“O Captain! My Captain!” by Walt Whitman (read by Tom O’Bedlam):
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red, Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills, For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding, For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; Here Captain! dear father! This arm beneath your head! It is some dream that on the deck, You’ve fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done, From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won; Exult O shores, and ring O bells! But I with mournful tread, Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.
I recently watched Dead Poets Society (1989) and absolutely loved it. The movie emphasizes the importance of both literature and critical thought; two forces that define much of who I am today.
While the movie references many poems, the one that sticks out is this one by Walt Whitman. In Dead Poets Society, “O Captain! My Captain!” is the phrase used by the students to address an unorthodox but inspiring English teacher, Mr. John Keating. I found the symbolism of this piece to the overall plot of the movie to be hauntingly beautiful.
Here are two takeaways from this poem:
1. Winning the war, but at what cost?
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, / The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won…
While “O Captain! My Captain!” was written at a time of celebration with the conclusion of the American Civil War, this poem is also an elegy for President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. As a result, victory and loss are closely intertwined throughout the poem and this juxtaposition illustrates the close nature between victory, and any associated pain.
When one’s fearful trip is done (=success over trials), it might be human instinct to immediately celebrate. However, occasionally one must acknowledge the sacrifices made to get to that position; sacrifices which may have far been too great to be fair.
But O heart! heart! heart! / O the bleeding drops of red, / Where on the deck my Captain lies, / Fallen cold and dead.
Personally, one of the saddest moments of my Undergraduate degree was when I achieved straight H1s for my second year of Biomedicine. It seems like a weird flex, but I felt that the sacrifices I made for my physical and mental health far outweighed the grades that I got. It was ultimately a great lesson on how to prioritise studies though.
2. Individuals vs. the Nation
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding, / For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Another juxtaposition found throughout this poem is the distinction between the speaker and the nation’s response. The nation is depicted as being rejoiceful and quickly moving on from any sacrifices made –emphasizing a nation’s wellbeing over an individual’s. However, the speaker is clearly seen to be mourning through the repetition of fallen cold and dead at the conclusion of each stanza.
This separation is something that can applied beyond President Lincoln’s assassination. Often, people don’t seem to care that much about others’ problems. And quite fairly so – why should they, when they have their own demons to face?
Yet, being alone in one’s mourning can feel terribly isolating and be costly for one’s wellbeing. As a result, this piece indirectly emphasizes the need for strong relationships; ones that go beyond the superficial and where one will step into another’s shoes, taking on their problems as their own.
This is simultaneously a begging of others, but also a call to action: that sometimes, no matter how trivial another’s problems are, it is worth being a friend to them – simply to protect another from the harsh isolation that the world can bring.
Disclaimer: I’m writing this as 2:30am as I realised yesterday was Thursday and woke up in a fright at missing my schedule. As a result, this may turn out to be a messy ramble that might not be representative of how I normally feel. Enjoy.
2020 has been a chaotic year. It’s brought on wonderful highs that have made my heart soar, and terrible lows that nearly drove me to take my own life. But wild experiences are often catalysts for growth, and this year was no different. Upon reflection, 2020 has been a breeding ground for insights, but here I’m just going to discuss the one that has been my biggest relevation.
The idea is: being okay with stuff not being okay.
This year, I discovered that people can really suck. We human beings can be entirely contradictory, tell blatant lies and commit acts of shameful morals. We put on a persona and disguise acts of complete selfishness as acts of charity, deceiving others and ourselves in the process. And when we see others commit the same transgression as ourselves, we reel in horror and disgust. While it seems like I’m accusing others for this, I’m really only speaking for myself.
But this is my favourite lesson of 2020: that things might suck, and this is okay.
As W. Somerset Maugham described this in his novel Of Human Bondage,
Then he saw that the normal was the rarest thing in the world. Everyone had some defect, of body or of mind: he thought of all the people he had known (the whole world was like a-sick-house, and there was no rhyme or reason in it), he saw a long procession, deformed in body and warped in mind, some with illness of the flesh, weak hearts or weak lungs, and some with illness of the spirit, languor of will, or a craving for liquor. At this moment he could feel a holy compassion for them all. They were the helpless instruments of blind chance.
Sure, people can suck. But why would we expect anything more? I doubt our ancestors were much holier than us. And history has revealed time and time again that humans are capable of pretty horrendous things.
Rather, if we reframe our worldview to see people as being naturally defected, we start seeing the good in others. We look past their failures and rejoice when we see a glimpse of scintillating morality.
