The Power of Solitude to Inform Us About Possibility

Tonight I biked twenty miles along the minute-man bike path, starting in early evening. I found myself relishing and enjoying the solitude. When do we get such moments unless forced upon us, or rather when do we relish such moments -when the moment for reflection arises in us, and with overwhelming need, takes advantage of this time to flood the brain, the body with inner reflection. Thoughts would be too simple a word. Ideas too profound. It's more like the self, once a frequent visitor, recognizes itself and takes a cup of tea by the wooded edge and takes in the sunny vale- but here it's night and bugs fly by in haste and make bug jam in my eye. The self is a gauzy cloak, a teary eye in the night lit by a small lamp that softly blinds me with memory while speaking entirely in the present and future.  

Henry David Thoreau seems to have gotten it right when he wrote in his chapter "Solitude" in Walden: "This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt-sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whip-poor-will is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled."

The velvet darkness speaks to me, from within a question emerges. How to express the impossible? Or rather, how to synthesize what is currently impossible into what is possible? At every moment there is possibility, the way there is potential energy in a car battery or a book just peering over the edge of the counter. It occurs to me that the reason people have uncertainty is because at any moment there are a many things with potential that have yet to come into being. We are validated in this feeling. It is both normal and necessary to recognize those moments where uncertainty is so palatable you can taste it - a violin string so tight it reverberates a twang and leaves a cloud of resin dust in its wake. Taste. Hear. Feel. Relish. Relish the moment that you were able to arrive at a moment for reflection, sadness, joy, humor, uncertainty, and even loss. How did we get here? Are we powerless to control what happens to us? We are powerless insofar as we can rarely control the actions of others, but we can often control how those actions affect how we feel. If we let a moment destroy us or allow us to respond in anger or disappointment, it will be that. If we instruct ourselves to work not with what was but with what is and what could be, we can vastly determine how we think about future thoughts. We may not  be able to remove or change existing feelings, but we can change how we choose to interpret new ones.

So, as I continued to fly by during this cool August evening, getting lost in memory and the tight weaving of emotion, it was only the right thing to do. Summer informs us of its end and fall of its beginning. So, why shouldn't other cycles be as natural? Why shouldn't we be able to say goodbye to those we love, the way early fall says goodbye to sultry summer evenings and lake baths pitched in the aroma of lavender and verbena?

On the Value of Habits and Why We Should Develop Them

 "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." - Aristotle.

Habit as Essential to Every Day Life
Look around us and you will realize that we could not function without habit. 99% of everything we do is an activity conducted out of habit, rather than out of new learning or new decisions. Decisions and learning take energy expenditure, and most of what we do every day could not be done without the chemical channels literally carved into our brains by habit. We would spend all day trying to insert a button into a the button hole on a shirt if we did not have the ability to develop life-long habit. This suggests that habit is a kind of learning. Once learned, the brain changes physically to accommodate for the new learning, and like a well-carved out river bed, little will disturb the flow of the river except land-slides or extraordinary human power. This means our habits, over time, will become ingrained into us like grand-canyons delved by slow-moving glacial ice. Persistence pays off with well-honed habits. The tortoise wins the raise every time, whether it be developing a habit, climbing mountains, climbing the corporate ladder, or whittling your middle. So, think twice next time you decide to "break" a developing or well-established habit you've been working on.

William James on Habit
William James is particularly insightful when it comes to habit. "The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this very hour to set the matter right."- William James


What is a Habit?
Habits are what allow us to follow diets through the years, as they become integrated into our lifestyles. Habits allow us to go from ice-cream slurpers to celery munchers in a mere matter of months if continued uninterrupted. Habits allow us to go from undecided undergraduates to highly skilled scientists, doctors, teachers, police officers, and business people. It is said that an activity must be practiced 30 times, consecutively, before it becomes a habit and that 10,000 hours must be spent on a subject for that person to become an expert in it. That, then means that there are 30 times for us to fail before the activity becomes a full habit, in which the task is more or less automatic. But on the wonderful flip-side, this means that there also only 30 times before it becomes second-nature. Only 30 times before we capture the indelible solution to our flakiness, unpredictability, money and weight-loss problems. Invest in this. Invest in yourself. Remember that habit, ultimately, is a personal investment in yourself, much like money in a bank that you yourself managed, an investment fund you proudly managed. Think of that. The potential for success is boundless after that.

