Caring Without Getting Burned & 'How Not to Waste a Life'

"those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing"

I’m going to try and post on Wednesdays about the way-making approach, ‘navigational mind’ ideas from my next book (coming soon from Iff) or some related issue that has arisen in our research conversations on Love and Philosophy. This week is a ‘written-all-in-one-sitting’ (zero AI) piece about a particular fear—that of ‘getting burned’ or ‘being taken advantage of’—a subject that comes up a lot in emails & comments on L&P. Thanks for being here. Whether you know it or not, many of you have already changed my life, love, A.

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YouTube has these things called shorts.

Maybe you’ve heard of them. One short on L&P that has been viewed about 40,000 times and that we get a lot of comments and emails about is How Not to Waste a Life. It’s a clip of psychiatrist and scholar Iain McGilchrist from an L&P conversation about poetry, the brain, and Asymmetrical Reconciliation.

This clip generates a lot of discussion from people about whether or not being in service to others is a strength or a weakness. Since the whole point of L&P is moving beyond those sorts of binaries without trying to dissolve them, I wanted to address this a bit tonight.

In the clip, McGilchrist says:

“What actually matters is you in service to other people, the idea of stopping being so hung up on pride and selfish concerns.

It’s something that comes easier with experience; you learn the hard way that you don’t really matter that much. What does matter is all the things that you can give to and partake of and be enriched by. But you won’t be enriched by them if you’re in your little invulnerable coat of armor trying to win something.

You will waste your life, and you’ve only got the one.”

A recent conversation with philosopher Thomas Metzinger came around to a similar point, whereby we discussed how hard it can be to feel the suffering of the world, how hard it can be to open oneself to care, or to sense how everything is so terrible and so beautiful all at once without ‘getting burned by the negativity’.

Both these statements get at what (to me) is really the biggest challenge we face, and also the (real) point of just about everything we are doing here. (here on Substack, here on YouTube, here in our personal lives, here in the art we create, here in the music we make, here in the jobs we go to.) And what is that? Well, as best I can articulate it this evening, it is:

Finding ways to help one another handle what no one person can handle alone but what, when handled, opens new meaning, encountering and sensuality.

All our relationships and all our technologies and sciences, and even all our ways of ‘being on social media’ are towards this (though of course they can degenerate and are often not consciously oriented towards this). Still, I often think of all this activity we are so very much living as procreation or generation in the widest sense; it matters for the ongoingness that is all of us.

We’re constantly orienting and steering these chariots, co-creating all we move through, all that is all of us and cares no less for any one of us than for any other (even if it seems so) and yet every one of us matters all the more because of it. We can hardly imagine what is ‘beyond’ because we cannot (yet) handle it, and the more we can handle, the more there is beyond. There is no end and it’s not a circle; it is more real than real: The point is to help one another handle it so we experience its unfolding; fractals of richness are always nudging us to try and do so.

Many of us seem to sense this in our clearest moments and it’s what I think McGilchrist is saying above when he says that ‘you’ are not what matters in the end but rather what matters is what you have been part of with others, what you have enriched and what has enriched you altogether. It is also what I’ve always thought Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich means by the ‘real life’ that is pulsing beyond the artificial ‘named’ life, all that stuff we feel pressured to suppress so as to keep up our appearance, all that we seem to know matters but which somehow those most in view seem not to show us, all we choose not to focus on because we fear embarrassment but which Ivan senses as the real ‘beyond’ at the end of his life.

“It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

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Meaning, sensuality, communion and the uncanny are all here (around us, in us, as us) and we have the extraordinary chance of wading into ever more, but never by ourselves.

It’s quite the paradox because it means that so long as we are doing anything only for ourselves, we will never wade into more of precisely what we gain the power to do as individuals wanting more for ourselves: The only way to wade into this ‘beyond’ is by developing that individuality, then taking it as a portal into the communion beyond what it had assumed was solitary.

This is one reason I am always yammering on about how every person’s life matters, not for any (or only) sentimental reasons but because each life is literally a unique part of all that is, of ongoingness and encountering; it’s literally a unique spatiotemporal happening and each life changes and contributes to whatever we might assess via whatever frequency. There’s no choice, which is why we are all so concerned about what everyone else is doing.

Not having a choice about contributing is not the same as not having agency or free will. We do have agency and free will to the extent that we are able to communicate. (That’s a big philosophical statement but I’ll have to unpack it philosophically later). Still, communication is quite challenging. It comes with a risk that whatever you are (the contribution you are by being alive) will be criticized, aimed at, possibly even made fun of, possibly even for all to see.

Feelings of shame and the desire to change or correct how others sense us or have some power over how they define us is at the root of a lot of pain and motivation (not to mention most of the advertising that exists for just about everything). Sensing into this differently could change a lot of what we assume as parameters of orientation.

