Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

Doubtless many of you are saying, “Hey, look, we get it, four years ago you dealt with a near-suicidal depression, and the universe helped you through, and, months later, when you hit bottom and really truly asked for help, you received all the help you could ever want and then some, and because of what you’ve learned from those experiences and since, all the changes you’ve made, how much better your life is now, and especially the intense gratitude you feel for all of this, you feel called to speak, because you believe that in so doing you can really help people. And that’s all great, but what we really want to hear about is more about your stalker.”

Hey, I get it. That sock showing back up … it really threw me for a loop. It was like finding proof of Bigfoot.

I tried on a couple of logical explanations. Like that maybe the sock had been static-clinged to the Famous Blue Hoody, and had fallen off at some point. But that didn’t really make sense–I’d pulled out the Famous Blue Hoody on Sunday, which would have meant that either I was carrying the sock around with me for a couple of days without me or anyone else noticing, or else, even less likely, it had fallen off right away and been sitting on the floor for several days. That certainly doesn’t seem very probable, does it? None of the other ostensibly logical explanations held up in the face of scrutiny, either.

So then what does that leave? The only thing left is that she brought it back.

I stared at the sock for a while. It lay there on the floor, both a question and an answer. Finally I said out loud, “I don’t want to seem ungrateful, for it is one of my very favorite pairs of socks, but could I have the shirts back as well?”

(Still referring to The Greatest Day I’ve Ever Known.)

When I read back over my one-year-later piece about the Greatest Day, I am struck by the series of coincidences that occurred to help me once I opened myself to the possibility of receiving that help. One way of looking at it is that they were just coincidences, and any greater significance I see in them exists only because of my narrative around the events–confirmation bias to the Nth degree. Certainly the scientific (or, more accurately, scientistic) world-view would argue that perspective, and maybe it’s true.

You’ll be unsurprised to hear that I don’t agree.

Without trying to be melodramatic, I’d say it took some strong intervention by the universe to get me through.

Through the path that I ultimately have found myself on, I have come to learn and appreciate just how little control over our lives we really have, and how much of what happens in our lives is just energy flowing (or not flowing) through us. We have choices that allow us to either allow it to flow or block its flow, but the natural state of all things is flow. From that perspective, it should be no surprise to us when we need help and find that the universe steps up to give us the help we need.

But I hear the scientistic reader objecting again: “This is still just confirmation bias. After all, a series of events happened to drive you down into that pit of despair. Where was the universe’s help then?” That’s actually a really good point. During the time that day when I sat in the chair in my office and watched my thoughts loop back on themselves and hurt like I had never hurt before, I was very, very aware that I had a very sharp knife in a nearby drawer. It wouldn’t have taken a whole lot more negative to transpire in my life that day before I would have decided to find out just how sharp that knife really was. So what changed?

The answer is here: “Somehow I got myself into the bathtub, and I lay unmoving in the hot water, and I watched my mind and I watched my breath and there I discovered that no single moment couldn’t be breathed through, so long as I could keep my attention close enough.”

The primary conscious activity we can engage in to help energy flow is conscious, centered breathing. I didn’t know this at the time. All I knew was that I needed to find a way to get through the next moment. The breath gave me that way. And from there, things began to improve.

Over the course of that night, again and again and again I was given help. I was desperate for help and I received help. Coincidence? Maybe. But maybe not. Ten months later I started working with Jerry, and the first thing he taught me was the centered breath. Within days, my life (still in a lot of turmoil at that time) started to improve. Within weeks, I was dealing with my life more skillfully, and learning to rewrite and re-understand the story I had told myself about myself for so many years. It wasn’t long before my depression lifted. Now I’m four years on, and I am a different person. Call it confirmation bias if you want. You’ll never convince me. On the Greatest Day, when I opened myself to the breath, good things began to happen. Later, when I became a student of the breath, my life changed irrevocably.

It really is this simple. (Though a bit of warning: don’t mistake simple for easy.) I so fully believe this to be true that I have devoted my life to sharing it.

Though I marked the occasion of the anniversary of the Greatest Day yesterday, energetically I connected with the experience most profoundly last Friday. The piano concert I mentioned in The Greatest Day I’ve Ever Known was a performance by the winner of the Van Cliburn competition that year. The Van Cliburn is a quadrennial competition, and this past Friday, this year’s winner performed at Macky Auditorium, just as the 2013 winner had. Between the contemplation of that not-so-distant day and being in a space that was physically and in some ways musically the same¹, I found myself overcome with strong emotions.

It wasn’t that I found myself reliving the depression, not by any stretch. Rather, I could recall the emotions of that day in a way that left me somewhat overwhelmed, and then to that I experienced the added emotion of the profound gratitude I feel at how far I’ve come. Consider: I went from the flat gray expanse of the anhedonic depression in which I lived for so many years prior to late 2013, then into the deep black pit I found myself in around the time of the Greatest Day (of which the Greatest Day was, obviously, the deepest, blackest part), and then into about eight months of turmoil, instability and anguish before I hit bottom in early August 2014–and from there I embraced life changes so significant that it’s only because of our sense of continuity of self-identity that I don’t simply say that I am literally a different person now.

Not that I don’t still have some connections to that four-years-ago me. I’m still learning how to be happy. It turns out that happy as a baseline demands a different approach to life than what I lived previously. Of course, it is a privilege and an honor to get to do that learning, and a still greater privilege to bear witness to the process, that I might help others who are going through what I went through.

Four short years have passed since the Greatest Day, but I live in a different world now.

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¹ The long-ago music major in me feels the need to clarify that this year’s winner was a very different musician from the winner in 2013. They are from different countries and cultures, with commensurately different relationships to the piano repertoire, and quite distinct in terms of technique and tone. Classical pianists are a far cry from fungible, young music-major Benjamin wants you to know.

