The Lottery of Life

Note: Today, as with every Monday during 2014, I’m publishing a short “chapter” from my unpublished ebook about fear, happiness, and freedom. Astute readers will recognize that much this particular chapter appeared as blog post at this site last September.

My work nowadays involves meeting and chatting with folks from all walks of life. They email me to say, “Want to have lunch?” and I say, “Of course!” (After all, I’m all about the power of yes.) We talk about podcasts or travel or bicycling or comic books. Whatever strikes our fancy. When we’ve finished our tea or our Thai noodles, nothing seems to have happened — not on the outside, anyhow.

What’s happened, though, is that we’ve both received lottery tickets. By meeting and chatting and sharing ideas, we’ve been given tickets in the lottery of life.

Exchanging lottery tickets with Jim and Pete…

I also get a ticket whenever I try something new. (Because I now try new things all of the time, I’m accumulating a lot of lottery tickets.)

I get tickets when I say “yes” to things that are scary or difficult too. When I spoke at World Domination Summit in 2012 — something that scared the hell out of me! — I got a lottery ticket. When I flew to Ecuador last September to talk with people about Financial Independence, I got a lottery ticket. When I introduce myself to strangers or “important people”, I get a lottery ticket.

But note that these tickets are rarely handed to me. To get them, I have to take risks. I have to move outside my comfort zone. As much as I enjoy sitting on the couch in the evening watching “Downton Abbey” with Kim, neither one of us receives a lottery ticket for doing so. To get tickets, we have to do things.

Colleen earns a lottery ticket…

The prizes in this lottery are many and varied.

When I learned Spanish, for instance, I received a winning lottery ticket that has paid off in all sorts of ways. I made new friends (my tutor, my English student), traveled to new places (Perú, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador), read new authors, tried new food, watched new movies, and so much more.

When I was in Quito last fall, I rode the teleférico, the cable-car that carries visitors 4000 feet up the side of a nearby volcano. During the fifteen-minute ride, I chatted with two couples that spoke only Spanish. If I hadn’t learned Spanish, I couldn’t have understood them, much less conversed. But because I do speak Spanish, I enjoyed a pleasant chat about one couple’s life in Venezuela and the other couple’s life in Quito. Plus I garnered a restaurant recommendation for later that evening. yet another small prize I won simply because I took the time to learn another language.

Any time I do something — especially something new — there’s a chance my life will be vastly improved in the long run.

Not every meeting and not every experience pays off — in fact, some are disasters — but many do provide a reward. Often enough, those rewards are enormous. Winning lottery tickets are so common and so fruitful, in fact, that I’ve almost become addicted to playing the lottery of life. I relish making new acquaintances, going new places, and trying new things.

I used to think I was unlucky. Good things happened to other people, and never to me. Everyone else had more fun than I did. Now, seven years since learning to say “yes” to life, I know the truth. Wishing won’t make you happy or wealthy, and good things don’t just happen. Luck isn’t magic or a gift from the gods.

You make your own luck.

If It Bleeds, It Leads

If our lives are filled with fear, that may be due in part to the prevalence of internet, television, and radio. Our fears are fueled by the modern mass media, which makes money by highlighting extreme and unusual events.

Here, for instance, is the front page from Saturday’s on-line edition of USA Today:

Headlines from the 18 January 2014 edition of USA Today

Human trafficking! Attacks on Americans! Identity thieves! Remains of dead boy! Elsewhere on the front page, there are stories about extreme weather, a new truck that burst into flames, the background of a high-school gunman, a gay teacher forced to resign, and so on. And this is a normal, uneventful day.

Note: I’ve written before that when it comes to investing, it pays to ignore financial news. Studies show that investors who receive no news perform better than those who receive a constant stream of information. Likewise, the people I know who pay less attention to current events tend to be happier than those who consume a regular diet of news. This is merely anecdotal, I know, but maybe ignorance really is bliss.

If you pay attention to the news, you might think terrorist attacks are common, bicycles unsafe, and that it’s dangerous to let children play unattended in the yard. Yet statistically, terrorist attacks are exceedingly rare, riding a bike increases your life expectancy, and your children are safer outdoors than you were when you roamed the streets twenty or thirty years ago.

The events in the news are newsworthy only because they’re the exception, not the rule. They’re statistical outliers. Yet because we’re fed these stories daily, we think these things happen all of the time. As a result, we’re afraid to live normal lives.

I have a friend who’s reluctant to leave her home. Because she’s been assaulted in the past — an unfortunate event, but a statistically unlikely one — she lives in fear of being assaulted in the future. It’s true that by appearing in public, my friend runs the risk of being assaulted again. It’s far more likely, however, that doing things outside the house would bring her pleasure and fulfillment.

To some degree, each of us is like my friend — but not as extreme. We are all filled with fears, and these fears hold us back.

To live a richer, more fulfilling life — a life without regret — you must first overcome your fears. You can start by exposing yourself to new experiences, by interacting with your environment and allowing it to change you.

It all begins with the power of “yes”.

What Were You Wrong About? Wisdom That Comes with Age

On Wednesday, I listed the eleven common irrational beliefs enumerated by Albert Ellis and Robert Harper in their book, A Guide to Rational Living. This book served as the launching point for a recent discussion at Ask Metafilter. RapcityinBlue asked, “What have you been wrong about, realized it, and it changed your life?” This question generated sixty quality responses.

While many of the respondents had (knowingly or not) managed to overcome one Ellis and Harper’s irrational beliefs, each answer is unique. Plus, many other folks unique pearls of wisdom gleaned from years of hard knocks.

I’ve taken the time to collate some of my favorite responses, little pieces of insight that ring true to me based on my own experience. (I’m quoting excerpts below, and linking back to the extended answers at Ask Metafilter.)

Ruthless Bunny wrote: “I thought being dour and sarcastic and always finding the problems with things was the way to go through life…Actually, solving problems, being upbeat and helpful to others is a MUCH better way to go through life.”

ottereroticist wrote: “I thought I was lazy and inherently broken when it comes to getting things done…I learned that unconditional self-friendliness is a much more effective productivity tool than a harsh and accusatory inner monologue.”

phunniemee wrote: “Most people aren’t out to get you. Most people aren’t sitting in silent, seething judgment of you. Most people are too busy worrying about themselves, just trying to get through this.”

rpfields wrote: “I thought I had to please everyone around me or something terrible would happen/be done to me. Conversely, I also thought that being “nice” to everyone meant they were “obligated” to do the same to me. At the same time I craved some kind of permission to pursue my goals, and harboured tremendous resentment for those who “got to” do things…I am a much happier person now that I allow myself to do as I please (within the bounds of kindness and legality, of course) and recognize that others have the right to do the same.”

sevenofspades wrote: “I thought that if something was hard work, it meant that I wasn’t good at it. Not true. If it’s hard, it just means I’ve never really worked at it before.” and “I thought that you had to impress people, win them over, or flat-out buy them somehow in order to get them to be your friend. Woah was that wrong. True friends just love your company.”

rabbitrabbit wrote: “I have learned that minding my own business has made me happier and made people like me more.”

kimberussell wrote: “If I mess up, I admit it. I’m human and make mistakes. That’s okay. If I don’t know how to approach a project, I’ll ask for help. If you think I’m stupid, that’s not my problem. I’m not going to get hung up on what people think.”

telegraph wrote: “There is nothing protective about pessimism. I was convinced for a long time that if you expect a poor outcome, it hurts less. It’s actually easier to cope with failure if you spend most of your time celebrating and expecting the positive, building up your reserves of happiness and strength, instead of creating huge unceasing loads of psychic stress based on assuming things will go wrong.”

changeling wrote: “I have learned that I don’t always need to prove I’m right, especially in casual conversation, especially about dumb crap that doesn’t matter.” also “I will change in ways I can’t even anticipate.”

