Month: July 2020

“I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.”

Langston Hughes

In the years between 1916 and 1970, there was a massive movement in the United States called the Great Migration. It saw over six million African Americans relocate from the South and into the Northern States. Cities like Detroit, Baltimore, New York, and Chicago experienced huge shifts in their demographics. In 1910, 90% of African Americans lived in the south; after the Great Migration, only 50% remained.

The main cause of the movement was the increasingly widespread racist ideology in the Southern States. Racial segregation and discrimination, enforced by the harsh Jim Crow laws, led to the lack of social freedoms and economic opportunities for black people. Corrupt legal systems, unfair labour practices, and lynchings drove them north to search for a better life.

Another contributing factor was the shortages of labour in the northern industrial areas caused by the decrease of immigration from Europe after the start of the First World War.

This move into the densely populated cities would lead to a cultural eruption that started in one of the most popular destinations during the Migration; a neighbourhood in New York City, called Harlem.

The artistic, social, and intellectual movement which began there in the 1920’s would be called the Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement. It was characterized by black artists and writers who were striving to create a new identity for themselves and to explore new modes of cultural expression.

Langston Hughes, one of the most prominent writers of the Renaissance, said that Harlem gave them an opportunity “to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.”

This is from Wikipedia:

“The Harlem Renaissance was successful in that it brought the Black experience clearly within the corpus of American cultural history. Not only through an explosion of culture, but on a sociological level, the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance redefined how America, and the world, viewed African Americans. The migration of southern Blacks to the north changed the image of the African American from rural, undereducated peasants to one of urban, cosmopolitan sophistication. This new identity led to a greater social consciousness, and African Americans became players on the world stage, expanding intellectual and social contacts internationally.”

However, the personal aims of some of the leading figures varied. Some tried to challenge existing stereotypes and incite social and political change with their work, while others thought to inspire and uplift their race with optimism and to preserve African American cultural traditions, without referring constantly to racism.

Two of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright, would embody these conflicts in two of America’s greatest novels: Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God published in 1937, and Wright’s Native Son, published in 1940.

These books were more than just stories. They were ideas, and what makes their author’s literary rivalry so interesting, is that much of what they disagreed on is still so relevant today. Together, the two classic works represent the lingering dichotomy of left and right wing politics.

Their Eyes Were Watching God

This is from the first line of Hurston’s novel.

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.”

Hurston’s opening paragraph echoes a sentiment felt by the ex-slave and abolitionist, Frederick Douglass in his autobiography:

“Our house stood within a few rods of the Chesapeake Bay, whose broad bosom was ever white with sails from every quarter of the habitable globe. Those beautiful vessels, robed in purest white, so delightful to the eye of freemen, were to me so many shrouded ghosts, to terrify and torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition… My thoughts would compel utterance; and there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my soul’s complaint, in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships:– “You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip!.”

Hurston’s continues with her second paragraph: “Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”

Hurston cleverly words her opening line using “man’s wish,” “his dreams” and “the life of men” to be interpreted as humanity as a whole. It’s not until the second paragraph that we understand more clearly Hurston’s intentions.

It’s here we get an early glimpse into the theme of feminism that permeates through the entire novel.

Unlike her contemporary writers, Hurston chose to write about love, sexuality, womanhood and individuality, many of which were ideas that were downplayed and minimalized under the greater issues of racial inequality.

She was an anthropologist who dedicated much of her life studying African American folklore, language, and culture. The speech in Their Eyes is written in the dialect of the south, in early 20th century Florida, where the novel takes place.

The story follows a woman named Janie Crawford, and it begins as Janie returns to her home town and tells her story to an old friend.

The plot is broken down into three narratives, each representing a different lover in Janie’s life.

Her first marriage is to an older farmer named Logan Killicks. Their relationship is loveless and bleak and she’s treated like an employee rather than a wife. She was forced into it by her grandmother who, with good intentions, tried to situate Janie into a financially safe and secure relationship.

‘Taint Logan Killicks Ah wants you to have, baby, it’s protection.”

Her grandmother was a slave, and her hope of a peaceful and uneventful life for Janie was influenced by the absence of safety and comfort during her own life. Janie on the other hand, not having had the terrible experience of living through slavery, dreams of a more fulfilling life for herself. It reminds me of a quote from Alexander Dumas, who said:

“There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more.”

Alexandre Dumas

After two years with Logan, she runs away with man named Joe Starks. He is ambitious and charismatic and he takes her with him to the first all black community in the United States.