The silver-lining, is that once we do become full embracers of those habits, life is significantly easier, saving us oodles of agonizing, stressful hours as we pine about when or how to get back on track with life and what we want. What we want gets done with habit. Anything great needs habit. Anything accomplished needs habit. Just 30 times on average, and we have mastered 95% of the problem- developing the habit to begin with. The rest of it is smooth sailing. Master the habit and you have a solution, almost without fail every single time. 

Newton's "Law of Habit"
"Every object continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless compelled to change that state by external forces acted upon it." Like Newton's first law of motion, a habit will continue until something distracts you or knocks you out of the regular course of events, such as an invitation to a party on a Tuesday night with your friends when you originally planned to attend your weekly spin-class. Tragically, this party could knock your spinning habit out of its orbit, depending on the number of times you've attended the spin class and the strength of your emotional association with this habit.

This is why it's so important to not go to that party on Tuesday and continue attending your weekly spinning class. The energy needed to return to the spinning class the following week will be significantly greater than the week of the party, and if you don't go the second week, exponentially harder after that. Thus, knowing how great a difference it takes to elevate oneself from the energy level of the habit once it's fallen to the first, like an electron knocked from its orbit. From this, we start to get a picture of how important it is for us to stay on track with our habits no matter how much we may be tempted by other events.

So, pick up those celery sticks, almonds and fresh veggies or whatever it is you want to develop a habit in. Munch away, and combined with proper support and some information, to your surprise, you can find yourself with a desire for vegetables in no time. Pick up those exam books and start ploughing away for an hour or two a night. Pretty soon you will be missing the quiet night time routine with your books. Just be aware that the first hour, and the second, and even the third time will be a struggle. Note that every time you sit down to study or eat carrots instead of brownies the difficulty will become less and the enjoyment greater. As when you were a child and finally got all the way across the monkey bars on your own, pretty soon you will even start to feel the same kind of pride and confidence that you did then and look forward to your study time or your fresh salad with light vinagarette on the side. If you slip up, remember, "two steps forward, one step backward." Continue on with your attempts as if nothing happened. Stick to your routine. Stay calm and carry on and have confidence that your actions will result in a positive end and smooth-sailing habits.

Good Habits and Bad Habits
James informs us how important it is to actually try to develop habits that may be good for us. It's important to note that habits are not only a means to help us to good for our selves and others, but a means to do unhealthy or unsafe things, as well. The same habits that keep our teeth healthy also make us fat, blacken our lungs, and deepen our credit card debt. The difference is that it takes about five times on average to develop a "bad" habit, versus 30 times on average to develop a "good" habit.

This has to do with the different chemical pathways and the ways that those chemical pathways act on our brains. When you eat chocolate ice cream, dopamine, a relaxant and "feel good" chemical floods the brain. The receptors in the brain remember this this feeling and connect chocolate ice cream with relaxation, and therefore as your head sinks into your chest and your eyelids struggle to stay open, wallah! you have the makings for a 3 p.m. craving for chocolate ice cream. This association between feeling good and ice cream becomes stronger with each satisfying of the craving, as with each bite you are reinforcing the brain's belief that ice cream induces relaxation.

Taking It Home
So, what is the best strategy? Armed with this knowledge, you can take further steps to make yourself aware of the danger of participating in "bad" habits and of the perils of caving into temptation while establishing or reinforcing a "good" habit. Ultimately, you run a huge risk of expending thousands of hours re-establishing your good habits every time you allow yourself "just this time." For the sake of spending those hours doing something enjoyable, stick to your good habits.

However, if you find yourself loathing the activities of habit, this is a separate matter that must be addressed first, in which you should examine your thought process to find out where the negative feelings are originating and whether or not the habit is actually worth pursuing.