St. Peepsburg wrote: “I was too prideful to listen to others, especially their feedback of me. I assumed they really didn’t understand, and if only I could explain it clearly they would see it as I do. Now, I love feedback.” also “I also believed other people caused my feelings of fear or anger, and that they needed to change in order for me to feel recognized and safe. Now, I don’t need people’s validation as much. I don’t need their constant reassurance. I know who I am. And when I feel angry, it is my anger. When I feel insecure, it is my insecurity.”

mono blanco wrote: “I learned it’s ok to be a dilettante. Nobody’s grading you. Since then I’ve learned how to play tennis, speak a smattering of languages, put up shower rods, draw sketches, and play some blues. All half-assed, but with huge enjoyment.”

still_wears_a_hat wrote: “I learned that I don’t have to prevent every possible thing I can from going wrong. That I can deal with stuff when it goes wrong instead of trying to prevent every possible problem. It’s made a huge difference.”

Sullenbode wrote: “Feelings don’t obey logic. Having no good reason to be upset doesn’t magically make me not upset anymore. Rather than argue with myself about my emotions, I’ve learned to recognize when they’re just passing clouds, and let them pass.”

JohnnyGunn wrote: “I have become much more transparent in my old age. I tell it like it is when it comes to how I am feeling and what I am thinking. That does not mean I get to be mean, but rather life is too short to play games. Here is what I am thinking. Love me for who I am because that is exactly what I will do for you. Accept you for who you are. Also, I try things now. Be it food, a book, an idea, a trip, whatever, try it once.”

FauxScot shared several gems, including: “I discovered that if I took my time, my quality really would go up.” “I also discovered that something was finished when I decided it was.” “Help people out. Even if it costs a buck or some time. Don’t always insist on a financial payoff or even acknowledgement or appreciation.”

sonika wrote: “The minute you realize that yours is not the only plot that is going on around you, it truly changes your outlook. I’m oddly much more ok with doing things that others might perceive negatively (such as distancing myself from unhealthy relationships) because I’d rather be “that bitch” in someone else’s plot than make my own more difficult.”

Turkey Glue wrote: “I’ve learned to ask questions about things I don’t understand.”

talldean quoted the Buddha: “Anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” talldean also shared this nugget: ” Lucky people aren’t as locked into a goal, so if something great happens to them, they accept it; it’s luck. Unlucky people pass by the great things to get to a more specific set of goals, but don’t always get where they wanted to go.”

Athanassiel wrote about the sunk-cost fallacy: “The falseness of continuing to do something which it becomes clear you should stop doing, simply because you have already invested a lot in it…Sometimes you really just have to cut your losses and walk away.”

Jandoe wrote: “I learned that staying in relationships out of a sense of obligation or pity was not a good reason.”

sio42 wrote: “Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want and what you need, especially if it’s help.”

GorgeousPorridge wrote: “Status and money might make some people happy, but not everybody. If you’re not one of those people, it can be hard to live in a society where you are judged by your wealth or job title. But in the end, if you decide those things don’t matter all that much to you (and sometimes it’s hard to really conclude that they don’t), you’re wasting the only life you’ve got in order to fit in, and ultimately it’s a pointless sacrifice.”

Autumn wrote: “If someone is having a horrible go at life, you can’t swoop in and “save” them.”

That’s nearly 2000 words of great advice. In these responses are a lot of the themes we’ll cover at More Than Money in 2014.

What about you? What things were you wrong about? What have you learned during your sojourn here on earth that’s caused you to change how you think and act? What lessons can you add to this list?

The Regrets of the Dying

For the next year at More Than Money, we’re going to have a conversation about how to obtain personal and financial independence. To begin, I want to talk about death.

Australian singer-songwriter Bronnie Ware worked in palliative care for many years, spending time with men and women who were about to die. As she nursed her patients, she listened to them describe their fear, anger, and remorse. She noticed recurring themes.

In 2009, Ware wrote about her experience in a blog post that went viral. She turned that article into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. When people die, she says, they often express one or more of the following sentiments:

“I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.” People (especially men) often find themselves trapped on what economists call the “hedonic treadmill”. They work to achieve material wealth and status, which should bring happiness but doesn’t. Instead, they want more. So, they work harder to achieve even greater wealth and status, which should bring happiness but doesn’t. And so on, in an endless cycle. People trapped on the hedonic treadmill are never happy because their reality never meets their ever-increasing expectations.