What I’m saying here won’t make sense without first reading The Greatest Day I’ve Ever Known.

Today marks four years to the day since the Greatest Day. Without meaning to sound melodramatic, I am grateful for having survived. But (this might strike you as odd) I am also grateful for having experienced it. I believe I never would have gotten to where I am without having gone through that place. Pain like I experienced that day has a tendency to galvanize.

The vastness of the help the universe has given me, that day and since, humbles me still.

For necessary background, please go read Stalker Update.

On Wednesday morning, I came upstairs (my room is in the basement), and found this on the floor by the dining room table:

“What the literal fuck?” I said out loud.

Last week, in discussing my work, I remarked that none of us are served by holding back our gifts. “Let your light shine,” I said.

That brought something up for me. My dad used to say about me that I “hid my light under a bushel.” I don’t think he’d say that anymore. I think he’d enjoy watching me continue to expand into who I am. I wish he were here to see it.

This sentiment has been expressed far more elegantly than I am able.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

III. Hard Hat Required: Area Under Construction

I’ve said this since the earliest days of Free Refills, but it still matters: I am building something here. I am using what’s already here to build something lasting. I intend that process to build a more solid foundation going forward. But beyond that, I am also building something that is Free Refills as a whole, an online … something. We don’t actually have a word for it yet.

Free Refills is supposed to support the work and be a container for the work, but in a certain sense, it is also the work itself. Obviously you can read my writing here. You can watch it be built here. You can even watch as I find may way to what exactly it is that I am building, be it piece, book, or website. But there’s an underlying philosophy guiding everything I do. It derives from the nature of the Internet itself, but has at best just barely begun to be explored, despite twenty-seven years having passed since Tim Berners-Lee gave us the first browser, ushering in the mainstream Internet Age.

Everything I do here is predicated on the idea that, when it comes to content creation and dissemination, there is something radically different about the Internet era from what came before, and Free Refills is an experiment in a new way of doing things, built on a foundation of abundance rather than scarcity. Once we were given a machine that allowed infinite and essentially costless perfect copies, the whole idea of the scarcity implicit in the sell-the-next-unit approach no longer really made sense. The only thing that’s kept it alive is momentum and an unwillingness to imagine something better. We saw the demise of scarcity already take down the old music industry, but because of the furious, politically connected denial of the previously powerful, what’s arisen in its place kind of sucks. We’re far better served in choosing to embrace abundance. I express this intent and hope right here in the Free Refills name. And if–actually, let’s instead say when–I pull this off (with your help, of course), it will be seen as one way (but not the only way) of doing things that’s vastly better than what came before.

And this matters. Without trying to be too highfalutin about it, the very core of everything ill that afflicts us is the sense that there simply isn’t enough, and so we must struggle. But there is enough. I’m sure of it. There is enough for everyone.

II. The work needs to be remarkable.

The people who care enough to read what I’m doing now–that’s you– need to care enough and believe in the work enough to recommend it to others, word of mouth surely being the best path to a steady readership, a steady readership (I believe) being one of the first steps to coaching clients and thus a regular income stream.

While it’s lovely to ask you to pass Free Refills on to others–and I am! Please recommend this work to others! Our cups runneth over!–to actually inspire word of mouth, the work needs to be remarkable. It needs to be remarkable in the literal sense, “deserving notice, comment, or attention,” but I believe it also needs to be remarkable in the colloquial sense, “something striking, unusual, even amazing.” Why? Well, first of all and most importantly, because I’m capable of work of that quality. No one in the world is served by me operating at less than my full potential. (By the way, I make this statement not as just a comment to myself about myself, but also as a piece of advice I want to consistently share with the world at large: no one in the world is ever served by you holding back your gifts. No one, not ever. Let your light shine.)

Second of all, because in a world with as many options as ours for engaging with content, anything less than the second meaning of remarkable isn’t likely to hold people’s interest for long.

I have my work cut out for me. I guess I better start sewing.

From One More Thing Before We Dive In:

I could aim to make Free Refills play an essential part in supporting the advancement of my career …

If the work I’ve done on Free Refills has failed to support the advancement of my career or has done so inadequately, then what do I need to do to change it? Over the next three days, I’ll present three principles that, taken together, should make a substantial difference.

I. The work has to matter long-term.

The writing has to have lasting value. There is no point in doing all this work if the ultimate outcome is that these pieces are, in the worst possible sense, just blogposts: merely writings about whatever was on my mind on a given day, losing more and more value as they recede from the present. Life is surely too short to waste my time doing work like that–nor to ask you to read it.

If the pieces are to have lasting value, then I need to conceptualize them as such from the very get-go. It’s okay if occasionally something ephemeral grabs my attention, but I can no longer allow it to be a habit.

So what’s the key to producing writing of lasting value? I am coming to believe that the only work that ends up mattering for long is long-form writing, especially books.

Therefore I need to figure out how to make everything that goes up on Free Refills either function as part of a greater whole–as something that can be assembled into part of a book or at least a long-form essay–or else contributes directly to that goal: pieces could offer commentary, request help, express uncertainty, or describe something I am wrestling with. All my daily work needs to function within these contexts.

It’s not entirely obvious to me yet how to organize my time to make it so. Do I work on multiple projects at the same time? (Given how my brain works, the answer is by necessity likely to be yes.) How do I organize various projects on the site? (I actually have some good ideas about this question.) How do I best change my approach to the daily work to achieve all this? (My best answer: play with it. Keep what works, discard the rest.)

This change in approach and mindset should on its own have a major impact on the long-term value of the writing.