Systems Optimization and a Life

I'm going to argue two seemingly contradictory points. First, a point about systems optimization.

You don't optimize a system by optimizing any one part of it. To optimize a system, you have to sub-optimize its parts. Let me illustrate what I mean by talking about a life.

Your life is a product of so many things: your physical health and fitness, your mental health and learning, your social life and psychological well being, your sense of meaning, your connection to the community around you and your sense of individuality in the community around you, your sense of legacy, individuality, belonging, your income and financial security, your cool shoes or cool car or cool taste in music, your hedonistic pleasures of food and sex, the hunger for stories that comes in the consumption of books and movies, or your tribal urges that find expression by cheering for your team and so many other things.

Here is the deal, though. If you optimize any one of those, you will sub-optimize your whole life. Do everything you can to be in peak physical condition and you'll likely have little energy left for something like plowing through great literature or keeping current on important new books. And if you do both of those things while working a full-time job, working out and reading all the great books, your social life will suffer. Life is zero-sum and if you optimize to any one piece of the myriad pieces that make up a life, you will sub-optimize the whole of your life. Oddly, the way to optimize any system - including and perhaps especially your life - is to sub-optimize every piece of it.

The punchline is perhaps cliche: a balanced life means moderation in all things.

Now the contradictory point.

This week there was some furor over Elon Musk's claim that to accomplish anything a person needs to work 80 hours a week. People pointed out that an 80 hour week is counterproductive. I totally agree. Long term. Short term? I think he's right.

A moderate, balanced life is not something that one achieves in any given instant. You don't split up each hour into 7 minutes for workout, 3 minutes for reading great literature, 8 minutes for building relationships, 4 minutes for eating, etc. Even within the course of a day or week we focus on just one thing at a time. So in any given instant, we're certainly not balanced.

There are times in life when you need to move forward. In those instances you look for the limit or obstacle to moving forward and you challenge that. You do optimize to the part that is the limit .... at least until it no longer is.

So then the question is, if you are going to optimize a life but not any one part of it, what does it actually mean to sub-optimize in a way that is best for your life?  It means that you have stretches of life that really do optimize for one part of it and subordinate everything else. Let's say that you have children. You don't want the entire rest of your life dedicated to doing what is best for your children, optimizing everything for them. But in those first few months? First few years? Maybe even first decade or so? You will optimize for them. Nobody with a newborn is running marathons or throwing big parties or reading great literature. They're sub-optimizing pretty much everything to that one thing: the newborn.

If you create a dissertation or book or symphony or business, pursue a gold medal or partnership in a prestigious law firm, you will probably go through something similar to what one goes through with a newborn. You're going to sub-optimize to that one thing. At least for a few years. New parents are not going to say that they'll only put in 40 hours each to care for their newborn; it would die in the other 88 hours of the week. A similar, but less dramatic thing, can happen with any of these ventures. Balance suggests that you never dive into anything: success suggests that you do.

And maybe you just keeping diving into things for the whole of your life. Or more realistically, at various times in your life that could be separated by six months to six years of "la de dah," days in which not a great deal happens. (That perfect storm of incredible opportunity for which you are incredibly well suited at the right time of life only happens one, two, maybe three or four times a life.) You throw yourself into things that result in sub-optimization elsewhere. You're immoderately out of balance at every stage and the end result is a full life that is balanced in that it lets you experience life as whole over the course of a whole life, but never in any one instant. Because in the end, a life takes a lifetime and if you're interested in a legacy of any kind, you don't even optimize for a window that small. (But that's the stuff of another post.)

Maybe There is No Lesson

Someone had shared this recently:

Rule 3
"There are no mistakes, only lessons."

As is my tendency, I nodded silently. It made sense. Then, because of my tendency to over-think things (or as I like to call it, "thinking"), I thought we may too readily believe in the power of lessons.

Lessons make it sound like there is something we can carry forward from one experience to the next. Maybe the most profound experiences of life are too unique to be understood by anything that happened before or of anything to follow. They are not lessons for life. They are life. And all we have to guide us through them is our heart. And maybe that's enough.

What Our Oldest Story Tells us About What it Means to be Human - Greenblatt on Gilgamesh

All of this is taken from Stephen Greenblatt's new book The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. This is a blog post rather than a book chapter, so where I could I made the story much more succinct, the result being that this is more choppy and less informative than Greenblatt's account.

