“You cannot become happy. You can only be happy, in this moment, right now.”

As I exit my sabbatical, I’ve spent more time thinking about what’s next. These thoughts tend to with come hopes, desires, and worries. But they don’t have to.

This year has been the first time in my life I haven’t had a plan or timeline for my next phase. That openness has helped me appreciate the present, and be wary of the future. I’ve learned to notice when I’m ruminating on the future (rather than taking practical steps along my desired path). It gives me an uncomfortable feeling, like leaning too far over high ledge.

In my meditation app recently, I heard this advice:

“You cannot become happy. You can only be happy, in this moment, right now.”

We should still make plans and follow through with them. But we shouldn’t confuse those plans for living a good life.

Every moment an eternity.

Hours after he stood in front of a real firing squad in what turned out to be a mock execution, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, wrote to his brother Mikhail:

When I look back at the past and think of all the time I squandered in error and idleness, lacking the knowledge I needed to live; when I think of how I sinned against my heart and my soul, then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness … Every moment could have been an eternity of happiness! If youth only knew. Now my life will change, now I will be reborn.

The execution was staged to make Tsar Nicholas look merciful when the actual sentence was handed down for Dostoyevsky’s political subversion: four years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp. In the letter, he is describing the feeling that grabbed him in what he genuinely believed were his last moments on earth. As he saw the sunlight glinting off of a church steeple, the people moving through the square, and other everyday sights, he tried to fully experience each moment, stretching each into a brief infinity.

I’d heard the story of the mock execution, but only learned about the letter a few weeks ago, and the novelist’s turn of phrase has been rattling in my head ever since. It has become an effective mindfulness device. “Every moment an eternity,” I think to myself lately, any time I manage to catch a moment of mindfulness amidst the normal rush of daily life.

Meditation trains our minds to be present, not just in the few minutes of actual practice each morning, but throughout the rest day. Breaking the spell of distraction, over and over again, is the only goal. And this thought has helped me succeed at that goal more often over the past few weeks.

Trains of thought.

As a kid, I used to lie in bed at night, thinking. I’d imagine things, tell myself stories, or replay the day’s events. Eventually it would be late enough that even my kid brain worried I’d be tired the next day, and I would tell myself to stop thinking and try to sleep.

The thing that usually tipped me off that I’d been “daydreaming” too late into the night was suddenly becoming aware of my current thought, and realizing I had no idea how I’d gotten there. When this happened, I’d play a game of retracing my mental steps before falling asleep. It would go like this:

“… velociraptor, that is definitely the best dinosaur. Wait why am I thinking of dinosaurs? I was thinking of basketball practice tomorrow.”

“… dinosaurs, which came from velociraptor, which came from Toronto Raptors … Vince Carter … I wish I could dunk … basketball practice tomorrow.”

Today I was reminded of how I used to play this mental retrace game. I was listening to my meditation app, and the guest teacher Joseph Goldstein retold a Buddhist proverb that compares the untrained mind to a waterfall, always tumbling down. The metaphor that’s more common in Western speech, he continued, is the train. We lose our ‘train of thought’ all the time, which can happen only when we’re identified with (lost in) thought, rather than observing thought. When our minds wander, Goldstein says, it’s like “hopping on a train, and never knowing the next stop,” or even like “falling asleep on a train and then awakening, not knowing where you are or how you got there.”

Awakening is the practice of breaking the spell, realizing you were lost in thought, and no longer being identified with thought. It was fun to remember back to being a kid, and realize that many nights lying alone, I’d been doing something like meditation practice, without knowing it.

An epiphany, but more so.

I’ve been trying to find the word to describe a particular phenomenon. The feeling is when you hear something for the first time, and it immediately and permanently changes your worldview. It’s similar to a flashbulb memory, but it’s knowledge rather than memory.

This is more like knowledge you’ve been primed to receive, with the background experience to solidify it, until you hear it distilled into an ultimate truth. For example, a mentor once told me, “I can’t teach or manage for ambition. By the time I meet an employee, nature and nurture have already conspired to give them some amount of ambition and hustle.” Hearing that felt like knowledge I’d never forget, that I’d always believe, both new and not–like I’d already sensed a version of it but couldn’t articulate it. But now, with the clarity my mentor provided, I’ll never lose that insight. It’s like pulling back the curtain on a ground truth, seeing it for the first time in its axiomatic clarity. What’s the word for that profound, transformative experience?

