RE-REMEMBERING & THE ABUNDANCE OF LIFELONG LEARNING
Seeking is a lot like skiing.
I often feel a sense of scarcity around the things that I consume and create day-to-day.
Books, podcasts, essays, YouTube videos, journal entries, little notes, conversations - regardless of how much, it often feels like it’s never enough.
I’m constantly preoccupied with the thought that it would be such a shame if I let all these wise insights go untapped, floating away, un-incorporated in my daily routine, abandoned, stranded, embedded somewhere in the middle of a 96-minute podcast episode, or on page 118 in a forest green journal from June 2022.
As I think about it, this mindset is that of the optimizer.
The life-hacker.
It assumes that the more juice squeezed out of life, the better the life.
It’s a mindset that isn’t new to me. It’s been my way of living for as long as I can remember. It’s one that I’ve been re-considering for some time now.
You can’t hoard life
I came across this essay the other day.
It’s as if Oliver Burkeman has been watching me wrestle with this general feeling of lack in my pursuits.
In truth, it’s because I’m not the only one that does.
What Oliver shared has implications beyond my specific flavor of the Sysiphean pursuit of perfection that some of us struggle with.
My specific flavor of this feeling of insufficiency and its corresponding worldview is so often an intellectual pursuit, grasping for a specific quote, idea, or insight that I fear losing.
When I’m caught in this mode, my worldview is poisoned with a scarcity paradigm. It implies a zero-sum model of the world - that wisdom encountered and not captured and enacted remains lost, leaving me a worse-off, less fully-realized version of myself.
Living this way is exhausting.
It is these moments of depleted resignation that (re-)spark my search for a more forgiving, abundant, sustainable way of life.
This particular story is part of the search that’s encapsulated here in my work with Comma: my search for more wholeness, aliveness, and freedom.
Seeking is like skiing
My understanding of this work based on my own experiences so far is that this process is like skiing.
It’s dynamic. The path changes all the time. Some parts are fast. Others, slow. Sometimes the mountain forces us to stop completely. Sometimes, it demands that we keep moving, traversing across the face of the mountain, going sideways rather than down. Sometimes, we must even climb back up the hill, getting further from where we seek to go.
The result of these moments is bouts of effort that don’t always look like progress, especially if we’re judging progress by whether we got any closer to the bottom of the mountain.
And that’s just the thing. I’m learning that the work of seeking and becoming is wandering. It zigs and it zags. It’s certainly not ending up looking like the journey that I imagined at the beginning.
It’s just like when we push ourselves on the mountain, when we ski right at the edge of our ability, in pursuit of not just making it to the bottom, but also challenging ourselves, to evolve into our potential, and to feel alive. The line that we end up taking on the way down rarely looks like the one we imagined at the top.
Re-learning
Part of this process for me has been re-learning what I’ve already learned.
I learn things, then can find myself somehow getting out of touch with the wisdom gleaned.
It’s in these moments that I get the speed wobbles, or find myself flooded with challenging experiences and emotions. These experiences serve as a signal to me that I’ve somehow gotten misaligned with what’s true and wise - and that it’s time to make a change.
The struggle with shame, scarcity, and insufficiency that I was sharing earlier is one such example.
I’m re-learning, as much as it goes against my old programming, that life is lived way beyond what intellect I can seize and stuff into that pink matter perched on our shoulders that we call a brain.
I’m constantly re-learning that life is an embodied, emotional, sensory experience. One that unfolds, and slips through our fingers like grains of sand, no matter how tightly we try to grip or hoard it.
It’s in those moments of ambient feelings of insufficiency that I was describing that I remember to remember what I already know - that this is a deeply ingrained pattern of mine. One that pulls the strings of my life like a puppet master as I walk in the world, often leading me to run away from what still hurts.
As I’ve said before (and will continue to say), my intention for Comma is to share stories and insights - mine, as well as others’ - that guide me along in my process, in hopes that they might matter to you, too.
I hope that Comma serves as a vessel for seeking, learning, and re-learning - for you, as much as it does for me.
Comma is about the process, for seekers in the process, with stories from within the process.
The abundance of lifelong learning
As I’ve been writing this, I’ve had a realization: if I truly believe in lifelong learning - that this process of seeking and becoming is an infinite game - then there’s another, more grounded, graceful way than my familiar fear- and shame-fueled need for better.
This realization comes with the understanding that every moment of my life has contributed to who and where I am today. Everything in the story of my life plays its crucial part.
This includes all the quotes and nuggets of wisdom that I do or don’t remember; all the accomplishments that I do or don’t achieve; the pervasive sense of insufficiency that possesses me in my most dysregulated, scarcity-fueled moments; the resulting drive for the impossibility of perfection; the fear of failing, and remaining imperfect.
All of it.
And the irony is that to seek to jettison the imperfection from life is to seek to jettison the humanity - and inherent beauty - we are gifted with. Perfection is the domain of gods, not humans.
To be human is to be imperfect.
As Cyan Banister posits on Invest Like the Best:
Nothing is going to be more valuable than what’s created by human hands in the future.
In a world where everything is quick, cheap, and flawless, the things that are flawed have value.
What’s left is artisanship.
Cyan Banister
As I re-learn this, I can feel my body responding by taking a deeper breath. Simply by acknowledging that there could be another way to operate in the world gives rise to and hope for a more grounded, peaceful walk through life as it unfolds.
Because it is true - I do believe in the process of lifelong learning. And I strive to live my life this way.
It’s in this remembering that I remember to reaffirm my intention to live from this more abundant, grounded perspective of the infinite game of the process.
That to continue to walk as a lifelong learner - as a seeker, in process - is sufficient. In fact, it may perhaps be the best and only thing you and I can do in the face of the challenges we face in our lives, whatever they may be.
That the process - and the story of our humanity that unfolds through the process - is more important than any piece or collection of insightful quotes, frameworks, miles run, money earned, weight lifted, awards won.
That these things that I often find myself fearing will (or won’t) solve my problems, or be the determinant of the quality of my life, are in fact only ever manifested as consequences1 of our continual, ongoing process of becoming - and living along the way.
It’s in this remembering that I more clearly re-see that life is and will be difficult, painful, sad, and lonely at times.
I also more clearly see that life also can be more free, peaceful, authentic, true, and luxuriously fulfilling, should you and I have the courage to work to shift our focus from what is out of our control back to what is.
So, what can we do that is in our control?
We can seek what’s true, and do the work to become our fullest and most authentic selves, evolving through what holds us back along the way.
We can be in process.
Today, this is what I’m re-learning.
Tomorrow, another class is in session in the halls of the school of life. I’ll be presented with another opportunity to learn. And the day after, yet another. And on it goes.
I intend to show up, as best and as often as I can.
See you in class.
Until next time,
Devin