Red Flags

 Oh, behave! — Mike Myers 

In The Ultimatum: South Africa, one of the participants on the show was a well-spoken and well-put-together lady named Khanya Nqolase. As well-spoken as she was, she was also unfiltered and pretty much said whatever crossed her mind. I would wince and brace myself every time she spoke because, in polite society, we have been taught to reign in our opinions and tame our tongues. One of the things that stuck out about Khanya is that most of what she said was true. Her insults had a biting nature to them because they were factually correct. From the get-go, she commented on how boring the conversation was between her and most of the male participants with the exception of Isaac. I could understand that, whenever I meet new people, it is those with whom I go off the conventional small-talk/ ice-breaking script that leave a lasting impression. “What’s your name?” “What do you do?” “Where do you live?” My eyes glaze over as they did with Khanya. I met a lady a month or so ago at Plato who was holding The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta in her hand. We kicked off a conversation over that, and I thoroughly enjoyed the entire conversation. Khanya was bored, as I would have been, except I would not have said it because I don’t think telling people they are boring is helpful. Also having been close friends with a few men who have felt completely disrespected by their romantic partners in the past, I am super sensitive with regards to the language I employ to get my point across. But that is just me and my own experience. 

I don’t have X or Instagram or anything of that nature, so I am not quite sure how Khanya was received by viewers. However, knowing how brutal those spaces can be, I can imagine the unkindness. This unkindness would be based on one thing, her outward behaviour. As I wrote in the Ashley Madison essay a couple of months ago, we make a huge deal out of behaviour, and it eclipses everything else. It seems easier to binarize people into bad or good all based on their behaviour but as Satre reminds us, there is no bad or good behaviour but whether it is carried out in good or bad faith. We see Khanya’s behaviour and draw a lot of conclusions about her from that. As spectators and people on the sidelines, ours is to only watch and be entertained, and not to judge. As difficult as it may be to withhold our judgment, we have to because our opinions would be ill-formed, vacuous and specious. My primary reason would be that we are not in relationship with Khanya and therefore have no moorings with regards to her. There is nothing we can stand on because she graces our screen for a curated ten hours of our lives, returns to her life and we move on to the next thing. 

Men and women alike would “red flag” her. According to a Better Help article, “red flags are warning signs that indicate unhealthy or manipulative behaviour. They are not always recognizable at first– which is part of what makes them so dangerous. However, they tend to grow bigger and become problematic over time.” As I considered this definition, the word ‘behaviour’ took up centre stage once more.  

Rollo May, a humanistic psychologist, offers a critique of Behaviorism in his book The Courage to Create which attempts to move us towards a more holistic perspective when it comes to making sense of behaviour: 

I am, of course, entirely aware of the argument that we have to study behaviour because that’s the only thing that can be studied with any kind of objectivity. But this could well be—and I propose it is—a parochial prejudice raised to the level of a scientific principle. If we accept it as a presupposition, does it not lead to the greatest mistake of all…—namely, a denial by fiat of the significance of irrational, subjective activity by subsuming it under the guise of its external results?

Instead of restricting red flags to exclusively being a signifier of danger, perhaps it may be more helpful to see the red as blood that has been spilt on the battlefield of life. Perhaps when Khanya speaks, she speaks with blood in her throat. She speaks in knives because her thirty-something years on this world has been a whetstone. Perhaps she can’t help but lacerate or aim for the tender flesh of the jugular because predators have had their way with her, and she has had to adapt to survive. Obviously, I don’t know her from a bar of soap and can therefore not speak on the reasons she behaves the way she does, but that is the point; we just don’t know. I genuinely believe people are doing the best that they can, with the tools that they have and that there is much more to them than how they behave. The thing is, apart from great entertainment, it is people like Khanya who are in the position to teach us most about other people, ourselves and the world we live in because they have lived and bear the scars of that living. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes:

Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit. It is not easily possible to understand the blood of another: I hate reading idlers. Whoever knows the reader will henceforth do nothing for the reader. Another century of readers—and the spirit itself will stink. That everyone may learn to read, in the long run corrupts not only writing but also thinking. Once the spirit was God, then he became man, and now he even becomes rabble. Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read but to be learned by heart. In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak: but for that one must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks—and those who are addressed, tall and lofty. The air thin and pure, danger near, and the spirit full of gay sarcasm: these go well together.

In a way, Khanya cuts out a lot of bullshit, and cuts through the pleasantries to the bottom line. She does not want to be judged but to be learned; not to be agreed with but to be thoughtfully contended with. Most of us would not dare to be that honest, we would rather speak beneath our breaths, behind people’s backs or worse of all, using our thumbs behind a screen. Most of us are masked, and now and again, it becomes important that someone points our masks out to us even if she too, may be wearing a protective mask of her own. Khanya herself owns up to her mask because she says that she has a hard exterior shell but is soft within, but some of us wear masks for so long that we completely forget that we are wearing them. 

