Here are Kindle highlights from two books that cover themes of friendship, love, and grief. The first is Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival, a collection of essays and musings that Andrew Sullivan published in 1999 essays. Some great passages about friendship. Anything Andrew writes, I read.
The second is Stay True by Hua Hsu, a memoir about growing up a child of immigrants and, among other things, forging a deep friendship. Stay True recently won the Pulitzer Prize for memoir. Thanks to John Krakauer for the recommendation.
Love Undetectable by Andrew Sullivan
For, of all our relationships, friendship is the most common and the most natural. In its universality, it even trumps family. Many of us fail to marry, and many more have no children; others never know their mother or father, and plenty have no siblings. But any human being who has ever lived for any time has had a friend. It is a relationship available to and availed by all of us. It is at once the most particular and the most universal relationship there is.
It is as if only in the death of a friend that a true reckoning with mortality is ever fully made, before it is too late, which is why so many theologians for so long saw friendship as an integral and vital part of a truly spiritual life.
A really good friend, indeed, might be defined as someone whom you need not see for a year or so, or even longer, and yet, when you next get together, it is as if nothing has happened. The relationship snaps instantly back into place, as if the year were a matter of hours.
Equally, it could be said that one’s friends are simply those people with whom one spends one’s life. Period. Anything else is a form of rationalization.
And I don’t mean what Saint Paul meant by love, the Christian notion of indiscriminate and universal agape or caritas, which is based on the universal love of the Christian God. I mean love in the banal, ubiquitous, compelling, and resilient modern meaning of love: the romantic love that obliterates all other goods, the love to which every life must apparently lead, the love that is consummated in sex and celebrated in every particle of our popular culture, the love that is institutionalized in marriage and instilled as a primary and ultimate good in every Western child. I mean eros, which is more than sex but is bound up with sex. I mean the longing for union with another being, the sense that such a union resolves the essential quandary of human existence, the belief that only such a union can abate the loneliness that seems to come with being human, and deter the march of time that threatens to trivialize our very existence.
friendship delivers what love promises but fails to provide. The contrasts between the two are, in fact, many, and largely damning to love’s reputation. Where love is swift, for example, friendship is slow. Love comes quickly, as the song has it, but friendship ripens with time. If love is at its most perfect in its infancy, friendship is most treasured as the years go by.
In love, so many hazardous uncertainties in life are resolved: the constant negotiation with other souls, the fear and distrust that lie behind almost every interaction, the petty loneliness that we learned to live with as soon as we grew apart from our mother’s breast. We lose all this in the arms of another. We come home at last to a primal security, made manifest by each other’s nakedness.
But I am saying that this is the principle to which all love finally pays homage, the criterion by which such relationships are ultimately to be judged. It is, of course, a sublime experience, almost inhuman, because it is about the loss of the self-control which ultimately makes us who we are. And with that loss of control comes mutual power, the power to calm, the power to redeem, and the power to hurt. In some relationships, one partner holds that ultimate power, and the love is unequal. But in those relationships, the other partner must want to be powerless, yearn to be controlled or held, if the underlying principle of love is not to be undermined. And in other relationships, the power is distributed and redistributed from day to day and hour to hour and, sometimes, minute to minute. It will always differ, of course, in how it is given expression. But the principle is the same: it is a principle of control, of giving and retaining it, of wielding and begging for it. It is a strange mix of choice
How many of us can say that about love in its highest form, a love that elevates us like a narcotic and addicts us to its redemptive power? But friendship is for those who do not want to be saved, for those whose appreciation of life is here and now and whose comfort in themselves is sufficient for them to want merely to share rather than to lose their identity. And they enter into friendship as an act of radical choice. Friendship, in this sense, is the performance art of freedom.
If you enter a friendship to be less lonely, then it is not a friendship; if you enter it to find out something, then you are fooling yourself; if you enter it for profit or even the chance to meet others, then you have no understanding of it. Love solves a need, answers a calling, scratches an itch. Friendship does none of these things. It merely flourishes, a sign that human beings can choose one another for company, enjoy each other’s selves, and accompany each other on an enterprise, with no thought of gain or purpose. In a utilitarian world, it is useless in the best sense of the word. It resists the meaning of anything but itself.
The fear of male intimacy, which is intrinsically connected to a fear of homosexuality, has too often denied straight men the bonds they need to sustain themselves through life’s difficulties. When they socialize, they too often demand the chaperone of sports or work to avoid the appearance of being gay. Or they need to congregate in groups that tend to diminish the quiet intimacy that all of us need.
Stay True by Hua Hsu
[Youth] At that age, time moves slow. You’re eager for something to happen, passing time in parking lots, hands deep in your pockets, trying to figure out where to go next. Life happened elsewhere, it was simply a matter of finding a map that led there. Or maybe, at that age, time moves fast; you’re so desperate for action that you forget to remember things as they happen.
[On immigrants] The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories. I often try to spin the details and small effects of my parents’ lives into a narrative. How did they acquire a sense of taste or decide which movies to see?
The things around them were like the raw materials for new American identities, and they foraged as far as their car or the subway line could take them.
we were both sifting, store to store, for some possible future—that we were both mystified by the same fashions, trends, and bits of language. That my late-night trips to the record store with my dad had been about discovery, not mastery. Later still, I came to recognize that assimilation as a whole was a race toward a horizon that wasn’t fixed. The ideal was ever shifting, and your accent would never be quite perfect. It was a set of compromises sold to you as a contract. Assimilation was not a problem to be solved but the problem itself.
