Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time with someone who, over the past several months, has transformed from a wonderful client to a wonderful friend. For the purpose of this newsletter, let’s call him Dan. (…because that’s actually his name.)
Dan co-founded a media company that has over 10 million subscribers across all platforms. Dan’s an amazing person. Dan’s also an agnostic. In his words, he’s “compelled by the neuroscientific case for Buddhism but still sympathetic to many aspects of Christianity.” (Yeah. Dan talks more eloquently than I do.) He also often says that all the great religions point to the same mountain of truth, just from different angles. And you know what? Even though Dan and I violently disagree on many things (actually, we probably try too hard not to offend each other), he and I largely agree on this point.
He’d say the principles are emergent. I’d say they stem from the Designer who built his intentionality and love into every facet of creation. But either way, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about these principles because of a film we’re working on. The film is about an important public intellectual and his “principles of human progress” – ideas like mutual benefit, equal rights, and openness…
Anyhow, the more Dan and I’ve talked, the more I’ve started seeing these timeless principles everywhere. You know that thing where once you’re focused on something, you start noticing it all around you? The Germans have a word for it that sounds like a sneeze: Baader-Meinhof.
Case in point: I picked up Mere Christianity again recently for a small group I’m in, and right there in chapter one, C.S. Lewis lays it out. And by “it” I mean the “universal moral law.” (He calls it the “Tao” in a different book.) He argues that, deep down, we all know what’s right. We all agree on the basics: fairness, kindness, humility. But none of us consistently live like we believe it.
Here’s Lewis:
“Everyone has heard people quarreling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kinds of things they say. They say things like this: ‘How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?’—‘That’s my seat, I was there first’—‘Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm’—‘Why should you shove in first?’—‘Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine’—‘Come on, you promised.’
People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.
What interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: ‘To hell with your standard.’ Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat had a right to do so.”
He goes on for several pages like this, but at the end of the chapter, he summarizes:
“These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it.”
So what do you do with that tension between what we know and how we live?
Enter my latest spiritual tool: the Oura Ring. Yetta bought it for me after finding out that I’d been wanting one for months and now I’m using it to track everything. Heart rate, sleep quality, readiness score (whatever that is). But more importantly, it’s helping me pay attention. To slow down. Breathe. Lower stress. Be here now.
“Mindfulness,” Dan might call it. It reminds me of this:
“Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” – Jesus (Matthew 6:34)
So I’m learning, slowly, that presence isn’t about zen stillness or escaping the world (although, maybe there can be some of that too). But for me it’s about keeping a clear mind about who I am, how I relate to others (including my Creator), and living a bit less in the future or the past. I’m trying to practice a little less distraction (oof that’s tough), and trying instead to focus on how I’m treating those around me now. How I react to the stress stimuli now. Whether I’m enjoying the moment with my family now. Listening to a friend now. Praying (you guessed it! now). You get the picture.
Even Aristotle, who I’m told did not wear a smart ring (history buffs, check me on this), said something like this:
“Happiness is the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. . .in a complete life.”
He didn’t think all men automatically know how to be virtuous, but he did say we learn to be virtuous through practice and repetition (habituation):
“We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.” — Nicomachean Ethics, Book II
My point? Through squinting eyes, I think Aristotle, Lewis, Dan and I all agree a bit more than we might sometimes think. Perhaps like Lewis says, all people secretly know the laws of human nature AND perhaps like Aristotle says, it’s only through practicing those virtues that we habituate them into our daily practice to truly discover joy, peace, and happiness.
And perhaps, today as I’m looking at the mountain of deadlines our team is facing, instead of habituating stress or the trappings of mental fatigue, I can practice stopping, breathing, saying a prayer of gratitude, and responding with love, joy, peace, etc. instead.
Perhaps we all can.
Until next time, here’s to Human Flourishing.
-Ian
New Project Spotlight: The Story of America
For the past couple of months, we’ve had the honor of working with Hillsdale College and the White House on a new series on American History, featuring a lot of names you might recognize. New episodes drop every month, so stay tuned for more! Last week we went live with an episode about the 250th Anniversary and history of the U.S. Army (featuring Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth). Check it out!
ALSO, if you’re one of my many friends who might wonder “How can Ian work on something with THAT administration?!” Check out my Linked-in post about this very topic. We live in contentious times, but if we can all add a bit more truth, beauty, and goodness into the world, I’m all for trying to help make that happen!