How to Muddle Through in Life

In the end, life is about muddling through as best you can. Most self-help books (and I read a lot of them) will advise you to find your “life’s purpose and passion,” but that’s like telling you the secret to success in business is to found a good company and make lots of money. The devil is in the details.

If I had to summarize all that I have learned about making your way on the path of life, however, I think it would come down to just a few core principles.

1. Put a priority on education. No one ever got very far, or became very happy, by being dumb. Stupidity is not a virtue, no matter what Hollywood tells you. Of course, by education I don’t necessarily mean college… although for most people, that is what it means. If you want to be an actor, fine… but learn everything you can about acting and about everything else you’re interested in. Read every acting book there is. Get the best training you can find. Ask questions constantly. Be curious. Be the geek who stays after class, asking followup questions. If you’re a mechanic, get advanced training. Sign up for courses. Take distance learning courses. Go to graduate school. Keep learning, keep studying. Become a perpetual student. Fill your home with books… and read them. Subscribe to as many magazines and journals in your field as you can afford. Take notes. Get a journal and write in it. If you’re in high school or college, make it your mission to learn everything you can… whatever it takes. If you’re already in the work force, make it your mission to learn everything you can about your profession, or your job, or your business. Become the “go to” guy or gal in your office, the expert the boss looks to for answers. Don’t be a smart ass about, don’t show off, just be knowledgeable – in your own quiet, unassuming way.

2. Try a lot of different things… especially things you don’t think you’ll be good at. I think this is good advice for young people but even better advice for old people. The infinite power that created galaxies and us gave us all talents and magic powers we don’t even know we have so the purpose of life, and especially when we’re young, is to experiment to discover what they are. The only way to do that is to try different things. In high school, if you’re a chemistry whiz and the math geek, try out for the football team. You might be surprised. You might, to your amazement, find you actually like tackling people. Similarly, if you’re a jock and a natural athlete, show you really have guts and try out for the school musical. Learn to play an instrument. Take up a new foreign language – like Chinese, perhaps. A few years back, there was a wonderful movie with Jim Carey called “Yes Man.” It was about a man whose life was utterly transformed when he went from saying “no” all the time to automatically saying “yes” – yes to volunteering, yes to learning Korean. Remember the old proverb: Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. It doesn’t matter if you’re lousy at something or don’t really know what you’re doing. If you were good at it, it wouldn’t be something new… and therefore wouldn’t test or stretch your abilities. I’m not particularly good at taking my own advice but I have tried to do this a little. I worked at a lot of different menial jobs when I was younger – fry cook, delivery boy, warehouse man. I learned a lot from all of them. When I was forty, I took up Aikido – a strange Japanese martial art that is derived from jujitsu. Change is good. Do different things. Never stop experimenting.

3. Make a solemn, lifelong vow of kindness. In Mahayana Buddhism, this is called the Bodhisattva Vow, the commitment to work for the salvation of all sentient beings. In the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, this is choosing the standard of Christ. In essence, you make a lifelong and solemn commitment to be kind – to your family, your friends, strangers you meet, animals, the earth. If it’s not kind, you don’t do it. It’s that simple. Be the one kid in class who sticks up for the underdogs, the new kids, the kids who get taunted and mocked. Be a decent human being. Make it a conscious choice. Decide to become a Knight of the Round Table. Defend the innocent. Stand for justice. Be courteous to all, especially to people who don’t deserve it. I don’t really believe in karma, but when it comes to “random acts of kindness” I’ve always found that it’s true. Even from a selfish, self-interested perspective, kindness almost always pays off in unexpected ways. It’s something we never think about but it’s a foundational principle for a successful life and general happiness.

