Arise Each Day

The stripping away of non-essentials

Dec 20, 2024

Friends and readers. Merry Christmas to you and yours in however you choose to celebrate. Today’s offering is part of a series—now our sixth quarterly effort—put forth by a group of six men who I meet with monthly and talk often. We have all shared much of our life experiences with one another in the 18 months of our collaboration which began right here on Substack.

This final 2024 series is each of us exploring what our personal life philosophies are—and have become. I hope you’re able to read and enjoy each of these fine writer’s essays in this series and beyond.

have each written their own contributions earlier this week.

Lyle McKeany

will follow mine tomorrow.

Enjoy. If any of this resonates with you, we’d all appreciate your comments and your shares. Thank you in advance for your support by reading.

I put my feet on the floor. A small prayer of gratitude. Quick check for any new pains or hitches in my git-along. Kisses and rubbies all around to my bedroom mates—two-legged and four alike. I am alive. I am healthy. I am loved. This could be as good as it gets today. And it is very good. I have hope—and plans—of more to come today. But if it does not, I can accept that.

What drives me to remain young at heart despite an obviously aging container?

What makes me want to give at least as much as I often take?

What is it inside of me that requires me to continue to learn?

Why must I—given the suffering I’ve already survived—suffer more?

How can I better grab onto and hold moments of joy when they are fleeing so quickly away from me?

How do I let more love in so that I’m full enough to generously hand it out?

Why does it seem that every time I’m sure that I have it figured out does life hand me a giant “nope—you don’t?”

When will I be able to coalesce and articulate the energies and lessons I’ve received?

What more must I shed of the old ways to make space for the new and better?

Where do various philosophies meet and blend in my own becoming?

How? When? Why? What? Where?

The questions of our lives. The answers are sometimes as clear as mud. We search our whole lives through for clarity and purpose and love and understanding. Sometimes we come upon the answers accidentally. Many of the answers come cumulatively with time. Wisdom is in the practical application of those lessons and answers. Mostly more questions arise. For someone like me who has always plunged ahead, that question is often, How did I miss that? How did that happen?

I think of the oft referenced Talking Heads song, Once in a Lifetime.

“And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack

And you may find yourself in another part of the world

And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile

And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife

And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?”

I was not raised as a thinker. Not as a scholar. I did fine and got good grades in public school and went to a wonderful university. My education was forged in the fire of experience. Reading about it just didn’t work for me. Debating it was just as ineffective. I don’t honestly remember taking a Philosophy class although I’m sure I must have. Books were merely tools of school. I didn’t develop a personal book-reading habit until my twenties. Life was too busy being lived. Singing, dancing, playing, tackling, running, winning, losing. Constant motion—and a fair number of bloody noses, cut lips, broken bones, crashed cars, broken hearts, stints in jail—on the rare occasions when the motion stopped.

From Marcus Aurelius “Meditations” here is #40 from Book 7: “Life must be reaped like the ripe ears of corn. One man is born; another dies.” I never read this—never knew of Meditations. But it was how I’ve lived much of my life.

Author James Clear wrote this in today’s newsletter. Of course he did. “You are better equipped to deal with stress when you are moving. When you feel tense or frustrated or worried, it is difficult to think your way into feeling better. The more you think about the situation, the larger it becomes in your mind. Trying to think your way out of it often leads to a spiral of overthinking and rumination.

The first step is not to think something different, but to do something different. It doesn’t matter what. Stretch on the floor, go for a walk, work on a project. Get out of your mind and move your body.”

I’ve never had motion sickness—but I’ve surely had sitting sickness.

Unlike several of my peers in this men’s writing group, I never read Kant or Socrates or Kierkegaard or any number of other philosophers when I was young—I don’t remember reading many of the classic writers either.

So how does one otherwise find a personal philosophy to live by?

Well, in my case, by living—and nearly dying a few times over—and then living again. I have found my wisdom in other, more visceral ways. For example, although I talk about it and write about it frequently, it is only in my later years that I discovered Stoicism. When I first encountered the writings of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and Zeno and Seneca and Cleanthes, it resonated with me. The man who brought Stoicism to my consciousness many years ago was modern author Ryan Holiday. His podcast—and several of his books, particularly Ego is the Enemy—were like mini-explosions in my head and heart. It was a Eureka! moment. I’d not read anything with ancient roots that so aligned with my life of sobriety and ongoing recovery.

Can Recovery from drugs and alcohol be a personal life philosophy? To be sure. The principles of recovery, developed by AA co-founders Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, align deeply with various ancient texts about how to live one’s life. The context of self-examination, self-honesty, treating others with respect, keeping your own side of the street clean, making amends for past mistakes, letting go of issues outside of our control—these principles echo deeply in the Bible and other historic, religious texts and philosophies.

Wisdom in long-term recovery is developed by assembling and internalizing these principles into our own lives urgently in order to maintain our sobriety. The resulting Sober Mind then can uncover the truth about alcoholism and addictive behaviors—not as a physiological malady—but as a spiritual one.

