Lessons From Experience

I spent an hour and half this morning over coffee with fellow Africa traveler, Buck Elliot, and talking with him reminded me of several things I’d forgotten, hadn’t noticed and/or have been overlooking.

He said he came back from Tanzania last spring feeling really engaged by the question “What really matters?”

We all did in some way; I think Buck is doing a better job than me, though, in paying attention and, as Richard Leider puts it, “noticing the signs” that indicate to him where his passions lie and in what direction his hand naturally turns.

I feel like I spend at least a portion of my energies successfully shutting myself off from messages that reach out to me; Buck likened it to watching notes in bottles float by, thinking, “Later…I’ll pick up the next one.”

But there is only so much time.

It occurred to me in our conversation that—for me, anyway—the authentic lessons are those drawn from experience and yet I find myself learning the same ones over and over again:

The truth, however inconvenient, cannot be avoided.

We must work together to save each other.

It’s always easier said than done.

Last night, I rode in the midnight bike race around Greenlake and came in dead fucking last behind even a guy on a downhill mountain bike who couldn’t sit down because his seatpost was slipping but I’m not sure that’s telling me to stay home, which illustrates, I think, the challenge for me:

Of all the possible messages, which ones do I heed?

Hunter-gatherers would say to attend to those that sustain us.

But that makes it way too easy, which is to say way too hard to avoid.

So, unless I’m willing to be authentic and wholehearted, then why am I kidding myself? Unless I’m willing to do what I say, why say it at all?

Unless, of course, the reason for saying it IS to make me do it.