But I saw coolness as a quality primarily expressed through erudite discernment, and I defined who I was by what I rejected, a kitchen-sink approach to negation that resulted in essays decrying Beverly Hills, 90210, hippies, private school, George Bush, braided leather belts, the police state, and, after they became trendy, Pearl Jam. I knew what I was against, but I couldn’t imagine what stood on the other side.
…I was a diligent scholar. I knew all the bands that sounded a bit like Nirvana that nobody had heard of yet. I prized research: the excavation of arcane tributaries, secret knowledge, and conspiratorial anecdotes, building new religions around has-beens or never-weres.
Ken lived too loud a life, at least by my standards. I had met hundreds of him, hundreds of times before. I was eighteen, in love with my moral compass, perpetually suspicious of anyone whose words came too easily. He was a genre of person I actively avoided—mainstream. Ken was flagrantly handsome; his voice betrayed no insecurity.
Now that I was a college student, I tried to rebrand myself as someone who was outspoken, hopefully in a charmingly digressive way. Someone who knew a little about everything and fancied weighing in on stuff; this was how I hoped I came across when writing my zine.
He was boisterously overfamiliar, and I could never tell if he was making fun of me.
There are many currencies to friendship. We may be drawn to someone who makes us feel bright and hopeful, someone who can always make us laugh. Perhaps there are friendships that are instrumental, where the lure is concrete and the appeal is what they can do for us. There are friends we talk to only about serious things, others who only make sense in the blitzed merriment of deep night. Some friends complete us, while others complicate us. Maybe you feel as if there were nothing better in the world than driving in a car, listening to music with friends, looking for an all-night donut shop. Nobody says a thing, and it is perfect…For others, it’s the sporadic intimacy of effortlessly resuming conversations or inside jokes left dormant for years.
What does it mean to truly be yourself? Around this time, in the mid-1990s, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor began thinking about how people throughout history had dealt with this question of individual identity.
It turned out the Beach Boys were pretty good. Everything about the group was inauthentic: only one of them actually surfed, they were more indoor than outdoor kids, and whatever good vibes they conjured were incidental. Their breezy harmonies were less a reflection of collaboration and friendship than the bandleader Brian Wilson’s micromanagement. He became so obsessed with translating his psychedelic visions into sound that it pushed him to the edge of reason.
But this was exactly why Derrida resisted the eulogy form. It’s always about “me” rather than “we,” the speaker burnishing his emotional credentials rather than offering a true account of the deceased.
A celebration of how it began, rather than a chronicle of free fall, a tribute to that first sip, rather than all the spinning rooms that followed. It would be an account of love and duty, not just anger and hatred, and it would be filled with dreams, and the memory of having once looked to the future, and an eagerness to dream again. It would be boring, because you simply had to be there. It would be poetry and not history.
But she had helped me rearrange some of the furniture in my mind. I knew what I needed to do now, I told her. I needed to figure out how to describe the smell of secondhand smoke on flannel, the taste of pancakes with fresh strawberries and powdered sugar the morning after, sun hitting a specific shade of golden brown, the deep ambivalence you once felt toward a song that now devastated you, the threshold when a pair of old boots go from new to worn, the sound of our finals week mixtape wheezing to the end of its spool. Which metaphors were useful and which were not, what to explain and what to keep secret. The look when someone recognizes you.
I recently sat with Auren Hoffman for an hour on his World of DaaS podcast. We covered a range of topics — from talent spotting to the future of work to what’s happening in venture capital to lessons learned from Reid. Fun convo and the YouTube embed is below.
Also, separately, on the Village Global podcast, I interviewed:
Thejo Kote of Airbase (who recently sold his company to Paylocity) about how to scale an enterprise software business, hiring remote, doing customer development in the early days, and more.
Guillermo Rauch of Vercel (one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley) about open source, AI, crypto, and more. Guillermo is a really clear business thinker who dropped out of school in his teens to code in his native Argentina.
Day two of a ten-day silent meditation retreat, and my mind was a fireworks display on the Fourth of July. Thoughts exploding with obsessions and cravings and aversions. Inner monologues chattering away unabated. Each bright flash capturing flickers of my attention. So much for the serene state I’d imagined achieving by now. As I sat there, legs cramping and back aching, a sobering thought crept in: after all these years of practice, was this really the best I could do?
Over the years, six silent retreats adding up to about 60 days of silence. Hundreds of hours of individual meditation practice. A small library of books I’d read. Countless evening dharma talks, evening sits, and episodic mini-retreats with dharma friends.
And what did I have to show for it? Was I really that much of a better person? Was my attention and peripheral awareness so refined that I could actually be more in control of what I think, free of clinging and greed and delusion? If I could not, on a retreat with physical seclusion and perfect silence, achieve an above-average level of quiet in the mind…what hope is there for me in the real world?
These are no small questions. Our minds are all we have. I believe training it is of the utmost importance, as Sam Harris points out: “Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind. Every relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the minds involved. If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life—you won’t enjoy any of it.”
So I felt discouraged, reflecting on my progress, as I entered the meditation hall for the Dharma talk that Sunday night on retreat.
The senior teacher Kamala Masters opened her talk with these words: “Good evening. Tonight I want to talk about faith. And this faith is about trusting our potential for transformation, our potential to purify our hearts and minds.”
In the Vipassana meditation context, “faith” is not about faith in a God or deity or any particular teacher. “Blind faith” is explicitly discouraged; “verified faith” is espoused. It’s about faith in yourself and the instructions of the practice.
