I was Tokyo for a couple of weeks, working on my doctoral research and seeing family and friends between interviews and writing sessions. One night I enjoyed dinner with Brad, a longtime buddy who’s been in mobile communications for some ten years. He’d lost his job a few months back, and wanted to talk about life, work — and going solo.

“I went to see a recruiter about a month before I got canned,” he said over a Club sandwich at a basement café in Omotesando. “I told him, ‘I know I’m going to get the ax, and want to see if I can find something preemptively.’

“The guy looked at me like I’d sprouted green dreadlocks. ‘Don’t quit your job now,’ he urged. ‘Nokia just let 60 people go, and a bunch of them are showing up here. Stay put as long as you can!’

“Two months later, that recruiter’s company closed down, and he himself was out of a job.”

As I listened, I tucked into my maguro tuna garlic steak. Outrageously good. Brad continued.

“That mindset — that your well-being and success depends on an organization — just blows me away. Now that I’m older, I see how I’m the one creating value, I’m the one who makes things happen.”

He went on to detail the events leading up to losing his job, his anxiety over continuing to provide effectively for his wife and children, his unforeseen excitement about being forced to pursue career and personal goals closer to his true self.

Reflective, Brad returned to his sandwich. I told him I got his drift about the “dependency mindset,” and that it often results in too much work time spent resolving conflicts unrelated to operations. Turf battles, personality clashes, political struggles. Those things are a huge part of salaried employment.

“In fact,” I said,  “most office jobs can be done in three or four concentrated, uninterrupted hours of real work or day. It’s the attendant nonsense — plus meetings, administrivia, and commuting — that claims the rest of employee time. The key challenge of blowing all that off and going solo is securing the steady income of a conventional job: the relentless salary that rolls in month after month.”

Brad began describing possibilities for his new, non-employee career. He’d already secured a temporary gig with a mobile content consultancy, enough to carry him through the following month, and now he was looking at combining three part-time opportunities that might equal or even surpass his previous income — all the while letting him focus on areas of greater personal interest, minus the commute, conflicts, and constricted hours of conventional employment.

“I’m starting to see how losing my job has pushed me to a new level of awareness about the nature of work,” he said, bright-eyed. “When you put yourself out there, things start to happen. If you make ten tries, one or two might work out. Make 20, four or five might work out. It’s not like you make ten tries and nothing happens.”

I nodded, recalling my favorite takeaway from Rich Dad Poor Dad: The amount of revenue coming in is directly proportional to the number of communications going out.

Brad paused. “I don’t know why any of this should come as a surprise, but somehow my thinking has changed.”

Time for an epigram, I decided, and quoted from a new book by Kanye West: “Life is five percent what happens and 95% how you react.”

Brad kept talking, and I kept listening. As we parted, he thanked me profusely for the “energizing discussion.” I nodded with a smile. He had energized himself. He’d lost a job, and now was reclaiming his life.

(This post is from the Soul Shelter archives)

You may also enjoy:

“How to Go Solo without a ‘Big Idea’”

“Entrepreneurship: A Primer”

“Know Your Gift“

In my last post, I wrote:

The vocation of selfhood, the cultivation of personal, psychic, and spiritual independence, remains — and will remain, as ever — inescapably tied to solitude and its concomitants: privacy, slowness, inner quietude, and anonymity. All of which, of course, contradict our culture of connectivity and instantaneousness.

And I noted that our present day culture of Reality TV and Social Media indoctrinates us with two misguided notions: 1) being alone amounts to humiliation and inferiority, and 2) being unknown amounts to worthlessness and disgrace.

In a 1968 interview in The Paris Review, John Updike alluded to the locales that tended to engender his best writing.

A few places are specially conducive to inspiration — automobiles, church — private places.

It was an offhand remark, not especially unique for its time. But in today’s cultural context does it not sound practically … eccentric? Private places? Anybody remember those? The phrase today tends to conjure one’s bathroom or boudoir, for it may be presumed that in those two places most of us still prefer technological chastity.

But I digress. My point is that today the intangible realm which increasingly claims our waking hours, the Internet, serves to drain our lives of private psychic space, and consequently of solitude, for the Internet is not and never can be a private sphere. (Concerning the irony of blogging about this stuff, see part one of this post.)

Firstly, of course, it is the Web’s connectivity that precludes privacy, but there is another reason we cannot be alone online. It is, quite simply, because we cannot “be there” at all.

In a prior Soul Shelter post, Tim has pointed out that the Internet is not an industry.  Following that line of thought, we discover that the Internet, in a critical sense, does not “exist.” (Stay with me now. I realize this amounts to a modern heresy. ) What I mean is that the Internet is not properly a realm, a sphere, a space or a room. It cannot be “entered.” It is a word, an abstraction, a concept, a fancy — albeit a marvelously impressive and even useful one.

Neil Postman, in his 1992 book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, traces the important distinction between ideas and things, and shows convincingly how in our information-saturated present day we tend to mistake technological notions and processes for actual, material absolutes. This profoundly alters our understanding of the nature of reality, and brings us to do immense damage to ourselves, each other, and our culture.

The isolated components which create what we call “The Internet” may be physical and tangible, such as a keyboard or screen, but a computer terminal is not the Internet, nor is a fiber optic cable or a modem. The Internet itself is immaterial. It cannot be touched, let alone inhabited. It is an idea — and by its nature it is unitary; i.e., collective.

Thus, you cannot “sit inside” the Internet as Updike sat in his car or upon his church pew, and you most certainly cannot “sit inside it alone.”

Remember “Virtual Reality”? Why is it that we hear this term less and less these days? Might its scarcity signal our total conversion to the ideology of the Internet — the belief that the erstwhile Virtual now constitutes Reality itself? If so, this would signal that we live in a veritable Technopoly, as Neil Postman argued seventeen years ago:

Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.

