Rush forward into boredom and disappointment* A therapist's view of the good life* Long tail of a vacation*

Rush forward into boredom and disappointment* 

Some selections from Brian Eno's interview on NYer Radio Hour Podcast

Brain Eno: I was always interested in this fundamental question of why do we make art? It's a completely universal human activity, but we don't seem to know very much about that fundamental level. This question, I've been aware of it for ages, that people think art is a luxury. We're very used to the idea that humans respond to pain and punishment. We avoid things that are going to hurt us.

I think we're also guided to a huge degree by the things that we find beautiful, or awesome, or striking, or impressive or all the words we might use. I think we very much want to be guided by those things as to where to go. My friend John Hassell, who died unfortunately three years ago, I think, now, used to have a great phrase. He said, "One of the most important questions you can ask yourself is, 'What is it that I really like?'" That seems like a trivial, self-indulgent sort of question. "Oh, what do you really like?" Well, but it isn't actually, because we live in a world now where 10,000 people a day are trying to tell us what we ought to like, be they advertisers, press barons, TV companies, politicians, influencers. It's very, very important that you remember what it is that you actually really like. That's your guidance. That's your lodestone, as it were.

Brian Eno: When I started to notice that nearly all of the things that humans regard as peak experiences, being bowled over by a piece of music, being knocked out by a sculpture or a dance, or something like that, so love, art, religion, sex, drugs, all of those things are situations where we willingly let something happen to us that is slightly beyond our ability to comprehend and control. We surrender. I think a lot of the art experience is about surrendering. That's the point. The whole point is being moved, having feelings.

One of the realizations I had when I was writing this book is that, really, the only product of art is feelings. Its main point is to make your feelings change, is to give you feelings that you perhaps didn't have before or did have before and want to have again, or want to experiment with. It seems very simplistic to say, "Oh, it's all about feelings," but actually I think it is.

Feelings are overlooked by all of those people who think bright children shouldn't do art. They're the same people who think that feelings are the irrelevant part of life, sort of simple-minded and inarticulate, and can't be quantified. Feelings are rather slippery, undefinable stuff. I think feelings are the beginning of everything. It's our first line of contact with the world.

Brain Eno: We all understand that children learn through playing. I thought, "What happens to the play impulse in people?" I suddenly had this flash. Play is how children learn. Art is how adults play. In fact, when we go to the theater, when we read a novel, when we go to a gallery, when we watch a dance, I think we're learning about important things when we do those things. We're still playing, actually, we just give that kind of playing a different name. We call it art.

It's a sort of simulator. The reason you have flight simulators is because you want to be able to crash. I think art is very often a simulator in that way. You can experience what an unhappy marriage is like by reading about it without having to have an unhappy marriage. You can experience the terror in revolutionary France without having to have your head chopped off. If you can do it first in art, and then give it a try in real life.

Brian Eno: The feelings that I think are very, very easy to locate in sound are sort of melancholy and the sparkle of new life. I often hear those things in sound. I have never yet, I don't think, heard anything that captured the feeling of boredom. I'm disappointed in that because there's a great line in the Tibetan leader Chögyam Trungpa's book where he said, "We should rush forward into boredom and disappointment." I've tried to do that, but I don't think I've succeeded yet.

I like this idea that those might be places where you can learn something unique. I do think boredom is very important. If you keep getting boredom out of the way by distracting yourself with Wordle or whatever else you distract yourself with, you lose the possibility of your threshold of interest falling so low that you can notice a tiny thing.

Brian Eno: I try to do things because I want to do them, not because they're just a little tiny bit better than sitting looking at the wall. I really try to now just sit and look at the wall. If you don't provide input, what happens if you want things to come up from inside you, all of the accumulated knowledge and information and experience that you have, if you want that to manifest itself, you have to stop trying to stuff more stuff in at that moment. You have to give it space to come up. You can't do both things at once, I think.

Brian Eno: Well, one of the themes of my work, I think, is economy, is trying to see how much you can do with how little. I really like that feeling.....  I always love that challenge of saying, "let's just accept what is here at the moment and make the best of it." I'm not the kind of person who thinks, I'm not going to work in any studio that doesn't have 16 ancient compressors and 14 fabulous old German microphones and so on. I just don't think like that. I always think that every moment in your life is a unique set of circumstances. Unique both in what it has and in what it lacks. If you make your work out of the moments in your life, then every piece of music will be different. Everything comes from a different place. I reject the idea that you have to standardize the working conditions before you can do any work.