Masters went on to quote a Tibetan teacher: “Spiritual awakening is one humiliation after the other.” Faith is what allows you to survive the humiliations.
Near the end of her talk, Masters paused, looked at us all, scanned the room, and then said softly — just above a whisper: “I know you have wholesome qualities of heart inside of you” — qualities that can be cultivated. The feeling of her belief in me and in all of us — traveled from my head to my heart. As we sat in silence for a few minutes afterwards, eyes closed, I felt a surge of emotion.
Being Proud of Being Aware
In most domains of life I’m self-motivated and fairly unmoved by words of positive reinforcement relative to average person. The circle of people whose words rev my engine has shrunk over the years.
But it turns out that in the domain of meditation and spirituality, I need it more. I needed Kamala Masters’ talk on faith that night.
And because of her encouragement, I was able to take a step back — in my mind — and evaluate my progress a bit more charitably.
There was one thing in particular I should have been proud of during those first couple days of struggle: I was aware. I knew that I wasn’t concentrated at repeated intervals during my sits. That, itself, requires skill — to catch yourself in endless loops of mind, be it on the cushion or walking around off the cushion. The average person isn’t actually aware of the extent of their daydreaming. Their unconscious is running the show and they’re mere puppets in a puppet show.
Beginning meditators will report that their mind wandered 2 or 3 times the course of a 20 minute sit. Advanced meditators will report their mind wandered 10 times in a 20 minute sit — because they’re aware.
These moments of awareness are glimpses of freedom; they are moments of personal agency because you can exercise choice about what to do and think next.
The next couple days of retreat, rather than self-criticize, I gave myself credit for noticing. My mind was fairly active during sitting and walking meditation but I commended myself when I noticed the gyrations. I gave myself extra credit when I also noted the feeling tone (pleasant/unpleasant/neutral) of the gross and subtle sensations.
Joseph Goldstein — who co-taught the retreat — made the point that we’re deeply conditioned to equate “pleasant” with good and “unpleasant” with bad. But that’s mistaken. The measure of a sit isn’t about how pleasant it was but by how mindful you were while meditating. If you are mindful of the mental chaos — even if mind wasn’t very relaxed or balanced — then it was a good sit. (Can you imagine how powerful it would be if we dissociated “pleasant” from “good”?)
Under this framing, I had a few good sits in a row, and my momentum began to turn.
Oh, the Stories We Tell
A few days in, we were assigned to small groups. Each group met with a teacher for an hour. It was a rare break from the silence because each person is expected to speak. My group consisted of some highly experienced meditators — mostly folks in their 60’s and 70’s who’ve spent a lifetime on the path.
One of the guys in my group was named Robert. I noticed him earlier in the retreat. In the main hall, during Q&R (“question and response”) after one of the instructional sits on metta, Robert prefaced his comment on the microphone by saying, “I teach metta.” I found that an amusing and unnecessary detail to share in front of everyone in the meditation hall — clearly he was a student on the retreat, not a teacher, and announcing that he teaches metta did not serve the purpose of his question.
Anyway, in the small group, Robert prefaced his comment to the teacher with a bit more biographical detail: “I usually do month-long or 6 week retreats, so I’m still wrestling with the fact that this is only a 10 day… I’m experiencing first jhana and it’s no big deal [a deep state of concentration usually inaccessible to beginners]…I usually just meet Guy Armstrong [a famous dharma teacher at Spirit Rock] one-on-one, I’ve been doing so for 10 years, and I don’t usually join group interviews so this is really uncomfortable for me.”
His tone was even and reflective, and not braggy; yet, I couldn’t help feel my resentment toward him mounting.
My mind, ever the efficient storyteller, immediately went to work:
Story: Robert thinks he’s better than us.
Evidence: He name-dropped a famous teacher and bragged about doing longer retreats.
Conclusion: What a prick.
For days, as I saw him walk the grounds, this narrative played on repeat in my head. Robert, the meditation snob. Robert, the humble-bragger. Robert, the obstacle to my own spiritual progress.
Lying in bed one sleepless night, another possibility dawned on me. What if Robert was simply… being Robert? No superiority complex. Just a guy sharing his experience, genuinely struggling with a shorter retreat and different teachers.
The real story? I was feeling insecure in the face of someone with more experience and potentially greater wisdom. My ego, threatened by Robert’s apparent progress, had constructed an entire narrative to protect itself.
This micro-drama was a perfect microcosm of how our minds operate in daily life. We’re constantly spinning yarns about the people around us, rarely pausing to question our own narration. We react, react, react.
The beauty of mindfulness — of remembering to recognize the present moment’s experience? It gives us the power to yell “cut!” in the middle of these mental movies. As Joseph Goldstein said, “We begin to cut through the stories we tell ourselves about experience, living less in thoughts about things and increasingly in the direct experience of the moment.”
In that moment of awareness, lying in my uncomfortable retreat bed, I experienced a tiny awakening. The Robert in my head dissolved, replaced by curiosity about the actual human being I’d barely interacted with.
This is the premise of mindfulness.
And, while this perspective is not unique to Buddhist meditation practice, I’m fairly persuaded that taking in the idea of mindfulness as mere knowledge — from a therapist, or in a book — is quite different than internalizing it as experientially gained wisdom. Which is why they call it a mindfulness practice.
Thoughts are like mini-dictators distracting us from the inevitability of unwanted experiences
What you think about becomes the inclination of the mind. The chattering mind of subtle thoughts — that non-stop string of words that make up your inner monologue — shape what you believe in and how you move through the world. Crucially, the impact of this influence goes largely unnoticed by us, even though we’re the ones thinking the thoughts. In this way thoughts are like mini dictators.
