• Flex Your Thought Muscle

    Who doesn’t face difficulty in life? Difficult decisions, for starters, are part of being human. Each day presents us with countless choices—some big, some small.

    But what about difficult internal experiences? At some point, we all have experienced things like negative emotions, unwanted thoughts, or intrusive memories. We may even be engaged in an ongoing battle with depression or anxiety, or avoid situations that would lead to a more fulfilling life because of an unspoken fear holding us back.

    Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT (pronounced like the word “act”) is an evidence-based tool that can help you accept your difficult internal experiences and commit to taking action that brings you fulfillment in life. In other words, it’s a way of choosing to act according to your values rather than allowing your difficult internal experiences to dictate how you live.

    One of my favorite quotes about choice comes from the Austrian neurologist and psychologist Viktor Frankl. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he writes:

    Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

    ACT takes a similarly empowering view of choice in response to human suffering. In Reclaim Your Life: Acceptance & Commitment Therapy in 7 Weeks, psychologist Carissa Gustafson describes how the mindfulness components of ACT help you make the choice to live out your values despite the difficult experiences you may face. She writes:

    They allow you to pay attention to difficult experiences like thoughts, feelings, memories, sensations, and urges without immediately reacting to them. Instead, you make a conscious decision as to how you want to respond to any given situation based on your values.

    Many of our internal struggles are the result of the storytelling mind, something that makes us uniquely human. While our ability to tell stories allows us to do many wonderful things, it can also lead us to believe things about ourselves and our world that are untrue or unhelpful. In fact, oftentimes the stories we tell ourselves make our internal suffering worse. ACT helps us overcome this trouble through gaining psychological flexibility. Just like performing exercises to increase our body’s flexibility, we can also use strategies to increase our mind’s flexibility.

    There are six core processes of ACT that can be used to increase psychological flexibility. In his book Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Dr. Steven C. Hayes calls them “the ACT hexaflex.”

    The ACT hexaflex (via Rising Sun Counseling)

    Let’s break it down:

    1. Acceptance

    Essentially, the “acceptance” part of ACT entails welcoming any experience, whether positive or negative, into your life without judgement. In his poem “The Guest House,” 13th-century Persian poet Rumi encourages us to welcome every kind of guest into our home. “Entertain them all!” he says.

    The negative spaces are part of life and we should accept them too. I like how Henry Miller describes acceptance in The Wisdom of the Heart:

    The act of living is based on rhythm—on give and take, ebb and flow, light and dark, life and death. By acceptance of all aspects of life, good and bad, right and wrong, yours and mine, the static, defensive life, which is what most people are content with, is converted into a dance, “the dance of life,” metamorphosis. One can dance to sorrow or to joy.

    It’s through acceptance that we give up the fight to control the uncontrollable, and can begin to take action toward what we value.

    2. Cognitive defusion

    You are not your thoughts. This idea is central to the process of cognitive defusion. We sometimes get “fused,” or attached to a negative thought, which can end up clouding our view of reality and dictating how we experience life. But if we can get some distance from the thought, or separate ourselves from it, then we gain the clarity needed to understand that it’s just a thought, and our thoughts don’t define us. It’s our choices and our actions that define us.

    Cognitive defusion (via Reclaim Your Life)

    In his book The Creative Act, Rick Rubin describes the act of noticing the culture without feeling obligated to be a part of it:

    It’s helpful to view currents in the culture without feeling obligated to follow the direction of their flow. Instead, notice them in the same connected, detached way you might notice a warm wind. Let yourself move within it, yet not be of it.

    The same could be said for noticing thoughts or emotions. If we imagine them floating by us like the currents of a river, we can more easily see that they are fleeting and they are not really part of who we are. This is the power of cognitive defusion.

    3. Being present

    The present moment is all we have. ACT incorporates many mindfulness strategies, but perhaps none as direct as those focused on being present in the moment. In “The Haunted Mind,” Nathaniel Hawthorne writes:

    Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future. You have found an intermediate space.

    It’s in this intermediate space that we have the power to act. Or, take Jamie xx’s song “Breather,” which features audio of a yoga teacher speaking calming words over the DJ’s backing rhythms:

    Breathe
    Be grateful for this present moment
    The only moment that truly exists
    ‘Cause the past is gone
    And the future is uncertain
    But what we know right now is this moment

    Making contact with your present-moment experience—whether it’s your external environment or your internal condition—rather than resisting it, is an essential component of ACT. Again, psychologist Carissa Gustafson describes it like this:

    The point is not simply to be present, but to help increase your ability to attend to your present-moment experience so that you can respond rather than react reflexively through old habits that may not be serving you.

