Hawai’i and Scuba Diving. and Last Week’s Letter

Tomorrow, I’m flying to Hawai’i with a friend so that we can get our scuba diving certification before she runs off to the Peace Corps and never sees me again (read: two years). It started with a discussion about how much I dislike the idea of having a honeymoon in Hawai’i, and before I knew it, she cajoled me into having our mock honeymoon in Hawai’i.

A tricky sex, women are.

In all seriousness, I fell in love with the idea (I’ve wanted to get certified since I was a kid), and now we plan on getting our initial certification, diving a bit, and then running around Oahu for a few more days before I have to run back home and get to work. I’ll post pictures when I can (they’ll probably be on her blog, to which I’ll link you), and talk about what I’ve learned from what I believe will be a really enlightening trip.

Related to this trip, I copied down a letter a week and a half ago which details a certain understanding of what it means to live well. I’ve been deeply moved by that letter, I admit. She’s a very condensed writer, so I feel the need to talk a bit more about what I think she’s saying.

I post it here again for your convenience:

“Dear Mr. M,

“I think you didn’t quite understand me because I didn’t make myself quite clear. I’ll try again: As a modern man, you have a “self.” It says “me, me, me.” It is self-centered, self-conscious, selfish. As a human being you have a “soul.” It is perhaps partite, perhaps unified, perhaps balanced, perhaps dominated by one aspect, perhaps outgoing, perhaps isolated, needy or self-sufficient. I’m saying: Put an embargo on the preoccupation with the individual self, know, as best you can, the human soul. And that’s best done by engaging yourself with some absorbing project, not necessarily communal, and probably least of all, reformist.

“Never, ever make an effort to improve other people’s character. You’re neither called to it nor able to do it. Don’t even improve your own–just behave well.

“There’s more: Look to the form of things. Don’t send torn-off pages with dashed-off thoughts. Give things shape, and you’ll be less frustrated by others.–You’ll be too engaged with doing well rather than good.

“I’m telling you what I myself ardently believe–and try to do. …

“All the best.”

So, what can we make of this letter?

First, she distinguishes between a “self” and a “soul.” Now, there’s no need to get metaphysical about it; we definitely don’t need to ask if there is or isn’t a soul, and where the self comes from, but she is clear: When you learn about your soul, you’re without self in that moment, and when you listen to (work through?) your self, you are getting no closer to knowing your soul.

But why know the soul at all? What’s wrong with the self? That, too, is a question I have trouble answering. I wonder if our most basic answer is that knowing your soul brings fulfillment–but fulfillment of what sort? In what sense? To what extent? Those, too, I leave you to think about in greater detail, but I think in one sense she might be talking about the sort of feeling you get when you do something you really love. The modern name for it is flow, and it is when you do something in complete concentration, and everything else falls away. To me, the most important thing about that state of mind is the lack of self-reflection. I’m not thinking about how I feel about what I’m doing, or what I think of myself, or what else is going on. My whole being is fixated on that one single activity, and the string of successive nows which comprise it. You could say, perhaps, that you are without self in those moments.

But I don’t think she means to say that flow is the only time that you’re without self. Getting better at something is tremendously painful. There’s no flow in “perfect practice.” It’s actually really shitty. When I’m dancing with someone, and all I’m doing is trying to figure out which step goes where, and where my hand goes, and which way I turn her, neither of us is really having a “good” time. But, it’s hard for anyone to argue that, if you ultimately love what you do, you don’t walk out of those moments feeling really satisfied, full, overjoyed. And those moments lead to easy flow when it’s time to perform, and that’s what I should hope anyone who works hard at something meaningful to them looks forward to.

This is different from vain reflection, though. I think about talking to a pretty girl. My personal experience with those interactions generally varies from “Amazing” to “Wow, that was very Not Good,” and often, in a self-reinforcing cycle, if I’m worrying about how I look, or my body language, or what I’m saying, the whole interaction takes a nosedive. I’m worrying about what she thinks of me, and that, of course, is a selfish worry about self-approval. I do the same thing when I sit there and worry about how I think of myself: I’m engaging in a totally vain enterprise, under the rationale of self-improvement. The goal is to practice, to be without self. Each time I talk with a pretty girl and I’m struggling, I think about it afterwards, focusing a lot more on the “What I said here wasn’t effective” type of thought, instead of the “Why can’t I ever get a girl?” self-flagellation. She’s no doubt right–such self-abuse really is the epitome of self-centeredness.

So, when we do these projects of ours, what exactly are we “learning?” How does engaging ourselves through them give us such knowledge like whether or not our soul is “needy” or “self-sufficient”? (And what does it mean for a soul to be ‘needy’ if we just saw that the Self seems to be the very paradigm of what ‘neediness’ is? Maybe if we pursue that question we’ll find out what she believes the relation between the soul and the self to be.) Good questions–I don’t have an answer yet for those either. On that point, I’d love to know if anyone actually does have an answer.

I think her reasoning for disliking reformism might be that the progress of your project is reversible, in a way that, say, learning to dance is not. It may also be that the progress you make in your project is contingent on factors which you largely can’t control, also in a way which is unlike a simply communal project (like running a company) or an individual one. I’m not sure. I’m still figuring this one out, too.

But I think her most profound advice lies in the line: “Don’t even improve your own [character] — just behave well.” Here, she removes motive entirely. It doesn’t matter if you behave well to get back at some guy you dislike. It doesn’t matter if someone else does a good deed and doesn’t “really” mean it. In fact, probably since you can’t ever know motives at all–not even your own–the very idea of trying to include that in how you live your life is absurd. Kant concedes that no man can ever know any motive, truly, and so no man can ever judge an action based on motive–on that, he’s right. So she’s looking at the only thing that really counts in this world: What You Do. And so long as you behave well (still not sure what this means yet either), you’re going to create your integrity, in your own eyes and in the eyes of others. And ultimately, that’s how you’re going to build a better self-image. It’s not top-down, so to speak, it’s bottom-up. Behavior leads to a mental change; I don’t believe that you can merely think your way to a better life. If you want to stop being  a liar, begin by not lying. Don’t try and adapt the “mentality” of a truth-teller. And that’s how our “character” changes.

I hope some of this was insightful, but it’s pretty clear that I have more questions than I do answers about her letter. I know only that my absorbing scuba-diving project will do me a lot of good, especially since it’ll be earned alongside a close friend. As I said at the beginning of this post, I promise I’ll tell you about what I learned on the trip. Also, pics.