Frozen Toothpaste

It’s often bandied about that optimism — no, pessimism — no, optimism is the key to being happy. I don’t think either, in the way we commonly understand them, has the potential to be the answer. Both require a unique flavor of delusion to do full time, and all delusion is detrimental.

“Detached openness” is a phrase I invented (or encountered, one can never be certain about such things) a few years ago. It is a shorthand of the disposition I thought (and think) ideal for moving through the world and being happy doing so.

While that alone may be enough for your understanding, let me clarify my understanding of these two words, as the standard definition of each is unlikely to illuminate what I think I mean.

Detachment, Buddhists caution, should not be mistaken for the ideal of non-attachment. While there’s certainly wisdom in that distinction, my understanding of detachment isn’t so narrow. The quickest way to differentiate the cautioned against detachment and what I mean by detachment seems to be these quotes from the Wikipedia pages for emotional detachment and detachment respectively.

[Emotional detachment] refers to an “inability to connect” with others emotionally, as well as a means of dealing with anxiety by preventing certain situations that trigger it; it is often described as “emotional numbing” or dissociation, depersonalization or in its chronic form depersonalization disorder.

Detachment, also expressed as non-attachment, is a state in which a person overcomes his or her attachment to desire for things, people or concepts of the world and thus attains a heightened perspective.

This proper understanding of detachment means knowing that not getting that promotion will not be the end of you. Exercised more strongly, it means knowing that the success or failure in this promotion process should in no way affect your self-worth or career objectives. At best, it means never even entertaining any of those thoughts. In this situation, one should understand the lower form of detachment as refusing to even try to get the promotion for fear of all the mentioned turmoil.

Openness here is understood as not dissimilar from optimism. It is being open to the possibility contained in every minute and seeing the good that can come out of seemingly bad things. It consists in being able to see the beauty in a piece of trash, the possibility in everything. I reach here for a quotation from Henry Miller:

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or as heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

I fail to see much with which I can supplement that.

The combination of these may be clear to you, but some illumination: detached openness recognizes the beauty in a sunset without striving to make it last in any way. It recognizes that the uncapturable ephemeral should not be held onto jealously or regretted when gone. Neither of those actions it helpful to your current mental health, nor do they enhance what was.

Ideally, we do this with all thing. We strive to see what good is unfolding without seeking to shape or change what we cannot. When something changes over which we have no control, we recognize it and seek to find good in the new order of thing. When something doesn’t change that we want to, we reassess and accept the unchanged situation without getting emotional. (Yes, I did basically steal this from the Serenity Prayer.)

I would make clear that I am no master of this disposition. I am prone to practicing the inferior form of detachment. I regularly find things ugly or infuriating or just plain bad. And I’m not always able to practice detached openness when attempting to correct these flaws.

Nor is this the only thing one needs. Other things certainly matter in life beyond your basic disposition to the world. Staying present for what is happening, to choose just one example, can get you at least as far.

But I feel rather certain that this disposition is the most healthy and useful one I’ve encountered in my life. Beyond pessimism or optimism, I believe detached openness is the secret to what mental balance I have and what happiness I find.

If there was one obstacle, beyond laziness, that made me hesitate to get back to writing in more than the few-sentence bursts I regularly produce for Link Banana it was my uncertainty about what of value I could say.

It’s not that I don’t think people need to hear things I think that I know — while there may be merit in possessing that type of modesty, I do not — it’s that they’ve already heard those things I think they most need to hear.

Things about how money doesn’t buy happiness. That understanding is rooted in attention. That the greatest obstacle to your happiness is your waiting to be happy. That happiness is not the same as pleasure, or a lack of sadness. That ignoring the present situation is the worst way to change it. That you can always find something to be thankful for. That anger is never the best way to solve a problem. That an act of kindness is never squandered.

These statements — and many others I didn’t list — are all, at least to my ears, the most obvious of truths. There are hundreds of famous quotations that attest to all of them. Anyone unacquainted with those quotations probably wouldn’t be reading anything I said anyway.

These short and obvious cliches are exactly what conventional wisdom says a writer should avoid.  But anything that takes more than a sentence to express seems overstated to me. While a sentence can’t explain the political climate of Somalia, or what spin means with relation to the bonding of atoms, or how the crash of the US stock market in 1929 was influenced by Germany, none of those things hit you where you live. Between your insides and your outsides none of those things matter.

The only things that really affect your quality of life exist within a radius about the length of your arms from your body. Everything outside of that radius is not acting on you in any direct way, and is thus irrelevant to your true quality of life.

I think that if there’s a single reason that the facts I consider most essential are simple, it’s this: not that much exists between your mind and fingertips. And even the most teeming of minds doesn’t contain much more than twenty thoughts at a time. And chatter among twenty idea’s can only get so complex.

People searching the edges of human knowledge are unlikely find anything there that will, or should, fundamentally affect their life as it’s lived daily. The confirmation of string theory says absolutely nothing to that longing you feel lying alone in your bed for the first time in years. A better understanding of the relationship between modern man and neanderthals, or market demand and labor supply, will not correct your dysfunctional relationship with everyone in your family. The existence or nonexistence of God changes nothing about your difficulty controlling your drinking.