Importantly, this radical acceptance of the state of things can be applied to other domains. 2020 had multiple global issues that touched upon cultural inequalities (BLM), a health crisis (Covid-19) and environmental illnesses (bushfires). While one could respond in offense and betrayal at the suffering in the world, it could be more productive just to accept it and act from there.
This is not to say that one should fly low in the face of mediocrity and injustice. Jesus loved the wretched but still tore down temples in the name of a higher goal. The danger I speak of is getting too attached to things being unfair. But instead, if we accept things for the state in which they are in, and avoid being overly idealistic, perhaps life can be lived in a happier and reasonable state.
Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese Buddhist and peace activist and is one of the most influential Buddhist teachers around today. I first encountered him a few years ago upon stumbling on one of his quotes, which I deeply resonated with:
People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer a suffering that is familiar.
But today, I came upon this exquisite piece on Maria Popova’s blog (Brain Pickings) that addresses Thich Nhat Hanh’s four mantras on turning fear into love. Whenever I come across a great article, I usually attempt to summarise the key points and put in some personal reflections, but this piece was so well-written that I’ve decided the best I can do is to share the whole thing here – might add some thoughts in a separate post.
“Fearlessness is what love seeks,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her magnificent early work on love and how to live with fear. “Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.”
This notion of presence as the antidote to fear and the crucible of love is as old as the human heart, as old as the consciousness that first felt the blade of anticipatory loss pressed against the exposed underbelly of the longing for connection. It is at the center of millennia-old Buddhist philosophy and comes alive afresh, in a splendidly practical way, in Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm (public library) by the great Vietnamese Buddhist teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, who continues to enrich, ennoble, and empower with his teachings well into his nineties.
Thich Nhat Hanh
In the general Buddhist style of befriending complexity through simplicity and with his particular gift for simple words strung into a rosary of immense wisdom radiating immense kindness, Thich Nhat Hanh writes:
We have a great, habitual fear inside ourselves. We’re afraid of many things — of our own death, of losing our loved ones, of change, of being alone. The practice of mindfulness helps us to touch nonfear. It’s only here and now that we can experience total relief, total happiness… In the practice of Buddhism, we see that all mental formations — including compassion, love, fear, sorrow, and despair — are organic in nature. We don’t need to be afraid of any of them, because transformation is always possible.
Such transformation is possible only through deliberate practice — none more challenging, or more rewarding, than the practice of transforming fear into love. In consonance with his teaching that “to love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love,” he anchors this transmutation practice in four mantras “effective for watering the seeds of happiness in yourself and your beloved and for transforming fear, suffering, and loneliness.”
Unlike a prayer — which channels a hope at some imagined entity capable of interceding in favor of that hope and has only as a side benefit (though arguably its only real and robust benefit) the psychological self-clarification that comes from honing our hopes in language — a mantra is not addressed at anything or anyone external and is entirely devoted to distilling the object of hope to its clearest essence. This, in and of itself, transforms the hope into an intent, making it more actionable — but also saving it from the particular complacency against which Descartes admonished as he considered the vital relationship between fear and hope. A mantra is therefore not a form of magical thinking, for while there is a sense of magic to how such distillation seems to shift the situation by its very utterance, it is an entirely practical sort of magic, for a mantra simply clarifies, concentrates, and consecrates intent, and all meaningful transformation springs from purposeful, devoted intent.
Thich Nhat Hanh writes:
A mantra is a kind of magic formula that, once uttered, can entirely change a situation. It can change us, and it can change others. But this magic formula must be spoken in concentration, with body and mind focused as one. What you say in this state of being becomes a mantra.
Within this conceptual framework, he offers four mantras for transforming fear into love, beginning with “Mantra for Offering Your Presence.” A generation after Simone Weil insisted that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” he writes:
The most precious gift you can give to the one you love is your true presence. So the first mantra is very simple: “Dear one, I am here for you.”
A century after Tolstoy insisted that “love is a present activity only,” Thich Nhat Hanh gently reminds us that the greatest resource of our own heart — our greatest source of power, our mightiest antidote to fear — is the quality of love we give through the quality of our presence:
When you love someone, the best thing you can offer that person is your presence. How can you love if you are not there? Come back to yourself, look into [their] eyes, and say, “Darling, you know something? I’m here for you.” You’re offering [them] your presence. You’re not preoccupied with the past or the future; you are there for your beloved. You must say this with your body and with your mind at the same time, and then you will see the transformation.
Such crystalline presence is the prerequisite for the next mantra — “Mantra for Recognizing Your Beloved”:
The second mantra is, “Darling, I know you are there, and I am so happy.”