One thing I feel for certain: the Internet has produced in our culture a connection-addiction, a constant being-elsewhere, a daily transplanting of the self from its real, palpable world into a virtual reality, a hive life, a maze of information stimuli — and all of this threatens to deplete our efforts to sow personal, psychic, and spiritual independence. A primary benefit of being solitary, after all, is that it facilitates being, that natural state of the soul in which you find yourself “in the moment,” as they say. Right here, right now.

“In Technopoly,” writes Postman, “we are driven to fill our lives with the quest to ‘access’ information. For what purpose or with what limitations, it is not for us to ask; and we are not accustomed to asking, since the problem is unprecedented.”

He continues:

Information has become a form of garbage, not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems. To say it still another way: The milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed; i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose.

So, predisposed as we are to move our thoughts, our inner lives, our reading habits further online — and thus further into the public sphere, where collective technology dissolves and annuls our personal solitude — we ought to pause and ask:

• Whither goes our sense of self, our ability to be alone, think alone, believe alone?
• Whither goes our propensity for discipline and self-reliance, for doing a thing solely because we believe, down to our human core, in the thing’s intrinsic value — even if it should never be seen by anybody else and thus never elicit praise, profit, or prestige?

On the rear flap of an old edition of J.D. Salinger’s novel Franny & Zooey I recently discovered the following impish testament, penned by the novelist himself, and well worth framing above one’s desk:

It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer’s feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second-most valuable property on loan to him during his working years.

Today we may ask: What if Salinger’s proverbial writer faces a compromised anonymity, a lack of solitude precluding the blessings (yes, blessings) of obscurity?

Say the young writer is — if not famous in a societal way — then “socially famous” on Facebook or MySpace; say he’s got 662 “friends” whose irresistible avatars dispel his focus hourly; say he’s engaged by thirty-seven e-mails daily; or say, instead of recording his thoughts and imaginings in the privacy of a paper-bound journal, he blogs these things to the world and then spends his days patrolling reader comments?

Connection, interaction has become the raison de vivre of our time. We rate our technologies first by the efficiency with which they allow us to reach another person and gather data. And quick, even instant measurability of that efficiency is a chief advantage of online media. Send an e-mail, get a response. Build a Web Site, then tabulate “unique visitors” and hits per day. Set up a Facebook page, count your friends. Within this hyper-social, data-driven ethos, does it not follow that endeavors failing to serve the ultimate utilities — i.e., connection and measurability — call for abandonment?

How, in such a culture, can one still conceive of spending three to five years writing a novel in the quiet of one’s study?

“The gods are just,” wrote Shakespeare in King Lear, “and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us.” (Aldous Huxley was so fond of the line, he included it in Brave New World.)

Here’s our friend Montaigne talking about solitude again:

Remember the man who, when he was asked why he took so much pains in an art which could come to the knowledge of scarcely anyone, replied: ‘Few are enough for me, one is enough for me, none at all is enough for me.’ He spoke truly: you and one companion are an adequate theater for each other, or you for yourself.*

The Internet, TV, and mass media in general promise to save us from ourselves. Solitude is now completely avoidable. But what do we lose when we lose solitude? What is the cost of trading in our anonymity?

“We are not merely social beings,” says William Deresiewicz in a dynamite article entitled “The End of Solitude,”

We are each also separate, each solitary, each alone in our own room, each miraculously our unique selves and mysteriously enclosed in that selfhood. To remember this, to hold oneself apart from society, is to begin to think one’s way beyond it. …No real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.

The spirit of the age notwithstanding, we possess in our solitude, our anonymity, our inwardness and interiority, the precious resources that have produced and sustained the best and most enduring cultural creations of the ages.

No matter how popularly devalued these resources become, no matter what suspicion or scorn each may arouse, we ought to hold them dear. The health and wellbeing of citizens, society, and culture depend upon it.

So I write this offline, after slow and fruitful days in real time, in silence, alone with my thoughts or in the company of printed books authored by wide-eyed souls, each of whom, in turn, studied and wrote alone.

And I post this as a reminder to myself above all, before logging off to seek more of where this came from.

…If we have thus deconsecrated ourselves — and who has not? — the remedy will be by wariness and devotion to re-consecrate ourselves, and make once more a fane [temple] of the mind. We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. — Henry David Thoreau

*Montaigne translation by Donald M. Frame, Selected Essays of Michel de Montaigne, Walter J. Black, NY, 1943.

(This post comes from the Soul Shelter archives)

You may also enjoy:

“In Defense of Solitude (PartI)”

“Is the Internet Dangerous?”

“To Recharge, Unplug”

“A Song for the Unsung”

“Presenting … the Intravidual”

“When Connectivity Breeds Loneliness”

“Hazards of Career, Rewards of Vocation”

“On Slowness”

“Soul School”

“In Defense of ‘Aimless’ Learning”

There are successful entrepreneurs and there are what I call Entrepreneurial Thinkers, people who don’t necessarily start new enterprises, but who consistently pursue opportunity regardless of resources currently controlled (more on this in upcoming posts).

Kuniyasu Sakai is both.

Almost unknown outside Japan, the remarkable Mr. Sakai founded several dozen successful manufacturing companies, then wrote a series of books describing bunsha, his overarching business method (bunsha refers to spinning off growing operations into new companies before they become too big; today we would call it intrapreneurship).

Mr. Sakai briefly drew international attention in 1990 with a stunning article in the Harvard Business Review entitled “The Feudal World of Japanese Manufacturing.”

