Soul Shelter

My Dad had some choice 1930s phrases for exhorting us to work hard and act with integrity:

“Knuckle down!”

“Put some elbow grease into it!”

“Use the right tool for the job.”

“Straighten up and fly right.”

And the old reliable “Thatta boy!”

Maybe that’s one reason Ainsley Drew’s runner-up prize winning essay, Knuckle Down, Knuckle Up, appeals so strongly.

Dad would’ve been confused by Ainsley’s piece, would’ve failed to see the hard work and sweat oozing from a writer’s life. That’s okay. Twenty years from now I’ll be confused about how my kids are earning a living, too. Just hope I can remember when then.

Knuckle Down, Knuckle Up

The influx of work has once again slowed to a trickle, which means that it’s back to verbal bloodsport for me and my other half. Keywords and phrases of recent arguments: entitlement, worry, melodramatic, I’m going to/why don’t you just move back to New York, really?!, you act like the sky is falling, and the tried-but-true f*ck. If my life were a well-trafficked blog I could do a tag cloud.

For those Portland residents who didn’t see our tantrum both in Unthank Park as well as on the corner of Shaver, the conclusion came after my boyfriend and business partner was gently hit by a truck as he skated after me. We talked it out from a seated position, the conversation went nowhere, and I got so hungry that we decided to put the fight on hold while we went out for Mediterranean food.

He was okay. The truck didn’t hit him hard. Jesus Christ, that sounds insensitive.

I decided that there has to be a deeper psychological component to our word combat. I mean, we’re not actually crazy, even though he tells me I need to “see someone.” We’re in love. Really, we are.

So I used Google to try to find an explanation, a sentence that, in and of itself, should clue me in as to how far along defecation creek my mental canoe has gone afloat.

Here was this little tidbit I dug up from the annals of Psychology Today, my favorite magazine to read in the library of my high-school when I wanted to seem “smart”:

Couples fight about money more than any other issue. This is as true of couples who stay married as of couples who wind up divorcing. The main financial matters couples fight over include levels of spending and saving (since women tend to think men should make more, while men tend to think that women should spend less), the amount of time spent working, differences in long-term financial goals such as retirement savings, and money chores such as balancing the checkbook and paying bills. [Psychology Today Magazine, Nov/Dec 2004]

Considering that we have no money to worry about saving, spending, or balancing in any way other than in a neat stack of quarters on the bedside table for bus fare, I don’t think this article is appropriate. Moreover, we work together, and we love what we do, so “time spent working” isn’t an issue. Retirement, for everyone in this country and particularly for freelance artists, is basically on par with a unicorn-versus-narwhal dance-off. It isn’t going to happen.

So, in conclusion, I suppose we don’t fight about money, although I’m no psychologist. I believe we fight ‘cause we want someone to give us a chance at a long-term gig, may it be corporate blogging or a company’s advertising copy and editing. And what adds to the short kids’ cage match is that we’re wholly poor, which makes us skip meals, and skipping meals makes us cranky. Two only children who are craving burritos and yet are forced instead to spend the afternoon together typing out compelling prose about bourgeoisie necessities such as vacation packages and software components. It’s basically the equivalent of taking two beta fish and tossing them into the same bowl, then dubbing over sound effects of hyenas ripping out each others throats. And that’s on a good day.

Since he thinks that we fight because I stress over money, I figure I have to get money for both of us in order to stop the endless fight. Money equals clients, in the grand scheme of things. I don’t know how to get clients—a gold lamé mini-dress, pleather stilettos, and a large thumb, perhaps—but I’m trying.

This morning I was still pretty keyed up, but I kept it to myself. My thoughts ranged from What does he know anyway? He at least has a part-time DJ gig to feed him to I don’t care about money, I wear the same clothes I did in high-school. Literally. It’s true.

Then I lost forty dollars on my way to the grocery store and the frenzied cycle of homicidal rage and abject terror that ensued—as well as the sudden, histrionic shift of the internal dialog—led me to believe that perhaps the boy is right. Maybe I do worry about money. Maybe I even, daresay, stress about it. Maybe I should see someone. And by someone I mean the kind folks at the local Food Stamp Office. Or a temp agency. Or my mom.

Adding to my generally apoplectic worldview is that I have no idea how to take the work we’re currently doing and apply it to the job hunt. One of our employers is at the helm of a sinking ship enterprise, and in response to a project we were sent an email about what we should be gearing our work towards. The meandering message and accompanying asinine images included MTV celebrities from circa 2000 as well as washed up socialites and the phrases like we were ballin’ and he came threw and got laced. [Editor’s Note: Yes, that spelling.] Scrolling through the suggested examples made me want to drink a liter of bleach and jump off of my roof. I couldn’t tell if it was serious. But, again, it’s writing for a living.

Sometimes it feels like freelance work is a lot like high-school, only without the dewy hormone-induced glow that arrives every morning. I’m grateful to be in this with someone as pigheaded, confrontationally capable, and small as me. It makes for a delightful off-road spectacle, if nothing else.

* * *

About the Writer

Ainsley Drew is a New York native currently spilling ink in the puddle known as Portland, Oregon. She and her cohort, Simon Goetz, work as a team of copywriters under the name Ministry of Imagery. Hire them to write for you and they will eat their own words. Ainsley’s work has appeared in Spindle and GO NYC Magazine, and she is the author of the blog Jerk Ethic. She has eleven spring-loaded fingers, so she can type faster than you.

You may also enjoy:

“The Truth About Quitting and other winners”

“Jack London on Upward Mobility”

“Twenty-Seven Years of Zen Destroyed My Life“

It’s a joy to present the Second Place Winner in our Soul Shelter First-Person Essay Award. Writer Yuvi Zalkow receives $500 for “Dogs & Dolphins,” which we present below. Says Mr. Zalkow:

I never had the courage, or whatever you want to call it, to drop everything to find a better life, but it’s been brewing in me to describe my take on how one might meander their way to that better life (even through slow, awkward, less-decisive steps). I was excited to see that Soul Shelter had some very compelling and diverse and non-dogmatic ways to talk about this subject. And so this contest got me started writing about the dolphins. …

• Dogs & Dolphins by Yuvi Zalkow •

I feel like this should be an essay about how I quit my terrible job to do the thing I’d always dreamed of doing and how it turned out that I became even more successful (financially, emotionally, spiritually, sensually) than before. I want to tell you that I left a horrible corporate environment and started my own non-profit helping people in need. I want to tell you about the lives I’ve saved. I want to tell you a story full of courage and heroism and salvation. I want to tell you that I rescue dogs and help the dolphins.

But I don’t have any of those stories. It’s not that I don’t like dogs and dolphins. In fact I’m a fan of both species. But my story is less dramatic and less amazing. It won’t make you cry. It’s not shocking or life altering. It goes in small steps, if it steps at all.

My story does start off the way a typical inspirational story is supposed to start: I hated my job. I was working too hard. I was annoyed and exhausted. I was angry that I wasn’t doing the things I most wanted to do in my life. …

My terrible job goes like this: I was working as a software developer at an oversized multinational corporation. There was a lot of pressure at this job and I was tired of the hours. I came home every night with worries about what needed to be done the next day—or what needed to be done later that night before the China or India team picked up where my team left off.