To be there is the first step, and recognizing the presence of the other person is the second step. Because you are fully there, you recognize that the presence of your beloved is something very precious. You embrace your beloved with mindfulness, and he or she will bloom like a flower. To be loved means first of all to be recognized as existing.
In a sentiment of especial relevance and consolation in these disembodied times, he reminds us that these mantras can be performed across distance, across wires and cables and screens, not requiring the physical presence of the beloved — however they are articulated, they are at bottom meditations containing all four elements of true love as described by the Buddha: love, compassion, joy, and freedom.
While the third mantra, “Mantra for Relieving Suffering,” could be magnified and deepened by the atomic rewards of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “hugging meditation,” it too can be extended across the digital distance:
Even before you do anything to help, your wholehearted presence already brings some relief, because when we suffer, we have great need for presence of the person we love. If we are suffering and the person we love ignores us, we suffer more. So what you can do — right away — is to manifest your true presence to your beloved and say the mantra with all your mindfulness: “Dear one, I know you are suffering. That is why I am here for you.” And already your loved one will feel better.
Your presence is a miracle, your understanding of his or her pain is a miracle, and you are able to offer this aspect of your love immediately. Really try to be there, for yourself, for life, for the people you love. Recognize the presence of those who live in the same place as you, and try to be there when one of them is suffering, because your presence is so precious for this person.
The fourth and final mantra, “Mantra for Reaching Out to Ask for Help,” seems on the surface to be self-concerned, but is in fact the crucible of self-care from which all unselfish love and presence spring. It is also, Thich Nhat Hanh observes, the most difficult of the four, for it dwells in the place of our greatest vulnerability and at the same time pushes us to lean on our most crippling crutch:
This mantra is for when you are suffering and you believe that your beloved has caused you suffering. If someone else had done the same wrong to you, you would have suffered less. But this is the person you love the most, so you suffer deeply, and the last thing you feel like doing is to ask that person for help… So now it is your pride that is the obstacle to reconciliation and healing. According to the teaching of the Buddha, in true love there is no place for pride.
When you are suffering like this, you must go to the person you love and ask for his or her help. That is true love. Do not let pride keep you apart. You must overcome your pride. You must always go to him or her. That is what this mantra is for. Practice for yourself first, to bring about oneness of your body and mind before going to the other person to say the fourth mantra: “Dear one, I am suffering; please help.” This is very simple but very hard to do.
I’ve recently started a course called the Part-Time YouTuber Academy and it’s been great. I’m doing this alongside many creative individuals across the globe and the mutual inspiration that the group brings is incredible.
One of the key messages in this course so far, is the notion that when getting started, quantity matters over quality. A simple illustration of this comes from the Parable of the Pottery Class:
There was once a ceramics teacher called Brian. One month, Brian decided to split his class into two groups. Over 30 days, Group A would be graded on the quantity of work they produced, and Group B would be graded on the quality of work they produced. Group A had to submit 50 pounds worth of pots to be graded an “A”, 40 pounds for a “B” and so on, whereas Group B only had to work on a single pot and submit it by the end of the 30 days.
At the end of the month, Brian judged the quality of the pots. Without exception, every one of the top 10 pots came from Group A, those that made one pot per day. None came from the group that focused on perfecting their single pot.
Source: Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland.
The idea is, your first few iterations of anything will probably suck, whether it’s videos, drawing or singing. And that’s totally fine, because:
Nobody cares; and
Being bad shows you how you can be better.
And once enough iterations of failing, improving, failing and improving occur… maybe you’ll wake up one day and realise you don’t suck anymore.
So here’s a short reminder to myself that even though my video quality is substandard, I have camera confidence issues and editing takes a long time, that over time, things will improve.
Mark Twain once said, Eat a life frog first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day (side note: whether Twain actually said this is debatable).
Of all the productivity hacks I’ve tried, my favourite is eating the frog. The idea is that if you do your worst task (=frog) first thing in the morning, you can ride your wave of accomplishment through all your easier tasks, leading to a productive day. Makes sense: if you do tough work early, you can’t procrastinate on it. And personally, eating the frog in the morning has carried me through University life so far.
But what exactly is this frog? Though there is no consistent definition, most people define the frog as the most difficult, mentally strenuous task that must be completed that day. Some people have even gone to say that if you don’t eat the frog, the frog will eat you (yikes).
However, I’ve recently noticed that the days I eat the bad, ugly frog early on aren’t the days I remember at all. In fact, many of my most productive days I can hardly remember being pleasant at all. Rather, my best days have consistently been ones with:
A good night’s rest;
Some journaling and reading;
A bit of exercise;
New and interesting things learnt; and
Quality time around people I love.