The article revealed that, contrary to popular perception, Japan’s diversified technology conglomerates are essentially industry overlords heavily dependent on low-status manufacturing subcontractors — like Mr. Sakai’s many bunsha firms — for their much-vaunted technological expertise. Nearly two decades later, “The Feudal World“ still reveals more about the true nature of Japanese industry than many self-styled Japan experts will ever know.

But I digress. Apart from his stunning insights into entrepreneurship and Japanese manufacturing, what I really love about Mr. Sakai is his enthusiastic, jovial embrace of contradiction. Here’s what he wrote in one book:

Occasionally one of my listeners will point out that what I have said at the end of a speech contradicts something I said at the beginning. Or that what I said on Wednesday contradicts something I said on Monday. Or that what I wrote last week contradicts something I wrote ten years ago … every now and then I run across somebody who intends this comment as a criticism of my whole system. The implication is that because my ideas seem contradictory, they must be worthless.

Mr. Sakai sees a world that is often unclear and confused — sometimes even contradictory (as with the perception and the reality behind Japan’s technology giants). But, he asks, should this stop us from living our lives?

… the charge that what I say is full of contradictions is one that has never bothered me. To me, the whole world is full of contradictions and so it is only natural that human beings are full of contradictions. Any system of ideas that is logically perfect in every place and time belongs in the world of mathematics, not the world of people.

What a relief to hear such an accomplished person say this! Maybe a writer’s task is to articulate truths readers believe are forbidden.

Here’s Brenda Ueland in If You Want to Write:

… remember always that the true self is never a fixed thing. And do not try to be consistent, for what is true to you today may not be true at all tomorrow, because you see a better truth.

‘Nuff said. Let us march forth, and gladly contradict tomorrow what we say today.

(This post comes from the Soul Shelter archives)

You may also enjoy:

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

“Know Your Gift”

“The Surprising Truth About Why People Become Entrepreneurs“

In his 1848 work Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill observed:

It is not good for a man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character: and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without.

That notion — of solitude “as essential to any depth of meditation or of character” — sounds weirdly, disturbingly, antique today. We can’t very well turn off our cell phones or keep our e-mails unanswered, can we? And what if we know nothing of the news of the day?

Still, the idea of solitude as an essential, humanizing trait is one that’s been honored, and reiterated, for centuries by the best and most influential minds of Civilization. It’s an idea come down to us through the humanities — art, history, literature, philosophy, religion — those disciplines which Mark Slouka panegyrized in last September’s Harper’s:

The humanities … teach us incrementally, endlessly, not what to do but how to be. …[They] are a superb delivery mechanism for what we might call democratic values.

OK, yet are we to count solitude as a “democratic value”? Yes indeed, for solitude is conducive to thought and introspection, and introspection conduces to empathy and education, and thus to George Washington’s ideal of an “enlightened” citizenry.

“Thought is neither instant nor noisy,” Wallace Stegner reminds us:

… It thrives best in solitude, in quiet, and in the company of the past, the great community of recorded human experience. That recorded experience is essential whether one hopes to reassert some aspect of it, or attack it.

Writing back in the 1500s, Michel De Montaigne assures us:

It is not good enough to have gotten away from the crowd, it is not enough to move; we must get away from the love of crowds that is within us, we must sequester ourselves and regain possession of ourselves. … That is what it is to choose wisely the treasures that can be secured from harm, and to hide them in a place where no one may go and which can be betrayed only by ourselves. … The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to ourselves.*

And Thoreau tells us in 1863:

When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. … Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself ,— an hypaethral [open to the sky] temple, consecrated to the service of the gods?… It is important to preserve the mind’s chastity. …I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.

And Nietzsche tells us in 1888:

Slow is the experience of all deep fountains: long have they to wait until they know what hath fallen into their depths. / Away from the marketplace and from fame taketh place all that is great: away from the marketplace and from fame have ever dwelt the devisers of new values. / Flee, my friend, into thy solitude…

By contrast to these enduring voices from Stegner’s “great community,” our present day culture of Reality TV and Social Media sends us the subtle but insidious messages that 1) being alone amounts to humiliation and inferiority, and 2) being unknown amounts to worthlessness and disgrace.

Writer Dave Eggers touched on this concept beautifully in his book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius:

We’ve grown up thinking of ourselves in relation to the political-media-entertainment ephemera, in our safe and comfortable homes … how we would fit into this or that band or TV show or movie, and how we would look doing it. [We] are people for whom the idea of anonymity is existentially irrational, indefensible.

“You are worthy or desirable,” declares the culture of today, “inasmuch as you can demonstrate acceptance by others via circuits and cables” (or in the case of reality TV, inasmuch as you remain in the group and avoid getting kicked off the show).

Similarly, we hear it declaimed: “You are valid, you are real, inasmuch as you publish evidence daily — even hourly (Twitter, anyone?) — of your existence, your validity.”

The unavoidable problem here, however, is that as much as we crave to avoid isolation and seek verification that we exist, the selves we wish verified are actually becoming less and less singular or unique, at least in the principle realm we use to verify them, the Internet.

Online we are more isolated than ever, but without the soul-shaping benefits of real aloneness. Why log on unless you hope to connect with somebody, or at any rate feel connected to the buzz of the day? Granted, the Web is more than minute-to-minute media (may we doff modesty a moment to take this blog as an example?), but you get my drift.

The Internet, by itself, also cannot provide us with real community. An e-mail is not a handshake. Nor are most Facebook friends likely to live close enough to keep an eye on your house while you’re away.

(Blogger’s note: Herewith, I face an incontrovertible irony — employing the Internet to outline the Internet’s dangers and deficiencies as today’s medium of choice. But hey, that the medium is good for some things can’t be denied. Onward, then.)

