On Searching

Or What I’ve Learned from Alan Watts and Paul Atreides.

Banteay Srei, Siem Reap, Cambodia

The great things you do are really happenings

-Alan Watts

I’ve spent my whole life searching. Perhaps you have too.

At first most of this searching was for a rudimentary American definition of ‘success’ that like most of us I was brought up with: building a successful career, settling down right away, and making a name for myself in the upper echelons of society. I thought this would make me happy because it appeared to make other people happy. But once I graduated college and set out on this search for the American dream, I realized I wasn't all that happy. So I decided to try and pursue a happy life outside of this rudimentary definition, first spending more time in nature and later by embarking on the solo-trip of a lifetime.

Which brings me to the present moment. These days I find myself searching for ways I can help people and help the world. I'm still searching as if in this very moment I could find a definite answer.

I've made pro/con lists, talked with friends and in therapy, and soul searched. And yet the more time I spend thinking and trying to pinpoint a path for myself, the more confused I become.

Getting Out of My Own Way

It was a rainy November 2019 evening in Boston. I remember feeling a bit lost and depressed. I had just lost my first job out of college and I felt this powerful urge to improve my situation. Then I stumbled on a Youtube video called ‘How to Get out of Your Own Way,’ a 50 minute lecture by Alan Watts in which he is speaking to a group of American students. I'll do my best to summarize it below but I recommend listening to it if you have the time.

Watts asks the question ‘How do you know what is best for you? And how is it possible to improve yourself when you don’t even know yourself? If “the person who is doing the improving is the one who needs to be improved” then how can one know where to look for guidance? It's possible to go ask a mentor, guru, god, or some other authority, but how can you know that said authority is telling the truth? 

The answer is we don't. It's impossible to know how best to 'improve' ourselves through thinking about it.

So in that case, what is one supposed to do? According to Watts, the answer is: nothing. Or more specifically: that the things we do unconsciously, when we aren’t trying to improve, are what actually improve us. To try to force a set of religious principles, self-improvement guidelines, or rudimentary definition of success is simply to believe that we can outwit ourselves, outwit nature, and force ourselves to become something we aren’t yet. 

Now before you get depressed and call me a pessimist, let's take a second to reflect on what this really means.

If it's not possible to improve ourselves through trying to improve, and our only path forward is to evolve naturally, then we are therefore already complete. In this moment there is nothing to improve. We are all perfect works in progress.

So how do we get out of our own way? How can we evolve naturally without overthinking it?

Letting Go

This past summer I attended Middlebury College’s language intensive program to learn Spanish. You could say I was doing a self-improvement thing, challenging my brain to learn a new language within the very short span of 7 weeks. Growing up I hated language learning; it always felt like there were so many rules and words to memorize and remember all the time. At the beginning of this summer I felt much the same, constantly walking around campus reciting things I’d learned in my head and pushing myself hard to spend more time studying in the library. By week 3 my head was spinning and I was making the same mistakes in class. I started feeling discouraged, after all, my level was practically the same as week 1!

So one day I confided in Darío, one of my professors. His advice was to stop thinking and just speak without policing my mistakes. All of a sudden I started enjoying the program a lot more. I let go of my lofty expectations and made more mistakes. But my Spanish also started rapidly improving. I took more risks in class. I found that when I wasn’t overthinking and just living moment to moment, I would speak with vocabulary or grammar structures I didn’t know I had. I started taking big risks and eventually forgot that I had spent weeks speaking only in a language I still was not ‘fluent’ in. By the end of the program I wasn’t fluent, but I was a whole lot more competent and confident in my level of Spanish.

I set out to work hard and learn Spanish as a means of self-improvement. But ironically the most effective way I improved my Spanish was when I let go of expectations and stopped forcing the language into my brain. Of course there were study strategies I had to utilize to introduce new material, but I had to practice speaking the language off the cuff and in a flow state to learn them. And once I stopped comparing myself to some arbitrary expectation of success I could flourish. 