Buddhist meditation instruction urges you not to identify with your thoughts. They’re not you. They’re not permanent. You may not even believe them.
Clouds have no roots and no home. Similarly, thoughts arise due to causes and conditions, and then pass away.
This idea, which I had heard before, landed for me on this retreat, and got extended further: One thing the chattering mind does is it distracts us. It obscures the reality of dukkha, or unsatisfactoriness, or the inevitability of unwanted experiences. Everything becomes otherwise. We’re less equipped to deal with life as it actually is when we engage in endless daydreaming and delusion.
Years ago, a teacher once told me a Buddhist meditation practice prepares you for the worst day of your life. The worst day of my life hasn’t happened yet. But bad days happen. Distracting yourself from them makes them worse.
Deep concentration can arise when you don’t force it
Over the years of my practice, I’ve enjoyed occasional peak concentration experiences.
Moments of deep concentration is like happening upon a sudden clearing in a dense forest. You’ve been pushing through the underbrush of thoughts and distractions, and then sometimes unexpectedly, you step into a serene glade. The mental chatter falls away, and you’re left with a profound sense of stillness and clarity.
I can instantly call to mind the memory of the time at Spirit Rock Meditation Center when I went into the downstairs yoga room, late at night, sat in a chair, and began counting my breaths. I stopped counting in a kind of blissful awareness that I could count to 50 or I could count to 1000 — I could go to infinity — because the breaths didn’t matter and perfect stillness enveloped me and I could barely notice my heart beating and everything was so quiet and my mind was an endless blue sky stretching on foreeeever.
The most concentrated I got this year happened at an unexpected time — though I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, because teachers always tell you to sit with no expectation. Trying to force a particular experience is the surest way to ensure it never happens. This time, I had just gotten out of an interview with a teacher who, in response to my reporting on my experience, suggested I stay on the breath a bit longer before moving to broader body awareness.
I went back to my dorm room, instead of the meditation hall, and sat quietly, not expecting much, given the distraction of the interview session. In the rare moments you talk (to a teacher) on a silent retreat, your energy equilibrium kind of gets out of whack. It takes time to settle back into the silence. But within a couple minutes of sitting in my room, I found myself in a deeply concentrated state. I sat for a full 45 minutes on my bench in my room: still, aware, beautiful.
The lunch hour arrived. I got up from the bench and put on my shoes and walked slowly, ever so slowly, from my dorm building to the dining hall. I got food in the chow line and sat in the quiet dining hall, everyone looking at their own plate of food. I noticed the colors of the food in a way I usually don’t. The vegetable oil spread over the zucchini was shiny. The string beans simmered with a deep forest green radiance. My attention noticed and lingered on the micro glimmers of the salad dressing oil.
After lunch, I wandered over to an outdoor bench in a meadow near the food hall and continued to meditate on a bench. I wasn’t in my proper posture position, but I just sat there with my eyes closed and felt pretty connected to everything. It was a blissful and non-ordinary state of being.
Metta: Cultivating an inner garden of kindness
Metta (“loving-kindness”) meditation practice, it is said, inclines the heart and mind for kindness — to yourself, to others in your life, to all beings everywhere.
Basic mindfulness practice facilitates compassion almost indirectly — when you’re present, you’re able to have the awareness to draw upon your noblest values more than whatever base emotion might be the reactive impulse. But metta practice explicitly seeks to create grooves of kindness in your mind.
At peak form, as practiced by masters, metta is non-verbal and manifests as vibrating flow of loving-kindness in your heart, mind, and body. “Everything in your awareness turns into a white light,” a teacher told me, reflecting on her 20 years of serious metta practice.
Metta is frequently introduced as a side practice at Vipassana retreats, and frankly it has never really worked for me. The phrases you’re supposed to verbalize in your mind and then direct to other people — “May you be happy” “May you be free of suffering” etc. — are dry for me. I do not overflow with lovingkindness vibrations when repeating the phrases. Nor do I achieve deep concentration through metta, which many do, because I seem to lose interest in repeating mantras. So on Vipassana retreats I often ditch the instructions given and just sit in open awareness or stay concentrated on a single object of mindfulness. Perhaps not coincidentally, I can’t say I overflow with loving kindness in the real world, in my day to day life.
I confessed this to a teacher on the retreat and to an expert friend after I got home, and I was given three tips. First, I should note metta when it’s alive in real life off the cushion — i.e. not-forced, just naturally arising feelings of loving-kindness — and try to harness and replicate that energy when practicing metta meditation formally.
Second, even if the phrases are dry in the moment when doing the standard meditation practice, you’re planting seeds of intention in the mindstream that may come to bear IRL when you encounter that person later. For example, if you send metta to a difficult person now in a mediation sit, when you see him in actuality months later, you might be inclined to kindness based on the seed previously planted.
Third, when doing metta meditation, try multiple ways to arouse the feeling of goodwill. Don’t just repeat the stock phrases. Think of anything that promotes good vibes: memories, plans, funny movies, etc.
Here’s an analogy that resonates with me based on the above advice. Metta practice is like tending to a kindness garden. When you repeat phrases like “May you be happy” or “May you be free from suffering,” you’re planting seeds of kindness in the soil of your consciousness. Each time you practice metta, you’re watering these seeds, giving them the attention they need to grow. Gardens don’t bloom overnight; it takes time.