What I really wanted to do was write stories. I wanted to tell fictional stories of people stuck at big companies—I didn’t actually want to be one of those people. And I was too tired to tell these stories after I was done with work.

I didn’t quit right away even though that seems like the thing to do if you plan to be the narrator of an inspirational story. I liked having enough money to eat an overpriced meal and drink an overpriced cocktail. I didn’t really want to lose that pleasure.

So I took a small step, maybe even a cowardly step. I told my boss that I wanted to help our group write better documentation. I volunteered to do all the documentation for my group of seven software developers. I figured that writing about computers was a little closer to my passion of telling stories than programming a computer. This request was fine by my boss because we were behind on our documentation. We were behind on our documentation because all engineering groups are behind on their documentation. You should know that any self-respecting engineer refuses to document what they are doing. And either because I lacked self-respect or because I wasn’t an engineer at heart, this task appealed to me. My boss wasn’t sure he heard me clearly when I made this request: “You want to do what now?”

Once I got confident enough in my ability to do this kind of work, I began looking for a job elsewhere as a technical writer. I felt that this big company was a bit too dreary a place to work and that it might be more lively elsewhere, a smaller company, or perhaps just doing some independent consulting. It turned out that there was a need for writers with my kind of technical background. So I found another job and quit the corporate gig.

Pretty soon, I became good enough in my technical writing skills to negotiate working slightly fewer hours. When I say slightly fewer hours, I mean that I trimmed about five hours off my work week. Not a big difference, but it afforded me some useful hours to keep at the writing practice.

I began writing more stories. I found a way to get a master’s in creative writing without quitting my day job—by getting into one of the many low-residency master’s programs around the country. I expected to write stories about the silly work environments where I had worked, but it didn’t go that way. I wrote about outcasts and drinkers and fathers and sons and the dead and the desperate and ex-husbands and ex-wives and lonely people saying hello at the coffee shop. That’s where the energy took me and I went with it.

And so here I am today. Five years later. My job isn’t amazing, but it is reasonably more fun than before. I don’t have a ton of time to write, but I have more time to write than before. My student loan payments are not ideal, but they’re not too bad. I can’t afford to drink as many cocktails as before, but I still enjoy a Manhattan when I’m craving one. I’ve made time to teach writing on a volunteer basis. I haven’t written the great American novel, but my stories are better than before. I hope.

I can’t say that the characters in my stories have saved any dogs or dolphins, but on their better days, they make a trip to the beach and they look out at the vast horizon. They take a good, long moment to see what they can see. And then they check the time and realize they should probably get back to work.

• the end •

Yuvi Zalkow lives writes works eats breathes bikes walks sleeps and brushes his teeth in Portland, OR, in a house that his wife says is Robin Egg Blue. He is currently working on a novel and in the MFA program at Antioch University.

(editor’s note: the guy in the picture above is not Yuvi Zalkow. We do not know the guy, and neither does Yuvi.)

Readers Steve and Sean dropped by the house the other day for coffee and a chat. We talked about Portland, hiking, music, Steve’s new magazine article, Ken Kesey, Eugene, New York, writing, and, of course, jobs.

Sean, an accomplished poet and an emerging travel writer, is a former teacher who’d been struck hard by Theresa Collins’s essay, The Truth about Quitting. After we’d polished off our Portland-sized iced coffees, Sean asked the big question:

How can I make more money?

As Soul Shelter’s Director of Fortune, I consider it my solemn duty to help readers become more prosperous.

So I offered Sean some hard truths about book publishing and some alternative ideas for making money with writing. And I described how some writers (not copywriters) regularly pull down $10,000 per month.

Sean jotted down a few furious notes, Steve chimed in, and the conversation moved on.

But afterwards I realized Sean had asked the wrong question. Worse, I had offered the wrong “answer.” My response should have been a counter-question:

“Sean, how do you want to spend your days?”

Because if Sean can truthfully say he wants to spend his days writing, then finding ways to achieve the goal of making more money is simple (not easy, but simple). One can’t examine methods until goals are defined. “Making more money” is merely a by-product of work. It isn’t an acceptable goal because it isn’t predicated on how you want to spend your days. If you want to experience fortune or fulfillment, you must spend your days—first and foremost—in a manner satisfactory to you.

Last month, Three Questions Seekers Must Ask Themselves described the process of setting a goal, identifying a strategy to achieve it, then appraising both the strategy and one’s own ability to execute it. Taken together, the Three Questions form a powerful goal-achievement methodology. The core question is, What is your Goal?

If Sean’s goal is clear, surely there are many ways he can go about achieving it.

Let’s consider Reality A—today, with our goal unachieved—and Reality B, the future, with goal achieved. Our mission is simple: To journey from Reality A to Reality B. Reality A is defined by a set of behaviors that keep us grounded—or tethered—to current circumstance. Moving toward Reality B, therefore, requires adopting new behaviors. But “behavior” is shorthand for “habits.”

So to move from Reality A to Reality B, we must break our Reality A habits. Long-standing habits limit us to long-standing behaviors. As reader Brigid puts it, “if you keep doin’ what you’re doin’, you’re gonna keep gettin’ what you got.”

Reaching Reality B demands acquiring new, uncomfortable, habits. In fact, achieving any significant goal is sure to require uncomfortable action. It’s amazing how frequently we relearn that one can’t create Reality B by repeating Reality A behaviors.

Here are The Three Questions revisited:

1. What is my goal?

2. What new behaviors does Reality B require?

3. Which Reality A behaviors should I replace?

Look at the steps defined in The Three Questions: They provide the clues to new actions needed.

Part of the challenge is that even positive behaviors can hold us back when we become too dogmatic about them. For instance, I’m pretty anal about my Monday through Friday morning stretching/exercise routine. But a pulled muscle recently forced to me to cancel my heretofore inviolable regimen for a week, so I started walking instead. What a difference that made! Now I’m hooked on taking a couple of long walks each week, while continuing the morning exercises—minus the drillmaster attitude. So one cornerstone of achieving greater prosperity is breaking habits.

The other is asking the right question: How do you want to spend your days?

You may also enjoy:

“Entrepreneurship: A Primer”

“The Soul of an Entrepreneur, the DNA of a Business”

“The Heroic Journey“

“After several generations of ‘technological improvement’… we have become a people who cannot think about anything important.”
—Wendell Berry

The Internet is widely celebrated as a democratic, informational, and connective blessing. But what if it also exacerbates the “American malady” that the poet Stephen Spender bemoaned back in 1949?—“The commercialization of spiritual goods on an enormous scale, in the same way as material goods are commercialized.”

What if the Internet poses a threat to the cultivation of a rich, reflective inner life? What if Internet-mentality endangers Art—its creation, its place in our culture, and our ability to appreciate it?—or the cultivation of real knowledge?

Ridiculous! you might say. The Internet as a cultural negative?! You’ve gotta be crazy!

Well, I do see the self-destructive irony of using the Internet to blog about the potential damage the Internet is wreaking on our spiritual lives. But here goes anyway.

I’ve recently sunk my teeth into three books that deeply and compellingly question the real nature of online culture, and the price we may be paying in our eagerness to embrace the Internet as a godsend. (Don’t get me wrong: I want you to keep reading the words on this screen).

1. Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob by cultural critic Lee Siegel. Published earlier this year, Siegel’s volume makes the most curmudgeonly arguments of the books I’m discussing today—but Against the Machine also advances a number of salient points. The most arresting, and hard to dispute, is Siegel’s assertion that culture on the Internet—that is, the ‘cultural offerings’ most readily available to browsers through Google rankings, etc—is often qualitatively of the lowest common denominator.

Though the Internet promises freer access to information or culture than older mass-culture media, Siegel contends that it does so by using the same mass-culture formula used by network TV: Popularity = Value. And a trawl through mainstream primetime offerings will immediately show the cultural folly of such a formulation.

Siegel is not alone in complaining that the Internet as we know it actually lowers the cultural bar, rather than raising it to accommodate a refined cultural hunger in the American public. It’s a concern being echoed in numerous places these days.

The effect on American youths of prolonged Internet use is a point of special worry. Recently the Los Angeles Times featured a prominent review of writer Mark Bauerlein’s new book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. Bauerlein argues that the intellectual atmosphere of the Internet is one of information detrimentally streamlined. Consequently, instead of nurturing real curiosity and undertaking real inquiry, students reared in the Internet age adopt a kind of intellectual tunnel vision fixated on results and indifferent to substance. They “seek out what they already hope to find, and they want it fast and free, with a minimum of effort. … Going online habituates them to juvenile mental habits.”

Similarly, the cover of the current July/August issue of the Atlantic Monthly bears the bold words, Is Google Making us Stoopid? Affixed to the article is the telling subtitle, What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Writer Nicholas Carr begins the piece with a confession:

I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. … The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online. … And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

Carr’s article is interesting and well worth taking in, but his insights have their antecedents in an eloquent book which receives nary a mention in the Atlantic article—the second in my three-book profile today…

2. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age by Sven Birkerts. Published in 1998, well before Internet addiction became a societal norm, Birkerts’ book was astonishingly prophetic—and hence destined for the honorable obscurity allotted to things well ahead of their time. A decade ago Birkerts foresaw the ominous consequences of our rush to move our existences online—the many dangers the Internet posed to the spirit, and correspondingly to the rich stuff of the spirit, such as art:

Our lives are busy, distracted, multitracked, stressed. We may have altered our cognitive apparatus—speeding up, learning to deal with complex assaults of stimuli—in such a way that we can no longer take in the [printed] word [of literature] as it is meant to be taken in. …

While circuit and screen are ideal conduits for certain kinds of data—they are entirely inhospitable to the more subjective materials that have always been the stuff of art. That is to say, they are antithetical to inwardness. …

Being online and having the subjective experience of depth, of existential coherence, are mutually exclusive situations. …

What I fear is a continued withering-away of [artistic and creative] influence. … My nightmare scenario is not one of neotroglodytes grunting and wielding clubs, but of efficient and prosperous information managers living in the shallows of what it means to be human and not knowing the difference. I fear a world become sanitized and superficial.

Digital/Internet culture is collective or ‘horizontal,’ says Birkerts. It is a world of disembodiment, fragmentation, and abstraction, predicated entirely upon instantaneousness. And though it was not yet so at the time Birkerts wrote The Gutenberg Elegies, the Internet has since become a realm of rampant commercialization too. It therefore stands opposed to the real culture, creations, and relationships which give meaning to our lives.

In contrast to our online mentality of today, says Birkerts, our pre-Internet mentality allowed for a greater number of deep, personal (‘vertical’), and cohesive experiences. For example, the old fashioned acts of reading or experiencing art entailed the “slow, painful, delicious excavation of the self.” Today, however, we are reducing—if not abandoning—these rich, subjective experiences in favor of constant connectivity and the light-speed acquisition of data. In other words, we’re trading inward cultivation for the collection of lifeless information.

“We will bring our terminals, our modems, and menus further and further into our former privacies; we will implicate ourselves by degree in the unitary life, and there may come a day when we no longer remember that there was any other life. …

To me the wager is intuitively clear: we gain access and efficiency at the expense of subjective self-awareness. …

We have created invisible elsewheres that are as immediate as our actual surroundings. We have fractured the flow of time, layered it into competing simultaneities. We learn to do five things at once or pay the price. …

We are experiencing the gradual but steady erosion of human presence.

The Gutenberg Elegies and Against the Machine share an important central message, which, for all our connectedness in the Internet Age, has been much too rarely transmitted till now. It is this:

As our personal time becomes more and more ‘virtual,’ as we become increasingly enmeshed in 24-hour connectivity, our individuality—our very identity—comes under threat, for the psycho-physical experience of staring at a terminal is the same for everyone. Individuality, personality, and independent thought are deeply conditioned by varied experience—there is no changing that. Of course, information and ideas have a role in shaping us as individuals—and these are accessible through a computer terminal—but they alone cannot sustain individuality. Contrary to popular belief, the democratization of information cannot itself liberate people. And what power it possesses to do so may well be countered, even dispelled altogether, by the dangerous flattening of psycho-physical experience produced in all of us by prolonged ‘screen-time.’

This brings me to the third book in today’s discussion.

3. The Twilight of American Culture by Morris Berman. Published in 2001, Berman’s volume takes aim and fires at a relatively new American culture in which “community life has been reduced to shopping malls,” and “endless promotional/commercial bullshit…masks a deep systemic emptiness.” He presents engrossing parallels between the onset of the European Dark Ages and the consumer decadence subsuming our national culture.

His societal critique is broader than the subject of the Internet, but it inherently takes up the soul-damaging aspects of the Internet Age, and sounds notes similar to those of Siegel and Birkerts.

Mass culture [is] not culture, but entertainment, and…to believe a society could become cultured via this process [is] a fatal mistake. … [Nevertheless] the drift in the United States today is toward the submergence of the self into the Mass Mind, a trend that is powerfully encouraged by corporate culture and the new technology. Along with this—as in the early Middle Ages—we see the dissolution of interiority, and the loss or denigration of individual judgment and achievement. All this is a major factor of the disintegration of American culture, which, popular opinion to the contrary, is a herd culture, not an individualistic one.

Berman’s argument builds to an inspiring discussion of what he calls a “New Monastic Individual,” a kind of person who quietly ‘checks out’ of the “total commercial environment” and espouses habits or causes that will help to sustain our culture through its coming ‘twilight’ in the same way that a coterie of monks preserved the Western world’s cultural treasures during the Dark Ages.

[New Monastic Individuals] belong to no class, have no membership in a hierarchy. They form a kind of ‘unmonied aristocracy,’ free of bosses, supervision, and what is typically called ‘work.’ They work very hard, in fact, but as they love their work and do it for its intrinsic interest, this work is not much different from play. In the context of contemporary American culture, such people are an anomaly, for they have no interest in the world of business success and mass consumerism. … [But] the new monastic individual is the purest embodiment of the human spirit.

Against the Machine, The Gutenberg Elegies, and The Twilight of American Culture form a beautiful triumvirate on the themes of Technology versus the Soul, Commodity versus the Spirit, Creativity versus Commerce. The reader will find valuable counsel embedded in each book.

I hope you’ll explore these three volumes in themselves, but to close I’ll offer some major takeaways:

Against the Machine: Popularity does not equal value; Log off; Go outside; Have a face-to-face conversation.