Fun Fact! Hurston actually grew up in this community in Florida, called Eatonville.

Joe is obsessed with money and status. He becomes the mayor of the town and builds a community that includes a general store and a post office. He gets rich and treats Janie like a trophy as he flaunts her as the mayor’s wife. Even though Janie has both wealth and power here, she’s excluded from attending local events and is kept from participating in the town gossip around the store.

The novel jumps ahead 20 years without much of a paragraph describing the interval. It’s suggestive of an uneventful and bland existence for Janie. Eventually, her second husband dies and Janie meets her third lover.

His name is Vergible Woods. Everyone calls him Tea Cake. He is several years her junior, but the two fall in love and they move to the Everglades to work in the muck and pick beans.

It’s a vivid contrast to her past marriages with Joe or Logan. Tea Cake doesn’t treat her like an employee like Logan had done, nor exclude her like Joe had done. He makes Janie feel free and liberated and even teaches her to play checkers, something Joe kept from her.

Tea Cake isn’t perfect though. At one time he steals Janie’s money, runs off, and gambles it away. He also beats her occasionally, not because he wants to, but because he feels his society demands it of him.

Still, Janie, Tea cake, and their community have fun, and they’re happy.

But the good times don’t last long. During a hurricane that storms through the Everglades, Tea Cake is bitten by a Rabid dog and gets rabies. Janie is forced to shoot and kill Tea Cake who, in his madness, tries to kill her.

After the trial, in which the judge takes pity on her and recognizes the genuine love she had for Tea Cake, she’s absolved of her crime. Janie then moves back to Eatonville, with money, freedom, individuality, and experience; satisfied, for the first time with herself and at peace with her existence.

“Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.” 

Zora Neale Hurston

Throughout the novel, Janie is denied something in all three of her marriages, but she learns something about herself from each one of them. It wasn’t until her last marriage with Tea Cake, where she is finally treated like an equal, that she finds her sense of self and individual fulfilment.

Their Eyes is about love and self-discovery. Its optimistic and uplifting. Even though the ending is sad, we see a transformation that had taken place in Janie. After she tells her story, her friend phoeby declares: “Lawd! Ah done growed ten feet higher from jus’ listenin’ tuh you, Janie. Ah ain’t satisfied with mahself no mo’. Ah means tuh make Sam take me fishin’ wid him after this.”

“Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches” 

Zora Neale Hurston

Unfortunately, Their Eyes wasn’t received very well at the time of its publication. Hurston lived in relative obscurity and poverty for most of her life. It wasn’t until the 1975, fifteen years after Hurston’s death, that Alice Walker (The Colour Purple) published an essay documenting her search for Hurston’s unmarked grave, and revived the literary classic.

Walker defended Hurston saying she was: “wildly in love with people of colour.” When people read her work they “saw this unstoppable joy, I mean, your not supposed to be joyful, your down there being lynched, you know, your supposed to be always picketing something, and if your not picketing at least you’ll be sending our leaflets and fighting. But to actually have joy in your life is a great victory. That is what I feel Hurston left us; this ability to understand what true success is. True success is about being happy, it’s about doing what you have to do to survive. You have your good times, you have your dances, you have music, this is it. She shared this with us, at great cost to herself.”

Walker found Hurston’s grave and had a tombstone with the words: “A Genius of the South” inscribed on it.

One of the novel’s most vocal critics was Richard Wright, who accused Hurston of “Voluntarily continuing in the novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes ‘the white folks’ laugh.”

Wright felt that Their Eyes carried: “no theme, no message, no thought.” He claimed that: “her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.”

Strong words, but it wasn’t all negative.

“Miss Hurston can write,” he admitted, “Her dialogue manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their pure simplicity, but that’s as far as it goes.”

Wright’s criticisms were borne out of his opposing political ideology. Hurston was a conservative and her political views, however subtle, shine through her work.

In the novel, one of the most influential black leaders of the late 19th century, Booker T. Washington, is mentioned. His name is brought up when a hateful and disliked woman calls him a: “white folks’ nigger.” Janie disagreed, she believed him to be a great man.

Washington had controversial views about the path to equality. He felt that blacks had to accept discrimination for a while and should concentrate on elevating themselves through hard work and material prosperity.

In a rivalry, much like Hurston’s and Wrights, W.E.B. Du Bois, a black intellectual and political thinker disagreed with Washington’s ideas. He said that they would serve only to perpetuate white oppression. Du Bois fought for political action and a civil rights instead.

