Pieces of wisdom everywhere

I’ve kept journals for years. Which is not to say that I’ve always been diligent about keeping them. There are gaps. I always feel guilty about the gaps.

But I’ve been fairly consistent about coming back to the journals, usually with an entry along the lines of, “It’s been awhile. I feel bad that I haven’t kept up this record of my life. I’ve committed to doing better.” Then, six months later, “Well…. that didn't work.”

There are several gaps like that, over a 48-year period. And yes, it hurt like hell to write that last sentence. Holy crap… forty-eight years. I still imagine myself as a 20-something at most.

Anyway, my delusion and ever-plodding pace toward inevitable death aside, even though there have been gaps in my journal-keeping, there have also been long and glorious streaks. In fact, I’m currently on one of those—a streak stretching back about 10 years, at this point. And though within that 10 years there are the occasional micro gaps, they last days, maybe a month or so sometimes, but definitely not years. And they tend to correlate with life events.

I didn’t journal much while I had COVID, for example. Or while I had bronchitis. Things that sucked the energy right out of me, disrupting every routine in my life. I journaled less, though. I didn’t stop entirely. And for that, I’m glad. There should be some kind of record of events like that, in my life. Something I can look back on, and learn from, by examining the experience and what I was feeling about it.

For the past couple of years, my journaling has evolved to include “three things.”

It all started when I was listening to a podcast from Tony Robbins. He was actually talking to the producer in the room, the guy monitoring and controlling the equipment Tony was using. He said something to the effect of, “If you wrote down three business ideas every day for 30 days, at the end of it you’d have 90 ideas.”

Ideas are easy, he was saying. Don’t let a lack of ideas stop you. Come up with the ideas, find the one you like best, and then dig in on making that idea happen. Action is the real magic.

But having the ideas can help you create the plan of action. That was the point.

I liked this point. So for 30 days I wrote down three ideas. And since that only took up the top third fo the page in my little Moleskine pocket journal, I started using the rest of the page to jot down thoughts, bits of philosophy, tiny records of my life. It turned out that writing those three things every day was an excellent and easy primer for getting myself to write consistently and daily in my journal.

After 30 days, just as Tony said, I had 90 new business ideas. And some were really good. I committed to a few things, combining things to form a direction and a plan. The results of that were something I can’t yet talk about… but it was good. Very good.

After 30 days of that, though, I was kind of hooked. So I thought, why not keep going?

Except I was kind of burned out on coming up with new and original business ideas. I was starting t repeat myself, to create variations on a theme. I wanted to do something else for my next 30 days of 3 things. Something that would be useful, but would also keep working as my daily primer.

I decided to write down three marketing ideas per day.

Three ways to improve the odds that my ideal readers would discover my books and buy them. Three ways to make sure my books were there and ready when they were. Three ways, every single day, that would give me some direction on reaching a new level for my writing career.

That worked too.

For 30 days I generated 90 marketing ideas that ranged from easy-to-implement to I’m-gonna-need-a-team-for-this. Some ideas were farfetched. Some were impossible without specific conditions. But there they were—90 marketing ideas for me to use or discard.

I’ve used a lot of them so far. And I’ve seen my writing career take off in interesting ways.

That practice—three ideas per day for thirty days—it was really working. It was reshaping my career in profound ways!

So I wondered… could it do the same to my life?

What cold I write three times per day that might have some kind of positive impact on how I think, behave, and live? What kind of wisdom could I jot down, each and every day?

And it hit me… wisdom was what I needed, so wisdom was what I would write down.

Three pieces of wisdom, every morning, right at the top of my journal. And then I’d write a short entry to fill out the rest of the page each day.

The rules for this were pretty simple: The wisdom could be anything I felt had a profound truth behind it. It could be a quote I’ve heard from someone else, or an observation I’ve made on my own. It had to be succinct enough to put behind a bullet point. It had to be something that could be understood at a glance.

Rules in hand, habit already formed, the very next morning I started.

3 Pieces of Wisdom.

For awhile I did lean on quotes and aphorisms and scripture. Things I’d learned through years of reading and observing. The sort of things you find in inspirational tweets and on bumper stickers.

Gradually, though, I started writing my own tidbits of wisdom—phrases that summed up things that I myself had learned, from living in the world and interacting with other humans. Things I learned by introspective observation.

Here’s what surprises me: I will sometimes write things that I didn’t realize I believed. And when I test them against the fires of public opinion, they tend to hold up. They are accepted as wisdom.

That’s weird to me.

You have to understand that when I write, sometimes it’s a fully automatic thing. I’m what’s known in the business as a “discovery writer,” or in the indie publishing world, “a pantser.” As in “someone who discovers the story as he writes,” or “someone who writes by the seat of his pants.”

I don’t outline. I don’t plan. When I sit down to write a novel, the most I usually have prepared in advance is a title. I don’t even know what story I want tell until I’ve finished telling it.

That’s weird, right?

Casting aside the crowd that rolls its eyes at this or rushes to point out flaws in my work as proof that my methods make for bad writing—you guys… so warm and fuzzy—this method of discovery writing has been the foundation of a long and successful career for me. It’s my bread and butter. It’s the roof over my head. Thanks to this method of writing as I go, my wife and I travel full time in a van that cost more than our first house, and we’re building a dream home in the Texas hill country.

Cast dispersions, if you like. I live in the house that words built.