In D.C. Schindler’s Social Media *Is* Hate Speech, he reminds us that anything written has to always be contextualized. Speech needs to be understood as being embedded in a deeper reality, and as with any sort of behaviour in my opinion:

We hear the words coming from him as things that he is saying, and indeed saying at this particular moment, in these concrete circumstances, addressed specifically to me, or to us, for some actual reason. We are able to take in not only the particular content of the words, but a whole world of surrounding things that give that content significant context: from the tone of voice and particular glint of the eyes and subtle gestures of the body, to the concrete circumstances of the thing said, circumstances in which I, too, am right now present as the listener. I take all of these things in as a whole in the words to which I am listening. Language discloses reality, and reality is always concrete: the complex, meaning-laden context in which the speaking takes place contributes to the disclosure and so belongs in an intrinsic way to the language.

I like the word disclosure because if we attune our hearts, then we realize that people like Khanya are taking us into their confidence and pulling back the veil on some aspect of reality, if only we were to open our senses to it.

Red flag rhetoric is not only dismissive, but it is also degrading. While labelling people may be easier for our own consumption of them, because it reduces their complexity and makes them bite-size, it is also a device to keep people stuck in their behaviour. When the behaviour is severed from the rest of the human being, which is the source, the behaviour has no way to change and grow. In a way, it reinforces and doubles down into itself. Instead of red flags being a warning to be alert and to pay attention, we use them to give us permission to write people off as no longer being worthy of our time and consideration. We write off cars, not people. Even in those cases where we need to create space between ourselves and people who have become destructive to us, there is a way of doing this without denigrating and reducing them to a label. 

    

Understanding 

Just as life is not about happiness, relationships are not about happiness either. People are not in our lives to make us happy, that’s what pets are for; people are in our lives to help us grow. Have you come across a relationship where the two people involved are toxic to and for each other and yet year-after-year, they stay together? Think Bobby and Whitney or Chrisean and Blue. As outsiders, we can never get it, because we become thoroughly preoccupied with the behaviours we see. At the reunion of The Ultimatum: South Africa, we learn that Khanya and Nkateko were back together even though they had broken up in the season finale. I wasn’t surprised and I also don’t think they stayed together for the baby they had during that time. Beyond all the drama, Nkateko knew how to get her to thaw. It was subtle but it was there, and the next moment she's cracking a smile.

These relationships, which we cannot wrap our minds around, are rooted in what Carl Rogers calls understanding. These couples truly understand each other. I don’t think there is anything as intoxicatingly dizzying as being understood. When someone gets you, they see you for who you are and there is also a large degree of acceptance. When the world moves to judge you, you will gravitate towards this person who understands you. And you will see, time and time again, how understanding will trump happiness. If the choice lies between being miserable and suffering the alienation of being misunderstood, many of us would pick being miserable as long as we have company.

Understanding is followed very closely by acceptance. Our understanding of the word acceptance is quite infantile. For many of us, accepting something or someone means condoning. We are unable to separate our acceptance from our judgment. In our minds these two concepts walk hand-in-hand; this is by and large the reason why we have difficulties accepting people who we think act inappropriately or incorrectly. I don’t think acceptance hangs on judgment. We’ve made it this way, but it does not have to be. Acceptance with judgment rests on an incorrect assumption, the assumption that most of us are good and those of us who do ‘bad’ things are bad people. The Jungian truth of it is that we all have a shadow side, a dark side. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes in The Gulag Archipelago, “The line separating good and evil… passes through every human heart.” Therefore, if acceptance were contingent on us being good all the time, it would deem all of us unworthy. Genuine acceptance, thankfully, does not need any of these conditions to be met in order for it to occur. In fact, our judgments may be screeching at the top of their lungs, and we can still exercise acceptance. This is when acceptance is at its strongest, in the midst of great judgment. It makes me think of the Biblical line, “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Just as Christ’s acceptance of us was not based on our works, our acceptance of one another should not be based on behaviour. 

There is a guy I know, Mpho, who recalls his grandmother’s wise words whenever he is at odds with a romantic partner. His grandmother used to tell him to remember that his girlfriend and himself were not raised in the same home. Sage advice that is and something that I think about often. It can soften us when tempers are flaring and permits us to release our myopic view on behaviour and see the entire person. It allows us to take in the difference without needing the other person to act like we do. The secret to long lasting change is acceptance. When we judge people and try to guilt trip or shame them into behaving the way we want them to, it usually backfires in the long run. When we make people feel as though something were wrong with them, they usually double down on the behaviour or they pretend to change it, in which case, it won’t be too long before the behaviour bubbles up to the surface.  

