back home now, and I’m feeling something I haven’t felt since the last time I returned from a big trip.

Friday night I came in the door, dropped my bag, sat on the couch out of habit. Instead of the relief I had looked forward to from the plane, I felt an intense uneasiness. My apartment is clean, spacious, utilitarian and unlike New York City in every way, and to this moment it makes me queasy.

It’s no wonder, either, that feeling so comfortable in the crowds of Manhattan (“like a warm bath,” I kept saying) I feel quite out of place in a city that is so starkly different, even if I do call it home.

What is a surprise, though, is that I’d been enduring some measure of this restlessness all the time without recognizing it. My living situation is nearly perpendicular to my actual values, and I didn’t realize it until I fit so well in a place so dramatically different than here.

It was a revelation to me that I crave a buzzing social life, walkable shops, dinners with friends, art and art people, cafés that aren’t franchises, buildings that are older than my parents. Yet I live in a dull park of two-level apartments at the edge of the city, with nothing in its walking radius but box stores. This is not a neighborhood.

One afternoon in Manhattan I was in a museum and I had to find a way to write something. I’m sure a lot of writers feel it. It comes on with the same kind of urgency as having to pee.

I quickly ended up sitting on one of the viewing benches in a room dedicated to Kandinsky, typing on my phone.

Things I have learned in ny.

Read more. Get healthy. Get calm but stay playful.

Create something everyday. Poem, stream of consciousness, article, drawing or narrative.

Find your people. Get close to the action.

Absorb art. 

Read much more. Master the language.

Walk more. Make plans. Eat out with friends.

Let yourself be overheard. Let people react.

Read a good periodical.

Do stuff but don’t worry about what you’re not doing.

Finish more, start less.

You’re okay.

No, nothing about being home is relieving, except that I remember feeling exactly like this when I got home from New Zealand – unsettled in a way I had never been while I was living out of a backpack. Like important parts are missing.

It does go away though, and that is worrisome. I knew early in my trip that I was going to be transforming certain aspects of my life when I got home, but it needs to continue to feel uncomfortable until I start the wheels turning, or it won’t happen.

The main offender really is the location. I’m planning to stay in Winnipeg, at least for now, but I need to get out of the suburbs. My apartment is cheap and unlovable. I generally don’t invite people here. I want a home.

None of this is to say I am not grateful overall for where I am. The people I met in New York, as much as I envy them, stirred up in me a very specific gratitude about the space and potential I have back home. For all the dazzling cultural opportunities their city offers, people generally have less personal space and less budget space in which to shift things around.

I have the makings of what I want. I’m young, well-traveled, kind of talented, unencumbered by debt, single and pretty damn handsome. I’m well-paid, I like my job and have freedom to travel in winter.

So the space for transformation is certainly there, but I have to harness this precious distaste for my “home” while it lasts. Complacency is never far off. Things get normal in a hurry, and when “not good” gets normal, time eats up the years fast.

Upon my return from New Zealand I didn’t quite know what to make of that queasy feeling. Travel does this, I see now. It shows you what you value, and when it’s over you feel certain deficits in the life you’ve built. You feel physically off balance. The inputs that nourished you while you were away — whether it’s the sight of the ocean every day, or the way strangers talk to each other so easily — leave a sharp hangover when they get cut off.

It’s a good thing though. It’s a healthy, natural impulse — a slower, calmer version of the feeling that makes you want to kick to the surface after you’ve been under too long. It moves you the right way.

Anyway, the trip was incredible, better than I could have imagined. And I have the people to thank most. Landmarks are cool, but it’s people that make it magical. Thank you everyone, especially Christopher, Allison, Susan, Leeat, Kent, Lisis, Danny, and the lovely Nicole. You don’t know the half of what you did for me.

Apologies to those I didn’t meet. I had completely overbooked myself. Originally I’d planned to visit about ten different cities in the same timeframe. Completely unreasonable, and I ended up redrawing the whole thing. I love the northeast though and I will be back. Of course, you should drop me a line if you’re going to be in Winnipeg.

And thank you all for bearing with me while I was gone. Writing gets difficult and disjointed (and maybe a little too self-reflective) while traveling. Raptitude will be back to its regular articles next week.

I love you all,

David

***

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 Photo by David Cain