Three things

I don’t feel much like talking (typing) this week. I spent a lot of energy on Monday thinking about what success is while writing my paper on Nathan Roark and I don’t have much left.

Okay, three things.

1.) Letter to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke.

“one more bit of advice: to keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your whole development; you couldn't disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to questions that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer.”

“You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself.”

“Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

Is this advice for a young poet or advice for a senior in college trying to figure out what to do with their life?

Rilke talks about solitude a lot. Only in solitude can we find God, only in solitude can we find the answers. In class we got real when talking about solitude. I guess you’d call it a moment. Being in solitude is a funny thing, and I think it’s important to make a distinction between solitude and feeling lonely. Well, actually, I take that back. But there is voluntary and involuntary solitude, both of which result with one being in his/her own company. 

IT’S HARD sometimes being with yourself. I know it was really difficult for me in Italy for a semester. I felt alone pretty much every day. It stings, and it can feel like torture, like you’re in a prison. But the shitty thing about that is that in the same condition that can feel so uncomfortable and so oppressive is the condition where one can find ”god” and the answers to all their questions. You have to find some quietude to listen to your gut, or your soul. I would even hazard a guess that the only way that we can find the answer to “what is success?” is in solitude.

2.) Larry (Kent’s friend) who’s last name escapes me, taught us some things last class. I zoned out for half of it because I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but he had one bit of advice that went something like: Become the best at what you do because that is the best way you can give back to society.

3.) After writing my paper on success and creativity after interviewing an awesome guy by the name of Nathan Roark, I think I’ve figured out what it takes to be successful. Nathan kept telling me, you can’t be successful before you know yourself, what you need, what gets you riled up, happy, etc. Rilke said pretty much the same thing in that you have to go into yourself for the answers, you have to know yourself. Carl Jung says the same thing, “It is quite possible that we look at the world from the wrong side and that we might find the right answer by changing our point of view and looking at it from the other side, i.e., not from outside, but from inside.” Abraham Maslow, you know, The Hierarchy of Needs, talks about these four categories that we are motivated (don’t necessarily have to) to take care of before we can reach our potential, to self actualize, or be successful (which I’ll get back to). But it is in knowing our own physiological, safety, love, and esteem needs that we can focus on higher things. Ask yourself, “What are my specific needs? What does it take for me to feel safe? To feel loved? To feel good about myself?” When you know these, and in turn know yourself, according to Nathan, according to a bunch of others, you can then become successful. You can work on self actualization, or being what you are meant to be.

 Here's a video I took while riding my bike. I didn't edit it or anything, I thought it captured the moment nicely.

Lucky mud

Story: The first thing I want to mention this week is a memory I have of Maia. The first time I really spent any time with her (and all we did was introduce ourselves) was on an outdoors club/photo club trip sophomore year. I showed up on the late side that first night to Myrtle Beach State Park, about the last one in before the guard shut the gate. I barely had time to put my backpack down on a table before ranger rick showed up. He was an older gentleman, obviously flustered with the 15 or so college students that stood before him. “Who’s in charge here?” he said, looking at Maia. Silence. Even though there was no “leader”, by default, in that moment, we expected the “adult” to step up. But still nothing. Finally one of our club officers spoke up. Ranger Rick then proceeded to give us the rules explicitly because he must have felt like they were important for us, and not the other campers, to know exactly what we couldn’t do because he had had trouble in the past with college students and we’re obviously all the same, like people of a certain race or gender. BUT the point of the story, the significance, was that in any other situation the “adult” would have said, “Yes, I am the leader” but not here. I was struck by the fact that I could call my teachers by their first names during my first days at Guilford, but this was a real life example of equality.

Taking back the bonfire pit: This week Jason and I led the group to a new location. We thought of a few locations, one being the hill where the rope swing is, but we vetoed that one because of the smell and decided on the bar pit. On our way up to the pit I heard a few side remarks, disappointment from some, I heard something along the lines of, “this isn’t very creative”, and that stuff bothered me for a little while. I took it a little personally. Maybe it isn’t creative enough for you, but it has a lot of meaning to me; I’m a sentimental person. I have spent many nights during my four years at Guilford in the woods around a fire. There’s something special about it in its simplicity. Rather than be distracted by TV, the internet, or whatever, how about sitting around a fire with good friends, good conversation, and a few beers? Why not enjoy the company of others while you enjoy the company of nature rather than your apartment.

