Soul Shelter

“I can’t. I’m scared.”

Skyler Dunn, three years older and infinitely wiser, looked at me with a kind smile as I stared nervously toward the water nearly thirty feet below. The surface of Lake Washington had never appeared so green and ominously dark.

It was a brilliant Seattle today in the summer of my twelfth year. I’d long before completed my rite of passage by leaping from “Top,” the white steel diving platform at the end of the Laurelhurst Beach Club dock. But budding hormones now goaded me to plunge headfirst–to dive, like the teenagers.

For an hour, Skyler had been egging me on, in a supportive, sympathetic way—my first one-on-one coaching session. I was thrilled that the bigger boy had taken such an interest in my dilemma.

“You can do it,” he insisted. “Once you’ve dove, you’ll wonder why you were ever scared.”

Again and again he pleaded my own case for me, persistent but positive. After what seemed like hours of agonizing, I edged to the brink of the platform, then flung myself headlong toward the water, moments later bursting with joy to the surface, to return triumphantly to Top for another dive. As Skyler had said, now it was easy.

It’s easy for me to know this now, because I’m a lot older, and when you get older it becomes easier to understand that risk is what makes life fun, what pushes you ahead. I love the Van Halen tune:

Might as well jump. Jump! Might as well jump. Go ahead, jump. Jump! Go ahead, jump.

My father died a couple of years ago, and your father dying is the universe telling you, “you’re next.” And when you’re next, you start to realize that—given the new big picture that’s just been handed you—few things in life are truly risky.

During my first six-year stint in Tokyo, I talked to a guy who told me how he got started on an impressive business career. It was like talking to Skyler Dunn twenty years later:

“An acquaintance’s father, an electronics company executive, asked me if I could go to the U.S. and research the battery market. ‘Sure,’ I said.”

Ever cautious, I asked if he’d had any market research experience when he made that bold reply. He snorted. “Hell, if I always had to have experience before trying something new, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning!”

His confidence bowled me over—and I winced at my own timid thinking. Of course! Just dive, like Skyler said! It’s the thought of trying the unknown, the fear of it that holds us back. It’s not that we’re incapable. We’re all capable of doing what we can reasonably imagine ourselves doing.

What Skyler taught me at the Beach Club so many years ago, and what I keep struggling to apply, now has the clarity of age. So I say: Dive, young man! Dive, old man! Dive!

The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously. Frederich Nietzsche

You may also enjoy:

“Recognizing the Opportunity Within”

“Eight Difficult, Outdated Ways to Excel”

Rejection is a bothersome word. When one’s ideas or efforts are rejected, it can be hard to take it as anything but a setback–or worse: a cruel dismissal. As a writer, I’m extremely familiar with rejection. I’ve received hundreds upon hundreds of no’s for most every yes that’s come my way. And that’s just the behind-the-scenes part of what I do. Being a writer who hopes to sell books, I must also make occasional public appearances at bookstores or libraries, and every one of these events can lead to rejection of a more public nature. Sometimes, quite simply, no one shows up! One learns to be grateful for an audience of two or three, believe me.

So even with two novels, a score of published short stories, and the ostensible stamp of validation thought to come of critical acclaim, several no’s arrive at my door every week. In this we can observe a strange paradox about the life of a writer today: where the private undertaking of his or her art requires the writer to cultivate high sensitivity–a dependably thin skin–the public act of producing and marketing that art requires a skin of bovine thickness. (But I suppose that’s a subject for another post.)

Because rejection is such a fundamental part of my vocation, I’ve learned to look at it in a special light. As I see it, each no that arrives by mail, rather than being an explicit stumbling block, is actually a stepping stone bringing me closer to a yes. And as for those poorly attended public appearances, well, those too, though awkward, are a means of moving forward, for they ensure that my book enjoys a prominent display-place in a bookstore for at least a few weeks before and after my in-person visit. Thus the rejection of public appearances is offset, to a decent degree, by a longer-lasting promotional bonus, while rejections from publishers clarify my vision as an artist, shedding light on the path ahead to publication.

Multiple refusals of a single short story provoke me to evaluate the work with new eyes. Often I will find at least a few small improvements to make. Sometimes I find many, and re-haul the story accordingly, then send it out anew. Sometimes, too, after serious consideration, I remain convinced that a story is as perfect as I can make it on my own, and I conclude (with as much self-awareness as possible) that the rejections so far do not reflect the work’s strength or weakness, but merely the highly subjective submissions process, or perhaps some age-old dissonance of art and the marketplace.