Resources from: The Principles of Psychology, 1890 ch. 4 "Habit" by William James

The Importance of Risk in Achieving the Realized-self

I just thought it would be helpful to share with you some of the books and resources that I am reading and that have been helpful in terms of getting me to think about establishing direction, guidance, meaning and action in life.  Some of these are just books that planted the seeds in my head, and whether they speak specifically to genre of self-improvement or not, they have been influential and poignant catalysts to my thought process recently.

Books
The Defining Decade: Why your twenties matter- and how to make the most of them now by Meg Jay
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships by Tristan Taormino
Delivered from Distraction: Getting The Most Out of Life with Attention Deficit Disorder


Blogs
Leaving The Law a blog by Jennifer Alvey
http://leavinglaw.wordpress.com/2011/01/10/you-can-do-so-much-with-a-law-degree/ 


Articles
"Is Law School a Losing Game?" January 8, 2011 New York Times Article by David Segal
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/business/09law.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

• Many long conversations with my friend Michael L. and others.
• My own experiences and collective books, articles and essays whose names I've now forgotten.

Response to "The Defining Decade"
At this time, I will respond to just one of the books for the purpose of keeping this article to a reasonable length. However, this book is particularly good at making a point about the twenty something generation (children of the 80's and early 90's), not often described so explicitly.

Meg Jay tries to explain how twentysomethings have been caught in the "swirl of hype and misinformation that has trivialized what is actually the most transformative period of our adult lives."
The following quote embodies what she tries to explain and respond to in her book:

Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find, ten years has got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun. -David Gilmore, Nick Mason, Roger Waters, and Richard Wright of Pink Floyd, "Time"

Whether or not it is actually true that the twenties are the most transformative years of our lives, she has some important points regarding acting on your goals. I, rather, think that the greatest degree of emotional and intellectual growth occurs in childhood through age 18 or so, and that the twenties are the time of greatest potential action and change based on our ability to shape our career direction, networks and earning power. The twenties are influential because it it is the time when we can act on impulse, on whim, on long established and hard-worked for goals, on long thought-out plans, or a trip to India embarked on after a few conversations with a new friend and have those ideas shape and color our direction in life for years to come. These changes can be made later in our thirties, forties, fifties and beyond, but our minds are most adaptable, responsive and sponge-like in the twenties. At this time, our brains our both incredibly impressionable and incredibly willing to take risks and take actions that will decide the fate and color the direction of our thoughts and behaviors for the rest of our lives. It is as if all the pieces of the quilt are there but the pattern they create is not yet stitched together until our twenties, and then simply further explored for the rest of our years. This is a rather simplistic and not totally correct expression for everyone, but for many people, the patterns we tread for the rest of our life are rapidly (or slowly and carefully) stitched together in our twenties. The thoughts we think, the people we meet, the kinds of activities we do and the number of hours spent doing them considerably affects the circuitry of our brains during a time when we come into the power to shape our futures through our actions and interactions with others. Hence, the power of the defining decade, the value of "now," and "the world as our oyster" come into clear view as we understand the critical timing of the twenties and how important it is to listen and take right action within them.

Decide to reflect.
"The time is now," is her message, but what exactly does "now" mean? Does this mean we should run out into the streets nude and dance from rooftops? Should we quit our jobs, join the ranks of unemployed and starving artists? Yes and no. It requires a bit of self-examination and reflection. Yes, reflection. Reflection wrought out with paper and pen, stone and anvil, clay and stylus, sand and brush, napkin and lipstick, or computer and word processor. However you choose to do it, do it again. Make a list. Write it out. Make a song. Draw a picture. Speak it into existence.

I'm sure you've made these lists before, maybe even hundreds of times as you've see-sawed indecisively through your twenties and maybe even early thirties, but try looking at those lists once more or write one again (as chances are things have probably changed since you wrote that list, even if only 3 months ago.)