Life on the backpacker trail is similarly fraught with expectations. When I left to go backpacking one year ago, I was setting out in search of new places, people, and cultural experiences. I romanticized (and still do) the idea of connecting with people from different backgrounds in spontaneous ways. Unsurprisingly, I quickly found that when I tried to plan for a ‘spontaneous’ interaction (much like a tour company does), rarely anything happened organically.

So I stopped searching for one.

I stopped planning for spontaneity and allowed the world to come to me. I went for walks alone and followed sweet smells, I signed up for fewer tours and gave myself more time in each place I visited. Turns out the special travel moments usually happen often when I least expect them to happen. Sometimes I didn’t even process them as organic cultural experiences until later on, long after they had ended. Like when I played soccer with local kids in Colombia or when I got drunk with rubber farmers in rural Thailand. You can read about some examples of these experiences in my Why I Slow Travel blogs. 

Thiền viện Trúc lâm Tây Thiên Monastery

So we can’t as Watts puts it ‘outwit ourselves’ to learn a language, or be ‘designedly spontaneous’ when we travel. When we spend our time searching for something or searching to realize an expectation we are usually disappointed.

So if expectations or strict plans aren't serving us, how do we know where to go? What are we supposed to do?

Frankly, I don't know a good answer, except to say that the more time I spend in the present moment, the more I can separate myself from expectation and embrace the unknown.

Perhaps, if you’ll permit me, I’ll go off on one last tangent to explain what I mean by that.

Looking to the Present 

As Frank Herbert echoes Soren Kierkegaard in Dune: “The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” 

In the beginning of Dune, Prince Paul Atreides is questioning and fighting against the intense path to which he is set. In his dreams and visions he sees his destiny: becoming a tyrant who does terrible things. He tries to avoid this dark future, but doing so only stunts and complicates his evolution as a character. Although Paul may appear to be an all-powerful messiah in the eyes of the Fremen, he is in reality just another mortal who has just as little agency as everybody else. 

Once Paul drinks the water of life, sees the future, and becomes the prophet Lisan al-Ghaib, he gains the full ability to see his future which is unchangeable even by someone as powerful as he. Yet the horrible truth that the future is unchangeable comes as a relief to Paul because he is forced to accept what is and what will be. 

Luckily we don’t have the power to see or dream the future like Paul. But we still have the innate urge to try to imagine it, control it, and forge a path for ourselves through it. This is human and can be helpful. Yet there’s a destructive element to this urge as well. For living in/for the future (or the past) does a disservice to our ability to live in and enjoy the present. 

Connectedness

We think we can control who we will be or what we will want tomorrow. We think we can make a value judgement on those predictions. But deep down we know we can’t be sure. What we can be sure of is this moment and how we process/react to it. And staying grounded in that is perhaps the best gift we can give to ourselves. 

For me, I feel most content when I can recognize that the internal and external are one. When I can see that everything I sense and perceive are deeply interconnected--perhaps more than I, or anyone else, could understand.

For example, when you look into a stranger’s eyes, you are looking into your own eyes. When you help/hurt others you are helping/hurting yourself.

I feel this connectedness most intensely and spiritually when I’m not describing it using language. 

I feel it when I’m not following a set of beliefs or guidelines, but instead just absorbing the matter of the moment. By the time I’m thinking ‘I am happy,’ the moment has already passed. 

So today I feel I’ve arrived at a place I’d set out to get to, although I’m not entirely sure I got here through one experience alone.

I didn’t have an ‘a-ha’ moment hiking in the Andes, meditating in a Buddhist Monastery, or studying Spanish in Vermont. But I’m having more and more days where it just makes sense.

This is not to say I have everything figured out or that I don't still endlessly stress about the past and the future. I do. But I feel less worried about the fact that these stressors are part of me because I know that I am enough in this moment.

I’m going to keep on searching -- we all will. But perhaps you and I can go forward with the knowledge that what we've been searching for has already been found. That God or nature or (insert spiritual higher power here) is just as much a part of us as we are of him/her/it… 

…and that the best thing to do is to stop thinking about all this stuff, breathe in, and drink in the moment.