I often listen back to things that I've done in the past, and I think, "I have no idea how I did that." I listened to an old song of mine the other day, and I realized there was a quite complicated set of similar sounds that went through the song at a particular rhythm. Now, I know that I didn't consciously put them there, but somehow or other, those patterns appear.

Now, I don't think they originated from God. I think they [chuckles] originated from somewhere in me, which led me to wonder, is it somewhere in me that people call God? Is God a name for those inaccessible or unknown parts of yourself that do things, that make decisions that you don't even know about? The conscious part of your mind doesn't know about? Anyway, that's rather a long question for a program like this.

A therapist's view of the good life*

Carl Rogers On Becoming a Person, "A Therapist's View of The Good Life" (1953) (pp. 183-198)

A NEGATIVE OBSERVATION

It is not, in my estimation, a state of virtue, or contentment, or nirvana, or happiness. It is not a condition in which the individual is adjusted, or fulfilled, or actualized. To use psychological terms, it is not a state of drive-reduction, or tension-reduction, or homeostasis.

I believe that all of these terms have been used in ways which imply that if one or several of these states is achieved, then the goal of life has been achieved. Certainly, for many people happiness, or adjustment, are seen as states of being which are synonymous with the good life. And social scientists have frequently spoken of the reduction of tension, or the achievement of homeostasis or equilibrium as if these states constituted the goal of the process of living. 

So it is with a certain amount of surprise and concern that I realize that my experience supports none of these definitions. If I focus on the experience of those individuals who seem to have evidenced the greatest degree of movement during the therapeutic relationship, and who, in the years following this relationship, appear to have made and to be making real progress toward the good life, then it seems to me that they are not adequately described at all by any of these terms which refer to fixed states of being. I believe they would consider themselves insulted if they were described as "adjusted," and they would regard it as false if they were described as "happy" or "contented," or even "actualized." As I have known , they I would regard it as most inaccurate to say that all their drive tensions have been reduced, or that they are in a state of homeostasis. 

So I am forced to ask myself whether there is any way in which I can generalize about their situation, any definition which I can give of the good life which would seem to fit the facts as I have observed them. I find this not at all easy, and what follows is stated very tentatively.

A POSITIVE OBSERVATION

If I attempt to capture in a few words what seems to me to be true of these people, I believe it will come out something like this:

    The good life is a process, not a state of being.

    It is a direction, not a destination.

    The direction which constitutes the good life is that which is selected by the total organism, when there is psychological freedom to move in any direction.

    This organismically selected direction seems to have certain describable general qualities which appear to be the same in a wide variety of unique individuals.

    So I can integrate these statements into a definition which can at least serve as a basis for consideration and discussion. The good life, from the point of view of my experience, is the process of movement in a direction which the human organism selects when it is inwardly free to move in any direction, and the general qualities of this selected direction appear to have a certain universality. 

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PROCESS

Let me now try to specify what appear to be the characteristic qualities of this process of movement, as they crop up in person after person in therapy. 

AN INCREASING OPENNESS TO EXPERIENCE

In the first place, the process seems to involve an increasing openness to experience. This phrase has come to have more and more meaning for me. It is the polar opposite of defensiveness. Defensiveness I have described in the past as being the organism's response to experiences which are perceived or anticipated as threatening, as incongruent with the individual's existing picture of himself, or of himself in relationship to the world. These threatening experiences are temporarily rendered harmless by being distorted in awareness, or being denied to awareness. I quite literally cannot see, with accuracy, those experiences, feelings, reactions in myself which are significantly at variance with the picture of myself which I already possess. A large part of the process of therapy is the continuing discovery by the client that he is experiencing feelings and attitudes which heretofore he has not been able to be aware of, which he has not been able to "own" as being a part of himself.

vironment — would be freely relayed through the nervous system without being distorted by any defensive mechanism. There would be no need of the mechanism of "subception" whereby the organism is forewarned of any experience threatening to the self. On the contrary, whether the stimulus was the impact of a configuration of form, color, or sound in the environment on the sensory nerves, or a memory trace from the past, or a visceral sensation of fear or pleasure or disgust, the person would be "living" it, would have it completely available to awareness. 