I should add that it’s crucial, and extremely difficult, to tone the muscle of critical discrimation that enables you to stand firm and believe in the worth of what you’ve produced without deluding yourself or being unduly hardheaded. Striking this precarious balance is a talent useful in all aspects of life; I suspect it’s the trait we often refer to as faith or trust–and sometimes love. Ah, but that too is subject for another post…

Occasionally, when faced with innumerable rejections of a story I believe wholeheartedly to be the best I can produce, I simply resort to the uncomfortable assurance that rejections, now and then, signify nothing. They’re just the stripes my work must earn before it finally arrives in print.

I recall a visit I once paid to Jack London’s estate in Glen Ellen, California. I was honing my own skills as a young literary aspirant, and had yet to enjoy my first acceptance from a literary magazine, but I’d already amassed a score of form-letters. I stood studying the contents of a glass case. Two or three rejections for London’s work were displayed there. One said something like, “Nobody cares to read about the Yukon.” A museum placard next to that letter declared that Jack London had received 600 rejections before breaking into print. Fascinating and instructive, when you consider that London became one of the first American writers to survive exclusively by his pen. The literary world is a tough and crowded one–it always has been–and one can’t expect to glide sweetly into any single accomplishment. (Check out the wonderful website, The Rejection Collection.)

But I’m reminded of a maxim Tim and I included in our parable of “The Vengeful Priest” in The Prosperous Peasant:

Average effort produces average results, but extraordinary effort produces extraordinary results.

Now, in possession of two large shoeboxes crammed mostly with form letter no’s, I’m long past the point where even a hundred rejections can weaken my belief. If I’m committed to a story, and have worked and reworked it till it represents what I know to be the height of my powers–and still it continues to meet with rejection, I tend to derive strength and resolve from each no it receives. A peculiar response, I suppose, but useful!

There goes The New Yorker, there goes The Atlantic, but I see a distinguished literary magazine ahead! Each rejection reminds me that I’m on my way. Each is a landmark on this journey through my art.

Join us again this Thursday, when Tim will write about the importance of taking leaps.

See also: “Poverty, the Pulitzer, & the Beauty of Letting Go” and “Fulfillment: A Work in Progress“

Working on a doctoral thesis has sent me on a book learnin’ kick, and the other day I stumbled across something that, to my mind, reveals much about how the world works.

It’ s a genuine sociology precept called the Thomas Theorem. Formulated in 1928 by the sociologist William Isaac Thomas, it’ s been described by one eminent scholar as “probably the single most consequential sentence ever put in print by an American sociologist.” Sometimes called the Thomas Dictum, it is accepted by many researchers as scientific fact—or at least as a powerful way of comprehending the human condition. Here it is:

If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

The Thomas Theorum is no armchair theory. Law enforcement agencies use it to train officers in the handling of the mentally ill, and it’s been used effectively to explain everything from beauty contest outcomes to panic runs on bank deposits.

To me, the Thomas Theorem explains a lot: The healing power of religion, crowd behavior, a leader’ s ability to galvanize, the staying power of superstitions, Henry Ford’ s famous line that “whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you’ re right.”

Closer to my heart, the Thomas Theorem suggests that self-help books advocating the power of belief are basically right.

In fact, Thomas may have gleaned inspiration from one of the Granddaddies of the self-help movement, a man who intuitively understood the Thomas Theorum decades before Thomas himself: James Allen.

A soft-spoken, retired Englishman who lived quietly in the southwest coastal town of Ilfracombe, Allen wrote a short book about positive thinking called As a Man Thinketh. The key theme of Allen’ s ground-breaking book is that one’ s thoughts determine one’ s circumstances. As Allen put it:

A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts … As the plant springs from, and could not be without, the seed, so every act of a man springs from the hidden seeds of thought, and could not have appeared without them.

And more to the point:

Most of us are anxious to improve our circumstances, but are unwilling to improve ourselves.

Oddly, Allen contradicted his own thesis when he decided that As a Man Thinketh was unworthy of publication. Fortunately, his wife disagreed, and the book spawned an industry now worth several hundred billion dollars each year.

You can view the complete text of As a Man Thinketh at sites such as the Project Gutenberg.

Allen died in 1912, long before witnessing the seminal effect his work had on today’ s gargantuan “wellness” industry. Allen wrote 19 books, many with undeniably broad appeal (it seems another becomes a bestseller in Japanese translation every year).

In my view, James Allen was to the self-help industry what Chuck Berry was to rock n’ roll music. Berry was influenced by many musicians, but he was the first to combine numerous traditional elements into an original, enduring new form.

Similarly, writers preceding Allen by decades—even centuries—covered comparable topics, but Allen crystallized the “power of positive thinking” concept in humble, poetic language utterly devoid of hucksterism (I haven’t read most of The Secret’s source texts, many of which preceded Allen and seem more focused on money-making—if you’ve read any, please share your thoughts).

