Note from the Webmaster: I intend to update this page every few weeks or months, replacing this with a new conversation when one really catches my eye. The object is just to give you a feeling for the sorts of conversations that we have.

This particular dialogue was inspired by one of my favorite quotes:

I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to suck the marrow from the bones of life; to put to rout all that was not life, and not to come to the end of life, and discover that I had not lived.
- Henry David Thoreau

The question that someone asked was, what does that mean? That got the ball rolling. (It doesn't take much to get SKS people embroiled in a conversation that jumps between the philosophical and the personal...you'll see.) The entire conversation took place by email. I have done a bit of reformatting and cleanup, but I have not rewritten what anyone wrote.

We all know we are going to die. Therein comes the yearning to make the most out of the time we do have—to live deliberately. We've all heard of the Thoreau quote about going to the woods to live deliberately and suck the marrow from life. It seems to me like the first part of the battle is realizing that you're not living deliberately. But what then? How do you change all your bad time-wasting habits into good marrow-sucking ones? Are there universal traits to the state of living deliberately or can it differ for each person?

This is a timely one for me. Basically it breaks down into two parts: the life you want to lead and the life you are actually leading. The problem for most of us is that there is a disconnect between the two. The only way to get from one to the other is one small commitment at a time.

You don't need to know what the final destination is, only the next step. There are lots of next steps available to us at all times—things that we know if we did, our lives would be much improved. Looking at the mountain ahead of you can be daunting, so focus on the goal of the next step. After each step, you'll have a clearer view of where you want to go.

When you can do what you say you're going to do, then you have the ability to live the "deliberate" life you want to lead. It's a matter of building willpower.

To build on what dan said:

Oh no, y'all. I can feel it happening—I'm becoming a suburbanite. (Or maybe I always WAS a suburbanite and am just now coming to terms with it.)

The primary sign of my demise has been my gleeful happiness with my latest living arrangement. For those of you who don't know, I've just moved to the western edge of metro Atlanta, in a nice big apartment complex—one of those generic, every-building-looks-the-same complexes with 500 other people living there, each of us in relative isolation from the others despite our close quarters. Doug Friedlander used to refer to them as "souless" complexes. You kind of get that feeling from my complex, too: there's something about it that is cold and efficient and really there's nothing homey or personal or personable about it at all until I walk through my front door and then, ahhhhhhh, I'm home.

You know what else? There's an indoor pool and an outdoor pool, a little workout room, and even a couple of poorly painted racquetball courts. I really dig it. I don't have to drive twenty minutes to get to the gym. Today I did the eliptical stair-master thing and the guy next to me did the recumbent exercise bike. He read the paper and I stared at the flashing green and red console.

Oh, but the best part—and the part that lets me know for sure that I'm now a complete victim of my consumerist culture—is that there's a Kroger and a Blockbuster just around the corner from the complex in a little strip-mall. A 24 hour kroger!! 90 seconds away! When I was in New Haven, I had to drive through downtown one route twenty minutes (due to all the traffic lights) to get to Shaw's, then twenty minutes back a different route because of all the winding one way streets. But the strip-mall! Ahhhhhhh, so convenient. If I run out of coffee filters, decaf chai tea, tofu, or soy milk, I can hop in my car at any time of the day or night and be back in five minutes. And since my new apartment sits almost right on top of I-20, I've cut off fifteen minutes on my drive to the Buddhist center. Do you realize what you can do with fifteen minutes? You can do a whole mini-meditation in that time!

Anyway—I'm getting to my oh-so-profound & spiritual point, I swear. The thing is, there's this sort of all-pervading emptiness in the suburbs—you can feel it just in the way things are organized. My apartment complex is the perfect example. It's made just for people like me, who have to get up by 5:30, get to work by 7ish, and who are so exhausted when they come back home at 7ish that all they can do is collapse on the couch. At most you get three or four hours to yourself or with your family before you fall into bed and pass out, only to repeat the cycle again the next day.

There's nothing wrong with hard work, but you have to admit that our American culture, especially when you compare it to other Western (ie European) cultures, operates at a break-neck speed. And don't get me wrong, I love my job. I really do. But it's no wonder I fall asleep when I try to meditate, or that I don't get the kind of writing done I want to on the weekends, because Saturday & Sunday are the only days I have time to do chores—grocery shopping, cleaning, general maintenance, organizing for the upcoming work week.

And then we beat ourselves up for not having a complete spiritual life! We accuse ourselves of procrastinating and not working hard enough, and in part, that's accurate—we really DON'T do as much as we could/should. But on the other hand, with the (and I know I'm over-generalizing here, everybody's lifestyle is different) lifestyle most of us are leading, it's really close to impossible to have a spiritual life that's anything more than "extracurricular."

