The Need for Conflict
By gbrown | July 2, 2009
image from jdlejeune.com
based on Eckhart Tolle’s “Living a Life of Inner Peace”
“Hell is the others” (Jean Paul Sartre)
“Us” and the “others”, “Vegetarians and meat eaters”, “Jews and Arabs”, “Buddhists and non-Buddhists”, “Locals and foreigners”, “Believers and non-believers”, “Patriots and terrorists”.
As you grow you’ll notice how preoccupied our minds are with conflict; finding what’s good, what’s wrong, what’s too noisy or different.
You’ll be surrounded by those who complain - complaining about the traffic jam because they need to feel “right”. They need to feel morally superior to reality.
The need to complain is based on a fear of rejection. People will travel the world and complain about the places they go because they feel outside their comfort zone and in fear of rejection will reject their host first. We’ll complain about the food, the weather, the traffic, the hotel or whatever we are able to reject.
This is the basis for conflict. We fear others we don’t know and preempty rejection by first building a mental construct about these unknowns that skew our reality such that what we experience confirms our convictions.
We create signposts to enable us to deal with this rejection. I hide behind the veil of being “English” or “American” or “French” enabling me to in turn hide behind a collective set of beliefs, actions and securities that justify my rejection of others.
These convictions inevitably create our identity. Without conflict therefore, we feel our identity, our sense of “me” is threatened.
There is only one thing worse than the “egoic” me - the “egoic” us; criminals create less than 1% of all the suffering in the world - the rest is manufactured by normal citizens.
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Impostor in my head
By gbrown | July 1, 2009
(Based on Matthieu Ricard’s “Happiness”)
There is an impostor in my head. I believe it’s the core of my self, my entity. It gives me labels - I am English, I am an entrepreneur, I am a father etc.
This self-importance navigates my stream of consciousness - a boat that attracts attention and self-importance. It feeds on the next moment, future fantasies and past reminiscences.
I fear that without the boat, without these goals I cannot achieve yet these thoughts are the work of the impostor, giving me labels and signposts that dictate shortcuts on how my life should be - other people’s agendas.
Imagine drifting downstream in the boat and you suddenly are awoken by crashing into another boat. Insensed, you rise to give both barrels to the clumsy navigator who just rammed your boat. Only, you don’t - you find the other boat empty so you laugh at the stupidity. Now imagine the same scenario but with the other boat occupied - your reaction will be different. Your reaction is different because of the self-construct of “I”. Our suffering in form of the negative energies and anger too were self-inflicted.
Without clinging to the boat, when the stream has object we have freedom.
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Being Awake
By gbrown | June 30, 2009
Sometimes called the “happiest man in the world,” Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk, author and photographer.
To do no harm means to be awake. The basic qualities of knowing lie behind the mental construct and it is this construct that creates harm - negative emotions, illusion and attachment.
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Self-discipline is Freedom
By gbrown | June 24, 2009
“You can’t cheat the farm” says Covey.
You can learn a lot from the natural world. Nature provides us with a seemingly infinite repertoire of solutions to our human problems - from medicine to learning how to fly.
Yet, as humans we tend to believe we can short-cut the process. Rather than labour diligently in watering and nurturing our skills we’d prefer the shortcut.
When we think habit we often think of trying to kick smoking or a nervous tick. We rarely talk of habits outside of the pejorative. Yet, when you grow up there is one book I truly wished I had read earlier - Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”.
I know a lot of people have tried to read it and have dismissed it. Why? Because it was too much work. You’ll hear them talk about “The Secret” and other self-help silver bullets that involve improvement only at the superficial level.
Habits are your foundations. All you are is what you do on a regular basis. Habits are “uncool” because they require exercising the D-word - discipline - and when you talk to people of the D-word they visualize authoritarian teachers and parents.
Self-discipline is, however, freedom. As Aristotle said “Discipline is remembering what you want”. See how those who lack discipline spend their lives unsure of what exactly it is they want out of any given scenario and constantly grasp at new ideas and “the next big thing”.
Your strength of your ability to exercise and control your thoughts is the distance between your freedom and your lifetime bondage to blame, other people’s agendas and opinions.