Hurston didn’t believe in what she called the: “sobbing school of Negrohood,” nor did she feel, in her words: “tragically coloured.”

She believed in empowering individuals to obtain economic and social justice on their own, without the help of liberal government interventions. Despite her novel only lightly touching on race and politics, she was frequently vocal about her opinions in letters and other writings:

“Suppose a Negro does something really magnificent, and I glory, not in the benefit to mankind, but in the fact that the doer was a Negro. Must I not also hang my head in shame when a member of my race does something execrable? The white race did not go into a laboratory and invent incandescent light. That was Edison. If you are under the impression that every white man is Edison, just look around a bit.”

“If I say a whole system must be upset for me to win, I am saying that I cannot sit in the game, and that safer rules must be made to give me a chance. I repudiate that. If others are in there, deal me a hand and let me see what I can make of it, even though I know some in there are dealing from the bottom and cheating like hell in other ways.”

She rejected, mockingly, the need of social welfare: “We were brought here against our will. We were held as slaves for two hundred and forty-six years. We are in no way responsible for anything. We are dependants. We are due something from the labours of our ancestors. Look upon us with pity and give!”

“Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can anyone deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”

Zora Neale Hurston

Three years after Their Eyes was published, Richard Wright would publish his Novel, Native Son. Wright would say in a speech given after the novel was published that “The birth of Bigger Thomas (the main character) goes back to my childhood, and there was not just one Bigger, but many of them, more than I could count and more than you suspect.”

Native Son

In a striking contrast between the two novels, Native Son is violent, angry, and hateful. It’s a gripping and tense train wreck of psychologically descriptive and harrowing accounts of racism in the early 20th century.

Wright would comment that after he had seen some reviews come in of a previous book of short stories that he had written called Uncle Tom’s Children: “I realized that I had made an awfully naive mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.”

Wrights intention with the novel was to awaken the realities of racism in America. He felt that the nation faced a great danger, one that would destroy the country if it wasn’t properly addressed.

“I felt that if I drew the picture of Bigger truthfully, there would be many reactionary whites who would try to make of him something that I did not intend. And yet, and this is what made it difficult, I knew that I could not write Bigger convincingly if I did not depict him as he was: that is, resentful toward whites, sullen, angry, ignorant, emotionally unstable, depressed, and unaccountably elated at times, and unable even, because of his own lack of inner organization which American oppression had fostered in him, to unite with the members of his own race.”

“The more I thought of it the more I became convinced that if I did not write of Bigger as I saw and felt him, if I did not try to make him a living personality and at the same time a symbol of all the larger things I felt and saw in him, I’d be reacting as Bigger himself reacted: that is, I’d be acting out of fear if I let what I thought whites would say constrict and paralyze me.”

In the novel, Bigger, his mother, sister, and brother live in a cramped, one bedroom apartment on the south side of Chicago in the 1930’s. Wealthy real estate owners refuse to rent out apartments to black people in white neighbourhoods, because of that, the south side, or the”black belt,” is overpopulated and the rent is artificially inflated.

Wright’s descriptions of Bigger’s thoughts are somber, and hopeless.

“…he hated his family because he knew that they were suffering and that he was powerless to help them. He knew that the moment he allowed himself to feel to its fullness how they lived, the shame and misery of their lives, he would be swept out of himself with fear and despair. So he held toward them an attitude of iron reserve; he lived with them, but behind a wall, a curtain. And toward himself he was even more exacting. He knew that the moment he allowed what his life meant to enter fully into his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else. So he denied himself and acted tough.”

Bigger gets a job as a driver for the Daltons, a wealthy, white family who want to give twenty-year-old Bigger an opportunity. On his first night, Mary, the daughter, asks Bigger to drive her to the university. However, she skips class and makes him pick up her boyfriend instead, a man named Jan. The three of them go to a restaurant in the black belt. Throughout the night, Mary and Jan treat Bigger like an equal, but it’s humiliating to him.

“Did not white people despise black skin? Then why was Jan doing this? Why was Mary standing there so eagerly, with shining eyes? What could they get out of this? Maybe they did not despise him? But they made him feel his black skin by just standing there looking at him… He felt he had no physical existence at all right then; he was something he hated, the badge of shame which he knew was attached to black skin. It was a shadowy region, No Man’s Land, the ground that separated the white world from the black that he stood upon.”

“At that moment he felt toward Mary and Jan a dumb, cold, and articulate hate.”