Directing metta to loved ones could be like nurturing hardy perennials that bloom easily. For difficult people, you might be cultivating thorny roses – challenging, but potentially beautiful.
As you tend to this garden regularly, you begin to change too. You become more attuned to the needs of each plant (person), more patient with the process, and more appreciative of the beauty in all forms of growth.
Eventually, your inner garden of kindness becomes so lush and vibrant that it naturally starts to affect the world around you. The fragrance of your cultivated kindness wafts out, influencing your interactions and relationships.
That’s the theory. I’ll try it.
Enlightenment = Lighten Up
Joseph Goldstein, the venerable 80-year-old meditation teacher, chuckles as he recalls watching a video of his younger self. There he is in the video, a serious 20-something, expounding on the intricacies of Buddhist philosophy at Naropa University with all the gravity of a Supreme Court Justice.
“Oh my God, I was so serious,” Joseph says at our retreat, his eyes twinkling with a mix of amusement and embarrassment. It was a funny moment: One of the West’s most respected meditation teachers essentially facepalming at his own youthful earnestness.
These days, Joseph emphasizes a key element of “enlightenment” is lightening up. Being less serious. Joking more. It’s as if after decades of rigorous practice, he’s discovered that the path to profound wisdom is paved with… laughter.
I can’t help but see parallels in myself. A criticism of a version of myself from 20 years ago is that every thought was A Very Important Idea. Every opinion was A Hill To Die On. The intensity was for real.
Fast forward to today, and I find myself a bit more playful. More willing to hold my views lightly, to see the humor in life’s absurdities, and less likely to arrive at strong moral judgments about people one way or the other. Don’t get me wrong – I’m definitely more intense than your average joe. But there’s an increasing lightness.
So I found provocative the framing that to wake up, we need to lighten up. That enlightenment might look less like a stern monk on a mountaintop and more like a wise old friend with laugh lines around their eyes.
On the meditation instructions themselves
My previous three retreats were a tad more specialized in terms of the practice emphasis: open choiceless awareness; concentration; and a mindfulness-of consciousness retreat. This year’s was a “classic” generalist Vipassana retreat, the standard instructions.
On this retreat, I drew upon both the offered instructions and other instructions I’ve received over the years. At the start of each sit, I began by counting my breaths until 10. This instruction comes from the wonderful book The Mind Illuminated. Counting breaths is a useful way to figure out how settled you are. (In regular life, I usually can get to 2 or 3 breaths before my wind wanders.) Then, I would scan my face for sensations. Pulsing, heat, cold, itching, vibrating. Etc. Then I would scan the rest of my body for sensations. These instructions come from the Goenka teachings, although I don’t do a systematic body scan head to toe — instead, I opportunistically notice sensation wherever on the body it appears.
It was a privilege to have Joseph Goldstein teaching at this year’s retreat. I’ve been a longtime listener, first time caller. Few people are as responsible as he for bringing Buddhism to the west. The clarity of his thought was exceptional. At 80 years old, he still radiates energy and genuine passion for all things dharma. Joseph says that training the mind is like training a puppy. You tell a puppy to sit, and a moment later it’s jumping up again licking your face. With gentle persistence and training, eventually, the puppy does learn to sit and stay. “Our minds are very much like this puppy.”
A few tactical instructions this year that resonated as I tried to train the puppy:
Call to mind the phrase “This is a body” at the beginning of a sit to create a wider container for initial breath focus. Later in the sit, ask yourself, “What’s happening now?”
When noticing thoughts, notice when you’re in the thought pattern. At the beginning, middle, or end of the thought? Can you notice it pass away?
Celebrate wakefulness! Commend yourself when you’re awake to the present and you notice you’re lost in the thought. Celebrate the fact that you noticed.
Discern between wholesome thoughts and unwholesome thoughts (greed, anger, or delusion). Discern between pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral sensations.
“Sadness is being felt” (versus “I feel sad”) is a way of describing sensations that doesn’t center the false notion of a singular self.
“Be simple and easy about things” — advice Joseph heard thousands of times from his teachers, speaking to the importance of taking a relaxed attitude to the whole endeavor.
Notice the “about to” moment — the moment just before you move your body or say something. If you can notice the about to moment, you can be more intentional about your words and actions.
Physically posture-wise, I’ve learned a lot (the hard way) about how I can sit comfortably as tall man living in a short person’s world. One new innovation this year: I brought a nursing pillow! To rest my hands on and support my shoulders. After dozens of hours of meditation, your shoulders get sore from your arms hanging low and still. A nursing pillow that wraps around your waist is a perfect resting device for your arms and shoulders.
For more tactical instructions and reflections, book excerpts, etc. on meditation, you can see my full comprehensive compendium of all my posts on the topic.
Being a student in a long lineage is powerful
On Theravada Buddhist retreats you’re frequently reminded that you’re following instructions the Buddha laid out personally 2,600 years ago. You hear a lot of quotes from the suttas — the original discourses of the Buddha. You hear live from teachers who heard the instructions from teachers of their own, who in turn had teachers (“my grand teacher” you’ll hear referenced from present day teachers), and so on and so forth, over millennia.
Via this great lineage of instruction, the material finds its way to you, the present day yogi. And you then embark upon a practice that millions (billions?) of people have undertaken to see for themselves if the instructions resonate.
The whole enterprise feels more credible because you’re situated in this vast tradition; when you remember the longevity and durability of the ideas being taught.