    The only place that change can happen, after all, is in the present.

    4. Self as context

    This process is also referred to as the “observer self.” When our storytelling mind is in high gear we are locked into the “thinking self.” Similar to cognitive defusion, shifting into the observer self helps us gain some distance from our thoughts, or our thinking self. It’s basically the ability to view what you’re experiencing from an outside perspective instead of an inside one. We can do this through the simple act of noticing our own experience. If we can direct our attention to what we’re experiencing and name it, then we become aware of it, and it’s through that awareness that we’re able to confront it in service of living out our values.

    5. Values

    Once we unhinge ourselves from all the things holding us back, we become empowered to move in the direction of our values. But in order to do that, we need to know what we value. In ACT’s terms, values differ from goals, which are things that can be accomplished. Values, on the other hand, are more ongoing and provide us with direction in life.

    6. Commitment

    This process is also known as committed ACTion. Clever, huh? Once we’ve identified our values, the logical next step is to commit to living them out. Taken together with the other processes of ACT, we are freed to live according to our values instead of our unwanted thoughts and fears. Living in like this may very well mean entering uncomfortable situations, but we do so willingly, knowing that they represent something we value. Isn’t that a much better and fulfilling way to live?

    So, if you ever find yourself struggling internally with difficult thoughts or unwanted emotions, remember ACT’s hexaflex. Go ahead and flex that thought muscle! Get out of your head and move toward living out your values.

    Image via the Mind Muscle Project

  • What You Came Here For

    In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about finishing Oliver Burkeman’s book 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. I loved its central message of accepting our limitations—not the least of which is the limited time we all have in this place—as a way of living more freely and more meaningfully. In particular, I loved the sentiment with which Burkeman ended his book:

    And the life you will see incrementally taking shape, in the rearview mirror, will be one that meets the only definitive measure of what it means to have used your weeks well: not how many people you helped, or how much you got done; but that working within the limits of your moment in history, and your finite time and talents, you actually got around to doing—and made life more luminous for the rest of us by doing—whatever magnificent task or weird little thing it was that you came here for.

    It has me reflecting on what “magnificent task or weird little thing” I came here for and goes well with Austin Kleon’s “Be the weird you wish to see.”

    It also has me wondering about how limitations can counterintuitively liberate us in other areas of life. On this topic, Kleon too, has something to say. In the final chapter of his book Steal Like an Artist—titled “Creativity Is Subtraction”—he writes:

    Nothing is more paralyzing than the idea of unlimited possibilities. The idea that you can do anything is absolutely terrifying.

    The way to get over creative blocks is to simply put some constraints on yourself. It seems contradictory, but when it comes to creative work, limitations mean freedom.

    I’ve recently started following Erik Winkowski’s newsletter Paper Films, which I find to be wildly creative. When I think about using constraints as a way of unleashing creativity in your work, Winkowski’s short films immediately come to mind. For example, a few weeks ago he posted a video showing how he uses a typewriter to draw.

    The Written Image by Erik Winkowski

    Drawing with a typewriter

    Read on Substack

    It’s hard to imagine a more constrained way of drawing than doing so on a typewriter.

    Kleon also employs the humble typewriter as a limiting tool for his own creative work. He conducts his excellent typewriter interviews via the U.S. Postal Service, a constraint in its own right. In today’s hyperconnected world, the time it takes to type up interview questions, mail them out, wait for a response, and post the results serves as a limiter that brings Kleon’s creative work and collaborations into focus. It’s the good friction.

    He also popularized blackout poetry—a form of found poetry in which you remove, or “black out,” words of a newspaper or other text to create your own unique composition.

    From Austin Kleon’s Newspaper Blackout

    One of Kleon’s predecessors in this type of work was the visual artist Tom Phillips. In 1966, Phillips decided to take W.H. Mallock’s 1892 novel A Human Document and modify every page through his beautiful paintings and collages with the goal of creating an entirely new work of art—blackout poetry taken to the extreme. Phillips’s commitment to the project would produce his magnum opus: A Humument. Over the course of 50 years, A Humument saw various publications and modifications, the latest version coming out in 2016, just six years before Phillips passed away. Every page of this beautifully unique and impressive book is graciously available for viewing on Thomas Phillips’s website.

    Page 93 of Tom Phillips’s A Humument (2nd version 1986)

    In the end, Winkowski, Kleon, and Phillips have all used limitations as a way of freeing themselves to pursue and define their life’s work. In doing so, they’ve carved out their own creative niche—their own unique voice, their own version of weird.

