What If This Were Enough?

by Heather Havrilesky

  This goes back to the core religion of the guru, of course: More than anything else, the modern guru denies the existence of external obstacles. Racism, systemic bias, income inequality—to acknowledge these would be to deny the power of the self. They are sidestepped in favor of handy modern conveniences, or the importance of casting off draining relationships, or the constant quest to say no to the countless opportunities rolling your way. What an indulgence it must be, to have your greatest obstacles be “sugar” or “anger” or “toxins.”

  * * *

  —

  In many ways, the artist might be seen as the polar opposite of the guru. The artist (or at least some imaginary ideal of the artist) leans into reality—the dirt and grime of survival, the sullen, grim folds of the psyche, the exquisite disappointments, the sour churn of rage, the smog of lust, the petty, uneven, disquieted moments that fall in between. The artist embraces ugliness and beauty with equal passion. The artist knows that this process is always, by its nature, inefficient. It is a slow effort without any promise of a concrete, external reward.

  In order to create, the artist can’t live behind walls or embrace fantasies. The artist must recognize that the real-world stakes are high, and control is hard to come by. The artist can’t hide or sidestep total honesty or avoid taking a stand. How could the artist make something meaningful without revealing himself and his position in the world? He can’t deny his emotions. He is forced to slow down and grapple with the injustices he encounters at every turn. To the committed artist, “extracting your max” sounds like yet another masturbatory pro tip, a way of turning inward as disappointments and upheaval threaten your good life.

  In the introduction to Tribe of Mentors, Ferriss writes, “[S]uccess can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations we are willing to have, and by the number of uncomfortable actions we are willing to take.” The guru’s words sound so wise in a vacuum, or printed on a poster, or tapped out in a tweet. Yet Ferriss neglects to address the fact that it matters a great deal what kinds of conversations we have, what kinds of actions we take, and on whose behalf we act.

  It makes perfect sense, really, that Ferriss begins his book with this question: “What would this look like if it were easy?” The point is not to dig into hard things. The point, always and forever, is to clear an effortless path before you. You are to avoid “unnecessary hardship,” by asking abstract questions like “[W]hat happens if we frame things in terms of elegance instead of strain?”

  Here’s what happens: We elegantly proceed to publish sterile, platinum-elite “wisdom”-lite, assembled into a 589-page tome that exists only within a hermetically sealed bubble of the self. Such a book will be a comfort to your personal tribe of fledgling, wannabe gurus, because their goals match yours: to float high above the grime of life and the rage of injustice. The aim is always to maximize your own gains while thoroughly expunging the inconvenient humanity out of yourself. Ideally, we will all evolve into disease-free, highly efficient, healthy, joy-seeking low-body-fat robots, safe in our bunkers, free to snack on cashew cheese and sulfate-free wine and peruse inspirational quotes as the world burns down outside our doors.

  But the real moral of Tribe of Mentors lies elsewhere within the book’s pages: “Don’t trust gurus, whether a marketing guru or a life guru,” writes entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist Jérôme Jarre. “The guru separates himself from the rest of us. Anything that creates separation is an illusion. In reality, we are all united, all the same, all smart parts of the same bigger thing, the universe.”

  Jarre then pinpoints the state of affairs that keeps the entire guru industry afloat: “Most of the world is asleep today, playing a small role in a gigantic illusion. You don’t have to be. You can choose a different life. It’s all within. You will know the answers when you take the time to find yourself and trust yourself.” This message necessarily counters much of Ferriss’s offerings, since it entirely obviates the need for the products he peddles so relentlessly. And not surprisingly, this message alone upstages most of Ferriss’s repetitive tome: You don’t need more of anything to find your true path. You have everything you need already.

  What Jarre implies but doesn’t spell out is that this realization tends to transcend the self, building momentum until it becomes something much bigger and more expansive and porous. Because once we learn to cultivate compassion for ourselves without improvements or upgrades, we also learn to have compassion for other people, as broken and flawed and different from us as they might be. And if we’re ever going to recognize that our survival is inextricably linked, this is how we’re going to get there. We can no longer close the doors to the outside world and expect to survive. In fact, we have to resist the temptation to handle our fear by placing ourselves above others, or by building up our fortress walls. We are called to reject the “gigantic illusion” of our separateness and see reality clearly at last.

  In other words, at this late date in human history, it would behoove most of us to think less like gurus and more like artists—deeply connected to ourselves and each other, painfully, beautifully aware of reality, and exquisitely alive to the moment—in order to build a new world outside of the toxic illusions of this one.

  my mother’s house

  My mother’s house has loud plumbing. There is a musty smell to most of its rooms. The screen doors don’t close completely, leaving a crack where bugs can crawl in. In the summer, there are large flying insects waiting on the front door when you get home at night. The front yard is covered in clover but very little grass. The windows are big and the frames are rusted metal and hard to crank open.