Later self-help gurus—Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Tony Robbins, Wayne Dyer and many others—owe a huge debt to Allen. And the industry is poised for even more explosive growth, analysts say. Economist Paul Pilzer, in a book entitled The Next Trillion, predicted the U.S. wellness industry will be worth a trillion dollars by 2010. So there’ s plenty of opportunity to do good by helping others be well.

But most important, the Thomas Theorum suggests that our own fortune and fulfillment are, indeed, largely the result of our beliefs. In fact, I feel a new Clark Rule coming on … wait a minute … yes, here it is! And with an easy-to-remember acronym: TTTTT™ (Tim’s Take on The Thomas Theorum):

“Make it real in your mind first, then real in fact.”

Or as Mark and I put it in The Prosperous Peasant, our own personal success parable released late last year: Conceivable Means Achievable.

See also:

“What We Really Need to be Happy”

“Life Without Principle (or Interest)”

I find myself at a semi-nascent period of my career as an earning writer—that is, earnings are no longer merely nascent. Each year, just enough wages come through to contribute a decent supplementary income to my household. That is something to be extremely grateful for—and grateful I am, everyday.

But keeping even the little checks coming continues to be a struggle week by week. And an optimistic outlook, rugged perseverance, and a brave belief in the worth of the work at hand all become more important as time goes by. I just turned thirty, my first child will arrive in two months, and despite my many plans, ambitions, works-in-progress, and continuing commitment to my art, the future remains uncertain.

This is the story of many a working writer—and has been so for ages, as anyone can see by reading the correspondence or journals of any number of even our greatest authors. Henry James’ notebooks, which I’m reading at the moment, contain a fair share of biographical evidence to this point. In 1889 James anxiously writes:

I simply must try, and try seriously, to produce half a dozen—a dozen, five dozen—plays for the sake of my pocket, my material future. Of how little money the novel makes for me I needn’t discourse here.

(Perhaps a need to remind myself of this plight of penury—and affirm it as universal to most all writing lives—was in part what compelled me to publish a novel about the impoverished poet Rilke.)

Ultimately, most writers can only bend their heads, keep working, and strive to be their best. “Success” as the world knows it is wholly beyond our control, and anyway mostly irrelevant to the substance of our daily labors. “For us, there is only the trying,” said T.S. Eliot in his Four Quartets.

But struggling as I am to keep the small checks coming, the mystery of success remains a natural subject for pondering, so I was primed recently to delight in the new book, Born Standing Up, by comedian Steve Martin. It’s an eloquent narrative of awkward beginnings, perseverance, and accidental fame.

Martin devotes his attention to the long struggles, the necessary obsession, the small and ill-paying—sometimes non-paying—triumphs that marked his journey to comedy dominance in the late 70s, and this sets his book apart from the standard celebrity memoir. There’s no gratuitous namedropping in Born Standing Up, not a bit of juicy insider gossip. Martin’s subject is his apprenticeship in—and his ultimate abandonment of—stand-up comedy. He begins:

I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.

 

This eighteen year period took him from youthful gigs at Kiwanis Clubs in his native Southern California, through employment at Disneyland during his teenage years and a repertory act at Knott’s Berry Farm during college, to eventual fame and fortune as a stand-up comedian who regularly sold-out giant stadiums.

Most fascinating about the book is Martin’s central confession: his complete lack of natural talent.

I had absolutely no gifts…Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent.

 

That aphorism becomes Martin’s pervasive theme as he recounts his experience pursuing a lifelong passion—and finding himself subject to the incidental whims of fortune and success.

I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a by-product. The course was more plodding than heroic: I did not strive valiantly against doubters but took incremental steps studded with a few intuitive leaps. I was not naturally talented—I did not sing, dance, or act—though working around that minor detail made me inventive.

Martin has always had a serious streak. All comedians do, of course—their craft demands a rigorous personality infused with perfectionism (see the film Comedian, which follows Jerry Seinfeld through the grueling process of developing new stand-up material). But few comedians have incorporated their serious side into their public career as has Martin, who’s long expressed an interesting blend of zany and heartfelt. His play Picasso at the Lapin Agile is a perfect example of his rounded style, as are the films L.A. Story and Roxanne, both wonderful comedy/melodramas that originated as Martin authored screenplays.

Like his best movie moments, Martin’s book is a refreshing blend of the breezy and the thoughtful. His motive here is not to produce a work of chuckle-inducing comic writing (see his earlier book, Pure Drivel, for that). In Born Standing Up, Martin provides a longer-lasting service to his reader. The memoir engages, entertains, and instructs. It will resonate emotionally with anyone who longs to bring their passion and a pursuit of excellence to convergence in hopes of earning a living.

