a friend from the farm guiding me into foreign territory
This summer - I found myself in a very typical Scott circumstance. I was in a state I had previously never known. Sleeping in a tent. At a farm. Invited by friends, friends I had met two days previous, who themselves were sleeping in tents and campers. They weren't the owners of the farm; rather, they were working on the land as a means to acquire equity from an elderly lady whose not quite sure what her next move was. This is not the beginning of a horror film.
The farm was cluttered, chaotic, unkempt, sorta like facial hair that's been allowed to grow for a few years, and had picked up some foreign debris along the way - and this farm had picked up a lot of things along the way. There's not really a way to explain all the things in one neat classification - just stuff, all sorts of stuffy stuff - baseball mitts of children from the 60s, VHS players, old dresses that hadn't been touched by human hands in 35 years. The sort of clutter that you couldn't walk around indoors without clanking into, stubbing toe on, or bumping elbows with. It was a real-world obstacle course, but in the kitchen corridor, on the way to the bathroom, going into the fridge; you get the point.
After the typical existential ruminations of: "where the fuck am I, and how did I get myself here?" I decided it was time to start a morning routine of sorts: It was time to meditate. Wanting space to make space - to sit with my internal stuff amid the external stuff- I went into a den: a crusty, old-school barn with unvarnished hardwood floors, which seemed to be the final landing spot for everything and anything that didn't fit anywhere else. I found a space near the end of the barn that doubled as a workout area or where some cobwebbed plastic barbell and dumbbell equipment congregated when nobody was watching. I moved a nearby pile of Tom Clancy books, plopped down my meditation cushion on the eroding floorboard, and started to bring my attention to my breath. As the world of things faded, my breath increased in volume like a light dimmer, gradually increasing in brightness, drawing me more and more to an increasingly illuminated interior room. Eventually, I lost sense of my surroundings; first for moments, then moments stretched into minutes - you could've told me I was in front of a peaceful waterfall, and my nervous system would have obliged.
a nearby brooke waterfall
I created a sanctuary in my nervous system, which changed my relationship to the world of clutter - it started to feel manageable - no, more than manageable, it felt familiar, intimate, somehow like a place I had a part in. This wasn't a new experience for me; it was a skill I gained journeying as a Bonderman Fellow, where I was funded for a year to travel alone to non-modern cultures, with no agenda outside of immersing in new stories of culture. I ended up visiting ten countries and two continents, but I had no real plan for this itinerary; most often, I had no plans for where I'd be the following day! For a year, I let the unfolding winds of experience blow me in whatever direction they wanted me to move. What does that look like? Very literally, it's developing an internal GPS system calibrated to the experiences you have with people and places:
"Oh, that remote island has come up three times in the past day, it must be time to go there!"
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"That Australian girl feels nice and warm. I'll follow her recommendations."
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"That street corner feels more welcoming than the opposing street corner - I guess I'm turning that way."
And so, in this way, a year of spontaneity was born: where I learned, I could trust myself to trust in the world.
6+ years removed from the internal compass building of the Bonderman Fellowship, and from living with hunter-gathering tribes of the Amazon, I had a revelation: shifting from external locations without a plan was only possible because I was able to intentionally engineer a repeated and predictable internal experience - of comfort, belonging and safety. Cultivating familiar feelings in an unfamiliar circumstance lent a sense of control. Despite not always being in control of my external situation, I was very much in the driver's seat of my internal situation. This was my entryway into the world, allowing me to drop my guard and let the winds of life be blown through me.
Back to the farm of things. There was no planning for where I found myself. I had no clue I'd end up in New Hampshire, at a random farm, with random people, needing to find comfort meditating in a cluttered pack rat-type den with 80's workout gear and a 70's wardrobe. Our lives are much like the random New Hampshire farms we encounter (hopefully with a little less entropy): they are irreverent to our attempts to plan situations and control for future outcomes. Down the line in the road trip of our lives, there's one certainty: we will meet a whole bunch of uncertainty. Sure, we can MapQuest the entire route ahead of time, but even with all the directions in the world, our headlights only show the road that is 5-10ft ahead of us.
Here brings us to the central discourse of this piece: how we are oriented to meet the unpredictable play of our life. I'll make an overly-generalized yet useful dichotomy that I'll lean on for the rest of the piece:
Planning versus preparing.