And the gratitude that flows from teachers, to their teachers, is inspiring. In no other sector or setting have I heard so many sentences begin, “My teacher so-and-so once told me…” In the Gratitude Hut at Spirit Rock, which is an actual physical hut on the property, photos of the teachers and grandteachers to the senior teachers in the west line the walls. It’s pretty touching.
It would be cool to see everyone’s intellectual lineage — yours and mine, everyone’s — as we all have had teachers (be they formal or informal) who’ve shaped the way we think and act today.
By the way, the senior teachers in the west — who brought this style of meditation to America — will soon be dead. This will change the dynamic of the modern dharma community. Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Sharon Salzberg can talk about their personal experiences meditating with Goenka, Ajhan Shah, Sayadaw U Pandita, Munindra, etc. The younger teachers today talk about learning from Joseph, Jack, and Sharon.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing — sometimes the modern re-interpretation can shape the dharma to better resonate for folks in the west. Sometimes grand-students can be better teachers than themselves than their grand-teachers. Age doesn’t equal teaching quality. Still, quoting a meditation master in the east with whom you studied first hand will always sound more credible than quoting an American in the west.
Sleep can be elusive but that’s okay
You’d think you’d sleep well on meditation retreats — all that silence. But it’s not often the case for me. Trying to sleep after a day of intense meditation is like operating a dam. All day, you’ve been carefully controlling the flow of thoughts. But when you lie down to rest, it’s as if the floodgates suddenly open, and all the pent-up thoughts rush through at once, making sleep elusive.
One night on this retreat, I was up for hours. Tossing and turning. Giving myself a scalp massage; massaging my eyes. At one point, I rolled out of bed, grabbed my notebook, and had my Jerry Maguire moment of middle-of-the-night scribbles, only about half of which were decipherable to me later. An example of a profound 2am scribble? “The breath is my friend.” (LOL, but also — it’s true?)
One important piece of knowledge I learned on previous retreats is that poor sleep will happen and you can still have good meditation days the next day. More broadly, I don’t need to be so anxious about sleeping poorly on nights where this happens. I can be lucid amidst sleep deprivation. Believing this, knowing this, has been a powerful re-frame, and actually has helped me sleep better in general. Because anticipating the derelict effects of sleep deprivation as you try to fall asleep is one of the inhibitors to falling asleep in the first place.
Other random nuggets
In many ways I’m healthier than a decade ago. Work out more, eat better, etc. But I have more gray hair everywhere now, nonetheless. One night on retreat I was looking at the mirror and noticed more gray in my beard and it kind of took me aback. Time spares no one.
In prior retreat recap posts, I have described my yogi jobs on retreat. Pot washing. Bathroom cleaning. Sweeping. And I reflected that the year I out-witted the system to get an “easy” job was actually a lot less satisfying than the grimier work. This time, during registration, I was asked if I’d scrub toilets, and I said yes — I’d be delighted. And I did enjoy my bathroom duties. I was on my knees scrubbing toilets and floors, feeling useful, serving my fellow retreatants.
WAIT acronym: “Why Am I Talking?” Speaking with intentionality. Share this acronym with someone who talks too much.
In my small group there was an 82 year old who proclaimed to the teacher his purpose for being there: “I just want to be a better person.” Inspiring to hear people so late in life still so committed to personal betterment.
Equanimity is different from being calm. It’s about being impartial to unpleasant or pleasant experiences. That’s a crucial distinction. And it does raise in my mind a question about the risk of intense meditation dulling the extreme positive emotions.
In the mornings on retreat, prior to sitting, I did various breathwork exercises. I did the Wim Hof 10 minute breathing along with some other techniques. I found them effective for settling the mind before meditation.
At one point during Q&R in the main hall a person asked about mindful eating and said she was practicing gratitude after sitting down to every being that helped the plate of food arrive in front of her. She said that she begins her gratitude practice by starting with thanking the dinosaurs who helped create the fossil fuels that set in motion modern civilization. Lol.
I generally think retreats at places like Spirit Rock with live, Western teachers is a better entry point for beginners than the Goenka 10 day Vipassana retreats that most people attend. But I must say, Goenka’s retreat style has some things going for it. The mandatory 10 day minimum. Splitting up genders to deal with the inevitable sexual fantasies that emerge. Sitting only, no walking. And so forth. If you’re ready to jump in the deep end of the pool, Goenka’s retreat format is compelling. It certainly worked for me.
The Goal vs. The Path
This most recent retreat was full of inspiration and insight. And I know that it won’t last. As a teacher told us at the end of the retreat, as you walk to the car in the parking lot afterwards, you can feel your concentration fade away. Nooooooo!
I’m still ruminating on the pace of my overall progress. Have I made progress toward greater insight over these years?
On each retreat I’ve been on, I usually have a mini-crisis of faith along the way, as the sacrifice (in terms of hours spent) is so extreme, the atmosphere so austere, the payoff so ephemeral sometimes.
I do know a lot more intellectually about Buddhism. I have conceptual understandings and bits and pieces of experiential ones.
But I’m not sure I’m in the time zone of even the most generous fragments of a definition of “enlightened.” And the battery charge from a retreat in terms of off-cushion habits doesn’t last more than 6-8 months, in my experience. Hmm.
In any case, my meditation battery is recharged for now. I’ve meditated most days since coming back online. The main thing I want to talk to people about these days is meditation. Going forward, I’m interested in the following explorations:
Metta practice and alternative approaches from the traditional mantra advice.
A deeper understanding of not-self. I’d like to turn the attention back on the observer a bit more and more deeply understand this.
Non-Vipassana meditation instructions that emphasize non-dualism (per the above point).