But back to this bonfire pit. The bar pit. Right off the bat the “give-back” nature of Guilford is apparent. A pentagon shaped bench paid for not from Guilford College but out of a student’s pocket and through his own sweat so that others could have a good time. And a bar! Perfect for those Friday nights. But back to giving back, its like paying it forward; you see a some cool benches, some awesome swings in the woods and enjoy them and suddenly you feel compelled to give back and put up more swings as others have before you. Or you feel compelled to go out into the woods with a hammer and some nails to fix the benches that someone decided to destroy. This bar pit, overrun by freshman parties, public safety, and a relatively recent attempt to destroy it in recent months needs to be taken back and cleansed with some good conversation.

The fire is an essential part to this. I was glad to be given the opportunity to start a fire, especially as it got a little chilly near sunset. And I was glad I could get one started because my reputation as the outdoors club vice president would have been ruined! Only kidding, kinda. But fire, such a simple thing, but so necessary. Knowing how to build one is essential being outdoors, only recently I learned how to start one with only one match. Now that’s intense.

Quote: David Funder says in The Personality Puzzle on existentialism, “In his novel Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut (1963) proposed that a human being is really no more than a pile of lucky mud. After all, the human body is chemically not much different from the dirt it walks on, plus a lot of water (the body is about 70 percent water). The only difference, says Vonnegut, is that this mass of mud is up and walking around. More important, it has awareness, so it can look around and experience the world. The other mud, that stuff underfoot, does not get to do that. It just lies there, ignorant of all the interesting things happening above…Therefore, it is imperative not to waste this brief period of lucky awareness. As long as you are alive and aware mud, and not just regular mud, you must experience as much of the world as possible, as vividly as possible. In particular, you need to be aware of your luck and know it won’t last – this is your only chance.”

That is my favorite quote of all time. It moved me back when I first read it in the fall of my sophomore year, and it still moves me now. When Maia gave me and Jason the opportunity to pick a new location I thought she also said to bring a reading, which was this quote, but either she was waiting for me to bring it up or forgot, I never got to read it. And I didn’t interject because this quote didn’t fit with what we happened to be talking about. But this quote fits in with what we’re doing. We’re living, aren’t we? Or do we forget? I forget how lucky I am all the time. This quote acts as a slap in the face, a bucket of cold water as it wakes me up from my slumber with a jolt. Why be blind, why be stagnant? According to Nathan Roark (survival expert), if you’re living a stagnant life (i.e. working in a cubicle for 30 years or pushing papers) you might as well be dead…you might as well be regular mud. Nathan told me that when things in nature are stagnant they die, they aren’t serving any purpose to the ecosystem. Life is dynamic, living things are dynamic; we choose to fight nature as we life stagnant lives. Again, we forget how lucky we are. We fight how lucky we are with our stagnation instead of experiencing the glory of the world around us. We choose not to see, to wonder what the experience of the living tree is, to realize the temporary awareness that we have been given by mere fucking chance. Move your finger, wiggle your toes, regular mud can’t do that.

Different Intelligences: Thank god for Howard Gardner, and hooray for psychology. In his study Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences, Gardner rejects the widely believed idea that people are either intelligent or not, measured by an IQ test to test “general” intelligence, and comes up with a theory, and tests it scientifically, which claims that in fact there are multiple intelligences and people have different and unique combinations of these. By being pretty intelligent himself, he was able to look at past research on the brain and its different functions and, after realizing that if a certain part of the brain was impaired that a certain human function was impaired like language or spatial skills, that there must be different skills or intelligences, not just a general one. Being a scientist, he created some criteria to come up with legitimate intelligences. These included a “potential isolation of the intelligence by brain damage”, “the existence of savants, prodigies, and other exceptional individuals relating to the intelligence”, “ability to study the intelligence with psychological experiments” along with five others (Hock, pp. 102-103). So then, all of the sudden, there are 8 ½ credible intelligences where there was only thought to be one.

Do you realize how big of a deal that is? For all the kids that were told they were stupid or told they would never amount to anything may have actually been smart. For all the kids that never did well on standardized tests, tests that only tested two of Gardner’s intelligences, may have had a gift for the interpersonal or the spatial, or the naturalist. Would you rather have a therapist that’s really good at reading books and taking tests or would you rather have a person that understands your emotions and can communicate to you genuinely about them because they them self feel those emotions within them? Mothers and fathers tend to be good at seeing the potential in their child, whether or not the school system can. Gardner seems to say that those parents might be right and that we are doing this whole education thing wrong. And for us, as second semester seniors on the brink of adulthood, it’s beneficial to know what combination of intelligences we have so that we may pick a career path that we can excel at, and do good with.