His treatment by Mary and Jan confuses him. It runs contrary to his entire understanding of socially acceptable behaviour at the time.

“The moment a situation became so that it exacted something of him, he rebelled. That was the way he lived; he passed his days trying to defeat or gratify powerful impulses in a world he feared.”

Bigger drives the couple around and they get drunk together. They drop Jan off and he takes Mary home. Because she is intoxicated, she needs to be helped up the stairs and into her room. As Bigger is putting Mary into bed, Mary’s mother is heard calling for her. She is blind and she slowly approaches Mary’s bedroom. Bigger, fearing that he would be accused of raping Mary if he was caught upstairs in her room, holds a pillow over Mary’s head to keep her quiet. Bigger unintentionally suffocates Mary. When Mary’s mother approaches, she smells the liquor and thinks the unresponsive Mary has just passed out and she leaves the room.

Bigger burns Mary’s body in the furnace and plans to blame the whole thing on Jan, who was a communist and was viewed with the same sort of animosity and suspicion as Bigger was.

“Though he had killed by accident, not once did the need to tell himself that it had been an accident. He was black and he had been alone in a room where a white girl had been killed; therefore he had killed her. That was what everybody would say anyhow, no matter what he said. And in a certain sense he knew that the girl’s death had not been accidental… His crime seemed natural; he felt that all of his life had been leading to something like this.”

The story continues with Bigger murdering his own girlfriend, Bessie, because he felt that she would reveal too much. Eventually he is caught and goes on trial for the death penalty. In court, the people seem to care less about the death of the Bessie than they do Mary.

Like Hurston, Wright would also face some hard criticism for his novel. His most noteworthy critic was the author James Baldwin. This is from an article from PushBlack.org: “The Revealing Conflict between Baldwin and Wright”:

“Baldwin’s main critique of “Native Son” was that it reinforced dangerous racial stereotypes about Black people. He argued that Wright used these disgusting depictions of Blacks to appease his white audience and sell more books. In essence, Wright “sold out” his own community by giving his characters stereotypical traits to make them palatable for whites in hopes to elicit their sympathy. Bigger Thomas, the story’s protagonist, was a murderer and rapist motivated by animal-like impulses while his supporting characters were petty criminals, mammies, and Negroes satisfied with an average life in the ghetto.”

“Representation matters in more than just novels, and that is why Baldwin took the time to address Wright. He understood that these were more than mere words on a page; these words carried consequences. If Blacks are perpetually portrayed as urban, criminal, lazy, and aggressive, people may truly believe that all Blacks fit those descriptions. This leads to a public that devalues the lives of Blacks and sees us as expendable. And ultimately, Baldwin believed Wright contributed to these destructive narratives.”

“It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.”

James Baldwin

In the novel, Bigger’s lawyer is a communist named Max, his defence is based on the unconscious effects of systemic racism and segregation. He points out all the unfair prejudices that Bigger had faced his whole life and he accuses society as a whole of killing Mary and Bessie.

“We are dealing here with an impulse stemming from deep down. We are dealing here not with how man acts toward man, but with how man acts when he feels that he must defend himself against, or adapt himself to, the total natural world in which he lives.”

Wright himself was a Marxist, and his ideologies are channeled through Max in the novel.

Marxism is a philosophical and economic theory that suggests that human societies and their development are the result of material conditions rather than ideals. It opposes private property and our current capitalist system. Marxists argue that our actions, our thought processes, and our ideas are caused by the existing class struggles present in our society.

Critics of Marxism claim that unlike socialism, capitalism isn’t a man made system at all, but is the beneficial consequence of the assumption that individuals are primarily motivated by self-interest; a variable that Marxists ignore.

I was surprised to learn that the founders of the current Black Lives Matter organization have stated publicly that they are “trained Marxists.” The mission statement on their website says that, in addition to liberating black people, the they want to, “alongside comrades,” “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.”

For Wright, it was a way for humanity to exist on equal terms. He would write that “I was a communist because I was a Negro. Indeed the Communist Party had been the only road out of the black belt for me.”

CONCLUSION

Despite Hurston and Wright both striving for equality for themselves and their race, why do their books contain such opposing ideologies? Although Hurston might have avoided politicizing her works, she was still aware of the racial inequality present in society, she just believed in a different solution.

The economist Thomas Sowell, who was himself a Marxist early in his career for the same reasons as Wright, wrote a book called A Conflict of Visions to help simplify and explain the root of these political conflicts.