“I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.” In order to keep the peace and avoid rejection, we sometimes bottle our emotions inside. But refusing to be open and honest leads to a life of quiet desperation. Sure, the barista at the coffeehouse might laugh if you ask her to dinner; it’s also possible that dinner could lead to the love of a lifetime. On your deathbed, you’ll regret the things you didn’t say and do far more than the things you’ve done.

“I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends.” In Aging Well, George Vaillant summarizes more than fifty years of Harvard research into adult development. “Successful aging [is] best achieved in relationship,” he writes. “It is not the bad things that happen to use that doom us; it is the good people who happen to us at any age that facilitate enjoyable old age.” In The Blue Zones, his book about populations of people that live longer than most, Dan Buettner writes that two secrets to a long and healthy life are making family a priority and finding the right “tribe”. At the end of their lives, people who failed to foster friendships regret it. (Here’s my summary of The Blue Zones.)

Common attributes among Blue Zones

“I wish I’d let myself be happier.” Happiness is a choice. Your well-being doesn’t depend on the approval or opinion of others. Happiness comes from one place and one place only: You. Because this idea is key to personal and financial success (and because it’s so well-documented in happiness research), we’ll discuss it at length in the months to come.

“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, and not the life others expected of me.” Ware says this regret is most common of all. “When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it,” she writes, “it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled.” We spend too much time doing the things that others expect of us. (Or the things we think are expected of us.) But living for the approval of others is a trap. We can never hope to please everyone. In fact, it’s nearly impossible to please anyone – other than yourself.

These regrets share a common theme. In each case, the dying lament having spent too much time seeking outside approval instead of focusing on their own feelings, values, and relationships. This is true regardless of wealth and social status.

Ware is not a nurse and she’s not a scientist – her observations are based on experience, not empirical data – but, from my reading, her conclusions match the research into happiness and human development.

Money can’t buy happiness – at least not directly. Money is a powerful tool, it’s true. Abused, it brings sorrow and suffering. Used wisely, it opens doors, delivers dreams, and fosters joy. Although wealth is no guarantee of well-being, the more money you have, the easier it becomes to flourish.

The bottom line: You don’t want to be rich – you want to be happy.

On your deathbed, you want to have lived a life without regret. To do that, you need to face and defeat your fears. You need to find joy in day-to-day activities, and then use that happiness as a platform to procure passion and purpose. And you need to forge freedom, both personal and financial.

This blog will show you how. Over the next year, we’ll explore each of these topics, and we’ll discuss specific strategies to improve your life. I’ll share what I know, and I hope that you’ll share your knowledge and experience too.

How to Win the Lottery Called Life

Today, I want to share how you can win this lottery called life.

I’ve been reading and writing about the notion that you can make your own luck for over five years now. And for the past year or so, I’ve been praising the power of collaboration.

I say, for instance, that my work nowadays (such as it is) seems to be meeting and chatting with like-minded folks from all walks of life. They email me to say, “Want to have lunch?” and I say, “Of course!” We talk about podcasts or libraries or bicycling or comic books. Whatever strikes our fancy. And when we’ve finished our tea or our Thai noodles, nothing major seems to have happened.

What’s happened, however, is that we’ve both just received lottery tickets. By meeting and chatting and sharing ideas, we’ve been granted a ticket in the lottery of life.

And there are other ways to get lottery tickets too. Any time I try something new, I get a lottery ticket. Since I make it a point to try new things all of the time, I get a lot of lottery tickets.

When I learn to drink coffee, I get a lottery ticket.
When I learn to drink beer, I get a lottery ticket.
When I learn to shoot a gun, I get a lottery ticket.
When I learn to ride a motorcycle, I get a lottery ticket.
When I learn to speak Spanish, I get a lottery ticket.

I’ve found another way to get these lottery tickets, too: I say “yes” things that seem scary or difficult. For instance, when I agree to speak on stage in front of one thousand people, I get a lottery ticket. When I fly to Ecuador to help people learn about financial and personal independence, I get a lottery ticket. When I spend six weeks locked in my office writing an e-book about money, I get a lottery ticket.

In short, any time I do something — especially something new — I get a lottery ticket.