Martin has a knack for quotable insights. Born Standing Up is jeweled with them. He writes:

I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you’re about to do.

 

And later on:

Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.

The book repeatedly affirms the worth of obscurity, naïveté, and these so-called “delusions.” And that’s a marvelously unique perspective to take as a basis for what, as we all know, becomes a tale of staggering worldly success.

What comes through in Martin’s story perhaps most palpably, most movingly, is the precious fleetingness of his apprenticeship period, before the arrival of mastery, before the glories of success or the rewards of fame, when the sole significant payoff of performing was the pure and resonant joy it brought. Here Born Standing Up, which at first appears to be a chronicle of a much-coveted pinnacle gained and abandoned, becomes an allegory of the importance of living life and cherishing one’s work each and every instant. Whatever our circumstances may be, however far from the ideal our careers may seem to run, there is always the work at hand to be nurtured with passion and delight. Recognizing and cherishing that reward—that we are doing exactly the thing we most wish to be doing, that we are learning daily—is the essential task of a fulfilled life.

In 1981, the year Steve Martin quit stand-up comedy forever, he was 36 years old, and he had become far more famous than he really wanted to be.

Though the audiences continued to grow, I experienced a concomitant depression caused by exhaustion, isolation, and creative ennui… This was, as the cliché goes, the loneliest period of my life.

I was caught and I could not quit, because this multizeroed income might last only a moment. I couldn’t imagine abandoning something I had worked so hard to craft. I knew about the flash in the pan, I had seen it happen to others, and I worried about it happening to me.

 

But it’s in freedom that the passing of time is sweetest—the freedom to learn, experiment, and make useful mistakes. And Martin had grown to understand that he was no longer free to do the thing he most wanted to do. He had striven to become a performer, but now he found himself merely rehashing prior achievements in hopes of staying rich. He was no longer growing, and the joy was disappearing.

Toward the close of Born Standing Up, he tells of an impulsive visit he paid to the Bird Cage Theater at Knott’s Berry Farm some twenty-odd years after his early employment there. The theater is no longer in use. Martin lets himself in and stands alone in the musty dimness. In this space, which is still unchanged, he had learned some of his most enduring lessons about performance. Daily, with a troupe of performers, he entertained small audiences, experimented, played around onstage, and now and then failed freely—with no ill consequences, but immense lessons learned.

Light filtered in from the canvas roof, giving the Bird Cage a dim, golden hue. There I was, standing in a memory frozen in amber, and I experienced an overwhelming rush of sadness… [I] looked out at the empty theater and was overcome by the feeling of today being pressed into yesterday. I didn’t realize how much this place had meant to me.

Driving home along the Santa Ana freeway, I was still unnerved. I asked myself what it was that had made this place capable of inducing in me such a powerful nostalgic shock. The answer floated clearly into my consciousness as though I had asked the question of a Magic-8 Ball: I wanted to be there again, if only for a day, indulging in high spirits and hi jinks, before I turned professional, before comedy became serious.

 

The journey itself, the learning itself, the apprenticeship, the obscurity and marvelous naïveté—the struggle itself—is the beautiful thing, a freedom to be cherished. Many long for such freedom from the heights of whatever professional pinnacles they have reached.

Here again is Henry James writing in that notebook:

To accept the circumstances, in their extreme humility, and do the best I can in them: this is the moral of my present situation. They are the reverse of ideal—but there is this great fact that for myself at least I may make them better. To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived—to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that—this doubtless is the right way to live.

See also: “Measures of Success,” and “Fulfillment: A Work in Progress”

“Should I take the job or go for my MBA?”

Few undergraduates make the effort to meet instructors outside of class, so clearly the earnest young man sitting across my desk—one of my best students—was wrestling with a big decision.

John had reentered school after working for a couple of years, and now had the opportunity to take a marketing position with a local company. More mature and experienced than his classmates, he was also more focused: someone clearly headed for management. Still, he only had a few years of full-time work experience.

“Take the job,” I said.

The occasional opportunity to offer uncompromising career advice (that actually might be followed!) is one of teaching’s great pleasures. Mine was an easy recommendation to make, because getting the most out of business school requires more than a couple of years of prior work experience.

But we all face decisions less easily made, and often without an adviser who’s trod the same path before us. How to best weigh the pros and cons?

I pondered this late last year after my blogging mentor, J.D. of Get Rich Slowly, asked his readers whether education is always a good investment. My thoughts ended up as a guest post, re-presented here in modified form.