The premise that most relationships are based on, is need. As Emeli Sande puts it in Sweet Architect, we are “knee deep with this deep needing.” We approach relationships with open palms instead of open hearts. We see other people as objects for fulfilling our desires, immediate and otherwise. Women seek security and attention, and men seek sex and affirmation. We approach other people with a fundamental lack and that lack takes centre stage, not the human being with whom we are relating. It then makes a lot of sense, that we are annoyed or aggrieved when they behave in ways which depart from our agendas. They are just not sticking to the plan we have for our lives and the role they play in them. So frustrating, right?  

In The Courage to Create, May connects conflict, limitations and creativity together which I think offers us an insight with regards to relationships:

The creative act rises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them… Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations. It is not by accident that the Hebrew myth that marks the beginning of human consciousness, Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, is portrayed in the context of a rebellion. Consciousness is born in the struggle against a limit, called there a prohibition. Going beyond the limit set by Yahweh is then punished by the acquiring of other limits which operate inwardly in the human being- anxiety, the feeling of alienation and guilt. But valuable qualities also come out of this experience of rebellion- the sense of personal responsibility and ultimately the possibility, born out of loneliness, of human love. Confronting limits for the human personality actually turns out to be expansive. Limiting and expanding thus go together. 

  

According to May, love is born out of conflict, or it finds its meaning in the midst of conflict. God’s love for us is displayed through the resolution of a great conflict i.e. the fall of man. Love for the next person is authenticated and brought alive in the midst of imperfection and flaws. Love is felt most intensely when we are at our weakest and our frailties are pressing hardest on our hearts. We can bear these exposed vulnerabilities and face them because of a commitment to love. In a previous essay I borrowed from Jonathan Pageau’s definition of love, where he describes love as an integration, a union of multiplicity. Love creates order out of chaos which enables the betterment of the other. The other has to be committed to their own betterment through love. This is when the “take me as I am” idea falls short. There is no commitment to change to betterment for the self and the other. This is when romantic relationships become toxic: when there is a lot of destroying but not enough building. Destruction is an important part of the process, old ways of being having to be burned on the altar of reality so that new ways of being can be formed. When we’ve outgrown old ways of being, we have to allow them to tear away at the seams like what happens when Bruce Banner turns into Hulk and proceed to sew for ourselves new garments of being. However, we cannot remain naked. Mere destruction is not enough. We have to begin the work of clothing ourselves. Most relationships have become very efficient at the destruction part but ineffectual at the building part which is why they continue to disintegrate into toxicity. 

Upon entering the realms of romantic relationships, a commitment to both our being and our becoming is necessary for everyone involved. We have to accept the conflict but also make a commitment to use the conflict to create a life together. Through this commitment, behaviour takes a back seat to being and becoming, and when undesirable behaviour stops being the centre of attention, then we may be surprised one day when we look into the rearview, we find that it has quietly let itself out the backdoor of our lives.  

Conflicts are not the most frightening part of a relationship; it is when these conflicts are chronic and tyrannical where the real problem comes in. It is when we do not do anything with those conflicts that relationships become debilitating and places where it is hard to breathe, and we feel that we are living on top of an earthquake. I once had a conversation with Melo, a perspicacious guy in his thirties who was single at the time when we explored modern day relationships. He described the disintegration of relationships in this way: Throughout the course of the relationship, conflicts arise, each of which cause a hairline fracture in the relationship. Over time these fractures accumulate, and the relationship eventually breaks under the stress. At this point, there has been so much damage inflicted that there is no way of going back. This is a fair assessment of modern-day relationships, but it does not have to be this way. I have borne witness to relationships which have been strengthened by conflict and where the individuals are both growing as the relationship develops which is pretty cool. In one of my all-time favourite songs, Repentance by 116, Andy Mineo raps, “Your ways are so high, but you bent your knee/ I keep falling but you call me to get on my feet.” Just as God encourages us to get back on our feet and try again in the wake of a conflict, we can extend this encouragement or grace to our romantic partners as well. But they have to be willing to stand back up again. We have a personal responsibility to ourselves and to the other to stand back up again. If we so choose, we can allow the chaos of conflict to, as Nietzsche proclaimed, give birth to the dancing stars that we can be.    

I am not advocating for ‘til death do us part’ long term relationships, although the process of getting to know someone and be known by someone requires some degree of time investment, I am advocating for the posture in which we set sail on these relationships whether they make it across the ocean or just across the bay, that self-interest not be rudder of the relationship. That we may be honoured and excited at the prospect of being let into the confidence of the other and be filled with wonder when we learn about the journey that has brought them to our shores. That we may experience an intimacy so rich and decadent that we feel guilty of experiencing a feeling so many go their entire lives without ever tasting, and we are humbled by the secret the universe has suddenly let us in on. That we may know what it feels to be oriented in an ever-changing world. That we may withhold our judgments and lead with understanding and be courageous enough to open ourselves to being understood. That we may be inspired to allow our best shelves to shine through in splendour casting light on everything around us. That is what I am advocating for, all I can hope for. Maya Angelou wrote that when people show us who they are, we should believe them the first time. I think when people show us their commitment to transcend their behaviour, we should also believe them.  

