The Urge to Inner Peace
I wrote yesterday that the idea of the love of fate, amor fati, was something which could be developed by practice, little by little. What I want to do here is explore some thoughts about it from a personal angle.
Both his philosophy and his mustache taunt me.
Photo: Public domain, Wikipedia.
I have far to go to feel like I do this regularly or particularly well -- "mastery" of the idea will be a long time coming, if it all. But it’s something I think about regularly, an outlook I try to incorporate into daily life.
It helps me with the thorny problem of how to integrate and understand life.
I’ve aspired towards a form of equanimity, largely built around meditation and mindfulness, for some time. Left to my own devices, I can ruminate the hell out of the best development in life.
This made life a constant storm. It seemed like a good habit to replace, although my idea of what to replace it with was fairly hazy. So I set out to explore equanimity by trial and error.
By coincidence, I saw two things recently which pointed me in the direction of the idea of amor fati at about the same time.
One was reading Mark Manson's book: "Everything is F*ed." Manson discusses Friedrich Nietzsche, whose definition I drew on in my first post, in perhaps the most accessible and humanizing way I can remember seeing. That’s probably not a particularly high bar to get over, but Manson clears it with style. (And strategic profanity.)
Godin Speaks So I Don’t Have To
The other was (another!) post by Seth Godin, whose work I've alluded to in other posts (here and here.) "Don't Waste The Lesson" captures some of what I'm striving for on my own behalf.
In his pithy, concise style, Godin writes:
“Things rarely turn out precisely the way we hoped.
Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we can figure out why.
If we find the lesson and learn from it, it might be even more valuable than if we’d simply gotten lucky.”
Now, no argument from me that things often don't go the way we had hoped, planned, or pushed towards. The first step to any sort of wisdom, it would follow, is to accept this.
Godin hits on a critical point with his second sentence, about finding out 'why.' This is a key point: it suggests that in the face of 'failure' or a setback, we not simply let it go or deny it, but pick it up, examine it, and try to tease out from the experience not just what happened, but why.
We have felt the effect; now we should look to understand the cause.
This is not an invitation to insist in the spirit of Voltaire's Candide, that despite massive evidence to the contrary we are in the best of all possible worlds. That's neither honest nor perceptive. It’s an invitation to see the world as it is, and embrace that reality.
The challenge for me here is that invitation doesn’t come with an exemption for stuff I feel passionate or insecure about. You embrace it all, or none of it.
What We Have Here Is A Failure To Inquire
Godin’s last sentence cuts to the heart of the matter for me: if we find the lesson and if we learn from it, it might teach us more than if we'd gotten what we wanted, or thought we wanted, in the first place.
That’s a lot of conditionality packed into one sentence, but it’s there for good reasons. Inquiring only when we are sure of what we’ll find is pointless. We can’t control whether we will get the lessons we seek any more than we could control getting the outcome we originally wanted.
This is the spirit of humble inquiry. We have to be humble about the outcome, our potential role in it, the limits of our planning, and the ability of the world to do what it wants despite us.
This is hard stuff to do right: I believe in this, and there still are times when every fiber in my recovering Type A self screams the equivalent of “But, I already KNOWWWW the answer!”
That reaction is also why it’s so important not to give in, to stay humble and curious. Why is this?
Too often, when we are successful at something we immediately develop a bad case of cognitive bias. Of course we did the right thing (when something worked out.) Of course it was bad luck (when something didn't work out.)
The sweetness of success tempts us to savor our triumphs, not second-guess them. The bitterness of failure invites us to make an excuse and then turn away. We learn nothing from either of these.
Both responses are rejections of the need to embrace discomfort. Discomfort is the seed of learning, and learning the key to growth and progress.
Notice Twice, Care Once
Again, this is not to suggest we should passively "lump it" or just not care when things don't go our way. Equanimity in the face of the good, bad and indifferent is not at all the same thing as apathy.
Equanimity is an active choice to hold all things equal. Despite being introduced to the idea in the context of meditation I quickly learned that it is an active and sometimes exhausting quality to cultivate.
Apathy is the rejection of active choices. We sink into a cocoon of inaction, rather than risk feeling either victory or defeat.
In some ways, comfort and discomfort are two sides of the same coin: both require that we accept something--the absence or presence of some level of pain. Apathy is the opposite of either of those states.
“When I ran the Arches Ultra in early 2020, I was lucky enough to largely get to a state of equanimity about the physical and emotional feelings I experienced.
I was not indifferent to either the positive or negative feelings. I held them both at a distance. I treated both pain and euphoria as messages about what was going on in my mind and body. I welcomed both feelings as useful data, not end-states to be judged.
I vividly remember, though, a moment of apathy from sheer fatigue, too. At the hotel after the race, I sat on the floor, staring at my mud-encrusted shoes. At some level I knew I should take them off. But in that moment, I just didn’t care. I just didn’t want to move, or really stay still either — I just didn’t want to do...well, anything.”
IRL, as the kids say, this is both a model and indirectly a source of frustration for me. What I experienced during the race was undoubtedly a bit of 'peak performance'--and it's something I both want to translate more widely into my daily life and find wildly hard to do consistently.
So Why Keep Going?
Investing the effort in cultivating amor fati seems, ironically, harder when things are inconsequential. I don’t know why. Perhaps it's because the stakes are lower.
That is, they’re lower until I notice--which happens like clockwork--that these small things are also what I often invest emotional energy into getting worked up or angry about.
And at that point, there's a sigh or a shrug, and it's back to trying to hold everything in equanimity again.
The changes are there, although it’s slow. I’ve started to see the potential in things I didn’t want to have happen, and have been grateful for events that were good, bad and indifferent outcomes.
A lot of that is in the past tense, true. Accepting it in real time will involve more reflection, more work.
But whenever I can hold a strong emotion in a bit of space and look at it as simply information, to be accepted for what it says rather than judged by what I wanted, I feel like it’s progress.
And that’s not a bad thing.