For me, as usual, I'm trying to do everything all at once. "To live deliberately"—the phrase Andrea used to kick off this conversation—for me means to really aim for my best in each aspect of my life and to continuously align ALL aspects of my life with my spiritual values and aspirations. But so much of it comes down to the basic problems of time. It's almost impossible, in the four hours I have between the time I come home and the time I fall asleep, to workout *AND* make a healthy lunch for the next day *AND* write *AND* study for the GRE *AND* read *AND* meditate *AND* keep up with current events AND make plans for the next work day. Four hours??? To do all that?? I should have four hours to do ONE of those things. Not to mention it's easy for me—I don't have a significant other or any children, so I can be greedy with my time!

So anyhow.

Like Andrea said, we all know we're going to die, but like Christian Deitrich (sp?) (remember him?) said once, "Life is a homework assignment due in forty years and we're all putting it off." And like Dan said, we should look only at the step in front of us.

Personally, though, I want to see a change in our entire culture. I want to see people using up ALL of their vacation time every year, and then demanding more of it. I want people to save their pennies and buy themselves a week's retreat at a monastery instead of a new DVD player. I want people to realize that they can't have it *ALL*, all the time, even if they live 90 seconds from Kroger.

I think living a spiritual life, in our country in our culture, is as much a daily battle of resources—especially of time and money—as it is making sure we read the right books and study under the right teachers.

Not that I've figured out how to do this yet.

Well, y'all. That's all for now. Pray for me, and thank my parents for letting me come over and use their DSL and watch their satellite television.

HAHAHAHAHA

In 1998, I had been working my ass off for ten years in three different companies. I was on the job from 7 am until 7 pm, and sometimes came back after dinner and stayed well into the morning. I had two small children and one on the way, and I felt like they were growing up and I was missing it. Children and spiritual work were supposed to be my top priorities, with work a distant third—but in terms of my time, it was completely the opposite.

So I quit. It wasn't sudden or impulsive—I thought it through, I gave a few month's notice to my boss and the people over me, and several weeks notice to the people under me, and I cleaned up everything I was in the middle of and so on. And then I quit, and moved back to North Carolina to be near my family and SKS, and I didn't get another job. No job and no school. My plan was to really devote myself to my kids and my spiritual work, finally able to spend my time where I wanted to spend it, until a year passed, and then I would get another job, but always look back to that blissful year of really spending my time where I wanted to.

It didn't work, and to this day, I don't understand why. Days just went by. As I went to bed every night, I asked myself, "Did I get lots of quality time with the kids today? Nope. Did I get lots of spiritual time today? Nope. What happened? Well, a bunch of things came up. It will be different tomorrow."

Nope. It never was. It was a frustrating, tense year.

The only part of the plan that did work was that, after a year, I got another job. I became a high school teacher. Teaching takes a huge amount of time, as any high school teacher will tell you. Planning time and grading time and teaching time and (for me) an hour-and-a-half of driving time every day. And suddenly, life felt better. I had a place in the world, and structure in my life, and strange-but-true, I started getting *more* time with the kids. Now I enjoy my vacations and they seem too short and I always want more, but I also know what would happen if there were too much.

There isn't a real moral to all that, except that I seem to be the sort of person who needs my life to be structured for me, rather than the kind of person who can build my own life directly out of my chosen priorities. And I always thought I was that latter kind of person until I got to try it.

Kenny et al,

In the midst of my pre-occupation about whining about our culture, I only briefly mentioned that I love my job. In line with what Kenny was saying, I wanted to put in a brief addendum: since the culture as a whole probably won't change during any of our lifetimes, I guess the next best thing to having more time to devote directly to "spiritual practices" is to work at doing something you really like, something that feels really meaningful to you, that lines up with your goals (ie read Georg's piece in Radical Spirit). I *love* working in the elementary school where I'm at—I love the kids even when I have to talk sternly with them, I love them even when they're busy being mad at me. And talk about having an opportunity to develop "patience" and "compassion"—try getting a roomful of forty five year olds to do the same thing at the same time and you'll have all the opportunity for developing patience you'll ever need. So, I had an opportunity to take a better paying job in the school district that would have had me working with computers instead of kids, and I'm *so glad* that I didn't give in to the pressure of $$$. (Even though I really *would* like enough money to take a week off and do a retreat. It would be even cooler if I got paid enough to do a retreat AND buy a DVD player.)

I thought I should add that in, lest you read my previous post and think I've gotten completely cynical & unrealistic in my old age.