And often, getting too caught up in being productive and doing good work leads to failing multiple of these conditions.
So tonight, I wonder: where does one draw the line between being productive vs. living a good life? Do the two need to be mutually exclusive? Can they be mutually exclusive? My guess is that the answer to these questions depends entirely on each individual and their dreams and ambitions.
On a slightly unrelated note, this eating the frog business reminds me of a piece by Marcus Aurelius in his meditations:
1. When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.
Hello Eric, here’s a graph outlining your levels of dogmatism over the last few years:
The trend is pretty clear. Coming fresh out of high school (pre-2017), you felt like you knew what you were doing. Your identity and beliefs were set solid and you weren’t afraid to let others know. You respected others, but for those who disagreed with you, perhaps a little less so.
But then came second and third year Uni (2018-19), when you met people smarter than yourself, and you suddenly fell under pressure from questions like why? and what makes you say that? Your ideologies, which once seemed so strong, now began to show cracks.
And in 2020, when you had time to think due to an extensive lockdown, you realised you know nothing at all.
You realised you don’t really understand terms like capitalism, Marxism, communism or democracy. You realised you’ve been throwing around opinions laid out by your smart friends and have been defending ideas that you haven’t really thought much about.
And it’s unsettling, because now you’re chronically uncomfortable giving your stance on an issue as:
You know the issue is complicated, but you don’t know why;
You know there are factors at play you’re not aware of, but you don’t know what;
You know you should go and find out more, but you’re not sure how.
Hence your very low dogmatism and chronic decision paralysis.
But perhaps – just perhaps – waging war against convoluted hyper-rationality is something worth pursuing. Maybe in a society of excessive digital deduction, the tendency to consider other points of view is an advantage, rather than a hindrance. As Bertrand Russell, a champion of analytic philosophy, suggests quite passionately:
One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid; and those with any imagination or understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
In the journey of living a good day, there are various villains one might encounter. For instance, sickness may whisper occasionally, melting your physical and mental strength; or its accomplice anxiety might pay you a visit, rendering you incapable of being rational.
But while sickness or anxiety are terrible in the moment, the flipside is that they usually go away. This cyclic period of battles and recoveries allows for multiple learning experiences, such that one can be better prepared to face them in the future. Cyclic natures like these tend to be found in many villains, though particularly dangerous genetic or chronic beasts are immune to this weakness.
Yet, there is one villain that I have frequently been bested by: phone addiction. This villain is sneaky because it has evolved to reside in objects that we increasingly rely on: our phones. So while other villains pop up periodically, this beast is something we encounter every day; and the more reliant we become on our devices, the more we feed the beast; and when the beast gets fed, it tears and rips at the curtains of our day until we are reduced to shreds of who we once were.
Okay, that’s a bit dramatic. But over the last few years, this has really been a huge problem for me.
However, I recently discovered a little antidote for this problem: the Screen Time Widget on iPhone. Basically, what it does is display your phone’s Screen Time on a home page so you can see it whenever you’re accessing your phone. This is what it looks like:
This is game-changing, for one of the most dangerous weapons of phone addiction is unawareness. Social media giants are terrifyingly good at keeping us unconsciously occupied on our devices, allowing the beast to feed through our consumption.
But what the Widget does is exactly the opposite: it provides a clear awareness of our phone usage. And my goodness, has this been amazing. Now, when I see my screen time creeping past an hour (thanks YouTube), I see the visualise the phone addiction beast growing and I set a hard stop for myself.
So, maybe it is this: the power of shining a light on this invisible, insidious beast, that is its weakness. And perhaps after enough blows to the face, I can look this villain in the eye and say that I’ve finally won.
Trying something new with some poem analysis. Enjoy, and feel free to disagree with my interpretations – criticism always welcome.
“Maximus, to himself” by Charles Olsen (read by Charles Olsen):
I have had to learn the simplest things last. Which made for difficulties. Even at sea I was slow, to get the hand out, or to cross a wet deck. The sea was not, finally, my trade. But even my trade, at it, I stood estranged from that which was most familiar. Was delayed, and not content with the man’s argument that such postponement is now the nature of obedience,
that we are all late in a slow time, that we grow up many And the single is not easily known
It could be, though the sharpness (the achiote) I note in others, makes more sense than my own distances. The agilities
they show daily who do the world’s businesses And who do nature’s as I have no sense I have done either
I have made dialogues, have discussed ancient texts, have thrown what light I could, offered what pleasures doceat allows
But the known? This, I have had to be given, a life, love, and from one man the world. Tokens. But sitting here I look out as a wind and water man, testing And missing some proof
I know the quarters of the weather, where it comes from, where it goes. But the stem of me, this I took from their welcome, or their rejection, of me
And my arrogance was neither diminished nor increased, by the communication
2
It is undone business I speak of, this morning, with the sea stretching out from my feet
I came across Maximus, to himself upon hearing the American writer Debbie Millman describe it as a “blueprint of [her] life”. And when a writer describes something as a blueprint of their life, I’m naturally curious.
