Jargogled Impressions.

Henry David Thoreau said, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms…”

What does living deliberately mean? To summarize Thoreau’s observation above – it is to purposely not live what is not life. The marrows of life as he calls it, are essentially the mundane aspects of our existence where we feel like observers looking at our own life as if from the rearview mirror of a car. Some aspects of our lives feels as if it could be so much more. The stories we weave into the tapestry of our existence becomes so commonplace and ordinary that we long to drive towards novelty. As it stands, we stand in our own way on account of the baggage that we invariably pick up along the way. And the only way to disentangle it comes in the form of deliberate action. Not reasoning, not thinking about action, but action itself. No wonder Nike has the catchphrase snug fit – Just Do It!

But doing it by itself won’t do much if it doesn’t add on to itself. If you account for compounding in every project that you pick up, you have a superpower. Compounding can take many forms – creating an ecosystem of support, a community of like-minded professionals, a cabal of passionate individuals, a product-oriented approach to building your career, a long-term, infinite game mindset, and so on and so forth. You call it by many names, but they all share the same attributes – how can we ensure whatever we spend our time on can accumulate towards a larger goal in a cohesive fashion. The larger goal in question being – how to live?

It’s a loaded question in its own right. And one with many takers to proffer up an answer, but none that would work for the specific instance of your life. Only you can figure that part out. Many don’t end up finding it out until later, maybe after their soul departs from this mortal world. Some seem to have found the Rosetta stone, but you are doubtful. So, what does that leave us with? That finding the answer is the only goal, and that the answer may never be good enough. But that’s okay. Life is absurd, and in absurdity lies the essence of what makes it worth living. Life is random, and in its randomness, you can find the tempered beauty.

How to live, then, becomes how to find beauty in your life. From the mundane to the profound, from successes to failures, from the arcane to the pedestrian – the beauty is lying there waiting to be discovered, if only you could bring the vision to see it. Finding beauty is never an exercise in chasing vanity. It’s actually the pursuit of that richness which cannot be explained away in the language of man. It’s the ability to dis-associate yourself with what is mortal and transcend into the considerations of the extra-mortal.

How to find beauty requires a specialized vision, trained to find beauty in everything and anything. This vision isn’t curated as much as nurtured. It isn’t believed as much as formed. It’s your vision that brings the beauty with it, not the object in its path. The object serves merely as a vessel to solidify the vision, nothing more. They are but the bits in the matrix that are there to help you know what isn’t.

Training this vision requires un-training first. Knowing where not to look, how not to see, and what not to discern is the first step towards liberating your vision to see where it must. Do that and you’d uncork the chambers of the inner mind, its vaporous fumes diffusing in all directions with nary a thought for what’s true or not. For an untrained vision isn’t restrained by object reality. It’s the vision of Neo that can see the bits swirling inside.

Maybe you need the pill to develop this vision, maybe you just need deliberate practice to get closer. Deliberate because it needs to be centered around the goal, and self-adaptive in its approach. Practice, because it’s never static as our requirements of this vision change as we age and as the world ages around us. Bringing deliberate practice in even the things we do on a day-to-day basis can unfurl the march towards vision liberation.

Much as what Thoreau aimed to do with his tinkering in the woods.

Tactically, every moment spent awake can translate into deliberate practice towards living a good life. Deciding how to spend every moment and improving as you learn and consciously question this spent time can turn your days into an extended experiment – one with no defined end goal, but with a defined end point. This experiment of life – an infinite game in itself, follows all the structures of a scientific quest. From observation to hypothesis to testing to analysis to concluding and iteratively observing. It also folds in all the meanderings of an artist’s creative process – preparation, incubation, illumination, and preparation.

Deliberate practice then, is a scientific quest towards a creative life. So, essentially, the entire modern-day movement towards constant self-improvement? Not really – as self-improvement is largely premised on the idea of capitalistic self-centeredness. Deliberate practice transcends this, aiming for the larger goal of mitigating our existential burden through conscious living. We may try the tools that are available to us through contemporary literature, but ultimately it’s the ‘doing’ where the answer lies.