Online we live in the thick of one another’s quasi selves, what writer Neil Postman called “a neighborhood of strangers.” And however manifold are the “activities” we initiate or the information we access on the Internet, the medium demands that we stare at a screen, and therefore it cannot enable individuality. To the contrary, screen-time can only act as a force of psycho-physical leveling. To stare at a screen is, for everyone who does it, the same experience.

So, one cannot be beneficially alone on the Internet, and in a very real sense one cannot be wholly oneself, for individuality, personality, and independent thought are conditioned not by the acquisition of information or fiber optic “access” to others, but by varied experience (i.e. away from the terminal).

“The drift in the United States today is toward the submergence of the self into the Mass Mind,” writes Morris Berman in his book The Twilight of American Culture,

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.

Berman’s pungent phrase “submergence of the self into the Mass Mind” inevitably conjures Aldous Huxley’s classic Brave New World (1932), which envisions a blissful and soulless future “paradise” expurgated of societal “ills” such as individuality, books, religion, marital life, and yes, personal solitude — all in the interest of industry (read: economic superiority), harmony (read: societal conformity and obedience), and ceaseless pleasure (read: distraction).

Huxley’s future world is no authoritarian dystopia. Rather, it’s a smoothly functioning society whose citizens, as far as they can imagine, couldn’t be happier or more productive. They are prosperous, well fed, pleasantly medicated, entertained, sexually promiscuous (it’s the norm, “everybody belongs to everybody else”), and desire nothing other than what’s offered to them by their station in the societal hierarchy. The key to their societal health and harmony is the eradication of individual desire through systematic “conditioning” begun at birth. A crucial component of this “conditioning” is an uninterrupted involvement in communal life, a forbiddance — and inculcated horror of — solitude

The following bit from the novel describes this culture of mass-identity.

The group was now complete, the solidarity circle perfect and without flaw. Man, woman, man, in a ring of endless alteration round the table. Twelve of them ready to be made one, to be fused, to lose their twelve separate identities in a larger being.

Now put them around the globe instead of around the table, make them a billion instead of twelve, and change “solidarity circle” to Internet. Creepy, for sure. Fortunately perhaps, the present climate of the Internet is much more fractious (at its best, articulate debate defines it) than Huxley’s gray-eyed group-think. But the point remains that we relinquish something quintessentially human in being constantly logged on, “accessible,” and vulnerable to the manipulation of our focus and the depletion of our attention-spans.

“Being online,” writes Sven Birkerts, “and having the subjective experience of depth, of existential coherence, are mutually exclusive situations.”

Meanwhile, the vocation of selfhood, the cultivation of personal, psychic, and spiritual independence, remains — and will remain, as ever — inescapably tied to solitude and its concomitants: privacy, slowness, inner quietude, and anonymity. All of which, of course, contradict our culture of connectivity and instantaneousness.

We modern mortals, like the generations before us, need to be re-set on a regular basis, reconditioned to the natural, non-mechanical pace of the world and of our own souls. Our age-old impulse toward meditation and prayer can itself reveal the intrinsic human impulse toward solitude.

Let the world’s course be what it may, you will always find a physician and helper, a new energy and future within yourself, in your poor, ill-used, tractable, indestructible soul.—Hermann Hesse (1917)**

Next week I’ll conclude this Defense with Part Two. Right now, I’m powering off in pursuit of solitude.

*Montaigne translation by Donald M. Frame, Selected Essays of Michel De Montaigne, Walter J. Black, NY, 1943.

**Hesse translation by Denver Lindley, My Belief: Essays on Life and Art by Hermann Hesse, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 1974.

(This post comes from the Soul Shelter archives)

You may also enjoy:

“Is the Internet Dangerous?”

“To Recharge, Unplug”

“A Song for the Unsung”

“Presenting … the Intravidual”

“When Connectivity Breeds Loneliness”

“Hazards of Career, Rewards of Vocation”

“On Slowness”

“Soul School”

“In Defense of ‘Aimless’ Learning”

A few years ago my back gave out when both my kids jumped on me at the same time. After a doctor visit and x-rays confirming the absence of serious injury, I received the standard issue medical advice for 90% of all back problems: “Take it easy and it will clear up in time.”

I did, and it did, but the experience was a stunning reminder that nothing can replace the good fortune of health. I stared in alarm at a photograph of myself: a sagging-posture “office physique” 40 pounds heftier than what I weighed in college. Without change, my physical condition would slowly deteriorate.

Well, it took time and hard work, but I’m finally back in shape. Though I’d never formally considered how I went about it, after reading Get Fit Slowly, I sat down and tried to distill the key points of my “program.” Here’s what I came up with: Four Simple Steps to Getting Fit (they’re not easy, but they’re simple).

Step 1. Stop eating while you’re still hungry

Most of us are accustomed to eating until we feel full. But if you feel full, you’ve already overeaten. Stop. Think. Chew your food slowly and thoroughly, and pay attention to how you feel as you proceed through your meal. If you attend closely to your eating, you’ll feel yourself gradually filling up. Stop eating when you feel about 80% full (don’t worry, you won’t starve. In Japan, this is known as hara-hachibun: the “80% full” policy—it helps you distinguish between eating to refuel and eating because it tastes good). If you decide to drink alcohol with your meal, eat less food to compensate for the additional volume (remember, stop when you feel 80% full). From the standpoint of losing weight, this 80% rule is the most important of the Four Steps.

Step 2. Weigh yourself twice a day

Weigh yourself first thing in the morning and again before you go to bed at night. Do this not to obsess about results, but to see what happens when you drink a beer late at night, or how constipation or poor elimination affects your weight. Weigh consistently, and you’ll quickly see the results of Step 1 reflected in the numbers. An enormously successful Japanese diet plan consists of doing nothing but recording one’s weight—writing it down in a special journal—several times per day. Paying attention to and becoming conscious of your weight is an extremely effective strategy. Do it religiously and the rest of your behavior will fall in line.