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Gilgamesh was written by Sin-lequi-unninni. All that is known of him is that he probably compiled materials - texts and oral legends - that reached far back into the past.

The Torah was probably assembled in the fifth century BCE; the Iliad somewhat earlier, perhaps between 760 and 710 BCE. But Sin-lequi-unninni wrote his text sometime between 1300 and 1000 BCE, and the earliest surviving written tales of Gilgamesh date from around 2100 BCE. Older by more than a thousand years than either Homer or the Bible, Gilgamesh is quite possibly the oldest story ever found. [And what follows is just a portion of that epic of Gilgamesh.]

Uruk was the first city in the ancient Near East and perhaps the first city in human history and the creation story of Gilgamesh starts there. This isn't the story of the origin of humans. This is the story of the origination of humanity, told through a being named Enkidu who is transformed from beast to man.

The people of Uruk are terrorized by Gilgamesh who is one-third human and two-thirds god. He's a great builder and warrior but his sexual appetites are terrorizing the city. In response to the complaints about him from the people of Uruk, the gods create Enkidu who is placed - not in the city but - in the wilderness outside the city.

Enkidu roams naked with gazelles, a wild creature with hair covering his whole body. Then he meets Shamhat.

Shamhat is a temple prostitute skilled in all pleasures. Shamhat and Enkidu spend six days and seven nights in fervent lovemaking and at the end of this time, when Enkidu tries to rejoin the gazelles he cannot. This - the love of Shamhat - has changed him. He is no longer an animal.

Shamhat continues Enkidu's initiation. He cleans himself and seems to lose the hair covering his body. He eats at a table. She takes off her clothes and shares them with him (one for me, one for you style), clothing becoming a sign of culture rather than a covering for shame.

Next comes friendship. Enkidu meets Gilgamesh and stops him from raping a bride on her wedding night - as was his custom. (This custom was the catalyst for the people complaining to the gods about Gilgamesh and their creation of Enkidu.) After they fight over this, Enkidu and Gilgamesh become great friends who share adventures and companionship.

Finally, Enkidu learns of his mortality. Facing death terrifies him and he curses Shamhat, who initiated him into civilization. In truth, though, Enkidu was always mortal but was simply unaware of it when he was more animal than human. While still filled with trepidation about death, he is consoled by the gods with the memory of all that he has gained by joining civilization: food and drink that have sustained and delighted him, beautiful clothing he wears, honors of which he is proud, and above all his deep friendship with Gilgamesh. Enkidu dies.

Gilgamesh is thrown into deep mourning at the loss of his friend. He, too, is saddened and terrified by the prospect of death and seeks out ways to avoid it. In his search for immortality he encounters an alewife who delivers this advice:

As for you Gilgamesh, let your stomach be full,
Always be happy, night and day,
Make every day a delight,
Night and day, play and dance.
Your clothes should be clean,
Your head should be washed,
You should bathe in water.
Look proudly on the little one holding your hand,
Let your mate be always blissful in your loins

The alewife's words epitomize the wisdom of the everyday, the advice summoned up by the spectacle of too much heroic striving: know your limits, accept the human condition, savor the ordinary sweet pleasures that life offers. "This, then," she concludes, "is the work of mankind."

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[Your loyal blogger's voice]

It isn't about avoiding death; it's about embracing life.

This reveling in the normal, realizing how extraordinary is the ordinary, seems to me a much richer way to enjoy life than to insist that we do great things or strive to fall into the top 0.01%. In that direction lies failure for 99.99%, and that's tragic. Learning to delight in the common things promises delight for anyone who can realize the gift of civilized humanity, the promise of the pursuit of happiness.

The Entanglement of Desire, Identity and Suicide

We are creatures of desire.

Desires make us happy but can also hijack us. We can find shortcuts to satisfying desire that lead to addictions to drugs, alcohol or banana nut muffins.

Scientists have found ways to suppress desire. The good news is that this seems to work. People taking the drugs that dampen desire lose weight or stay sober. Compulsion gives way to control. That's pretty good.

The problem is that when you begin to tamper with reward centers, you begin to tamper with our reasons for being. A life without desire is a life full of control yet empty of reward. These drugs targeting the desire for food or alcohol can wipe out our desires more broadly.

Desires can - and have - taken anyone in directions they regret:  the good sex with a bad person, the 5th slices of delicious pizza that hardens arteries, the alcohol that impairs judgement.