The Gutenberg Elegies: Information is not everything, neither is connectivity; Plumb the present moment; Be cautious toward electronic devices; Protect and nourish your subjectivity; Spend more time with the printed page.

The Twilight of American Culture: The cash value of things is not their only value; Avoid mistaking the “tools of the good life” for the good life itself; Defy the “commodity culture”; Be “monastic.”

You might also enjoy:

“Happiness is Turning Off the Computer”

“Fixing a Broken Work Model”

“Want to Achieve Your Goal? Avoid E-Mail!“

We received well over three hundred entries to our essay contest, and today announce the winners. All the prize checks (totaling $2,000) have been sent, and the winning essays lined up in our post bank for you to enjoy over coming weeks (several essays already appear on the site).

Culling the best essays was a tough job, and ranking the final eight tougher still. But reading the top entries over and over again was pure pleasure. Here are the winners:

Grand Prize
Theresa Collins of New Jersey, for The Truth About Quitting, which appears below. While puncturing the conceit of traditional Western thought that life should be free of contradictions, Theresa’s essay story reminds us that quitting doesn’t mean failing, and that sometimes, happiness comes not from achieving goals, but rather “from revising them, from lovingly sorting through them and discarding the ones that don’t work.”

Second Place
Yuvi Zalkow of Portland, Oregon for Dogs and Dolphins, a wonderfully funny piece that turns the “I quit my awful job to do something I love” form upside-down—sort of. Dogs and Dolphins will appear on this page Monday, July 28.

Third Place
Vance H. White of Niceville, Florida took third prize with The Bard of Gooseneck Bay, another piece about teaching—but with a twist. We’ll feature The Bard later this summer.

Runnerups
Ken Korczak’s delightful Twenty-Seven Years of Zen Destroyed My Life appeared on Soul Shelter earlier this month, and we featured Melissa Hanser’s powerful Lighting the Way for Others in May. Terri Davis Smith’s moving essay, originally entitled No More Sweater Sets, appeared in May.

We loved the gritty detail of Simon A. Smith’s These Things Happen, posted June 22. And finally, keep your eyes out for Knuckle Down, Knuckle Up, by the deeply talented Ainsley Drew. Now, enjoy The Truth About Quitting.

The Truth About Quitting by Theresa Collins

What if I had listened to Mr. Howard? I was nineteen years old, tote bag hitched under my arm, sensible shoes on my feet, the cushiony kind you can stand in all day, and I was walking down the endless hallway after my first day subbing seventh grade. It was June, two weeks left of school, and there was no air conditioning.

And I was almost in tears, the kind where you’re not quite crying, but your eyes are swollen pink from tears about to slosh over.

Mr. Howard stood at his door, flashed a kind smile, and asked how my day went. When he saw the look on my face, he waved me in. I sat on the edge of a wobbly student chair and Mr. Howard handed me a tissue. “It’s okay,” he said.

And I felt a little better. Mr. Howard was a thirtysomethingish teacher, new that year to the school, my old high school. And he was friendly, brown eyed, charismatic. Everyone’s new favorite teacher.

I prepared myself for inspiration, for a speech about how subbing isn’t like real teaching, how the first year is always tough, but how you learn, you get better, you change the lives of children and it’s all worth it. I wanted a real-life version of a teacher movie, a guide to becoming Michelle Pfeiffer.

But what he said was this: “You should quit now.”

I didn’t think I heard him correctly. “What?”

Perhaps he didn’t understand my situation. I told him what happened, how the students threw wads of paper at each other (and me), how they kept switching the fan and radio on and off when I looked away, how they didn’t want to learn. “But it’s subbing, and it’s the end of June, and I’m brand-new. I’m sure that’s why.”

He shook his head sadly. “After this year I think teaching is like triage. Everyone is hurting and you can’t help them all. It’s true that most of the kids don’t want to learn, and they prevent you from really helping the ones who do.”

He went on to give the most un-inspirational advice I’ve ever heard, affirming all my worst fears about entering the profession.

And I felt angry, defensive, challenged him when he raked my beloved theorists Piaget and Kohlberg over coals and described the disconnect between learning about teaching from people with PhDs and actually teaching. I leaned back in my chair, stared him down. “So what are you going to do about it? Are you quitting?”

“I’m handing in my resignation letter today actually.”

I have to tell you, I didn’t believe him. But he did it. He really did hand in his letter that day, and he wasn’t back the next year. I returned though. I subbed at my high school for three springs before I graduated and landed a full-time gig teaching middle school.

Before I left the room that day, Mr. Howard gave me his number, and I thumbed it into my cell phone. Call me, he said, if you have any questions about teaching.

I never called him.

I was an optimist, and one bitter, vocal teacher and a bad day couldn’t stop me. I’d invested four years of sweat and tears earning my B.A. in English Education, so how could I throw it away and give up?

Quitting was not an option. So I spent the next year at college taking education classes and yammering off the ears of my roommates with constant soul-searching. I wondered whether I should teach Elementary or Secondary Education, whether I should get a Master’s in Administration or Counseling, or maybe even a PhD, so I could instruct future teachers. I had my whole future hypothetically planned out.

The thing is, I never seriously entertained the gaping hole of dread floating between my heart and my stomach, the feeling that the future I meticulously planned was all wrong for me.

Student teaching came and went, and my doubts grew. My boyfriend comforted me each night and one night, sprawled on the floor of my dorm amid stacks of student papers, I asked him if he thought I could ever enjoy teaching.

And he said, “You should quit now. It’s killing you.”

I almost broke up with him on the spot. I clutched the student papers. “You clearly don’t know me! I can’t throw away a semester’s worth of tuition! I have to finish.”

So I finished student teaching, earned an A minus, and taught middle school for two years before I reached my breaking point. I snapped at my loved ones, cried in my classroom after school with the door shut, cried at home, felt anger and bitterness stiffening my spirit like ice.

I finally quit in June, the end of my second year, to the surprise of everyone, especially my supervisor. She told me I’d been a great teacher.

Maybe, I thought to myself, but maybe not. I think that was one of the hardest parts. I left teaching feeling like I had a red, teacher’s-pen ‘F’ scrawled across my forehead. I desperately wished I had a heartwarming story to tell, a moment of lucidity with a child in need, a feeling that all the hard work paid off. For years, ever since I did a career report in eighth grade, I’d labeled myself “future teacher” and later, “teacher.” To me, “teacher” meant a kind person, a person who patiently loved children, a lifetime devoted to kindness. And the dreaded alternative, “business,” meant pure, money-grubbing evil.

It’s hard to leave behind a label, an expectation you’ve had your whole adult life, the dream you worked towards in college. When I stopped calling myself a teacher and awkwardly described my new, quasi-human resources position at barbeques and holidays, I started feeling that I’d quit being a kind person too.

It’s been a year now, and I haven’t found my dream job, but I finally feel like I’m on my way. I’m working in human resources at an office, and I started noticing things. I’m happier. And I don’t cry at night, and I haven’t morphed into an evil, greedy ogre.

When I handed in my resignation letter and walked out of my supervisor’s office last year, I was surprised by the relief I felt. I wasn’t wracked with doubt, the way I’d lived for years. I was free, and I felt alive, vibrant. My inner world sparkled.

