Last post I talked about having mixed feelings about donating money to charity. Society’s prevailing attitude is that giving money is always helpful, and is always motivated by genuine altruism. I’m not so sure about either, and I know I’m not alone.

My suggestion for people who feel that way was to find a cause you can give to with your whole heart, without reservations. I hinted that I had found such a cause to give to, one that doesn’t make me feel condescending, or unsure of whether I’m actually helping.

It actually isn’t a charity. It’s a non-profit that facilitates small loans to small-time entrepreneurs around the world. Teresa needs $750 to properly stock her general store in Paraguay. Sergio, a furniture maker in Mexico, needs $425 to buy a reserve of wood so he can fill more orders.

These are independent entrepreneurs who probably wouldn’t otherwise have had access to any kind of financing. With a small loan, a hardworking individual can get a business off the ground, or help it become profitable.

The organization is called Kiva and I’m sure many of you have heard of it by now. Rather than donating money, you lend. You choose an entrepreneur, read their story and their business goals, and send them a no-interest loan, as little as $25. Nearly 99% of the loans will be repaid to you, usually within a year. You can then use that money to loan to another entrepreneur, donate to Kiva’s operating costs, or even cash it out and walk away with it.

By lending, rather than donating, you can help to create a self-sustaining source of income for these people. It builds economies and empowers people to support themselves, rather than depend on aid.

The three primary values Kiva is trying to promote are:

Dignity — by creating an equal-ground, partnership-type relationship between you and the person you lend to, rather than a downward, benefactor-type relationship. This promotes dignity on both sides.

Accountability — Because repayment is expected, these loans create accountability where a donation would not. Each borrower enters the relationship with the expectation of the recipient becoming self-sustaining financially.

Transparency — Kiva prides itself on being open about its operations and the financial transactions involved in an attempt to avoid some of the cloudiness people perceive in some traditional charitable organizations.

This article was supposed to wrap up around here, with an earnest appeal to lend through Kiva if you are feeling weary or ambivalent about traditional charities. But I did a bit of research, and although Kiva advocates transparency, it might not be quite what it appears at first. I want to make sure all the cards are on the table, so that people can contribute without reservations.

How it Really Works

Most people who lend through Kiva probably believe it works something like this:

1) You browse the site and choose an entrepreneur who wants to start or expand a small business or other project

2) You contribute a portion of the loan they have requested

3) When the total is reached (which happens very quickly considering the small size of the loans), your chosen entrepreneur is granted their loan and may proceed with their business plans

Therefore, you and 10 or 20 other kind lenders have given Geraldo a chance to buy enough seed for the upcoming planting season. This means there is a peer-to-peer connection, where you are able to help a specific person with a specific purpose. You chose Geraldo over others, perhaps because you have an affinity for farming, or because you are endeared by his story, or for some other personal reason.

There may be lenders you chose not to support, for personal reasons. Perhaps you are a vegan, so you’d rather help Luca renovate his clothing store than help Maria buy cows for her small dairy.

This personal connection is something Kiva wants to foster. It’s central to Kiva’s philosophy and it is very appealing to lenders. I like that I was able to help a woman in Nicaragua expand her corner store. I like that I got to choose where my investment went.

But that isn’t quite how Kiva works.

Kiva does not let you lend directly to its entrepreneurs. The loans are disbursed by “field partners,” which are microfinance institutions (MFIs) in the entrepreneur’s country. Kiva allows you to lend your money to the MFI, who loans it to your entrepreneur. This is indicated prominently on Kiva’s site and shouldn’t surprise anyone.

What might be a surprise is that nearly all of the loans have already been disbursed by the time the entrepreneur even appears on Kiva. Often Kiva does not know they exist until the loan is paid out. If you look at almost any entrepreneur’s profile you will see that the loan was “pre-disbursed” before Kiva even posted the entrepreneur’s situation and needs, and asked its users to lend.

Exactly when the loan is made may seem irrelevant, but it brings up a few problems for some people:

• It means you do not actually get to chose who you loan to, though it seems like you do, and for many people this is the reason they use Kiva. You do choose which field partner gets to use your money as capital, but not which business is funded with that money.

• The entrepreneur is represented as being someone in need of a loan, when they are actually somebody who has received a loan and is no longer in need of one. Your money will go into the MFI’s pool of capital, with which they will fund other entrepreneurs and/or pay back Kiva, for not only this loan but other previous loans.

To most people it probably isn’t particularly crucial to know which entrepreneur their loan goes to support, but for some it is. I mentioned vegetarian lenders and meat producers, for example. Others might be concerned that charcoal producers contribute to deforestation, or they might have any other personal or political objection to some of the businesses supported with their investment.

But think about it this way: your contribution probably helps someone — but you don’t know who, only that it is not the person you chose to help. Your contribution does not affect their situation; that entrepreneur has already received their requested loan, and their story and picture is posted on Kiva so that their creditor can recoup it and other loans.

What your loan does do is contribute to the capital of the organization that has already lent to your chosen entrepreneur. For what it’s worth, your loan expands the ability of that organization to help entrepreneurs. It almost certainly does help to improve the quality of life of some entrepreneur and his or her family, as well as strengthen their local economy.

This is a real contribution, and what makes it even more appealing is that you will get your money back 99% of the time. This means two things: you can continue to help others with the same funds, and that you’ve done more than give someone a proverbial fish — you’ve helped somebody to create a business that is able to reproduce that money and more.

So essentially, instead of getting to choose an entrepreneur to help (like I initially believed, and most undoubtedly do) you choose a Microfinance institution to support, and you get to see an example of someone they have helped. That’s a worthy thing to do, but it isn’t quite how Kiva presents itself.

A Point of Interest

It also may surprise you that many of these MFIs are for-profit lenders, and most of them charge interest rates that would be considered outlandish here. They can be as high as 80%, and most are in the 20-40% range.

So this is what actually happens: you lend money to Kiva at zero interest. Kiva lends money to a (carefully screened) MFI of your choosing at zero interest. The MFI lends their capital to individuals who apply for loans, at interest. So essentially you are lending your money to a creditor who can use it as interest-free capital to lend to others at interest.

I’m fine with that. I am not against lending for profit, and this system probably still provides an excellent opportunity for most of the entrepreneurs listed on Kiva, but I suspect the casual Kiva lender believes their interest-free loan is going to the entrepreneur in the picture, and this impression is cultivated on purpose.

Kiva does not exactly lie about how it works. All of this information is available somewhere on their website if you look for it, but I think the idea they present upfront is different than what they are able to deliver.

There is another place where Kiva’s presentation might be misleading. It advertises a 98.9% repayment rate, which suggests an extraordinary success rate among these entrepreneurs: apparently, a whopping 99 out of 100 made enough from their business venture to repay the loan. Though the loans are small, this success rate is extremely unlikely, and we’ll never know the real number. The MFIs repay Kiva for 99% of what Kiva lenders contribute, but these institutions almost certainly would rather eat the odd defaulted loan and repay Kiva, than report a delinquent borrower and stiff Kiva (and you), and consequently lose standing with an extremely important source of capital.

This is the reason most of the lenders charge interest rates that appear outrageous to us — 20-40% is typical. Kiva does disclose that its field partners do charge interest rates in this range. They say, and I believe them, that this is simply the cost of lending money to high-risk people in developing economies. They must charge these rates to cover the entrepreneurs who default on their loans, to pay for their own operating costs, and in the case of most, to make it worth their while.

Why am I telling you this?

This is not a condemnation of Kiva or the idea of microfinance. I am still an enthusiastic supporter of both. Even knowing what I know now, I do recommend lending through Kiva. I will continue to contribute through Kiva, though from now on I’ll base it on what I know about the MFI, and not about any particular entrepreneur.

After learning how it actually worked, I did feel a bit duped. I think they want to push the idea that it is a real peer-to-peer lending situation. They create this impression without being overtly deceptive. All of the information is there, but they know the casual lender won’t look that far.

I’m mentioning all this because I think there is a danger of backlash. Microfinancing is a powerful way to help alleviate poverty, without the pitfalls of short-sighted financial handouts, but I worry that people will dismiss Kiva as a scam when they discover that it doesn’t quite work like it appears to at first glance. To some it’s probably no big deal at all, but to others it is an offensive misrepresentation, and I’d hate Kiva to get a bad rap when they’re doing so much good.

I think the emotional appeal of individual stories and pictures is a tremendous draw for would-be lenders, and Kiva would receive far fewer loans if they did not play up this apparent peer-to-peer connection. But there is no real peer-to-peer connection here. It creates an interesting ends-justifying-means situation: should they play down the peer-to-peer concept so that people don’t get the wrong idea, knowing that it will cost many entrepreneurs a golden opportunity?

I’m not quite sure, but I’m on board either way.

Photo by Mckaysavage

Well it turns out there’s been much more interest in Douglas Harding’s Headless Way than I initially thought. I’ve had quite a few lengthy comments and a lot more emails than normal. Evidently Headlessness has struck a chord with a lot of you, and people have a lot of questions.

I can’t explain everything about it here though, for three reasons. First of all, I don’t want to write about the same topic for too long because I know not everyone is interested. Secondly, I can’t do nearly as good a job describing headlessness as Douglas Harding can and already has. And finally, this is a method of self-enquiry, which means you’ll have to do most of the exploring and experimenting yourself to get the most out of it.

So here are five excellent resources on headlessness, all available from your computer chair.

1) www.headless.org

Most of you have been here already. The center of the Headless community on the web, it’s run by Richard Lang, Harding’s good friend and the co-ordinator of the Sholland Trust, a charitable organization formed to help educate people about the Headless Way. www.headless.org has loads of information about headlessness, including videos, interviews, articles and stories.

