On Mantras

“There’s a mantra all great actors follow, “Do less, be more.” ”

— Ed Zwick

Long ago, I gave up on New Year’s Resolutions. But, that doesn’t mean I’ve given up on using this time of year for reflection and renewal. To remind myself of my purpose, of the person I am trying to be.

For the last few years, I’ve taken part in the New Year New You Challenge, by the Daily Stoic. The irony of the title aside (I am the same old me every damn time I do this!), I really enjoy the daily exercise of thinking about my life — and the gap between where I wish to stand and where I actually stand — as bite sized actions.

This year, the first challenge was to claim a mantra for the year. My kind of exercise. As an example, they share the story of comic Pete Holmes who, after a soul-crushing divorce, chose “Yes, Thank You,” as the scaffolding with which he would rebuild his whole world.

Scaffolding. On a trip through Myanmar, we ended our journey at the famed Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon and found it under construction. The oldest Buddhist temple in the world needed a touch up, a face lift. It’s gold dome had lost a bit of its “winking wonder.” Is that you in the face of a new year in the same old skin? If so, journey with me.

“Then, a golden mystery upheaved itself on the horizon, a beautiful winking wonder that blazed in the sun, of a shape that was neither Muslim dome nor Hindu temple-spire. It stood upon a green knoll, and below it were lines of warehouses, sheds, and mills. Under what new god, thought I, are we irrepressible English sitting now?”

— Rudyard Kipling’s description of Shwedagon after his 1889 visit

““My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it… but love it.””

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Amor Fati served as a mantra to Nietzsche. His game plan for fulfilling his desire to “learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful.”

I love the concept of the mantra, which in Sanskrit means “sacred utterance.” A prayer. A plea. A breath. Sometimes it’s just a whimper, the sound we make when we reach for clarity and guidance from the guiding force behind the universe. We all need one at the ready.

Over the last six years I’ve thought a lot about mantras. I adopted “Real People Do Real Things” several years ago, which led me to take a 6-year hiatus from Instagram and reshaped most of my online and offline relationships — none benefitting more from this exercise than my relationship with myself.

““If a man knows not to which port he sails no wind is favorable.””

— Seneca

Buddha statue at Shwedagon Pagoda. Yangon, Myanmar.

Burmese pilgrims flock daily to Shwedagon to offer gifts and seek guidance.

I have an entry from my personal journal open next to me as I type this. Penned on Jan. 26, 2019. In it, I listed 14 mantras I’d gathered alongside their use. Things like:

When I feel resistance:

“The obstacle is the way.”

When I’m tempted to blame:

“The cause is not the cause unless you make the cause the cause.”

When I feel off course:

“Desire well. Recalibrate often.”

When I fear the path ahead:

“Enjoy the adventure, that is true courage.”

When I’m feeling lazy or unmotivated:

“Without effort, entropy.”

I haven’t looked at this list in a while. Many of these I continue to lean on, but some seem to me not concise enough. Maybe the list, by my lack of constant review, has experienced a bit of entropy?

In the last few weeks, I’ve come across a few things which might be clues to what I’d like to adopt for this year, My “theme” as I’ve come to think of this annual commitment to a direction, to define my next port of call.

““The impeded stream is the one that sings.””

— Wendell Berry

““Concentrate like a Roman.” ”

— Marcus Aurelius

“Roman” I scribbled in my mornings pages just the other day “means citizen of the expanding empire, an empire which Marcus believed existed within himself first and foremost.” The kingdoms of this world are just a metaphor for the only kingdom over which we can ever truly rule: the kingdom within ourselves. Our mantras become the banners under which we march.

“The only way through is through,” another morning page thought from Dec. 28th. “Whatever the goal, whatever the intention, you don’t get credit for stopping because you have some handicap or natural hinderance. My ADHD, for example, is not an excuse. Do I want to stand atop Everest? However I chose to define my summit, I must do the work to get there. The mountain doesn’t care what natural impediments hold me back.”

In his book on productivity, Getting Things Done, author David Allen points out you can’t do a project, you can only do the tasks associated with a project. You can’t climb Everest, you can only take a single step toward the summit. Then ask, What is the next step?

