Emerson, Session 2: The Triumph of Principles
We trust ourselves because our true Self connects to something infinite and trustworthy.
Many mornings, I start my day with a guided breathing meditation from the app Open. This is what a recent session began with, before adding breathwork:
One of the foundational elements of modern life is the seemingly infinite number of possibilities available at our fingertips. At any moment in time, we can hop on a plane and go anywhere in the world. We can choose a new career path. We can reshape our identity—becoming anyone or anything we wish.
This wealth of choices, though exhilarating, can also be daunting. If you can be anyone, anywhere, why are you you—and more importantly, why are you here? The thought that perhaps something better exists elsewhere can overshadow the richness of our current experiences. It can haunt the choices we’ve made. A lifetime of infinite possibilities can easily become a lifetime of infinite what ifs and endless regrets.
But the funny thing about regret is that it assumes you have the ability to know how those alternate possibilities would have turned out. In your mind, you might imagine that the other paths would have produced better outcomes, but in reality, there’s no way of knowing whether they would have been better, worse, or exactly the same.
All you can do is trust that you made the best decision possible with the information you had at the time. And when you find regret creeping in, turn to gratitude.
Gratitude shifts your focus from what you wish had been different to what you can appreciate about your current situation. It replaces hypothetical comparisons with real appreciation. It reminds you that the present moment—imperfect, complex, and real—is always enough.
Hearing this, I first thought of our work with Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks. Burkeman helped us drop the fear of missing out by considering the joy of missing out.
About Time, Session 2: The Fear of Missing Out
Like Seneca and the other philosophers we have been studying, Oliver Burkeman provides the long-but-short way to personal change. It is a long way because it involves becoming more aware of our mindset about time, who we think we are, and our attempts to secure our self-concept. With growing awareness, we find the courage to question what we observe about our mindsets. This is a lifetime process. Yet, it is the short way because, as Burkeman points out, the time management techniques we try out one after the other are almost always futile.
Emerson would say gratitude begins with our inescapable connection to what he called the Over-Soul. Once we stop trying to make a seemingly infinite number of choices with the part of our mind that seems separate from all else, the number of choices begins to collapse. There are some things we are never going to do, and that is a good thing, not a bad thing. We are then able to do what really matters.
For many semesters, I assigned “Self-Reliance” to my MBA students before they read Hayek’s essay, “Individualism: True and False.” These students did not have the advantage of first reading Emerson’s “The Over-Soul.” (We will be reading Hayek in December)
What do you think my students thought when they first read Emerson's famous words?