The experiments section (which you’ve probably already visited) is the key to understanding headlessness. Each one demonstrates a different aspect of headlessness. There are about a dozen experiments in all. “Seeing Who You Are” is a particularly good one.

None of them are useful unless you do them though.

2) On Having No Head

If you’ve found something intriguing in Headlessness but could use some clarification, there is no better resource than Harding’s first book, On Having No Head. He’s a sharp writer, engaging and hilarious. The book covers the initial seeing, making sense of it, and the progression of incorporating headlessness in your life. He deals with the common “so what?” response (he had it himself), the practical application of headlessness, and the formation and dissolution of the ego. It’s really quite entertaining and he does a much better job at describing it than I do here.

It’s available on Amazon for about ten dollars, and you can preview the book there as well. You can also buy it through www.headless.org’s bookshop if you prefer to support the Shollond Trust. Neither are affiliate links. On Having No Head has had a bigger influence on my quality of life than just about any book I’ve read.

3) People’s accounts of headlessness

I love this section of Headless.org. It’s a collection of comments and anecdotes about ordinary people’s experiences with headlessness. It really helped me reconcile my own experiences with what I was “supposed” to see. I learned that a lot of the people had similar experiences to what I had, and to the experiences many of you described in the comments here on Raptitude.

These are so useful because different people tend to describe headlessness in different ways, with different words. It gives you a lot of angles from which to think about it.

The comments are divided into dozens of categories, including experiences with mirrors, first experiences, how headlessness clarified scriptures to people, and more.

I draw your attention to the “First seeing” category. For many people, the first try was quite disappointing, but it didn’t remain like that.

4) Catharine Harding’s Podcast

This is a three-part podcast of a talk by Douglas Harding’s wife Catharine. Each part is about 30 minutes long. Much of the podcast is guided experiments administered by Catharine to an Australian interviewer, but the first ten minutes is an excellent introduction to headlessness, as she talks about what led Douglas to his discoveries. If you’ve only got ten minutes check that part out.

Here is part one.

She’s quite well-spoken and likable. Thanks to Jeremy Ramsay for finding this.

5) Reflections: A free course in seeing

Richard Lang puts out a great Newsletter, which is a series of instructional articles followed by short reflections on headlessness, mostly poignant excerpts from Harding’s writings. It begins with a welcome from Richard, in which he explains where to start and where to go from there.

Occasionally he sends out news about headlessness, such as where there are workshops being held and where you can find new publications on Douglas Harding. In the last edition, there was a link to “A good article on Douglas Harding” and when I clicked it I was surprised to find it was mine.

***

I’ll publish one more post related to Headlessness on Monday and then it will be back to your regularly scheduled programming. But this topic is so widely applicable it is bound to make more appearances on Raptitude in the future.

Have fun exploring.

Photo by mugley

This is the fourth article in a series about Douglas Harding’s method of self-inquiry, called headlessness. The others are here: [Post one] [Post two] [Post three]

In the previous article, I described Harding’s discovery that he, in his first-person, singular, present-tense experience, did not have a head. He insists that anyone who gives it an honest, unbiased look, will find the same thing.

Obviously it’s a preposterous claim, and it raises some questions. Here are the most common sticking points.

What is the point of this?

The point is to experience your true nature instead of just experiencing your thoughts about your true nature.

We tend to see ourselves as what our thoughts tell us we are: separate, finite bodies, tiny compared to the world we inhabit.

Nearly all of your ideas about who you are have been derived from views of you at a distance, either from other people’s accounts, or from mirrors and cameras.

From a distance of a few meters, you do appear to be a finite thing in the midst of other finite things. From zero distance, your appearance is very different, but we tend to disregard what we see ourselves to be, in favor of what we’ve learned ourselves to be from non-first-hand sources. This collection of learnings is called the ego, and most people will never suspect that it isn’t who they are. All of it is second-hand, past-tense, misleading information about who you are, observed from angles that cannot possibly see what you see.

All the major spiritual teachings inevitably point to nonduality — that there is no real separation between you and the universe around you. Many people suspect this is true, believe it is true, or want it to be true, yet it remains only an interesting concept for most.

What the Headless Way (or “headlessness”) allows you to do is to see nonduality plainly. You can physically see the seamlessness between you and the universe that contains you. This has huge implications for our relationships with others, the ego’s negative effects on our lives, human evolution and a lot more.

I don’t get it.

That’s ok. Nobody will get it just by reading what I write here. In most of my articles, I explain a concept that is hopefully useful for the people who understand it and apply it to their lives. Normally the article is all anyone needs (I hope) to understand the concept.

This series is different from the rest of my articles. What I’m describing isn’t a concept, it’s an experience that you either have or don’t have. Once you have it (and I stress again that it is neither difficult nor exclusive), many of the peripherally-related concepts will suddenly make sense. But nobody will make sense of this just by reading my posts (or books by Douglas Harding for that matter.)

This series of posts is only meant to intrigue people enough to do Harding’s self-inquiry experiments for themselves. Reaching an understanding of headlessness through thought alone is impossible, and isn’t the point anyway.

The experiments are all available here, on the excellent website about Harding’s work, called The Headless Way.

But I know I have a head.

I know I have a head too, but that does not mean I see one from where I am, or that I could possibly conclude that I have a head like others do if I am honestly working from present evidence only. What I do see is an enormous space, without bounds, containing everything — including the rest of my body — which is centered on top of my shoulders. It is clarity itself.

I’m not you, so I don’t know what you see when you look at yourself, but I suspect that you will not see a head either, unless you are confusing your thoughts and memories with your sensory perceptions.

It’s not relevant that you know you have a head. Oddly, knowing you have a head doesn’t actually contradict your experience of not having a head, and once you experience it you will understand why that is.

Remember, your apparent form changes as the distance from the observer changes. At nanometers you appear to be molecules. At two meters you appear to be a headed human. At zero distance you appear to be headless. It makes no sense to pick one of these forms and say it is the truth and the others are wrong.

But two things are certain: 1) you can only ever experience yourself first-hand, from zero distance, and 2) since nobody else can experience you from a first-hand perspective, you should value your own direct observations above what outside observers tell you you are.

The headless part is only the beginning. Don’t get hung up on the debate about whether you have a head or not. Once you’ve seen what you are looking out of, there is no debate. It’s not a battle of beliefs — there’s no uncertainty here.

But I can feel my face and my head, and I can see my nose.

This is where we cross the line between observations and conclusions without realizing it. It seems that our non-visual senses — particularly touch — reveal that we do indeed have a head even if we can’t see it.

Experienced meditators know the value of observing a sensation without giving it a name. The body is constantly broadcasting little aches, throbs, gurgles, flushes and tingles, and with a bit of conscious attention it is possible to observe only what they feel like, without linking them to mental images — without picturing them, without trying to figure out what body part is hurting and why. When you do that, you recognize them only as sensations that arise in your awareness, perhaps change a little bit moment to moment, then eventually wink out.

The feeling of your hand touching your face is not itself a thing, it’s a sensation, and sensations are all we ever experience. They become “things” when we interpret and label them. Deal only with the raw materials of perception: sensations. Sensations are your actual observations, while things are conclusions about what those sensations are. With me?

When you move your hand closer to the clear space you are looking out of, at a certain distance the hand will begin to blur, and then at some point you’ll feel tactile sensations. With your eyes open, it is very difficult not to picture your own face (with your hand stuck to it) even though you cannot see your face. If you close your eyes and just observe the sensations by themselves, you will notice that you cannot pin down the boundaries of the involved body parts. You can’t tell where one ends and the other begins, they are just sensations floating somewhere in spacious awareness. Nor can you even tell that the sensations there are those of a hand contacting a face. Only your thoughts will tell you that.

If you try this, you’ll notice that there are undoubtedly a lot of sensations happening, but they do not amount to a head (or a hand for that matter) unless you ignore your direct observations in favor of your existing beliefs: “I already know what’s happening here. My hand is touching my head.”

Defer to your observations; do not let your memories and imagination tell you what those observations are. To live by what you see rather than what you think about what you see, is lucidity itself. Do this as if for the first time. Do this as if you know nothing.

All of the typical objections are addressed in Harding’s easy-to-do experiments.

“Probably there is only one way of converting the skeptic who still says I have a head here, and that is to invite him to come here and take a look for himself. But he must be an honest reporter, describing what he observes and nothing else.” ~ D. Harding

Why are you trying to convince me I have no head?

I’m not. I don’t believe I could do that.

To convince somebody is to change their thoughts about something. I’m not interested in doing that, at least not here. You can’t see who you really are just by thinking.

Headlessness will always be confusing and suspicious if you are trying to comprehend it with thought, because it isn’t a concept. It’s a physical method of seeing yourself. Thoughts will only get in the way, by misinterpreting your observations to match your beliefs.

There is no hope of comprehension without doing at least one of Harding’s experiments. I stumbled upon the “Pointing Here” experiment, and I knew I had found something powerful. I did some of the other experiments on that page, and life was never the same.

After that I watched the eight video experiments which helped me make sense of what I had seen, and clear up some of the apparent contradictions.

As I’ve said, nobody will get this by reading what I’ve written here. You will only see it if you actually do the experiments.

What are the benefits of headlessness?

Most of the benefits of living from headlessness aren’t easy to articulate. It’s an experience that’s yours entirely, so it’s difficult for anyone else to say how it will affect you. But here are a few benefits you can expect:

• You get to experience nonduality first-hand, so you no longer need to believe in it, or deny it. This comes with a flood of insights about compassion, emptiness, interdependence and evolution.

• It is a simple and easy way of disidentifying with the ego, because you can distinguish easily between emptiness and the world of content that fills it. If it’s content, it’s not you.