I asked ChatGPT, and it couldn’t come up with anything specific, but coined a phrase, “intimate resonance.” I like the phrase, but still felt like there must be an existing word that was closer to this feeling. I asked Claude, which first suggested “epiphany.” Which is close, but somehow smaller, and not personal enough. Epiphanies don’t always feel profound and direct. I asked Claude to try again.

“Ah, I see, there’s an even more specific term that captures that deeper, personal resonance you’re describing – “satori.”

Satori is a term from Zen Buddhism that refers to a profound, intuitive understanding or sudden spiritual awakening. It goes beyond just an epiphany or realization of a truth. With satori, there is a very personal, intimate connection and recognition of the truth that is being revealed. The key elements of satori that fit your description are:

It’s not just an intellectual understanding, but a deep, almost visceral recognition of the truth.

There is a sense of the truth “clicking” on a personal level, like it was always there waiting to be discovered.

The knowledge immediately feels integrated and embodied, not just an abstract concept.

It produces a profound shift in perception and worldview that feels permanent and transformative.

This feels exactly like the feeling I’ve been trying to describe, and searching to name. I’d like to learn more about satori in the context of Zen Buddhism.

PS–Score one for Claude 3 … on this particular task, their free model seems to outperform ChatGPT’s paid model. This makes me want to explore Claude 3 Opus, their Pro version.

Wisdom gets truer the more you believe in it.

You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes every day—unless you’re too busy; then you should sit for an hour.
Dr. Sukhraj Dhillon

I saw the above quote in a book years ago. At the time, my interest in meditation had begun, but I had not practiced very much or very consistently. The advice sounded nice, but I couldn’t imagine believing it myself, let alone following it. I was just too busy, and the things I was busy with just too important.

Years later, this advice still sounds difficult to follow. But it also feels (to me) more achievable, and much truer. Its meaning has deepened for me as well, such that I can now read this quote in several ways, all of them seeming true.

I think this is a good definition of wisdom in general. Wisdom is a type of knowledge that gets truer the more experience you have with it, the more you believe in it, the more you adhere to it.

Reflecting on newlywed life.

We were at a wedding this weekend—the first one we’ve attended since our own. It was a beautiful day with great friends. And it had me reflecting on our first few months of married life.

A question people like to ask couples in the weeks and months after their wedding is, “do you feel different?”

Day-to-day life doesn’t feel different. But we do feel different. After completing a ceremony and ritual like that, in front of all your friends and family, something does change in you. Taking a vow, crossing a threshold of nearly universal human experience.

Attending a wedding also feels different to me now—deeper and more meaningful.

When the Spirit moves you.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), psychologist William James wrote:

It is true that we instinctively recoil from seeing an object to which our emotions and affections are committed handled by the intellect as any other object is handled. The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. “I am no such thing,” it would say; “I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.

James is saying that we resist pointing the intellect at matters of the heart, or in this case the spirit. He goes on to say that although this reaction is normal, it’s unnecessary. We can separate the “existential” analysis (what is the thing, where does it come from, how does it behave) from the “value” analysis (is it good or bad). In the end, the value analysis for mental states is intuitive. We can tell the good states from the bad. We don’t need to prove it with science. But in his time, people twisted themselves in knots trying to find anatomical or otherwise deterministic support for arguments that were, at bottom, value-judgments. And people still do this today.

“I don’t like that person. I must get to know them better.”

“I don’t like that person. I must get to know them better.” On a podcast today I heard Cass Sunstein attribute this quote to Abraham Lincoln. It stuck with me, and immediately I want to make it a permanent habit.

Hearing this got me thinking of people I’ve disliked in my past. In calling just two people to mind, I was surprised how powerful the negative emotions came on, even though I haven’t seen one in at least 10 years, the since high school, 20 years ago. Reflecting, I why good old Honest Abe’s advice resonates with me. When we don’t like someone, we tend to rehearse the things we don’t like about them, or our specific negative interactions with them, over and over again.

Before, during, and especially after our interactions with the person, we’re talking to ourselves about the things we don’t like. Sometimes for decades.

Abe’s antidote (which I now call it in my head) seems like a memorable, straightforward way to short-circuit that routine before it takes hold. That doesn’t mean it will be easy for everyone. But I’ve been lucky in my adult life that there are few people I dislike, and even fewer I need to interact with on an ongoing basis (actually right now, zero). For everyone I meet from now on, I hope in 20 years to feel about no one the way I feel about those few early antagonists. With this new heuristic, I actually think zero is an attainable goal. And if I ever bump into either of the two people I thought about today, I’ll try to get to know them better.

