embracing everything that happens

by Wassily Kandinsky

“Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He, who can call today his own,
He who, secure within, can say:
’Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have lived today.’”

~ Horace

“All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely,” said Jorge Luis Borges, “All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.” I don’t consider myself an Artist or a Writer because that would be like wearing a robe that is too stiff and formal, as Murakami said in one of his interviews. I don’t like labeling, categorizing, and productizing myself, even though society expects that of me. Buckminster Fuller: “I know that I am not a category, a hybrid specialization. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb — an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe, and so are you.”

Borges’ words move something inside me because they mean treating everything as useful, even misfortune. This reminds me of the Stoics and their idea of loving your own destiny, called ‘Amor Fati’. It also reminds me of the parable of the monk who said that he finds peace by saying yes to everything that happens. Of course, doing it is not the problem when things are going well, but things are more difficult when they are not. In times of misfortune, I return to the books and authors where I find solace as I’m discovering the joys of revisiting things, and the books always welcome me with arms spread wide; like old friends. Having already spent a substantial amount on books this year makes me realize that yes, I am also a victim of the novelty bias, although I hear the whisper of encouragement every time I buy yet another book I’m not going to read: “but you’re building a library, you don’t need to read them right away, it’s an investment”.

I am revisiting my old thoughts and ideas because I would like to have a conversation with myself which would allow better development of these ideas. In my past essays I wrote about the struggle with discipline on the one hand and freedom on the other. I wrote how good habits change us but we forget and then again how tracking your habits in a spreadsheet is bad because it smells of dataism — overvaluing and glorifying data as if this data will reveal some important insights — while in reality it overloads with information but reveals nothing of importance.

Having no discipline is an alluring trap because it’s easy to do and because it’s masked as self-care, but it’s really self-uncare. This month I’ve discovered that discipline grounds me but this is easy to forget when I’m at the peak and so desperately needed when I’m in the valley. Discipline as a tool for better survival of these valleys. And I’m not opposed to having some system for tracking my discipline success, because there is an immense value in it — there is a price to pay, but the benefits outweigh it. I want to be that boring guy that wakes up at the same time every day and goes through his routine because I know that’s when life is the most beautiful.

If I don’t revisit my old opinions and thoughts, I will forget them and they are meant as conversation invitations. If not with anybody else, then with different versions of myself. My essays are snapshots of my thinking in time and sometimes a painful reminder how ignorant I was, but my consolation is that they are at least not reminders of how brilliant I was.

And so I go and scour the magical junkyard that contains all my notes. “Repetitio est mater studiorum” I hear her whispering, her being a middle-aged teacher in a very stiff outfit, even though I never had a Latin teacher. Instead of a gymnasium I went to a technical school where the biggest lesson was “What goes up must come down” as we built a “pyramid” out of chairs on the desk in the first row and then threw another chair just in time when the professor entered the room, to witness this destruction in all its glory and then call the headmaster for a little chat.

I’m learning to let go of expectations, I’m learning to just go with the flow, I’m learning to give myself permission to think whatever I want. Sasha Chapin said that writers should learn to stop lying to themselves if they want their writing to improve. I would love to have profound thoughts, but the reality is that I’m far from that. I need to come to terms with that. And so I go. I tell myself: embrace everything that happens to you, embrace even the bad thoughts, embrace that you’re not as brilliant as you’d like to be.