Step 3. Drink plenty of water and take psyllium fiber daily

Drink a couple of big glasses of water as soon as you get up, and after breakfast, drink another big glass of water or juice with a hefty teaspoonful of psyllium fiber (Metamucil is an inexpensive but poor substitute—it has tons of added sucrose). The fiber will fill you up, and—to put it rather undelicately—make you crap like a horse. And no, unlike laxatives, which loosen your bowels through chemical action, fiber strengthens your guts by making them work harder. My doctor recommended this as a way to reduce my high blood pressure, and I’ve been a fiber fan since.

Step 4. Start an exercise routine

This is the least important Step from the standpoint of losing weight, but the most important from the standpoint of becoming fit. Sticking to an exercise routine—just like the routine of weighing yourself, the fiber regimen, and the habit of conscious eating—strengthens your overall program. I got professional help from a corrective exercise specialist, who immediately perceived my biggest problem—poor posture—and designed a trunk-strengthening program for me.

Well, that’s everything I know about losing weight and getting fit, and therefore my first and last post on the subject. It’s all well-known stuff, but I learned the Four Simple Steps by doing them, and they worked for me. Maybe they’ll work for you, too.

(This post is from the Soul Shelter archives. A slightly modified version first appeared at Get Fit Slowly.)

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“What We Really Need to be Happy“

“The Risk of Happiness“

“A Moment of Fulfillment“

Before we cue Taps, let’s all step away from the media juggernaut, take a deep breath of reason, and recall a few (just a few!) of the attributes, consistently neglected in the now-daily hubbub, that continue to make the old-fashioned book not only a viable technology, but, well, a profoundly wonderful one we really don’t want to lose.

1 . The book unites delivery device and content. E-readers, drained of battery power, revert to hunks of plastic.

2. The book begets libraries and independent bookstores, irreplaceable bastions of culture and community.

3. The book, beyond cover price, comes with no proprietary fee. Your preferred e-reader sets you back $250 to $500.

4. The book is not an inventory portal, therefore not subject to proprietary restrictions in content; i.e.: Due to licensing or discretionary considerations, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley cannot be downloaded to this e-reading device. (Think this is a joke? See note* below.)

5. The book is not a brand, therefore free from functional limitations imposed by a manufacturer; i.e.: The e-book you’re requesting is not supported by your e-reader’s operating system. Upgrade to our newest e-reader or follow this link to our checkout to download OS-2011.5.

6. The book withstands excessive dust, direct sunlight, splashed soup, or dropped potatoes.

7. The book is hard to eradicate except by fire. Is any e-reading device likely to reach — with zero loss of content — an age comparable to civilization’s oldest incunabula?

8. The book, presented as gift, shows regard for the recipient’s tastes, being a single selection and/or bearing the giver’s handwritten inscription.

9. The book can be autographed by its author.

10. The book, by conspicuous display of title and/or author, occasions conversation between mutually inclined strangers.

11. The book may be safely read in the bath.

12. The book relieves you of the screen in an age of relentless screen-media assaults upon the eye.

13. The book is not an immediate access point for innumerable diversions (e-mail, video games, etc.).

14. The book’s printed editions are traceably distinct, a defense against manipulations of fact or history.

15. The book does not “transmit and receive,” except in mysterious ways. No need to fear an Orwellian eye embedded in the page.

16. The book cannot be “swiped remotely” by the powers that be.

17. The book’s publisher may go broke without imperiling access to additional content.

18. The book, bought second-hand or borrowed, yields up fascinating ephemera: grocery lists, love notes, locks of hair, receipts, etc., bringing the reader into poignant contact with an unknown fellow human being.

19. The book complements your mantelpiece.

20. The book boasts many practical uses beyond communication (as furniture, makeshift stairs, etc.). E-readers — oddly shaped and breakable — are as obsolescent as other computer junk once they quit working.

21. The book is not invariably manufactured in China.

22. The book accommodates ingenuity of format: children’s books, art books, illuminated texts, pop-up books, fold-out maps, etc.

23. The book makes a meaningful heirloom.

24. The book may be safely left unattended on the beach. As gizmo it is not a hot steal.

25. The book is not a shopping cart.

*“Last week…the creators of a Web comic version of the classic novel, called “Ulysses Seen,” said that Apple required them to remove any images containing nudity before the comic was approved as an application for the iPad.” –New York Times, June 13, 2010

UPDATE: June 16, 2010 — Apple recants. Still, a defender of literature this does not make.

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The War of Art by Steven Pressfield dispenses no-nonsense, read-it-in-a-day advice for anybody striving to channel their creative juices into a floodtide of productivity. In brief, snappy chapters titled clearly for easy reference, Pressfield calls it like he sees it:

Most of us have two lives. The life we live and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

“Resistance” becomes Pressfield’s keynote. You’ll get his drift if you’ve ever wished to finish a creative project (or start one, for that matter) only to succumb to procrastination and self-inflicted guilt. Resistance is the nattering, excuse-making voice in our heads that keeps us from quieting down, focusing, and getting to work.

Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. …To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be. If you believe in God (and I do) you must declare Resistance evil, for it prevents us from achieving the life God intended when He endowed each of us with our own unique genius.

Here lies my one significant quibble with Pressfield’s book. I find his terms, though helpful in a wake-up-call kind of way, to be a bit extreme.

For isn’t Resistance sort of … necessary to creativity? Rather than seeking to wholly suppress and kill Resistance, isn’t the artist’s task to tame it and train it to one’s service? (“Resistance sparks the flame,” goes the old adage.)