I like feeling passionate about things.

Dirty Lake #2: Seriously though, can someone clean this shit up?

Sam Flake's Thesis

Preparation

Preparation 2

Baby food. Cedar and small dead twigs

Okay, so I'm cheating by using a lighter

On Connection: David Abram says on page 112 in The Spell of the Sensuous, “the capacity to view and even dialogue with one’s own words after writing them down, or even in the process of writing them down, enables a new sense of autonomy and independence from others, and even from the sensuous surroundings that had earlier been one’s constant interlocutor.” I am particularly interested in this notion of a”new sense of autonomy” that was born out of the transition from an oral tradition to a written one. As a psychology major I can’t help but wonder about the enormous internal shift that had to take place within people. You have individuals that might not have a sense of individuality who, as Abram says, are connected to their sensuous surroundings, see themselves as one with the earth and with others. Then, these people are challenged to think about what they’re thinking, to say what they’ve said in another way, to define words, to define clouds, to define themselves for the first time. This is fantastic in the betterment of civilization, for example, the worker who can question the fairness of his situation and to ask “what does fair mean to me?” Or for the advancement in medicine in the sense that remedies can be recorded and made better. But Abram says on page 113, “the written letters bring not wisdom but only ‘the conceit of wisdom,’ making men seem to know much when in fact they know little.” That’s an interesting line because science  and all the other disciplines can make a pretty strong case for wisdom through written letters, but he seems to be talking about a different wisdom, a wisdom that goes back to oral tradition, to losing that sense of independence and feeling more connected.

Psychology: Viktor Frankl says in Man’s Search for Meaning, “The true meaning of life is to be found in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system.... Human experience is essentially self-transcendence rather than self-actualization. (p.175)” Self-transcendence is essentially that, a transcendence of the self, being one with the rest of the world. This is the highest human potential according to humanistic psychologists (Who all other branches of psychology hate because they refuse to break people down into little parts as they see with a holistic lens). We talk about Peak Experiences in psychology, too. We all know what these are, hopefully we’ve all experienced one where time is non-existent, we are swept away by beauty and feel wonder, we feel a connection with everything else in the world, where a certain euphoria washes over, all of this usually in response to something beautiful like a piece of art, an incredible landscape, or love. There is no I, there is no autonomy, there is no independence from the sensuous surroundings. There is connection. When one strives towards the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, towards self-actualization (but really self-transcendence), the disconnection of the objective created by ancient Greece is lost in the ever increasing feeling of connectedness to others and to the world. As disconnection is a basis for psychological disorder, connection is the basis for psychological wellbeing.

Advice from a graduate: I asked someone who graduated from Goucher College last year, who I know from high school, what the “real world” is like and if she had any advice for me. Her “best advice for me” was to,

“think about everything that you would ever want to do in your life and then start applying to internships/americorps/service groups or anything else that in the least bit applies. I think too often people around our age are getting out of college and thinking that if they don't get a 40 hour a week job that is exactly what they want to do they're failing...that's SO FALSE! I was a dog walker for the month of September and had no shame. Think big. There's no reason you shouldn't! “

              
I talked to my dad about this later and he couldn’t agree more with not worrying about getting the 40hr a week job. He wasted his spring break his senior year interviewing at different banks, started working at one right out of college, and has been at one ever since. I don’t want to do that, it makes me shutter to even imagine myself starting my “career” right now, not that there isn’t any fear of failing by not getting starting that career early, but I’m not ready to work the 9-5 for the rest of my life, maybe I’ll never be ready.

             
Actually, I had a conversation with a businessman over outside of London when I studied abroad and he thought working 40 hours a week was ridiculous and that we should all work 3 or 4 days of the week. To continue this tangent, I remember reading something in a Peace and Conflict Studies book that said when we were hunter-gatherers, people only worked the equivalent of about two days (it might not have been two, but it was close). Some men would go out on a hunt, kill a big animal, and eat it all week. There was none of this sitting in an office and punching computer keys for the majority of your waking hours only to get home so exhausted from the boredom that you can’t enjoy the stuff that your job pays for, or the kids that your job keeps you away from.  

             
But back to the advice. “Think about everything that you would ever want to do in your life and then start applying…” Because why not do what you want to do? Isn’t it that simple? Why does the 40hr/week job have to be any different than what you would ever want to do in your life? And hey, no one is really sure if there’s an afterlife, next life, or even an immortal soul, so why not live your life and do what you want (That statement is for you as much as it is for me). I think that gets close to the definition of success.