Be Your Own Guru

 Still Learning

On admiring thinkers without becoming their disciples

I like Sam Harris. I really do. I genuinely admire that he is rational, clear-eyed, and serious about ideas. He respects evidence, distrusts extremism and sloppy reasoning, practices mindfulness, and cares about the long-term welfare of humanity. On many things we agree. And yet I cannot follow him regularly. Something pulls me back, and I have spent a bit of time trying to understand what that something is and what it tells me about myself.

It is not his arguments. But I need more than a good argument. I need compassion alongside clarity, and tenderness toward the messy, contradictory reality of being human. When I lose that sense of warmth in a voice I am following, I tend to withdraw. I want truth, but I also want heart. I want discernment, but not without mercy.

I feel the same way when I try to follow Brené Brown. She is doing something genuinely worthwhile by encouraging honesty, working to reduce shame, and asking people to practice emotional courage. Many people find exactly what they need in her work, and I understand why. But I find myself looking for something I can't quite locate there. Her work centers on the quest to fully express yourself emotionally. What I need is to learn to live more truthfully, wisely, compassionately, and meaningfully while staying grounded in reality. These ideas may look like cousins, but they feel quite different to me.

I need voices that decenter the self a little and cultivate observation and perspective. I don't want to continually be processing my suffering but rather integrate it into lived meaning. I recognize this is its own set of preferences, its own set of limitations. I am not describing the right way. I am just describing my way, at this particular point in life.

I have spent time inside several frameworks that promised to explain things — going deep, then finding my way back out. Not because those frameworks were wrong exactly, but because no map is ever the whole territory. Politics, spirituality, trauma, wellness, optimization, and psychology each carry genuine insight and genuine distortion. It's good to be cautious of anything that arrives feeling already complete, and equally cautious of my own caution, which can become its own kind of rigidity.

I no longer try to resolve the differences between science and meaning, systems and compassion, mindfulness and community, realism and mercy. I want to practice discernment without contempt toward others, and toward myself. The word I keep returning to is restraint. Not repression. Those are not the same thing. Restraint is a choice. It is knowing that not every feeling requires processing out loud, not every belief requires a platform, not every thinker requires a following. It is, for me, the most demanding practice: to simply live your story truthfully, without performing it, without reducing it to a slogan, without handing it over to someone else to interpret for you.

Janis @ Maison Tranquille

Still Curious. Still Growing. Still Grateful.