Stoicism is now in vogue (I’ve read Ryan Holiday’s “The Daily Stoic” and the OG “Meditations” a few years before), but the expression of its ideas has never sat well with me. My impression is it demands far more determination than I have. If I were this determined, I would have had no need of philosophy to guide me.
Buddhism — especially how it is taught in the West, in a highly secular, practical fashion — resonates with me much better. I have not read much before or studied anything systematically, but it’s hard to avoid hearing about mindfulness and meditation. Those two have become mainstream.
Pema Chödrön has been on my to-read list for a while, and this year in particular I have been looking into some practical psychological shifts that could help me with my attitude. I’ve read a lot about habits and productivity and practice but still it all didn’t organize itself into a coherent system that would work for me.
I have a few books I respect that talk about what I call process, that I have read and re-read over the years, most notably Steven Pressfield’s “Turning Pro”, and more recently, Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way” and Seth Godin’s “The Practice”. The more of them and others you read, and other advice online, the more it becomes clear that it’s all about the same thing — what’s in your head and how you relate to it. In the grand scheme of things, everyone’s head is screwed on roughly the same.
Pema Chödrön’s work, I hoped, would give me another perspective that would help me fill some pieces I was missing. And it did! I wasn’t interested in Buddhism, but in ways of thinking that were offered.
I’ll start with the one I’ve read second because it’s more focused, and then talk about the one I’ve read first.
“Taking the Leap”
I bought this one on paper after reading it once to keep it on my shelf. Its subtitle is “Freeing ourselves from old habits and fears”, and the whole book is exactly one hundred pages long.
The central premise of Buddhism is nonattachment, and this book looks at one specific aspect of it called shenpa: as Chödrön puts it, “getting hooked”, the internal tightening and the urge to distract yourself or feed the feeling when you encounter certain words or situations.
There are many examples, but what got me interested was this:
If we’re attentive, we can feel it happening.
Following the other book (below), this is what Chödrön talks a lot about: seeing for yourself, noticing the pattern, becoming familiar with it. This is one step further than “The Power of Habit”: that assumes the habits are just there and fundamentally out of our control.
This concept of “getting hooked” is threaded throughout the whole book, and there’s advice on what it is, how it works and what we can try to do about it. It’s all very sensible and matches well what I feel, my reactions and my reflection.
Essentially, the action is to pause and notice the habitual reaction, and then learn to stay with it without acting. If we disengage this way, usually we can clearly see a familiar pattern of getting distracted, or outrage, or self-blame. This urge can be given space and time to dissipate, because we act on it only if we give it energy.
“When Things Fall Apart”
This is the one I’ve read first, and it’s a larger work that covers more ground and more concepts, and is more about actual Buddhist ideas and practices. The core idea I’ve taken out is “being present as it is” and the results if this practice is taken to the extreme.
The first is the concept of groundlessness: accepting that everything is impermanent, and trying to hide from change or to seek lasting security is fundamentally futile.
The second is relating to things and feelings as good or bad, welcome or unwelcome. Chödrön calls most feelings “the raw energy of the moment” and says that they come and go as ripples on water. We can pause and notice them and look at them closely — but it’s not necessary to put labels on them or act on them, we can experience them as they are.
The final idea from the book (for me) is that the present moment and how we relate to it is all there is. Quite literally, there is no past and no future, only the present moment — and for most of the time we’re not there to experience it, we’re thinking about something else.
Now is the only time. How we relate to it creates the future. In other words, if we’re going to be cheerful in the future, it’s because of our aspiration and exertion to be cheerful in the present. What we do accumulates; the future is the result of what we do right now.
“This very moment is the perfect teacher, and it’s always with us” is really a most profound instruction. Just seeing what’s going on — that’s the teaching right there. We can be with what’s happening and not dissociate.
I like neat puzzles, and these teachings are that. If you step back, this is all simply observing your thinking patterns very closely, noticing your (habitual) reactions, making conclusions and taking (gentle) action about them. “Present moment only” is a mode of thinking that is atemporal and goes against multiple time-based threads of thinking that are constantly present in our consciousness — which is why it’s really useful as an instant reframing that’s always there.
The problem with works like these is that they are an attempt to distill an immense amount of teachings into very few words. Not only that, most of it is talking about states of mind and the thought process that can only be understood through practice and not abstractly. I like to re-read these books at least once a year, and I noticed that every time I do that, I highlight different passages because I’m thinking about a different set of problems, and I’ve had a richer experience since the last time.