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Planning says, "how do I take hold and control a situation, to turn it into the exact external future outcome of my desire?"
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Preparing asks, "who do I have to be to, to be able to create my desired external future outcome, regardless of the situation?".
Underneath compulsive planning is a lack of self-trust. We employ resolutions, goals, discipline, rigid schedules, and health routines to compensate. These extrinsic directives attempt to impose a set of guidelines onto our future selves, to coerce them into behaving a certain way because we feel without an instruction manual, we will be unable to meet life in the way we desire. Planning, goals, and rules become a substitute for the sovereignty of self-trust.
Underneath preparation is a confidence that says, "life is unpredictable. I won't be able to map out all the experiences. But I can cultivate my sense of self to meet whatever experiences come my way skillfully." This doesn't mean you're without planning and routine, but the intentions aren't to keep you bound to a rigid schedule; they are an attempt to develop the self organically: learning to better respond to situations, regulate your nervous system, listen, move and learn from your emotions, communicate your needs, direct your attention, etc. The more your skills grow, the more capable you become in cultivating a felt sense of safety that expands and stretches into more situations in your life. The natural result of cultivating your safety is a relationship of trust to the self that keeps itself secure. You no longer need a meticulous instruction manual to eat this or eat that because you come to know that as you encounter the meal of your life, you can trust that you are the person that will make the right decisions.
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Here's the thing about all the planning and preparing - they are never really about driving a particular External Outcome; it's about the internal feeling we assume will come alongside The External Outcome, believing if we eat the proper meal and do the right workouts, then we will feel a certain way.
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"I want work to go well because then my boss will be happy with me…. and if my boss is happy with me, I will feel competent and an enhanced self-esteem."
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"I want my wife to go out with her friends because then she won't be stressed, and if she doesn't feel stressed … then I won't have to feel her stress."
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"I want to have meaningful travel experiences … because I will feel fully alive, present, and connected there."
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We are always looking to feel a certain way: secure. No matter how confused and distorted these attempts have become, all actions, everything, and everyone is ever doing - has ever done, and will ever do - is with one core motive: to feel safe in the world.
It's not to neglect planning; they are an essential part of engineering the relentless security of our lives. But when they become too rigid, they demean our internal compass system, signing over our way-finding abilities to an inanimate set of rules that have no real sense for the meaty context of the situation we find ourselves in. You can't outsource your choice-making ability, yet you can outsource choices. When you chronically delegate your choices outside of you - into routines, instructions, and health planning - the natural result is to locate your sense of trust outside yourself. You come to believe it's the routine or the meal that makes the person healthy and whole, not the person doing the routine and eating the meal.
Different moments call on us to meet life in different ways. Routines are supposed to make us more able at shape-shifting, not more needing to shift the shape of life. The more we grasp onto our habits with white knuckles, the less able we become to meet the rawness of life, bending experience to fit into the container of our contracting requirements and constantly tinkering with the thermostat of our homes. "Oh, I can't go out without makeup." "I can't possibly give that presentation without meditating first." "I can't talk to my partner, go on a date, or speak up to my boss without having a drink first."
It's a high-level form of control, coercing experiences into our comfort zone before we can comfortably rest into them. It's the metaphorical bringing of your own meal to Thanksgiving dinner.
So how do you develop a sense of self-trust?
I don’t have a 5-minute formula for you.
You can’t regain in 5 minutes what took decades of years to lose touch with. Â
Notice that I did say lose, though. Because the natural sense of who you are is self-trust. As a baby, you took steps you didn’t know how to, yet you took them anyways. Developmentally you’ve only grown in any way, shape, or form because of an implicit trust to grow into where you’ve never been before. The natural substance of a healthy human is self-trust.
I may not have a 5-minute prescription for you, but do I have a general pathway toward recovery: Go into everything that blocks you from the natural sense of trust that you are - the fear to approach women, the anger at your spouse, the sadness over past actions, etc. - slow down and feel it; feel it fully. Allow it to release and move through you. Emotions are temporary visitors; they aren’t meant to be permanent residents.
The only way to heal your trust is to feel and release everything that took it from you in the first place.
Love planning vs preparing. As they say the best laid plans............