What I have found wisdom to be is the stripping away of non-essentials. A decluttering of useless detritus—a simplification. What has struck me at my age is that when one embarks on a disposition of the external, the internal has more space to grow full. This isn’t easy for me or for anyone I would suspect. I like nice things. So clearly part of the exercise here is in the letting go. Ahhh…patience grasshopper.

When does this begin for us? Does it ever begin for some of us? What spiritual kicks in the ass are required? That kick was solid and painful for me. Not everyone receives such a luxurious gift. Others may receive the gift but not recognize it.

The shedding is a work in progress. The many things that I once coveted in my life are simply irrelevant to me now. Stripping it down to the essentials is likely also a trait I learned late in life from my father, as I observed him shedding work responsibilities, real estate obligations, and many other previously important anchors in his life in order to more effectively care for himself and my mother into their old age.

I’d say that aging has a factor in it as well. When one finds themself with less time ahead than behind—it is easier to shed and focus. The Stoics would remind us to stop counting time—to stop expecting a long, fruitful life. To focus on the NOW that we have. That concept is difficult in our modern culture of relative safety, comfort, boredom, and longevity. We’ve become accustomed to trivializing traumatic events happening around us. We expect that those things we witness happening to others will never happen to us. We expect others to fix it for us.

Can gratitude also be a life philosophy? I believe it can be—enough wise ones have written about it. I am most grateful for following five realities in my life:

The gift of life from God and my family.

The gift of my sobriety.

The gift of my loving bride and best friend.

The gift of the many dogs I’ve been able to rescue and care for.

The gift of supportive and loving friends.

Those gifts alone are motivation enough for me to rise each morning, but gratefully there’s more in this world. There are others to love and help and learn from and interact and share purpose with.

As I reflect and write about this, I realize much of my learning comes from relationships. The mirroring effect of having your own behavior reflected back at you by those you care for and care for you is a powerful mechanism for change and examination. I’ve always forged deep ones with both men and women. My legacy of friendships represents just that.

Learning more about who I am by borrowing bits from them has always worked for me. Being myself was never hard and sometimes that rubbed counter to what others saw in me—or perhaps it rubbed exactly aligned with what others saw in me. I’m less concerned about that now part now.

Many of my romantic relationships were hostage-taking—a sense of winning—of getting something I wanted. That has been one of the most profound changes in my recovery. I now view all of my relationships not by what they can bring me, but rather what I can bring to them.

In thinking about what my Self has been historically, I’ve always thrived in playing roles. As a performer—an actor if you will—filling out a character. I played team captain, teammate, singer, dancer, altar boy, Boy Scout, employee, entrepreneur, business owner, best drinker, best boyfriend, best lover. My motivation was unclear—except in the singular clarity of wanting to try anything and everything from an early age—and the outcomes were that I was able to take away something towards developing my own character.

The things I chose to do I did with gusto. Now I know that part of that was me trying to define who I was. Each part I played gave me more shape. No part filled me entirely. If I had a philosophy for life, I guess it could be defined as “try anything.”

Are life philosophies inherited? Are they read about and learned? Do we believe and behave in a certain way—with certain values—and then find one that we align with and say, “Yeah that’s the one?”

Combine recovery, profound gratitude, and Stoicism, and what do you have? A personal philosophy for me that recognizes the reality that I almost threw away this precious thing called life many times. A clarity that life is temporary. The reality that much of life is outside of our control—and that we must learn to control what we can—our responses.

Stoicism is about controlling our responses and reactions. Ryan Holiday wrote about it just today in his Daily Stoic newsletter. Of course he did.

“The thing you’re about to do is scary. It’s hard to be up there in front of people on a stage. It’s terrifying to step out onto a battlefield or to rush into a dangerous situation.

Of course you’re nervous. It’s normal that you would be. But normal? Normal is not what leads to elite performance.

On the set of Gladiator II, Paul Mescal felt exactly those kind of nerves—he was starring in a $210M dollar movie after all, a sequel to a movie that won five Academy Awards. “You nervous?” Ridley Scott, the director asked him on the first day of shooting. And when he answered in the affirmative, Scott looked at him and said, “Your nerves are no fucking good to me,” and then walked onto set.

Stoicism is a philosophy of nerve control. The first two virtues—courage and discipline—are all about this. We are going to face scary situations in life. Our mind can be our friend in these situations or our worst enemy. We can use it to calm ourselves down, to master our emotions, or we can allow it to stir us up, to drive us crazy, to paralyze us. Anxiety, worry, doubt, imposter syndrome? These things are no good to you. You must push them aside. You must put these impressions up to the test, master them so they don’t master you…so you can do what you need to do.”

Perhaps the definition of my own personal philosophy for living my life arrived late. The phrase Better Late than Never is a direct translation of a Latin proverb. It first appeared as potiusque sero quam nunquam in Titus Levy’s History of Rome. There’s another ancient, long-ago written text again—with a modern application—Stoic in nature and powerful in life.

Below you will find direct links to the essays written by the other men in this series on Personal Philosophy.

Latham Turner’s post from Monday, December 16th: