All aboard the Awareness Train to Liberation Station
Hello you novelty cocktail napkin.
We made it! January is almost over if you can believe it. One down, four to go--- look out spring, here we come!
To throw you a small curve ball, this week I wanted to do modest callback to the theme of last week's dispatch on thinking about thinking. Coincidentally Tim Ferris recently shared the video below of David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech entitled "This is Water", and it resonated so beautifully. So I wanted to share. It is a 20-minute time investment, but if you are at all interested in exploring this stuff, in my opinion it is really worth giving it a listen.
Pour yourself a cup of tea and enjoy.
And so, back to our regularly-scheduled-but-also-related theme for this week.
As alluded to in the video above-- and also ironically-- to "be" successfully in the world, we have to get better at taking ourselves out of the picture. Getting out of our own way allows us to move past what Foster Wallace calls our "default settings", and become better able to experience the world and the people around us with greater complexity and empathy and truth.
So this week, I continued down the rabbit hole a bit to understand more about the art of understanding another person, which is a great way to help get out of our own default settings and connect more authentically with the world around us. As Brainpickings summarizes on behalf of humanist Eric Fromm,"listening “is an art like the understanding of poetry” and, like any art, has its own rules and norms. Drawing on his half-century practice as a therapist, Fromm offers six such guidelines for mastering the art of unselfish understanding [edited by EP for gender]:
The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener.
Nothing of importance must be on their mind; they must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed.
They must possess a freely-working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to be expressed in words.
They must be endowed with a capacity for empathy with another person and strong enough to feel the experience of the other as if it were their own.
The condition for such empathy is a crucial facet of the capacity for love. To understand another means to love them — not in the erotic sense but in the sense of reaching out to them and of overcoming the fear of losing oneself.
Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.
In short, we can benefit from taking the time to think about how we think about others and the world; and then translate that learning into our interactions with others, experiencing them as much as we can with presence, patience, empathy, connection and love.
Listen, friends (pun intended)... this kind of understanding is not easy. I fail at it all the time (and can think of at least three clear examples from this past week). When we try to meet each other with kindness, love and empathy, we are working against some majorly ingrained psycho-socio-cultural, ego-driven coping tactics and defense mechanisms. And let's be doubly honest: the prospect of living that level of "being present" all day every day would be a disheartening mix of super-exhausting, super-annoying and ultimately super-impossible.
However, we can make thoughtful choices about when to deploy this practice in our daily life, to "be" with others in a meaningful way. Maybe with the frantic person working the register at a packed grocery store, maybe with someone you love, maybe with someone with whom you disagree. Life throws lots of opportunities to be understanding at us every day. And I am grateful for them.
Because as Foster Wallace says, "This is water." Awareness-- being conscious of what we are doing and how we are doing it-- is a powerful form of liberation. The world around us tells us that the anger, pain, fear and violence around us means that we only have "the freedom all to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation... However, the really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them in a myriad of petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing."
We are all swimming in the 'water' that is the miracle of consciousness, and when we act with awareness and tap into the connection with others and ourselves, we can transform ourselves and the world around us.
But wait! Is all this talk of understanding others a bit too intense on a chill Sunday morning? Then please feel free to check out this charming video taking us through the ideal, step-saving kitchen of 1949.
Still too much realness? Then check out this video of cooking with wool.
From one conscious person to another, I am glad that we can be aware of each other together. I hope you enjoyed this dispatch, and have an understanding-filled week!
Until next Sunday,
The Earnest Platypus