Preserving an inner life, and realizing how far one still has to go
Two months cumulatively in silence has allowed me to dive into the most private corners of my consciousness. In a world that values constant connection and radical transparency, these retreats have been a countercultural act of preservation. They’ve allowed me to cultivate a rich inner life, a collection of experiences and insights that belong to me alone. It’s not about secrecy or withholding; rather, it’s about nurturing a private garden of thought and sensation that feeds my social and more public life in subtle but — I hope — beneficial ways.
Training the mind is work, sometimes painfully difficult work. The work of transforming your inner environment to be one of peace and beauty; of harmonizing your inner values with your outer actions; of evolving your rhetorical instincts from reactive to responsive.
I aspire to these end states, to be clear; I still feel like a long way from their fully actualized peaks. When you observe the moment-to-moment contents of consciousness, you confront all the imperfections of your present state. The irony is that the more you engage in this work, the more you realize how far you have to go. And life is short, so there’s no time like the present to begin again.
Is there a level of early success in a career or firm that’s the optimal foundation for long term sustained success? Are there fields where too much success too early means a level of scrutiny that’s unhelpful? An erosion of necessary humility? A creation of incentives that lead to premature scaling?
In venture capital, firms that enjoy too much explosive success in their Fund 1 tend to be given a very long rope from LPs who automatically re-up for several subsequent funds. With a long rope, GPs can hang themselves by over scaling. Size tends to be the enemy of greatness in fund returns. I know of GPs who hit it out of the park with a $10M Fund I. Fund 2 is $200M, Fund 3 $300M, and within a decade their AUM is over a billion. The later fund returns never approach the high water mark of Fund I.
Now, of course given a binary choice, you’d rather your first fund be successful than not successful, and early success does produce advantages that compound. You can attract better talent, for example. You spend less time fundraising from LPs and thus have more time to focus on investing. And so on. So, there’s an “optimal” amount of early success that’s well north of merely average for positioning you for great long term success. But optimal but is probably less than “maximum.”
In short, a Fund 1 that returns 4x might be better for long term franchise returns than the Fund 1 that’s a 10x.
In athletics, there are plenty of examples of youth who flourish early but then wilt under the excessive scruinity their early success attracts. David Epstein’s work also points to premature specialization of youth athletes — a kid who starts to break out as a star soccer player in middle school is whisked into club teams and told to specialize. Perhaps counterintuitively, early specialization actually reduces their readiness for a long term professional career in that sport.
Finally, I’ve heard an argument that late bloomers (in whatever field, but especially artists) often experience high levels of productivity early in their career and then experience long dormant periods. They re-emerge as a late bloomer — which is when they make their signature contribution to society. If true, did something happen in their early years in which they were too productive? Could they have been a medium-length bloomer (instead of late bloomer) if they didn’t come out of the gate so strongly?
Compounding loops and the rich-get-richer effects and the early-bird-gets-the-worm effects are real and pervasive. But perhaps we don’t say often enough, about people or firms: “She has a great future but I worry she’s had too much early success…“
I read and enjoyed both of Freddie DeBoer’s books. Freddie is a Marxist by self-identification — a rabid anti-capitalist who wants to redistribute all wealth. He’s simultaneously a trenchant critic of the left. This duality makes him interesting to read.
His newer book is How the Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. He marshals ample evidence to show that the social justice movement of the past few years has been an abysmal failure on achieving actual outcomes. He convincingly argue that elites’ obsession with culture war issues and other symbolic victories distracted it from real, on the ground reforms related to crime and poverty. DeBoer centers class, not race, in his analysis. The book in one paragraph: “That basic drift from the material and the concrete to the immaterial and symbolic is no accident. This is the constant dynamic in left politics because of a kind of elite capture. If you’re a Black child living in poverty and neglect in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, you might very well wonder how the annual controversy over the number of Black artists winning Oscars impacts your life.”
In The Cult of Smart, his earlier book, Freddie effectively destroys the idea that every child has an equal opportunity to succeed if only put in the right educational environment. In fact, most life and academic outcomes, traditionally measured, are pre-determined prior to a kid enrolling in kindergarten. To be a star student, you want to have good genetics (IQ), be born healthy and at full weight from non-abusive parents who hail from a middle class or upper middle class background, and be free of any developmental or cognitive disabilities. A child is in control of precisely none of those attributes, and the school they attend has no bearing on those factors either. Freddie’s thesis calls into question the wisdom of virtually every educational philanthropic initiative and government ed reform effort — of which there are countless — to say nothing of the pressure parents put on themselves to get their kids into better schools. Freddie then questions the morality of a meritocracy — of a society that orders itself based on intellectual ability — given intellectual ability is not something you’re in control of.
Both books made me think. Here are my Kindle highlights from each.
Highlights from Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement
Some cities and states enacted modest criminal-justice reforms, but many of these were later quietly rolled back. In Minneapolis, where Floyd’s murder had taken place, the drift over time was telling: the city council first voted to abolish and replace its police department, then later changed the reforms to simple budget cuts, then later enacted an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.
Worse, there are now many in progressive spaces who decry the white working class—an immense group that still exerts heavy influence on American politics—as an inherently and permanently racist and bigoted class. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as left-leaning disdain for uneducated white workers and voters results in leftist cultural and communicative practices that seem tailor-made to reject the support of that large bloc. Left activists refuse to engage with the complexity of, for example, the millions of voters who supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 but Donald Trump in 2016. This is, strategically, a kind of madness; any successful future for the left-of-center requires expanding our coalition and dreaming big when it comes to convincing disaffected lower-wage citizens to support us.
