Hour of the mayfly: life and death the Existentialist way

Ever stared death in the eye? If you’ve not had the pleasure, like Pfc. Don Doll here in this shot from Terence Malik’s Thin Red Line, I recommend a thought experiment. Imagine that, right now, you are teletransported to the heart of a military conflict. Ker-bang. One moment you are surfing the internet, next moment you are knee deep in the mud with bullets hissing through the elephant grass about you. An explosion thows you down. Shit is real. You could be dead in an instant.

You want to run, cry, call for your mother. But there is no escape. You crouch low in the grass, taking deep breaths. Yout heart is booming in your chest. You are alive – for the moment. This simple truth has enveloped your entire consciousness. How strange it is that you didn’t reflect on this before, you think. Why, all your life, you’ve been stumbling about as if in a dream. Now, all you can think is: I’m still here! Life is not an abstract concept. You are living it, right now.

Death is in the moment too. Amid the explosions, shots and screams, the truth of human mortality is shockingly clear. Death is not something that lies far off in the distance, like the closing scene of a movie or the final chapter of a book. Death can come anytime, anyplace. The bullets are in flight, the bombs are descending. The hand of death may be on you now.

This is the truth of human mortality. Face this truth and it will change you.

Epictetus on the seas of fate: cultivate the power within

The Roman slaver groaned as it lurched through heavy seas. Below decks, a boy, Epictetus, lay writhing in his chains. His left knee, where the manacle bit into the shin, was trussed in a heavy rag. Two nights ago a crate had come loose in a storm, careered across the floor and crushed his leg. Epictetus had been in and out of consciousness since then.

No one had treated the break. The soldiers who had dragged the crate away retreated when they saw the damage it had done. Now they spoke in whispers and brandished the lash when he begged for help. He was damaged goods. Epictetus could tell that they didn’t expect him to survive the trip.

Epictetus would prove them wrong. All he needed to do was to control the pain. Try as he might, there was no stopping it. He had tried to blank it out, but it was oppressively – there. There had to be some way of dealing with it, the boy thought. What was it that the Stoics taught? Cultivate the power within. Epictetus struggled to apply the Stoic teaching.

What does it feel like to seriously confront death?

I answered a question on Quora: ‘What does it feel like to seriously consider the prospect of your own death?’ You’ll know if you’ve read Life Changing that I believe that confronting death is the best way to get in touch with who you are and what you think is important in life. Answering this question enabled me to go deep into intimate territory. Thanks to Seb Paquet for inviting me to take the plunge.

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It’s the people who haven’t done what they came to do in life who are the most scared of death.

As an atheist, I don’t see any reason to suppose that there is an ultimate meaning to life. Human beings are a cosmic accident (an accident that was inevitable in the scope of eternity, which doesn’t make our existence any less random or arbitrary). Conceding there is no ultimate meaning to life, however, doesn’t stop us from wanting to know the meaning of our own life. As Albert Camus claims, human beings are remarkable for the fact that they can acknowledge the meaninglessness of existence and affirm life regardless.

The attitude of existential revolt defines the human condition. It’s a bleak teaching, but having reflected on it for 20 years, I’m ready to say that Camus was right.

Ready for change? Your time starts now

Life Changing is a hands-on guide to harnessing the power of change. Using philosophical examples, it shows you how to cultivate the resilience, agility and vision to embrace change and make it an adventure.

The book includes practical exercises that enable you to apply the ideas in familiar contexts. By doing the exercises, you learn how to think philosophically about change and unleash its life-changing possibilities.

Be creative with change. Don’t just ride it out — use it.

Life Changing: A Philosophical Guide is available on Amazon, Kobo, and iTunes.

Check out the introduction to Life Changing on the P2P Foundation wiki.

Life Changing marks the end of a personal journey. For the past fifteen years, I have been studying, teaching, and applying transformative philosophy in my own life, first as a doctoral student at the University of Sydney, then as a lecturer at the Universities of Sydney and New South Wales, and recently in my Philosophy for Change course, which I’ve run at the Centre for Continuing Education, University of Sydney. My guiding intuition has been that it is possible to distil from philosophical ideas a kernel of practical wisdom, which can be communicated through simple exercises that students can apply to their lives.

This intuition is core to Life Changing. The book is structured about five practical exercises. Each incorporates a life-changing insight. The exercises show you how to muster the courage to change; how to control yourself like a Stoic philosopher; how to cultivate your Nietzschean will to power; and how to use Spinoza’s philosophy to supercharge your social life. They show you how to take adventure from the heart of crisis and fulfilment from the struggle with adversity.

RIP Steve Jobs (1955 – 2011)

‘No one wants to die. Even people who want to get to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is a destination that we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be. Because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old and makes way for the new. … Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become’.

Socrates, Seneca, Heidegger, or Sartre never said it better: ‘Remembering that you are about to die is the best way of I know of avoiding the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart’. Powerful words and true from one of recent history’s most inspiring innovators and entrepreneurs.