This poem deeply struck me and so I’m going to try something I haven’t done before, which is a poem analysis. Here are three takeaways from this beautiful piece by Charles Olsen.
1. The things we never learn
I have had to learn the simplest things last. / Which made for difficulties.
This juxtaposition between learning the simplest things last hints at a struggle to understand the most fundamental of human qualities.
Sometimes I feel that the most basic questions like what it means to be a good person, or to love, or to be a friend are incredibly difficult to answer. It’s bizarre that convoluted questions like what the genetic locus for a rare disease is or the factors leading up to World War II can be discovered in a article or a book, but questions for fundamental questions on living seem more unanswerable every passing day.
2. The serenity of the present
I have made dialogues, / have discussed ancient texts, / have thrown what light I could, offered / what pleasures / doceat allows
It can be tempting to look towards history or past texts to find the antidote to difficult dilemmas. However, Olsen urges one to explore life through the act of simply living and mentorship:
But the known? / This, I have had to be given, / a life, love, and from one man / the world.
It’s unclear whether “one man” refers to God, himself or family, but the message remains: that engagement with the stories of the past is inferior to a life lived in the present.
3. The waters of life
It is undone business / I speak of, this morning, / with the sea / stretching out / from my feet
Finally, Olsen closes with an image that captures the root message of the poem and spurs a call to action.
Describing the sea as stretching out from my feet creates an overwhelming desire to ground oneself in a rapidly moving world. And though this may seem grim, perhaps we should rejoice at this thought. That while impossible trials and tribulations lay in front of us, we should seize the chance to live. To try, no matter how hopeless it seems, to live in the present, and to refine one’s relationship with the world.
Recently, I noticed that my worst days are ones where I excessively scroll the internet. It kinda feels like swimming in the ocean: the water might feel refreshing at first – an amusing meme, or a cool life update on Facebook – but the deeper you go, the more dangerous and unpredictable it becomes. Sharks in the form of clickbait titles and fake news might slowly circle you, watching for a weak spot. And if you’re unaware, they can take you under. And when you’re under, it can be very hard to get out unscathed.
Doomscrolling and doomsurfing are new terms referring to the tendency to continue to surf or scroll through bad news, even though that news is saddening, disheartening, or depressing. Many people are finding themselves reading continuously bad news about COVID-19 without the ability to stop or step back.
As a reminder to myself, here are five things better than doomscrolling to spend time:
For most of my life, I separated entertainment and education into mutually exclusive categories.
The entertainment category contained TV shows I grew up watching like How I Met Your Mother,Hell’s Kitchen and Pokémon. Shows that while funny, didn’t really stimulate my brain all that much. Songs, plays and comics also found themselves strictly in the entertainment category.
On the other hand, the education category was largely dominated by difficult books. Stuff like math textbooks, physics handouts or huge works of history. Stuff that while packed full of knowledge, were mind-numbingly boring.
But of course, the domains of entertainment and education can intersect in wonderful ways. One of the greatest gifts I’ve received in my life is the gift of enjoying literature. Books have made me weep with sorrow, laugh with delight and fume in anger, all while having my worldview changed in miraculous ways – arguably the greatest form of education.
Yuval: I think that Black Mirror, at least some of the episodes in Black Mirror, are some of the best discussions that I’ve seen of certain dangerous tendencies in current technology. Some episodes are just fun. San Junipero, I think it’s an extremely good episode, but it describes the reality, which is so far away from us that it’s not really relevant to any of the discussions here.
But if you look at Nosedive, and maybe the Chinese got the idea for their social quality system from Nosedive, but it’s such a powerful and important episode.
And so television, while still being the source of some pretty trashy shows, can also be a powerful means of discovering fresh worlds and new ideas. There’s a certain degree of engagement enabled by music, lighting and actors that books cannot replicate, giving TV the potential to showcase ideas in a unique light.
Thus, I’m pretty excited about the future of content creators. The potential for this entertainment-education symbiosis to engage, entertain and educate a huge audience is pretty amazing.