Get Rich Slowly readers Lisa and Jethro had shared their thoughts about returning to school for a graduate degree. They were looking at the decision primarily from a cost/benefit viewpoint: An advanced degree would cost x dollars and require borrowing, but their salaries would likely rise to x dollars when their new credentials allow them to secure better jobs. Was it worth taking on debt?

Lisa and Jethro might benefit from a different approach to the issue, one based on Clark’s Option on Opportunities Theory (COOT^TM).

In finance jargon, an option is the right to buy or sell a security at a specified price within a set time. But COOT takes a more general “lifeview” of options—a perspective that any of us, even the financially disinclined, can find useful.

COOT says that “option” is simply another word for “opportunity” and that all action can be seen as creating new opportunities. The key point is that the value of a new opportunity is not precisely quantifiable, but is likely to be great—and more importantly, unavailable without “exercising the option.”

Here are a couple of examples:

Let’s say you want to write a book. From a moneymaking standpoint, that’s a terrible idea for most people; it’s like moving to Australia so you can date Elle McPherson, or starting a rock band because you want to become famous—sweet thoughts, but dreadfully naïve. (Mark, Soul Shelter’s Director of Fulfillment, will back me up on this point).

But writing a book creates opportunities that might not arise any other way—opportunities to teach, become a consultant, or develop authoritative knowledge in some field (or in Mark’s case, to create a lasting work of beauty and truth).

The same goes for starting a business. When you start a new business, suddenly you’re an entrepreneur, not just a worker. Calling on customers or prospects, you’re likely to meet with other owners and managers, and enter into a whole new world of business. Even if your venture doesn’t ultimately succeed, the experience of going out on your own will have created opportunities (options) unattainable any other way.

Likewise for education. Eighteen years ago I entered a part-time MBA program. It took me seven years to finish—the longest period allowed without getting booted out! Many times I came close to quitting, wondering whether the time, money, and effort were worth it.

Today, I’m grateful to have stuck with it, not just for the knowledge and career advances it enabled, but because it allowed me to become a teacher—an unexpected but welcome career change. Now I’m pursuing a doctoral degree—something inconceivable to me even five years ago—but something that wouldn’t have been a viable option without the MBA. Pursuing an advanced degree was creating brand new options for me, though I didn’t know it at the time.

So is education always a good investment? No. But if you have serious thoughts about going back to school, that’s a powerful sign that it’s a very good idea for you.

Heed your intuition. It’s trying to create new options for you.

P.S. As always, remember that COOT^TM—and all of Clark’s Rules—are empirically unproven, based solely on the experience of Clark, and may be completely wrong

“We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”
–T.S. Eliot

Occasionally I am asked one classic question every author must encounter: “Where do you get your ideas?”–and sometimes this variant: “Do you wait for inspiration, or do you just start working and see what comes out?”

There’s one very good answer which I’ve never really managed to articulate in person. It goes somewhat like this: Inspiration waxes and wanes, and producing a book is most often a matter of sitting down and serving time at the desk. But I also believe that inspiration can be galvanized in certain ways, and one of these is to consciously put yourself into the realm of the unexpected. The most reliable method of doing this is to travel.

My wife and I have always been avid travelers. The story of our relationship is, in a way, a travelogue. Major moments in the narrative take international settings: London, Paris, Switzerland, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Indonesia. Though we’ve never earned much money, throughout our married life we’ve made a point of using a sizable part of our earnings to fund lengthy trips abroad (three weeks or several months).

Recently, having learned that our first child is on the way, we made a pledge to ourselves. Parenthood will not mean our days of overseas adventuring have come to an end. Quite the contrary. As we see it, becoming parents mandates that we renew our commitment to travel, and strive to foster in our child the consciousness of a world citizen.

We want our child to grow up well-seasoned in the boundary-breaking, humanizing act of witness, discovery, and interaction that international travel can be. I daresay the absence of such experiences in the lives of most Americans is a root cause of our nation’s floundering international relations.

The United States is vast and diverse, but its very immensity makes it a chore to transgress its boundaries for any significant period of time–and I’m speaking here of boundaries both geographical and mental. Strictly American values and ideas pervade the thoughts and lifestyles of the majority of U.S. citizens to the exclusion of any other ethos. This is not surprising when you consider our geography. We don’t rub shoulders with other nations, other ways of life. As for our nearest neighbors, Mexico and Canada, we do our best to ignore or fence out the former (except, perhaps, when planning an all-inclusive beach getaway), and the latter is so self-sufficient and peaceable that we forget about it for all but a few moments each year.