Desires also make us different than robots or our daily planners. It's hard to find joy in rotely going through to do lists full of tasks that never feel rewarding to complete.

One of the challenges with designing drugs to target desire is one of entanglement. Part of what happens when you eat is that it lights up rewards centers - similar to what happens when you win a video game, have sex, snort cocaine, or solve an intractable problem. One problem with tamping desire for the things we shouldn't have is that it can mess up reward centers; it's an entanglement problem, a question of how you manage to take away one desire without messing up desire and reward more broadly.

When you start tinkering with desire you start flirting with suicidal impulses. These drugs that give us more control by suppressing desire also have a tendency to drive a rise in suicides. Suppressing desire can suppress the will to live. Even our less noble impulses are entangled with a reason to live and desire is entangled with what it means to be human. Kill our desires and it makes us want to kill ourselves.

Maybe the trick is to have desires but not let desires have us. Talking to a scientist this week who I was working with on a project to develop a drug targeting dangerous desires, she said that studying this has simply led her back to an embrace of the simple philosophy of, "moderation in all things."

Desire is part of our identity and that is not just the stuff of drama that dates back to Homer's stories of the gods but determines how happy we can make ourselves and others. Desire is itself something to be desired.

That's kind of fascinating.

A Root of Evil

I wonder if one root of evil isn't as simple as believing that our own lives don't make a difference. Once you believe that, it doesn't really matter what you do, what battles you walk away from, what innocents you fail to stand up for, what effort you do or don't make.

By contrast, believing that your life makes a difference makes you responsible for making an effort, for doing good, for finding meaning. That may not be the fruit of all that is good but it could be a root.

[It's been rightfully pointed out to me that this assumes a measure of compassion or empathy for other people. That is, it assumes that you're not a Hitler or inspired to be like him, making a difference by extracting revenge, real or imagined, on the French or the Jews or Muslims or women ... It turns out that some people are quite convinced that their lives make a difference only the difference to which they're committed isn't exactly a positive one.]

Heaven or Hell?

What if eternity is a place where you live among people who may be a different gender, of different skill sets and abilities, different races and styles, but who, in terms of how they fundamentally live their lives,

• have no more (or less) compassion than you
• are no more (or less) loving than you
• are no more (or less) mean or thoughtless than you
• do no more (or less) than you to realize their own potential
• put no more (or less) effort into life than you
• are no more (or less) brave than you
• are no more (or less) selfish than you
• do no more (or less) to make themselves or the world better than you

What if, in short, you lived for eternity in a world where no one was any different than you in terms of the emotions they evoked or nurtured? What if you were the only one who had the power to define whether it was heaven or hell and you only had that power now? 

The really important question is whether that possibility comforts or frightens you. What you might wish were different in that life could be something you ought to think about changing in this one.

Might be Metaphysical

As I get older, I'm more convinced that our emotional energy creates our circumstances. I've seen it too many times for it to seem like a coincidence anymore. If you are filled with fear, you end with fearful things in your life. Filled with love and you get loving things. Hate begets hate, etc.

This could be metaphysical. I don't pretend to know. It is - for me - conceivable that there is some kind of spiritual or emotional energy that creates things in the plane of reality. It seems far-fetched but it is, nontheless, fetched.

Or it might not be metaphysical. It might just be that attention is scarce and if we pay attention to one thing, we don't pay attention to another. And our attention seems to follow our emotions. I would go so far as to say that the motion in emotion is the direction that our feelings send our thoughts.

Once our attention goes into a particular direction, so do our actions, our talk, and the people and circumstances we pull into our life.

So if you are full of fear, you will - at best - solve the problem of what scares you. But the focus is on that, not other things.

Better to focus on possibilities and positive emotions instead. This isn't easy. Especially if you've found yourself steeped in things deserving of fear and dread. But I do think that this is where the work starts - with positive emotions like love, hope, and compassion. And as you continue to meditate on those things, you'll eventually create more positive things.

Life will always have a mix of wonderful and dreadful and the day to day mundane. But there probably is no one thing that more tips the balance in your favor than the emotions you feed and let drive your meditation.

I could be wrong, but just dancing with this delusion makes me feel a little more positive emotion. And even if I'm wrong and that doesn't create anything else in my life, that positive feeling is enough.

Curious

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."
-Walt Whitman

Resolution stops the creative process so it is probably a good thing that we are forced to play referee over the contradictions that we are.