What stands out for me as one of the times that I lived most deliberately was in and around my trips to the wilderness as part of Project WILD. Without fail, each year I would return from the trip in a state of incredible peace and ease. Whether the trip had cast me in the role of participant, of junior leader, of senior leader, or even program director, it made no difference. On the trip I felt more alive, more present, and more in-touch-with-something-greater-than-myself than I have in my life.

Afterwards, I realized that I was more happy and at peace with myself, my life, and all my circumstances than I ever was. The feeling would last anywhere from days to even weeks. Entire weeks of feeling incredibly at peace in which I felt like I didn't need anything at all. That I was perfectly happy with so little, that I was amazed and overjoyed by simple existence. And as you might imagine, this left plenty of head-space and heart-space to think about and really empathize with others in a way I was heretofore too self-concerned to afford.

If I could live my entire life in that state, I would do it. Inevitably, each year it would fade and each time I would try to understand why and how it had slipped away and resolve to hold on to it (longer anyway). It probably goes without saying that I have not yet succeeded at holding on to that indefinitely.

When looking back on the wilderness experience that led to this, I've tried to put a finger on what the relevant contributing elements were that made those wilderness excursions so miraculous. This is what I've come up with so far:

1. Unconflictedness: When in the woods, my mission in life was clear. As a participant, my mission was "survive." As a leader it was, "give your life and every ounce of everything you have to help these kids experience the transformation you did when you were in their position." Out there, there was nothing else to worry about, nothing else to focus on. I felt that I had not only permission, but also an obligation to give of myself ENTIRELY and to give it to this one thing. (There is even a way to worry about one's own survival in which one "forgets themselves.")
2. Presence: The demands of the terrain, of being exposed to the elements and to wildlife, require that you be far more attentive to your physical circumstances than you normally are. Every day was an exercise and practice (unintentional and un-self-conscious) in awareness of my surroundings. Little things that I could normally do on auto-pilot (such as walk) required additional care, deliberation, and attention. I had to place my feet carefully on the trail. Even my breathing—its patterns and rhythms and depth—was more important and occupied part of my attention.
3. Simplicity: This is related to unconflictedness. Considering that all I had with me was what I could carry on my back, there was little for me to gain, little that I could lose, or have to defend or worry about. There is just the basics of what's in front of you.
4. Equanimity toward sensations / whims / moods: The stark, inescapable and uncompromising nature of the reality of the situation made it pointless to engage in whining, anxiety, negativity, and other sources of unnecessary suffering. You couldn't just give in to your negativity and "quit" because even if you did, you were still stuck right where you were in the middle of the mountains. No games you play with yourself, no deals with God or the devil / your ego would forgive you of the demand to put one foot in front of the other in order to get to where you needed to go. Reality was reality and there was no negotiating with it; you had to physically get from Point A to Point B and you had to actually DO it, WALK it... You're in it and you don't have a choice. You are totally committed so you might as well see it through. You stop obsessing over little pains and simultaneously have no illusion that your little pleasures (like breaks, or food, or setting up camp, or even just relieving yourself) will last. You stop obsessing about comfort and discomfort because you couldn't do anything about it. You just lived. And put one foot in front of the other.
5. True Intimacy: There's a few reasons for this one. First, the starkness of your circumstances as already mentioned. But also, most of these experiences involved a strong interdependence on others. You're assembled into a crew, all of whom are depending on one another for safety, for carrying shared equipment and food, for moral and emotional support. As a participant, you at least have to TRY to think of others. And as a leader, you must. But it comes back to the intensity of the situation. The stress of the situation makes it signficant and real when you reach out to others. It means something because something is on the line and that can make the moment all the more beautiful. When you're leading a crew, you can really love them and yearn so hard for their safety and success. There's a selfless love that's wonderful to participate in.
6. Awe / Perspective: And there's some element of the whole experience that awes you with its grandeur, literally it's size. To be out in the face of the elements, of mountains, or even most stunning: surprising moments of utter stillness or the flood of incredible darkness that rushes over you at night. It puts you in touch with your mortality and your minisculeness in a way that I rarely get put in touch with in my everyday life.

The most clear example I have seen lately of someone living deliberately is my friend Larry. Larry is in the hospital with multiple infections following chemotherapy for an aggressive brain tumor. He's got pneumonia and an infection in his shoulder, and he's also on steroids which tend to mask symptoms, meaning there could be other hidden problems. It is an effort for him to speak; it was even before he got the pneumonia, and now he's coughing as well. Larry does not think this is his last gasp, so to speak. He believes he's going to beat this and come out the other side, at least temporarily. Although there are few words, he is aware, he understands and he communicates only when necessary. Each glance, each breath, each head motion is deliberate, while he's awake anyway. He seems to be aware of his body and his surroundings. As I sit here by his bedside, he wakes up, turns to see me, and his eyes widen with recognition and he gasps "Joyce." There is much in that single syllable; all the meaning in the world, I find.