For me, happiness hasn’t come from achieving my goals, it’s come from revising them, from lovingly sorting through them and discarding the ones that don’t work, the labels that don’t describe me anymore. To do that, I’ve had to entertain doubts, to accept the idea that maybe, just maybe, certain professions aren’t right for me, and that it’s okay to make a mistake, and then fix it.

I’ve discovered that quitting doesn’t mean failure.

I think Mr. Howard knew the truth about quitting, but, like so much advice, we can’t follow it until we discover it ourselves. Ultimately, I’m not sorry that I taught for two years. I’m just grateful that after two years I finally listened to myself and made the decision to quit before I taught for two more years. Mr. Howard described teaching as triage, picking the most wounded person and concentrating your efforts there. And sometimes, when that wounded person is you, it’s best to quit, to leap into the chilly unknown and dare to believe that it can become better than what you left behind.

You may also enjoy:

“Creativity Vs. Commerce: Stalking the Spotlight”

“The Soul of an Entrepreneur, the DNA of a Business“

Do actors have it the hardest of anybody seeking to balance fortune and fulfillment? We’re all familiar with the image of the hard-working waiter/waitress shuttling cups and plates by day in order to hit the stage by night, or maybe, by some glorious stroke of luck, break into the movies.

Barbara Rubenstein’s essay, a submission to our recent Soul Shelter Award, seemed a perfect fit for our new Creativity Vs. Commerce thread. Enjoy.

• Stalking the Spotlight by Barbara Rubenstein •

Announce, when a mere pipsqueak, that when you grow up you want to become an actor, and it’s a safe bet your family will clutch their hearts and moan: “Oh, m’god. You’re going to starve to death.”

It’s an even safer bet that your family will not moan: “Oh, m’god. You’re going to make it and you’ll never know the joy of being a true artist.”

It wasn’t until I was an actor and a grownup (though some people feel this is mutually exclusive!) that I questioned why it had to be “either/or.” Didn’t the audience, without whom we had no reason to perform, no need to communicate, have a say in the matter?

If the audience was moved, if they were touched even just by the release of laughter, did a ticket price or the easy accessibility of the subject matter negate the possibility that this could be art? Where did this “you must starve/suffer or you’re a soulless, commercial slickster” come from?

I’ve long suspected that it originated with whoever executed the breathtaking cave paintings in France. It’s easy to imagine the artist becoming so carried away depicting the hunt, that he forgot to participate in it. Thus provoking a visit from a clansman who announced, “Sorry to break the news, pal. I mean I like that Benjamin Moore red you’re putting on the rock and all but … you didn’t whack the mammoth today so you’re not getting any of its meat.”

This seems to have progressed through the ages to the romantic notion of the starving artist in a garret, a glass of wine and a sputtering candle by his side. It was no doubt advanced by all those not living in a crummy room, drinking bad vino and worrying about the candle burning down to a nub.

Once upon a time, back in New York after a nice run in a national company, I auditioned for an Off Broadway play. I was thrilled.

I couldn’t wait to read for a non-musical, perform in a drafty, leaky theatre, and get paid peanuts. In other words, I couldn’t wait to become fulfilled as an “artiste.”

An assistant handed out material which I expected to be a scene from the play. Instead, I was confronted with a three-page questionnaire which I was told to fill out for the director.

Question #1: How do you prepare your roles? I never read Question #2. This wasn’t a director, it was a pseudo-intellectual jerk.

I marched to the exit, finding to my surprise that another actor was busy actually filling out Question #1. Sneaking a peak over his shoulder (shades of a high-school geometry test), I discovered a kindred spirit. His answer in regard to his role preparation? “First I turn the oven on to 350.”

It’s surprising that any actor who’s ever experienced that breathless hush of a captive audience can still advance the “art vs. commerce” argument. But we’re great at it. We beat ourselves up with it.

There is an unofficial caste system at work in the acting world. Those actors who have made megabucks — but have done so via interesting work in worthy projects — are the gods and we bow low before them. Those who have been a member of an edgy Off-Off-B’way repertory company for years, while never being able to give up their day jobs, are our heroes and we mentally present them with medals. Those who work often, are able to pay their rent, and might even have a savings account, are only grudgingly given their due.

Growing up, I was aware of none of this. Entranced by acting at the age of six, I aimed myself like a tiny arrow at the target and let fly. My teachers (dance, voice, acting) were all pros who’d had careers. I absorbed the goal as well as the training: be a working professional. The art lay in being good enough to be hired by those who would actually pay you to do what you most loved to do.

It wasn’t until I was in college, a theatre major at a university with a department that had a national reputation, that I realized, “Muses, we have a problem.”

My teachers deemed me persona non grata for having gotten my Actors Equity union card after my sophomore year. They had not yet drilled me in all the paths to truth and beauty; I was not yet fully schooled in Chekhov, Greek drama, Ibsen. Who did I think I was? It was obvious from their point of view that I had traded youth, energy and personality for a technique. It was obvious that I’d confused a union contract with being a real actor.

Fast forward to the summer after graduation where I became a replacement in a musical/sketch comedy revue that was in town from New York. The show was a success, yet the star of the revue would make an audio tape of each performance and study it after the show. What hadn’t worked that night, and why not? What could still be improved upon?

Nothing could have been more commercial and out-for-the-tourist-bucks than this revue, yet the lead worked his tail off to perfect his “art.” It was a more valuable lesson than I’d learned in four years of college.

Only an actor, when spying a terrific role in a meaty, interesting script can cry, “This one’s mine! I’ll do it for free.” (I’ve yet to hear of a business type whom, upon learning of an opening for a terrific executive position, cries, “That job’s mine! Don’t bother to pay me.”)

I’m as “wonderful project obsessed” as the next actor. I’ve spent hours in developmental readings, workshops, and filming no-budget movies, all as a means to bring a work, a subject matter, a point of view to life that might not otherwise see the light of day. And as a means to discover how far I can stretch my own skills and grow.

Yet a sneaky little part of me still wonders if it’s the art of the project that’s grabbed me, or if I’m somehow doing penance for all the bread-and-butter projects I’ve worked and been trained not to think of as art.

In the long run, I’ve been lucky enough to have done some shows that finally taught me it’s the audience who should be the arbiter of such things. I was one of only two white actors in an otherwise black show. A big, brassy musical with an embarrassing book that was trying out outside of New York. At the curtain call after the first preview, the audience (all black) literally rushed toward the stage, grabbing the hands of any cast member they could reach (including mine), and thanked us fervently for having brought their musical and social history to life. Glitz and glamour of the show aside, nobody could tell me I hadn’t passed a few hours as an artist that night — even while earning a living.

I’ve done an artsy, avant-guarde project with an actor noted in that field. The subject matter was genetic engineering and at the production read-through, before rehearsals started, we learned our script was so “exciting” that it put our set and costume designers both to sleep (not metaphorically). If the audience snores, is it still art?

Unlike writing, painting or music, an actor cannot practice his craft in a room by himself. It’s a collaborative effort, and the product, if you will, cannot be a product without an end consumer. The creative tension this engenders is not going away anytime soon. Yet it’s a tension that has moved art into the mainstream and turned mainstream into art. Whether one is just starting out with a fervor to perform anything anywhere, or a veteran who wants nothing more than to keep on going as long as George Burns, an actor can only be the richer — both practically and spiritually — for needing an audience.

