I reached a place today where I’d like to reside for a lifetime. Just after the initial .35mi climb, there’s relief when you turn onto xxxxxxxxx. The grade goes negative, and without any effort at all, your legs carry you forward. Pre-run I decided I needed to do more. I needed to run into the downhill instead of coasting. That’s where I found the place.

The places that actually matter are never suburbs v. cities or country A v. country B. True, those distinctions make some difference, but only because you let them, only because superficial details seem to matter when one is distanced from what’s going on mentally. That distance isn’t such a bad thing – it certainly allows one to exist in the modern world instead of a cave in India. Furthermore, better controlling the mind is incredibly challenging. As much as I buy the truth of “mindfulness” and that paying attention is all that’s necessary to eliminate boredom and illuminate the world, it doesn’t mean I actually perform these skills.

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I relay this to you not to boast, but to remind you the strength of my weakness. The Friday we spoke was a “running day” for me. Unfortunately, a few hours after our conversation, it began raining so hard I couldn’t accurately decipher objects a few feet outside my windows. Worse still, my trusty iPhone SE, with the dope headphone jack, informed me it was 51 degrees, which happens to be the coldest temperature since I arrived in Ted Cruz’s great state a month ago.

No, I didn’t see this as any sort of “challenge.” I saw this as an excuse to push the run to Saturday, maybe even Sunday if the conditions remained unfavorable. I’m telling you, my weakness is so good at negotiating it could convince Kim Jong-un to unilaterally disarm. Just check some of these persuasive arguments:

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I feel like it’s easier to find someone who will admit to being a real racist than it is to find someone who will admit to being an extrovert. The charmer at the party? Oh no, this stuff exhausts me. The energetic go-getter simultaneously climbing social and professional ladders? You wouldn’t believe how introverted I am. The person who of his own free will chooses to interview strangers for a living? Not me.  

Fortunately, this once-in-a-thousand-years statistical anomaly of introversion overload offers a massive upside in a Covid-ravaged world. Beaten, broken, and drained from all that pesky interaction with humans, the introverts can finally recharge in solitude. Praise be to Christ our Lord!

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Someone can truly believe it, but not me, not us. And by someone, I mean someone who is not alive, because anyone still breathing is programmed to think The Terrible can’t really happen, especially this iteration of human which has seen little but peace and growth. That “little” offers still further proof against panic: we have been through tough times before and always emerged victorious.

Past results don’t predict future outcomes and all other foreboding clichés have thus lost resonance. We can understand them on an academic level – multiply this probability by that one – but not at a level where we truly grapple with the consequences of numbers that declare a nonzero chance that life forever changes in awful ways. The numbers are, actually, quite beside the point since there aren’t numbers for that which has never happened before.

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xxxxxxxxx may well have been Satan. Actually, probably worse.

“Um. Hey. Would it be cool if my friend xxxxxxxxx lived with us too?”

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

At least with Satan I could be assured a tan and the most interesting stories ever.¹ This oddly-named person offered no such guarantees. But sure, cool, whatever, it doesn’t matter, I like people, right? The more the merrier, right?

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Perhaps for that one fine day you were able to do it. As you committed to the deepest of commitments standing among your family and friends you thought: this is it, and it is enough. No wondering when or how you will be happy. No capitulation to the random desires that endlessly flow through your mind. Nope. Just gratitude to the point of disbelief, to the point where wanting is a foreign concept.

xxxxxxxxx kinda always knew how this could happen. He and I were fresh out of Torres del Paine travelling alongside an outrageous character – a guy who hiked “off trail” an entire day so he could avoid paying the $20 entrance fee; wore Walmart boots, jeans, and a hooded sweatshirt¹; and whose calories came from nothing more than a loaf of bread and some dinky cheese slices – when it was time to rest for the night. xxxxxxxxx and I shared a room while “the character” negotiated a reduced rate for his own room by vowing to not use the bed, but rather to set up his tent on the ground, inside the hostel bedroom.

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As you were going out and doing “things” every single Friday night, there were those older friends claiming to greatly enjoy quite the opposite – “doing nothing.” They must have been kidding themselves, right? Sure, they had found a way to rationalize totally forgettable Friday evenings, but deep down they wished to be living how you were living, which was indeed how they once lived.