“Halfway plus one step”, is how Steven Conrad expressed it through John Lakeman, his delightfully depressed spy, in the show Patriot. That’s Lakeman’s philosophy for dealing with difficult things. Take yourself just one step beyond the midpoint of the pain, that way, it’s easier to get to the other side versus turning around.

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“The only way through is through.”

“But, how far must we go?”

“Just halfway… plus one step.”

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Do not let “the implacable grandeur” of this life elude you. What a tremendous commandment. The implacable grandeur of the burbling stream and its song. (Wendell Berry, meet Albert Camus.) The discomfort you feel in your feet, in your bones, in your soul? That’s a song trying to break through. Learn to sing its tune. Be thankful for the song.

Gratitude, Seneca wrote, pays itself back in large measure. Let gratitude guide you. Better still, let it fund the whole expedition.

Nils Parker tells the story of how he arrived at his mantra, after bringing his son home from the hospital, just a few days after Coronavirus was declared a pandemic. He was a new father entering a new world. No father knew how to be a father at that time, but Nils, went to work against his despair, crafting a “panic mantra” he could fall back on in those moments all fathers feel from time to time, the moments at which we are powerless to do anything about any of it.

The baby’s sick. The world is sick. I’m sick of all this whining about masks…

“Be here now.”

That was the mantra Nils repeated to himself to calm himself. A cleansing breath. A prayer. When the baby’s sick and the world is sick, a mantra inoculates us against our fear.

At least ninety eight percent of life exists beyond our grasp and ability to control, but that doesn’t mean we are helpless in the face of those things. Ask yourself, What is the next step? Really, you have just two options: action or complaint.

““When you’re complaining, you are denying life itself.””

— Robert Green

Complaints are little more than deformed wishes, mutant desires standing in opposition to the flow of nature. In her book Order From Chaos, The Everyday Grind of Staying Organized with Adult ADHD, Jaclyn Paul says Rule #1 is to “make peace with reality.”

The baby’s sick. The world is sick…

Complainers are like big logging trucks “hacking and destroying” — to borrow a Marcus Aurelius’ metaphor — the free growing forest of reality. We make peace with reality, in part, because the peacemakers are called blessed. And…

““The whole is damaged if you cut away anything.””

— Marcus Aurelius

Be here now, because this obstacle in your path, this raging torrent of emotion rises not against you but for you. Feel it until you can hold it, until you can hold yourself steady in its presence. This is how the spirit gets strong. All those people resolving to get physically fit would do well to put their effort toward emotional fitness... and stand in awe of the “implacable grandeur” of their own body as it follows the mind’s lead toward wellness and renewed strength.

Wish not that all will go well for you, instructs Epictetus, but that you may go well with all things. That begins by not running from stuff. From the here and now. Stop. Breathe. Lead us in prayer, Nils:

“Be here now.”

“...if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”

— Albert Camus

There’s that phrase again, “the implacable grandeur.” Like with Everest, that grandeur is made up, mostly, of very difficult terrain. If the climb was easy, the name of the mountain wouldn’t hold such mystique.

There will be times when we are afraid, but in those moments, it’s worth remembering that we aren’t afraid of the unknown beyond ourselves, we are afraid of the unknown within ourselves that the unknown beyond awakes. What then?

Well, that’s usually when we tend to complain, to pass judgement:

this is weird...

this is scary...

this is bad...

I can’t...

Don’t I have a mantra for this? [Checks notes.] Ah, yes…

When I’m tempted to pass judgement against a foreign idea:

“Remember, knowledge is neutral."

Do you feel resistance? Or like you’ve lost your way? Does the path ahead seem scary? The river that runs through the valley between you and your Everst roars with a monolithic sound lacking any semblance of melody. So loud you can barely hear yourself think…

“What then?” we ask the air with air, and the unknowable known within us answers.

Be here now

Remember, knowledge is neutral

The impeded stream sings

Loud or soft, it sings a song

And all songs have melody

A top line tune

Right now that song is singing you

And It’s asking you to sing along

To sing your way through

Just as it sings its way through

But what is the lyric?

Yes, thank you.

A foot hold. Scaffolding.

Thanks Pete. I guess that will be my mantra, too. Amor fati, y’all.

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Next Steps