You might also enjoy:

“Creativity Vs. Commerce: My Kid Could Paint That”

“Nourishing the Creative Impulse”

“Steve Martin Tells the Story Before the Glory“

Derek Sivers had a problem.

As the leader of a successful touring band, he needed a way to make his CDs available to fans everywhere, all the time—not just at concerts.

But Derek and his group were unattached to a major label, and big sellers like CDNow and Amazon required bands to have in-place agreements with large distributors. What was a hard-working, independent musician to do?

Derek decided to set up his own modest online sales channel, and soon friends from other bands were asking for help selling their music. Within a couple of years, the store, renamed CD Baby, was distributing the work of more than 90,000 artists. To date it’s paid independent musicians more than $70 million.

At Derek’s invitation, a couple of years back I visited CD Baby’s cavernous headquarters near Portland International Airport, and was knocked out by the depth and conviction of his entrepreneurial vision. Over the past month we caught up by e-mail. Following are excerpts from the conversation.

- Making a living playing music must have been deeply satisfying. Describe the moment you understood that CD Baby would become a full-time job and your focus would shift from playing to business. What went through your mind as the scale tipped?

The big thought was, “Oops! Well … as long as I’ve accidentally started something, and I don’t need the money, I might as well be really utopian about it.”

That’s when I decided to give CD Baby a real DNA that was not about making money, but all about being a distribution deal dream-come-true from a musician’s point of view. I considered it a utopian experiment more than a business. I was really surprised when it made money anyway.

Really I think the timing was just right. The world needed it, and nobody else was doing it. I was reluctant and actively fighting the growth of it, so when it grew anyway I knew it was meant to be and just accepted my new role in the world.

- I love what you just said: “a DNA that’s not about making money.” I’ve never met a single successful entrepreneur who began with the primary goal of making money. Every one had a higher purpose. What’s your take?

People or companies that are only in it for the money seem to have a metaphorical odor. You might end up patronizing their business anyway, but feel kind of icky about it.

People or companies that are really doing it for the love of the subject seem to glow. You like doing business with them. You smile more often. You feel better about it. And that’s why you end up telling your friends how wonderful they are, and that’s why those companies do better.

People who truly love what they do are more likely to put that extra effort into excellence than those who are only in it for the money. The difference between “really good” and “passionately excellent” can be massive, and take a lot of maniacal work to achieve.

- CD Baby took off shortly before the explosion in digital music sales. How have you adapted?

We didn’t simply stick to CDs. As soon as iTunes launched, CD Baby became their biggest supplier of music, via our Digital Distribution program. Today iTunes is our single biggest source of income.

But we still sell CDs because people still want them. My original vision was to help the artists, regardless of how the music medium evolves.

- That vision clearly offers irresistible value to your customers, because CD Baby now serves more than 200,000 artists. What’s next for CD Baby? And what’s next for you personally?

On CD Baby’s tenth birthday, March 2008, I announced that I don’t work there anymore.

I’m more of an entrepreneur than a manager. I enjoy experimenting and inventing, and know that others can manage much better than me. So, in order to free up my time (and mind) to create new services for musicians, I completely stepped out of CD Baby. Good scary challenge.

After reading The Art of Learning I was thinking of mastery: committing yourself to years of achieving mastery of one single thing.

My first thought was computer programming, but that didn’t feel fulfilling enough. I enjoy it, but only as a means. Then I realized the thing I could really commit myself to a lifetime pursuit of mastery is entrepreneurship. It satisfies me on every level—much more for personal and altruistic reasons than financial.

- Wow. That’s one big hunk o’ learning.

But—what the hell is mastery of entrepreneurship? Starting one successful company? Ten? Or is it something else entirely? There’s no championship, no finish line, especially since happiness is a crucial barometer.

And if entrepreneurship is about creating a new company, then focusing on that means starting a company, achieving proof of success, but not getting involved with ongoing management after that, since management is a different skill. The focused entrepreneur should then start a new company.

As for what’s next—I have so many plans for new companies and services, but nothing worth talking about yet since they don’t exist, and we all know how plans change between paper and reality. In fact CD Baby was only meant to be like PayPal—processing credit cards for my friends—but it turned into an online retail and digital distributor. So, I’ll just quietly launch my new ideas and watch them morph into whatever my customers really need them to be.

- You’ve produced a terrific new illustrated book (6M PDF), that, while targeting musicians, offers tight, offbeat advice any entrepreneur can use. I love your bullets: “Proudly exclude some people,” “Be an extreme version of yourself,” “Well-rounded doesn’t cut it,” and “Call the destination and ask for directions.” Tell us how the book and illustrations came about, and your goals for the work.

Thanks! For the illustrations, I just found a friend-of-a-friend named Heather Q in Portland. She and I sat together at a bar coming up with ideas that might illustrate each point (”This one’s about things getting easier once you do the initial work. How can we illustrate that? Hmm … How about a guy pushing a heavy boulder up a hill, and he’s almost at the top?”). Then she would go sketch out the ideas and come back for the next revision. She’s great.

Honestly I had no goal for the book. I didn’t want to sell it. Just spread it out there freely in hopes it’d help some fellow musicians.

Between every line of the interview, Derek confirms surprising truths about entrepreneurship. I’ll share more in future posts, but here are today’s big takeaways:

It’s Not About You

Entrepreneurship is not about you struggling to break through, you making the grade, you overcoming the odds, you getting rich. It’s about helping others achieve their goals: enabling others’ satisfaction, helping others earn a decent living, helping others succeed.

But it Starts with You …

… because the best place to discover the seed of a new business is at your own workplace. What problems do you face? What’s annoying? Solve that and you may have a business. My friend Jay calls it “scratching the self-serving itch.” And if you serve yourself effectively, you may serve many others well, too.

You may also enjoy:

“Pursuing Fortune and Fulfillment with Blogger Extraordinaire J.D. Roth”

“Three Things I Wish I’d Known Before Starting My Own Business”

“How to Go Solo Without a ‘Big Idea’“

(This post is an installment of CommonSensical, a periodic feature in which we offer timeless words from thinkers and artists new and old on the subject of getting a living while protecting one’s soul.)

In his essay “What Life Means to Me” (1905), the American novelist Jack London relates the formative experiences of his working life. The essay seems fitting to share following Independence Day, as London is keenly observant regarding the pursuit of happiness, prosperity, and social standing—or what Americans have more recently come to call ‘Upward Mobility.’

I was born in the working-class. Early I discovered enthusiasm, ambition, and ideals; and to satisfy these became the problem of my child-life. My environment was crude and rough and raw. I had no outlook, but an uplook rather. My place in society was at the bottom. Here life offered nothing but sordidness and wretchedness, both of the flesh and the spirit; for here flesh and spirit were alike starved and tormented.

Above me towered the colossal edifice of society, and to my mind the only way out was up. … In short, as I accepted the rising of the sun, I accepted that up above me was all that was fine and noble and gracious, all that gave decency and dignity to life, all that made life worth living and that remunerated one for his travail and misery. …

Here London captures a powerfully American theme, one that he will learn (as have most readers) to question. The theme goes like this: With improved social standing comes not only happiness but spiritual enrichment. In other words, increased wealth or stature in turn increases one’s nobleness, graciousness, decency and dignity.