But what do I win? Great question. Turns out, the prizes are pretty fucking awesome.

When I learned to speak Spanish, for example, I hit the jackpot. I made new friends (my tutor, my English student), traveled new places (Perú, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador), read new authors (Neruda, García Marquez), tried new food, watched new movies, and more.

Today in Quito, I walked about ten miles across the city — up and down, up and down, up and down since Quito is nowhere near flat — spending part of my time on the teleférico, which is the cable-car that transports visitors up the mountainside from 9000-foot elevation to 13000-foot elevation.

During the steep fifteen-minute ride to the top of Pichincha Vulcano, I sat with two couples. They spoke only Spanish. If I didn’t know Spanish, I couldn’t have understood them, much less conversed. (Hell, I wouldn’t even be here in Ecuador if I couldn’t speak Spanish.) But I do speak Spanish, so I enjoyed a pleasant chat about one couple’s life in Venezuela and the other couple’s life here in Quito. Yet another small prize to add to the mountain of booty that I’ve obtained just because I spent some time learning another language.

Kim is awesome at playing this lottery. That gal gets tickets all the time. Because she’s a friendly and fun dental hygienist, her patients are constantly giving her things. In the eighteen months I’ve known her, she’s been given eggs, tickets to the country fair, tickets to a historical museum, tips on travel, and much much more. Remember how I recently sold my comics for a ton of money? (Wait, you can’t remember that because that article won’t go up at Get Rich Slowly until this Thursday!) Well, several thousand dollars of that came because we used one of Kim’s lottery tickets; one of her patients introduced us to a couple of folks who were interested in buying them.

To me, the best part is that one good thing often leads to another. Luck begets luck. When I win once, I get another winning ticket. I’ve reached the point where my entire life seems to be a series of fortunate events.

Note: Often just doing the thing that earned me the ticket is a sort of prize. Meeting certain people can be so delightful that even if nothing else came of it, the meeting itself was a tiny jackpot. Learning to drink coffee provided a small reward, not to mention the ongoing payouts involved in the fun morning ritual I get to share with Kim.

You know what doesn’t give you lottery tickets? Watching TV, for one. Also, playing videogames. Sorry, but there’s no payout for playing another round of Angry Birds. You don’t get lottery tickets for being a picky eater, being afraid to take calculated risks, and refusing to do the things that scare you.

Not every meeting and not every experience pays off. But many do provide a reward, and some of those rewards are enormous. Winning lottery tickets are so common and so fruitful, in fact, that I’ve almost become addicted to playing this lottery called life. I relish making new acquaintances, going new places, and trying new things.

So, get off your butt and go do something new today. Talk to a stranger. Try a new cuisine. There are still lots of prizes left in this lottery, but you have to be in it to win it.

The Substance of Our Souls

I’ve spent much of the past month moving the last of my belongings out of Kris’s garage, storage shed, and house. It’s amazing how much Stuff I still has there, even after nearly two years of moving, and even after several years of purging before that. Now, though, all I own is here with me in the condo…or in the storage unit that Kim and I have rented across the river.

While much of the work to move my Stuff was tedious (and overwhelming), some of it was fun. For instance, I’ve spent several hours sorting through boxes of papers and notebooks, skimming my old essays and classwork from high school and college. (Why was I keeping these things?)

In the process, I stumbled upon some unexpected gems.

Here, for example, is an epiphany I wrote in my Astronomy class notebook during my junior year of college.

J.D.’s major spiritual transformation/revelation of 29 Sept 1989

Maybe things don’t need to have a beginning and an end. Maybe such constructs are just our attempts to impose what we can know and comprehend onto what we observe, which may be incomprehensible and unknowable.

Perhaps everything is cyclical — the universe just goes on and on. We do, though our intellect does not. Where did we come from? We came from a sperm and an egg, which grew and flourished as cells were transferred from food to us. We grew from food, which grew from something else.

When we die, we will not pass away. Our remains will be absorbed into the ground to feed the Earth, and our minds will pass away. But our remains will serve to replenish life elsewhere and our cells will become part of other living beings — an endless cycle.

The body belongs to nature and to the endless cycle of life.