ChatGPT is a university in your pocket.

ChatGPT is a university in your pocket. One new way use I’ve found for ChatGPT is to “go back to school.” I can design and take a course on-demand, but unlike a MOOC, I can also fully customize it. In pursuing my vision for this sabbatical, one of my ideas was to revisit some things I learned about way back, in some 100- or 200-level philosophy course: the aesthetic concepts of Awe and The Sublime.

Before getting into the details, how does this relate to my vision? Religion never resonated for me, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve felt a pull to discover and develop the spiritual dimension in my life, in my own way. I’ve been meditating pretty consistently for several years, but during this time away from work I wanted to focus even more on the spiritual dimension of my life. Like all my interests, eventually I asked ChatGPT about it. This started as a conversation, and later I had the idea to ask ChatGPT to design an actual syllabus, for an imaginary course I wish I’d taken back in college.

Before ChatGPT, I would have done one of two things. Either I’d have ordered several books on my topic of interest, and probably not have read them; or I’d have done some haphazard Wikipedia and YouTube deep dives. The former is almost worthless. The latter is not much better—I would learn some surface-level stuff, but would be unlikely to engage with the material in an organized way. So I wouldn’t gain deep and lasting knowledge.

But ChatGPT has lowered the bar for engaging with complicated ideas. If you like the idea of taking a course, it can literally design the syllabus, organize the readings, generate lectures, and act as both a professor and TA. Most important for me, it makes me more likely to actually do the readings, because I can see where I am in the course and have a sense of progress; and because for any part that’s not interesting, I can just ask for a summary and skip it. At the margin, I’m much more likely to really learn something. If a full class isn’t interesting to you, you can structure your own learning however you want.

So before our honeymoon, I downloaded the first two readings from the syllabus to my Remarkable 2. Both are in the public domain, so I could easily find PDFs. I have been working through them at my own pace, and using ChatGPT for questions and context,

It’s obvious this technology will have an impact on Higher Education, or in my case, continuing education. But this is one way that it could be an opportunity for Higher Ed, rather than just a threat: let students design their more of their own courses, have professors review the syllabi and approve that they are “course credit worthy.” Assign TAs to give weekly oral quizzes, and then the professors design and administer oral mid-terms and finals. Maybe this can be done in cohorts, organized by year and major/elective area. I could see professors having fun with it too, adding personal favorites to the reading list, making it more esoteric but also ensuring it’s aligned enough with their knowledge base that they can easily administer the exams. We’ll see if universities embrace these types of experiments. I hope they do.

Honeymoon Day 10: Fitz Roy Massif Hike / Pinch Me I’m Dead

View of our hotel, El Puma, toward the mountain. Today we thought we saw a puma, but our guide informed us it was just a large house cat.

Bagged lunch of empanadas overlooking the glacial lake.

Today was a full-day hike guided by Leo, the craftiest guide in El Chalten and the nicest man in Argentina*. We drove a ways outside town this morning to have a longer one-way route, worth it for the additional views. Over the course of 15 miles and 3,100 vertical feet, we saw glaciers and the moraines they left behind over millions of years of glacial movement; we saw the Fitz Roy massif summits, the surrounding peaks, and rivers and lakes all the way to the horizon. I’ve never seen a glacier before (Kelly has), and it’s impossible to describe. It is eerily silent and still, but also appears to rush toward you from the base of those iconic granite peaks, literally frozen in time. We learned that the peaks of the Fitz Roy (aka Chalten) range were all formed by venting magma under the Pacific Ocean ~16 million years ago (a baby in mountain time). The magma cooled into those shapes. The peaks were pushed partially above ground by tectonic plate movement, and then the glaciers scraped away the rest, resulting in the formation pictured above (and in the Patagonia(TM) logo). We finished at a brewery for beers with Leo—resting our feet, reflecting on the day, and thanking him for so earnestly sharing his love of the mountain with us. This was by far my biggest hike ever, and maybe Kelly’s as well, though she’s done some long ones. The views were stunning, but equally great was experiencing something so rare and awe-inspiring together on our honeymoon.

Tomorrow, we’re looking forward to rest and recovery. And hunting for the best coffee in El Chalten.

*well, maybe tied with Eduardo.