In it, he breaks down two concepts that he calls the “unconstrained vision” and the “constrained vision.”

This is from Wikipedia:

“Sowell argues that the unconstrained vision relies heavily on the belief that human nature is essentially good. Those with an unconstrained vision distrust decentralized processes and are impatient with large institutions and systemic processes that constrain human action. They believe there is an ideal solution to every problem, and that compromise is never acceptable. Collateral damage is merely the price of moving forward on the road to perfection. Sowell often refers to them as “the self anointed.” Ultimately they believe that man is morally perfectible. Because of this, they believe that there exist some people who are further along the path of moral development, have overcome self-interest and are immune to the influence of power and therefore can act as surrogate decision-makers for the rest of society.”

It’s this “morally perfectible man” that is absolutely necessary for Marxism and socialism to work. In this view, intention matters more than consequences. Social change and public policy are implemented with the ideal solution in mind, not real world outcomes.

“Sowell argues that the constrained vision relies heavily on belief that human nature is essentially unchanging and that man is naturally inherently self-interested, regardless of the best intentions. Those with a constrained vision prefer the systematic processes of the rule of law and experience of tradition. Compromise is essential because there are no ideal solutions, only trade-offs. Those with a constrained vision favour solid empirical evidence and time-tested structures and processes over intervention and personal experience. Ultimately, the constrained vision demands checks and balances and refuses to accept that all people could put aside their innate self-interest.”

According to the constrained vision, Wrights novel, despite illustrating the justified resentment and hate that Bigger felt, might have negative real world consequences. What message is he sending to his readers? If we remove accountability for our actions, what might the ramifications of that look like?

Alternatively, when we look at Hurston’s novel with the lens of the unconstrained vision, she seems to be suppressing the potential of her race. By painting a simple and joyful picture, she’s accused of encouraging satisfaction with the status quo and inhibiting growth through inaction.

Who do you agree with? Wright? or Hurston? Which vision do you believe in?

Thanks for reading.

Featured image is called Aspiration (1936), by the Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas.

Photo Credit: De Young Museum

This was a speech given by the author David Foster Wallace as the commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005.

Photo credit: Kenyon College.

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

If at this moment you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude-but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let’s get concrete…

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here’s one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real-you get the idea. But please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called “virtues.” This is not a matter of virtue-it’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired, and you’re stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home-you haven’t had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job-and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the workday, and the traffic’s very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store’s hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can’t just get in and quickly out. You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store’s crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough checkout lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can’t take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.

Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn’t fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV- intensive rush-hour traffic, et cetera, et cetera.

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to foodshop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I’ve worked really hard all day and I’m starved and tired and I can’t even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people.

Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-theday traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth…

Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do-except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn’t have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It’s the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It’s not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to rush to the hospital, and he’s in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am-it is actually I who am in his way. And so on.

Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you’re “supposed to” think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it’s hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you’re like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat-out won’t want to. But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line-maybe she’s not usually like this; maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who’s dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Department who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible-it just depends on what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important-if you want to operate on your default-setting-then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying. But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars-compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship…

Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship-be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles-is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things-if they are where you tap real meaning in life-then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already-it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race”-the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to thirty, or maybe fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness-awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

“Employ your time in improving yourself by other people’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have laboured hard for.”

Socrates

This will be my tenth post! It’s hard to believe how quickly time passes sometimes. I’d like to thank everyone for reading, and for the kind words. A few of you have even told me that I’ve inspired you to read more. It’s hearing encouraging words like that that make this all worth while for me.

It’s a difficult thing to put your heart and soul into something like this. To have it be aired out like dirty laundry, for it to be criticized and ridiculed.

Every post that I’ve written so far I’ve had to fight with. I’ve had to overcome enormous amounts of debilitating self-doubt and fear. Everyday I wrestle with some nagging voice that tells me that I’m embarrassing myself, that I’m not good enough, and that I should quit.

So why continue? Why put myself through that? Life is too short to be doing things that make you unhappy.

It’s that type of attitude that makes us even more unhappy in the long run, not the other way around. It’s exactly why we have a hard time creating good, long lasting habits, because the pay-off isn’t immediate. If we don’t see results quickly enough, we get discouraged and we lose our motivation.

But motivation is only the half of it.

Everyday we have internal debates with ourselves about making positive changes in our lives, and most of the time we lose. The cynical and negative side always seems to have the best and most effective arguments.

In order to push yourself though hard times, or to pursue a meaningful goal, you have to be able to win that fight.