To a large extent, our country is like an island nation, culturally speaking. I was shocked to read recently that some 80% of Americans do not own a passport. The world outside is the other, and in our worst moments we tend to forget that these other nations exist, let alone possess social models, cultures, practices, and perspectives which we would often do well to borrow from–or histories we would do well to study. (See travel guru Rick Steves on the subject of why travel can mend a broken world.)

Being constantly aware of this parochial American mindset, my wife and I have made a particular parents-to-be pledge: We will take a big trip abroad sometime within the first two years of our baby’s life.

This may sound naïve, but our impetus is actually entirely practical. If we don’t travel reasonably soon after becoming a family of three–and thus fail to set the custom in place early on–we may risk never traveling again. And that, from the standpoint of two creative souls landlocked in the United States, is unacceptable. Unacceptable for us personally–and for the future of our child.

The thing is, we regard travel as something far more meaningful and edifying than the diversionary experience that comes to most minds at the thought of ‘getting away’ or ‘vacationing.’ Travel, as we see it, means engaging a larger world, not merely retreating from the one we know. It entails more than a flight from the boredom of an urban grind, or the doldrums of suburbia, in pursuit of touristy entertainments; it’s about seeking to become a part of (for a while at least) an experience that transcends one’s native outlook, habits, cultural predispositions. In other words, travel means joining in the human experience.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.--G.K. Chesteron

To tell the truth, I and my wife are a bit haunted by the familiar refrains we’ve heard from well-meaning stay-at-home sorts who’ve long since subscribed to a peculiarly American misconception–that lengthy travel is an extraneous indulgence of youth. “Enjoy it while you’re young,” they’ve told us. “Go while you’re still free. That freedom won’t last forever.”

We’re well aware that they speak to a frightful reality. We know how it goes: life becomes more and more complicated as one’s children grow. Commitments, appointments, routines multiply exponentially–and family finances get apportioned and stretched till the notion of designating any amount toward something as fundamentally non-essential as travel seems absurd.

And travel–particularly extended international travel–is expensive. That fact alone relegates it to the realm of excess, right? Well, we’re not so certain. The way we see it, there are vast and innumerable benefits–and some clearly numerable ones–that come of distant sojourning, and these make travel, however expensive, a monetary non-issue for us. We see the act of going abroad as an investment, plain and simple.

Here is a sampling of some major benefits (not to be underrated) that come of one’s investment in international travel:

• Stuttering in a foreign tongue
• Being subjected to the good graces (and yes, sometimes the rudeness) of others
• Being forced to ask questions of strangers
• Finding oneself confronted by things wondrous, disgusting, or simply difficult to understand
• Begging explanations for seemingly uninterpretable experiences
• Plumbing the histories and arts for some sense of what one has beheld and why it matters
• Putting oneself into the realm of the unexpected, where serendipity can unveil new horizons
• Generally feeling like an outsider

These experiences engender one’s empathy for fellow human beings, better understanding of the challenges faced by new immigrants in our own land, and overall discovery of things large, small, enriching or infuriating, whether they be works of art, episodes of world history, or political conditions.

One example of a very small personal discovery: I’ll never forget, on my first day in London at age nineteen, finding the face of Charles Dickens on the ten-pound note and vocalizing my astonishment that a nation would grant so high an honor to an author. I thought it was perfectly wonderful, but I could not imagine such a thing occurring in my own country. Robert Frost on the twenty? Emily Dickinson on the five? Somehow it seemed impossible. Even England–with whom we share a language, sort of–could not differ more from America on certain values. As a young writer wannabe, I was astounded to find myself in a culture with so strong and valued a literary tradition, and disturbed to compare this with the paltry official regard accorded the arts in America. As author John Gardner once drolly remarked: “In America, though federal, state, and local governments make feeble gestures of support (the whole National Endowments for the Arts comes to, I think, the cost of one frigate), it seems clear that nobody quite knows what to do with artists.”

Such small realizations and comparisons as this are the daily fodder of the international traveler–and though more usually small than not, they accumulate powerfully, and their personal resonance becomes positively seismic. The little things change and widen a person. Adam Gopnik puts it another way in his wonderful book, Paris to the Moon: “This can shake you up, this business of things almost but not quite being the same. A pharmacy is not quite a drugstore; a brasserie is not quite a coffee shop; a lunch is not quite a lunch.”

In short, the experience of traveling abroad invigorates the imagination. And it is imagination that makes us into human beings, enabling us to recognize the humanity in the world around us and to reach out to others as fellow humans.

For the profit of travel: in the first place, you get rid of a few prejudices…. The prejudiced against color finds several hundred millions of people of all shades of color, and all degrees of intellect, rank, and social worth, generals, judges, priests, and kings, and learns to give up his foolish prejudice.–Herman Melville

To be human is to be curious. And to be curious is to travel, if not literally, then in the mind through books, arts, cultural treasures. But too many Americans, bombarded with the rampant scare-mongering that characterizes our nation’s current political moment, have retreated into fear and loathing, while imagination and outreach could help to heal a great many ills. Perhaps travel is more a necessity now than ever.