As Goethe said “things that matter most should never be at the mercy of the things that matter least”. As you grow and get to know people in the professional domain see how many people’s lives exist in the whirlwind; busy-busy, firefighting, always “bouncing” somewhere, dealing with some crisis, spinning plates and ultimately achieving nothing.
“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing” as Covey says is the ultimate challenge - the truest test of our integrity. Maturity at this level releases us from the terror of deriving our security from the outside - from labels, from isms, from signposts and the opinions of others.
When we are able to exercise these 7 habits effectively we are liberated from a life of fire-fighting yet most people you meet will inevitably see the uphill effort required to conduct such interior work as too much effort and settle for the quick fix, the 60 minute synopsis, the success-in-a-box formula, or weekend course.
80/20 and Pareto will mean absolutely nothing to you, but what will resonate is that 95% of the people you meet spend their lives keeping themselves busy, keeping themselves insulated from the “main thing”. They work harder, longer and experience far more stress than you but ultimately still spend their lives at the mercy of others.
The difference between you and them is your ability to exercise self-discipline and these habits.
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You are not enough
By gbrown | June 23, 2009
Lastminute
You’ve got that dreamy look on your face.
You want to career down a mountainsidein a perspex ball: shake up the days,
dazzle the world with your escapades.You wake up here, in a shabby career,
in a perspex ball, not travelling at all.
You are not enough. I love this poem by copywriter Nick Astbury. Sums up the work in “Status Anxiety” by Alain de Botton and Tom Hodgkinson’s “How to Be Free”. These images are designed to make us feel inadequate and create a discomfort that convinces us that arrival and closure in the form of a cure is but one purchase away.
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Status Anxiety is a choice
By gbrown | June 23, 2009
When you grow up you’ll get a job and no doubt it’ll make you dread waking up in the morning. I spent Summers working in building yards, factories and, worst of all, the horrors of a meat-paste processing plant.
During my mind-numbing existence I smoldered in resentment towards my “oppressors” - who were inevitably those who had been just like me, yet only 20 years earlier, but had stuck it out and worked their way up to line manager.
The irony of modern day wage slavery is that no one is “forced” into it. There are no modern day pirates ready to pressgang you into slavery. It’s all in our head.
As you grow and are increasingly exposed to advertising, you will learn that it’s repetitive message is a drip-drip-dripping that seduces you into believing you aren’t “young/rich/popular/cool/handsome enough”. As much as we castigate the hoodwinkery of the admen, we must also accept we too are complicit in these “mind forg’d manacles”.
Ideology can only rule if, in the eyes of the masses, it rules without force. Coercion, therefore, is the key to acceptance. Ideology is embedded in textbooks, newspapers, TV, the internet and every other media that touches you on a daily basis meekly implying it only states “age old truths”.
Notice how those whose world-view fails to accept the dominant ideology and how they are treated, excoriated and even demonized by the media; hippies, the unwashed, tree-huggers, tramps, heretics, wanderers, vagabonds, squatters, loners, ravers and freaks.
Those brave enough to stand up for change and for the individual were inevitably alienated and ridiculed by ideology; the stories of Martin Luther King, Siddartha Gautama (The Buddha), Gandhi, John Lennon and even Jesus Christ are stories of outsiders brave enough to recognize ideology is not immutable.
Just because no-one is physically forced to accept an idea doesn’t mean it’s persuasive might is any less tangible.
The naivety of youth persuades us that force is the road to resistance. Yet, wisdom teaches us that resistance is best exercised through choice. Just as Winston exercises his choice to enjoy the moment, enjoy nature in the ending sequence of George Orwell’s 1984 we too have the ability to choose our own reality.
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Labels
By gbrown | June 22, 2009
When you were younger you had what Alan Watts would call “The Oceanic Experience”. As a baby, you weren’t able to distinguish between the “you” and your surroundings. The experience and the experiencer were one.
And now a world of education lies before you. As much as it can give it can also take; everything from the nature of a rock, to the colour of a star will be given a label.
As a baby labels were unnecessary. You experienced without signposts. Yet, as you grow education trains us to cling to them. The fragile ego absorbs them. “I’m Chinese”, “I’m a Manchester United supported”, “I’m a marketing manager”, “I’m a hairdresser”, “I’m Buddhist”, “I’m vegetarian” or “I’m a Republican”.
