By Ad Meskens - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11014389

“The cucumber is bitter? Then throw it out. There are brambles in the path? Then go around. That’s all you need to know.” –Marcus Aurelius

How To Live?

Action focuses this philosophical question into practice by transforming abstract reasoning into concrete reality.

Worthwhile philosophers are connected to reality.

Theories do no good unless they can reliably guide action – in our thinking and our physical actions.

Twenty minutes of meditation will show you what hours of reading the Bhagavad Gita never could. The concept of virtue is useless unless it drives your behavior.

You can never know if a theory is practical until you put it into action.

When you take a step forward you can truly grok a theory. You can feel what was being talked about.

And then, you know whether or not the idea works for you. In other words, you now understand the only thing that matters.

“To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school… it is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.” –Henry David Thoreau

Inaction Is Expensive

If we try and fail, we see the cost. The number of hours and dollars spent on the project. We feel the pain when it doesn’t work. The embarrassment is acute.

This makes inaction tempting.

We don’t consider refusing to choose as a choice. We think we’re safe if we don’t expose ourselves to failure. We don’t appreciate the consequences of inaction because they are slow, chronic, and less obvious. That’s what makes them dangerous.

You don’t get to escape pain.

The pain that comes with action is acute, scars you, and makes you grow.

The pain that comes from inaction is low-grade, softens you, and decays your soul.

You Are Not “Waiting To Live”…

You are waiting to act.

That stagnation, low-grade frustration, and perpetual exhaustion comes from your refusal to act.

The reason you don’t feel alive is because you’ve worn yourself out thinking about things instead of actually doing them. You haven’t moved because your habit is to flinch away from action.

You unconsciously refuse to see the falsity in your old beliefs, your old fears, and your old habits.

Action means pushing into a new way of living that you have not imagined before. It means pushing through what you’re scared of into what you couldn’t even think to be scared of.

It means pushing through all that, seeing that it wasn’t as bad as you thought, then doing it again.

Committing to action doesn’t end once you get somewhere. It means you never stop pushing.

What Is Up to Us Isn’t Up to Us

We can head in a certain direction. We can avoid the paths we know are bad. We can adopt a philosophy for living.

We cannot know what will happen. We cannot live in (or predict) the future. We cannot choose the choices we’re faced with

We can’t tame Fate. We can’t predict the future.

All we can know is how we will act when the rubber meets the road.

We can train ourselves to be more prepared.

We can’t change what’s happened. Only what we do now.

Books About Heaven

Steven Pressfield relates a New Yorker cartoon in his (short) book Do the Work: “A perplexed person stands before two doors. One door says HEAVEN. The other says BOOKS ABOUT HEAVEN.”

He’s perplexed. He’s considering the book over the actual experience. It’s funny because it’s absurd… and because we know we’d have the same consideration.

Why would we deny ourselves direct experience?

Action is going to Heaven. Abstraction is reading about going to heaven.

(Reading a book can be Heaven when it’s a primary activity.)

Acting Is Dirty

Creation is inherently messy. The Big Bang was an explosion that created everything we know. You were born into this world bloody while your mother endured the worst pain of her life.

Modern movies, video games, and novels generally follow a clean narrative. We might not know exactly what will happen, but we know the general contours. The hero will be challenged, he will either be victorious or temporarily beaten. Either way he’ll be redeemed by the end of the story. Life doesn’t offer this guarantee.

Honest action won’t take you on a straight path. It may not make sense to you or those around you at first.

Instead, it will straighten your posture on any path you’re on. You won’t fear what others fear. You won’t regret what the others will.

You’ll have scars and remember the lessons they taught you. Others will look fragile because while they kept their training wheels on you let yourself fall down, endure the pain, and do it again.

“If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not ‘studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

“Spartans do not ask how many are the enemy…”

“… but where are they.” –Plutarch, Sayings of the Spartans

The Spartans knew they would meet the enemy and fight with courage. They didn’t ask for unnecessary information.

You don’t need to either.

Gather the minimum information you need to begin.

Then, before you think you’re ready, begin.

This will provide you more useful information than any amount of abstract research ever could.

Kyle Eschenroeder

https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/meditations-wisdom-action/