H.W.P.O

 

If anyone went on for a thousand years asking of life: “Why are you living?” life, if it could answer, would only say, “I live so that I may live.” That is because life lives out of its own ground and springs from its own source, and so it lives without asking why it is itself living. —Meister Eckhart

I am a proud, yes proud, owner of an H.W.P.O. t-shirt. I am proud of the skills of persuasion I employed to get my hands on the shirt. I ingeniously persuaded it off a man’s back because I actually did not want to spend that much money on a shirt of such poor quality. Quality aside, the four letters printed in blue on a white background simply speak to me. 

I started following CrossFit during the Matt Fraser era. Brooke Ence led me to CrossFit, and I was instantly and insanely hooked. I watched enough to know who Rich Froning Jr. is even though he had stopped competing as an individual and had moved to the team division. I prefer individual sport rather than team sports, and that in itself reveals a lot about me. I am like Ryan Reynolds in Red Notice, “Teamwork, it feels weird in my mouth.” So, when I started watching CrossFit, I watched individual competitions exclusively, still do. CrossFit athletes, to me, are like gods made flesh. The things that these athletes can do is something that I still can’t wrap my mind around. I probably respect gymnasts and cirque performers just a little bit more but it's just athleticism to another level. 

Fraser has five Fittest Man on Earth titles which is one title more than the legend Froning Jr. In 2020, Fraser retired and went into coaching. He named his training program after his personal mantra: Hard Work Pays Off. It is simple, hard-hitting, to the point, and has just enough punch to make you want to work harder. There is a little caveat though, it is not true. Well, it is mostly not true.

I have probably mentioned this before in one of my earlier essays, but I live in a country that is a glaring example of how hard work doesn’t pay off. The economic backbone in this country is black people, they are the hardest working people in this country and yet they are the poorest. They manage to eke out a living month to month and there is zero correlation between the work they put in and the pay they take home at the end of the month. On the other side of the coin, there are many examples of people earning or inheriting money without having to work at all. From winning the genetic lottery to generational wealth, networking to becoming a Minister of such and such, there are many examples of how working hard is not even a prerequisite to having a certain amount of money in the bank. 

Facticity

In Ryan Holiday’s Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control, he contrasts two baseball Hall of Famers, Bath Ruth (1936) and Lou Gehrig (1939). Gehrig was the quintessential athlete, like LeBron James, who was absolutely disciplined when it came to what he ate and how he took care of his body and one look at Ruth showed you that he did not care about any of that. 

Most kids like to play sports. Lou Gehrig saw in the game a higher calling. Baseball was a profession that demanded control of, as well as care for, the body—since it was both the obstacle and the vehicle for success. Gehrig did both. He worked harder than anyone. “Fitness was almost a religion to him,” one teammate would say of him. “I am a slave to baseball,” Gehrig said. A willing slave, a slave who loved the job and remained forever grateful at just the opportunity to play. This kind of dedication pays dividends. When Gehrig stepped up to the plate, he was communing with something divine. He stood, serenely, in a heavy wool uniform that no player today could perform in. He would sway, trading weight between his feet, settling into his batting stance. When he swung at a pitch, it was his enormous legs that did the work—sending the ball off his bat, deep, deep, out of the ballpark… There were players with more talent, with more personality, with more brilliance; but nobody outworked him, nobody cared more about conditioning, and nobody loved the game more. (Holiday)

There was a point where Ruth was a whopping 240 pounds, because his diet consisted of soda and burgers, and yet he was one of Baseball’s finest. To Holiday, he disrespected the sport by not taking it seriously enough while Gehrig dedicated everything to the game. The simple fact of the matter is that Ruth was great at the sport, and it seemed all he had to do was show up and hit the ball. Then there were athletes like Jim Thorpe and Bo Jackson who were so genetically endowed that there was no amount of hard work that opponents could put in to match their skills. There was a great talent divide which no amount of hard work could bridge.

Let me take an example from CrossFit. There is a CrossFit athlete who goes by the name of Colten Mertens, a pig farmer from Iowa, who just recently missed out on securing his ticket to the 2024 CrossFit games in the semi-finals. Mertens is someone whom I would describe as having that dog in him. He is hardworking and if he was a little bit taller, he would stand a chance of winning the CrossFit games. He is 5’ 4” which is very short for a CrossFit athlete. While there are some events that favour shorter athletes, these are few in comparison to those favouring taller athletes. From a probabilistic perspective, there is just no way that he would be able to win the games. Fraser is also on the shorter side, 5’ 7”, in comparison to other male athletes, but it is not a height that he cannot compensate for. His height is a height deficiency that can be overcome with more effort.    