Every label is a move away from openness because each not only defines how we ought to behave but also how you wish others to interact with you.
“What are you?” you’ll be asked. Are you English? Are you vegetarian or what? Are you Buddhist or Christian? Because they’ll need to get closure on the discomfort caused by someone who doesn’t fit into a rigid worldview.
The fragile ego needs labels to hide its fragility. As you grow, as you pass through school you’ll see this play out and feel the urge to hide behind these labels. Yet, never forget that security is the opposite of freedom and the ability to live without labels is the mark of a confident man.
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Fight Club and Status Anxiety
By gbrown | June 19, 2009
Why do we envy and suffer in a world of plenty?
There’s a section in Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety that reminds me of the infamous Fight Club quote:
God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables — slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t. We’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.
In De Botton’s text, he quotes Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
“However independent minded we might judge ourselves to be we are in fact dangerously poor at understanding our own needs.”“Our souls rarely articulate what they must have in order to be satisfied. Or, when the do mumble something their commands are likely to be contradictory. “
Rousseau invited us to think of our minds as susceptible to the external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied. Voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and can distract us from the careful arduous task of correctly tracing our priorities.
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But
By gbrown | June 19, 2009
“But” negates everything you say before it.
- “It’s not an excuse but…” opens the rhetoric of the political animal as he tries to worm out of media enquiry.
- “Don’t take it personally but…” we say with a pre-emptive mollification of the other person’s reaction.
- “Yes but…” we interject when our fragile egos are challenged by reality.
Trying to live without “but” is hard. Years of ingrained and reinforced patterns of behavior. Some of you reading this may already be thinking “that’s true but…”. As Einstein said, the mark of intellect, is to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. A spoon of salt in a glass tastes foul. A spoon of salt in a lake goes unnoticed.
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A Path With Heart
By gbrown | June 19, 2009
The unawakened mind tends to make war with the way things are. To follow a path with heart we must understand the whole process of making war within ourselves and without; how it begins and how it ends.
War’s roots are in ignorance. Without understanding we can easily become frightened by life’s fleeting changes, inevitable losses, disappointments, the insecurity of our inevitable aging and death.
This understanding leads us to fight against life; running from pain or grasping at security or pleasures that, by their very nature, can never be truly satisfying.
We human beings are constantly in combat - at war - to escape the fact we are so limited, limited by circumstances we cannot control. But instead of escaping we continue to create suffering; waging war with good, waging war with evil, waging war with what is too small or what is too big, what is too short or too long, right or wrong - courageously carrying on the battle.
Genuine spiritual practice requires us to stop the war - this is the first step. But actually it must be practised over and over until it becomes our way of being.
When we let go of our battles and come to accept things as they are then we come to rest in the present moment. This is the beginning and the end of practice.
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Texting is a measure of social standing and cause of lack of self esteem - Josh Dhaliwal
By gbrown | June 18, 2009
American teen-agers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008. That averages out to about 80 messages a day, which is more than double the average from last year.
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Matthieu Ricard - Normal Life
By gbrown | June 18, 2009
“Normal life” with its ups and downs, mood swings, bouts of frustration and anger is a widely accepted pandemic. We give little credit to the capabilities of transformation because we’d rather tinker with the external world and all its content.
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Matthieu Ricard on the habits of happiness
By gbrown | June 18, 2009
If you were to say your purpose in this world was to be happy, people would say it “naive” or even “selfish” given the aggregate of human suffering. Yet, whether your goal is social justice, saving the environment, raising a family or building a business empire - as Aristotle says - happiness is the true “goal of goals”.
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Rescuers found a rucksack full of toys..
By gbrown | June 2, 2009
It would have been your run-of-the-mill tragedy that newspapers dwell on. So much so that you become habituated, turn the pages.
That would have been the case if it wasn’t for the line which drew me in:
“Rescuers found a second rucksack, full of toys.”
The original article stated that the bag contained a toy tractor.
