A Brief Meditation on Purpose and Distraction

Hi there. If you don't know me, I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky and just moved to Rutland, Vermont with my wife, who I'll refer to here as "Sky."

When moving across the country, it seems like it should be a time of transformation, right? Well, I'd certainly like it to be. It's just unclear what direction I should move in, to be perfectly honest. And I'm partially talking about career-type-stuff, but partially talking about bigger (secular version of spiritual) things.  

I should say right off the bat that we moved to Rutland because Sky got an awesome new job she was extremely excited about, and I supported this decision both for her sake and for my own. I had, for some time, felt like I wasn't going in the direction I needed to be going in, though I had not identified a viable alternative. 

So that's the backdrop, and with that in mind I'd like to peek into the realm of ideas for the majority of this post, beginning with a section of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience.

"We have a thought, or we perform an act, repeatedly, but on a certain day the real meaning of the thought peals through us for the first time, or the act has suddenly turned into a moral impossibility. All we know is that there are dead feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live ones; and when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to re-crystalize about it" (James, pg. 184). 

That sudden insight, or epiphany, or (when in the religious terms James is talking about, "conversion") is very appealing to me, and I suspect to many others. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I believe many people in the United States are dissatisfied with the way their lives look and feel. Without yet having read past this section of VORE to see how James qualifies this statement, I will reflect on my gut reaction: the thought that we might suddenly experience a "crystallization" of ideas sounds dangerously like spiritual/intellectual pornography in this age of distraction. This is because, read today, we hope that something will finally "click" in our heads and we can then put down the smartphone, the remote, the tablet, the laptop, disengage with social media and the internet, and truly experience a meaningful life. We (or, at least, I) hope for meaning to shower itself upon us and imbue our experience with joy, or, at least, purpose. 

Please remember that James was writing in an era of no TV, no Facebook, no digitization, etc. This is, in many ways, an age of distraction. More personally, I have not been formally diagnosed as struggling with ADD, but I certainly struggle with focus and attention which means that I am frequently spending my time jumping from one thing to the next and not really doing anything. This easily translates into not really engaging with myself or with the world. 

I cannot think of a better way of explaining the thought that I am trying to communicate than by deferring to Louis C.K. in the following clip:

If you disagree with the way I've characterized the ubiquitous over-consumption of wifi and data (perhaps you have found a better balance and self-control than I have, or perhaps you enjoy engaging with social media and believe that my characterization is judgmental and false) please just sub-in your own "vice of distraction" and my bet is you will agree that many of us are frequently distracted and not living "life itself" but rather deferring life itself through endless distraction. Stress is another huge distraction that is not necessarily connected to the internet/etc (e.g., stress about work, finances, etc) and can easily lead someone to the same disengagement with "life itself" that fosters an ambivalence. In short, many of us never (as Louis CK so eloquently puts it) end up feeling truly sad or happy because we put too many things in the way of life itself.

And just to show that what I'm saying isn't completely made up, I found this article: Happiness Index Article. (Note; this approach of googling an article to support your views is not very scientific!). On a side note, the article does have a somewhat optimistic ending: Americans are starting to value a purpose-driven life more than material wealth.

I'd certainly like a purpose-driven life. But, as I mentioned at the top, I'm not sure which direction to go in. Sometimes I wonder if that's even a helpful question to be asking; the Zen idea of purposeless as explained by Alan Watts carries some weight with me:

But let's set that aside: let's assume for the remainder of this post that "purpose" is a good, desirable thing. 

The thing is, I have experienced so many epiphanies that made me feel certain I knew my life's purpose, only to find that these epiphanies didn't stick (in James's terms, the ideas became "cold"). How do you trust enough to do the work to move in a particular career/spiritual/life direction when your epiphanies are akin to posts on social media that you "like" and then continue scrolling?

I have an idea for a potential solution that I think will be helpful to me, and maybe even others:

1. Be willing to acknowledge that often I am not engaging with whether or not I truly enjoy something  but instead "judging" based upon how I would like my "idea" of myself to feel about that thing (e.g., my idea of myself is as a voracious reader, yet I spend very little time reading these days. This cognitive dissonance very easily leads to yucky feelings). The question becomes: am I simply alienated from these things that I love because the idea has, temporarily, "gone cold" or is it that I am experiencing yucky feelings because I expect myself to enjoy things that my actual self simply doesn't? 
2. With the above consideration, acknowledge that while I know a great deal about my "idea" of myself, I know virtually nothing about my actual self.
3. Experimentation: now that I've acknowledged 1) and 2) (or at least am trying to acknowledge these thoughts), I can experiment with the things that I think are important to me, but also be willing to acknowledge when I am wrong and try not to experience guilt because of this.

Knowing that my previous pattern has been to throw myself in a particular "life" direction intensely for one afternoon, only to have it fizzle out the next day, I am instead going to change the way I experiment.

Every day I will do the following self-care things:

1. Spend 1 minute exercising 
2. Spend 1 minute reading for pleasure
3. Spend 1 minute catching up on the news
4. Spend 1 minute meditating
5. Spend 1 minute playing music 
6. Spend 1 minute writing
7. Spend 1 minute reflecting on the day

This list is based upon things that my "idea-of-myself" cares about very deeply (as well as health-oriented activities that will help me to continue to move forward; it is easy to be distracted by enjoyable or even purpose-giving activities to the point of not taking the time to complete healthy activities). 

I am hoping that by spending one minute focusing on each of these things, the amount of time spent doing what I truly enjoy will naturally grow, while I can also avoid the guilt of indulging in internet-based distraction as long as each and every day I complete these 7 minutes of self-care. Eventually, these minutes will grow where they need to and push out the wasted time slowly. The image of ivy comes to mind--one vine will eventually smother a house with its abundance. (Yeah, that's right. I just used the word "smother" in a positive sense that didn't have any weird kinky undertones 😜).

I believe that someone cannot pursue their purpose unless they take are of themselves and experiment--at least, they cannot unless they experience a type of "conversion" (re-crystalization of ideas) that gives them the strength and energy to pursue their life as it "should" be in a sudden and sustainable way. To date, I have not had an enduring conversion that answers the big questions of what to do with my life, but I would like to experiment with the idea that conversions or epiphanies can be built slowly and steadily through smart, tactical work rather than just scrolling through my news feed as I wait, passively, for the universe to tell me what I need to do.

That's all for now.

-Jimmy