( Virtue is a journey, not a destination.)

An asymmetric tree is one hundred percent a tree

Perfection belongs to another world. Back in ancient Greece, Plato talked about the importance of thinking of ideal forms of things. Ideal love, ideal society, ideal government, ideal shapes. It was important to know how things could be perfect in order to make them better, was the general idea. There might not be such a thing as a perfect square in the whole of nature, but it helps an architect or town planner to know the ideal version of a square so they can take it from the abstract realm and try their best to replicate it. It helps to know what the perfect form of friendship or education or justice might look like, too, so friends and teachers and judges can replicate it.

All great stuff, and I am not about to start a fight with Plato, as he was a wrestler as well as a philosopher apparently, but the problems start when we are told we can reach perfection with the right bank account or app or personal trainer. And then we remain imperfect, as all things are, and we might feel even worse for having believed this perfect Platonic world exists.

Another reason I don’t have to fight with Plato is because Aristotle already did. Aristotle, himself a one-time student of Plato’s, had a looser, more earth-bound approach to life. He believed that we shouldn’t focus on an abstract world of essential forms because this world right here—this one we live on—contains those essential forms. For Plato a tree was always a poor imitation of an ideal tree, whereas for Aristotle a tree always contains its essential tree-ness in its very substance.

The trouble with perfect abstract ideals that we want to reach is that we never get there. They are untouchable rainbows. Far better, I reckon, to find a comfort in the world itself. To try and see trees as essential versions of trees, and ourselves as essential versions of ourselves, and to cultivate the essential spirit of rather than to reach for something that doesn’t and can’t exist and watch it forever slip through our fingers.

Work with what you have. Exist in this world. Be the asymmetric square. Be the wonky tree. Be the real you.

You are more than your worst behavior

If you tell a child they are useless, they’ll begin to believe they are useless. If you tell yourself you are useless, the same thing happens. The depressed person who believes that people hate them is more likely to act in ways that fulfill that expectation. And if we believe people must fall into the crudely divided binaries of “good” and “bad,” we can easily risk judging ourselves forever because of one mistake.

We need kindness. We need a way to see the difference between who people are and what they sometimes do. And that includes us.

Warm

Don’t worry about being cool. Never worry what the cool people think. Life is warmth. You’ll be cool when you’re dead. Head for the warm people. Head for life.

Dream

Our very existence is a remarkable testimony to human survival. When we think of the likelihood that, after 150,000 generations, we would end up here, alive, right now, as us, we are contemplating an improbability so vast it is almost an impossibility. Think of all the terrible and unlikely stories of survival, and of each relative above us in the chain of existence having to stay alive and meet a mate. It is the contemplation of absurd odds. We are all inside a dream that is real. We are the fires conjured from nothing. We exist out of near impossibility. And yet we exist.

Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.

Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.

Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.

Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.

Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.

Nothing is stronger than a—

Clarity

You are here. And that is enough.

The importance of weird thinking

It is good to be weird. It is good to be eccentric. It is good to be separate from the crowd. The philosopher John Stuart Mill thought it was almost a civic duty to be eccentric, to break the tyranny of conformity and custom. But even if we don’t feel outwardly eccentric, we all have eccentric parts. Thoughts that crop up on the peripheries of our thinking. Random sparks we can set alight. Thoughts that offer the other point of view or the other side of a political argument. Thoughts that don’t quite fit in with our other thoughts. Tastes that go against our other tastes. And as we grow older it is good to keep tending to those unconventional parts of ourselves—the thoughts that buck the trend—because these are the parts that will keep us new and capable of surprise. They will stop us becoming a cover version of ourselves. They will help us become new songs.

Outside

Yes, sure, it is comfortable to be on the inside. Sheltered, protected. But there is a comfort to the outside too. Because outside is freedom. Outside you can keep moving until you find a place of your own. Or you can decide that outside is your place. And stay there.

Realization

I used to worry about fitting in until I realized the reason I didn’t fit in was because I didn’t want to.

The way out of your mind is via the world

By the age of thirty-two, Ludwig van Beethoven’s deafness was accelerating fast. He wrote to his brothers to convey his despair that people judged him as “malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic” when really he was just in a state of inner turmoil due to his advancing condition. He wrote that he felt like a “hopeless case” because he hadn’t been writing much music, which is like Shakespeare calling himself a bit of a slacker for taking a while to write Hamlet.

Beethoven recalled times when he was in the countryside and a shepherd was singing or someone was playing a flute and he hadn’t been able to hear a thing. Such instances had brought him to despair and he “would have put an end to my life—only Art it was that withheld me, ah it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce . . .”

Only Art it was that withheld me.

And so he stayed alive. Even as his deafness increased—the ultimate torture for the ultimate musician—he continued to create. Indeed, some of his greatest works, such as his brilliantly brooding and atmospheric Piano Sonata No. 14—commonly known as the “Moonlight Sonata”—were created when he was entirely deaf.

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What a tragic thought that the man who created some of the most well-known music in the world never heard a lot of it. But he had a passion. And the history of the arts is filled with sensitive-minded people who have been consoled and given purpose by the art they create, from Emily Dickinson to Georgia O’Keeffe.