I read this story waiting to board the plane, flicking nonchalantly through the news as is the habit to kill time. It took several reads to finally appreciate the almost incomprehensible sadness of this story. To describe it as “sad” seems inappropriate, weak. Every time I tried to shut it out on the plane, my thoughts kept returning to Sam’s story.
All week I’d been troubled by client business. This story is a reminder to us of the sheer irrelevance of such detail.
Sam’s story here: Daily Mail feature on Sam Puttick
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When to do nothing and when to not
By gbrown | May 12, 2009
I’m not sure what my point is going to be but I’ve just been at the receiving end of two strange turn of events today that I felt compelled to write it out of my system so that it made some sense.
The first event takes place in a supermarket in Dubai. City Center to be exact. It’s going to be yet another solitary walk around the local mall in search of water, toothpaste, moisturizer and the welcome stop at Starbucks. This could be Singapore, Dubai or any other faceless city.
I’m lining up at the checkout behind a restless Russian girl whose attention keeps darting back and forth between this aisle and the next. She keeps pushing back and forth to get a better look then suddenly disappears to the next aisle.
As I place my items on the conveyor I feel a trolley pushing into my back and the shouts of annoyed shoppers as Russian girl and accomplice come charging through the line to reclaim their original position. Such unnecessary stress. She throws my sushi platter and water into the back of the conveyor and shouts something in Russian to the disbelief of onlooking shoppers.
Australian woman 3 down the line pipes up and starts shouting loudly to the effect of “this is not how we do things round here” but Russian woman is unperturbed. If she was, she wouldn’t have done it in the first place.
In my younger years I would have been right in there in the melee. Hell, we’d be exchanging blows right there in the aisle. But, I’ve learned something - that sometimes piping up makes no difference because if manners did make sense, then people like her wouldn’t act like her.
I thought to myself “If this is how you treat people, this is how people’ll treat you”. And, for me, this was enough to know that someday she’d get her payback.
Heading back to the hotel I witnessed event 2.
A crowd gathers round an unfolding scene obscured by a throng of security guards. Judging by the looks of those 3 or 4 deep something major is happening.
Somebody is on the floor surrounded by security. Was it a shoplifter caught red-handed pinned to the ground by the mass of uniformed men? Difficult to tell, too many people.
Then I hear the banshee like wailing of a woman - what could this be? A middle aged European woman screams hysterically as she rushes back and forth in panic around the fallen man.
Indian looking guards look stunned into impotence. One holds the fallen mans legs up in the air. The man is in his 60s and white lying on his back. In desperation the woman beats his chest with a single fist and once again rises to her feat screaming unintelligibly.
There is no heroic doctor bursting through the crowd to administer CPR. With my distant CPR training, perhaps I could do it? But as the conveyor belt takes me further away from the scene I feel increasingly impotent and the crowd slowly envelops the scene.
Inaction takes hold and I feel ashamed. Only 4 days before I was on a flight bound to Heathrow from South Africa when a young girl passed out two rows back. Stewardesses rushed to the scene and eventually adminstered oxygen but not after having a 5 minute pause of inaction.
One stewardess decided the best course of action was to take her to the back of the galley and lay her out there. After minutes of deliberation I decided to step forward and said I’d carry her as few of the crew were strong enough to rise to the task.
The whole plane just sat looking on either in disbelief of denial. “Why wasn’t anybody helping?” I thought.
Back in Dubai, locals rushed excitedly from the corners of the mall to witness what they believe is going to be something worth talking about.
I walk away feeling impotent, I should have done something. That could have been me and I didn’t act because I was too scared and, as is so often the case, I believed somebody else was going to sort it out.
Sometimes it pays to do nothing, other times people will pay for our inaction. I just hope when you grow you are brave enough to act when it counts.
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A World of Music
By gbrown | May 10, 2009
There’s nothing worse than old people telling the young about what music they should listen to is there - so I feel obliged to carry out this age old tradition that will one day make you squirm. But before we get there, before your musical tastes become concrete, allow me to broaden your mind for a minute.
You haven’t even heard of the Beatles yet and I’m about to launch into a rant about World Music. Anyway, you have a world of music before you to discover, define and make your own. Just make sure that sense of discovery doesn’t ever stop - that’s when you unofficially become “old”.