Last week I attended a Zen retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh at Stonehill College outside of Boston. I think that week may have been the first glimpse I've had of understanding what living deliberately really means to me. It seemed like in SKS, what living deliberately meant to me was doing what I said I was going to do, when I said I would do it. Or, kind of what Dan said, about making the life you are leading the life you actually want to lead. I thought a lot about my spiritual life and the spiritual lives of others that I know, and I wondered about how these compared to the spiritual lives of the monks and nuns I came into contact with at the retreat. Am I living deliberately? And what does that mean?

Thich Nhat Hanh teaches the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness means being aware of what you're doing all the time. When you wake up, when you brush your teeth, when you walk to your car, when you eat, when you work or write something, you should always be conscious of what you're doing. When you meditate, you are aware of your breath. "Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in. Breathing out, I know that I am breathing out." If you can extend this to every moment of your life and whatever you're doing, chances are that you'll feel a little more peaceful, a little more calm. You won't be swept up by mental "to-do" lists and the ongoing monologue in your head. Peace is right now, in this moment.

In one of the Dharma talks, Thay (the name given to Thich Nhat Hanh by his students, Vietnamese for "teacher"), told us that the first idea in Zen is to stop. Just stop. Get your mind to stop for a second and be aware of what you're doing. At the retreat there was a mindfulness bell to remind us of this. When we heard the bell ring, during lectures, discussions, and meals, we would all go back to the simple awareness of our breath, and then resume our activity in mindfulness. Awareness of this sort also lends itself to greater peace in communicating with and understanding others. When you're aware of your conversations and what you're saying, you listen more. You really listen, not thinking about what you're going to say next, just concentrating deeply on what the other person is saying. Allowing the natural sense of compassion to arise if someone is talking about their suffering or their problems.

When I first heard the Thoreau quote about living deliberately, I was confused. I thought, "What is he actually going to DO in the woods that is so deliberate?" Now I'm thinking, maybe he was just going there to live, to breath, to enjoy the beauty of his surroundings, to be aware of his existence. To be aware of your existence is a deliberate action. When you're practicing mindfulness, each of your actions becomes deliberate. Washing the dishes becomes a deliberate action. Walking to work is deliberate. To me, practicing mindfulness as much as you can means living deliberately.

This is a helpful thing for those of us who don't know yet what we actually want to DO with our lives (or for those of us who don't feel we have very fulfilling jobs). Each moment that we are aware can be fulfilling. Just stop, go back to your breath, and begin anew in mindfulness. This practices lends itself to amazing things. Since I've been practicing mindfulness, and stopping and being aware happens more frequently, I've begun to realize my habitual ways of thinking and reacting to things, ways that are probably not healthy ways of living. I pay much more attention to how I treat other people and how I treat myself.

I think that this practice is not "just another spiritual practice" that works for some people and not for others. I think that mindfulness is for everyone, and can help everyone to become more peaceful. You just have to do it as much as you can, and hopefully be able to reinforce it by actual sitting meditation each day (even if only for 15 minutes). So maybe if you agree with me that practicing mindfulness is living deliberately, you won't be as hard on yourself for not meeting a deadline or messing up every once in a while. If you're mindful, then you can change, and grow, and become a better person.

I like Doug's observations, but there seems to be something missing from his analysis. Yes, in a group expedition into the wilderness, it's easy to experience that simplicity, unconflictedness, intimacy, and awe. The problem is...we don't live in the wilderness. Most of our lives are lived in complexity: the phone is ringing, the emails are piling up, the instant messenger is blinking, someone is talking to you about something very important while you nod your head and think about something completely different that is also very important. We have a vast multiplicity of roles, tasks, demands, expectations, and desires, all competing for our attention. To some extent, we can reduce the noise and the clutter: unplug the phone, turn off the computer, pay attention to the person in front of you. But only somewhat. I think we are inevitably called upon to live within complexity and manifest, by will and attention, what happens naturally and spontaneously in the wilderness.

José Ortega y Gassett says: "Show me what you pay attention to, and I will tell you who you are." So, I think the most important part of living deliberately is paying attention to what you're paying attention to. I think this is the purpose of meditation: to increase your capacity to know where your head is going, and why. Not just so you can be blissed out in the simplicity of an empty mind...but rather, so you can continually be asking yourself: "Am I doing the right thing for the right reasons?"

