It's Always Now

How I’m not searching for enlightenment

Photo by USGS

Today’s essay is part of a quarterly series including

Latham Turner

,

Joshua Doležal

,

Bowen Dwelle

,

Michael Mohr

,

Dee Rambeau

, and me. In the past, we’ve written about trust, fatherhood, recovery, work, and home. This week, all of us explore the roots of our personal philosophies.

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“Boundless love for myself and others.”

That’s what I wrote in my journal on the last day of the breathwork retreat¹ my wife, Allison, and I attended last weekend.

If decade-ago Lyle read those words and witnessed what led up to them, he would’ve scoffed and dismissed it all as woo-woo nonsense. He certainly wouldn’t have believed that he wrote those words. This Lyle called himself a skeptic. This Lyle thought science and rational reasoning were the sole arbiters of capital T, truth. This Lyle thought he was open-minded but was often quick to judge.

Skepticism isn’t really a school of thought or philosophy. In many ways, it’s the opposite. It’s pro-science and anti-dogmatic. Show a skeptic compelling, peer-reviewed evidence and they’ll quickly change their mind. That’s the basic idea. Yet that level of certainty is difficult to find across much of what our rich, diverse world offers, especially concerning matters of the human experience. It caused me to default to disbelief and start with a guilty-until-proven-innocent stance.

I discovered skepticism through various sources. Writers such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and

Sam Harris

. Scientists such as Brian Cox, Richard Feynman, Phil Plait, Pamela Gay, and others. And even through entertainers such as Penn Jillette, Tim Minchin, and the show Mythbusters. These are all supremely talented and smart people. And I still agree with a lot of what they espouse.

When I attempted to start a company with some of my skeptic friends, I was introduced to the tech startup scene. While that company didn’t work out, I eventually found myself working as a growth marketer—a role tailor-made for someone drawn to the scientific method.

It was during this time that I came across the writer Ryan Holiday. In 2013, he published a short ebook called Growth Hacker Marketing, which I snagged in exchange for my email address. Then less than a year later, he started sending emails about a completely different topic: Stoicism.

I was immediately enamored by this 1,000+-year-old philosophy that taught me that you can’t control what happens, but you can control how you respond.

I listened to dozens of audiobooks and podcasts during my long daily commute from Sonoma to SoMa², including Holiday’s first book on Stoicism called The Obstacle is the Way.

The book resonated.

A lot.

In the intervening years, I read Holiday’s follow-up books on Stoicism. I joined his Daily Stoic community. I read Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. I jotted down quotes from Stoic philosophers and used them as bookmarks or computer backgrounds.

“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” — Marcus Aurelius

“Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself.” — Marcus Aurelius

“We suffer more in imagination than in reality.” — Seneca

But the one quote that stuck with me the most is the one that inspired the title of Holiday’s first book on Stoicism:

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” — Marcus Aurelius

In short, the obstacle is the way.

I loved the idea of being prepared for something to go wrong in life. But I had no idea how much my preparedness would be tested four years later.

***

At just after 3 am on June 4th, 2018, my daughter Em was born. It took only three pushes for her to arrive, just 12 minutes after we parked outside the emergency room.

When the doctor pulled her up onto Allison’s belly, Em wasn’t crying. Her body was dull gray. And she wasn’t breathing. After what felt like an eternity, she was revived and stabilized and transported to a hospital better able to manage her critical needs.

Em had to be revived two more times in her first week. By the time we were able to bring her home a month later, she had a feeding tube, multiple medications, and an unclear future.

In the subsequent years, Em was diagnosed with severe cerebral palsy due to the lack of blood and oxygen to her brain during birth. Nowadays, she’s six years old and still gets all her food and fluids via a feeding tube, requires assistance to hold her head up, sit, roll, and walk, and is nonverbal.

During this time when I was steeped in learning all about Stoicism, I remember telling Allison about the obstacle is the way. I shared the Marcus Aurelius quote and how Em’s challenging needs felt like the obstacle in our way. Using this newfound framework, I knew that, despite how difficult everything was, we’d look back and have a tough time imagining our lives any other way. Our lives would be forever changed as we veered onto a new path.

It felt strange to essentially refer to my daughter as an obstacle. Yet it made perfect sense in the context of Stoicism. Her birth, and resulting disability, was the biggest, most unexpected event of my life.

While I intuitively knew that her challenges would be the giant, unexpected obstacle in our way, I didn’t yet understand what the way—that new path around the obstacle—would lead us to. It felt as if we swerved around a large boulder and had to forge a new route in an unfamiliar direction toward an uncertain destination.

***

I’ve spent most of my adult life dreaming about the future or dwelling on the past.