After all, we all live this paradox to some extent—we want to be sensed (we want others to recognize our contribution, our being-here-ness, as part of this ongoingness of everyone and everything) but we also do not want to be too vulnerable, do not want to be made fun of, taken advantage of, or have to deal with any sort of shame or at least not too much embarrassment.

And yet all of us experience all of those at some point in our lives. Knowing it’s going to happen and that it happens to everyone, why does it still worry us so much? And why do we keep accepting it as if it is normal to feel this way?

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Why, for example, are we so embarrassed when we stumble? We are walking down the street and we miss a step and our body is flooded with embarrassment. Why?

Perhaps we feel a loss of control. Perhaps it gives us a glimpse of the very little control we have as just one body in this vast and endless ongoingness. We feel the small amount of space we are, as part of this ongoingness, and we resist. Maybe what we are calling embarrassment is our resistance to that fall into the abyss.

If so, it’s good to resist. It’s good that tripping wakes up our senses so we do not fall, or so that we know to be careful.

But resisting the fall (resisting the conclusion that we are not powerful or that we do not matter) and being ‘only a drop of water in the vastness of this ocean’ need not be of only negative valence: In other words, embarrassment doesn’t have to be processed as a bad thing. When we stumble, we could take it as a sign to be more vigilant and feel (at the same time) grateful for what helps us correct.

But can we take that stance with others too, take their embarrassment as a chance for them to reorient rather than a chance for us to feel some sort of power at their expense?

If we can, we can resist the fall and feel into another power through it. It is pretty amazing, after all, that even though we are just ‘a drop’ in all this ongoingness, the world communicates through us and we communicate through it (with others and with ourselves), even in simple missteps.

When we stumble, we might notice how our misstep shifts the energy of all those who might be watching it happen, how wild it is that this movement can ripple out so immediately and cause others to react—whether to reach out to be sure we do not fall, or whether to giggle with us in our awkwardness. We might fall down and feel the scrape of the concrete. We don’t want to court that, but if we fall, we have learned something. We are always in communication.

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Once as a kid I went out skateboarding on a part of the road I wasn’t allowed to go on because it was out of sight of the house. In a rebellious mood one day, I decided to skate out of sight anyway. And of course, I fell right away. I fell and I was in the middle of the road. I couldn’t move at first, then I realized I was clinching my body in stress. I took a breath, felt my body again, picked up my board and ran to the grass. There were no cars anywhere around but still, I felt like I’d just saved my life. It was embarrassing and I felt watched even though no one was looking. Still, all this gave me a different grain of awareness. I must have been seven years old at most, but I’ve never forgotten that moment, or the feeling of it. It did a lot more than show me something about boundaries. It was a moment where I realized the world was real and hard and I could function outside of what I had been told were the bounds. It made me much more confident, and much more careful.

These sorts of communications are ongoing with ourselves and with others, with grounds and bounds. We are all part of an overall ongoingness, all part of the power of all that is. We are all helping one another to set this ongoing frequency and we are all also capable of changing this ocean’s frequency from any other point from which it is measured, but not by ourselves. Even though I was alone on my skateboard and never told anyone (till now) about falling, the confidence and carefulness came through my conversation with the world and with what I had learned from others and then from it about its bounds.

It was something no other person would witness directly (I never told my parents) but that would shift frequencies that would be noticed. This is what happens when, for example, a stranger says something to you that then changes the course of your life, but they never know it because you never see them again. Or what happens when a book does that for you. Or a poem. Or piece of music. Or just something you overhear. You are doing this for others, too, quite frequently. This is happening with all we encounter; it even happens through the streets we explore as kids.

Exploration is a sort of resistance that helps us better communicate and notice our communication. Exploration needs care to flourish, and care is not located in any one person or position.

Still, there are many who confuse this resistance and connection as part of our ongoing power with resistance towards taking more of that power for themselves, which is not possible, even if we tend to praise or initially be in awe of such actions, because in temporary viewings, that is often how it looks—it looks like power, which is why people do it, because then the illusion of power often sticks. But it is not real power, and always shows itself; it never sticks in the time that is the time that holds what matters for all of us.

Those of us who do this—who try and take power to balm over shame—are those who not only resist but also try to grab more ‘space’ so as to feel as if we have more control. When we are dong this, it is nearly always flashy and full of anxiety at some level, for we are so afraid of shame or embarrassment or failure that we need everything to make us look as if we are the best. Some people spend their whole lives doing this, trying to be sure everyone knows their name, but they never actually feel the real power that was always so close, because they did not open to (or perhaps were never offered or able to accept) the care that alchemizes it.