Music is like food - there is a world of tastes and sensations out there to be discovered. Take this classical Indian Raga for example. I’ve been fortunate enough to hear this type of music in its element - in India. But, you can travel even without leaving home, such are the wonders of the internet my friend.
You’ve only got to “twinkle twinkle” and “Thomas” songs. Don’t get stuck on one type of music - keep exploring.
Classical Indian Raga - raga bhopali. On Tabla is Pandit Anindo Chatterjee playing drut teental (fast 16 beats)
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Cityboy - Don’t live out your life with other people’s agendas
By gbrown | May 7, 2009
Harry
I read this book coming back from Africa and felt compelled to share a thought with you. Damn! You haven’t even kissed a girl yet and I’m already trying to tell you how about the vaguaries and illusions of the working world. On the one hand I feel obliged to shut up and let you make your own mistakes. On the other, I feel that I can at least give you courage when you feel self-doubt by knowing that you may not be alone in taking the tough calls that face us all when growing up. I wish someone had done that for me… said that “this was right” or “this is what I’d do”. But I had none of that so I guess like all us we over-compensate for what was missing in our childhood by indulging in our adult life.Anyway, Cityboy reminded me of my early career in London. Geraint’s career was in Investment Banking - mine in a Finance House run by ex-Investment Bankers. In fact, I’ve met all the people in this apocraphyl tale - albeit in their many guises. As a young lad trying to carve his way though the heady world of finance I was faced with the omnipresent fagging and bullying that enables elite public school kids to recreate these unknown worlds in the guise of their familiar norms and hierarchies.
These macho coteries of fragile egos massaged by excess - bonuses, drugs and bigotry - are designed to humiliate so chief swinging dick can rule over the the rest of the monkeys. That’s nothing new but the problem is that you get sucked in - you start buying it, they start shaping you. I stuck it out no more than a year and felt so brainwashed it took me several years to empty so much of the false logic they had seeded in my mind.
That said, you could learn many useful skills like I did - finance, sales and just negotiating the working world of the primate. Use it for what it is but just remember no matter how much $$ you’ll make, you’ll always be working for the man. I was doing well but as in this story - it was a hollow existence.
Everyone talks of retiring by age 35 but very few ever do because they’re always “one deal” or “one bonus” away from kicking back. Use it, but don’t let it you use you and waste your best years of your life chasing someone else’s agenda.
‘His timing couldn’t be better!London’s pernicious financial world reveals itself in all its ugliness’ — Daily Mail ‘As a primer to back-stabbing, bullying, drug-taking, gambling, boozing, lap-dancing, this takes some beating!a necessary and valuable book’ — Evening Standard ‘Excruciatingly candid’ — Sunday Times ‘!engaging, timely and important!an effective indictment of the narcissism and decadence of City life’ — The Times
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10 Into the Wild Tribute Videos
By gbrown | May 7, 2009
Harry,
You’re too young now to be thinking about this sh*t but allow me to sow a seed in that curious mind of yours.
Because you’re curious you’ll be born into the dialetically opposed worlds of, on the one hand, the joy of discovery, and on the other, agitation of the soul. It’s a hunger that often defies any logical manipulation and it’s only through the stories of others that we begin to make sense out of this deck of cards we’ve been dealt.
Don’t dwell on the aphorisms, just watch the movie. Don’t try to define it, just let it sink into your subconscious and leave it there. Someday you’ll get that longing to find closure and pay all the associated prices to find your arrival. When that happens, just remember what it was all about and remember this story.
Your friend…
(Tribute videos to Into the Wild - written by John Krakauer - directed by Sean Penn)
#1 Rise (Eddie Vedder)
#2 The Movie Trailer
#3 Sean Penn & John Krakauer - the names behind the movie & book
#4 Running with Horses
#5 Best Scene
#6 Hard Sun (Eddie Vedder) - best video
#7 Society (Eddie Vedder) - same video diff music
#8 The Real Christopher McCandless
#9 Soul & Sea Tribute
#10 Forgiveness
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Fight Club Quote
By gbrown | April 17, 2009
Harry
It’s ironic that I should lay this one on you when you grow up to appreciate how I put bread on the table. Just remember how these guys make their money - making you and I feel inadequate.