The existentialists use a term, facticity, to sum up the hand we are all individually dealt. Our height, race, parents etc. are all a part of our facticity. There is nothing we can do to change these things. They are what they are and there are therefore certain limitations that we must make peace with. However, the existentialists believed that we still have options, given our facticity. We still have freedom to create our lives. I think this is true, provided we let go of the finite games that we human beings typically play. The big games are those we play around money, status, and looks but I actually don’t think that those games are for everyone to play, let alone win. The essay I wrote on “free will” titled Turtles All the Way Down made me seriously rethink this whole discipline thing. While discipline is highly valued in today’s society, the gods were closing their eyes and may have been slightly inebriated when they dispensed of it. There are things that I am very disciplined about, and things that I am not. When it comes to physical activities, I am there for it. I will show up every day, when I am supposed to, where I am supposed to, in the heat or cold, and with a smile on my face. Wake me up at 2 AM yelling “Who's going to carry the boats?” and I'll be yelling back “ME!!!” But ask me to do my admin, and I fall apart at the seams. There is truly nothing that I procrastinate more than doing admin. If my discipline was measured by how I show up to my admin duties, my score would be low. I would not think of discipline as freedom, a la Jocko Willink, I would think of it as pulling my teeth out. As it so happens, the things that I am disciplined with are the things that are important for my overall wellbeing so overall being disciplined for me is quite pleasant even if there is hard work involved. 

Following is an excerpt from Roland Lazenby’s biography of Michael Jordan which reinforces my point: 

The fifteen-year-old boy who pinned his hopes on trying out for the Laney High School varsity basketball team in the fall of 1978 was a far cry from the supremely confident Michael Jordan the world would come to know. That young man was stalked by self-doubt. He wasn’t a bad student, mostly Bs and Cs, but there was no indication that he was headed for stardom in academics. And he hated working, making no effort to do anything to earn extra money. He was oblivious to the example of his brother Ronnie’s two jobs during high school, and it was clear to his father that Michael would do anything to avoid anything that resembled effort.

That’s the laziest boy I’ve ever seen, James Jordan would say time and again. “If he had to get a job in a factory punching a clock, he’d starve to death. He would give every last dime of his allowance to his brothers and sisters and even kids in the neighbourhood to do his chores. He was always broke.”

Yet that laziness magically disintegrated when it came to sports. If it involved a ball in the air, a contest to be settled, the switch came on. In his adolescent mind, Michael figured maybe he could be a professional athlete. That was really about the only thing that interested him, which made him no different from millions of other daydreaming boys his age. He couldn’t see how to make that happen, but rarely is there a clear or even a sane path to a life in professional sports.

Time had narrowed his options. He had watched his advantages in baseball mostly disappear. And his mother was determined that he drop football entirely. His choices seemed so bleak that Deloris even suggested he begin taking home economics courses so that he could learn to sew and cook for himself. Chipping away at his self-esteem, she implied it might be wise to do so because he didn’t seem to be the kind of guy who could easily attract a mate. It was her way of saying, “Just go on in the house with the women.”

Rather than getting bent out of shape, Jordan took her suggestion and signed up for the courses—and found he liked them. “I remember he baked a cake in school that was so good we couldn’t believe it,” his mother said. “We had to call his teacher to verify it.”

Nonetheless, at age fifteen, Jordan was verging on the melancholy common to so many teens. Truth be known, he didn’t have a lot of friends. The single beacon, the one bright spot in his life, was basketball.

Now considered the Greatest Of All Time when it comes to basketball, no one would associate laziness with Michael Jordan. And yet, there were things that he was lazy at because they just were not interesting to him. One of the biggest deceptions in our culture is that we all should be interested in the same things and have the same preoccupations. There are a handful of idols which almost all of us have bought into and when we just can’t get ourselves to worship at the feet of those idols, we feel like ‘losers’. We spend so much energy and time trying to convince ourselves to do things that we would rather not be doing because they have been given the social thumbs up.  

In Putting the Work Hard Delusion to Rest, Thinking Ape shares a study of how conscientiousness has a genetic component to it. Conscientiousness is one of the big five personality traits that is most aligned with “hard work.” Not only is our conscientiousness not entirely up to us, but even what we are conscientious about is not entirely up to us either. How do we then make the most of our facticity in such a way that we aren’t always feeling like we are missing the mark socially? Authenticity. I am of the opinion that we have all been uniquely gifted and that the gifts that are available to us as the human race are inexhaustible. There are people, right now as I type this, who are spending their lives engaged in something you and I have never even heard about. Take myself as an example, I’ve recently dedicated 10 hours of my weekly hours to learning the Cyr wheel. At the beginning of the year, I didn't even know what a Cyr wheel was, and now it is an important part of my life. There is so much possibility out there and with every passing year, I realize how vast the vistas of human potentiality are, if only we would attune ourselves to them. To fully access these possibilities though, we have to let go of the mindless conforming forces in our lives.