  My mother’s house is not air-conditioned. She is one of the last humans alive in the swampy North Carolina heat without any relief beyond whirring fans. There are tiny spiders that live in the corners and no one kills them or cares that they’ve taken up residence there. There are windows with glass so old it looks a little warped. There are pine needles in the gutters. The shutters need painting. The bathroom could use a wastebasket. In the bathroom cabinets, there are bandages and Epsom salts and weird brands of shampoo like Body On Tap that date back to 1987. When I visited a few months ago, I found a little jar of Vicks VapoRub that looked like it had been excavated from someone’s garden sometime around 1975.

  I grew up in that house. My mother sleeps in my bedroom now. The mini-blinds are still peach, the color I chose for the room, but the walls have been painted dark brown. The stairs are very steep. The ceilings are high. The chairs in the dining room have curved metal backs that dig into your shoulder blades. The table shakes when you touch it. The backyard is carpeted with pine needles, ornamented with ivy and pine trees. There is an old garage with a creaky door and a roof covered in leaves. My mother’s car is twenty years old. My mother is seventy-five years old.

  When I arrive at my mother’s house in the summer, a cacophony of small creatures surrounds her house—birds singing, cicadas buzzing, tree frogs humming. Because there is no air-conditioning, you have to keep the windows open at night, which means yielding to this rain forest symphony. Sometimes there are crickets in the actual room with you. If you leave your phone on for a few too many minutes after you turn the lights out, tiny unidentified bugs will hit your phone screen repeatedly. You are never alone.

  Pine trees tower over her house, a threat during big thunderstorms, which happen at least twice a week in the summer. The thunder is louder than any thunder you’ve ever heard, partly because the windows are open. You don’t forget that her house is surrounded by tall trees, on a hill, when you hear that thunder. You remember the pine tree that was struck right outside the big dining room window. You remember how the whole world was just an orange and red flash. The tree splintered to bits. Weeks later, the bugs moved into it. My mother felt relieved that no one in the house was hurt. She said we had a lot to be grateful for.

  And I do feel grateful every time I visit
and a big storm rolls in. There is nothing like lying on that bad futon mattress on the floor of the den, listening to the thunder, watching the branches lash around in the wind, hearing the rain hammer the roof and the windows. You’re inside but you feel like you’re outside, as you wait for the storm to pass, as you wait for the cool breezes to arrive after the rain.

  And in the morning, you hear the birds. The leaves of the trees dance in the dappled sunlight. The trees go on forever out there, straight into the sky. It’s hard to get up off that hard futon when you can stare up at those trees from the floor, through windows six feet tall.

  My mom and dad were going to rent the house at first. A professor and his German wife owned it, but then they decided to move back to D.C., because the German wife hated our small Southern town. My mother told my father, “We need to buy that house. That is a great house.” My father found out the house was $24,000. My mother said to him, “That house is a steal. We have to buy it.”

  This was 1971. They bought the house. It was the best decision my mother ever made. Her marriage ended ten years later. My dad died fifteen years after that. There were disappointments and heartaches, but that house was never one of them. The cicadas and the birds and the little flying bugs and the crickets and the squirrels and the chipmunks and the tiny spiders and the mold and the rot and the creaky stairs and the thunderstorms all agree with her. That house never disappointed any of us.

  Our visitors were always a little disappointed, though. They didn’t appreciate the lack of air-conditioning, the bugs, the yapping dogs. How could they be so immune to its charms? They probably lived in houses with double-paned windows, sealed off from the birds and the storms, sterile and quiet and dull. They probably closed their blinds at night and cranked up their buzzing central AC units. “You might as well sleep in the middle of a shopping mall,” my mom often says.

  When you leave my mother’s house, it’s true that you might feel some relief at the thought of returning to the comforts of modern life. But when you get back to your own house, your ordinary windows and doors that shut tightly will feel like a disappointment. Your dry California air and your swimming pool will feel like trifles compared to trees so tall they disappear into the sky. I used to think that my mother’s house was embarrassing, a ramshackle mess in a small town, nothing and nowhere. Now I know that my mother’s house is the center of the universe. There is no other place like it.

  the miracle of the mundane

  On a good day, all of humanity’s accomplishments feel personal: the soaring violins of the second allegretto movement of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 7, the intractable painted stare of Frida Kahlo, the enormous curving spans of the Golden Gate Bridge, the high wail of PJ Harvey’s voice on “Victory,” the last melancholy pages of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. These works remind us that we’re connected to the past and our lives have limitless potential. We were built to touch the divine.

  On a bad day, all of humanity’s failures feel unbearably personal: coyotes wandering city streets due to encroaching wildfires, American citizens in Puerto Rico enduring another day without electricity or potable water in the wake of Hurricane Maria, neo-Nazis spouting hatred in American towns, world leaders testing missiles that would bring the deaths of millions of innocent people. We encounter bad news in the intimate glow of our cell phone screens, and then project our worries onto the flawed artifacts of our broken world: the FOR LEASE sign on the upper level of the strip mall, the crow picking at a hamburger wrapper in the gutter, the pink stucco walls of the McMansion flanked by enormous square hedges, the blaring TVs on the walls of the local restaurant. On bad days, each moment is haunted by a palpable but private sense of dread. We feel irrelevant at best, damned at worst. Our only hope is to numb and distract ourselves as well as we can on our long, slow march to the grave.