For me, the edict “You must declare Resistance evil” sets up a false duality that seems a little Manichean. I personally favor John Dewey’s more nuanced outlook on the very same subject (Resistance and the Artist) in his 1933 book Art As Experience:

Since the artist cares in a peculiar way for the phase of experience in which union is achieved, he does not shun moments of resistance and tension. He rather cultivates them, not for their own sake but because of their potentialities, bringing to living consciousness an experience that is unified and total. … The moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of intensest life.

In other words, without Resistance, how could we know artistic success?

Nevertheless Pressfield’s central point is sound. “It’s not the writing part that’s hard,” he observes, “What’s hard is sitting down to write.” And the perspectives of The War of Art are frequently salutary. For instance, I love this bit:

As artists and professionals it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls. In this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture. We overthrow the programming of advertising, movies, video games, magazines, TV, and MTV by which we have been hypnotized from the cradle. We unplug ourselves from the grid by recognizing that we will never cure our restlessness by contributing our disposable income to the bottom line of Bullshit, Inc., but only by doing our work.

The War of Art gets somewhat New Agey for my tastes toward its close, but it nevertheless serves like all good books of the “Inspiration” genre to affirm creative expression.

Creative work is not a selfish act nor a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.

That is a message of inestimable value to artists striving in a culture that all too often instills shame in answer to creative enterprise. Even those entities that ostensibly nurture the fledgling artist (e.g., university MFA-programs) can be tacit accomplices in this shame game, for they inadvertently suggest that only a degree, or firm “career track,” can dignify the artistic attempt.

Iconoclastic playwright David Mamet, in his wonderful 1997 book True & False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor, excoriates such sham authority, and extols artistic self-reliance. (True & False is a resource of wisdom and solace for any kind of artist, actor or not.)

It is not childish to live with uncertainty, to devote oneself to craft rather than a career, to an idea rather than an institution. It’s courageous and requires a courage of the order that the institutionally co-opted are ill-equipped to perceive. They are so unequipped to perceive it that they can only call it childish, and so excuse their exploitation of you.

If the value in The War of Art is how it galvanizes the artist to get working and keep at it, the value of True & False lies in its authoritative philosophy about the creative life. Mamet continually vindicates the artist in his or her headlong impracticality. I’ll leave you with the following passage which does just that.

Read Pressfield and Mamet and be inspired. Work and be well.

The best advice one can give an aspiring artist is ‘Have something to fall back on.’ The merit of the instruction is this: those who adopt it spare themselves the rigor of the artistic life. … Those with ‘something to fall back on’ invariably fall back on it. They intended to all along. That is why they provided themselves with it. But those with no alternative see the world differently. The old story has the mother say to the sea captain, ‘Take special care of my son, he cannot swim,’ to which the captain responds, ‘Well, then, he’d better stay in the boat.’ … Those of you with nothing to fall back on, you will find, are home.

(Thanks to Chris at the The Art of Non-Conformity for alerting me to Pressfield’s book)

(This post comes to you from the Soul Shelter archives)

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Andy Goldsworthy talks to rocks. He stacks driftwood. He bites at finger-like chunks of ice and welds them together into swirling lines. With strands of stem he sews broad green leaves into ribbons and sends them afloat on rivers, where they glide as sinuous as snakes.

Goldsworthy is a sculptor –- but not of marble or of metal. Often his works endure for a matter of moments –- no longer. Their home is under the sun, in the rain or snow or dappled autumnal light. His sculptures stand on beaches, in fields. They sway in trees or drift atop natural water. Ultimately, they fall apart.

In Rivers and Tides, the mesmerizing 2001 documentary by director Thomas Riedelsheimer, we see Goldsworthy in his element, at work in the elements, borrowing all his materials from nature and letting nature bring his sculpture to life, then undo it –- and, by the same token, patiently submitting when nature resists collaboration, stymieing his work or destroying it too soon.

Goldsworthy’s delicate, painstaking process teaches much about the creative or artistic endeavor, which is almost always a matter of surrender. And Rivers and Tides contemplates beautifully, through breathtaking imagery and Goldsworthy’s own soft-spoken voice-overs, the nature of meaningful creative work.

On a damp, solitary beach Goldsworthy arranges gathered stones, stacking them one at a time, studying his placement of each. The stones are large and heavy, but seem to oblige his design for them. He feels he understands the stone, and that his work will emerge from this understanding, to exist, if only momentarily, as a complement to its natural setting.

The stones accumulate, a gesture toward the instructive sculptings of nature herself. A form arises. But something is off, and the stones begin to resist one another. They lean and pull apart. The form collapses. Sighing, Goldsworthy reconsiders. He dismantles the rubble and starts anew.

He intends to construct an enormous cone, taller than a man, wider than a tractor tire, before the tide draws in to cover his working area. He wants the cone to be ready, finished and standing, when the water arrives, because the flooding is part of the sculpture. The cone will drown away. The tide will dismantle it. The vision for the work includes the work’s impermanence.

Goldsworthy does not have cash on his mind, nor career trajectory. His work is a way of life, wonderfully impractical,  rich with mysterious rewards.

The stones topple again –- and for an agonizing moment Goldsworthy is crushed. But he collects himself.

That’s the fourth –- the fourth collapse. And the tide is coming in. I think it would be better to wait. Oh, the moment when something collapses, it is intensely disappointing. And this is the fourth time it’s fallen, and each time I got to know the stone a little bit more, and it got higher each time, so it grew in proportion to my understanding of the stone. And that is really one of the things my art is trying to do –- is trying to understand the stone. I obviously don’t understand it well enough … yet.

Process is paramount. Many a creative aspirant bears constant reminding of this inspiriting truth. The true artist works wholeheartedly and faces failure willingly, devoted to an end that is often of no practical significance, striving simply to better understand the materials at hand. If the material resists, the artist seeks to glean the lessons in its resistance. The artist does this all in the faith that something beautiful, if gleamingly ephemeral, will come forth.