The uses of travel are occasional, and short; but the best fruit it finds, when it finds it, is conversation; and this is a main function of life.--Ralph Waldo Emerson

But travel at its best is a spiritual investment, that is, it provides a value utterly unquantifiable by the standards of the dollar or any other currency–though no less tangible. And as long as travel remains an imperative in one’s life, an essential endeavor, and I daresay a moral responsibility, a means can be found to make it possible.

My wife and I keep a modest household and our incomes are not large. But we hope to break a cultural mold and start our family life under the consciousness that travel is integral to a rich and fulfilled life. Call us idealists, but if we can cultivate sensitivity, tolerance, openness, and insatiable curiosity in our child, we will have reason to put our faith in the next generation.

Travel at its best is a refresher course in human life on earth, with its millions of dizzying customs, civilizations, and creations. Sign us up, please!

With what ease our seemingly entrenched lives might be altered, were we to walk down a corridor and on to a craft that in a few hours would land us in a place of which we had no memories and where no one knew our names. How pleasant to hold in mind, through the crevasses of our moods, at three in the afternoon when lassitude and despair threaten, that there is always a plane taking off for somewhere.--Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

For more reading on the subject of travel, I highly recommend the following books and authors:
Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik
The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton
Jan Morris, multiple titles
Paul Theroux, multiple titles

This Thursday, Tim will expand upon some ideas brought up here; specifically, he’ll propose an unconventional means of evaluating investments and opportunities.

See also: “The State of American Happiness” and “The Risk of Happiness”

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past two years researching the extraordinary men who reunited feudal Japan after the century-long Age of Warring Clans. During this time I’ve become intrigued with Bushido, the chivalrous code of samurai conduct, and a doctrine whose lessons still resonate with surprising force. Though the samurai were expert fighters, the definitive Bushido treatise deals only briefly with warfare—but at length with the Eight Virtues of Rectitude, Courage, Benevolence, Politeness, Sincerity, Honor, Loyalty, and Self-Control.

Two things occurred to me: First, I’m as dismayed as anyone about our current American leadership. Second, in today’s world of “warring clans,” a strong dose of Bushido just might be of some help to our struggling president.

So, I tried to find someone who could shed light on both Bushido and whether George W. Bush can muster the virtues necessary to provide effective leadership in today’s turbulent times. I found an exceptionally qualified commentator: Professor Yoshi Tsurumi of Baruch College, who instructed Bush in an economic policy and international business course at Harvard Business School from the fall of 1973 through the spring of 1974.

At Harvard, Tsurumi taught that true leaders—both at home and abroad—must demonstrate honesty, compassion, moral courage, sincerity, and noblesse oblige: the belief that privilege entails responsibility. When we spoke, Tsurumi, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was quick to emphasize that such leadership qualities, far from being the exclusive province of Bushido, are cornerstones of Judeo-Protestant thought, and underpin both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.

How did the future President of the United States respond to these teachings about how leaders should behave? Here’s what Professor Tsurumi said:

George W. Bush showed disdain for such leadership qualities. He was disconnected from accepting moral and social responsibility for his actions.

According to Tsurumi, during class discussions, young Bush referred to President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a ‘socialist’ and opposed Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission, unemployment insurance and other New Deal innovations because he thought they were ‘bad for business’—though it was precisely those programs that bailed the U.S. out of the Great Depression, achieved victory in World War II, and produced the Golden Age of post-war economic growth. Hmm … so much for Rectitude and Benevolence.

At Harvard, Tsurumi came to know his students well. He remembered two types: “Those with strong social values, whom one feels honored to teach, and those like George W. Bush, who are the polar opposite. What I saw in my students many years ago reliably predicted how they behaved after graduating.”

Tsurumi said that in class, Bush uttered incoherent statements, avoided answering questions, and became petulant when addressing colleagues who questioned his opinions:

He willfully misrepresented reality to fit his prejudices and denied his own statements when challenged. He often indulged himself in delusions similar to current claims of a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 tragedy. But his continuing ignorance of world affairs and lack of knowledge about the real threats to America’s security at home and abroad are far more dangerous today.

Well, then. I guess we can write off Politeness, Sincerity, Courage, and Self-Control.

Today, the president’s former teacher gives his former pupil a resounding “F” for post-graduation performance. Said Tsurumi:

Then, as now, George W. Bush refused to let inconvenient reality interfere with his self-righteous obsessions.