Then the pandemic hit. And provided another giant dose of perspective. I had more time to reflect on what was important and how I wanted to show up for myself and my family. I realized that my creative muscles had atrophied and I wanted a way to express and share stories from my life. I discovered memoir writing through books like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle, and others. I was blown away by their beautiful and raw prose, and how they were unafraid to be vulnerable and dig deep into their emotions.

I was inspired and took to the page to excavate my stories and the emotions that came up for me around them.

Writing has been a great way for me to process what has happened in my life and the largely positive feedback I’ve received has been validating.

I joined some writing communities to connect with other writers and improve my work. That’s how I ended up at Foster, the writing collective I’ve worked at for the past couple of years.

Through my work at Foster and our culture of exploring self and organizational development, I was introduced to new friends and colleagues who helped me feel comfortable trying and experiencing new things. Somatic coaching helped me get in touch with and truly feel my emotions. I harnessed my anger and screamed into a waterfall. I cried my grief and sadness out in a cold plunge. I tried sound baths. I did ecstatic dance. I participated in a family constellation with a shaman. Meditation, kundalini yoga, breathwork journeys, and lots more I’m not remembering.

All of these things introduced me to different ways of being. I liked some of them. Others not as much. But I could see the value in them and how impactful they could be.

They all did one thing incredibly well, though. They all brought me back to the present.

Nowadays, I’m regularly practicing being present. I refer to it as a practice because it’s impossible to constantly be present.

I mean, I couldn’t have written this piece without thinking about my past. In fact, this piece serves as a great example of my practice. It has been one of the toughest pieces I’ve ever written. I suppose I should’ve expected it since personal philosophy is an awfully big topic.

Just yesterday, this piece looked a lot different. It had roughly 500 words that are no longer in it and a long bullet-point list of thoughts that had popped into my head as I thought about the topic over the past few weeks.

I also didn’t have a lot of writing time yesterday. Em’s school had a gingerbread house party and I told her I would attend (Allison also made all the gingerbread and assembled the houses for it). Allison and I had a date night planned to see our friend TJ Carter sing and play guitar at a local bar in the evening.

I felt the tension between wanting to be present for my family and wanting to get this published by 8:08 am PT today, which I had publicly promised in my last post. I felt a pit in my stomach. When I closed my eyes and breathed into the discomfort, I felt frustrated, overwhelmed, anxious, and sad. I realized that my breath had been shallow, probably for the past few days as those emotions built up more and more.

Allison offered me an out. I could skip Em’s gingerbread party and spend those hours writing away in our quiet house. But when I sat with that for a moment, it didn’t feel alive. I wanted to keep my word with Em more than I wanted to keep my publishing promise. I wanted to be present with my family more than I wanted to uphold a self-imposed deadline. And I’m glad I did.

I recently came across this quote about being present from a golf coach named Fred Shoemaker:

“It’s always now.”

Its simplicity struck me. No matter what’s going on around me or what emotions are coming up for me, I can always come back to now.

I hesitate to call being present my personal philosophy. But it’s what feels most true right now. I still have those skeptic tendencies—I don’t dogmatically follow one school of thought or teacher. Allison described my philosophy as agnostic, meaning I’m open to trying almost anything to see if it works for me. That makes it hard to boil down into a single word or phrase.

There’s still no clear destination on this practicing-being-more-present path. I’m not searching for enlightenment. It’s more like the path is continually unfolding in front of me as I walk along it, and my work is to not get too far ahead of myself.

I’m grateful to be more embodied and open-hearted. I’m grateful for the obstacle that altered my path. Otherwise, I’d likely still be in my head, not in touch with my emotions, and probably pretty damn miserable, which is curious because if you told me back then what I’m dealing with now, I would’ve thought that it would be miserable. But it’s not. And I’m not.

While writing and researching for this piece, I came across a quote from one of the most prominent Stoic philosophers. A man who had a disability and spent most of his life as a slave. It’s a quote I had never seen before and it so perfectly encapsulates what I’ve been trying to write this whole essay that I’ll leave you with it here.

“Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.”— Epictetus

1. The “Aliveness Retreat” was facilitated by a wonderful couple,

Kelly Wilde Miller

and

Jonny Miller

. The four breathwork journeys and the intervening deep discussions with them and the other participants were very impactful for Allison and me, both as individuals and for our partnership. I can’t recommend their work more highly.

2. SoMa stands for the South of Market area, which is a district in San Francisco that’s, you guessed it, south of Market Street.

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Read the rest of our series on personal philosophy:

A letter to my son by

Latham Turner

How I Became a Scholar - Pt. 2 by

Joshua Doležal

Drapa’s Shirt by

Bowen Dwelle

My Personal Philosophy by

Michael Mohr

Arise Each Day by

Dee Rambeau

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Thank you so much for spending time with my words. It means the world to me. If you liked this piece, could you please let me know by giving the heart button below a tap?