So, where do our minds go when we die? What happens to that energy? How and why do we think? Our physical self is part of a never-ending cycle, but what about our mental self? Is our mental energy just a by-product of the physical nature of our beings and doomed to non-existence when we die? Or is it possible that our mental energy is absorbed into some sort of “psychic ground” to be born again in other lives?

Crazy stuff. There I am, at the age of twenty, trying to find an argument for reincarnation and the rebirth of souls. There’s nothing in my past that would have led me to that, and it’s an idea I discarded almost immediately. It’s only recently — since I’ve been dating Kim, who believes strongly in past and future lives — that I’ve begun thinking about these ideas once more.

I like the twist my youthful meditation brings to the subject. Instead of suggesting that our souls might be reborn whole from one life to the next (which seems to be the traditional view of reincarnation), I’m suggesting that our “psychic energy” might break down to become food for other souls, just as our bodies will break down to become food for other bodies.

In a way, this does happen, even leaving aside reincarnation.

Also while sorting my Stuff, I happened upon the eulogy I wrote for my friend Paul a few years ago. Here’s how I ended it:

Paul is gone now — but he’s not. I’m reminded of him every day in countless little ways. First thing in the morning, when I get out of bed and walk downstairs, I have to shuffle sideways like a crab. My bum knee hurts. That’s Paul. When my knee hurts, I think of Paul, every single time. It’s as if a piece of him is in me. When I hear U2, I think of him. When I get on my bike, I think of him. And every time I meet and talk with one of you, I will think of him, too.

So, maybe our mental energy doesn’t return to some sort of “psychic ground” when we die — maybe it’s a process that happens our entire lives. Maybe we’re constantly feeding people with the substance of our souls, so that pieces of who we are will linger long after we’re gone.

Lost in Translation

All day long, I think about Spanish. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I think in Spanish (though this never lasts for long). When I’m not working on my Spanish, I wish I were. And sometimes, like last night, I’ll stay up long after Kris has gone to bed just so I can read more Spanish or do more flashcards.

My favorite activity is translation. I love taking a Spanish-language book or poem or song or comic and working out the English translation. It’s such lovely, imprecise work. (Aly and I have had some good conversations about how translation is never an exact thing because words in different languages never have direct analogs, and because of cultural nuances.)

Here’s a poem I’ve been working on today, a poem by Amado Nervo, a Mexican writer from a hundred years ago. This poem is called “En Paz“, or “At Peace”. It’s about a man nearing the end of his life.

En Paz por Amado Nervo

Muy cerca de mi ocaso, yo te bendigo, vida,
porque nunca me diste ni esperanza fallida,
ni trabajos injustos, ni pena inmerecida;

porque veo al final de mi rudo camino
que yo fui el arquitecto de mi propio destino;

que si extraje la miel o la hiel de las cosas,
fue porque en ellas puse hiel o mieles sabrosas:
cuando planté rosales, coseché siempre rosas.

…Cierto, a mis lozanías va a seguir el invierno:
¡mas tú no me dijiste que mayo fuese eterno!

Hallé sin duda largas noches de mis penas;
mas no me prometiste tú sólo noches buenas;
y en cambio tuve algunas santamente serenas…

Amé, fui amado, el sol acarició mi faz.
¡Vida, nada me debes! ¡Vida, estamos en paz!

And here is my very amateur translation, with an attempt to keep things poetic:

At Peace by Amado Nervo

As I approach my twilight, I bless you, Life,
because you never gave me false hope,
nor unjust labor, nor undeservéd pain;

because I see at the end of my long journey
that I was the maker of my own destiny;

that if I’ve taken sweetness or bitterness from things,
it was because I put sweetness or bitterness in them:
when I planted roses, I always harvested roses.

Indeed, my blossoms will continue into winter:
Although you never promised me an eternal spring!

It’s true that I’ve had long nights filled with pain and sorrow;
but you never promised that I’d only have good nights;
and in exchange, some nights were holy and serene.

I loved, was loved, and the sun caressed my face.
Life, you owe me nothing! Life, we are at peace!

