On electricity firing in the void (or, what my mind does when I’m alone) The mind is a wild thing. Bundles of electrons. A collection of synapses firing back and forth, little electric pulses that combine to form thoughts. Spinning out across my frontal lobe, I feel happiness and sadness, not as some mechanical feat of engineering, not as emotion, but as pure electricity. Electricity in motion as this soft sludgy gray matter works away to create the sense of being. So how do we take this seemingly abstract collection of ‘stuff’ and form emotion from it? Where does this happiness or sadness, or the constant wild fluctuation between the two poles emerge? How do I interpret someone’s ‘external’ words within my own ‘internal’ mind and react/interact/inter-react with them to cause emotion? Without extended studies in neuroscience (who even knows where to begin?), surely this is beyond the scope of my weak human understanding. … How wild. How free. This idea that all that we do and feel and experience is merely electricity firing in the void. … I’ve been pulled kicking and screaming into a ritual where I read a passage from the Daily Stoic. Thankfully the book is designed with the western world’s thirty second attention span in mind. Each page a separate day. Each day a single thought. Each single thought distilled in fifty words or less. I read the passage. Think about it for a couple of seconds. Generally dismiss it entirely and move on with my day. Nevertheless, I find some ideas tick tick tick in the back of mind, nudging their way to the surface and coming up in casual conversation. This is my most recent thought bubble. … Marcus Aurelius: “If you are pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs you, but your own judgment about it.” Seneca: “Life is divided into three parts: past, present, and future. Of these, the present is brief, the future doubtful, the past certain. For this last is the category over which fortune no longer has control, and which cannot be brought back under anyone’s power.” Epictetus: “The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control.” So if I’ve had a past, or a present, I can take my perception of my experiences and warp it to my will. Bend and mould it to the shape I want and fling it to the seething ocean below. Is this not man’s greatest achievement? History re-written by the victors, and my mind re-writing my past over and over, synapses firing in the void to create meaning where meaning wasn’t intended and give life to the gremlins that dwell in the basement. How wild.
On What We Want from Life In another part of my life I work with children. All ages from five to eighteen. It’s interesting to see little people grow up, become big people at age twelve and then suddenly devolve into little people again. Life as a big fish in a little pond matures you, but beginning high school drops you into a wide flowing river where everyone gets jostled and jumbled and unceremoniously dumped into the sea. We might cry salty tears but the world itself is salty and no-one really cares. Not much moral to this story. … I talk with eighteen year old boys about their goals, their ambitions, their loves and hates and worries. One wants to be me. Most days even I want to be me. But is that enough for someone else to aspire to? Am I enough of a goal? He pesters me, looking for the secrets that make up my fabric. Where did I grow up? What did I want to do? How did I get here? How much do I earn? Am I happy? All great questions, but my responses feel trite in this ever-flowing river that make up my life. … I don’t feel like my childhood has affected my profession. Sure, its affected my personality, and my worldview, the way I interact with people, the things that I love and hate. But has it made me a better musician? Maybe it gave me interesting stories to tell through music. But as a drummer the story I tell is of rhythm, and while the childhood rhythms of Africa still flow through my brain I don’t believe they appear in the way I play my music. As a lyricist I have a wealth of wild childhood stories that could be passed on through song. Instead I dwell on the mundanity (profundity? depends on perspective I guess) of winter loves and lost shoes and mans’ indelible impact on the earth. So my childhood fails to affect the practical nature of my music (and I am a most practical man). … Is it enough to choose someone who interests you and mold your life on theirs? I did the same at university: flitting and floating between a series of musical crushes. I’d borrow parts and portions from teachers and records and videos on Youtube, blending them together into myself. I do the same in my small business: finding the people above me who achieve ‘success’ as I see it and following their processes, stealing their email templates, asking them for advice. Indeed, human history is littered with admirable people and the people who aspire towards them. Religion itself as the main case in point, but the cult-like status of the Tim Ferris’s, Elon Musks and Joe Rogans of the world shows that a ‘higher purpose’ isn’t the sole requirement for a hero. … If we venture away from the human aspect of human nature, there lies a vast world of inspiration. We could devise a life built around accumulation. Accumulation of knowledge. Accumulation of wealth. Accumulation of experiences. Accumulation for accumulations sake, where I stockpile a warehouse of anything at all, just so I can show the world that I own it. We could endeavour to have the most of something, develop a status as the record holder for the fastest time or longest lap or biggest hoard. Surely this is where the Murdochs of the world take note. Accumulation of power as one of the oldest stories man knows. If we take Josephus at face value then the Pharisees were exponents of the power of religions’ hold on the common-folk and we can follow the thread back to the cradle of civilisation itself. … One last thought. Love. … So do I coach my young students to follow me, to build their lives around what they see of my life’s successes? Do I push them towards what interests them, whether that’s accumulation of knowledge or merely a safe life on a quarter block in the suburbs? Do I suggest they indulge their hedonistic desires and dive into the world of possibilities that presents at the arbitrary age of eighteen? It’s a slippery slope, one that no-one ever really prepared me for.
On finding purpose I used to say that my purpose was to make people dance. A hilariously condensed version of an on-going life goal, but at the heart of it, a pure and achievable purpose. Every day I could evaluate myself: ‘did I make people dance today’? If not, why not? In a nutshell, a great reason to exist, but possibly not multi-faceted enough to make the daily trudge of life worth pursuing. For a brief period before this I studied jazz, mainly interested in bettering myself as a drummer. This was possibly the most self-indulgent part of my life thus far, spent indolently enjoying the process of exploring myself by listening to music and playing drums. For an even briefer period before this I worked in fast food, creating sandwiches for people’s lunch. At the heart of this is creation, but not many would see it as a purpose, and even fewer as a reason to exist. Still, it was an honest way to make a living and instilled several positive qualities within me (mainly an entrepreneurial spirit and a desire to never work fast food again). … I stumble upon a copy of Seneca’s ‘On The Shortness of Life’, an essay written some two thousand years ago. This particular copy is covered in highlighter, notes scribbled around the margins, from when a twenty-five year old me discovered Stoicism and endeavoured to re-structure my life around it. “It’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it’s been given to us in generous measure for accomplishing the greatest things, if the whole of it is well invested. But when life is squandered through soft and careless living, and when it’s spent on no worthwhile pursuit, death finally presses and we realize that the life which we didn’t notice passing has passed away. “ Seneca continues on to perfectly encapsulate and criticise me at the same time: “What about those who are absorbed in composing, listening to, and learning songs? The voice, whose best and simplest flow is naturally straightforward, they twist into sinuous turns of the most feeble crooning. Their fingers are always snapping in time to some song that they carry in their head, and when they’ve been asked to attend to serious and often even sorrowful matters, you can overhear them quietly humming a tune. Theirs isn’t leisure but idle occupation.” … Recently I find a greater joy in writing words. I find joy in playing guitar. And indeed I still find joy in playing drums (a blessing because I still earn most of my living playing drums). But there’s also joy in teaching, and joy in relationships. There’s joy in learning, and joy in building a small business. There’s joy in running, and a definite joy in leaving everything behind to dive into the waves on a warm summers’ day. But is this purpose? Could it be that a life lived between various pursuits is enough to bring a sense of purpose? While I’d love to dedicate myself to one thing, becoming a true master, I think my spirit has been endowed with a sort of wanderlust, a need to continue to grow and develop in numerous different directions. … I leave you with the great American poet Mary Oliver and her poem The Journey: One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice– though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!” each voice cried. But you didn’t stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do– determined to save the only life you could save.