If you are clear about what is most important to you, and you have taken the time to understand how the multiplicity of relationships and tasks and desires impact that highest value, then all the confusion of the world is naturally filtered down to the most important things. That's how you carry the wilderness with you through the world.

I largely agree with Georg and so maybe I'm just restating what's already been said, but I have my own little analogy for it.

Living deliberately in this day and age is as if you're six years old and you've been placed in the biggest candy store in the world, there's more candy here than you could ever eat in a lifetime. Living deliberately comes down to deciding consciously, how do you make your way through the candy store?! Do you try and look at every kind of candy before making your decision? Do you spread yourself thin and just try a little bit of each candy? Maybe the best decision is to eat whatever type of candy makes you the happiest. Or perhaps you choose the cheapest candy because then you can get more. But maybe you really should choose the more expensive candy which is made with fair labor practices and living wages. Perhaps you should eat the candy with the fewest calories so that you can live longer and end up eating more total candy.

There are so many different ways to make the decision and so many different choices. So, some people, in the name of spirituality have decided that the best thing to do is to go back to the days when there were fewer choices, that's the solution. Go back to when things were simple and we lived more in touch with nature and had more peace. But to me, that's regressive. You don't need to think or philosophize when you're living that way. It's true, when i was in India, the happiest people there were the people with the simplest lives, the people in the village who had no choice but to be farmers. However, they also had the most simplistic philosophy and spirituality. It's almost as if the way societies are evolving, the abundance of choice forces us to go forward in our thinking and come up with better philosophies about how to live: or in my analogy, how best to make your way through the candy store. To go back to simplicity is regressive, to move forward and allow the abudance of various pressures, choices, responsibilities, complexities of modern day living to grind and mold your philosophy from a rough, black coal, into a sparkling diamond, that's true spiritual living!

So I think that we should not shrink back from modern life, but rather lean into it and allow the overwhelming nature of the candy store we live in nowadays to force us to refine our thinking and to better choose the best strategy for living, that is the sincere way to living deliberately.

"Living deliberately" is a big deal for me, even if I don't come close to really doing it. I have all kinds of "icons" all over my apartment to remind me to do it. A crystal someone made that was supposed to help you with intentionality. Reminder quotes and messages to myself. I've been meditating and journaling every day, am exercising nearly every day, and I've cut out caffeine and carbs (again). At Kenny's suggestion, I'm even saying a prayer every day to help me be more honest/sincere, less full of histrionics. But I still feel like most of my life is lived for reasons that I can't get a handle on—and not in the good way (NOT "God is in the driver's seat," but "psychology preceeds philosophy"). I did all this SKS work and paid a psychologist about $1000 to help me just be more REAL earlier this year, and I don't feel like I'm much closer than after the House Course—in fact Aug says I'm much farther—even if I'm more comforatble with myself. I still make decisions (not just small ones but major ones) and feel very conflicted about them. Sometimes I feel like my integrity is in serious question. Not because I go around telling blatant lies or trying to screw people over, but because I'm not honest with myself and I do stupid things. My first month in Austin was disgusting because I just went to work and didn't really feel like I was doing anything worthwhile, came home exhausted and was lucky if I actually went running, and then collapsed in bed after working myself up to clean or just being lazy and reading and letting the dishes pile up, or maybe even going out or doing improv or writing or something. The point isn't that I've wasted my days, because I haven't necessarily done that there's been a LOT of great stuff going on in my life here, but that they've been mostly out of my control, and I haven't been able to predict what I'm going to do—I've been pretty much pushed around by circumstance. Which doesn't mean that I'm "bad" because I guess that's pretty normal when you make such a big transition, and it's true that I'm starting to get everything back into a controlled schedule and lifestyle, but even harder for me is the feeling like ULTIMATELY this is the way I'm living my life—going from one experience to another, or one event to another, without much sense of inner direction or purpose. It's been very exciting to be around the artistic community here, and I'm still psyched about all kinds of things—the energy in the air, the people, the way people do their own thing, the poetry slams every week, the improv, the theatre, the artists and all the just plain good people—but it's been lonely—actually that isn't the right word because I miss INDIVIDUAL PEOPLE like crazy but honestly I don't crave company and am enjoying "alone time" and actually resented going on a date last week—but I'm missing the sense of being needed, and of needing people, and of doing stuff that is really valuable that I felt in the SKS community, at Identify, and in Transactors. Well maybe that *is* loneliness, just not loneliness for arbitrary company or a sense of being loved but rather loneliness for real community and purpose. I know this is probably temporary—probably soon I'll have made a life for myself just like I did in college and then in NC—but on a broader scale I will probably still be making the same mistakes, being pushed around by what's exciting, what seems interesting, what seems like a good story. The next thing for me will probably be finally going to acting school or eek getting married or some zuggy thing like that, but I wonder if I will ever feel like I'm **exactly where I need to be doing things for exactly the right reasons.** I so much want not just an unconflictedness, but a conviction that I'm unconflicted about my life because I'm doing the right thing. My favorite prof in college used to say that "wanting to be sincere" is the stupidest thing he ever heard of, because Hitler was sincere—so I want not just the ability to be at ease with my life, but **a conviction that no matter what kind of stories I'm not living up to or things I might not be perfect in, deep down I'm really doing the RIGHT THINGS FOR THE RIGHT REASONS.** I want to be able to say that my life happened on purpose AND it was in accord with what God wanted me to do. Not some personal God, but the God or whatever that is behind **things unfolding as they should.** That's what I want more than anything. Sure wish I knew how to get there.