Thus, one aspect of this process which I am naming "the good life" appears to be a movement away from the pole of defensiveness toward the pole of openness to experience. The individual is becoming more able to listen to himself, to experience what is going on within himself. He is more open to his feelings of fear and discouragement and pain. He is also more open to his feelings of courage, and tenderness, and awe. He is free to live his feelings subjectively, as they exist in him, and also free to be aware of these feelings. He is more able fully to live the experiences of his organism rather than shutting them out of awareness.

INCREASINGLY EXISTENTIAL LIVING

A second characteristic of the process which for me is the good life, is that it involves an increasing tendency to live fully in each moment. This is a thought which can easily be misunderstood, and which is perhaps somewhat vague in my own thinking. Let me try to explain what I mean. 

I believe it would be evident that for the person who was fully open to his new experience, completely without defensiveness, each moment would be new. The complex configuration of inner and outer stimuli which exists in this moment has never existed before in just this fashion. Consequently such a person would realize that "What I will be in the next moment, and what I will do, grows out of that moment, and cannot be predicted in advance either by me or by others" Not infrequently we find clients expressing exactly this sort of feeling. 

One way of expressing the fluidity which is present in such existential living is to say that the self and personality emerge from experience, rather than experience being translated or twisted to fit preconceived self structure. It means that one becomes a participant in in an observer of the ongoing process of organismic experience, rather than being in control of it.

AN INCREASING TRUST IN HIS ORGANISM

Still another characteristic of the person who is living the process of the good life appears to be an increasing trust in his organism as a means of arriving at the most satisfying behavior in each existential situation. Again let me try to explain what I mean. 

In choosing what course of action to take in any situation, many people rely upon guiding principles, upon a code of action laid down by some group or institution, upon the judgment of others (from wife and friends to Emily Post), or upon the way they have behaved in some similar past situation. Yet as I observe the clients whose experiences in living have taught me so much, I find that increasingly such individuals are able to trust their total organismic reaction to a new situation because they discover to an ever-increasing degree that if they are open to their experience, doing what "feels right" proves to be a competent and trustworthy guide to behavior which is truly satisfying.

CREATIVITY AS AN ELEMENT OF THE GOOD LIFE

I believe it will be clear that a person who is involved in the directional process which I have termed "the good life" is a creative person. With his sensitive openness to his world, his trust of his own ability to form new relationships with his environment, he would be the type of person from whom creative products and creative living emerge. He would not necessarily be "adjusted" to his culture, and he would almost certainly not be a conformist. But at any time and in any culture he would live constructively, in as much harmony with his culture as a balanced satisfaction of needs demanded. In some cultural situations, he might, in some ways be very unhappy, but he would continue to move toward becoming himself, and to behave in such a way as to provide the maximum satisfaction of his deepest needs. 

THE GREATER RICHNESS OF LIFE

One last implication I should like to mention is that this process of living the good life involves a wider range, a greater richness, than the constricted living in which most of us find ourselves. To be a part of this process means that one is involved in the frequently frightening and frequently satisfying experience of a more sensitive living, with greater range, greater variety, greater richness. It seems to me that clients who have moved significantly in therapy live more intimately with their feelings of pain, but also more vividly with their feelings of ecstasy; that anger is more clearly felt, but so also is love; that fear is an experience they know more deeply, but so is courage. 

And the reason they can thus live fully in a wider range is that they have this underlying confidence in themselves as trustworthy instruments for encountering life. 

I believe it will have become evident why, for me, adjectives such as happy, contented, blissful, enjoyable, do not seem quite appropriate to any general description of this process I have called the good life, even though the person in this process would experience each one of these feelings at appropriate times. But the adjectives which seem more generally fitting are adjectives such as enriching, exciting, rewarding, challenging, meaningful. This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, he chooses as the good life this process of becoming.

Long Tail of a vacation*

We just finished Dead River Blend beans from our trip to the UP.  Dead River Coffee shop was one of our favorite hangouts discovered in the trip.  They say that vacations are good for you not just DURING the rest and restoration during the vacation, but because you look forward to them.  The anticipatory effect.  The study I reference says that there's almost no post-vacation effect, except for some of the participants who considered their vacation "very relaxing."  

I say you should try to make vacations should change your life.  You should be on the lookout for things that inspire you to make changes small and large -- a new discovered activity, book, observed local behavior, a new recipe to try, the pace of life in a coffee shop, etc.  This Dead River Coffee last us a couple weeks of our shared morning coffee time.  The coffee was good.  It also reminded us every day of the nice time we spent in the local coffee shop.