• It gives you a completely different perspective from which to solve problems in your life. Encountering familiar problems is almost fun, because you have a much less reactive standpoint from which to deal with them. What was once troublesome might strike you as hilarious.

• Suddenly a lot of cryptic passages and quotes about “emptiness”, “inner space,” unity and nonduality will make a lot more sense. Ancient wisdom won’t seem so ancient. It will give you a starting point from which to interpret a lot of religious or philosophical ideas that once seemed completely out to lunch. The words of Confucius, Lao Tsu, Jesus, the Buddha, and Zen masters will probably take on a clearer meaning to you, particularly if you are not religious.

• Perhaps the most immediately useful effect is that it keeps you in the moment better than any other method I’ve tried. Your attention defaults to your senses, rather than the usual default to thoughts. You will be better able to observe each moment freely, and be less preoccupied with what’s in it for you or not in it for you. This means much less stress and fear. Gratitude comes more naturally and almost nothing seems to be of absolute importance. It is a perpetual, moving state of Dying on Purpose.

***

I have to say I’m baffled with the virtually non-existent response to the last post. My many regular commenters, the ones I would think would be most interested in nonduality, are conspicuously silent. I think this is the most important and most useful topic I’ve ever written about, but from the tiny amount of feedback I received I can only guess that I’ve presented this idea very poorly, and I’m probably turning people away from it by confusing things and inciting skepticism.

No amount of explanation will suffice anyway. Like any of the other angles from which spiritual teachings can be approached, thinking and explanation will not take you all the way, they can only lead you to personal experiences that show it to you. I was hoping I would be able to lead at least a few people to see (not understand, but see) what I’m talking about. Maybe I have, but nobody’s quite said so.

My mistake was trying to describe this experience before presenting the experiments. The best way is to see your own headlessness, and then make sense of it, not the other way around. I fell into the biggest spiritual pitfall of all — trying to convey “the Peace that passeth all understanding” with words and thoughts.

I was going to go on to talk about the implications of headlessness for the ego, and how it relates to God and religious ideas, but without feedback I have no idea how this is going over among you readers, and I may just be confusing people. I would like to know what you’re all making of this. Is it interesting? Confusing? Troublesome? Boring? Irrelevant?

Unless I get a lot of requests to continue on in this vein, for now I’ll give it a rest and talk about other things. So if something about headlessness intrigues you, do the experiments, and explore www.headless.org. Those who are interested will figure this out rather easily, with a little initiative.

Do the experiments here.

Feel free to ask me any questions, through the comments or the contact page.

Photo by lordcolus

This is part 2 of a two-part post. The first half is here.

Let’s continue, shall we? Things may get a bit rowdier here in the second half. But as before, there’s something for everyone.

“Need You Tonight” – INXS

Looking back to the decade that produced me, there was a point when all the ridiculous fluff of the mid-80s gave way to some really timeless, inspired tunes. I figure it was about the time Kick came out. Still one of the grooviest guitar riffs I know, this song was ultra-cool on arrival and still is. It makes non-dancers want to dance.

If you like it: The rest of Kick is worth a listen. Consult an INXS die-hard for further instruction.

“Jolene” – Dolly Parton

A heartbreaking song about a girl watching her man drift away to a woman she can’t compete with. There is something so refreshing and honest about a song that looks unflinchingly at personal powerlessness, without dolling it up by babbling about hope. We’ve all been devastated by a Jolene of some kind, in one way or another. Utter defeat is human too, and Dolly saw something meaningful in it.

If you like it: The White Stripes do a fantastic cover of this song, mercifully ignoring the obnoxious custom of changing the gender when a male sings it. Check it out.  

“Kiss From a Rose” – Seal

You heard me. Overplayed, melodramatic and loved by all the demographics I am not, I still think this song has one of the most compelling and original melodies I’ve ever heard. It sucks me in. And a brilliant melody is truly, exceedingly rare, no matter how much music you consume. Even the most celebrated artists often excel at everything but melody, Bob Dylan most famously. That rare talent for melody is (for example) what the Beatles used to write so many dozens of devastatingly likable songs, with which they proceeded to conquer the earth. Kiss From a Rose, despite its clichéd floral theme, despite its over-the-top harmonies, despite its embarrassing affiliation with the worst of the Batman movies, features a verse melody so effortless and original that it probably gives Bob Dylan nightmares. I urge you not to watch the video at all, just listen. Ignore the words even, just follow the notes.

If you like it: I have no idea where to point you, for neither Seal nor co-writer Trevor Horn nor Batman himself will likely lead you to anything in the same league.

“Astro” – The White Stripes

Only bitter old men say rock is dead. This is an early one from the Detroit divorcees-turned-siblings. If you can figure out the bizarre innuendo in the lyrics, more power to you, but the saucy guitars should carry enough meaning for anybody. I love this band.

If you like it: See them live! In the mean time, check out Jimmy the Exploder, Offend in Every Way, or Black Math.

“Bulls on Parade” – Rage Against the Machine

If you don’t know Rage, they were (are?) a quartet of furious, rocking leftists, led by charismatic frontman Zach de la Rocha. Quite possibly the only rap-rock outfit that made any great music. Though political music is as old as music itself, no act ever achieved the same level of sheer, physical intensity with it. Bulls on Parade is a better-known track of theirs, and it still rocks my bones.

If you like it: Try Fistful of Steel, People of the Sun, Killing in the Name, or Freedom.

“Say it Ain’t So” – Weezer

Weezer’s first album is another one of those uncanny mid-nineties albums that are thoroughly, consistently exceptional. Say it Ain’t So is the standout on an album of standouts. The music is easy, catchy, and lighthearted even when it’s serious. In my humble yet coldly dismissive opinion, nothing they’ve done since has been as remarkable as any of the songs on this disc. Listing Say it Ain’t So here is really just a sneaky way for me to include ten of my favorite songs in the space of one.

If you like it: Get “the Blue Album,” as it is known.

“The Funeral” – Band of Horses

I was all over Band of Horses’ debut album when I first heard it, and this was the best track. It’s the song’s stoic refrain that gets to me:  At every occasion I’ll be ready for the funeral. Read it any way you wish; I think it’s a powerful philosophy. To my horror, Funeral was used in a television ad by the Ford Motor Company. I know it shouldn’t matter, but it does.

If you like it: Band of Horses’ self-titled debut is solid, as I’ve mentioned.

“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” – U2

Yep. U2 has been releasing a steady stream of material for almost 25 years, and though it would surely get me drawn and quartered in some neighborhoods I’ll go ahead and say that I don’t think it gets any better than I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. That’s not to say it’s anything less than brilliant, in fact, every time I hear it I know I’m listening to one of rock’s greatest anthems.

If you like it: Reintroduce yourself to U2′s other early hits: One, Where the Streets Have No Name, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Mysterious Ways. If you’re looking for obscure U2 songs you’re definitely asking the wrong guy.

“Fast Car” – Tracy Chapman

Saddest song in the list, no question. Read verbatim, the lyrics appear to profess hope, but something — in Chapman’s voice, in the guitar riff, some subtle note of pleading somewhere — betrays a sinking doubt through all of the pair’s talk of better days to come. We’ve all done it: talked hopeful talk when we just don’t buy it, and nobody else does either. Fast Car is a song about people who are broken, and know it.

If you like it: I always loved the title track off of New Beginning.

“Brother Down” – Sam Roberts

Brother Down is probably his best-known song, but I’m not so sure Sam Roberts is known outside of Canada. It is enormously catchy, and seems to have stayed fresh after hundreds of listens. Catchiness is a virtue in my books, evidently. But the lyric is really something too: a highly quotable speech about finding principles you can actually live by.

If you like it: You may just be a Sam Roberts fan, and if so you’ll like almost everything of his. But probably not. Try Bridge to Nowhere, to start.

“March of the Pigs” — Nine Inch Nails

Not for the faint of heart. I was scared of this kind of music as a pre-teen. Nine Inch Nails, particularly on their 1994 masterpiece, The Downward Spiral, is hellishly dark. My friend, upon first hearing it said, “I’ve got to buy up everything of theirs before he [NIN mastermind Trent Reznor] snaps and shoots everyone.” Now in his forties, he has calmed from his early suicidal/homicidal subject matter, and as much as I hate to say it, the music has lost something. March of the Pigs is an intense, raging tune that will leave you no doubt as to what I’m talking about.

If you like it: You wore lots of black in high school. The Downward Spiral is must-own for you. So is its predecessor, Broken. Listen to them in the dark on headphones.

“Cherub Rock” – The Smashing Pumpkins

The Pumpkins are a rather polarizing band. Perhaps as a testament to their creativity, their material is all over the map in terms of style, and most people either love them or hate them, or both. Some of their stuff is ugly, boring or worse. Just about everyone agrees, though, that 1993′s Siamese Dream was their stroke of brilliance, and leadoff track Cherub Rock is one everyone loves. For best results, listen at loud volumes.

If you like it: Try Soma, Geek U.S.A., or Rocket. Venture into the rest of their catalogue at your own risk.

“I Feel it All” – Feist

Feist always makes me smile, but especially on this track. To me, I Feel It All is about throwing yourself headlong into whatever fate your desires will bring you, only acceptance and curiosity rather than ordinary foolishness. The perfect soundtrack for one of those rare days when wake up knowing exactly what you want in life, and it happens to be sunny. And what a line: I’ll be the one who’ll break my heart.

If you like it: Try So Sorry, Mushaboom or Let it Die.

“Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” – Jimi Hendrix

I didn’t know what awesome meant until I heard this tune. I remember the day too. I was thirteen when my friend called me and said “David! My brother’s having a sixties flashback! Come over quick!” When I arrived they were knee-deep in Beatles, Doors, Hendrix and Stones. I had never heard Hendrix before, and it blew my mind in the best way. That whole mid-nineties summer was like our very own 1968. Voodoo Child‘s first solo break was unquestionably the coolest thing I ever heard in my life, and I don’t think anything’s topped it since.