We're a curious amalgam of bowels and brains, soul and scrotum, a spiritual being continually reminded that we're really just animals and vice versa. (Hm. It just occurs to me that the vice might actually be vice and the versa might be scripture. More creative tension.)

Humor seems the only resolution to living our life managing the war between such odd and contradictory roommates as we house within us.

The Unfortunate Eye-Glazing Tendency of Economic Development

Economic development sounds like such a dry and abstract topic. That’s unfortunate. Economic development can mean the difference between a mother crying as her child goes off to college or crying as her child dies in her arms. Poverty brings with it so much grief and prosperity so much possibility. The potential for a human life is vastly different at higher and lower stages of economic development.

As I would define it, no topic has such a pervasive influence on the lives of people. Economic development is not just a matter of getting more goods but of giving people more options. At its most dramatic, economic development gives people the option to eat rather than starve. At its more nuanced, in developed countries, it gives people options about how to define their own lives. In the poorest countries, it can mean life. In the richer countries, it can give meaning to life.

A New Olympics

Games mirror life in that they require some mix of skill and luck and have uncertain outcomes. One reason we love games is that that while we may be unable to predict whether we'll win or lose, we know what game we'll be playing when we're done.

By contrast, the game of life has uncertain rules and we may find ourselves playing a game we hadn't started out in. A man eager to show how smart he is may soon find that he is, instead, playing the game of how gracious he can be. A person who thinks that life is all about making money may suddenly find herself playing a game of soul searching. Life has a funny way of changing the game on us and it is not just that we can't predict whether or not we'll win or lose but even what game we'll be playing.

So, I propose a new kind of Olympics, one that more closely mirrors life. Figure skaters will find themselves suddenly sprinting and archers will find themselves performing the high dive. It will - as with life - be a test of one's ability to adapt to something one did not sign up for. We'd call it, "The whatever life throws at ya'" Olympics. Or something like that. It might just be the best reality show yet.

What is the Purpose of Teaching Purpose?

Life's purpose is an odd and curious question. It might be the reason that just as we reach a point in human history in which the likelihood of dying from hunger or violence has gone down, we find a rise in the search for therapy and self help books, a susprising persistence of unhappiness.

In less developed communities, the work for food and shelter is enough to busy a person. Years ago, a little friend of ours from Texas, born in the late 1800s, announced to us, "Stress? All this talk about stress? We never had time for stress. We were too busy working."

And without a crush of information that needs to be processed and numerous myths and worldviews competing for our attention and undermining one another, life's purpose is essentially a given.

Here in the 21st century, survival is a given for many. Nor can we expect to duck the question of what overarching purpose to accept or define, defining what matters.

I wonder if taking a job or partner is not too often a substitute for the hard work of defining a life. The unemployed or recently separate are forced into an existential angst that the rest of us would just as soon avoid.

For the most part, there is little in traditional education to deal with this question of who one will be. It's left to the Learning Annex and issues of Oprah magazine.

Given this is hard to grade and harder to prescribe, the process of defining who one will be is likely to stay out of school curriculum in spite of its importance to leading a happy and fulfilled life. Meaning is too hard and too controversial so we'll just keep children focused on polynomials and parenthetical asides rather than purpose. Because if we have learned nothing else about education it is this: if you can't grade it on a standardized test, it ought not to be taught.

Will Hoffman - Moments

This is beautiful. I smiled through the whole thing.

What Will You Do?

My daughter graduated from UC San Diego last month. Even people she has just met now feel free to ask her, "So, what are you going to do with your life?" They feel free to challenge her ability to pay the rent, be happy, or actually accomplish what she's planning. (Although few actually do so directly.) She is gracious about it, in no small part because she has a plan and it's already in motion.

And this got me thinking. I have even less time left than her, presumably. This question should have even greater urgency for me.

So, I wonder why we don't ask this question instead of, "So, what do you do?" of people who have become old like me.

Please don't feel offended if you see me in the next week or two and I ask you, "So, what will you do now?"

An Inane Idea for Education

The Obama administration is set on spending more on education, but they still haven't seemed to confront the basic truth about it: we need to increase the productivity of teachers in order for investments in education to get us more return. There are, as near as I can tell, only three ways to do this: 1. have each teacher teach more children; 2. have each child learn more (because of new methods or approaches); or 3. more directly apply what they learn to a productive life. It seems to me that there is a way to do all three. The first would slash the number of teachers needed and the last would create a surge in demand for the number of teachers needed. The number of teachers would be about the same but the net result would be better and, I think, more gratifying for teachers.