With youthful confidence, you vow to avoid the same mistake. Then years pass. Then your body starts aching in frustrating ways. Then, just as Legos lost appeal with time, the “things” you defined as “things” no longer deserve the same positive status. And so you chuckle and realize those older friends may not have been rationalizing anything at all. In this moment, full capitulation is possible: Ha. I was so stupid when I was 22. This humbling may even extend to your current self: Wow. I should probably drop some of my 35-year-old certainty because if I grow at all, in 10 years I’ll look back and again view my younger self as stupid.

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Please allow me to counter myself: fuck balance. There is nothing more important than purpose, and it comes with a steep price. But it’s a price that anyone should want to pay because, as I just declared, there is nothing more important than purpose. All the things we say we want – love, money, health, etc. – are inhabitants in the kingdom of purpose.

There’s a major difference between doing things and doing things. People living in the non-italicized state may think they comprehend some truth that the overweight mogul has missed; they are wrong. The mogul knew the rules – there is a steep price to pay – and decided to play anyway. Some on the path to doing things may pretend the rules don’t apply. They are also wrong. These are the people, specifically women in our current “The Future is Female” moment, who “want it all.” I want to be CEO AND a great mother AND healthy AND well-read AND a great spouse. Naw, it doesn’t work like that, because operating at the highest levels requires a form of singular purpose that blocks out other endeavors – maintaining concentrated purpose is hard enough that spreading it across disciplines is damn near impossible.

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“Man himself is in control,” was Bezdomny’s quick and angry reply to what was, admittedly, a not very clear question.

“I’m sorry,” replied the stranger in a soft voice, “but in order to be in control, you have to have a definite plan for at least a reasonable period of time. So how, may I ask, can man be in control if he can’t even draw up a plan for a ridiculously short period of time, say, a thousand years, and is, moreover, unable to ensure his own safety for the next day? And, indeed,” here the stranger turned to Berlioz, “suppose you were to start controlling others and yourself, and just as you developed a taste for it, so to speak, you suddenly went and…well…got lung cancer…”- at which point the foreigner chuckled merrily, as if the thought of lung cancer brought him pleasure. “Yes, cancer,” he repeated, narrowing his eyes like a cat as he savored the sonorous word, “and there goes your control! No one’s fate is of any interest to you except your own. Your relatives start lying to you. You, sensing that something is wrong, run to learned physicians, then to quack, and maybe even to fortune-tellers in the end. And going to any of them is pointless, as you well know. And it all ends tragically: that same fellow who not so long ago supposed that he was in control of something ends up lying stiff in a wooden box, and those present, realizing that he is no longer good for anything, cremate him in an oven. Why even worse things can happen: a fellow will have just decided to make a trip to Kislovodsk,” – here the foreigner narrowed his eyes at Berlioz, “a trivial matter, it would seem, but he can’t even accomplish that because for some unknown reason he goes and slips and falls under a streetcar! Would you really say that that’s an example of his total control over himself? Wouldn’t it be more correct to say that someone other himself is in control?” – and at this point the stranger laughed a strange sort of laugh.

—

“You haven’t by any chance spent some time in a mental hospital, have you?”

“Ivan!” softly exclaimed Mikhail Alexandrovich.

But the foreigner was not the least bit insulted and he burst out with a hearty laugh.

“I have indeed, I have indeed, and more than once!”

—

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Imagine a day 20 years from now when your parents are grocery shopping. They happen to run into a friend. Small talk ensues, compliments follow, and then the conversation turns to you. Think deeply about this moment and you’ll notice the lie inherent in the encouragement you will receive your entire life.

If you haven’t heard it yet, it’s coming: xxxxxxxxx, you can be whoever you want to be, do whatever you want to do. What a wonderful notion. It’s simple and totally empowering. But is it true? This act of uncovering truth is the task of a lifetime. You will be constantly bombarded by information, usually from well-intentioned people, and it will be up to you to determine what is valuable (aka true) and what is not. The better you are at this task, the better you will be navigating both yourself and the world.

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