For those undertaking it, and for those witnessing it, there’s a message in work of this kind, pointing toward a fulfilled life.

(See Goldsworthy at work here, in this breathtaking clip from Rivers & Tides.)

(This post comes from the Soul Shelter archives)

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In 1799 the English mystic, poet, and painter William Blake sat down to pen a lively document in defense of the imagination, the inventively eccentric, in sum: the artistic spirit. For anybody laboring in service to a dream, an image, or voice of inspiration, whose work defies convention or leaves folks wagging their heads in disapproval or bewilderment, this text is a prime comfort.

Blake was addressing a dissatisfied client. Reverend John Trusler had commissioned from him some illustrations, but upon receipt found them to be stylistically disagreeable — and, one guesses, too drastic a departure from traditional Christian iconography. Blake specialized in the unorthodox but evidently what Trusler whiffed most clearly in the artist’s flair was “immorality.”

August 23, 1799.

Revd. Sir,

I really am sorry that you are fall’n out with the Spiritual World, especially if I should have to answer for it. I feel very sorry that your ideas & mine on moral painting differ so much as to have made you angry with my method of study. If I am wrong, I am wrong in good company. I had hoped your plan comprehended all species of this Art, & especially that you would not regret that species which gives existence to every other; namely, Visions of Eternity. You say that I want somebody to elucidate my ideas. But you ought to know that what is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the ancients consider’d what is not too explicit as the fittest for instruction, because it rouses the faculties to act. I name Moses, Solomon, Aesop, Homer, Plato.

Given Blake’s uninhibited defense of his own work –an act justifiably recognized in some as blind egotism — it’s worth bearing in mind that he had by this point in his career attained a stage of technical mastery. For all his eccentricities, his self-confidence (righteous indignation?) was just. In other words, it was not self-importance, delusional pride, or base implacability that prompted his letter, but something far more profound. Blake knew well — and said himself — that “Without unceasing practice nothing can be done. Practice is Art. If you leave off you are lost.” And he knew the intensity and dedication with which he practiced.

Because Blake was consummate he could be honestly unconventional, and rise to his own defense without unduly flattering himself regarding his gifts. There’s an important difference between faith in one’s unique vision and fallacious pride.

But as you have favor’d me with your remarks on my design, permit me in return to defend it … I perceive that your eye is perverted by caricature prints, which ought not to abound so much as they do. Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, & happiness is better than mirth. I feel that a man may be happy in this world. And I know that this world is a world of Imagination & Vision. I see everything I paint in this world, but everybody does not see alike. To the eyes of a miser, a Guinea is far more beautiful than the sun, & a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule & deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; & some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers. You certainly mistake, when you say that the Visions of Fancy are not to be found in this world. To me this world is all one continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination, & I feel flattered when I am told so. What is it sets Homer, Virgil, & Milton in so high a rank of Art? Why is the Bible more entertaining and instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the Imagination, which is spiritual sensation, and but mediately to the Understanding or Reason? Such is true painting, and such was alone valued by the Greeks & the best modern artists. …

Blake’s religious regard for the Imagination (capital I) reminds me of some remarks by his contemporary John Keats, written in a different letter some years after: “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as beauty must be Truth, whether it existed before or not.” What was it Blake said at the outset? “If I am wrong, I’m wrong in good company.”

I am happy to find a great majority of fellow mortals who can elucidate my Visions, & particularly they have been elucidated by children, who have taken a greater delight in contemplating my pictures than I even hoped. Neither youth nor childhood is folly or incapacity. Some children are fools & so are some old men. But there is a vast majority on the side of Imagination or spiritual sensation.

To engrave after another painter is infinitely more laborious than to engrave one’s own inventions. And of the size you require my price has been thirty Guineas, & I cannot afford to do it for less. …

I am, Revd. Sir, your very obedient servant,

William Blake

There it is: the stout and soundly articulated refusal to compromise or let one’s Art be co-opted for fear of missing out on a buck. And time has proved the rightness of Blake’s refusal. His work is still very much with us. Who over the last several generations has not read or memorized in school those haunting lines…

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

(As for the good Reverend Trusler? We’re told he was the author of two books: Hogarth Moralized and The Way to be Rich and Respectable. Says it all, I fear.)

“[Blake] was a commercial artist who was a genius in poetry, painting, and religion,” say the editors of The Portable Blake. “He was a libertarian obsessed with God; a mystic who reversed the mystical pattern, for he sought man as the end of his search. He was a Christian who hated the churches; a revolutionary who abhorred the materialism of the radicals. He was a drudge, sometimes living on a dollar a week, who called himself “a mental prince”; and was one.” Yes, Blake knew what he was about, knew how to go about it, and didn’t let anything divert his vision — certainly not a crabby critic.

Note, by the way, that little biographical tidbit about living on a dollar a day. Uh-huh, Blake was poor. Good art has never guaranteed good income, much as being guided by one’s own lights rarely does. Therein we find a caution for the faint of heart. … But also, perhaps, comfort for creatives unpaid but as yet undaunted.

Stay the course. William Blake and countless others have got your back.

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Some years ago, in the Special Collections of the Free Public Library in Concord, Massachusetts, I sat for several hours with a thin green notebook, poring over the distinctive scrawl in its pages. A forty-five-year-old writer had worked on this manuscript in his last days, considerably weakened with tuberculosis. At several points in the notebook the scrawl broke off, replaced by a neater feminine script. The manuscript was the first draft of the famous essay, “Walking,” one of Henry David Thoreau’s crowning creations. Thoreau’s sister and deathbed nurse, Sophia, took dictation when he was too weak to write.