Hey y'all:

The white trash spiritual seeker is back. Those with sensitive ears are warned. :-)

No seriously guys, this might have been addressed sooner (I've been out of the loop for a while) but I've been wondering a lot about memetic theory and how it intersects with some of the research the folks at the J-school conduct. If somebody else can explain memetics better to me, please do, but the way I basically understand it is that there are parasite ideas that infect the societal body (a good example would be the song that you hear somebody hum and can't get it out of your head). Basically it's messages and ideas that self-replicate and spread among society. Of course, most ideas don't do this, but the ability is there if it's packaged right—I read when South Africa ditched apartheid, officials hired somebody to memetically engineer the society to help the transition, and with a degree of success.

And at the J-School there is a professor who argues that media messages don't necessarily tell people how to think but what to think about (I can't remember the term to save my life, but his research seems pretty solid).

But if both of these theories are true, that we are basically told what to think about and—thanks to memetics—how we think about it, how the hell can anyone live deliberately in this society? If all these messages sink into us, then is it even possible to live completely on conscious choice, since more and more media messages are determining what the choices are? How much free will really is at play here?

For this reason, I'm not completely argeeing with Chuck—I would argue that people's choices in modern society are lessening, not increasing. To use the same analogy, the candy store isn't all that expansive. And it's that lack of choices that make people live less deliberately, because the most self-replicating ideas don't necessarily approve or even present it as a viable option.

But I said "most"—this is what I'm wondering: could you surround yourself with the "right" messages to help encourage a more deliberate lifestyle? I agree with Chuck that becoming more regressive ain't the answer, we're stuck in the society we're in to some degree, but is it possible to take these parasite ideas and turn them into an advantage rather than a disadvantage?

And if so, how do you go about that?

Since you asked for clarification on the idea of memes, I have to hasten to point out that they are *not* by definition bad things. In Dawkin's original proposal of the term, the word doesn't even have a negative connotation—and it doesn't refer to marketing. "Meme" is just a way of expressing the fact that some ideas propagate and survive well, and others don't. For instance, the idea of Christianity seems to be a more successful meme than Zoroastrianism. That doesn't mean it's better, but it also doesn't mean it is a case of slick marketing. It just means that, for whatever reasons, one caught on and survived and propagated, and the other vanished. More recently, we can see that the meme "slavery is a bad thing" seems to have propagated so well that it has all but displaced its antithesis throughout the world.

As far as having fewer choices today, I honestly can't imagine why you think that. If we were living a few hundred years earlier, every boy would know from early childhood that he was going to be the same thing his father was (usually a farmer), and every girl would know from early childhood that she was going to be a housewife/mother. We would all know our religion, where we're going to live, and what cultural mores we're going to follow, from early childhood.

Today...well, try contacting all the people who graduated high school with you. At that moment, high school graduation, they were all in the same place at the same time with more or less the same education. But with different personalities. Now, find out what they've all done since then. You will almost certainly find a dizzying array of careers, life paths, religions, politics, places to live, and so on. I can look at my children and honestly say that I have *no* idea what they will be doing in twenty or thirty years—it's up to them.

Kenny's email got me thinking because I too just finished almost a year of not working. Like Kenny, I also decided after much thought that I'd rather spend the time doing something more spiritual than staring into my computer monitor for 11 hours a day (I had no concerns about wife or kids, thank God).