If you like it: You have probably liked it for a long time. If not, lucky you.

“Isis” – Bob Dylan

My favorite Dylan tune is actually A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall, but I already included it in my Six Amazing Songs post. Isis is a close second. Sit back and listen to Bob tell you one of the strangest travel stories you’ve ever heard. In less than fourteen verses, he covers it all: romance, adventure, comedy, poetry and history.

If you like it: Consult your local Dylan nut for further recommendations. In the mean time, try Tombstone Blues if you want to keep laughing.

“Mutilated Lips” – Ween

What to say about Ween? If anyone is doing their own thing with abandon, it’s these guys. No style or subject matter is taboo for them. Pick a random Ween track, and you could get a straight-laced country song, a psychedelic soundscape, a bitter acoustic breakup song, or an Irish drinking song. And those are only the songs that lend themselves to description. Behind all the weirdness is some top-shelf musicianship that most people probably don’t stick around to discover. Mutilated Lips, though plenty weird, is a seductive song with an extremely unattractive title. Words fail me, give it a listen.

If you like it: Ween is a real grab bag; try Beacon Light, The Mollusk or A Tear For Eddie.

“No Way” – Pearl Jam

Non-Pearl Jam fans often scoff that the Seattle veterans have released little of spectacular quality after 1991′s debut Ten. Even my friend, a musicphile and fellow Pearl Jam lover admitted, “They do have a lot of forgettable material.” I don’t necessarily disagree, but all their fans know that they’ve lain a steady trail of gems all the way through their 18-year career. They also remain one of the best live acts around. No Way is a standout from their late-nineties comeback album, Yield.

If you like it: Try Corduroy, Brain of J, or Tremor Christ, assuming you already own Ten.

“D7″ – Nirvana

The “band that saved rock” left such precious little material before Kurt Cobain’s death that virtually every other notable song is too well-known to be worth mentioning here. D7 did not appear on any of the band’s releases, and hopefully you’ve never heard of it. It’s unreleased status is not much of a mystery — it’s a cover, so it lacks Cobain’s genius with melody, and the beginning is quite dry and plodding. But D7‘s glory comes in its second half, when the trio kicks in the distortion and lets it rip at speed. Suddenly the same words take on a riveting intensity, not that they make any more sense. The shrill guitar solo bumps it up another notch, followed by yet another when Cobain brings the “vocals” back in.

If you like it: You probably know the multi-platinum Nevermind inside and out, so try these lesser-known, equally raging Nirvana originals: Negative Creep, Radio Friendly Unit Shifter, and School.

“Tiger Woods” – Dan Bern

I urge you to give this one a fair listen, even if the opening few lines offend your sensibilities. It’s a ridiculous song with a rather rude central metaphor (you’ll see), but one with a rare earnestness to it. As silly as it appears on the surface, it is indeed a passionate song about wishing for greatness. I hate to have to mention that this song was written long before Tiger Woods was a symbol of anything except undisputed superiority in one’s chosen pursuit.

If you like it: If you investigate Dan Bern you may find his huge catalogue is preoccupied with politics and religion. God Said No is worth a listen and will give you an idea of how he reconciles his faith with his wild imagination and racy lyrics.

Oh, Me – Meat Puppets

Another song that is probably best known by its inferior Nirvana cover. Idols of Kurt Cobain, the Meat Puppets are a supremely talented band who never made music that was quite accessible enough to rise beyond a comfortable level of obscurity. Every time I hear this song, I feel like I’m hearing my own story. If, for whatever reason, you ever want to understand me, all you have to do is understand this song. I don’t have to think / I only have to do it / The results are always perfect / But that’s old news. The beautiful guitarwork on the Nirvana version is actually not Kurt Cobain but Curt Kirkwood, the Meat Puppet who wrote it.

If you like it: The Meat Puppets have a wild and extensive catalogue to get lost in; start with the other songs of theirs Nirvana covered (Plateau and Lake of Fire.) See whose version you like better.

Bonus song:

It Girl – Brian Jonestown Massacre

Couldn’t leave this one out. I don’t know what to say about it, but I love it. You will too.

Photo by Clearly Ambiguous

One of my earliest (and to date most successful) posts was Six Songs that Illustrate What it Means to Be Human. Many readers said they hadn’t heard some of these tunes before, and really liked them. I’ve since received a number of requests to post a list of my favorite songs.

So here it is. But first a few quick things:

• Choosing my forty outright favorite songs is not really possible. I can’t recall every song I love at any given time, so I can never be sure I’m not omitting something. Therefore this is a list of forty of my favorite songs.
• Some songs are very well known. Most aren’t, but I didn’t take the indie-snob route and give you forty small-time artists you’ve never heard of and won’t “get” because you aren’t cool enough. I happily included songs and artists that are decidedly uncool. (You’ll see.)
• You’ll find this list to be a bit 90s-heavy, which just reflects my age and tastes. But there’s something for everyone.

Each song links to a place where you can listen to it. Most point to Youtube, and some are on Mp3Raid.com. On the latter site you just have to enter the code they show, no need for signing up or anything. Let me know if any links are broken.

This is part one of a two-part post. Part two will be posted on Monday.

Enjoy.

“Grandma’s Hands” – Bill Withers

An unbelievably catchy tune. Members of my generation might think they’re listening to Blackstreet for the first few bars. It will get stuck in your head, beware! You’ll be snapping, clapping, head-bobbing or shoulder-dipping to Billy’s vivid memories of his sweet old grandma.

If you like it: go find Bill Withers’ version of Use Me, probably better known as an Aaron Neville song. I think Bill did it best.

“The Seeker” – The Who

The taking-life-back anthem of Lester Burnham, the pot-smoking, career-ditching mid-life revolutionary from American Beauty. It’s a straight-laced rock tune, with a comedic take on the biggest of all human themes. It characterizes the search for life’s meaning as a mocking, hopeless conundrum, through the eyes of a regular joe who sees no reason why it shouldn’t make perfect sense. And with a guitar riff like that, it’s hard to see it any other way.

If you like it: I’m no Who expert, but you could do worse than giving My Generation (the album) a good listen.

“Ragged Wood” – Fleet Foxes

Fleet Foxes is one of those young bands whose first release is so remarkable and original that the mind goes wild in anticipation of what they’ll come up with next. As for Ragged Wood itself, all I can say is that I love it through and through, and it makes a perfect soundtrack for overland travel. Might make you feel like hitting the road.

If you like it: There is probably no Fleet Foxes you won’t like, and there is precious little of it at the moment. Listen to anything you can find.

“Pig” – Dave Matthews Band

A pretty, little-known song with an ugly name, Pig is all about our recurring, inane wish for life to be better, when we’re so fortunate to be alive at all. It’s not just the song’s sweet message that gets me, it’s how convincingly it’s delivered. This song inspired periods of bliss and ease in the middle of some of my worst times. Well done, Dave & Co.

If you like it: Try The Dreaming Tree, Don’t Drink The Water, or The Stone, from the same album.

“In the Pines” a.k.a “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” – Lead Belly

The only recording from the 1940s on the list. While best known from Nirvana’s flawed live rendition on Unplugged in New York, the Lead Belly version is much more haunting, in spite of its smiley, bluesy vibe. It plays on the age-old theme of relationship troubles, but with unusually sinister undertones. Leadbelly’s delightfully lazy style almost makes the listener forget that the song is essentially a death threat.

If you like it: You may want to check out other Lead Belly tunes. I’ve looked a bit, but haven’t found one this good.

“Missionary Man” – Eurythmics

This is one of a handful of songs that would completely take over my Dad when it came on. He would squint and nod his head to every beat. “So good!” he would say, like he was tasting a delicacy. I see what he saw: the same infectious energy you’d find in the other songs that did that: Bob Seger’s Old Time Rock n’ Roll, and Mellancamp’s Paper in Fire. Annie Lennox is in top form, and Dave Stewart rocks an electrifying harmonica solo. It’s hard to listen to this song without moving.

If you like it: If you aren’t familiar with the Eurythmics’ other hits (Sweet Dreams, Here Comes the Rain Again) they would be ideal starting points.

“Ahead by a Century” – The Tragically Hip

Few non-Canadians know the Tragically Hip, and few Canadians don’t. They are the quintessential Canadian rock band, still going strong after twenty-some years. Though their sound has evolved from rather twangy country-rock to become more modern and poppy, It has always been the lyrics that make it so special. Ahead By a Century “explores the realm of catharsis” according to lead singer/bard Gord Downie. To me it’s a celebration of the lightness of the present moment, despite how the weight of everything in our lives must fit inside it — but I think too much sometimes.

If you like it: Their music is so diverse, it was difficult to pick just one track. Try Scared, Locked in the Trunk of a Car, Bring it All Back, or Bobcaygeon. Oh so good, all of them.

“Apparitions” – Matthew Good Band

I have no idea if Matthew Good Band is known outside of Canada, but they had a good run of hits around the turn of the century, before their headstrong frontman left the band to write angry books and terrorize coffeehouse poetry readings. At the time I was rather dismissive of them as a little too mainstream, but in hindsight I see an earnest band with heaps of talent. I never thought Apparitions was anything less than damn brilliant though. I love this song, and feel lucky that I never owned it, because if I had I would have played it again and again until it lost its edge like most of these other songs.

If you like it: Matthew Good Band’s hits are worth exploring if you are unfamiliar: Everything is Automatic, Load Me Up, and Indestructible.