Trauma specialist Gabor Mate once said that the worst thing a parent could ever do to a child is to make them choose between authenticity and acceptance. From what I see, society has taken over the baton from toxic parents and consistently makes us choose between authenticity and acceptance. There is a cruelty in this choice and death on either side. Since most of us choose acceptance over authenticity, there is a sense of deep mourning for not having truly known our own particular and unique shape and discovering our own potentialities. We remain existentially stuck as children, accepted, yet never really knowing what it means to grow and become who we are. That’s why it's called never never land, we never land into our truest selves, and remain estranged from ourselves. 

Our authenticity is too great a price to pay especially since we only just have one life to live, and we do not have the luxury of time on our side. At any given moment, our brief candle can be blown out and we would have withered away this one chance we have at life by living other people’s lives and worshiping at the feet of their idols. I could not think of a worse way to live than inauthentically. I’ve personally managed this supposed dichotomy by refusing for it to be paradoxical or dichotomous in nature. Being accepted is just as fundamental and indispensable as it is for the next person, but I have selected and qualified those whom I seek acceptance from. There are people, whose names I can string together in a single breath, who have fully accepted me in my authenticity. We think we do, but we do not actually need the approval or acceptance of the general public. We just need the eyes of those precious few to rest their warm loving gaze on us and know that we are seen. It may be family; it may not be. It may be friends or mentors or people passing by who have significantly altered our lives’ trajectory in a positively significant way. You know those people, right? Those on the side of your personal growth and development regardless how ambiguous and vague the path may currently be. Those are your people and everyone else can, well, just do them.  

In Mastery Robert Greene writes about how we all have a life’s task, and it is our life’s task and the mastery of it that should take up most of our lives. I truly believe that we all have a life’s task and that it is our duty to explore and listen when that life’s task is revealed to us, and to follow it. A life’s task is not a procrustean bed on which we have to amputate or stretch ourselves to fit onto, it is the bed which fits Goldilocks perfectly. It may be one thing or several different things which call to us along the path and create an exquisite bricolage when combined. Ours is to heed the call and diligently follow through on it. Someone like Mertens may truly be drawn to the CrossFit games and it may be something that he wants to do even if winning is off the table. That is still pretty cool because that means that he is motivated to continue on the path from the inside out. 

Morality and the Protestant Work Ethic

It was definitely during the reformation where morality and hard work were betrothed, 'til death do them part, and it has been difficult to separate the two since. It was believed that those who worked hard and reaped the rewards of the hard work were in God’s favour, a prosperity gospel at its finest. Earning our way into God’s graces by works goes against the entire “it is not by works we have been saved” project, but society in general seems to not have gotten that particular memo. It also seemed that when God died in the Nietzschean way, the protestant work ethic proved harder to kill than the terminators. Our modern bent towards hyper-productivity, where our first encounters with each other are marked by the classic “what do you do?” can have us forgetting that before we were human doings, we were human beings. Our human doings were meant to be in service of our being, not the other way around. A sleight of hand prestidigitation that has most of us working like dogs, worse of all identifying and priding ourselves as such. So, what is the deal with hard work? 

The humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow in The Further Reaches of Human Nature differentiates between two types of hard work. The band Tenth Avenue North begin their song By Your Side, with the opening line “Why are you striving these days?” which offers a clue on the type of hard work which we should not be engaged with. Throughout the entire book, Maslow makes reference to Taoism which is in concert with the self-actualization process. The Tao is also known as The Way which if you think about it, embodies an effortlessness to it. When you are on the way, your particular way that is, then you will be doing what you are supposed to be doing. There will be resistance as Steven Pressfield describes but it will be of a completely different nature. It won’t be miserable. There may be tons of work on the way, but you won’t be miserable. It’s the Albert Camus line, “we must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Sisyphus was fated by the gods to carry a rock up the mountain which would eventually roll back down of which he would roll back up the mountain again, in perpetuity. We like to imagine Sisyphus miserable because from our perspective, there is a futility to his efforts. Perhaps if we look a little closer then we may see subtle changes in his boulder rolling skills. He may be getting better and better with each subsequent roll that there is a beauty to it. He would be like Bach, making music with his rolling. His body and the rock communing, his strapping muscles, calloused hands, clenched jaw, protruding calf, as he makes his way up the mountain, striking our hearts like poetry. In a similar way, we must imagine Mertens happy. “It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche. We justify our existence by being faithful to our life’s task to the point of beauty and disconsolate tears. 

When we set aside the striving, we are left with what Maslow calls trust. When we begin to create our lives as opposed to striving to be other than what we are, then we also begin to open ourselves to trust. We trust ourselves, the world and the way. 