I guess you could say I made the move very deliberately, since I started out with a definite plan. I started meditating an hour a day, sometimes, two. I did yoga. I signd up for a bunch of retreats. I did a lot more SKS work than I had before. I took a job doing manual labor. Unlike Kenny, I had no issues of living without structure—my neurotic nature had a new structure up and running before I even realized it. But I also found much of the experience to be pretty frustrating and unfulfilling. Living a slower pace got me depressed from the very beginning. At first I treated my distaste for sitting still as a koan to sit with, but I can't honestly say I detected any sign that I got any closer to solve it. After 8 months, I was still depressed and getting more bored and frustrated every day.

Then I forgot all my plans. I stopped meditating, I quit the SKS, and bought tickets to go to South America for 2 months. And I have to say, even before the plane touched down in Ecuador, I felt as if I had just stepped outside and breathed fresh air for the first time in years. (by the way, I'm not endorsing any of the above—I just know it worked for me, then) My tour guide turned out to be a great Zen teacher—after 3 or 4 days he told me I'd better relax if I wanted to enjoy the trip. And if I at all lived deliberately during the trip, it was only to the extent that I consistently tried to take his advice. I lived one day at a time. I met a few new people every day without really trying. I went out almost every night. I had the time of my life, and when I look back I think I felt more alive in South America than I had since finishing college 3 years earlier.

As for living deliberately, I think it's definitely important to decide what you value and live your life according to those values. After coming home I decided I wanted to keep my head in the same place it had been in South America (or at least remember, as I bury myself in legal research, that there are other states of mind which can't be found in the library). So I'm spending a fair amount of money to decorate my apartment with photos and souvenirs from my trip, speaking Spanish wherever I can, and looking around for any suggestions--I know I've got a pretty tough (perhaps desperate) challenge on my hands. Like Rachel, I'd rather have more time than the latest of every appliance, although my strategy is to work my ass off and retire young, rather than take a lot of vacation. And I want to do everything I possibly can to live for what I really want, rather than mindlessly obey Madison Ave. when they tell me I need a new DVD.

Since all of the above involves going against the flow, it requires a certain amount of determination, planning--in short, it requires you to be deliberate. But at the same time, if my trip taught me anything it's that living deliberately shouldn't come at the expense of living spontaneously. And you can't be deliberate about being spontaneous! It would be like trying hard to relax—it just doesn't work.

So I think living deliberately involves a bit of a tightrope act. If you don't plan anything at all and just go with the flow, you'll end up living your life unconsciously, perhaps waking up in 30 years and wondering where the time went. But it's also possible to live too deliberately. If you plan too much, or try to control too much about your life, you'll put close the damper on any surprises, any spontaneity--in short, you'll hardly live. And you'll inevitably set yourself up for failure, because your plans will not come to pass exactly as you intended.

In terms of less choice: you were talking about all the various personalities/jobs that people can be now. There's a lot of more freedom, granted. But is freedom to be anyone you want the same thing as choice? I'm not so sure. It's troubling me: I do think that there's more freedom but less choice, and I'm having a hell of time understanding and articulating why I believe that. It certainly makes sense to me personally—they way I've always dealt with choice is I automatically rule out options until I pretty much a couple are left and honor and duty kick in from there—Sure, I could do A, but I really have to do B because "It's The Right Thing To Do, Dammit."

That's the evil twin of living deliberately—it's being completely reactive. In truth, I've come to realize lately that I haven't done much deliberate living at all, and recently all this reactivity has started to approach torture. So I'm in the process of trying to reconfigure my life—I left my job at the DTH last semester, and I'm digging my heels into my work with my shrink again, recommitting to my studies so I leave college eventually, looking for new, less life-consuming work, losing weight/working out, trying not to push people out of my life when they get too close, regulating my sleeping patterns and (GASP!) quitting Sugar-loaded, caffeine charged Mountain Dew. Still smoking like a fiend, but Rome won't built in a day. :-)

Jokes aside, I do realize in some ways, I approached all of these life changes with my old thought pattern: "These are things I've ignored them for too long." In that regard, I haven't changed. I'm ruled by negative versions of Honor and Duty (Good 'Ol Southern Boy I am)—I felt I put these things off for too long and felt obligated to give 'em a shot because it's the right thing to do.

But if I'm still reactive, at least these ways of expressing my reactivity are a little more empowering than they've been in a long time. I don't think that's the same thing as living deliberately, but I'm hoping/praying it's a step in the right direction. Otherwise I don't stand a chance in Hell of putting m'self back together again.

So that's me, but looking around all these seniors getting ready to graduate, I see them act like they have no choice at all. I'm seeing PhD students *really* feel like they have no choices anymore. And not just in a collegiate environment—everywhere I'm seeing/talking to people who feel like no choice, no control of their own lives.