“Planet Telex” – Radiohead

Radiohead is the best in the business, and it’s a big business. These guys are professionals. I am not exaggerating when I say I could have made this a list of my 40 favorite Radiohead songs. So, naturally, recommending one above the others wasn’t easy. I chose Planet Telex because it has a certain uplifting, youthful quality that has since evolved its way out of Radiohead’s sound — not that I don’t like where they are today. I love the way this band has evolved; they’ve gone further and further from convention yet they’ve gotten better and better. So exceedingly rare. Planet Telex is a flashback to a simpler, brighter time.

If you like it: I envy you, for you’ve got one of the richest catalogues in modern music with which to acquaint yourself. Some of their work is a tad inaccessible to the casual listener, so start simple. Easy: Letdown, Bulletproof; Moderate: Exit Music, Nude; Challenging: Everything in its Right Place, The National Anthem.

“Pushit” – Tool

Tool changed my life. Good music has the ability to transport a person, and I’d never been taken for a ride like this. Pushit is an enormous, challenging song that descends to realms of intense introspection where most people probably don’t want to go. This 10-minute opus arrived when Tool’s creative talent was peaking; every track they did was unpretentious and epic (this was before the word “epic” was pretentious) and its mother album is a masterpiece. As good as it is, Tool is certainly not for everyone. Like most Tool tracks, it builds to a climactic “toolgasm” near the end.

If you like it: I envy you too. I would kill to listen to this music for the first time again. Tool is best absorbed in albums, but if you want a few songs to try  out… Easy: Sober, Stinkfist; Moderate: Eulogy (so good!), The Patient; Challenging: Third Eye, Right in Two. And find their incredible videos!

“In the Air Tonight” – Phil Collins

The atmosphere of this song is something else. It sounds as if you’ve somehow slipped past the edge of the universe, floating alone in total blackness, with Phil Collins’ disembodied voice singing to you a cryptic poem about your sins on earth. Or something. However you try to describe it, this song seems to come with its own unique, alien emotion that you’ll find nowhere else.

If you like it: Well, there is nothing out there quite like this song. But you can revel in its famous climax with this fantastic Cadbury ad.

“She Said She Said” – The Beatles

Of course the Fab Four had to make an appearance here. Yes, I’m one of those people. Out of the Beatles’ entire catalogue, I chose this one because it represents my favorite point in the evolution of their sound. She Said She Said is the precisely the sound of that precious little gap between the ditsy love tunes of their early years and the enigmatic anthems of their later ones. It’s full of youth and life, and it shows the whole band at full stride — as a unit. In fact, it’s one of the last Beatles releases humble enough to sound like it was played by a straight-up four-piece band, rather than a magic walrus on a harpsichord tanning in an English garden. Brilliant, but proudly smaller than Jesus.

If you like it: Go get Revolver.

“The World I Know” – Collective Soul

I don’t know why I still consider this one a guilty pleasure. Maybe it’s Ed Roland’s histrionic singing, or the too-casual cello lines in the background (but everybody was doing it back then, even Nirvana.) Even with the pretentious bits, this is a song that still, to this day, makes my lungs swell with gratitude. You have to like life to like this song though, so depending on your disposition, the emotional component may not work for you. But you may still enjoy the beautiful guitarwork.

If you like it: Most of Collective Soul’s inspired material is on the same album, namely December and Collection of Goods. Their first hit, Shine, is still their best song.

“Nitemare Hippie Girl” – Beck

From what could be my favorite album ever (1993′s Mellow Gold) this is a quirky, hilarious love song that could make anyone smile. With his outlandish words, Beck paints a picture only he could paint, and a vivid image of a skinny-fingered, perfectly imperfect girl emerges.  She’s a whimsical, tragical beauty / Uptight and a little bit moody. Don’t you love her too?

If you like it: Listen to Pay no Mind or F*ckin’ With My Head, from the same album.

“Kitchenware & Candybars” – Stone Temple Pilots

For all of Nirvana and Pearl Jam’s ambivalence about being in the spotlight, fellow hard rock outfit STP just couldn’t get enough of it. They carried the Motley Crue-esque lifestyle of excess well into the grungy 90s and made some awesome music while they were at it. 1994′s Purple is one of my favorite discs, and largely because it combined rude, indulgent rock with a sentimental, ballady side. Kitchenware & Candybars is the last proper track on the disc, and it’s a beautiful, sensitive piece for such an unapologetic band.

If you like it: Try Creep or Still Remains.

“Pedestal” – Portishead

Another avant-garde act caught in a passing storm of brilliance, 1994′s Dummy is through and through a spectacular album. I could have picked any of the tracks off of this deep, sexy record, they’re all that good. Better make-out music you will not find.

If you like it: Get the whole album, dummy.

“Don’t Look Back in Anger” – Oasis

Somewhere along the line — maybe during one of the extremely well-publicized childish bickerings between the band’s sibling frontmen — it became very uncool to like Oasis, at least in North America. I’ve always thought their music ranged from solid, straight-up rock to sheer genius, and Don’t Look Back in Anger is my favorite. Much like (dare I say it) certain Beatles tunes, it almost sounds as if the song wasn’t written by a lowly working band but had already existed in its own right, complete and beautiful, before anyone ever played it aloud. Or something. Suffice it to say these guys know what they’re doing.

If you like it: Give Oasis another chance. The Brits recognized their genius a long time ago, and not just out of national pride.

“Televators” – The Mars Volta

Completely out there, and completely beautiful. With regular instruments and plenty of effects pedals, The Mars Volta is able to create an utterly alien soundscape. Televators is one of the more accessible, less schizophrenic tracks on TMV’s best effort, Deloused in the Comatorium. This song and its mother album will create pictures in your mind you’ve never seen before.

If you like it: You are probably in a minority, and you should be proud of that, for you are capable of enjoying modern music all the way to its ragged fringes. The rest of Deloused would definitely interest you.

“Limo Wreck” – Soundgarden

By far the most inventive and ambitious of the grunge bands, Soundgarden blessed us with a small but wildly original catalogue of heavy (but pretty) opuses before packing it up in 1997. They remain one of my favorite bands. Limo Wreck is a towering piece about hubris and humility, and makes a great showcase for Chris Cornell’s unbelievable voice.

If you like it: The album it came from, Superunknown, is a one of those rare albums where everything seemed to go so perfectly, magically right, that the record is so good it leaves you in disbelief that it was actually human beings that created it. Go get it.

“Strange News From Another Star” – Blur

It is unlikely you’ve heard of this song unless you’re either a mad English townie who already owns all things Blur, or you bought their yellow self-titled album because it contained their international mega-hit, Song 2. While the rest of the album features nothing remotely as catchy as Song 2 (if you don’t think you know Song 2, believe me you do) it is a suprisingly inspired collection. It might be partly the intriguing title, but Strange News From Another Star sweeps me away to another place and time, David Bowie-style.

If you like it: From the same album you’d like Beetlebum, Look Inside America, and possibly some others.

***

Part 2 of this post is here.

Photo by Nikki Varkevisser

Some of you may have run across this already, but I’ve got an article published in an inspirational ebook called Reasons for Hope. It was very early on in my blogging career that I wrote my contribution, but the book was only released fairly recently. It contains 23 pieces by 17 writers, including some of my most talented friends, Lisis Blackston and Jay Schryer.

Within the broad theme of hope, it contains everything from smileworthy short stories to straightforward how-to’s. I haven’t read all of them but I’m pleased to be among such a solid lineup. Throughout the pages you’ll find a whole palette of ways to spin silk from suffering. If you’re looking for a place to start (other than the beginning) I think Rey Carr’s The “Right” Wrong Number exemplifies the book’s message perfectly.

The book is completely free and you can find it here.

My effort is called The Two Spells of Nausea That Changed My Life, on page 54. I hope you enjoy. If it makes you feel uneasy, take two Gravol and plenty of fluids.

Photo by Cutglassdreamer

As promised, here is what I plan to do before I die. This list is now a permanent addition to Raptitude.com, and the most up-to-date version can be found by clicking “The List” tab on the top of any page.

If you want to make your own list, here is the comprehensive guide to making one that you will honor.

A few notes:

• You’ll notice my list is very travel-heavy. One of my major goals in life is to achieve a location-independent income, which will allow me to move around the globe without the constraint of limited vacation days. Without the intention to live this kind of lifestyle, my list would not be realistic to me and I’d probably soon forget about it.

• I have tried to eliminate redundancies, but some are inevitable. I want to see the Louvre and tour Paris, but it is unlikely I’ll do one and not the other. Still, both are important and I don’t want to leave either off my list.

• The list is not complete. I cannot be sure I’ve thought of everything that deserves to be on it, but this is a pretty good start.

Here goes.  

Cities to tour

To tour a city means to spend at least a few days there exploring.

Istanbul

Florence

Venice

Montreal – DONE but I will be back

Quebec City

Toronto

Vancouver

Paris

New York

London

Rome

Prague

Cologne

Geneva

Washington, D.C.

Dublin

Amsterdam

San Francisco

Zermatt, Switzerland

World treasures to visit

Cathédrale Notre Dame de Paris

Chateau de Versailles

Pyramids of Egypt

Cairo Museum

The Eiffel Tower

The Statue of Liberty

The Louvre

Medici Chapel, Florence

Machu Picchu

Hagia Sophia

Taj Mahal

Chateau Frontenac, Quebec

Windsor Castle

Mont St-Michel

Town of Annecy, France

Carcassonne

Countries/regions to explore

Visiting only one city in these regions doesn’t count. One week minimum, must include overland travel.