4. Serve a higher purpose. One of the tasks we are actually performing, as we flop about in our twenties, thirties and forties, looking for something to do with our lives, is searching for a cause or mission worthy of our commitment. To be truly happy in life, we have to serve something bigger than our own bellies, we have to work for a noble cause. For many, if not most of us, that cause can be something as simple as our own families. To raise and educate children in modern society, and keep them safe and strong and thriving, requires sacrifices and work most people have no clue about – until they actually face it themselves. Oftentimes, service to the higher purpose of our children requires us to work in hum-drum jobs just to earn money – even hum-drum jobs like law or medicine. As a result, we should realize that is what we are doing and make it a conscious choice rather than something we drift into by default. I am deliberately trying to sell more life insurance than any other salesman in my town because I have three children to get through college. Of course, it helps if we can combine our high purpose and our work, if our work serves our higher purpose… and that is the subject for another chapter. But even if we haven’t figured out how to pull that off, even if we have to work as a house cleaner or a computer programmer, we can still serve a higher purpose. This is essential to our happiness. Find that higher purpose in your life. Keep thinking about it, refining it. Read books on mission. Find a “failure is not an option” mission and commit to seeing it through.

5. Be flexible. Precisely because I’m not a particularly flexible person, in both a physical and a psychological sense, I know something about flexibility and its importance. I’m naturally rather stiff. It’s kind of a running joke in my Aikido classes. My ironic nickname is Gumby because I move like Frankenstein’s monster. But flexibility is something you have to consciously work on. You have to stretch regularly. You have to breathe, bend, get out of the way. This is why Aikido is so good for you. The essence of ukemi, the Aikido practice of “welcoming” attacks, is flexibility. Say someone throws a punch at you or tries to kick you. In karate, you would typically just block the attack, hard. In Aikido, you move out of the way and “blend” with the attack, actually trying to ride it the way a surfer rides a wave. This requires great flexibility as well as balance, timing and lightness on your feet – all great attributes to have when facing the blows that life throws at you. It’s helpful throughout life to remain flexible. You have a plan but you have to adapt. You take advantage of opportunities you didn’t expect and you recover from setbacks you didn’t see coming. Of course, you can’t be so flexible you just fall down. That doesn’t help you, either. Someone who “goes with the flow” too much ends up over the waterfall. In Aikido, the trick is to be flexible yet “buoyant,” maintaining contact with your attacker with an ongoing energy. You don’t just collapse. It’s the same thing in life. You have a direction, an energy, an intention. You have ideals and moral principles. You’re more flexible about means than ends. You know approximately where you want to go but realize there are a variety of ways of getting there.

6. Have a plan. It helps to have a plan, to think a few moves ahead. Most people don’t. You can overdue it, of course. There was a character in the old Australian TV series McLeod’s Daughters who had this elaborate flow chart of her life, with every contingency anticipated, every step outlined. It filled an entire wall of her room. The Master Plan both fascinated and horrified her friends… as well as viewers. But all things being equal, having a plan is better than not. You can have a plan for getting through college and/or graduate school… for landing a job… for your career… for meeting and marrying the love of your life… for your business… for retirement. They say that the single reason why most businesses fail is because the owners didn’t take the time to write up a business plan. Whenever I’ve struggled in my life, usually in business, I’ve written up a Plan for how I am going to get through things… and then tried to follow it. Things usually work out. Without a plan, I flop around like a fish on a dock, desperate and in a panic. I even try to plan my day a little – not too much, but enough so I know what I want to accomplish. I also find it’s very helpful to write things down. I buy expensive leather-bound Italian journals, fill them with my plans, and take them with me everywhere for constant review.

7. Have fun. These “macro” imperatives for life reflect my own values, of course, but I think they are fairly universal. What’s the point if you don’t have fun? That applies to every stage of your life – high school, college, your jobs, your marriage, raising kids, your business, retirement. One of the things I most admire about the late conservative writer and publisher William F. Buckley, Jr., was his enormous capacity for and dedication to having fun. Unlike many conservative political activists, Buckley believed in having a good time. He and his wife hosted dinner parties, cocktail parties and receptions. They spent a full two months every year in Switzerland, skiing and writing. Buckley was a passionate sailor and was constantly organizing expeditions and trips. He enjoyed life, good friends, his wife and son. I think we should all strive to have more fun. As the saying has it, we should work hard and play harder. By all means, go to medical school… just make sure you take spring break off and head to the Bahamas. That’s my advice for my overachieving children.