Yesterday I said that a lack of choice makes people live less deliberately. Granted, I unwisely linked it to the whole meme/mass media idea. But maybe I was right but not in the way I thought. Maybe it's the perception of a lack of choices that cause people (esp. people like me) to be less deliberate.

Maybe the key is surrendering to the idea of possibility so that more determination and thought can go into decisions again instead of just disregarding them. Of course, I might be just running my mouth again. :-)

But in any case, it feels really good to talking and thinking like this again. Feels like my brain is waking from a long slumber.

My only reply to what <Russ Lane wrote above> is that I agree that most people spend most of their lives acting as if they had no choice. But I don't blame "society"—I think society has liberated us more than at any other time and place in history. (That is, those of us who are fortunate enough to have been born so fabulously wealthy that we don't have to worry about where our next meal is coming from, how to get shelter from the rain, and whether we can afford a doctor if we're dying—which is still a small fraction of the world, but it does include everyone on this list, as far as I know. But I digress.)

At that point, it becomes human nature. Human nature is to generally float through life taking the path of least resistance, pulled this way by money and sex, pushed that way by laziness and fear. This is indeed very "choiceless" and non-deliberate. The alternative is to choose some lofty goal or ideal, and live your life by it at all times—note that this might be spiritual or not. At that point, your life again seems quite determined. But it was determined by you. Maybe we only get one big choice each!

Kenny's statement...

I think society has liberated us more than at any other time and place in history. (That is, those of us who are fortunate enough to have been born so fabulously wealthy that we don't have to worry about where our next meal is coming from, how to get shelter from the rain, and whether we can afford a doctor if we're dying—which is still a small fraction of the world, but it does include everyone on this list, as far as I know....)

...has been rumbling around in my head—I don't know, I guess I've heard that kind of thing over and over again before, but somehow it just really hit home this time. For all of my uncertainty, I feel very lucky right now. I got another email today from a friend that says that over 50% of the people in the world have never given or received a phone call. A lot of people close to me have had scary medical issues in the last year, but have turned out to be just fine, with most things either going away or being false alarms.

Despite my whining about deliberateness, my life is really pretty close to what I would ask for, for this moment in my development. I might wish that I was a little further on the path, but at least today that seems trivial, whiny, smacking of lack of gratitude. I'm here in Austin (my chosen location) doing game programming (what I wanted to do all through college) more-or-less setting my own hours, seeing my family about as frequently as I want to, living in my dream apartment that costs under $500/month, exercising nearly every day, and doing all the imrov, poetry and dance that I have time for. I also get to meditate and have cool discussions (like this one) with people who just want to be real and find God (like you). I have good, dear friends and family that love me. Beyond that, everyone I care about, except my ninety-something-year-old great-grandmother (who is still in pretty good shape for her age) is in fairly good health. I'm not just "provided for," I'm actually relatively happy and plugged in.

In fact, I was talking to my great-grandmother last weekend, and was giving her the usual great-granddaughter update: How is my job, Am I dating anyone, Do I have any shows coming up, etc. I was telling her about my job, showing her pics of NC, telling her how psyched I am about the theatre stuff I'm getting into, and she just looked at me and said: "Leila, you're so lucky. Your great-granddaddy worked the night-shift at the postal service most of his life, and he hated it, but at least it gave us the retirement we needed. Before that, he was a milkman. I think he was just so grateful to finally get the night-job at the post office so he didn't have to deliver milk anymore. You don't know how lucky you are to be able to spend so much time doing what you want."

**And I'm still complaining.** A lot of it is my enneagram 4 melancholy :-), but a lot of it is just the way most humans approach things. Especially spoiled ones like us. Or maybe it's just me. :-) But I don't think so.

One time I did a site visit in Iowa, and was talking with one of the lead programmers. He was complaining about not having the kind of money he wanted. He told me he had a summer house in Italy, travelled around the world a couple of times a year (on vacation), and had a nice house in the States. He had several children who were doing okay financially. He drove a nice car and had helped his children buy their nice cars. He was complaining because "all he wanted" was to also have the money to help his kids get "starter homes." If he just had *that,* then well you know he'd be happy, and would be able to stop worrying about money.

I dunno, I guess it all goes back to Aug's story about his ex-girlfriend who was already in the top 1% in beauty, money, education etc—he asked her What made her so sure that if she just had that little bit extra in the way of beauty, money etc that she would be happy?

I mean, in my case I **am** basically pretty frigging **happy**, I'm just not **satisfied**. Makes me wonder how much of all this is true, natural dissatisfaction with things that I need to get off my butt and change, and how much of it is just me attached to being dissatisfied.

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