My feelings upon holding that notebook are probably indescribable. Eighteen years old, I had crossed the country to Concord, alone on the longest journey of my life. I wanted to walk through the historical world of Thoreau and Emerson, the writers who meant most to me then. I wanted to pay my respects at their gravestones. I wanted to see Walden Pond. But I’d never expected to enjoy the transcendent, time-defying privilege of turning through Thoreau’s last handwritten pages. Nobody had told me such things were possible!

As I held them, I imagined the pages changing hands. First Thoreau had propped them in his lap as he sat up in his sickbed immersed in his poetic outpouring. Later, seeing that he’d fallen asleep, Sophia gently drew them from beneath his hands. Henry stirred and said he would like to keep working and asked her to take down his words. The pages in her lap now, Sophia sat beside the bed transcribing. Eventually the pages were delivered to Henry’s publisher Ticknor & Fields. Years later Mr. Fields donated them, bound in the green notebook, to Concord’s Public Library. And a century after that a young literary pilgrim on the longest journey of his life sat in the library basement reading the pages for hours, alone in the ghostly presence of his literary hero.

This profound experience taught me conclusively that the artistic and historical past lives on beyond textbooks or centennial editions of great works. The past abides in centuries-old rough drafts, or in the rooms where these were written, or in the village or city where the rooms were located, or in the very landscape where the village or city stood. The past is not the room or village or landscape itself, but can be found there. It can be held in hand. It can be felt underfoot.

Why look for the past this way? Because as the playwright John Guare observes, inspiration does not arrive merely because one waits around for it. Rather, inspiration is an assertive act:

If you love something it is a categorical imperative commanding you to absorb what it is you love and make it yours.

By an act of inspirational pilgrimage we make the past ours – and once the past is ours, the present turns powerfully prescient. Whatever our hopes may be, we find them enlivened with new possibility, given vital precedents to support them and speed them on. This, precisely, is what I learned in the Concord Free Public Library that day. The past can come alive within us, more significant than textbook pages, more useful than legend, more personal than hagiography.

So, since that first long journey to Concord, my life has been punctuated by pilgrimages. Being a naturally solitary person (and a non-academic), I have, over the last twelve years or so, searched among literary ghosts for kindred spirits, for guiding voices, and a godspeed from the enduring past. This has been a remarkable — and remarkably vivid — education. The ghosts themselves have been my teachers.

My pilgrimages have affirmed beyond doubt what Thoreau’s friend and mentor Emerson proclaimed in a poem.

The word unto the prophet spoken
Was writ on tables yet unbroken;
The word by seers or sibyls told
In groves of oak or fanes of gold,
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.

Human beings are mutable and mortal, of course. But the human spirit never vanishes without a trace. Humans, living in a place or passing through it, will always be in that place for having been there once. Pilgrimage can reawaken one to this important mystery (it’s no coincidence that the word is often used to describe human existence).

As the ruminative narrator of Thornton Wilder’s ageless play, Our Town, observes while standing in the hilltop cemetery above Grover’s Corners:

We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses, and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars. Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it.

Pilgrimage can connect us to one another across a gulf of generations. Wherever the span of time threatens to make a person remote or an event impersonal, pilgrimage can restore immediacy and facilitate intimacy. Pilgrimage reminds that every past had its present (just as our present will eventually be a past).

And for the artist or aspirant, pilgrimage reveals that every enduring work was once unborn and unknown to the world — each required the vision, commitment, and often seemingly senseless dedication of a living person. Is that particular person now a so-called “immortal”? It wasn’t always so. Once, however long ago, in a room in a village or city, a solitary soul filled pages with words, covered a canvas with paint, or dotted a scoresheet with musical notes (and did so, perhaps, despite looming anxiety about paying the bills, staying healthy, or striving not to disappoint friends and relations).

My pilgrimages have taken me across the globe (and not because I have money to burn; I don’t).

In the Wye Valley of Wales, high on the hill overlooking Tintern Abbey, I declaimed Wordsworth’s famous poem and understood anew his rendering of the surrounding countryside:

…hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!

In Prague, I wandered the labyrinthine, paranoia-inducing streets of Rainer Maria Rilke’s fearful boyhood (and of Kafka’s).

In Glen Ellen, California I stood in Jack London’s living room and read multiple rejection letters of The Call of the Wild. (“The reading public doesn’t care to read stories about the Yukon, thank you all the same.”)

More recently, I took a somewhat less literary pilgrimage to a tiny township (population 700) in the heart of the Midwest. Nobody particularly famous ever came out of this place, though local lore has it that Jesse James passed through at least once. One drizzly morning I visited the old cemetery on the edge of town and found the weathered headstone of an ancestor from five generations past.

At age eighteen or nineteen this great-great-great grandfather was severely wounded in the Civil War. He suffered the privations of a deplorable Confederate prison and lived to tell of it.

While I’d read his regiment’s various histories, that young Union soldier had remained an essentially fictional character to me. But now I knelt before his simple grave-marker and ran my fingers over the etched letters of his name, regiment, and company number — and was flooded with unexpected emotion. I whipped the cap from my head, letting the rain wet my hair as I paid proper respects.

In that powerful moment, as in many another transformative moment of pilgrimage, I heard a voice like the one in Walt Whitman’s majestic poem, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry“:

What is it then between us?
What is the count of the scores or the hundreds of years between us?
Whatever it is, it avails not — distance avails not, and place avails not …

… Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?

Every past was once the present. Its voices are real, as mine is real. The process goes on, and I am part of it. We all are.

Feeling uninspired, inconsequential, disconnected? Seek inspiration, consequence, and connection. Consider a pilgrimage.

(This post comes from the Soul Shelter archives)

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