China

Japan

India

Borneo

Thailand

Peru

Chile

New Zealand

Germany

France

Czech Republic

Italy

Switzerland

Ireland

Nepal

The Maritime Provinces, Canada

Skills and knowledge

Learn French to fluency

Learn conversational Spanish

Learn Jujitsu until it’s muscle memory

Learn photography

Learn my wines

Learn to boost a car without worrying I might zap myself

Achieve a comprehensive knowledge of the events of the Second World War

Learn to surf

Learn first aid and CPR

Learn to do a handstand

Learn to do one-arm pushups

Learn to dance well

Learn to drive a stick

Learn to throw a tight spiral with a football

Learn to swim properly – after all these years I must say I really don’t know what I’m doing

Master the GTD system

Learn to swing a golf club properly

Achieve a general understanding of the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, Machiavelli, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Blaise Pascal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Paine, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ayn Rand

Achievements

Become self-employed

Complete the Secret Service Snatch Test in 200 reps

Play guitar in a working band

Get a university degree

Own a house

Speak in front of a large audience (500+)

Become debt-free – DONE

Assemble a comprehensive family tree

Sponsor a successful entrepreneur in a developing country (through kiva.org)

Try a vegan diet for 30 days

Become a millionaire

Have my own website – DONE

Do 20 pullups in one set

Own a suit I feel great in

Make my living doing work I love

Achieve a midsection I like the look of

Go 21 days without complaining once

Adopt a sustainable lifestyle

Achieve a “location independent” full-time income

Get my gmail inbox to zero

Write my will

Books/films to read/see

Schindler’s List

Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)

Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

On the Road – Jack Kerouac

Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand

Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes

Moby Dick – Herman Melville

The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway

The Stranger – Albert Camus

Roughing It – Mark Twain

Beyond Good and Evil – Freidrich Nietzsche

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert Pirsig

Experiences to have

Become a parent

Plant and harvest a vegetable garden

Walk the Milford Track

Snowboard in The European Alps

Take a boat ride on the Nile

Take a boat ride on the Amazon

Hike the Tongariro Crossing

Explore Yosemite National Park

Take a gondola ride on the Grand Canal, Venice

Go to an NFL game

Drive a 300+ horsepower muscle car

Drive a 500+ horsepower sports car

Swim in the Mediterranean

Float in the Dead Sea

Orbit the earth in a spaceship – Yeah that’s right

Drink Irish beer in an Irish Pub

Fly in a hot air balloon

Look at the heavens through a huge telescope

Go rock climbing

Go bouldering

See the Northern Lights – DONE but I want to do it again!

Take an epic (ten day plus) hike in the Alps

See Radiohead live (in England if possible!)

Go snowboarding somewhere only accessible by helicopter

Travel by train through the mountains

Live in France for at least a few months

Live in Montreal for at least a few months

Walk the Abel Tasman Coastal Track

Take a round-the-world trip

See an opera in a grand opera house

Dine at a ridiculously expensive restaurant

Stay at a ridiculously expensive hotel

Share a ridiculously expensive bottle of wine with someone

Go to a movie by myself

Participate in the making of a documentary

Fire a pistol

Play a song I wrote in front of other people

Get a massage from a professional

Have a picnic on a green rolling hill with a checkered blanket

Eat a baguette and drink wine in France

Hike in a rainforest

Sit on a beach with no trace of any people other than me

Order in French at a French restaurant

Hike in the Himalayas

Go white water rafting

Tour Medieval villages in Provence

Take a road trip via motorcycle

Record an album of my own music

Tour Le Marais in Paris

Tour a region famous for wine, and sample a lot of it

Work for room and board in the WWOOF program

Take an overnight camping trip by canoe

Take a coast-to-cost road trip across the US South, visiting Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Nevada and California

Snowboard at Vail, Colorado

Go kayaking

Summit a mountain (10,000+ ft)

Attend Toastmasters

Drink beer from a ridiculous beer stein with the locals in Germany

Ride a Harley Davidson

Total goals: 161

Total complete: 4

***

Please share some items from your own list, or better still, publish it on your own blog or on 43things.com. I always find it fascinating to hear what people would identify as “must-do” experiences.

Photo by Dudu Viana

Six years ago, when I lived in a snowy mountain village and paid my bills by cleaning high-end sinks and toilets, someone said something that prompted me to confront an uncomfortable truth about myself.

A well-meaning coworker mentioned that she had been talking to another housekeeper about me.  Oh?

“She said, ‘David is a such great guy to work with, it’s just that he’s just so quiet.‘”

I don’t remember how I responded, but I assume I tried to disagree somehow, and went back to my work hoping nobody would ever say that to me again.

Quiet.  As if I have nothing to say.

I remember the rest of that day.  As I scrubbed luxury-suite shower stalls, I played out an imaginary rebuttal in my head:

“Maybe I don’t want to talk about what any of you want to talk about.  I have plenty to say, I just don’t want to talk about TV shows or how much I hate my job, like everyone else does.  Maybe all you people do is complain, and I don’t want to participate.  I’m a lot of things, but I’m not quiet.”

My little internal rant echoed a common human pattern, though I didn’t see it at the time:

When people feel inadequate in some way, they tend to make up whatever prejudices or beliefs they need to feel okay about it.

Of course, nobody realizes it while they’re doing it.  Forming beliefs out of self-defense is very common behavior, and it’s probably the source of most of the erroneous and destructive beliefs people carry.  I knew my coworkers weren’t all complainers and ingrates.  They talked about things I was interested in too, but they did it much more freely and comfortably than I could, and I hated that.

Another typical example of a self-defense belief: a person feels like he doesn’t make as much money as he wants, so he forms the belief that highly-paid people are greedy or materialistic, to defend himself from feelings of inadequacy about his ability to earn.

I told myself that everyone else talked too much, so that I could spare myself the rotten feeling of recognizing that I was really bad at something I knew was important.  I was painfully shy and I knew it, but like so many other behavioral problems I had, I rationalized it away.  I argued to myself that I had every reason for speaking exactly as much or as little as I did.  That belief kept me slightly less uncomfortable, but also prevented me from ever fixing the problem.

The Black Hole of Social Anxiety

I suspect that most shy people are not hardwired to be that way.  They don’t lack any innate social talent, they just had one or two bad social incidents early on, and in an effort to avoid further social pain they began to err on the side of silence.  Where last time they said something and regretted it, the next time they said nothing, and did not regret it.

Unbeknownst to them, this seemingly innocent little lesson is actually the seed of a devastating habit.  Every shy person knows that the safest thing to say is nothing. Once a person chooses this safe approach a few times in a row, an insidious snowball begins to pick up speed.

The default approach to conversation soon becomes minimalism.  Say what is necessary, but don’t volunteer anything extra.  Anything you say is a liability.  Every statement makes you a target for scrutiny.  Every question you ask reveals your ignorance.  Every passion you confess opens you up to ridicule.  Better to say nothing.

Silence seems to quickly become the smartest policy.  And in the short term, it is.  Humiliation happens far less often.

But the long-term consequences are brutal.

You always look to someone beside you to address questions asked of your group.  You slow down your pace when you enter a restaurant so another member of your party will reach the maître d first.  One easily sinks into the habit of deferring social responsibility in this manner, and that dynamic begins to influence other aspects of life, such as work and family roles.  You never feel like a leader, and that’s because you’ve always avoided leading.  To lead is to be responsible.  And shyness, at its heart, is about avoiding responsibility for what you say.

Shyness is so devastating to a personality because its effects compound so quickly, creating an outward personality that does not match the person, and an anemic social skillset that makes it difficult to ever recover.

First you begin to avoid conversation, because it presents risk.  This reluctance becomes habitual.  Then, because saying nothing is the standard approach, the prospect of speaking up becomes scarier, which only makes you avoid it more.  The thought of humiliation becomes a looming, stalking monster, who can only be thwarted by keeping your mouth firmly shut.  The more you avoid disapproval, the scarier it gets.

Being shy just kills self-esteem.  People begin to treat you like you have nothing to say.  It’s not even that they’re trying to marginalize you.  It’s just that when you consistently contribute little or nothing to the conversation, they can’t help but assume you have nothing to contribute.  And if everyone seems to be treating you like that, you begin to believe it.  You begin to play out the role that is expected of you, even if it isn’t who you are or who you want to be.

Does any of this sound familiar?:

• People you’ve already met introduce themselves to you multiple times.  They don’t remember you because you didn’t say anything.
• People know they’ve met you, but forget your name every time.
• Somebody speaking to your party always looks to someone else for a response, never you.
• You often hope someone else in the group will say something, to kill the silence.
• You get nervous, or even resentful, when your friend departs to the restroom, leaving you with someone you don’t know well.

To make things worse, the consistent lack of practice prevents you from getting any better at conversing.  So when you do find yourself wanting to speak up, it’s because you’re in a situation where it’s crucial to do so, such as at a job interview.  Your underdeveloped conversation muscles make you much less likely to succeed in these high-pressure situations, which only creates more bad results and feeds the fear that much more.

This cycle is a big, slippery black hole, and once a person slides too far, they may never get out.  Many come to a point where they give up on ever being comfortable socially.  I wonder if this is what happened to Eleanor Rigby .

Public speaking still outranks death as most people’s greatest fear.  No wonder.

Recovering From Shyness

I’ve spent a lot of time in online forums discussing ‘recovering from shyness’ with other people, and it’s comforting to know so many people have been in the same place I was in.

There are two primary pieces of advice I received, and now give.  The first is watch how more skillful people do it. There are always opportunities to watch people interact.  How do they begin conversations?  How do they end them?  How do they change topics?  Even watching bad conversations can give you a great idea of what to do instead.  Just watching people can give you a short go-to list of ways to open and close conversations.  Make conversation-watching a habit.