Write it out.
Plot out the whims, the desires, the angst, the pleasures, the wants, the goals, the loves, the hates, just let it all flow out for 20 minutes of pure, uninterrupted thought. Let the core of your being come to the surface, be those ideas evil dragons or milk-fresh princesses. Let the things you feel and want and the things you need come out. Don't inhibit yourself by what others want or by what you should do. This is a writing exercise, not a contract for your life.

Now you've written it/ drawn it/ spoken it, what does it say?

Stop thinking of your life as a contract written in stone. Nothing is written in stone, and the thing you think are will at some point be dramatically wiped away with the stroke of a brush. Think about what you, at the core of your being wants and no one else. This is not defiance or rebelliousness, just pure and simple truth about who you are, what you are passionate about, and hence, what you are most likely to succeed at and from which you will likely draw your greatest income if pursued to its fullest. Give yourself the chance you deserve to be a productive member of society and a fulfilled self with a fully-realized sense of identity.

Some helpful advice from my friends.
Risk as the vehicle for moving direction of your dream (and achieving it.)
Two years wasted in pursuit of your dream (or one of them) is not wasted at all. We waste years of our life in all sorts of ways. There is no one who hasn't wasted a year or two of their lives. Waste it for yourself. Waste it in pursuit of yourself.  Waste it in spite of yourself. You'll be surprised how "wasting" that time by taking a risk may actually be the best move you've ever made. Take more risks. I'm not asking you to take ridiculous risks like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute, but a risk in pursuit of your dream is definitely one worth, well,  risking it all.

If you believe that we are wasting time by taking a risk, chances are you have not accomplished your dream yet. Am I right? A risk is inherently risky by nature and hence, we yes, run the risk of wasting time.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Backward. If you get discouraged, which is as common as sliced bread, this piece of advice will keep you plodding along when it feels like you are fighting an invisible enemy in the dark along a road with no road-signs or markers to give you a sense of how far you have progressed. In a moment of panic and distress years ago, a supportive professor gave me this piece of advice: two steps forward, one step backward. With each step, we may not get to exactly where we want to be. We may actually go backwards, get a C on that math exam we studied for for weeks or lose our cool after nights spent in a musty library shoveling legalese into our brains while the sun shines and beach-goers mock you with their sandy bods and coaster-sized sunglasses. Nothing worth pursuing was ever pursued in vain. We want to give up and break down. Don't.

This quote says don't underestimate the power of failure to teach us how to proceed forward. Some days we go backwards a few steps, some days forward ten steps, and others a long plateau, but always moving forward when moving forward sometimes means going backwards or standing still. Then, pop your head up occasionally to reflect on where you  are and how you could revise our approach, should your progress not be as expected. Sometimes we must simply lower our expectations for how long something takes. Let the project be our guide, rather than rashly deciding it's "not worth our time." You might be surprised at what it can teach you.


Find a mentor. Talk to a friend that cares. That mentor may be a parent, a counselor, a professor, a teacher, a friend, a fellow MBA student you met at the bar last night. Whomever. Just make sure you have someone to bounce ideas off who is supportive with just enough criticism to keep you on your toes and who pushes you to get going and keep up with your goals. He or she might say, "You haven't taken that grad school entrance exam yet? What are you waiting for?" Or, "Did you start that novel yet? I want to read the first few pages by next week Monday." Or, "You should definitely work on your Spanish. You have a a shot at this interpreting job. We can work on it together through conversation."

Act on your chosen risk. Whatever you do, do something now. Take that programming class. Go for that MBA at Stanford. Take that class on sociology and gender studies at the local university after the workday is through. Secure a space to do your welding. Go to the meeting for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. Go for that internship in California. Try out that farming experience in France. At least you'll improve your French, find out you like sustainable food, discover you hate milk but love cows and that hard physical work can be a great way to let of steam, and maybe find out you want to become a veterinarian. That's all? Who knew!? So, take a risk, take a walk. What difference does it make? Actually, it might just make all the difference in the world.

Focus. And then, when you find that special thing, focus. As Dogen says, "When you find your place, practice begins."