You have be confident and disciplined. You have to be able to not care what other people think, and it starts with how you think.

That’s why these quotes have helped me so much. They allow me to think about problems in a different way.

They have helped me change the way that I approach fear and doubt. They help me fend off the unhealthy mindsets that occasionally creep up on me, and they inspire me to take chances, avoid negativity, and give me the confidence to believe in myself.

I hope you enjoy them and that you find them as useful to you as they have been to me.

1.

“The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.” 

Thomas Hardy

A common thing our society does is measure success using the wrong metrics.

We praise people who are already successful, as if being successful makes them worthy of our approval.

Rather than wealth or fame, what if you measured success by a person’s character? Or their faithfulness to commitment? Or their generosity?

If you change your definition of success, you can save your admiration for the people who deserve it. You might also discover that failure might be less likely and confidence easier to obtain if you’re driven by integrity as opposed to greed or your own ego.

2.

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

Calvin Coolidge

I read something similar recently from the comedian Steve Martin: “Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent.”

Success is directly related to how much you want it. It’s as simple as that.

This is from an interview with Terry Crews on The Tim Ferris Show:

“Now, the way your life is, truthfully, you want it. Now, that’s hard to say because a lot of people are like no way. There’s so many other obstacles. There’s this and this and this and this. But the truth is, if you wanted something different, you’d change it. And that hit me. Like it’s scary because, if I failed, or if I showed up wrong or messed up on something, I was like I didn’t really do what it took to get it.”

“But that’s kind of the way fitness, success, any goal, any aspiration, you must be it now. That book, the thing you want to write, or that thing you want to accomplish, you have to be it now. You are an author. So, now, what do authors do? Authors write. And when authors write, they have a book. And I’m telling you, it sounds really, really simple. But once you get it, forever, you will never think of anything the same way again.”

3.

“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.”

Seneca

This one pairs well with #4.

4.

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, be better.”

Mary angelou

I don’t think my writing is very good. Actually, I know its not. But these words have consistently inspired me to continue.

I read a tweet once from a prominent blogger who said that: your first 99 blog posts will be bad, but your 100th will be great.

I’m ten percent there!

It’s all about re-framing how you think about failure. It isn’t something that you should avoid; it’s something that’s necessary in order to improve. As long as you continue to learn, it should be thought of as proof that your getting better, not worse.

5.

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

Winston Churchill

6.

“The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.”

Theodore Roosevelt

7.

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

Archilochus

There is a common saying that you hear often: “quality over quantity.”

Obviously, it has its value in certain contexts, but when it comes to personal growth, it can be detrimental. It encourages perfectionism, something that isn’t very helpful when you’re trying to learn.

Sometimes you can expect too much from yourself. You compare your abilities to the abilities of others who are at the top of their game. What you should be doing instead is comparing your abilities to theirs when they were at a similar skill level as you.

You need to understand that everyone was a beginner once.

8.

“Every activity that I engage in has to contain the possibility of internal growth, otherwise it ends up either, “Making a living” or “Passing time” – two ways of going through life that feel to me like a living death”

Alan Arkin

This one is not so much about actionable advice or a shift in perspective, it’s just a reminder to myself to keep learning; to not get stuck in the status quo.

Not progressing and developing personally, is to me, worse than failure.

9.

“Our doubts are traitors and cause us to miss the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.”

Shakespeare

Fear is an important and essential tool for your survival. The emotion is hard-wired into your nervous system. When you sense danger or feel threatened, your body reacts physiologically by triggering a fight-or-flight response.

Fear can be your best friend when you need it, but it can also be your worst enemy when you don’t. The hard part is, is that you can’t always tell the difference.

I’m fearful of sharing my writing with people. I feel like an imposter that will be found out and exposed, and I’m scared of the embarrassment that would accompany failure if I was to ever give up.

But re-thinking fear has allowed me to ask myself: whats the worst that could happen? Am I in any danger? Is it going to kill me? If not, it’s probably not worth being fearful about it.

I’m reminded of a Marcus Aurelius quote:

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

This is a another way I frame things when I think about fear: When I’m long dead, are people going to remember me if I wouldn’t have had the courage to leave something behind? Probably not.

If you avoid uncomfortable situations you might be better off in the short term, but at what cost?

Life is bigger than you. Your time here is short, it’s not worth keeping your imaginary fears and apprehensions.

10.

“He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To overcome fear, the stoic philosopher Seneca, would willingly put himself in scenarios that he was most fearful of.