8. Realize the path is the goal. That’s the title of a book by Chogyam Trungpa, the Tibetan Buddhist meditation master and founder of the Naropa University in Colorado. He was talking about Buddhist meditation but I think it applies equally to life. You know what they say, life is what happens while we’re making other plans. It’s human nature, I think, to have big goals… big plans… and to assume that once we reach them, we’ll have it made, be happy. But we should all be mystical enough to realize that, in a very real sense, we’re already there, life itself is the goal. The kingdom of God is among us, right now. Everything we could want in the universe is already ours. “Everything I have is yours,” the father tells the prodigal son, who never realized the gifts he had right under his nose. We should make big plans, struggle hard to achieve our goals, suffer the disappointments of failure, and yet maintain what the Mormons call an “eternal perspective” and realize that the path is the goal.

Robert Hutchinson is an writer and essayist. He latest book is The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible.

Frank Fenner: Another Crackpot Prediction of Doom

NOTE:  The photo above is an illustration of what the earth would look like if ALL of the ice on earth melted and the worst fears of the climate change doomsayers came true:  About 4% more of the earth’s surface would be covered by water than is true today.

I would take the aged scientist Frank Fenner’s predictions of imminent doom more seriously if his fellow scientists hadn’t been making the same predictions for 400 years — and have a near perfect record of being wrong.

Apparently Fenner, a 90-year-old microbiologist, calmly told The Australian newspaper recently that the human race faces extinction within 100 years due to… wait for it!… overpopulation, famine and, yes, climate change.

“We’re going to become extinct,” Fenner told the newspaper jovially. “Whatever we do now is too late.”

At least Hollywood is more original: In the film 2012, which I found entertaining if a bit tedious, the extinction comes from a new kind of Flood: all the land masses are covered by a massive melting of the earth’s ice. The problem is, such a scenario is scientifically impossible. If all the ice on earth did, in fact, melt, it wouldn’t come close to covering all of the land masses.

According to William Johnston, melting the 29.3 million cubic kilometers of grounded ice would produce 26.1 million cubic kilometers of water and raise the levels of the oceans about 66 feet — enough to swamp small low-lying islands but which would leave most of the earth untouched.

Johnston estimates we would have 128 million square kilometers of land compared to 132 million square kilometers today.  So much for Hollywood!

Back to Fenner. How does he know that “over-population” is going to do us in? After all, scientists have been complaining about “over population” since the days of the British economist Thomas “the End if Near” Malthus in the early 1800s when the earth’s population was about 978 million. Here is Malthus’s “scientific” prediction:

The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world. (An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798, Chapter VII, page 61.

Of course, other scientists have made equal fools out of themselves. Paul Ehrlich, of course, the author of The Population Bomb, famously predicted:

“In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” – Paul Ehrlich, 1970

“When you reach a point where you realize further efforts will be futile, you may as well look after yourself and your friends and enjoy what little time you have left. That point for me is 1972.” – Paul Ehrlich, 1971

“Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity…in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.” – Paul Ehrlich, 1976

“Human-induced land degradation… affects about 40% of the planet’s vegetated land surface… [and is] accelerating nearly everywhere, reducing crop yields.” – Paul Ehrlich, 1997

I dunno. Doom and gloom certainly seems to make people money. Al Gore’s personal net worth went from $1 million when he left office in 2000 to $100 million today. As the Democrats demonstrate almost daily, there is a sucker born every minute.

BP Oil Spill Shows Need for Natural Gas Conversion

The British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico only underscores the need to develop the most plausible, practical, real world source of alternative fuel we have: natural gas.

Anyone who spends as much time as I do on the beach is a natural environmentalist. I’ve been itching for years to get my hands on an all-electric car (like fellow right-winger, Mel Gibson, I was eager to get the first electric car built by GM)… and I’ve priced out solar and wind systems for my ocean-facing, sun-drenched house. Yet I’ve learned the hard way that most alternative fuels, at this stage, are a pipe dream. Both wind and solar cost a fortune. The last time I priced out a solar array for my roof, the Return on Investment over the outrageous prices charged by our electrical utility was more than 20 years. By that time, the PV panels will be shot.

