“Go to the Limits of Your Longing” by Rainer Maria Rilke

Now reading: “The dropout: a history” at Aeon. I’ve been in a sort of project of disconnection for several months now. Specifically, disconnecting in order to re-connect in a more healthy way. This article provides an enlightening history of the cultural concerns (and paranoias!) underlying the “turn on, tune in, drop out” movement. It’s easy to see parallels in the present day.

I’ve been making notes about the influences on my life. I noticed a surface-level contradiction between these two, which is resolved at a deeper level.

Malcolm X: for the way he learned and changed in public

Bernie Sanders: for his moral clarity and stability over time

I value Malcolm for his willingness to change and Bernie because he hasn’t. But change isn’t really the issue, is it? I value them both because they found true north and did not deviate from their course - whatever it cost them in terms of popularity and misunderstanding. It is a rare and valuable thing to find someone who has found and followed their deepest convictions.

Austin Kleon recommends studying something you love in depth - and it just so happens that I’m reading through the collected poetry of Robinson Jeffers. I’m keeping notes in Craft and hope to turn those notes into occasional posts. There are themes running through his work that very much interest me.

I’d also love to do something like this for the albums of Over the Rhine, or blog through the Tao Te Ching. Blogging through books (in the style of blockquote followed by commentary) was very common on the blogs I used to read fifteen years ago. I miss that sort of amateur scholarship.

Austin Kleon’s latest (subscriber-only) newsletter issue is about the creative seasons. Two things:

1. It contains a pdf version of a zine he wrote on the subject. I know some people around micro.blog have recently been talking about zines and other ideas for analog delivery of writing. This is an interesting way of doing that: digitally delivering a pdf of something meant to be printed and folded.
2. I am definitely a person who goes through creative seasons. In the past, late-winter and early-spring are when I’ve started more creative projects. This latest round has been a bit of an anomaly since it started in early winter - but I think that was driven in large part by my attempt to resist Big Tech and seeking out other ways of communicating.

It’s a new year - and that means well-intentioned people making resolutions and other well-intentioned people insisting that we’re all good enough as we are. Both are right.

It seems clear to me that most of us could use some improvement and such improvement requires intentionality and planning. The beginning of a new year is as good a time as any to do that.

It also seems clear to me that some of our ideas about self-improvement are driven by corporations intent on exploiting our insecurities for their own profit, a.k.a. marketing.

This tension between self-improvement and self-acceptance is one that has bedeviled me often. I won’t say I have any answers but I do have some experience.

I suggest two words to keep in mind:

Grace

Be gracious with yourself. Something needs improvement? That’s fine! Approach the issue knowing that you are not your enemy. Get out of the conflict frame of mind.

For example, I’ve let my running and meditating practice fall apart over the last couple of months. It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last. I shrug my shoulders and make plans to gently correct it.

Running: Work back into the practice by running a mile a day 3-5 times per week. Increase that from a mile as I feel like it. I’m in no hurry. I’m not going to die of a heart attack if I’m not running a 5k next month. One mile is better than zero miles.

Meditating: Work back into the practice by meditating 20 minutes at a time. I was meditating for longer periods of time and there’s a voice in my head that wants me to believe that 20 minutes (or even 10 or 15 minutes on really distracted days) isn’t good enough. But I will be gracious with myself. Ten minutes is better than zero minutes.

Whim

I was reading The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction this evening when it occurred to me that Alan Jacobs’ discussion of Reading at Whim might apply here also.

The Eat Your Greens school of reading (see Adler/Van Doren in How to Read a Book) would have us read the right books in the right way and - most importantly - have the right opinions about them. Jacobs offers a different approach: Read at Whim.

Eventually, however, he comes upon a problem similar to the self-improvement/self-acceptance conundrum. Not all books are equally valuable (some are more like junk food) - yet he still maintains that the Eat Your Greens school misunderstands the point of reading.

This is where he distinguishes between whim - “thoughtless, directionless preference that almost invariably leads to boredom or frustration or both” - and Whim - “based in self-knowledge.”

Capital-W Whim includes a playfulness grounded in a person’s knowledge of their own interests, capabilities, etc. It is not based on what others believe you should do, much less on what will enrich people wholly unrelated to you.

Grace applied to self-improvement means you will be kind to yourself, refusing to see yourself as your enemy. Whim applied to self-improvement means you will approach it with a certain playfulness, always with reference to what leads to your own flourishing.

Together this means that self-improvement is best approached through love and patience. The same approach you would take with a beloved friend.

Austin Kleon: Cultivate a willingness to be bad

Useful distinctions from Erich Fromm’s book On Disobedience

From Erich Fromm, On Disobedience (nearly every line of this book so far is worth quoting):

In order to disobey, one must have the courage to be alone, to err and to sin. But courage is not enough. The capacity for courage depends on a person’s state of development. Only if a person has emerged from mother’s lap and father’s commands, only if he has emerged as a fully developed individual and thus has acquired the capacity to think and feel for himself, only then can he have the courage to say “no” to power, to disobey.

A person can become free through acts of disobedience by learning to say no to power. But not only is the capacity for disobedience the condition for freedom; freedom is also the condition for disobedience. If I am afraid of freedom, I cannot dare to say “no,” I cannot have the courage to be disobedient. Indeed, freedom and the capacity for disobedience are inseparable; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth.

John Halstead has written an thoughtful post on prayer from a non-theistic perspective. (John believes that the threat of climate change is going to lead to civilizational collapse but you don’t need to have any opinion on that subject to read this.) I had similar negative feelings about petitionary prayer for a long time after leaving Christianity. I’m still not a person who prays - because, thankfully, I’ve not had any great personal upheavals in the past few years - but I’ve developed an attitude toward prayer similar to John’s. The post is also interesting for its incorporation of the thought of SF writer Octavia Butler.