The other piece of advice is, of course, to practice speaking up. And practice always means allowing yourself do something badly until you can do it not so badly. It means making habit of doing things that are uncomfortable at first.  So when it comes to overcoming shyness, that means speaking more than you feel like speaking. If you’ve established a habit of leaving most of the speech to others, it will feel unnatural to open up.  That’s good, do it anyway.  Discomfort indicates growth.  Always say a little bit more than you’re used to.

Everyone eventually recognizes that social muscles will atrophy if they are never exercised, so there is no salvation from social discomfort that does not include deliberately making conversation.

That was a huge sticking point for me: I hated the idea of making conversation. I thought it was phony to try to force something to happen like that.  If there was something meaningful to be said, it would be said, right?  Unfortunately that just isn’t true; it’s another false belief created for self-defense.  I see now that making conversation is one of the most important life skills.

The bottom line, when it comes to overcoming fear of anything, is this:

Whenever you give in to a fear, it grows.  Whenever you act in spite of it, it shrinks.

Luckily, it tends to shrink fast once you start opening up.  You’ll find people have an easier time opening up to you.  Uncomfortable people tend to make others uncomfortable, and open people tend to make others open.

However, when it comes to creating the habit of being un-shy, there is a roadblock almost everyone seems to encounter, even after the anxiety of speaking up begins to wane.

The problem almost everyone seems to have is that they simply don’t know what to say. They may be no longer afraid to speak up, but they just can’t think of a place to start.  Those who have been social butterflies their whole lives probably have an entire arsenal of conversation starters at the ready — an inevitable byproduct of experience.  But for the rest of us, it is often a struggle to find something to say that isn’t either trite or self-absorbed.

The Three Stooges of Conversation: Weather, Work and Current Events

Making conversation is uncomfortable for many people, because “made” conversations so often turn out to be contrived exchanges about the weather.  I heard it’s supposed to be nice tomorrow. Yeah, but I think they changed the forecast.  Might be cloudy.  Oh, that’s too bad.  Yeah, it is…

Awful.  Why did we create this banal monster?  Surely silence would have been preferable.

The reason the weather turns up as a topic so often is because we know that it’s something that is relevant to the other person’s life. In that sense it’s somewhat ‘safe’ territory.  But wouldn’t it be nice if we could think of something (anything!) else that might be a little more… engaging?

Even with good friends, I’ve often found myself scrounging for conversation fodder, offering up such winners as: “So how’s work?”  “Man is it windy today.”  “So what did you do yesterday?”

Sometimes these tired offerings do get the words flowing, but so often the conversation limps along on topics neither person really wants to talk about.  Most people I know aren’t especially excited to spend their leisure time talking about their jobs, or spending today talking about what they did yesterday.  We dutifully play out these dead-weight conversations because it seems to be more wholesome than a conspicuous, lingering silence.  I agree that it is marginally better, but it sure is refreshing when someone offers up something specific to us as a topic.

When you bring up something the other person genuinely cares about, enthusiasm begins to flow.  A sense of collaboration emerges, and bonds form.

Best friends usually have an easier time getting a meaningful conversation going, because they know each other so well.  They each know what the other wants to talk about.  With acquaintances or ‘second-tier’ friends, it is more difficult to peg a particular topic as a good one, and so we lean on the old standards: weather, news and work.

It really comes down to making the habit of discovering what other people value. You can connect with anyone, if you know what is important to them, and if you give them an opportunity to talk about it.  Just ask about their boat/kids/trip to Mexico/new motorcycle/squash club/kitten/sustainable household/homemade jam.

People are so grateful to get a chance to gush about their pet topics.  They’ll remember the conversation, and they’ll certainly remember you.  And that’s because you gave them a tremendous gift: you gave them a chance to be themselves with you. You rescued them from the slow agony of a dead-end work or weather conversation, and you let them feel good about being who they are.  Don’t underestimate how profound an effect this has on a person.  You can be the best part of a party for a lot of people.

It doesn’t really matter if you’re not interested in the topic.  Just become interested in their interest.  We all know what it’s like to be in our element, subject-wise.  Help them to get there.  Once the enthusiasm gets flowing, there is usually such openness and understanding that it becomes easy to work in virtually any topic you like.  Then you can be in your element, if you want.

When you’re in a conversation with somebody, (or better yet, when you’re just watching a conversation) see if you can pick out what you think they really want to talk about.  Everyone has their own pet topics that excite them  What makes their eyes light up?  Here’s a quick hint: all parents love to talk about their kids.  And they’re so impressed when you remember what sport they play or what university they go to.

It’s not such a terrible idea just to sit down and write a list of friends and acquaintances, and for each, a few things you know they’d be happy to talk about.  Then there you have it: starting points for any conversation you might find yourself in.  If you can’t think of anything, make a point of finding out next time you speak with them.

Now I don’t suggest getting creepy with this, creating folders and pie charts about what the people in your life are interested in, but there certainly is something to be said for just being aware of what is important to other people.  When you’re going to some kind of get-together, and you know certain people are going to be there, can you think of one or two topics each person might like to talk about?  Again, not to get too stalker-y, but Facebook is a great resource for this if they’ve added you as a ‘friend.’

In any case, generally avoid asking about people’s jobs.  It’s just too easy, and it almost guarantees a dull conversation.  They will remember their encounter with you as dull and typical, and that’s the type of emotion the will associate with you.

If you do sit down and brainstorm what people in your life get excited about, you may realize there are people you don’t really know at all.  You may know how they get paid, but if you don’t know what makes them smile, you don’t really know them.  So find out.

I am far from a brilliant conversationalist, but there is no fear in it for me anymore.  It did take consistent effort to get comfortable, and I still feel a bit behind where I’d like to be in terms of beginning and steering conversations, but I feel like I’ve got the most important part down: Learn what others get excited about, and give them a chance to get excited whenever they speak to you.

So next time you find yourself looking to the Stooges to save you, ask yourself “What excites this person?”  If you don’t know, then you know what to ask.

Photo by Deapeajay

This is part 2 of a 2-part post.  The first half is here.

If there’s no good and evil, why do people steal and hurt others?

Because they’re dumb.  They just don’t know any smarter and more rewarding ways to live.

Ok, ‘dumb’ is a little misleading.  There are intelligent people who commit crimes and atrocities too.  A person can have a genius IQ, yet still misbehave himself into addiction, ruined relationships, or prison.  ‘Foolish’ might be a better adjective.

What they lack is wisdom.  Insight.  They just don’t know how to cultivate peace in their lives.  So they grasp at things that provide fleeting scraps of fulfillment: money, power, gratification.  They don’t know where else to look.  But of course it’s never enough, and so desperation mounts.  They begin to feel an even stronger draw towards gratification and security, mistaking them for some kind of salvation, and soon they are stepping over others (or worse) to acquire these things.  They just don’t get it.

A common argument is that without morals, we wouldn’t know how to behave.  We’d become greedy, cruel and petty, slaves of every selfish impulse we have.  Well, I don’t think so.  I don’t know about you, but I’m smart enough to see the benefits in being good to others, and the drawbacks of being mean.  There are natural incentives built into both love-based and fear-based courses of action.  It is clear to me that this is exactly what religions were trying to teach: that there are smart ways to live, and dumb ways to live.

If you try to make your way through life by stealing, hating and killing, you will suffer.  This is a guarantee.  And it doesn’t take a vengeful deity to dole out that punishment.  You do it yourself!  By approaching life with disdain and greed, you create suffering in your own life.  You create guilt.  You create resentment in others.  You create enemies or jail sentences or self-loathing in your life.

Acting from love and acceptance, on the other hand, provides abundant natural rewards.  More friends, a higher quality of consciousness, inner peace, well-managed finances, a pleasant worldview, a happy family, self-acceptance, and more.  It is these acts that create a high quality of life for a person.

The Bible makes clear the benefits of acting out of love.  Unfortunately, power-hungry theocrats reframed these smart and wise choices as orders, enforced up by severe, state-sanctioned punishment.  I suspect the word ‘commandments’ was carefully and purposefully chosen, centuries after the Bible was written.  This violent reframing sabotaged the value of the message by making them fear-motivated acts, rather than love-motivated.

A sin is just a thoughtless or foolish act that creates some degree of misery for yourself or others.  It is not an abomination that makes you unworthy.

The Good and Evil mentioned in scripture, are not invisible, polarized external forces controlling people.  Evil is just a descriptor for unconscious, egoic behavior, while good is just a descriptor for loving and wise behavior.  They work as metaphors, certainly, but they were never meant to indicate anything other than those two different modes of human consciousness.  If quality of life is what we’re after, one approach works very well, and one doesn’t.

The Sopranos is a particularly brilliant show, because it shows characters attempting to find happiness by going about it in all the wrong ways.  And thankfully, they show the humanity in these people; they don’t characterize them as unfeeling monsters.  Even though they are murderers, thieves, and adulterers, we can’t help but love them.

No matter how much Tony Soprano loved his family, he never learned smarter ways to play the game of life.  He was educated about how to deal with life by his gangster father and his bitter, broken mother.  He keeps coming back to the methods he’s been taught: violence and force.  And that approach creates all kinds of hell for him and for those around him: broken families, enemies, legal trouble, guilt and death.

‘Evil’ — which I would describe as unskillful and destructive ways of living — punishes itself.  Act out of hatred, contempt, pettiness or greed, and you will suffer, there is no question.  The forms of suffering vary, but they will find you:

• low self-esteem
• enemies and paranoia
• attachment and addiction
• world-weariness and cynicism
• unmanageable debt
• legal trouble
• persistent dissatisfaction
• identification with material possessions
• untrustworthiness
• insanity

There is no escape from this natural mechanism of compensation.  These are the punishments scripture refers to. But unfortunately, some historical bad apples took the opportunity to take on the role of punisher themselves, in order secure the power to do whatever they wanted.  And in doing so, they made a tradition out of moral judgment and disdain, and permanently warped the message of their religion.  Nice job, boys.