But a single new idea, if it’s strong, simple, and powerful enough, added to the constant mental chatter can fundamentally change the timbre of the conversation in your mind. And that constant chattering is the very substance of your disposition, your life, and your reality. It is you, more than anything else anyone thinks they know about you. And you’re the one I’m interested in.

Though I like to write things like this less and less, I have to take a moment to say something about this blog itself. And it’s this: While I don’t have the time or will I once did when I was publishing nearly every day of the work week, I intend to start taking this blog seriously again. To regularly publish on it things I’m proud of, and hope will be worth taking seriously.

For now, my plan is modest. Having not written anything here (and much anywhere else) in over a year, I intend to merely publish one thing a month on the 15th (regardless of the day of the week).

And though I like some component post-types that used to make up this blog, I see many of them as methods I used more to fill space than say important things. I intend to do my best to avoid reviews of all but the most interesting or misunderstood cultural products. I intend to avoid writing direct responses to editorials and articles I see elsewhere. I intend to, at least on a once-a-month schedule, stop posting things other people said with nothing more than my statement of agreement. And finally, I intend to start citing facts and figures I mention (because damn it’s annoying when I go back and can’t tell how I came up with them).

My goal is to write with as little filler as possible things I think are interesting, largely unsaid, and worthy of saying. I doubt that I can do all those things every month, but it’s unquestionably what I’ll be striving for.

I harbor few illusions of what this thing will do for me, or what I can do with it. But I know that I like to have written things and that there are things I wish I saw talked about more. For those two reasons, I intend to revive this site. I hope you’ll join me.

Technically it’s just weeks right now, but before — when I first drafted this — it really was months. It was, and remains, that a strange confluence of inconvenient facts keep me from regularly flexing my muscle in this space.

I could go into the details, but I would rather say simply that they are far more prosaic than profound, and that to the extent I find myself different in the interim, it is having gained a certain weariness with the machinations of modern living and certain lessening of my certainty that all will turn out well.

But there remains fantastic potential in each keystroke. A never-relenting possibility that though this sentence bores me in it’s writing, and likely you in it’s reading, I may soon stumble upon something that leaves the two of us astounded.

My greatest aspiration as a writer, a thinker, a seeker, and a person, is to find myself amazed at the clarity that can be produced in a single well-structured essay. It’s a rarity, and looking back a little on all I’ve produced here, even more of a rarity than I remember.

But it’s the reason that I find myself returning this screen from time to time, looking at this empty box, and hoping hard to be able to get back to it in earnest. I never tire of the potential that from my keystrokes, someday, my world may be altered forever.

We see language as a mere tool at our peril. Being literate is not merely about having a functional ability to make sense of things recorded in a different time or place. It’s about having the ability, by merely moving your eyes, to enter another world. It’s about being able to, with mere movement of your fingers create new worlds, or new visions of this world, for others.

There’s magic in the act of writing. A magic the endless drag of 9-to-5 can easily sap from your awareness. But it is real. And it’s real, even if your skills, like mine, are rather feeble.

This is something I need to remember. To keep with me. To bring me here more.

Sometimes you work very hard to reach a moment of clarifying insight. Sometimes they just fall into your lap.

Sometimes that clarifying insight quickly reveals itself to be illusory. To have been too simplistic. Or poorly articulated. Or wrong.

But sometimes you sit with that moment of clarity for a bit — spinning it around, looking at it from as many perspectives as you can — and it seems to be flawless. It seems like all the moments of insight that have come before grasped for this insight you now hold. The others weren’t wrong, but they weren’t quite what you’d been going for. But this one, this is the real deal.

Obviously such certainty can be revealed weeks, months, or years later to have been wrong. But in that flash, and the afterglow that follows, you’re sure it could never be different.

And so I feel about these three words: Be. Here. Now. Be here, now.

Be where you are, when you are. Be at the table having breakfast with your family. Be in your bed, reading the lastest Clancy novel. Be entering data into a spreadsheet. Be reading this entry on this blog.

Presence in any situation is no mere thing. Full presence in every situation is a very hard one.

It’s so easy to focus, instead, on what dread awaits you in the next day to focus on the serenity of this moment, sitting here, writing this. Reading this. To find, after snapping back to attention, that your mind had drifted off to the hubbub of yesterday or the joy that awaits that night.

But if you’re able, being here now is the most amazing thing you can experience. “Everything that exists,” when you’re able to focus on it,  “is beautiful.” “What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such. “

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last year in worry. Primarily about the material circumstances of my life. How I could pay for the things I needed, and especially those I wanted. How I could get from where I am to all the places I’d rather be.

And I can’t even put into worlds how freeing it feels to rediscover what I think I once knew: all that matters is the sequences of nows I’m currently experiencing. That I am doing my best within those is the best I can hope for.