I early inquired the rate of interest on invested money. … I ascertained the current rates of wages for workers of all ages, and the cost of living. From all this data I concluded that if I began immediately and worked and saved until I was fifty years of age, I could then stop working and enter into participation in a fair portion of the delights and goodnesses that would then be open to me higher up in society.

Young London did not wish to spend his prime years in work only to enjoy freedom and ease in a more decrepit season of his life (a model known as the Deferred Life Plan). No, instead he would become his own master. In the celebrated American style, he would mold himself into a wizard of business and create his own fortune. So,

At ten years of age, I became a newsboy on the streets of a city … I had a vision of myself becoming a bald-headed and successful merchant prince. …

For a while it seemed a viable path. By sixteen, London’s zeal had taken him up “the first rung of the business ladder. I was a capitalist. I owned a boat and a complete oyster pirating outfit.” But though he’d improved his financial lot, it turned out that nobleness, graciousness, and decency did not arrive as natural byproducts of success. Instead, London found himself exploiting his boat crew for the sake of profit.

And as it happened, he would climb no further up the business ladder, for he soon found himself reduced by the greed of competing oystermen, who raided his boat and “stole everything, even the anchors.”

So much for London’s business career.

From then on I was mercilessly exploited by other capitalists. I had the muscle, and they made money out of it while I made but a very indifferent living out of it. I was a sailor before the mast, a longshoreman, a roustabout; I worked in canneries, and factories, and laundries; I mowed lawns, and cleaned carpets, and washed windows. And I never got the full product of my toil. I looked at the daughter of the cannery owner, in her carriage, and knew that it was my muscle, in part, that helped drag along that carriage on its rubber tyres. I looked at the son of the factory owner, going to college, and knew that it was my muscle that helped, in part, to pay for the wine and good fellowship he enjoyed.

But I did not resent this. It was all in the game. They were the strong. Very well, I was strong. I would carve my way to a place amongst them and make money out of the muscles of other men. I was not afraid of work. I loved hard work. I would pitch in and work harder than ever and eventually become a pillar of society.

And just then, as luck would have it, I found an employer that was of the same mind. I was willing to work, and he was more than willing that I should work. I thought I was learning a trade. In reality, I had displaced two men. … I was doing the work of both for thirty dollars per month.

London now experienced a bitter irony: the lust for profit that drove industry could destroy an industry’s most precious resource, it’s best worker’s inborn love of work.

This employer worked me nearly to death. A man may love oysters, but too many oysters will disincline him toward that particular diet. And so with me. Too much work sickened me. I did not wish ever to see work again. I fled from work. I became a tramp … wandering over the United States and sweating bloody sweats in slums and prisons. …

I was now, at the age of eighteen, beneath the point at which I had started. I was down in the cellar of society. … The things I there saw gave me a terrible scare.

London’s avid upward mobility had come to seem more like a steep descent. For now he must not only contend with his natural born poverty, but with the oppressive shame of having failed in his social climb. What to do? London reexamined society, and came to a new conclusion about his options, one that would teach him further difficult lessons.

All things were commodities, all people bought and sold. The one commodity that labour had to sell was muscle.

But … there was no way of replenishing the labourer’s stock of muscle. The more he sold of his muscle, the less of it remained to him. It was his one commodity, and each day his stock of it diminished. …

So there had to be a better way to rise in the world than by using up the unrenewable resource of one’s physical strength. Surely work of the mind, though one might remain poor while doing it, would at least dignify one in the eyes of fellow men.

If I could not live on the parlour floor of society, I could, at any rate, have a try at the attic. It was true, the diet there was slim, but the air at least was pure. So I resolved to sell no more muscle, and to become a vendor of brains.

Then began a frantic pursuit of knowledge. I returned to California and opened the books. …

Given his disillusioning experience of the working world, London’s self-education led him to socialist ideas. He soon found himself hanging out with “intellectual revolutionists.”

… I met strong and alert-brained … members of the working-class; unfrocked preachers too wide in their Christianity for any congregation of Mammon-worshippers; professors broken on the wheel of university subservience to the ruling class and flung out because they were quick with knowledge which they strove to apply to the affairs of mankind. …

Here life was clean, noble, and alive. Here life rehabilitated itself, became wonderful and glorious; and I was glad to be alive. I was in touch with great souls who exalted flesh and spirit over dollars and cents, and to whom the thin wail of the starved slum child meant more than all the pomp and circumstance of commercial expansion and world empire. …

But London would learn that any hunger for social status and its ostensible dignity, like the desire for enormous wealth, necessitated eating food that made one sick. And a chief dish was hypocrisy.

As a brain merchant I was a success. Society opened its portals to me … [but] my disillusionment proceeded rapidly. I sat down to dinner with the masters of society, and with the wives and daughters of the masters of society. The women were gowned beautifully, I admit; but to my naïve surprise I discovered that they were of the same clay as all the rest of the women I had known down below in the cellar. …

It was not this, however, so much as their materialism, that shocked me. … [They] prattled … dear little moralities; but … the dominant key of the life they lived was materialistic. …

The so-called masters of society, the “preachers, politicians, business men, professors, and editors” were equally disappointing to London, who’d hoped “to find men who were clean, noble, and alive, whose ideals were clean, noble, and alive.”

I ate meat with them, drank wine with them, automobiled with them, and studied them. It is true, I found many that were clean and noble; but with rare exceptions, they were not alive. … Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life, there were merely the unburied dead — clean and noble, like well-preserved mummies, but not alive. …

I talked … with captains of industry, and marveled at how little traveled they were in the realm of intellect. On the other hand, I discovered that their intellect, in the business sense, was abnormally developed. Also, I discovered that their morality, where business was concerned, was nil.

The original goal, for London the boy, had been to attain the American dream of deliverance from poverty through personal initiative and upward mobility—to increase his social standing, find happiness, and gain spiritual enrichment all in one. But now he found himself surrounded by half-men—prosperous and well-respected, perhaps, but spiritually empty.

This delicate, aristocratic-featured gentleman, was a dummy director and a tool of corporations that secretly robbed widows and orphans. … This man, talking soberly and earnestly about the beauties of idealism and the goodness of God, had just betrayed his comrades in a business deal. … This man, who endowed chairs in universities, perjured himself in courts of law over a matter of dollars and cents. …

It was the same everywhere, crime and betrayal, betrayal and crime—men who were alive, but who were neither clean nor noble, men who were clean and noble, but who were not alive. …

Morally and spiritually I was sickened. …

Now, in light of years spent struggling upward through the social strata in search of wealth, respectability, and spiritual fulfillment, London suddenly recognized a more meaningful wealth—and a natural dignity—he’d possessed at the beginning.

I remembered my days and nights of sunshine and starshine, where life was all a wild sweet wonder, a spiritual paradise of unselfish adventure and ethical romance. …

So I went back to the working-class, in which I had been born and where I belonged. I care no longer to climb. …

“What Life Means to Me” culminates as a Socialist testimony, but it’s more than manifesto. Beyond its political position, it rings with belief in the human spirit. It affirms the private struggles of individuals passionately pursuing their dreams despite the threats of a lean pocketbook, lifelong obscurity, limitations imposed by class, or the scorn of their contemporaries.