We have to get past thinking that our righteousness makes victory inevitable and start engaging in the real, tough, boring labor of convincing others. We have a lot of work to do, and there’s no time like the present.
at the height of the George Floyd protest moment, 55 percent of Black respondents wanted police spending in their area to stay the same or to grow; by September 2021, that number had grown to 76 percent.
Consider this statement: “My life is determined by my own actions.” While 52 percent of respondents identified as very conservative agreed with this statement, only 33 percent of very liberal respondents agreed.
But as I have argued in this book, zero-sum racial (or gender, et cetera) thinking is the enemy of progressive politics. White people make up 70 percent of the electorate; men half of it. Straight people, cisgender people, and the able-bodied make up dominant majorities. To convince those people that they must lose for those from marginalized communities to succeed is politically suicidal.
For example, there are people who earnestly believe that the phrase “I see what you mean” is ableist—that is, disrespectful and oppressive toward people with disabilities—because some people can’t see. This is—and I choose the word carefully—nuts.
Highlights from Cult of Smart
For decades, our educational politics have obsessed over between-group variation, that is, gaps between black students and white, between girls and boys, between rich and poor. But to me the more interesting, more essential, insights lie in the nature of within-group variation. Take any identifiable academic demographic group you’d like—poor black inner-city charter school students, first-generation Asian immigrants in Los Angeles public schools, poor rural white girls in the Ozark Mountains. There are indeed systematic differences in outcomes between these various groups. But what’s more telling and more interesting is the variation within these groups. In any such groups, you will find students who excel at the highest levels and students who fail again and again.
You can have two students who are the same age, the same race, the same gender, from the same socioeconomic status, with similar family compositions, who live on the same street, who even have the same teachers. I knew many such sets of kids growing up. And yet for all of their demographic and educational similarity, these kids will see profound inequality in their academic outcomes. Some will be academic stars while some will struggle until they eventually drop out. Why? What is the source of this variation? And why has our society seemingly decided never to ask that question?
But I would put it to you a different way: What could be crueler than an actual meritocracy, a meritocracy fulfilled? Because once we acknowledge that natural talent exists at all, even if it were a minor factor, the whole moral justification of the edifice of meritocracy falls away. No one chooses who their parents are, no one can determine their own natural academic abilities, and a system that doles out wealth and hardship based on academic ability is inherently and forever a rigged game.
The blogger Scott Alexander laid it out well in a piece titled “The Parable of the Talents.” As he points out, in most arenas, ascribing outcomes to biological factors is the more progressive position—when it comes to being overweight, for example, or in the case of mental illness, progressive people tend to believe that it’s biology, not willpower, that plays the largest role.
The obvious pattern is that attributing outcomes to things like genes, biology, and accidents of birth is kind and sympathetic. Attributing them to who works harder and who’s “really trying” can stigmatize people who end up with bad outcomes and is generally viewed as Not A Nice Thing To Do. And the weird thing, the thing I’ve never understood, is that intellectual achievement is the one domain that breaks this pattern. Here it’s would-be hard-headed conservatives arguing that intellectual greatness comes from genetics and the accidents of birth and demanding we “accept” this “unpleasant truth.” And it’s would-be compassionate progressives who are insisting that no, it depends on who works harder, claiming anybody can be brilliant if they really try.
This is, as I’ve said before, akin to having a height requirement for your school and then bragging about how tall your student body is. Schools that use a screening mechanism specifically designed to exclude the students who are less likely to succeed can’t then turn around and assume that the strong outcomes of their students say something positive about the efficacy of their teaching.
In fact, I will go a step further: school quality simply doesn’t matter very much when it comes to quantitative educational outcomes.
Random selection into a better school in Beijing has no effect, random selection into a better school in Chicago has close to no effect, random selection into a better Kenyan school has no effect, nor does it in Missouri, nor in New York City. Once you control for student characteristics, Australian private schools didn’t outperform state schools on the 2009 PISA. Conscription into extra education didn’t much affect life outcomes in late 1970s France. In 1950s England, going to an elite school made no difference to a youth’s job market outcomes. The literature is huge and there are many many more examples.
Once you correct for ability, attending schools like Hunter makes no difference. Several high-quality studies have been performed evaluating the real impact of selective public high schools and have found that attending those high schools simply doesn’t matter in terms of conventional educational and life outcomes.
A high-quality longitudinal study found that, in cohorts of college students from both the 1970s and the 1990s, the returns from attending an elite college were effectively nil, once you controlled for SAT scores. Once you compare like with like, and look at students of similar underlying ability, attending a prestigious school makes no difference.
To succeed academically, a child should be born to college-educated parents. Those parents should be from the middle class or, preferably, the upper class. The child should be brought to full term and be born at a healthy weight. The child should be free from developmental or cognitive disabilities. The child should be raised in a lead-free environment. The child should not be abused or neglected, particularly early in life.
No one would assume that one’s ability to run a race or to lift a heavy weight is synonymous with their greater human value. No one would presume that height is an accurate marker of human worth, or that we should accept a rigid caste system based on how tall we are. And few would doubt that there is a genetic element in each of those attributes. Yet when it comes to intelligence—a complex and multifaceted human attribute that includes both objective abilities of raw reasoning and a great deal of socially constructed and influenced factors—too many would-be egalitarians assume that there is a simple relationship between genetic predisposition and general human value. This is the Cult of Smart in its most distilled form.
