Adversity as Exercise

The House for Human Flourishing is coming together. The interior feels surreal, living at the foot of the Phoenix Mountains Preserve is grand, and I should have my second roommate signed up this Friday.

It’s already a “bat signal” shining bright. A guitarist, vocalist, yoga instructor, life coach, physical therapist in training, actress, sauna manager, national park seasonal worker, and a few world-traveling-adventurous types — all interested/interesting people — inquired about living here. One already is, and a second soon will.

On the whole, it’s going great.

Day by day, however, buying a fixer-upper house and turning it into a beacon for curious compadres is an exercise in overcoming adversity. Molding matter is more challenging than pushing pixels, and building out such an intentional house comes with more trials and setbacks than the lightness of nomadic life.

It sometimes takes two trips to the Home Depot just to get two screws to sit flush in a wall. Or the shower tile is so smooth that a tension-held shower rod won’t hold, and you instead have to acquire the equipment and skill to drill into tile. Or the last Sunday of September, the concrete base crumbles out of the stylish, secondhand floor lamp you just purchased, a twenty-minute drive to pick up a $10 Buddha statue becomes an hour because of a car crash and the seller accidentally drops the Buddha on his head as you greet them, and that evening, you mount a framed Pale Blue Dot print to the wall and as you step back in wondrous admiration, it falls to the floor and glass shards scratch white specs into outer space larger than the pictured Earth.

One can regard such happenings as anything from “bad luck” to ceaseless tortures, but thanks to the great Greek philosopher and Stoic Seneca, I deliberately choose to regard all this adversity as exercise (after, of course, cursing the gods for a good bit).

Back in the winter of 2018, residing in my Honda Element and hiding out from the cold for a few evenings in a Burger King in Santa Fe, NM, I plowed through The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca, and the meaning-making alchemy of seeing adversity as exercise impressed upon me from lines like:

“Evils are not punishment but paternal correctives. They are like exercise to the athlete or medicine to the sick. Good men accept them willingly, for they offer themselves freely to the decrees of eternal fate.”

and

“No one is more unhappy, in my judgement, than a man who has never met with adversity.”

and

“I do not maintain that he is insensible to externals, but that he overcomes them… all adversity he regards as exercise.”

This September, relative to my usual at least, has gifted me a plethora of practice. It stings (and takes a few minutes to come around to it), but one can see adversity as exercise for the spirit and convert it into meaning (by willingly enduring it as part of the path toward one’s goal).

Or, in short: the equanimity on my smiling Buddha statue’s face has even more meaning because he’s broken his neck.

WAY:

Lower Thy Kelvins

We’ve lost our way with lighting. We use far-too-white, 5200 kelvin “daylight” bulbs throughout our homes, literally designed to “mimic natural midday sunlight.”

Want to subdue your space and give it a cozy, warm, amber vibe, and not subject your biology at night to bulbs that mimic the midday sun? Move down the spectrum to 2200 kelvin, Edison-style bulbs and reap the rewards of better vibes and deeper sleep.

The entire House for Human Flourishing lights up at 2200 kelvin (with the exception of the bathrooms, which have 2700 kelvin bulbs for a more neutral hue of one’s mirrored reflection).

P.S. The Yesman, on the road often these days, mentioned this past weekend that he travels with a salt lamp light bulb (they’re plastic and thus don’t break) to pop into any hotel room lamp.

PROFUNDITY:

A Short Lecture Series on Carl Jung’s Red Book

One of the wildest things I’ve discovered in the past year is that Carl Jung composed a kind of prophetic book across sixteen years of his life by intentionally inducing a near-psychotic state in himself to draw out the unconscious. He had apocalyptic visions, encountered re-appearing guides and characters, and purposely verged on madness by night — while maintaining a strong, scientific-objective ego as a kind of ballast towards sanity — to produce a book called Liber Novus, or The Red Book, that was hidden from the public until 2009.

These lectures, by a professor who religiously poured over the book for a year before its release, are a fascinating entry point.

Listen In

MUSIC:

The Belgian Blue - For Wards Weight / Summersweeps

One of my favorite humans walking the Earth is a deep-stream, Montana-raised guitarist/banjo player by the name of Ian Straun. We met in 2016, getting wifi at the only place we could, a picnic table on the porch of the Cooke City, MT Chamber of Commerce.

For me, it was one of those as rare as it is beautiful moments where you lock eyes with another, and that’s it. Some inexplicable deep thing is in perfect resonance. You recognize in them a long lost friend that you’ve yet to meet (years later, Ian actually confided he was skeptical about my wearing of baggy athletic shorts, but nonetheless, my instant internal resonance proved spot-on).

For many summers, we’d return to Silver Gate to revel tunes in a creekside wood-fired sauna, bag trail-less mountain peaks, and engage in tireless conversation of tremendous depth and substance.

The past two summers, neither of us have made it up to those mountains. It pains me, but the pain is outsized by glimpses of the dude living a tremendous life of music, love, and germanic heritage in Vienna, Austria. He’s the heart of an indie-folk band hailing from the world over called The Begian Blue, and Pádraig, their Irish lead singer, has one of the most resounding, haunting voices you ever did hear.

*Reality is truly stranger than fiction.

They just put out this double EP. It’s a vibe for a fall drive, or a slow evening among the fading days and growing nights. These guys are geniuses who breathe music. Not only are their more obvious banger songs like Blood and Beautiful World a gift, but their slower tunes like Summer Sweeps and Coyotes have become my over-time favorites.

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THROWBACK:

Waking Up in the Middle of a Dream

This article attempts to point to one of the most interesting things about being human: the bulk of our human “world” is malleable because it was made up.

I’m making up the culture of the House for Human Flourishing this fall, revisiting this piece struck a particular chord of inspiration in me while pondering it all in a coffee shop last weekend.

Dig It