For example, to overcome a fear of being poor, he would go days at a time “content with the scantiest and cheapest fare.” By doing so, he proved to himself that life is never as bad as he imagined it. “We shall be rich with all the more comfort, if we once learn how far poverty is from being a burden.”

Another stoic philosopher named Cato, did something similar. He would dress in embarrassing clothes so that people would make fun of him. He was training himself to be comfortable in high stress situations. “He would accustom himself to be ashamed only of what deserves shame, and to despise all other sorts of disgrace.”

11.

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”

Robert Louis Stevenson

I would have written sow. Don’t you think it would have sounded better? Plant. More like face plant, Robert.

Anyway, this is another example of how you can shift your perspective. Understand that things take time, that Rome wasn’t built in a day. Be patient. Learn to enjoy the journey and not just the destination.

12.

“If you wish to be out front, then act as if you were behind.”

Lao Tzu

The people who believe themselves to be at rock bottom in their lives are the ones with the clearest trajectory for success. They have nothing to lose. What’s the worst that could happen? They could fail and hit rock bottom?

Some of the most successful people have had to overcome impossible odds. They were abused, or bullied, or told that they couldn’t do something. Because of that, they we’re driven to succeed, to prove the world wrong.

Think about the amazing things that people accomplish when they’re told, for example, that they’ll never walk again after an accident. The world is full of personal stories like that. These people don’t let their handicaps hold them down. They use it as fuel.

The beautiful thing is that: it’s just a mindset. It doesn’t have to be influenced by experience alone. We can teach ourselves to think that way without all the negative external events.

13.

“I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.”

Frederick Douglass

I struggle with this one all the time. Especially now. It’s difficult to be honest without offending someone.

But to be encouraged toward truth by the people that are remembered for fighting for truth, makes for good company when the public may turn their back on you.

14.

“I do not care so much what I am to others, as I care to what I am to myself.”

Michel De Montaigne

Same idea as the Fredrick Douglass quote. Still, it’s worth repeating.

15.

“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.”

Henry David Thoreau

Jordan Peterson has a chapter in his book, 12 Rules For Life, titled: “Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.” In it, he explains how we lack respect for ourselves because we alone are aware of everything about us that makes us imperfect. We don’t think that we deserve attention from others because of that awareness. On the other hand, when we think about other people, we think that they deserve the necessary support and care that they need.

Next time your being hard on yourself, ask if that’s how you would treat your partner or friend.

If you want success, you have to feel worthy of that success. You have to believe that you deserve it. And you do.

16.

“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”

Johann Von Goethe

17.

“Most of the shadows of this life are caused by our standing in one’s own sunshine.” 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

He could have said: you are your own worst enemy. We’ve all heard that one before.

But there is a subtle difference. You might not deserve to have enemies, and you might not be deliberately acting against your own best interests.

Emerson’s quote is different because it means you all deserve your own sunshine indiscriminately, and that you might just be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Meaning that you just haven’t learned to think about something in a more meaningful or helpful way.

18.

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I would think about writing, I would ask myself “What do you have to say that hasn’t already been said?”

The answer was always discouraging, but I’m comforted by the idea that no one else will ever have my unique perspective. No one has or ever will have the exact same set of experiences in the same order that i’ve had them in.

Each of you has a story unlike any other. You might not re-invent the wheel, but you can put your own spin on it. See what I did there?

Many of the following quotes touch on these themes of individuality and non-conformity. They are some of the biggest obstacles we need to deal with in order to overcome self-doubt.

19.

“It is better to fail at originality than to succeed in imitation.”

Herman Melville

20.

“What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?”

Ralph Ellison

21.

“To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.”

George Hegel

22.

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric”

Bertrand Russel

23.

“Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong”.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you haven’t already noticed, I included a heavy dose of Emerson. Most of his quotes are from a wonderful and powerful essay he wrote called Self-Reliance. Its had a huge influence on me. I’ll put the link Here if you want to check it out.

I’d also like to give a shout out to a good friend of mine, Dustin Ritter, who was generous enough to draw this awesome portrait of Emerson for me. You can visit his Instagram page @dustin.j.ritter to see his impressive body of work.

You might notice that Dustin is a dog lover. He’s honed his craft by providing personalized portraits of people’s pets as memorable keepsakes. Most of his other work consists of the portraits of comedians, actors, and musicians, of which the last category, he belongs to himself. You can listen to the newest Dustin Ritter Band album, The Weightless Effect, on Spotify.

