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Hello, As you may have noticed, this is a late late night letter. I try to write the last night of each month with religious zeal, but I got dehydrated on a long midday run yesterday and had a migraine headache of the incapacitating sort the rest of the day. These times feel especially important times for stirring words, and I didn’t want to give this letter a half-hearted, whole-headached attempt. So, I’m writing to you a night late. As I’m sure you’re aware, we humans are in a significantly different situation at the beginning of this month than we were the last. We’re contending with a virus that recently jumped to humans, that’s very contagious, lethal to a small percentage of us, and has spread with remarkable speed across our globalized world. I know I don’t have to explain all this, it’s become our cultural focal point and its implications have probably already impacted your life in a major way. I’d like to use this letter to share three ideas that have been tremendously helpful to me in tough times, that I feel directly relate to this COVID-19 situation: 1. “There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands.” The quote atop this letter, from Richard Bach’s book Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, is one of my favorite sentences of all time. I am a fortunate someone who today considers something I initially considered the worst thing that ever happened to me to be the best thing that ever happened to me. And this single sentence quote contains the entire idea that allowed that change to take place. There are positive and negative aspects to everything in our experience, and to only worry about what something might take is to entirely miss what something might give. The same goes for this coronavirus situation. 2. Stoicism and the ability to shift between different planes of awareness. There are two main philosophies for dealing with the heaviest of human hardship that I knowingly follow today. The first is Stoicism, which is a more rational, act at the level of your direct experience sort of philosophy. I’m not going to attempt to teach you anything about Stoicism in this paragraph, but there are two books on my Bookshelf — Meditations and The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca — both of which are 2,000-year-old works more directly applicable to this COVID-19 situation than anything I’ve read written within decades of today.
The “ability to shift between different planes of awareness” idea here has less to do with dealing with tasks at hand (like Stoicism), and more to do with seeing above, below, and beyond them. If you figuratively have two “mental feet,” can you put one here dealing in this moment and simultaneously put the other in a place of a more spiritual understanding that spans beyond yourself as an individual, across time, and allows you to identify with something larger? It took me a long while to reach beyond myself as “Ethan, an individual” and discover that we can dwell on different planes. Books like The Snow Leopard and The Power of Now helped me open up and learn to shift my awareness and perspective.
If you find yourself social distancing with lots of downtime, these four books are beyond spiritual floatation devices — they’re more like guides for learning how to swim. I highly recommend each of them. 3. Times of great change are also times of great opportunity.
I believe the pain of loss, seas of boredom some will sail through social distancing, and general chaos of this time will produce fantastic works of art, personal transformation, and improve upon many ways in which our society works. Obviously, there will be tremendous loss as well. People are going to die. The economy will probably take a good walloping. A whole lot of us are already enduring this coronavirus situation and will have to continue to for who knows how long. However, I believe one of the greatest strengths we humans have is an ability to do — forgive me for using this word but it works — alchemy. To not just handle a problem, but discover the gifts hidden within and inherently connected to that problem and cultivate those gifts. There’s this quote I encountered a few weeks ago from a real intense looking guy by the name of Manly P. Hall that reads: “The alchemist taught that man contained within himself all the elements of nature, both human and divine, and that by a special culture the base elements of his nature could be transmuted into the spiritual gold called the soul. In discussing this, Paracelsus makes plain that these philosophers did not wish to leave the impression that something came from nothing, but rather they emphasized the fact that each individual thing contains all other things and that the alchemical process of making gold was merely to culture the germ of gold which is contained in every base substance.”
While that might sound woo-woo on the first read through, give it a second glance. Do you see the parallel to “a problem with a gift in its hands” concept in there? Perhaps a third pass through and it’ll jump out a bit more? Like combing that paragraph, it’s my hope that you will look for and find some of those unseen gifts within your experience this month my friends. We may find great benefit in practicing a little more alchemy than usual in the coming days. I’m eternally grateful for the opportunity to do so with you all.
With love & stoke, Ethan
P.S. The article below is a revised and improved version of last month’s Hawks, Fire, and the Problem with Pure “Objectivity. It was selected for Medium’s featured column Human Parts, and I got to hone it further with a great editor. While I may not like the new title as much, the complicated thing I’m trying to explain comes through much clearer. Do dive into it if you find you have the time!
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