Everybody is subject to the forces of selfishness, anger, resentment and hate.  Everyone has those feelings, but some of us know better ways to deal with them than others.  I’m sure all of you can think of people in your lives who are very short-fused and reactive, and I’d bet any money that their lives are far less enjoyable in general than the people in your life who are calmer and kinder.  The difference is not morals, it’s skill and wisdom.

The saddest consequence of this trend is that it has become common to apply an all-or-nothing approach to people.  Many honestly believe that there are two types of people in the world: good ones and bad ones.  The quote I mentioned in Part 1 (and its disturbing popularity) provides a perfect example.

Part of the reason for this myth is that the gulf between those of low skill level and those of higher skill level widens throughout their lives.  As the years roll on, wise and skillful people create more and more joy in their lives, and troubled, unskillful people create more and more suffering.  There is often such a stark contrast between two people, that it almost appears as if they are utterly different in nature.  In this sense, people do seem to take one of two distinct paths, but the direction they are headed is a function of their wisdom, rather than their worth.

Don’t Fuel the Fire

Since we all have more or less the same instincts, the place people end up in the happiness spectrum primarily depends on their upbringing — a factor which nobody is able to choose.  Yet our culture tells us to hate and condemn those who hurt others.  We can’t help but feel that initial emotional reaction to somebody doing something harmful, but I think we are not serving humanity by expressing disdain for them.  It is worth biting our tongues, and letting the negative feeling go when the urge to condemn arises, because to trust and act from that feeling really only fuels the fire.

People who are unlucky enough to be in the habit of destructive behavior make themselves constant targets for derision of others.  Any ‘bad’ person has assuredly been sneered at, punished, belittled, kicked and punched throughout their whole lives, and this can only serve to build a stubborn, rationalized (some might say justified) dislike for other people in general.  By hating ‘bad’ people, we are creating monsters who are capable of much more destruction than they would be otherwise.  Don’t be an accomplice.

Often, it is only an initial, unbearable dose of disdain and mistreatment that starts people on a troubled path in life.  Nowhere is this more apparent than with the effects child abuse.  When a person grows up in an environment where they are hurt repeatedly, they will find it virtually impossible not to recreate more suffering for themselves and others.

Whenever news a heinous crime breaks, I often see letters to the editor of this type:

I don’t care if they had a bad childhood.  I don’t care if mommy didn’t love them enough.  A killer is a killer, and should be punished severely.

This is the prevailing mindset where I live.  Whatever your views on corporal punishment, we have to admit that not caring about the origin of terrible behavior is a huge reason why there is so much of it.  To think that it has to do with a lack of morals is shortsighted.  It assumes that we’re all starting from the same place mentally, and if I couldn’t do something that bad, then anyone who could must be an agent of evil.

Whether a person has done something ‘bad’ before receiving such cruelty from others is not relevant.  It is ridiculous to think that we can somehow mete out exactly as much suffering as a person ‘deserves’ for what they’ve done, yet our whole culture, as well as our justice system is built on the assumption that we can and should.  Surely we have to have legal consequences for crime, but I think the more we can keep hatred and moral idealism out of the process, the better.

The Habit of Judgment

Moral judgment just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.  You can always apply a judgment to someone else’s actions, but who is helped by it?  It just complicates and subverts the natural learning process, because judging others (as warned in scripture) is one of these ‘naturally punished’ acts (see Matthew 7:1 .)  Character judgments have a cost.  When you judge a person’s worth based on their behavior, you paint a little bit of your world black.  You create a dark spot on the reality you see, and it stays there as long as your verdict remains unexamined.  If you are particularly judgmental, most of your world eventually becomes stained in this way too, until you live in a world you don’t like.

The most judgmental people I know are, correspondingly, the most unhappy.  Chronic judgers complain about how nobody can be trusted anymore, how greed runs the world, how society is going to hell, blah blah.  What they don’t see is that they’ve created that world.  They’ve slapped a “this is unworthy” label on most of the people, ideas, and organizations that make up their world, and they mistake it for reality.  Not wise, and thus, they suffer.

And of course, the most tolerant, loving and appreciative people I know, are the happiest.  Whether they learned these lessons from the Bible, or another source, they understand deeply how beneficial it is to understand and accept others, rather than measure them against something.

People who do good don’t do it because they possess some exclusive ‘moral compass’, or because they learned to in Sunday school, they do good because it directly benefits them. They are simply wiser than those who steal and hate their way through life.

Treating others with compassion invariably results in less suffering for yourself.  Those who spend their lives mistreating others are never pleased with their lives.  Try to find an example to the contrary.  Some people identify this principle at some point in their lives, others miss it altogether.

There are people who are outwardly friendly, yet well-being eludes them because their friendliness is rooted in fear and desire for acceptance, rather than compassion.  They seek to receive, rather than give.

There appears to be some sort of inalienable mechanism that ensures this compensation.  It may be a function of our psychology, or sociology, or some as-yet unknown influence.  It is often described as karma, which has unfortunately picked up all kinds of undeserved connotations about magic and religion.  It’s simple cause-and-effect.

To do something because “it is right” is at best just parroting what your parents and your culture have taught you.  The benefit of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you is an intuitive understanding that cannot really be taught; it must be discovered.

It is very difficult not to react judgmentally when we see or hear about someone committing a crime or behaving cruelly.  But you have to remember, they are doing it because on some level, they’re just not very smart.  It could be an acute episode of mindlessness, such as when someone takes an insult the wrong way and gets violent.  Or it could be just another upsetting incident in a very counterproductive lifestyle, born of a tragic lack of wise influences.

Leave Out the Hate

I propose we remove the condescension from the equation.  People misbehave because they, for whatever reason, do not find themselves capable or aware of a smarter action at that time.  If anything, their poor choice is evidence of a failing on the part of all of us to recognize the real reasons behind bad behavior.  It is time to remove the venom from ‘sin.’  It is not helpful.  Bad behavior should inspire compassion and an urge to help, rather than condemnation.  But only if you want to make the world a better place.

This is not a prescription for excusing hurtful or destructive behavior, just a way of explaining it.  There are no magical forces, just varying degrees of wisdom.  Those who live lives of crime are not happy.  From the street-level thug to the Columbian cocaine god, a habit of taking selfish and underhanded actions does not lead to fulfillment.  It can lead to a stream of momentary pleasures, certainly, but habitual ‘evildoers’ are missing the vital component of what it takes to be happy: love.  That’s what the Bible is all about, in my humble opinion: love and its extraordinary benefits, as measured against fear and its pitfalls.

So next time you feel the rush of anger at what someone has done, remember that there is a bigger picture behind it.  Morality is an attempt at explaining bad behavior without looking any further than the perpetrator. It would certainly be convenient if the causes of malevolence were contained within some personal scorecard we call morals.  That way we could (as we commonly do) direct our frustration at a person, as if that person is the beginning, middle and end of the problem.  But that just isn’t looking deep enough.  The person is just a clue hinting at the real problem, which is a pervasive human ignorance of how to be happy.

Let’s get something straight: any hate you express, whether it’s for people who drive too slow, or for Osama Bin Laden himself, is only adding to the problem.  This costly indulgence, though it is extremely common, actively creates thieves and killers.  This is not an exaggeration.  Indulging in disdain, no matter the target, is just an unskillful response so the passing emotions of frustration and resentment we all feel.

If you don’t understand what I’m saying, then for now just try to do as little harm as possible.  We’re all in this together.  Be smart.

This is part 2 of a 2-part post. The first half is here.

Photo by Francis Storr

The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television. ~Andrew Ross

I am indeed prone to hyperbole, but I’ll go ahead and say it: the advent of writing is by far the greatest tipping point in all of civilization.  Often I think about the instant in which it happened, that very first moment when a primitive person scored a few strokes on a rock face, in order to demonstrate some idea, however simple, to another cave-dweller.

It floors me that there was a specific point in time (maybe at seventeen minutes after sunrise on the 25th day of the year 42,128 B.C.) when a few people convened to attempt to relate something to each other with markings on a wall.  They could never have imagined the epic, world-changing sequence of events triggered by this tiny, innocuous act, but I suspect that each of those individuals left that little gathering with an as-yet-unprecedented sense of understanding and closeness to their peers.

That first instance of symbol-scrawling unlocked an incalculably powerful ability in humans.  Suddenly, knowledge was no longer confined to an individual’s memory.  It could be transferred, replicated, stored and accumulated.  It could be displayed in a public area, for an entire community to see and absorb into their own personal knowledge.  Each individual could now contribute their own exclusive insights and experiences to a collective, whereby everyone could gain from them.

Whatever happened that day exactly, it marked the point in time when knowledge became bigger than any one person.  Finally we could accumulate information and insight outside of our addled, vulnerable brains.  Writing made thought permanent, immortal.

This must have unleashed a ferocious tidal wave of advancement.  The best methods for hunting, gathering, farming, interacting, crafting, and living could have become apparent to everyone very quickly, and the less efficient methods could be abandoned.  This proliferation of permanent thought sparked exponential growth in individual and collective human knowledge.

The written word allows us instant access to the thoughts of greatest minds in history.  I can go to the library, and within minutes be experiencing Thoreau’s 150-years-dead contemplations about mindfulness.  I can cross the aisle and absorb a first hand account of the Normandy Invasion, or slip into the adjacent aisle and, by suppertime, know what the world’s leading CEOs do to keep organized.

The information age has applied yet another multiplication bracket to the already exponential growth of human knowledge.  Among countless other incredible feats, our beloved internet has effected three very significant changes in the writing world:

Photo by eflon