24.

Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look there.

Marcus aurelius

I interpret that internal strength to mean confidence.

We all have the potential to be confident, but most of us think it’s caused by something outside of ourselves.

When we come across a successful person for example, we often think that they’re confident because they’re successful. In most cases, the opposite is true: they’re successful because the are confident.

Confidence is a choice.

25.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Kurt Vonnegut

Confidence might be a choice, but too much of it can be mistaken for arrogance.

The difference between the two lies in your intention.

It wasn’t long after I started this blog that I learned a valuable lesson about humility. I wrote a piece about Jordan Peterson recently, and after I published it, I sent the link to his daughter Mikhaila on Twitter. She told me that she loved it, and she re-tweeted it.

She has roughly 70k followers, and in the matter of a few hours I had over two thousand people reading my article.

This modest increase in readers was enough to seduce me into thinking more about growing my audience. My ego had momentarily caused me to forget the real reason that I created my blog; to share wisdom, practice my writing, and to leave something behind.

Now, don’t get me wrong, it would be nice to grow an audience and to have recognition, but I noticed how my mindset had changed. I was thinking about how to pander and appeal to readers as opposed to being genuine.

I learned that arrogance thrives off of external validation and comparing yourself to others.

Real confidence, on the other hand, means that your not afraid to be vulnerable. It means that your quest for success or truth is authentic and honest. It shows that you don’t care what other people think and that your willing to learn.

I’m sure you have all heard of “playing hard to get,” or “fake it ’till you make it,” but these “tricks” will usually only get you into trouble. Eventually, other people will realize that your actions are inconsistent with the rest of your character.

True confidence is being comfortable with who you are. Being honest, and being true to yourself.

26.

“Because of self confidence with which he had spoken, no-one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid.”

Leo Tolstoy

You also have to be somewhat foolish to be confident. It’s like taking a leap of faith.

You have two minds: an individual mind and a societal mind. Everything you do gets filtered through those two.

Often times to fit in, you ignore our own mind so that you can blend in with the crowd.

But when you do focus on your own mind, you lose that safety net that society provides.

As a consequence, your contrasting opinions can becomes vividly transparent, and they can seem foolish in comparison. But if you believe in what you say, and you say it with conviction, people just might believe you.

It’s like that quote from Peter Pan:” The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease to be able to do it.”

27.

“I have great faith in fools – self-confidence is what my friends call it.”

Edgar Allen Poe

28.

“All you need in this life, is ignorance and confidence, then success is sure.”

Mark Twain

29.

“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, your’e right.”

Henry ford/matt lowry

30.

“The obstacle is the way.”

Ryan Holiday

This is a common stoic principle that I think about often. When we are confronted with doubt and fear, the best way around it, is through it.

Seneca said that: “Misfortunes are virtues opportunity.”

Marcus Aurelius said: “Here is a rule to remember in future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not “This is misfortune,” but “To bear this worthily is good fortune.” 

Epictetus said that: “The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.”

31.

“It had long come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things”

Leonardo Da vinci

And they don’t have to be big things either. This is from Naval Ravikant: “Play Iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.”

Gary Keller is the author of the best-selling book titled, The One Thing. The book breaks down the benefits of asking ourselves continuously: “What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

It’s also an especially helpful tool when life gets overwhelming and stressful.

32.

“Most people fail in life not because they aim too high and miss, but because they aim too low and hit.”

Les Brown

Learning from success is just as important as learning from failure. Giving up too early on compounding interest defeats the whole purpose of it.

33.

“Hold up your head! You were not made for failure, you were made for victory. Go forward with a joyful confidence.”

George Eliot

Thanks for reading.

Before you go, I’d like to quickly mention a few bloggers/writers that have inspired me lately.

Scott Bryan writes a weekly newsletter called 1-2-3 Miscellany. In it, he breaks down: an interesting ethical dilemma, a random news story, and a random oddity. He’s an excellent writer and the subject matter is always super interesting. His last one talks about the disconnection of humanity in the language used by tech companies when they think about their users. He argues that it lacks empathy and respect citing terms like “targets”, “viral”, “engagement,” and “funnels.” Check his site out Here. Or follow him on twitter @ScottDbryan.

Another great writer who I’ve stumbled upon is Joshua Nzambimana. You can visit his site Here, or follow him on instagram @joshuathinks. He’s incredibly smart and he makes the most interesting observations on subjects like imagination, solitude, death, and perception. He’s worth checking out.