We see this at play so often that people often think that it is a stance of power to be a bully or to be the one who never lets you forget they are powerful. It’s not, but it takes time to see through the antics. In all this performance, it is easy to get lost.

At least these are the sorts of comments that come up relative to conversations about this like the one by McGilchrist. I think it is also what can lead many who do get a lot of attention to lose sight of the main point of it all, and to get sick or to get too carried away with being the resistor.

It can (understandably) seem like what you have to do is never care because if you do care, people like that will run over you; so if you can’t beat them join them? No. Just give it time. Still, I understand why sometimes when people hear ‘be of service’ they think it means ‘let others take advantage of you’. In truth, it means let others enrich your life and enrich the lives of others through exploring the communications that even your stumbling can conjure.

It might also happen when we try to be so unattached that we have to act as if nothing bothers us, or as if we feel the same towards every aspect of our encounter and every person and action, and, in so doing, find it harder to touch the nerve opening into all that stumbling messy meaning, connection and uncanny beyond-ness that we were born to help one another explore and orient into knowing in new ways.

Attention and our fascination with extremes gets curled into that sort of misunderstanding. Because something gets attention or is fascinating, we tend to think the person who is at the core of that is somehow feeling more powerful. The truth is, however, that it can often be extremely alienating and hard to process. Also, if a person feels the power of their connection with all this ongoingness and with the real procreation and generation to which it is all connected, the last thing they need to do is get attention or do things to try and prove that they are strong and powerful.

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Parents have to learn this lesson all the time: To care and to be connected to the power of that care is often to do what makes one look less powerful in the short term but is the most powerful of all experiences when they (or their children) look back at their lives.

Real power, which is not the power of a temporary metrics or of the confusion of public image with power but rather the actual rush of sensuality and meaning and peace and excitement (all at once) that comes when, for example, you reach out and catch someone and keep them from falling, or when you say something to a person you will never see again that uplifts them, having said it spontaneously because you really meant it.

Still, we don’t give one another these messages so often anymore. I really understand the comments that worry that ‘being in service’ means letting others take advantage of you or that care is somehow going to open you to people who want to harm you, because the truth is, there are scammers all over the place and one has to be careful.

Still, that does not change the fact that the ultimate sign of confidence is the ability to care and the ultimate sign that you are taking the action to stand up for your own life is that you are finding ways your life is in service to enriching and opening the channels beyond the self you created so as to come to know this is possible and be enriched.

This is why we need one another.

No one can handle the suffering and tension of all this on their own.

The hardest challenge we have is the challenge to stay in a place of real power and to help others feel it just as much as we do. A sure sign that someone is feeling and giving and procreating and generating and extending real power is that they do not have to convince you or brainwash you or take over whatever seems to be in opposition, but rather that they are able to hold the tension of that seeming opposition long enough to ask how it might be alchemized into care, and in so doing, crack open a portal into a way of seeing the world and being with the world that had never been conceived that way before.

No one person does that; it is always a communication.

Care is so hard (and so easy to make fun of) precisely because it is the real source of confidence and strength that outlives all that is temporary or mean.

One of the first images I remember from one of my first philosophy classes is that of the chariot—Plato’s chariot allegory in Phaedrus where he compares the human soul to a charioteer that is in charge of two winged horses.

Phaedrus is one of my favorite dialogues because it is all about madness and love in much the way I have sketched out the self leading beyond itself above, but as my time is already nearly up for this writing window today, I will keep myself from getting overly excited about how love is the ongoingness, and madness the ways we close off from it, and instead remind you that in Plato’s allegory, the charioteer is supposed to be the intellect or reason and the two horses are what we must learn to control so as to navigate.

One horse is there to represent the noble side of us that wants to do the right thing and serve the best in us (to put it in the context of the discussion above) while the other horse is the more lustful and pleasure-seeking side of us that just wants all the temporary hits it can get. The point of this allegory or parable is that reason/intellect (as the driver) is to steer those two (the noble and the pleasure-seeking) in their tensions together towards the destination of the eternal Forms or perfect essences but which basically gets translated as meaning the good life or the life well lived. Not only holding the paradox but also steering it.

What I would like to do before leaving for now, however, is to let those horses have a rest, unleash them and instead imagine that we are in a new sort of vehicle, one that is powered by our own powers of communication. We are floating and flying as one does in a dream. There is nothing enclosing us, nothing outside of us, and yet there is one ‘lever’ called ‘our communication with ourselves’ and one ‘lever’ that is ‘communication with all we consider not to be ourselves’. The only way to stay afloat and to move ourselves wherever we want to go is to shift these levers and feel these energies moving us, to practice and see how they best move us with their tensions, to find our balance as we push and pull and perhaps even find some sweet spot where we can no longer sense their difference; this is how we find the atmosphere of care, and from here, we can take this vehicle anywhere.

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