I look forward to a time when man shall progress upon something worthier and higher than his stomach, when there will be a finer incentive to impel men to action than the incentive of to-day, which is the incentive of the stomach. I retain my belief in the nobility and excellence of the human. I believe that spiritual sweetness and unselfishness will conquer the gross gluttony of to-day. And last of all, my faith is in the working-class. As some Frenchman has said, “The stairway of time is ever echoing with the wooden shoe going up, the polished boot descending.”

Read “What Life Means to Me” in its entirety here.

You might also enjoy:

“Time for Everything”

“Fulfillment: A Work in Progress”

“Recognizing the Opportunity Within“

There’s lots of Zen this and Zen that traversing the blog-o- and book-o-spheres these days, but few offerings have delighted us like Ken Korczak’s piece, a submission to Soul Shelter’s First-Person Essay Award.

Twenty-Seven Years of Zen Destroyed My Life

So I have been practicing Zen meditation every day for 27 years, and it has destroyed my life. Now, when I say, “destroyed my life,” that is not a bad thing, nor a good thing. You see, after 27 years of Zen, for something to be “good” or “bad” becomes a very problematic concept. Things like “good” or “bad” lose their meaning. Even the word “meaning” loses its meaning. So you can already understand why Zen has destroyed my life, even though it never happened. Zen did not destroy my life because my life was the way it was even before 27 years of Zen, except I didn’t know it.

It’s like what Zen master Shunryu Suzuki suggests in his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. He says everyone is enlightened all the time, except they don’t know it. Now I realize that he was right. In other words, you don’t need 27 years of Zen to destroy your life because it has already happened to all of you. Suzuki also says that before you achieve Zen Enlightenment, you think it is something special, but after you achieve it, you realize that it is nothing special. He was dead right about that, too.

One of the problems, however, is when you have this realization it destroys your life, even though that’s not a problem because it never happened in the first place. In the end, nothing happens. There even isn’t an “in the end.” The fact that there could be “an end” to something is rendered ridiculous after 27 years of Zen, believe me.

I drive my wife crazy because I talk like this all the time, which is just one of the reasons why I say Zen has destroyed my life. For example, my wife might mention something Oprah Winfrey said on TV about how important it is for couples to communicate, and I say, “Oh that Oprah Winfrey is such a phony and a witless blockhead!” My wife retorts that Oprah makes some good points. Then I say the concept of “good” has no basic meaning. Oprah blabs on TV because it makes people give her money, that’s all. My wife can’t understand what I’m talking about. It’s a problem, yet my wife puts up with me, so it ends up not being a problem. This makes sense since there was no problem to begin with. You start realizing things like this after 27 years of Zen.

I once wrote a column on popular Web site. The article suggested that people should stop worrying about things simply because none of us have anything to worry about because of the obvious fact that none of us exist. The article spread like a virus across the Internet. In a short time, more than 1,000 posted responses suggesting that I was insane. Some people were insulted by my suggestion that they don’t exist, some called it a “whacked theory” and “mental masturbation” and a lot worse. I even got threatening e-mails.

Let me tell you, if you want to get people really upset, just suggest to them that they are not real, but only think they are real. Believe me, they will get extremely irritated with you. But why? It’s because people are heavily invested in the idea that they have an existence-a real, solid existence. They want that. Even if their lives are miserable, boring and bland, they will feel threatened if you suggest that their miserable lives are not real. What’s interesting is that if people are happy and leading exciting, adventurous lives, they will be less threatened by the idea that their lives are bogus illusions. They won’t care as much. They’re happy anyway, so why should they mind if anything is real or not? Still, even some happy people will get upset if you tell them they don’t exist. Suddenly they are less happy because they are afraid of the idea that they are unreal. They want their happy existence to be real.

Yet, the concept that some people are happy and some are unhappy is facile because these values or nuances have no basic meaning once you start thinking about them. After 27 years of Zen, to say “I am happy” or “I am sad” are empty statements that only diverts one-and the diversion is not even really a diversion because there is nothing to be diverted from. Get it?

You might wonder how all of this started for me. Well, when I was in college working on a degree in journalism, I took an elective class from the philosophy department. It was a one-credit class called “Zen Meditation.” It was 90 minutes once a week. What we did was, come to class, sit on a pillow, and stare at a blank white wall. All we did was stare at the wall and concentrate on our breathing. If we had “thoughts” we were instructed to ignore them, and not be bothered by them. After about 25 minutes of staring at the wall, we got up and did a walking meditation, which took about 15 minutes. Then we sat down and stared at the wall for another 25 minutes. After that, the instructor rang a bell, meaning we were supposed to stop. We were supposed to stop doing nothing, and start doing something again. That part is weird. Then he led a discussion about Zen, and we were to read Suzuki’s book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.

One of the hilarious things about the class was that there were two fundamentalist Christian Bible believers attending. They did what they had to do to earn their single, measly college credit, including the meditation, but then in the discussion portion, they heaped scorn upon the whole thing and kept saying things like, “This is all so ridiculous! Why can’t people just read the Bible and find out what Jesus wants for us, follow His advice, and then lead a good, moral life?” And they would also say things like, “We’d all be better off giving our lives to Jesus and not wasting our time staring at a blank wall!” For some reason, these comments caused everyone to laugh, even if they agreed with the Christians.

Yet, everybody hated the class, and not just the Christians. Only eight of the original 20 of us finished the class. I have to give the two Christians credit-they finished the class, but never gave up their loathing of it, and they never stopped urging people to “go with Jesus.” Anyway, staring at a blank wall is extremely difficult. It drives people crazy. Nobody wants to do it, or enjoys it, even if it means one college credit toward a diploma. What’s weird is that I not only finished the class, but for some reason, I continued to meditate at least once a day, and I have done so for the past 27 years.

A lot of people point out to me that I am obviously a political liberal. They think that this is a contradiction because after 27 years of Zen, I really shouldn’t be a liberal or a conservative, and that I should be neither, but this issue is just a big red herring. Whether someone is a liberal or a conservative is not the point. The point is to see that one is either a Liberal or a Conservative. If you’re a liberal, then be a liberal, if you’re a conservative, then be a conservative. You just see it for what it is. Get it?

I have a friend named Mike who is a brilliant computer scientist. He’s from North Dakota. When Mike figures complex math equations, he does them so fast it looks like he’s writing a letter. Mike thinks I am nutty, and, in his words, “a flake.” Mike is your classic skeptic and atheist. He is a materialistic guy. He doesn’t even believe in psychology unless it is behavioral psychology. Everything is about basic cause and effect to him. All the rest is speculation. So, anyway, I asked him that if he thinks I am such “a flake” why does he waste his time hanging out with me” And Mike said, “Well, you’re a flake, but you know you’re a flake. That’s different from being a flake.” I thought, “Wow! Mike’s life has been destroyed by Zen and the lucky SOB didn’t even have to stare at a wall once a day for 27 years!” But then, neither did I!

It’s the same for you readers. Like my life, your life has been destroyed by Zen. Some of you know it, some of you don’t. But it doesn’t matter whether you know it not because the situation remains the same. It took 27 years for Zen to destroy my life, but it wasn’t wasted time. It wasn’t anything. It would have happened anyway. But, ultimately, nothing happened. Nothing HAD to happen, so nothing DID happen. Get it?

You may also enjoy:

“Bushido”

“Born Ready”

“The Heroic Journey“