1. Teachers repeatedly teach certain concepts that could be better taught with a combination of video, computer games, and instant tests. Children at the computer doing certain kinds of drills would not only be taught just what they were missing but would provide continual feedback about where they are in learning. If schools got serious about this, they could raise the teacher to student ratio at least 20% - probably more like 100% to 200%. This increase in productivity would show up on the cost side.

2. Teachers would still be needed. They just would be able to focus on exceptions, rather than rote lessons. They could complement the computer aided instruction by coaching individual children on two things: lessons that the individual child seemed unable to get through the computer and by teaching lessons that did not lend themselves to computer aided instruction - such as music, dance, and inter- and intra-personal skills. These kinds of lessons are largely neglected now in schools, in no small part because teachers are so busy teaching the math, language, and logic lessons that could - at least in part - be taught by video and computer.

3. Finally, it seems to me that one of the biggest problems of our current education system is that it fails to help translate the life of the individual into the milieu of the times. We are born into a particular time in history and with a particular potential. Unhappiesness stems from either failing to understand how to apply our potential to the times or from failing to understand how to realize our potential. There is something terribly personal about potential. For a child to realize her potential requires a kind of attention that can't be provided by teachers busily teaching rote lessons.

Educators - school boards - should be busily engaged in the question of the times. It is unclear to me who - outside of educators - can do more to create the future. As they educate children into adults, they inculcate particular values and skills. The question that educators should continually ask is about the direction of history and where society should be steered. This is to address the question of the times in which they expect children will find themselves as adults.

Educators should further be asking themselves about the children they are failing. It is an apt description to say that these children are failing, in reference to children who have to be held back. They have been failed. And even those who are passed along are often failed in that they leave school having received more insight about themselves through horoscopes than through any insights shared by the school. Educators should be continually addressing the question of what potential are we failing to realize in this child, in these children?

This third point, this notion of education as something that steers us into the future and that identifies and realizes the potential of individual children - would create a huge demand for more teachers. This would at least offset the drop in demand that would follow from automating more of education. And it would greatly increase the productivity of teachers not by spinning the engine of education with more energy - more busy work - but by engaging the power of this more directly into the individual lives and times of the children who spend so much time in schools.

It is not enough to just put more money into education. We should demand a greater return on the money we already spend.

Two Kinds of People

"There are," Bernard said, "two kinds of people."
"I know. Maddie told me. There are Zambonis and grocery carts."
"No," Bernard waved me off while he wrinkled his nose up. "That's just nonsense."
"So," I tried what I thought was a sage voice, "two kinds of people: people who can be put into some category and people who can't be?" I chortled at my own joke.

"And you think that a quote is the same as an insight?" Bernard asked. "People who trot out someone else's quotes are like little kids playing dress up with their parents' clothes." He shook his head. "Don't use quotes. It's juvenile."
I rather like quotes but was in no real mood to argue with Bernard. "Okay," I shrugged.

"Two kinds of people," Bernard held up his fingers. "People who don't have a clue and people who don't have a clue that they don't have a clue."
"You are saying that we don't even have clues? None of us?"
"Well, okay. Maybe we have clues but we haven't really pieced them together. There are so many pieces and so much of it contradictory that it ultimately defies our powers of inductive reasoning."

"I'm not so sure. There are people I would go to if I needed help repairing my car, for instance."
"I'm talking about life - not objects! There are people who just don't know. They, for the most part, are hesitant to ever admit this. And then there are people who just prattle on at length about how life works. Full of advice, almost none of which actually applies. And they haven't a clue that what they are telling you to do is not just different from what they actually did but is highly unlikely to apply to your situation. Some people don't know and some people don't know that they don't know. It is ludicrous." Bernard stared at his drink.

"You visited your cousin Eliot again, didn't you?"
"Bah!" Bernard spat. "I don't want to hear his name for the rest of the day."
"Got it," I said, pretending to zip my mouth closed. "He's that kind of person, eh?"
"Ah," Bernard sighed, "he is so much that kind of person."

