Hej! Welcome to this week's digest. This is a very special "Everything Zen" edition, because mindset comes up many times, and Bush is highlighted. This week's topics include analyzing our mental models, comic legends (and their diaries), the Stoic philosophy for grief, ideas about love from a Zen master, and British rock. Enjoy!
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“Give more. Give what you didn’t get. Love more. Drop the old story.” ~ Garry Shandling
TOPIC OF INTEREST - MENTAL MODELS THAT I AM WORKING ON
When I re-started therapy earlier this year, I began with a few specific mental models that I wanted to work on. I e-mailed these mental models to my therapist at the beginning of our relationship, and then re-visited them every week before our sessions. These are incredibly subjective, and often difficult to track making progress on, but they have served as invaluable reminders of an aspirational way of being. I share these with you in case any offer helpful perspective for your own way of being.
Self-Love: Learn to love myself and accept that I am enough, shadow and all.
Default Perception: Transform paranoia / anxiety into pronoia / curiosity.
Stability: Build 'unfuckwithable' / 'ghost' presence, maintaining sovereignty over the moment.
Truth: Appreciate the limits of knowledge and the inherent unexplainability of much of the world.
Emotional Spectrum: Accept both "positive" and "negative" emotions, without judgment.
Mortality: Accept my inevitable death to enable both playfulness and urgency.
Growth Mindset: Embrace and appreciate the value and necessity of rejection and 'failure'.
The Self: Accept the distinction between who I am and my thoughts / emotions.
Note: Therapy is one of a variety of mental health tools at our disposal. Meditation, journaling, and exercise (particularly exploring nature) also serve as impactful means for introspection and self-discovery.
BEST OF WHAT I CONSUMED THIS WEEK
DOCUMENTARY - HBO: The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling by Judd Apatow (Thank you Paul for sharing!) - A marathon re-telling of the life of one of the great comedians of our time. Very much worth the time investment. Throughout his work as a stand-up comedian, Tonight Show host, and TV show creator / star, Garry was unabashedly himself, unusually introspective, and relentlessly anxious. Garry is a role model for how we can violate norms in our industry to realize incredible creativity; for how hard we can be on ourselves despite our success; for how we can let our past haunt us; and for candidly documenting his struggle in the search for happiness.
My high level thoughts / takeaways:
Garry's anxiety is pervasive. He was SO analytical and in his own head, it seemed difficult for him to fully be in the moment, or to appreciate what he already had.
Garry continuously moved his professional goals as he realized success. It started with wanting to do stand-up comedy; then hosting the Tonight Show; then creating his own show; then creating multiple shows; then becoming a movie star, etc. Some of this is expected and healthy, but too much of this can lead to tremendous anxiety (see above).
Garry's brother died when they were both young, and he seemingly replayed this relationship through other people over the course of his life. Garry would create close fraternal relationships (e.g., his manager, his show runners, his writers, etc.), but also destroy them over perceived disloyalty (I can imagine him saying to himself, subconsciously, don't leave me like my brother did). It seems like he let his past continue to haunt him.
Garry's relentless pursuit of excellence was all consuming, as demonstrated in how he ran himself ragged while producing his TV shows. There is value in our work and serving others, and there are also personal needs we need to satisfy in order to do our work and truly be there for others. It does not seem like Garry found that balance.
Garry chose to create The Larry Sanders Show over becoming the host of the Tonight Show (which went to Jay Leno instead). This was Garry's preferred expression of meaningful work for the talk show entertainment format - The Tonight Show was prestigious but would not enable the output he would be proud of. It was a bold and unconventional choice, and offers a wonderful example of eschewing traditional paths to create a novel, personalized way forward.
Garry demonstrated the power of mentorship and really being there for others. In his 1-1 relationships, Garry personally impacted dozens, if not hundreds, of other comedians, creating tremendous ripple effects throughout the industry.
Garry was accepting of death when it came for him. Through his journaling, meditation, and other mental health practices, he was at peace when the inevitable arrived.
One quote from Garry's journal, from part 2, had me crying when I first saw it. “Give more. Give what you didn’t get. Love more. Drop the old story.” There is SO much in there to unpack, but I think different parts of that will resonate for each of us.
ARTICLE - Aeon: Against Mourning by Brian Earp - Brian's work provides a thoughtful summary of Stoic philosophy towards grief and loss. In particular, he does a wonderful job of illuminating the 'straw man' version vs. the actual philosophy, which is far less cold and rigid than it can appear at first glance.
My highlights:
They [Stoics] deny the first premise – that it is psychologically impossible to love someone, truly love them, and yet remain unmoved by their death when it arrives. It’s just that you have to spend your life, to the day, to the hour, mentally preparing for such potential losses.
For just as virtue cannot exist without wrongdoing, as some Stoics held, so too might the prospect of grief be in some way bound up in love, so that you cannot have one without the other. Yes, that is right – some grief. Even the Stoics (or at any rate, some of them) seem to concede this as we’ll see in a moment. But far less grief is truly – or you could say naturally – entailed by such love than common sense would have most of us believe
Therein lies the importance of mental preparation. It is a systematic means of freeing oneself from false beliefs, including wishful thinking about life and death.
Instead, if anything, by actively reminding ourselves of our child’s mortality – even as we delight in kissing her goodnight – we render all the more salient what is most precious about her existence. As Seneca says: ‘Let us greedily enjoy our friends,’ as we should also enjoy our children, ‘because we do not know how long this privilege will be ours.’
‘resilience to losing those we love plays a deep and systematic role in making us the kinds of creatures that can overcome the frequent and inevitable setbacks that we must suffer over a lifetime’. In other words, adapting to loss is part of who we are – a part of our nature, and so in line with Nature – and we are better at such adaptation than we think.
Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love.
The essence of loving kindness is being able to offer happiness. You can be the sunshine for another person. You can’t offer happiness until you have it for yourself. So build a home inside by accepting yourself and learning to love and heal yourself.
If you have enough understanding and love, then every moment — whether it’s spent making breakfast, driving the car, watering the garden, or doing anything else in your day — can be a moment of joy.
When you love someone, you have to have trust and confidence. Love without trust is not yet love. Of course, first you have to have trust, respect, and confidence in yourself. Trust that you have a good and compassionate nature.
Often, when we say, “I love you” we focus mostly on the idea of the “I” who is doing the loving and less on the quality of the love that’s being offered.
MOST FAVORITE FROM THE PAST
MUSIC - Bush - Bush was first introduced to me while working for the Staten Island Yankees in high school, when we (the production team) would create the ~2 hour pre-game playlist and regularly use Machinehead. After that initial exposure, their simultaneously sad, sweet, and angsty music got me excited to continue exploring their library, and they eventually became a staple of workout and sad playlists in high school and college.
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