  On a good day, humankind’s creations make us feel like we’re here for a reason. Our belief sounds like the fourth molto allegro movement of Mozart’s Symphony no. 41, Jupiter: Our hearts seem to sing along to Mozart’s climbing strings, telling us that if we’re patient, if we work hard, if we believe, if we stay focused, we will continue to feel joy, to do meaningful work, to show up for each other, to grow closer to some sacred ground. We are thrillingly alive and connected to every other living thing, in perfect, effortless accord with the natural world.

  But it’s hard to sustain that feeling, even on the best of days—to keep the faith, to stay focused on what matters most—because the world continues to besiege us with messages that we are failing. You’re feeding your baby a bottle and a voice on the TV tells you that your hair should be shinier. You’re reading a book but someone on Twitter wants you to know about a hateful thing a politician said earlier this morning. You are bedraggled and inadequate and running late for something and it’s always this way. You are busy and distracted. You are not here.

  It’s even worse on a bad day, when humankind’s creations fill us with the sense that we are failing as a people, as a planet, and nothing can be done about it. The chafing smooth jazz piped into the immaculate coffee joint, the fake cracks painted on the wall at the Cheesecake Factory, the smoke from fires burning thousands of acres of dry tinder, blotting out the sun—they remind us that even though our planet is in peril, we are still being teased and flattered into buying stuff that we don’t need, or coaxed into forgetting the truth about our darkening reality. As the crowd around us watches a fountain dance to Frank Sinatra’s “Somewhere Beyond the Sea” at the outdoor mall, we peek at our phones and discover the bellowed warnings of an erratic foreign leader, threatening to destroy us from thousands of miles away. Everything cheerful seems to have an ominous shadow looming behind it now. The smallest images and bits of news can feel so invasive, so frightening. They erode our belief in what the world can and should be.

  As the first total solar eclipse in America in thirty-nine years reveals itself, an email lands in my inbox from ABC that says THE GREAT AMERICAN ECLIPSE at the top. People are tweeting and retweeting the same eclipse jokes all morning. As the day grows dimmer, I remember that Bonnie Tyler is going to sing her 1983 hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart” on an eclipse-themed cruise off the coast of Florida soon.

  Even natural wonders aren’t what they used to be, because nothing can be experienced without commentary. In the 1950s, we worried about how TV would affect our culture. Now our entire lives are a terrible talk show that we can’t turn off. It often feels like we’re struggling to find ourselves and each other in a crowded, noisy room. We are plagued, around the clock, by the shouting and confusion and fake intimacy of the global community, mid–nervous breakdown.

  Sometimes it feels like our shared breakdown is making us less generous and less focused. On a bad day, the world seems to be filled with bad books and bad buildings and bad songs and bad choices. Worthwhile creations and ego-driven, sloppy works are treated to the same hype and praise; soon it starts to feel as if everything we encounter was designed merely to make some carefully branded human a fortune. Why aren’t we reaching for more than this? Isn’t art supposed to inspire or provoke or make people feel emotions that they don’t necessarily want to feel? Can’t the moon block out the sun without a 1980s pop accompaniment? So much of what is created today seems engineered to numb or distract us, keeping us dependent on empty fixes indefinitely.

  Such creations feel less like an attempt to capture the divine than a precocious student’s term paper. If any generous spirit shines through, it’s manufactured in the hopes of a signal boost, so that some leisure class end point can be achieved. Our world is glutted with products that exist to help someone seize control of their own life while the rest of the globe falls to ruin. Work (and guidance, and leadership) that comes from such a greedy, uncertain place has more in common with that fountain at the outdoor mall, playing the same songs over and over, every note an imitation of a note played years before.

  But hum
an beings are not stupid. We can detect muddled and self-serving intentions in the artifacts we encounter. Even so, such works slowly infect us with their lopsided values. Eventually, we can’t help but imagine that this is the only way to proceed: by peddling your own wares at the expense of the wider world. Can’t we do better than this, reach for more, insist on more? Why does our culture make us feel crazy for trying?

  * * *

  —

  Mozart composed an enormous volume of music over the course of his short life, working relentlessly from his youth to his death. He composed music as a child in a horse-drawn carriage, traveling with his father. He wrote music even when he was very sick or in debt. And though he is often portrayed as temperamental, unsteady, and erratic, his productivity never suffered. He found a way to shut out distractions and do the hard, patient work necessary to compose transcendent music.

  Mozart’s father, Leopold, viewed his son’s musical talent as a miracle given by God. He believed that it was his job to help Mozart share his miracle with the world. In Mozart’s time, composers weren’t seen as an exalted class of humans. As Paul Johnson writes in his biography of Mozart, “Musicians were exactly in the same position as other household servants—cooks, chambermaids, coachmen, and sentries. They existed for the comfort and well-being of their masters and mistresses.” Leopold Mozart didn’t agree. He believed “that his son should be displayed ‘to the glory of God,’ as he put it.”