Unlearning in crisis and change

What do you need to know in order to effect change? What do you need to learn to bring change about? These are questions that we ask as we set out to become agents of change. But we should also ask: what do I need to unlearn in order to prepare myself for a new and different way of thinking? Unlearning is important too. Unlearning is an essential part of the process of change.

Change and innovation both call for unlearning. To think anything new, and to see what could be new in things, one needs to find a way of unlearning what one already knows. Without unlearning, there is no chance of achieving a break and new beginning in your way of doing things. Think of experiences you’ve had of working towards change in whatever respect, and reaching a moment in which you saw that change was actually possible – more than possible, inevitable. In the sense of inevitablity – the realization that nothing you can say or do will make a difference, things will change – there is a new beginning.

The airbag moment

It is Monday morning and you are heading into work, late for an important meeting. Traffic is banked up on the freeway, moving at a snail’s pace, and by the time you hit the city you’re ready to burst. Every muscle in your body is focused on that meeting, five minutes in the future. You are blasting through town like the proverbial maniac. Nothing is going to stop you now.

Until a woman with a baby stroller steps out onto the road in front of you.

You hit the brakes and swerve across the centre line – straight into the path of a bus! Hauling the steering wheel about – it’s too late! You slide to your doom in a chorus of tyres. At the last moment, the bus swerves – CRASH! – you are spinning like a top across the street. You bounce off vehicles, sideswipe the kerb, THUD! The car vaults to forty five degrees before slamming its tyres back on the bitumen.

You’re wedged behind the airbag, staring back up the street. Someone raps on the side window. You burst into tears.

If you’ve experienced a car accident, you’ll know how, in the blink of an eye, your whole sense of being can change. One moment you are homing in on a temporal target – a definite event in the future. The next moment you are alive and that’s the whole story. The shock of the event wakes you up. You find yourself at existential ground zero.

You might call it an airbag moment. Heidegger calls it a moment of vision.

Heraclitus, change, and flow

The ancient philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (530-470 BC) is one of the most important thinkers in history. Heraclitus’ views on change and flow stand in stark contradition to the picture of the static universe presented by his predecessor Parmenides (5th century BCE), and fed into the work of untold philosophers from Marcus Aurelius (121 AD–180 AD) to Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900 AD).

Heraclitus’ philosophy is a good starting point for anyone concerned with change in life. Heraclitus said that life is like a river. The peaks and troughs, pits and swirls, are all are part of the ride. Do as Heraclitus would – go with the flow. Enjoy the ride, as wild as it may be.

Heraclitus was born into a wealthy family, but he renounced his fortune and went to live in the mountains. There, Heraclitus had plenty of opportunity to reflect on the natural world. He observed that nature is in a state of constant flux. ‘Cold things grow hot, the hot cools, the wet dries, the parched moistens’, Heraclitus noted. Everything is constantly shifting, changing, and becoming something other to what it was before.

Heraclitus concluded that nature is change. Like a river, nature flows ever onwards. Even the nature of the flow changes.

Heraclitus’ vision of life is clear in his epigram on the river of flux:

‘We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not’ (B49a).

One interpretation of this passage is that Heraclitus is saying we can’t step into the same river twice. This is because the river is constantly changing. If I stroll down the banks of the Danube, the water before my eyes is not the same water from moment to moment. If the river is this water (which is a debatable point – the river could be its banks, the scar it carves in the landscape, but let’s leave this aside), it follows that the Danube is not the same river from moment to moment. We step into the Danube; we step out of it again. When we step into it a second time, we step into different water and thus a different river.

Moreover, we step into and out of the river as different beings.

Most interpretations of Heraclitus’s river fragment focus on the idea of the river in a state of flux. But Heraclitus says more than this in this fragment: ‘We are and are not’.

The river changes and so do you.

We are familiar with the principle of biological generation and corruption. Heraclitus puzzled over this principle two thousand years before the birth of the modern biological sciences and drew the ultimate lesson for the human condition. As material beings, we live in a world of flux. Moreover, we are flux. As physical bodies, we are growing and dying all the time, consuming light and resources to replicate our structure, while shedding matter continuously.

Change and death are ubiquitous features of the natural world. Maybe this is what Heraclitus meant when he said, in his inimitable way:

‘Gods are mortal, humans immortal, living their death, dying their life’.

Or maybe not. With Heraclitus we can’t be sure. What we know of Heraclitus comes from his commentators (nothing survives of his original work), and so Heraclitean epigrams can seem dubious in provenance, attributable to other authors. Everything changes, and history has changed a dozen times since Heraclitus’ time; yet I believe we can still take value from Heraclitus, particularly in a time like today, which is so clearly calling out for deep institutional and infrastructural change (I am speaking to people who are looking to make deep changes in our environmental and energy systems; our political, representative and regulatory systems; in our economic system – market capitalism – which is intrinsically indebted to the kind of society we really don’t want to be, an industrial society).

I think that Heraclitus gets it right. Reality is change and flow.