I’ll freely admit that I may have messed up this translation in places. I’m not familiar with many Spanish idioms, and I suspect there are a few phrases here that I’ve translated literally but which ought to be taken in another way. (“Trabajos injustos“, for instance, and “pena inmerecida“.) But I’ve done my best to convert a beautiful Spanish poem into English.

Note: Here’s another example of translation difficulties — at least for me. There are several subtle different ways to translate the line “cuando planté rosales, coseché siempre rosas“. Rosales could be “roses” or it could be “rosebushes”. Rosas could be “roses” or it could be “pink” (or “pinks”). The latter may always imply the color — I’m not sure. So, how does one translate this? For me, to get the meaning that I think the author is going for and to remain poetic, I used the English word “rose” in both cases. But I could be wrong.

Back when our book group read the first volume of Proust, I remember that Pam complained that the translation was imprecise. She wanted it to be literal. The translation we read was the classic from C.K. Scott Moncrieff, who translated for mood and feeling and not exactly word for word. This bugged Pam. It didn’t bug me.

Note: For instance, the literal translation of the title to Proust’s huge novel is In Search of Lost Time, but Moncrieff translated it as Remembrance of Things Past, which was more poetic, a reference to Shakespeare, and attempted to capture the mood of the work. The modern, literal translation of the second volume’s title is “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower”, which is hideous. Do the literalists actually like this? Moncrieff translated it as “Within a Budding Grove”, which is poetic and hints at the sexual awakening without being so overtly clinical.

The more I learn about languages, the less I like word-for-word translations. They may capture the technical meanings, but they don’t convey the deeper dimensions, the wonder behind the words.

I still have a lot of Spanish to learn — I’ve barely begun my journey — but I look forward to lots and lots of future translating. It’s my favorite part of this process.

Action is Character

Back when I worked at Custom Box Service, Nick and I would often have philosophical discussions. Or psuedo-philosophical discussions. Well, we’d share our Deep Thoughts with each other at any rate.

On more than one occasion, I’d be lamenting that X was a priority in my life — where X could be exercise or getting out of debt or reading more books — but that I never seemed to have time for it. Instead, I did a bunch of other stuff.

Nick would always tell me, “Then X isn’t a priority.” If I tried to argue, he’d point out that the things we actually do are the priorities in our life. What we say doesn’t matter; it’s what we do that counts.

It took me a long time to learn this lesson. I used to be what I call a Talker: I talked about all the things I wanted to do, and I felt like I had the solutions to everything, but I never actually took action. I was full of hot air.

Somehow, I’ve turned into a Doer. Most of the time, I get things done. Instead of lamenting about the man I want to be, I’m working hard to be that man. I’ve built a new life out of doing the things I used to only talk about before. (Note that I’m not always a Doer. I still spend plenty of time Talking, but my ratio of action to words has increased sharply in recent years.)

I’ve written about this subject several times in the past, both here and at my personal finance blog. For example, in August I wrote a piece about the difference between Talkers and Doers for GRS. It may be my favorite article from last year. And longer ago at Folded Space, I shared Action Girl’s Guide to Living from Sarah Dyer. (Action Girl’s #1 tip is awesome: “Action is everything! It really doesn’t matter what you say or even what you think; it’s what you do that matters.”)

Anyhow, I’ve been thinking about this subject quite a bit lately because of a single quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald. In his notes on The Last Tycoon, he wrote, “Action is character.”

I’d never heard this phrase until Kris and I watched An Education, an interesting little film from 2009. In it, a bored English schoolgirl spends a few exciting months hanging out with an older man. At one point, she says, “”Action is character, our English teacher says. I think she means that if we never did anything, we wouldn’t be anybody.”

Or to up it another way, we are what we repeatedly do. (This is Will Durant’s interpretation of an idea from Aristotle, though many people mistakenly attribute it to the latter.)

This is brilliant, and it goes back to what I said earlier: We are not what we think or say; we’re what we do.