    I think we need limitations in life. There’s definitely a time for pushing yourself beyond your limits, but when life seems complicated, I always find it helpful to simplify. If I ever feel stressed out, this mantra always helps to ground me: “Keep it simple.” This could just as well be, “Find a limitation.” It’s a way of focusing yourself in on what you can actually do now with the tools you currently have.

    Setting such limitations ends up teaching you something important—it might even reveal the wings of your real self opening, or the weird little thing you came here for.


  • A Moment for Maná

    I wrote about Maná in Friday’s newsletter. The Mexican band Maná was nominated to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year. Their nomination is especially significant because they’re the first rock group to be nominated that primarily sings in Spanish. This is a great article explaining why this is the perfect moment in history to induct such a deserving band. My dad—a Spanish teacher—introduced me to Maná when I was just 12 years old. I remember spending many summer days listening to their album Dónde Jugarán los Niños (#250 on the top 600), fully absorbed in the sunny vibes it radiates. My good friend Charles Hughes over at the No Fences Review knows that I’ve been a long-time Maná fan, so he asked me to do a write-up for one of their songs for his newsletter, “Turn It Up – Rock Hall Nominees, Part 1” (also check out Part 2). This is what I wrote:

    At a time when many Latinx artists had to “cross over” by singing in English to expand their reach, Mexican band Maná just kept rocking out en español. Their sound is a fusion of diverse genres—rock & roll, of course, but also reggae, ska, and funk. In many of their songs, lead singer Fernando “Fher” Olvera gives voice to love’s yearnings and heartbreaks. Llorar (crying) is often compared with llover (raining) and you’ll frequently hear words that rhyme with corazón (heart). The song “Cuando los Ángeles Lloran” (When Angels Cry) is a softer ballad that has all the classic Maná sounds, but with an added lyrical depth that highlights an aspect of the group I admire—their protest. It tells the story of Chico Mendes, the Brazilian activist murdered in 1988 for his efforts to protect the Amazon rainforest. Here, too, llorar and llover mix together, but for a different reason: when an earthly angel like Mendes dies, the angels above cry along with us—and it rains. Beyond their environmental and social advocacy, Maná tells stories that connect with the human experience. It’s why they’ve remained a staple in the Latin rock scene for so long—transcending borders and generations, and absolutely earning this historic nomination.

    You can read the rest of the newsletter here.


  • Threads and Through Lines

    Earlier this year, Bad Bunny released a short film a few days ahead of his sixth studio album—both titled DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (I Should’ve Taken More Photos). The short film features Puerto Rican director and poet Jacobo Morales who laments over not having taken more photos throughout his life. In doing so, he contemplates Puerto Rican identity over the course of a complex colonial history. Morales expresses the belief that taking more photos might have improved his memory of Puerto Rico’s past and the cultural identity he longs to preserve. The video leaves an impression, and I wrote about it in a post called “Photos and Memory.”

    It’s a complicated task to consider the cultural identity of a whole nation. It’s complicated enough to consider the identity of a single individual. In our current cultural landscape, I hear a lot about searching for your authentic self—as if my current self is not my authentic one. It often leaves me wondering what we mean by “authentic self.” Is your authentic self something you can uncover by peeling back the layers that hide it? Or, is your authentic self something you actively create by simply living out your life and carving your own path?

    Both photos and memory are attempts to preserve time—to record its passing. But time is a hard concept for humans to grasp. Historian of science James Gleick refers to it as the “the fast-expanding tapestry of interwoven ideas and facts that we call our culture.” Stitched within the fabric of time is memory, and Gleick also points out how problematic memory can be. Referencing both Woolf and Carroll, he writes:

    We say that memory ‘takes us back.’ Virginia Woolf called memory a seamstress ‘and a capricious one at that.’ … ‘I can’t remember things before they happen,’ says Alice, and the Queen retorts, ‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.’ Memory both is and is not our past. It is not recorded, as we sometimes imagine; it is made, and continually remade.

    Memory is not as reliable as it appears to be, and neither is a photo. A photo represents a moment frozen in time. A photo of yourself, then, represents yourself frozen in time. If you string a bunch of those photos together, you can create a continuum, of sorts, leading from your past all the way into your present. This string of photos would compose your personal identity, or at least part of it. While considering personal identity, philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein asks:

    What is it that makes a person the very person that she is, herself alone and not another, an integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be…?