A Commitment to Extraordinary

I once had a philosophy professor who was a fascinating fellow. As a monk, he had kept a vow of silence for about a decade. By the time he was teaching us, he had things to say. I remember, at lunch, he once advised a couple of us young guys (I would have been about 18 or 19) not to ask a woman for a date – at least, not directly. Instead, he said, plan a great outing and then let her know that you’re going to do that and you’d be happy to have her along.

I’ve come to think that this is apt advice for any relationship. Work first on creating an extraordinary life, a great outing, if you will. And then invite people along. If you are going to see a beautiful sunset or painting, or walking through a great park, or eating at an extraordinary restaurant or any number of wonderful things, people will probably want to come along. They may even invite themselves. If you create a great life – one that is engaging, enjoyable, and meaningful - you’re likely to bring along others in your wake. They’ll be compelled to come along.

And even if you don’t bring along certain people on your trip to extraordinary, you still get to go to extraordinary. If you plan an extraordinary evening and get it right, it’ll be extraordinary whether or not the date you’d like to bring is with you. Given you can’t control other people, it’s probably best to make your commitment first to extraordinary. That’s not a bad environment for any relationship to unfold.

If you commit to a relationship first, you might find yourself compromising on extraordinary. and if you commit to extraordinary first, it is the rare person who - particularly if they are already in a relationship with you - won't want to come along.

Life Ends Badly. So?

“It seems so unfair,” Bernard said.

I looked up from my breakfast burrito and was surprised by what I saw. Bernard looked disheveled, his wispy hair smudged up one side of his head and literally waving in the breeze on the other. His eyes were bleary.

“What?”

“This,” he gestured expansively. “All of this.”

I looked around. We were at one of our favorite spots; the patio at Kono’s in Pacific Beach is alongside the Crystal Pier, overlooking the beach dotted with brown bodies and the surf dotted with black wetsuits. We had only brought Maddie there once; after she expressed her surprise at how many “negroes” were surfing (her weak eye sight confusing the wetsuits for bare skin), Bernard insisted that we would never come here again with her. Sitting perched over the beach like this always left me feeling exquisitely alive. I thought it did the same for Bernard and expressed my surprise that he was feeling so down.

“This,” I gestured, “makes you feel like that?” I pointed at him.

“Not always,” he said. “But today it just seems like too much.”

I waited. He rubbed the back of his hand across his nose like a small child who had been crying. I looked again. He was crying.

“Bernard?”

“You finally get how amazing this all is, how precious this all is, and then …”

“Then …?”

“It’s like you’re halfway through the most amazing ride at the park before someone tells you that at the end of the ride your life is over. This life – it ends so abruptly. And it is not until you are well into it that you realize there is no other exit, no other alternative.”

We watched a wave pick up a couple of surfers. A seagull landed on the railing and eyed Bernard’s bagel. A gorgeous woman laid out her towel in preparation for sunning herself.

“You would have chosen to skip this ride if you knew how it ended? Really?”

Bernard began to laugh. He actually snorted. And then he shook his head. “No,” he laughed. “No I would not.” His laughter made him begin to wheeze and actually seemed to worry people at nearby tables. “I don’t know what got into me.”

“You had trouble sleeping again,” I asked.

He waved off my question. “Do you think that I’m too old to learn that surface boarding?” he pointed.

“I think that even with a surf board leashed to your leg, you’d sink like Jimmy Hoffa,” I told him. I didn’t think that I could feel any better that morning yet Bernard’s guffaw reminded me that good can always get better – even if the ride eventually ends badly.

Your Life as Fiction

“I feel that you probably have the chance to change your whole life like a
thousand times a day….But the way we live we’re so shut down that our sensors
don’t (pick up) the stuff anymore. Because we’re scared or we’re not sensitive
enough to realize, or we’re not flexible enough to say yes or no, we just don’t
see it.”
- Franka Potente

One of my best friends has been overcome by a sense of dread. His life has, rather obligingly, become dreadful. Oddly, his life is not that different from mine in many ways, but his narrative, his constant refrain, is one of woe. And even more sadly, our lives depart in ways that are not fore-ordained; he finds himself entangled in miserable situations at work, situations that leave him emotionally and physically drained. This happens repeatedly. It could just be luck that my experiences are less onerous, are, in fact, exhausting but in more sustainable bursts and with people who I enjoy. It seems to me that, at some level, he creates this.

I could recount other people in other situations whose emotional state seems to find its own level in reality – as if their expectations, at some level, create the outcomes that match their inner narrative.