But there is one technology that exists right now… for a fuel we have in astonishing abundance… that is 100% clean… and cheaper than oil… and that’s natural gas. What’s more, the conversion kit for your car is as low as $300… and any decent mechanic can do the work. Or you can buy a brand-new all-natural gas vehicle, such as the Honda Civic, for the same price as a regular gasoline car. The problem: There are still not that many natural gas refueling stations around. You can get a natural gas refueling set-up put in at your house, but if you travel the ordeal of finding a natural gas station can be trying. There are plenty in British Columbia and California, for example, but almost none in oh-so-environmentally-correct Oregon. (Google maps actually shows you the locations of the stations AND their prices at: http://www.cngprices.com/) Plus, we have vast supplies of natural gas in North America and Europe (see the latest natural gas statistics from the Energy Information Administration)… so that would allow the civilized world to reduce its dependence upon oil imports from corrupt and murderous regimes of the Middle East.

Bottom line: If you love the ocean, as we all do, and if the BP oil spill has you reconsidering the wisdom of offshore drilling, the most practical alternative fuel to push for is natural gas, not solar. Since I live in a very sunny place, I wish solar power would pan out, but so far, as a practical alternative, it hasn’t. Natural gas is here, now.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and a Return to Eden

I just finished reading Leo Damrosch’s magisterial 2005 biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius) and I’ve been thinking a lot about how Rousseau’s vision ties in, or doesn’t tie in, with the problems of modern urban society. (Full disclosure: My wife hates Rousseau because he forced his lifelong mistress, Therese Levasseur, to give up their five children to foundling homes and then had the temerity to instruct women on why they should breastfeed their children and raise them according to his precepts.)

Rousseau, born in Switzerland in 1712, was basically a professional vagabond and loafer who ran away from his home in Geneva at the age of 16, was almost entirely self-taught, and who earned his living through menial jobs, copying musical manuscripts and writing books that both titillated and outraged most of Europe. Rousseau’s basic argument is that “civilization,” far from being an engine of progress and advancement, is actually a corrosive, even destructive force.

Rousseau was original in that he went against what everyone believed about social advancement, the value of science and art, technology and so on. Things aren’t getting better and better as the Enlightenment philosophes taught; they actually getting worse and worse. And nothing is getting worse quite like human beings themselves — who, Rousseau taught, are slowly degenerating from centuries of living in cramped, ugly cities, bad nutrition and the demands that social life imposes.

Rousseau was thus the world’s first hippie.

He championed a more “natural” lifestyle free from the artificial constraints and absurd duties that society demands. Much of what the modern world believes about human beings — from the importance of child-centered education to an emphasis on “authenticity” and natural foods — comes from this strange and highly original thinker.

Although denounced by both Protestant and Catholic religious authorities for his departures from Christian orthodoxy, Rousseau remained, to the chagrin of his agnostic friends, an obstinate believer throughout his life; and his vision of an original “wholeness” and perfection in nature is a kind of secular version of the creation story in Genesis.

Rousseau, like Christian theology, believed that mankind was created good… but that, through the actions of men and women, that natural perfection became disfigured. Here is how Rousseau explains it in his strange book on education, Emile:

Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man. He forces one soil to nourish the products of another, one tree to bear the fruit of another. He mixes and confuses the climates, the elements, the seasons. He mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave. He turns everything upside down; he disfigures everything; he loves deformity, monsters. He wants nothing as nature made it, not even man; for him, man must be trained like a school horse; man must be fashioned in keeping with his fancy like a tree in his garden.

Powerful stuff! I’ve always thought that our (my!) modern obsession with health can be seen in a Rousseau-like light, as a kind of primal “therapy” to correct the imbalances, weaknesses and deformities that our indolent modern lifestyles have bequeathed to us.

Rousseau was well aware that his “natural man” may never have actually existed… and that in reality primitive life may have been the way Thomas Hobbes described it as being (brutish, nasty and short)… but he imagined what human beings might have been like free from the artificial conveniences of cities and bad food.

He imagined “natural man” as strong, free, healthy, honest and direct. As imagined in his strange romantic novel Julie, Rousseau wanted to help people to get back, in a sense, to Middle Earth, to a time before the furnaces of Mordor destroyed the natural beauty of Man and his environment. Who can’t sympathize, at least a little, with this primeval longing?

More later…