But yeah, it’s weird. It’s beyond strange that with no source material whatsoever someone can sit down and tap words onto a screen, and those words can have meaning. And in fact, there can be a meaning beyond anything the writer intended.

This happens all the time, and not just to discovery writers. Many of the books we love have traditionally interpreted meanings and symbolism that the authors have often admitted they had never intended, and didn’t realize was there.

There’s an old joke about a teacher inviting an author to visit her English Literature class. Before bringing the author to the podium to speak, the teacher introducing him with some observations about this work, and particular zeroes in on the symbolism of the blue curtains in a particular scene. “I immediately picked up on the symbolism of the curtains—the serenity fo the blue, the transience of life played out as they billowed from the breeze of the open window. It was one of the most moving examples of metaphor I’ve ever read.”

The teacher then smiles and invites the author to come forward, to the applause of the classroom.

When the author stands at the podium he smiles, shaking his head. “Thank you for that lovely introduction,” the author said. “And for pointing out that scene, with the curtains. Such a deeply insightful observation! And here, all this time, I just thought the curtains were blue and someone left the window open!”

The first time I heard that story, I laughed. Years later I heard it again, with a few books under my belt, and I smiled. Because by then I’d had a few teachers introduce me to their classes, and I’d had more than one person explain to me the symbolism and metaphors of my work. And I knew that sometimes the curtains are just blue, and sometimes the windows are just open.

But there’s another truth to that story. One that makes it even more ironic.

Because even though the author hadn’t intended any of the things the teacher had noticed in the work, their truth was there all the same. The symbols were there for the teacher to interpret. And her interpretation was there for the students (and the author) to hear, and to consider, and to learn from.

Without intending it, the author wrote truth. And without anything more than the scene and her own interpretation, the teacher created and shared wisdom.

It came to her, then spread from her to others, without any intention at its root. Just wisdom, found in the raw.

There’s a term for that Eastern philosophies sometimes apply to that sort of wisdom. They refer to it as a sutra. A universal truth, encapsulated in a phrase. And sometimes, many times in fact, the sutra is the result of an unintended turn of phrase. Wisdom emerges, like Athena from the head of Zeus.

In the book of Proverbs, in the Old Testament and the Torah, wisdom is described as a woman standing by the gates of the city, calling for all to find her and follow her. The implication—and one reiterated throughout the book of Proverbs—is that wisdom is something that exists independent of the thoughts of humans. Wisdom is there, calling, and we will find her if we just look.

That’s essentially what I think is happening, when I jot down three wise ideas every morning. That part of me that taps into the symbolism and metaphor of the universe is calling out to wisdom, and wisdom answers by showing up. I write down the things that come to mind, and there she is.

Always?

Always.

And not just there.

Something I’ve discovered, over the past few years, is that wisdom is hiding in plain sight all over the place. It’s right there—it’s everywhere. Sutras, right out in the open. Truth from the mouths of babes. A reality underlying reality, buried but visible if we just dig, just a little, under the surface.

A couple of years back there was a show called “The Good Place.” There was a character on the show named Jianyu—a Buddhist monk who had taken a vow of silence, and was maintaining that vow even in the afterlife. He was a quiet, stoic-seeming figure, and some of the characters seemed to have moments of realized wisdom when they would speak to him, and were met only by his silence and his sublime expression.

Later (and here were have a spoiler… sorry), we discover that Jianyu is actually named Jason Mendoza—a slightly brain-rattled stoner from Jacksonville Florida, who awoke in the Good Place after a misspent life, and discovered that some sort of mistake had been made. He was told who everyone thought he was, and he was told that he’d taken a vow of silence. So he ran with it.

He was not a smart guy. But his silence made him seem wise and intelligent.

And, maybe ironically, seeing that story play out onscreen taught the audience some actual bits of wisdom, about the nature of silence, of belief, and of introspective contemplation.

Or maybe it was just a funny gag. Things are sometimes just cigars.

But I prefer to think of it as a hidden wisdom, and I think that’s a perfectly valid perspective to have. We can observe things and learn from them, even if those lessons aren’t intended.

in fact, you can learn good things even if they come from bad people.

That’s why the whole “cancel culture” thing is such a bad play. Shutting people down because you don’t agree with them or don’t like them means closing your ears, eyes, and minds to understanding them. As if understanding someone’s point of view might somehow taint your soul or corrupt your heart or infect your mind.

In the novel Ender’s Game, Mazer Rackham tells a beleaguered and exhausted Ender Wiggin, “There is no teacher but the enemy.”

If anyone knew the power of that lesson, it was Ender. He’d spent most of his life, by the at point, surrounded almost exclusively by enemies. And the thing he learned from it all was that the moment you most understood your enemy was the moment you loved them.

If you are unwilling to study and understand your enemies, if you’re unwilling to love them, you can’t really beat them. You can win a battle, but you’ll lose the war. Real victory comes from love, and the forgiveness and peace that builds on that love.

True story.

So wisdom…

I’m amazed, sometimes, at what comes from my fingertips. The ideas that flow to the page sometimes feel like they had to come from anyone but me. In some sense, they probably do.

Wisdom comes from the world around us. The insight we gain from learning to understand others. The love we have for others. The introspective observations we make about ourselves and the way we think, the way we live.

Wisdom is alive. It’s hiding, but not very well. It’s hiding like a little kid that can’t wait to be found. All we have to do is look.