Growth, my boy, is so often an illusion. Before you buy in hook line and sinker to the idea just take time to see people who are not desperate to strive for more - whether they be the villagers in Bhutan or the islanders in the Aegean whose gentle ways and acceptance of the present moment reminded me that as this Fight Club quotes so beautifully illustrates - once you replace happiness as life’s purpose with growth then you’ll only really discover the true cost of the price you paid when you finally reach 65 and reflect back on what has been missed.
Your friend
“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy sh*t we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact.”
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Into the Wild - John Krakauer
By gbrown | April 15, 2009
There’s something compelling about this story that speaks to the heart - a wake-up call.
A young idealistic man pays for pursuing a long held dream with his life. Perhaps it’s the legacy of unanswered questions and “what if?”s that makes these tales compelling - from Christopher McCandless in “Into the Wild” to the ill fated Everest expeditions of Mallory and Irvine in 1934.
There’s no doubt about it - Krakauer is a talented writer amongst a legion of mountaineering epic drones who churn out countless pages of tortuous accounts that serve only to bore the reader into submission. Like Tom Hodgkinson, I find Krakauer to be one of the few writers in my collection who are linguistically dextrous in the written format.
Perhaps the appeal of Krakauer is, however, his empathy with the tragic events of young McCandless’ life. Whereas the (very excellent) movie directed by Sean Penn is recounted purely from the narrative of McCandless, the book adds further depth to the tale by helping the reader understand the mindset that compelled a young man to give up a promising educational career at Harvard Law School, donate and/or burn his remaining savings and hit the road to fulfill a dream of a hobo existence from Washington to the wilderness of Alaska to live off the land - a move which finally became his undoing.
Like McCandless, Krakauer was once young, idealistic, passionate and stubborn - a mix that agitates the soul enough for a man to seek answers in an alternative existence that disparaged the bourgeois ideals of their hard-working middle class parents.
Where his father’s existence was devoted to typically methodistic values that would have made firebrand preachers like Watt Tyler proud - hard work, money education and the deferment gratitude till tomorrow, the young McCandless sought the moment and the feeling of “being alive”. From slumming it with hobos and the shady characters that lived on the margins of society to working combine harvesters to foraging on wild fruits and berries, McCandless’ pleasures were simple - the unencumbered experience of now sharpened by the very challenge of daily existence.
“I read somewhere it’s not important to be strong but to feel strong. To find and measure yourself at least once in the truly ancient of conditions” McCandless
It’s easy to romanticize about the tragic lives of idealistic adventures who’s own naivete was both their lifeblood and final undoing. Yet, Krakauer doesn’t fail to address the criticism levelled at McCandless - namely that his reckless itinerant lifestyle and its unanswered questions caused a great deal of pain to those he left behind. Perhaps it was the shared themes between the upbringings of both Krakauer and McCandless that helps us understand the complex labyrinth of emotions that unravelled to shape this mendicant’s lifestyle.
Both Krakauer and McCandless were afflicted by an agitation of the soul that only comes from an estranged and difficult relationship between father and son - a burning desire to prove oneself and seek some form of closure through that elusive experience that grows from curiosity into obsession.
But McCandless’ story is not a pathological insight into the mind of yet another misunderstood youth - like the more timid Ferris Bueller’s Day Off these tales serve as reminders to us all as to what’s important.
In a world where we’ve relegated happiness to being but a purchase away, where advertising continuously reminds us that, in some form or another, we are “not enough” McCandless’ story proves that a life without title, without money or belongings, without “success” and only a minimum of food can bring real joy. Espousing the vulgarity of future plans and ambitions and experiencing the moment through an atavistic closeness with nature are the keys to happiness.
But that requires work. Working hard is, after all, the lazy option - it’s easy to sacrifice everything for long hours and a consumer existence. True happiness means staying awake - alert to the reality of pursuing our own as opposed to other people’s agendas.
So when I ask myself “was McCandless happy?” even though he died alone stranded in an abandoned bus in the depths of Alaska, I would say yes. McCandless lived a short yet full life when so many around him live a long yet hollow existence.
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