I’ve become convinced that we all write fiction. For some, this fiction is not particularly powerful – it is mere fantasy, like Walter Mitty. Others are more powerful authors who actually translate this into the real world. (And no, I don’t believe that our lives are completely or, perhaps, even mostly determined by such an act. This is a big world and anything we do has limited impact.)

This is not because of magic or because the universe wants us to get what we want. This is because reality is a swirl of possibilities at any time – we’re always at a place of near infinite possibility that is open, to varying levels, to our influence. It is not that we create reality, at some level – we just tune in to particular channels. The channels are always there: our choices might determine whether we get horror or drama or dread or chortles. We don't so much create our own reality as choose the dimension of it we live in.

If you make sense of your life by saying that “My job sucks,” your fate will know which way to navigate through the infinite swirl of possibilities: it’ll gravitate towards the “life sucks,” area. It is not that you create it – it is just that you’ll find a place of equilibrium once you hit “life sucks.” You’ll come to rest there because you’ve now matched the narrative and once you’ve done that, life – however miserable – now makes sense. The inner narrative and the outer reality match. You're at equilibrium.

You’re always writing fiction, always running a narrative through which you try to make sense of life. it seems to me that it's worth being careful what story you get hooked into because it just might become your life.

But of course, I could be way off on this. My notion that our lives are works of fiction might, itself, be a work of fiction. (And if so, have I just proved my point?)

Six Word Meme

Holly (HRH) hit me with a meme. It sounds simple. It is not.

Those hit with this meme need to describe their life in six words. Not less. Not more. Here I go.

As if I had a clue.

Bernard on Miracles

Bernard was feeling introspective. He hadn’t touched his Reuben.

“The odds against your existence are staggering, you know,” he said wistfully.

“My existence? Why mine?”

“I’m talking about the universal ‘you,’ you twit,” he rebuked me. “But I do also mean you.” Finally, having said this he seemed to have regained his focus. He picked up the rye bread and took a bite. A little strand of sauerkraut dangled from the corner of his mouth. He looked content.

“Were you going to elaborate, or were you just going to leave me to guess about what you meant.”

“I’m eating,” Bernard said indignantly. So, I waited for Bernard to eat.

“The odds against my existence …” I reminded him as he began to stagger at the girth of his deli sandwich.

“are astronomical,” he said.

“Think of the series of improbable events that intervened between you and nonexistence. At least one of your parents – maybe both – probably have a story of missing death by inches before you were conceived. A car accident or a charging bull. Your grandparents, their grandparents, their grandparents … all could tell you stories of their brushes with death if only they were here. And if that is not enough, think of the stories of how they met. How rarely do people instantly fall in love? How easily might even one of the couples upstream from your gene pool have failed to meet or failed to fall in love or lust or whatever galvanized them to action? And if that were not enough – well, think about this. There are from 20 million to a billion sperm in an ejaculate. Think about the odds that the sperm that became you would be the one that won the race to the egg. In each generation! Given all that, how outrageously infinitesimal are the odds of you existing?”

“Wow.”

“Wow indeed,” Bernard emphasized.

“So, what does this mean?”

“Well, the choice about what you make your own life mean is just a microcosm of the choice you have about what you make all of this mean,” Bernard gestured expansively. I was tempted to ask if he was referring to D.Z. Aikens restaurant, but I knew he meant the whole shebang – this whole universe around us. “You can make it mean that your life is destined or you can make it mean that your life is a triumph of the wildly improbable against the inevitable. In either case, I think that you have to take heart.”

“What does it mean I have to do?”

“Nothing. Anything. Everything. Your very existence is already an act of improbability. You might want to revel in that for a while.”

“Or even contemplate the odds against the existence of this very Reuben,” I said, returning my attention to my sandwich. “Think about the odds that this very dollop of mustard would meet with this very slice of pastrami.”

“Now you’re just being stupid,” Bernard said disgustedly. “The point is that we misunderstand miracles. We keep expecting levitating bodies or healing. If you really understand the odds against your existence, or more spectacularly, the odds against the existence of all of this,” he gestured again, “you’ll get the concept of miracle. You’ll see that our expectation of miracles is merely a distraction from the real miracle. It’s unnecessary.”

“So?”

“So live your life with a sense of awe. Treat it like the miracle it is. Don’t wait until you’re 80 to revere what you think of as common.”

I can't say for sure, but I think that Reuben might have been the best I had ever had.