🦮Love and Devotion 🦮
🔥Welcome to volume #00064!🔥
I’m Christian Champ. This is ☯️The Middle Way Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore, share, and invite you along for the journey.
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🦮Love and Devotion 🦮
My house is empty as I write this.
The emptiness echoes through the rooms.
The hustle and bustle of multiple people banging about got swapped into the sound of silence. The silence creates a noise that permeates that echo.
In this case, the kids went with their mom to visit their grandparents, leaving behind a trail of hollowness. Even playing Spotify on Alexa feels barren.
The break is nice, but it feels like I’m on an island. When we care about someone or something, and they disappear, things feel off, even for a short spell.
There is joy in taking breaks, but there is a greater joy when the holiday ends. The breaks remind us to cherish our dedication when it shows up.
There are short breaks, extended breaks, and sometimes for the rest of our lives breaks. When the break never ends or might end, we sit in the liminal space.
We start to miss our practice, our people, and our poetry. We miss the chaos and the order that they bring to our lives. The love and dedication show up in our families, our jobs, and our crafts. They make us whole while challenging and pressing us to be better.
Our love and devotions shift and change with our lives. They are roller coasters we ride up and down, coming and going.
The key is to continue to find things to give our love and devotion. When we find them, we give it our all.
It’s on us to notice our love and devotion and to garden it well.
📓Things to Think About📓
Erik Barker on How to Be Resilient
Icelandic men live the longest because life was heard. Erik offers up some ideas on how we can increase our resilience.
For most of those thousand-plus years, food was scarce. Winter lasts nine months, sometimes with just four hours of sunlight. There’s precipitation 213 days a year. Life on that island has been so difficult there was zero population growth for centuries.
And that’s their secret. What made Icelandic men the longest lived on the planet. What unrecognizably changed their DNA: discomfort. In Stefansson’s own words:
This f***ing wet rock in the North Atlantic that has been punishing us relentlessly for the last eleven hundred years.
All that hard living made them stronger, unrecognizably altering their DNA.
We can chase the Misogi, which means “doing hard stuff”.
So how do we get there? There are two fundamental rules to doing a Misogi:
1. It has to be really hard.
2. Don’t die.
Be Constructive by a Learning a Day
I’m really feeling this idea from Rohan. In our home life and office life, the people that show us how to make a difference are always constructive. The humble optimists always beat the sounding smart pessimists.
To be constructive means to build up. Folks who learn to be constructive focus on the facts at hand and work on building the most positive reality they can. And, as optimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy, their energy often helps in creating that reality.
It is the equivalent of the “Yes and” rule in improv. There is no time for “buts” as we construct the next scene.
📚 Book Breakdowns📚
Freedom by Sebastian Junger (Goodreads)
Junger and some buddies take a 400-mile walk down the East Coast rail lines. The book describes walking, freedom, community, and their histories as they make their journey.
It's hard to walk on railroad tracks. They are laid in the summer since they contract in the winter. Every component of the railroad wears out. 140,000 miles of railroad and no original components. Given that dynamic, there are packed cinder maintenance roads next to the rail lines because of its constant maintenance work.
Sebastian and his team walked those cinder roads. You can easily walk 3 miles an hour (but four feels like twice the effort). You can also walk them at night without a headlamp.
A pack gives you some momentum for walking but a 60 lb pack, cuts your capability in half. On hot days it generates so much friction in your shoes that you can start to destroy the bottoms of your feet in hours.
You start out walking solo, but when you get in cadence, not walking is harder than walking. Hours turn into minutes.
The poor have always walked and the desperate have always slept outside.
Before WWII most Americans didn't own a car and that meant walking to get places. During the Great Depression, 1/4 of the labor force had no job and rural schools would be left unlocked for people to sleep (generally families and single men slept in barns) and get water.
Freedom is a complicated word. Walking 400 miles where no one knew where you were was one definition of freedom. What really is freedom? It’s complicated.
The poor neighborhoods were easy to walk through b/c they offered you water and ask if you were ok; in the affluent neighborhoods they called the cops.
Their insignificance vs. so much energy began to feel like true freedom until they realized that everything they needed - food, clothes, gear - came from the vary thing they thought they were outwitting. Freedom is complicated.
Historically people sacrificed for freedom but in modern democracies, an ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed and survival is more or less guaranteed
To be fair, it's hard to feel loyalty to a society that is so large it hardly even knows we are here and yet makes sure we are completely dependent on it
Wealth is supposed to liberate us from dependency, but quickly becomes a dependency in its own right.
The wealthier we are, the higher our standard of living and the more - not less - we depend on society for our safety and comfort.
Poverty is its own cruel trap but raises the questions about whether we own our possessions or are owned by them.
Freedom on the frontier was a bit of a mirage. The closer you got the more danger increased and the more you need other settlers. If you didn't carry weapons and step in to help during an Indian raid you were shunned.
Irish and Chinese built the railroad b/c it was so dangerous people didn't want to lend out slaves. Railroad companies would grab new immigrants and work them to death and not even track the number of deaths.
Freedom comes from a German word (virdom) which means only people in one's immediate group deserve rights or protection
Freedom vs. death in many battles, so people fought to the death
A million-man army can probably be destroyed faster than a thousand-man insurgency because it's completely dependant on command hierarchy and resupply; destroy those things and there is no army
The great virtue of hunter-gatherer societies around the world was that, although leaders understandably had more prestige than other people, they didn't have more rights.
In any society, leaders that aren't willing to make sacrifices aren't leaders, they are opportunists, and opportunists rarely have the common good in mind
They're easy to spot though: opportunists lie reflexively, blame others for failures, and are unapologetic cowards
Dying for an idea gives people an extraordinary sense of purpose
“You have to put your mind in one room and your body in another and just don't let them talk, I thought. That way the more you hurt the less you feel.”
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Strange Rites - Isabella Burton
Taken all together, rituals and a sense of purpose link a community with a wider meaning.
The Flinch - Julien Smith
The anxiety of the flinch is almost always worse than the pain itself. You’ve forgotten that. You need to learn it again. You need more scars. You need to live.
Killing Commendatore - Haruki Murakami
Our lives really do seem strange and mysterious when you look back on them. Filled with unbelievably bizarre coincidences and unpredictable, zigzagging developments. While they are unfolding, it’s hard to see anything weird about them, no matter how closely you pay attention to your surroundings. In the midst of the everyday, these things may strike you as simply ordinary things, a matter of course. They might not be logical, but time has to pass before you can see if something is logical.
Tweets From Orange Books @orangebook_
My definition of success:
You are self-confident and calm.
You spend your time doing what you love.
You are surrounded by people you love.
You are in a position to help others.
You live the life you want.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
What love and devotion does your life contain?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