All of the foregoing happenings imply a kind of trust in the self and a trust in the world which permits the temporary giving up of straining and striving. of volition and control. of conscious coping and effort. To permit oneself to be determined by the intrinsic nature of the matter-in-hand · here-now necessarily implies relaxation, waiting. receiving. The common effort to master, to dominate and to control are antithetical to a true coming-to-terms with or a true perceiving of the materials (or the problem, or the person. etc.) Especially is this true with respect to the future. We must trust our ability to improvise when confronted with novelty in the future. Phrased in this way, we can see more clearly that trust involves self-confidence, courage, lack of fear of the world. It is also clear that this kind of trust in ourselves-facing-the-unknown-future is a condition of being able to turn totally, nakedly, and wholeheartedly to the present. (Maslow)

This is the other facet of trust, the return to the present. Most of our strivings are externally rewarded which means that most of the time our consciousness is in the future while our bodies are in the present. We approach our work in a disintegrated state which inhibits us from being completely absorbed and arrested by our life’s task.  

Rather than being focused on hard work, it may be more beneficial to focus on peak experiences and entering states of flow which is one of the behaviours leading to self-actualization. There is a Japanese concept called muga. “This is the state in which you are doing whatever you are doing with a total wholeheartedness, without thinking of anything else, without any hesitation, without any criticism or doubt or inhibition of any kind whatsoever. It is a pure and perfect and totally spontaneous acting without any blocks of any kind. (Maslow)” Muga becomes possible only when we have transcended or forgotten ourselves. The prevailing work ethic is solipsistic in nature, it is entirely focused on the self and what the self may hope to achieve through its effort. In this instance, the external rings loudest, with a preoccupation of biting the fruits of our labour checking for ripeness. Be it God’s favour, prestige, status, the material trappings of worldly success or even the number one title, these get in the way by pretending to be the way. 

The Jonah Complex, according to Maslow, is one of the reasons that we never enter into our fullness. Named after Jonah from the Bible, who when called to take up his life’s task, ran away and wound up in the belly of the whale. There is something quite vanilla, safe, uninvolved, when it comes to doing what other people want us to do. We can always blame others for our smallness, and the world offers us ready-made answers to life’s pressing questions. But the world punishes us for this smallness. The megaphone of social media broadcasts our ineptitude, reminding us that we are not good enough and that we are not working hard enough. There are no solutions, as it has been said, only trade-offs. The belly of a whale is no place to live. “The secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is to live dangerously,” writes Nietzsche. “Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas.”  Taking up the challenge to go your own way is dangerous because you risk standing out and facing persecution for it, you can’t avoid the responsibility that comes with acknowledging your own unique gifts. Unlike the man who received one talent in the biblical parable and buried it, you have to contend with the possibility and danger of failure by putting your talents to use, and you have to make peace with perhaps parting ways with security and control. You have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. Hard work is indispensable as illustrated in Maslow’s “secondary creativeness”, but this hard work is different in nature. 

Meister Eckhart writes that it is not our works which sanctifies us but rather we who sanctify our works. It is not our hard work which sanctifies us but rather we who sanctify our hard work. We have to reimagine ourselves as something other than beasts of burden worked until our backs break or our minds depart from us. We have to look at our hands and the wondrous works thereof in a sacred light. Our hard work is an arc in the story of our self-actualization, itself hardly the main theme in our lives. Who we are and become through our works and how we serve the greater humanity in our own unique ways is what it all boils down to, what remains when everything else evaporates away. It is not hard work that pays off, but the heart committed to creating meaning through work, the radiant body which offers itself in focused service, and the quiet self-actualizing mind trained on being rather than doing.

The worthiest work of all is the outcome of a quiet mind. The quieter it is the more powerful, the worthier, the deeper, the more telling and more perfect the [work] is. To the quiet mind all things are possible. What is a quiet mind? A quiet mind is one which nothing weighs on, nothing worries, free from ties and from all self-seeking, is wholly merged into the will of its [unique self-actualization] and dead to the [world’s]. (Meister Eckhart inspired)

The Prelude

 You are the slippery morning dew on the leaves

The premonition of events to come

The moist coaxing out the sun to take up the seat in the skies,

Charge us, and make a living

You are the thing before the thing

The announcement, save-the-date, the call-to-action

The trembling beneath the feet of elephants 

As they make their way to higher ground before the storm arrives

You are the impenetrable acorn

Tipping its cap and winking 

An accomplice harbouring secrets of great oaks to burgeon

Whose leaves will block out the sun when tempers flare, burnings and blindings ensue

You are the grabbing of the coat before taking a step over the threshold

The preview, trailer, foreshadowing

The clink of flutes in a celebratory toast 

Before the rivulets of champagne meander through the gullet

Looking at you bubbling over with potentialities

I wonder, if like a puerile sneeze observed, 

You will flatten to the background like a child neglected

Into the eternal silence of a firecracker rained on

Never entering into your fullness  

The Fisherman by Ness

Me and my friends we go down to the water. 

We talk about getting older. We’re folding to the ocean. 

Stitch up my chest, cast my heart in a bottle. 

My body will walk up the shore till he finds it.

I miss the warmth crawling up inside my skin. 

Looking at the sun, the pieces fall into place– 

this cityscape– I gotta burst out.

The fisherman feels a pulse on his line, 

reels in my heart like a call to the sky. 

But he throws it for my own good. 

A god among men gives the task to the waves, 

left me a chance to learn from mistakes and be honest. Be honest. 

My feet are in the sand and my head's in the sky, 

but my heart's in the water as I justify the earth, the wind, the waves all to collide.

I salute to the fisherman, 

built an ark with my bare hands– 

said I’m done pitying my scars, 

set sail for my human heart. 

I salute to the fisherman, 

built an ark with my bare hands– 

said I’m done pitying my scars– 

can’t live as a human heartless.

Daring Greatly

"What do you think we can do about it?"

I thought he was asking a rhetorical question, but he made a gesture with his eyebrows urging

me to answer.

"To live as happily as possible," I said.

"Right! But do you know anyone who lives happily?"

My first impulse was to say yes; I thought I could use a number of people I knew as examples.

On second thought, however, I knew my effort would only be an empty attempt at exonerating

myself.

"No," I said. "I really don't."

"I do," don Juan said. "There are some people who are very careful about the nature of their

acts. Their happiness is to act with the full knowledge that they don't have time; therefore, their

acts have a peculiar power; their acts have a sense of..."

Don Juan seemed to be at a loss for words. He scratched his temples and smiled. Then

suddenly he stood up as if he were through with our conversation. I beseeched him to finish what

he was telling me. He sat down and puckered up his lips.

"Acts have power," he said. "Especially when the person acting knows that those acts are his

last battle. There is a strange consuming happiness in acting with the full knowledge that

whatever one is doing may very well be one's last act on earth. I recommend that you reconsider

your life and bring your acts into that light."

I disagreed with him. Happiness for me was to assume that there was an inherent continuity to

my acts and that I would be able to continue doing, at will, whatever I was doing at the moment,

especially if I was enjoying it. I told him that my disagreement was not a banal one but stemmed

from the conviction that the world and myself had a determinable continuity.

Don Juan seemed to be amused by my efforts to make sense. He laughed, shook his head,

scratched his hair, and finally when I talked about a "determinable continuity" threw his hat to the

ground and stamped on it.

I ended up laughing at his clowning. 

"You don't have time, my friend," he said. "That is the misfortune of human beings. None of us 

have sufficient time, and your continuity has no meaning in this awesome, mysterious world.

"Your continuity only makes you timid," he said. "Your acts cannot possibly have the flair, the

power, the compelling force of the acts performed by a man who knows that he is fighting his last

battle on earth. In other words, your continuity does not make you happy or powerful."

I admitted that I was afraid of thinking I was going to die and accused him of causing great

apprehension in me with his constant talk and concern about death.

"But we are all going to die," he said.

He pointed towards some hills in the distance.

"There is something out there waiting for me, for sure; and I will join it, also for sure. But perhaps you're different and death is not waiting for you at all."

He laughed at my gesture of despair.

"I don't want to think about it, don Juan."

"Why not?"

"It is meaningless. If it is out there waiting for me why should I worry about it?"

"I didn't say that you have to worry about it."

"What am I supposed to do then?"

"Use it. Focus your attention on the link between you and your death, without remorse or

sadness or worrying. Focus your attention on the fact you don't have time and let your acts flow

accordingly. Let each of your acts be your last battle on earth. Only under those conditions will

your acts have their rightful power. Otherwise they will be, for as long as you live, the acts of a

timid man."

"Is it so terrible to be a timid man?"

"No. It isn't if you are going to be immortal, but if you are going to die there is no time for

timidity, simply because timidity makes you, cling to something that exists only in your thoughts.

It soothes you while everything is at a lull, but then the awesome, mysterious world will open its

mouth for you, as it will open for every one of us, and then you will realize that your sure ways

were not sure at all. Being timid prevents us from examining and exploiting our lot as men."

"It is not natural to live with the constant idea of our death, don Juan."

"Our death is waiting and this very act we're performing now may well be our last battle on

earth," he replied in a solemn voice. "I call it a battle because it is a struggle. Most people move

from act to act without any struggle or thought. A hunter, on the contrary, assesses every act; and

since he has an intimate knowledge of his death, he proceeds judiciously, as if every act were his

last battle. Only a fool would fail to notice the advantage a hunter has over his fellow men. A

hunter gives his last battle its due respect. It's only natural that his last act on earth should be the 

best of himself. It's pleasurable that way. It dulls the edge of his fright."

"You are right," I conceded. "It's just hard to accept."

"It'll take years for you to convince yourself and then it'll take years for you to act accordingly.

I only hope you have time left."

An excerpt from Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Castaneda