Let’s see: What’s left? Loyalty? At least America’s first “MBA president” has behaved consistently for the past 33 years.

And so ended my search for Bushido virtues, for noblesse oblige, in the world’s most powerful leader. Whither Rectitude, Courage, Benevolence, Politeness, Sincerity, Honor, Self-Control? My conclusion can only echo Processor Tsurumi’s:

George W. Bush was unfit to lead then, and he is unfit to lead today.

By the way, I don’t find this amusing. All great writings on leadership—and I’ve read a fair share—say essentially the same thing: When a leader has failed, only his replacement can restore an organization’s credibility.

So, for those who have the power to replace the leadership of our great nation, I offer a final Bushido precept, via Confucius: “Perceiving what is right, and doing it not, argues lack of courage.”

See also:

“(Bushido) Eight Difficult, Outdated Ways to Excel”

“Bushido: The Way of the Armchair Warrior”

Call us grandiose, but here at Soul Shelter we like to think we explore some of the essential issues of modern life, most namely the pressing challenge of getting a living while protecting the soul. That one’s no easy matter in this country of ours, perhaps because we’ve all been indoctrinated in the notion of “American Happiness.”

This notion has an inherent philosophical beauty, of course: the concept of equal opportunity; the self-evident truth of one’s right to seek one’s own particular destiny; the ideal of material bounty shared by all; freedom from authoritarian regimes, etc.

But as many of us experience on a day-to-day basis, American Happiness is peculiarly vulnerable to the distortions of capitalism, and can engender troubling lines of logic like the following:

1) ‘This country’s bountiful material rewards come of good ol’ American hard work, therefore… Since my material rewards haven’t yet materialized, it’s because I’m not working hard enough, therefore… If I work as hard as I can and still fail to reap those rewards, well, damn, it’s no one’s fault but my own; i.e. I am not pretty enough, not charming enough, not ambitious enough — or not ruthless enough; i.e. I’m a failure by nature and unfit for the American dream.’

2) ‘I’ve done plenty of good ol’ American hard work and I now have all the material rewards I ever wanted! — but I have yet to experience the warm glow of American Happiness, therefore… I’ve not gained enough to become happy, therefore… I need more, more, more and cannot rest till I get it!’

(Our nation’s greatest playwright, Arthur Miller, wrote a masterful play on this very subject almost sixty years ago.)

This month, we’ll celebrate the birthdays of two legendary American presidents (not to mention the votes we will cast in numerous states for tomorrow’s Super Tuesday primaries), so I thought it timely to offer discussion of this pervasive cultural idea.

The November 2007 issue of The Atlantic Monthly contained a compendium of mini-essays by America’s foremost intellectual, artistic, and political figures on the subject of “The American Idea.” One contribution, by Arianna Huffington, dealt with the American definition of happiness. It requires no commentary. Enjoy.

Pursuit of Happiness

Watching the news in our celebrity-choked culture, it’s easy to feel that the grand experiment envisioned by our Founding Alchemists — turning a fizzy mix of freedom and responsibility into societal gold — has spun wildly out of control. The promise of unlimited opportunity has given way to rampant narcissism and misplaced perfectionism (and the disappointed self-loathing that inevitably follows the search for a flawless self).

But isn’t this the logical result of the path the Framers set us on? After all, from the beginning, America has been dedicated to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” hasn’t it? So why not lust after fame and Botoxed beauty and hedge fund riches and size-0 jeans? Thomas Jefferson told us to, damn it! Only he didn’t. The signers of the Declaration of Independence assumed that some truths did not have to be proved — that some truths were, to borrow a phrase, self-evident. It was self-evident, for example, that the happiness to be pursued was not the blissed-out buzz induced by drugs or shopping sprees. It was the happiness of the Book of Proverbs: “Happy is he that has mercy on the poor.” It was the happiness that comes from feeling good by doing good.

Happiness today has been reduced to instant gratification. We search for “happy hours” that leave us stumbling through life; we devour “Happy Meals” that barely nourish the body; we believe the ads that tell us that there is a pill for every ill, and that happiness is just a tablet away.

But there is good news. All around the country, individuals are choosing to redefine the pursuit of happiness in ways much closer to the original American idea. More young people are volunteering than ever before, and more and more people, young and old, are including service to others in their busy lives. There are, of course, days when the travails of Britney, Lindsay, and Paris dominate the news, but the American idea, embedded deep in our cultural DNA, is inspiring us to pursue a much less shallow happiness.

See you on Thursday, when Tim will offer a second part to his discussion of Bushido, searching for chivalrous virtues here at home — in the figure of our current president.

See also:

“What We Really Need to Be Happy”

“Measures of Success”