You can say that health is important to you, but if you don’t eat and act healthfully, it’s just not so.
Thinking about writing doesn’t make you a writer; writing makes you a writer, and if you’re not writing, you’re not a writer.
You can say your life’s too busy and you want to slow down, but so long as you keep scheduling things, you’re showing that you value the busy-ness more than the downtime.
You can profess a belief in Christianity, but it’s your actions that actually make you Christian, not your words. (I know, I know: We could argue this point of doctrine for days. Or years. Or centuries. But I believe it. Faith without works is dead.)

Action is character. We are what we repeatedly do.

All of this was tied together by a quote from Jess Walter’s Citizen Vince, which we just read for book group. In it, the author writes:

There is what you believe and there is what you want and these things are fine. But they’re just ideas, in the end. History, like any single life, is made up of actions. At some point, the thinking and believing and deciding fall away and all that’s left is the doing.

So, my friends, what is important to you? No, I mean really: What is important to you? Stop hiding from it, stop being afraid of it, stop waiting for it to come. Go act. By doing so, you’ll reveal your true character.

Superman Believes That a Wife’s Place is in the Home

I’ve been reading a lot of old comic books lately. Since I love comics, this probably doesn’t sound unusual. But it is. I mean I’ve been reading actual comics (instead of compilations) from the 1950s and 1960s.

I find these books entertaining, even though their stories are often dull and repetitive. (The DC comics of the era are just plain bad most of the time.) I’m fascinated by the window to the past these comics provide, by the glimpses they give of culture and values that have faded to memory.

For example, I think we take it for granted how far the role of women has come in U.S. society. Sure, there’s more work to be done, but when you see how women were portrayed in comics fifty years ago, it’s like a whole other world.

My favorite example of this is the Lois Lane comic series, the full title of which is Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane. Every issue contains three stories, and every story features Lois pining for Superman. (She’s usually trying to prove that Clark Kent is Superman in these stories, too.) And although Lois is portrayed as a strong “girl” for her era, she still needs Superman to save her over and over again.

Lois Lane comics are filled with “imaginary stories”, stories that the editors claim are “what if” stories. They’re not part of the official Superman storyline, but imaginary tales about what could happen — if Lois and Superman married, for instance:

These are nice because they give the comic a change of pace. And, presumably, they satisfy the female audience’s taste for romance, though I’m dying to know the demographics of the Lois Lane readership during the early 1960s. Did women really buy these? It’s hard to believe now, but comics regularly sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and the most popular would sell over a million copies per month. Surely some women read this. But how many?

If the magazine’s letter column is any indication, plenty of women read Lois Lane (though most letters are from men). Here, for example, Anne Zeek of Kearny, New Jersey, writes to ask how Lois and Clark would handle working in the same workplace:

Dig that answer: “Superman believes that a wife’s place is in the home.” Mind boggling! Can you even imagine a magazine printing something like that nowadays? Yet, fifty years ago, this was the prevailing attitude. (This letter is from the January 1961 issue of Lois Lane.)

For a long time, the only bastion of strong womanhood in comics came from Wonder Woman, who starred in adventures like this (from November 1959):

Even Wonder Woman wasn’t immune to sexism, though. She palled around with Steve Trevor, “ace military intelligence pilot”, who often was depicted as stronger than she was. (Though, to be fair, most of the time the comic really did feature role reversals: Wonder Woman was saving Steve Trevor from danger.) The sad part about Wonder Woman is that after creator William Moulton Marston left the book, its writing and art sunk to the bottom of the barrel — worse even than Batman (which was dreadful at the time).

Marston was the psychologist and feminist theorist who created Wonder Woman. But even his noble aims seem patriarchal today:

Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don’t want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.

Do women have stronger roles in comics today? I don’t know, to be honest. I rarely read modern comics, and almost never read modern superhero comics. I do know that when I was a boy in the 1980s, there were some strong female characters. And I can’t imagine any editor in the 1980s writing that Superman believes that a wife’s place is in the home.

Perfectly Content

Photos, videos, and narrative of our trip to Europe are coming soon. We had a great time.

Today, though, I want to say that I can’t imagine anything better than a rainy afternoon spent upstairs with my cats, sorting comic books while sipping a scotch and soda, listening to classic country music, waiting for my sweetie to come home.

This is what life is all about. I’m not joking.

(The only way this could be better is if we were expecting to meet friends for dinner tonight…)