    She goes on to compare her current identity with a childhood picture of herself:

    I stare at the picture of a small child at a summer’s picnic, clutching her big sister’s hand with one tiny hand while in the other she has a precarious hold on a big slice of watermelon that she appears to be struggling to have intersect with the small o of her mouth. That child is me. But why is she me? I have no memory at all of that summer’s day, no privileged knowledge of whether that child succeeded in getting the watermelon into her mouth.

    A photographer named Noah Kalina took such a comparison a lot further. In January of 2000, Kalina started the Everyday project, and began taking a picture of himself every day. He was 19 years old at the time, and after 25 years, he’s still taking them.

    Sequence of self-portraits from Noah Kalina’s Everyday project

    At a few different points over the years, Noah has released a video that dramatically documents his journey, the most recent coming out in 2020. It takes the viewer through 7,263 photos of Noah, captured from ages 19 to 39, in just over eight minutes—his calm face gazing unsmiling into the camera.

    Watching the video, it’s fascinating to see Noah age through the thousands of photos rapidly flashing across the screen. Even more compelling is the realization that behind each mundane snapshot is a life being lived—with all its joys and triumphs, all its hardships and tribulations. The simplistic and quick linear movement of the pictures from past to present obscures the nonlinear life that Noah has lived—a life we all live.

    The British anthropologist Tim Ingold knows a lot about lines and writes about them as beautifully and eloquently as I imagine anyone can. In a 2020 article titled “Lines, Threads & Traces,” he quotes artist Paul Klee who once said, “Drawing is like taking a line for a walk.” Ingold continues by describing the curving path that’s created when many feet walk upon that same line over time:

    But the path, like the line made by drawing, twists and turns. So, too, does life itself. Life goes on, precisely because it is not lived at this point or that, but is rather on the way from someplace to someplace else. It is in the detours that everything happens. That’s why the stories we tell, of our own and others’ lives, also circle around. We have to circle too, to follow them.

    We know that life doesn’t make haste to simply move in a straight line from point A to point B. Rather, it curves and twists, sometimes reversing back or changing course altogether. Life moves along lines more like those created by the Biro life forms pictured in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

    Biro life forms tracing out potential life paths (via The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Illustrated Edition)

    As with life, these lines are all over the place. An individual line moves in its own unique, nonlinear fashion, while intersecting with the lines of others. It’s at the moment of intersection that our life’s path has the opportunity to impact—or be impacted by—someone else’s. Ingold concludes that each single line ends up connecting to the lines of others and eventually forms the web of lines that make up a community. After describing the isolated clicks of a keyboard, he rejects the notion that we should consider these lines as nonlinear, and advocates for the connectedness and vitality that’s achieved through the curvatures of handwriting:

    Linear thinking, we say, goes from point to point; linear transport from location to location; linear time from moment to moment. Of thinking, travel or time that wanders off course, or loops around, we are inclined to say that it is non-linear. Yet did you not just draw a line with your pencil? Does the winding path not follow a line, as does the story with its twists and turns? Indeed, what we witness today is not the birth but the death of the line. To reduce a linear movement to a rigid sequence of fixed points is to drain it of vitality, of everything that gives it life and growth. For the living world, in truth, is not connected like a net, but a writing mesh of lines. Knotted in the midst, their loose ends never cease to root for other lines to tangle with.

    What is our community but a mesh of individual lines—sometimes knotted with others or with themselves, sometimes floating loosely—always seeking to lay down roots or longing to intertwine with others. Even for the most introverted among us, our life story is meant to be joined with those of others in community. Something about our authentic self, I believe, comes from who we are when we’re with other people. Our lines not only progress forward as we live out life, but they also circle around and outward, impacting others along the way. Their lines do the same for us.

    Translation: I don’t know where I’m going but I’m going (via 72kilos)

    Joy Division (New Order) is one of the bands that was nominated to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year. The cover art of their 1979 album Unknown Pleasures is both iconic and enigmatic. It’s no stranger to a T-shirt and it’s instantly recognizable when you see it. Unlike its appearance on clothing, the album’s front cover doesn’t include its title or the name of the band. It’s all black with 80 straight-ish, white horizontal lines that form a small square in the center. The individual lines peak unevenly and irregularly in the middle, giving the impression of a mountain range that runs vertically through them.

    The image is the result of a star, or rather an exploded one—a supernova explosion. This Far Out article provides more details:

    Simply put, the image is a “stacked plot” of the radio emissions given out by a pulsar, a ‘rotating neutron star.’ This sudden overload of astronomical terms might be a little overwhelming, but the concept though ‘unknown’, gives one immense ‘pleasure’.

    To trace the pulsar’s origin, we need to rewind a little. The pulsar named CP 1919 was discovered in 1967 by two Cambridge academicians–a student named Jocelyn Bell Burnell and her supervisor Antony Hewish. As per their observation, when the star turns, it emits electromagnetic radiation in a beam, much like a lighthouse overlooking a vast stretch of a dark ocean. Radio telescopes can pick up these radiations; hence, each line on the image is an individual pulse, varying in length as waves travel a long distance confronting various obstacles on the way.

    Back in 2019, to celebrate the album’s 40th anniversary, scientists made a new recording of the same pulsar and posted it here. Each “peak” of the 80 lines featured on the album’s cover was a recording of one of 80 radio emissions that came from the neutron star as it made 80 turns in 107 seconds. In essence, the lines on the album cover represent radio waves caused by lightning in outer space, observed from many light-years away. Although separate, the lines appear to be connected—each peak was the result of energy received from the rotating neutron star. It’s the same with us: our life’s path, or line, is impacted by the energy of others.

    Looking down on the magnetic pole of pulsar CP 1919, which is encircled by lightning (via The Conversation)

    The vast lightning systems of CP 1919, as pictured above, continue to circle around the magnetic poles of the pulsar, and while they initially appeared to be chaotic, over time they have revealed a more uniform pattern. The same can be said for how our line in life eventually reveals patterns—our authentic self, perhaps—over time. In a post called “The Continuous Thread of Revelation,” Maria Popova references author Eudora Welty’s thoughts on “writing, time, and embracing the nonlinearity of how we become who we are.” I love Welty’s perspective on writing—and on life:

    Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer’s own life. This has been the case with me. Connections slowly emerge. Like distant landmarks you are approaching, cause and effect begin to align themselves, draw closer together. Experiences too indefinite of outline in themselves to be recognized for themselves connect and are identified as a larger shape. And suddenly a light is thrown back, as when your train makes a curve, showing that there has been a mountain of meaning rising behind you on the way you’ve come, is rising there still, proven now through retrospect.

    As humans, we long to find the meaning in belonging to something bigger than ourselves. In its absence, we’ll go so far as to create it. We want to find the stories and the patterns that help us understand ourselves and one another better.

    Translation: Everything that seemed disconnected soon will make sense (via 72kilos)

    We start with a single line. Our line sometimes goes straight, but then it begins to curve around, perhaps to avoid an obstacle. It continues on, moving forward and outward. It intersects and interacts with the lines of others, bending and peaking as it receives energy from both obvious and surprising sources. It gives off its own energy as well. It mixes and mingles and forms connections with other lines, eventually forming webs. Over time, it reveals the larger patterns of an identity—the culmination a life lived, with all its joys, hardships, and mundanities.

    This is the authentic self—a narrative that we paradoxically create, even as it creates us. We are shaped by our life experiences, both good and bad, many of which are beyond our control. However, the story we tell ourselves about our life is within our control. And it’s this story that determines how those experiences will shape our identity from this moment onward. If both memory and photos are unreliable or unhelpful references for us, we have a degree of flexibility that works in our favor. We can hold onto narratives that empower us and release those that hold us back. The beautiful thing about controlling our own story is that we can change it at any point. Our identity is active and we continue to create it each day—its threads and through lines weaving together the fabric of our authentic self.


  • Be Not So Fearful

    In yesterday’s newsletter, I wrote about hope in the corners. I opened it with a quote from Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark:

    Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. … Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimism and pessimism.

    There’s a middle ground, according to Solnit, that exists between being too positive or too negative. It’s the room where hope resides. Maybe we can find other things in that room too.

    The cult British singer-songwriter Bill Fay died this past week at 81. I was only vaguely familiar with his work from Jeff Tweedy having routinely covered his song “Be Not So Fearful” (also featured in this scene of the excellent I Am Trying to Break Your Heart documentary). 

    I read that Fay once said:

    I’m thankful that side of my life has continued for all my life—finding songs in the corner of the room.

    For much of his life, Fay’s music lived on the periphery. His recording career started in the early ‘70s and abruptly ended only a few years afterward. Later, his career would have a resurgence of sorts after being rediscovered my musicians like Tweedy, among others.

    Fay’s comment about “finding songs in the corner of the room” circles us back to something else Solnit writes of hope:

    How the transformation happens … recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of center stage. Our hope and often our power.

    Bill Fay didn’t occupy the limelight and our hope doesn’t have to either. This doesn’t make it any less transformational or less powerful. In fact, it does just the opposite.

    Rest in peace, Bill Fay. You can read the whole newsletter here.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eric Wenninger is an educator and writer. He teaches language and culture and writes about his thoughts and experiences here.