Missing Link

Sometimes it seems that everything in the known universe has already been comprehensively explored, discovered, labeled, mapped, dissected, cross-examined, catalogued, abbreviated, acronymified, domain-named, and proffered at the low low price. “Operators are standing by!”  Google Maps has rendered naked every square mile of the planet’s ample surface. Wikipedia has ambitiously aggregated the entire stockpile of all information worth ambitiously aggregating. The internet stands as a record of all human pronouncements, complete with their astounding truths and falsehoods, and artificial intelligence has emerged as a seemingly superior process for ideation.  The world appears to be a lot less mysterious than it used to be. “There is nothing new under the sun.” Or so it was said. By King Solomon. Some 3,000 years ago. Allow me to respond in no uncertain terms: I punch this idea square between the eyes. I reject it, not just because it is disheartening, disabling, and oppressive, but mainly because empirical evidence shows it to be a boldfaced lie. So much of the world, as it reveals itself through your experiences, moment by moment, is as yet unknown. That is because so much of life’s experience seems to be unknowable. Life’s mystery is perpetuated by life’s unpredictability.  I am here to say emphatically, the world is not a fait accompli. It is not pre-fixed, pre-determined or pre-set in concrete. The world continues to reveal itself with ever new developments and discoveries, minute by minute, day by day. And you, my friend, you influence how it turns out. Yes, you do. Why do I say this? Three reasons. First, the things that are known to be known and the things that are known to be unknown are, at best, guideposts.  So often throughout history, humanity has been astonished to discover that some of the truisms previously upheld as Absolute Truths (with a capital A and a capital T) were, at best, relative truths or, at worst, absolute falsehoods. Many things that were once immutable turned out to be… humblingly mutable. Just ask Gallileo or Copernicus or Einstein or Darwin.  History is chock full of events that were previously believed to be impossibilities until someone came along and – poof! – they reminded the world that impossible can sometimes be made possible. Thank you, Thomas Edison, Amerlia Erhart, Roger Bannister, Hellen Keller, Alan Turing and all you pioneers too numerous to name.  Like the universe spanning outward in all directions from the seminal Big Bang, the field of what’s possible is perpetually expanding. Second, the way that a person interacts with her surroundings gives rise to new and unpredictable developments.  If the same person sets out across town every day for 1,000 days, none of these journeys would be exactly identical. Likewise, if 1,000 people set out across town on the same day, none of these journeys would be exactly identical. Each iteration of the same journey births uncountable new interactions, which themselves reverberate to create still other new ineractions. Call it the Butterfly Effect, the Domino Effect, the Ripple Effect, or anything else you may want to call it. The world is unpredictable, and your presence in it makes it even more so. Third, a fait-accompli world is just boring. I would much rather live in a world that contains mysteries, uncertainties, and revelations.  Some of the greatest art was created by people who had no idea what they were doing. They didn’t realize what artists should do or should not do. They just did. They belched out a bunch of art, and that art happened to resonate with other people. Science has also brought the world plenty of accidental discoveries. Penicilin and X-rays are just two that come to mind. It’s easy to break the rules when you don’t know the rules exist. Ignorance is bliss. A pre-fixed world implies that you have no choice in the matter, that you are just living out your role, as everyone is, in some dystopian choreography. What’s the point? Look at it this way. Whether you believe the world has nothing original to offer, or you believe the world is filled with plenty of possible discoveries, sooner or later you will encounter disappointment. That is inevitable. What is not inevitable, however, is how you react to this disappointment. If you believe the world is predetermined, this disappointment will serve to reinforce your powerlesness. On the other hand, if you believe the world is influencable — that is, if you believe you possess some form of agency to be able to affect change — this disappointment will serve as a reference point, a booby trap, a pitfall, something to be respected and avoided in the future. For one person, disappointment screams powerlessness; for another, it screams power. There nothing more stifling to the imagination than the notion of a pre-determined world. It robs you of your wonder and your curiosity and your hunger to find secrets that nobody else knows. These pursuits are good and worthwhile and a hell of a lot of fun! So, here’s what I think you should do the next time someone complains that things are so predictable. You should punch them. Punch them wherever you choose, and do so as softly or forcefully as the situation dictates. Don’t get yourself arrested, just get their attention. If you don’t want to punch them, then at least give them a good, pointed poke. And then, when they look at you incredulously, mouth agape, eyes demanding an explanation, just ask them, “So, did you predict that too?”

Here is a metaphor in three parts. Part One Imagine you spent your whole life in an underground cave. You were born in the cave and you grew up there. You were unaware that anything existed outside your cave. All the people and all the objects in your life were lit by dim lights on cave walls. The air was humid and still. Your skin was pale and your eyes were sensitive to faint movements in shadows. Then one day, you discovered a passageway leading to an area that you had never noticed. After some further exploration, you arrived at a place that was different. It was brighter and the air was dryer. You pushed on, and eventually you came out to a place that was lit by a harsh shaft of sunlight shooting through a gap in the cave ceiling. You had never seen sunlight, never witnessed such brilliant brightness. It blinded you. It filled you with awe, and it frightened you. So you fled back underground. When you returned to your friends, one of them pleaded, “Where were you? We were worried about you!” “I found a new place, a different place. It is very bright and the air moves.” “Oh, no!” cried another. “You went there?! You went to the bright place?” “What’s the bright place?” another friend asked. “The bright place is a dangerous place. I found it one day when I was out with Brinker. You remember Brinker. He was the one who was always trying new things. More bravery than brains. Always living on the brink. He went out into the light and he never came back. I tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen. I hear he went blind and his skin was burned from its flesh and he died a horrible death. Poor Brinker. You should never go back there.” The story frightens you and you agree, you should never go back to the bright place. There’s only one problem. Once a mind stretches to a new idea, it never goes back to its original dimensions. Days go by, but you can’t get the bright place out of your mind. It burns your brain with an insatiable curiosity. What is that place? What goes on there? How big is it? What is the source of all that light? You continue your daily life, but the mysteries of that bright place haunt you. You lay awake in bed wondering about that place. One day you cannot contain yourself and you decide to retrace your footsteps back to the bright place. You wish you didn’t have this curiosity, but it has become such an obsession that you would go crazy if you didn’t explore it. You are nervous. It could be dangerous, but you press onward. When you return to the bright place, it is every bit as overwhelming as you remembered it. The light forces you to shut your eyes tight, but this time you don’t run away. You just sit there for a while feeling the movement of the air around you. It’s an unusual sensation. Eventually, something interesting begins to happen. Your eyes slowly adjust to the light. Soon you can open your eyes just a crack. You look at the backs of your hands. It’s as if you are seeing them for the first time. They appear clearer to you in the bright light. You can see they have little veins under the surface of your skin and tiny hairs and pores. Then you turn your palms upward and you notice that your fingertips are not completely smooth as you had always believed they were. Rather, you see in this new light that your fingertips have tiny swirling ridges on the skin. The light has revealed that your fingers have fingerprints. Part Two When you get back to the cave, you describe your fingerprint discovery to your friends, but they don’t believe you. You try to show them. Unfortunately, the light is too dim. And they don’t get why you’re so excited about some mundane detail that seemingly has no impact on anyone’s life. On the next visit to the bright place, you notice some new things about the cave walls. Contrary to the common knowledge that all cave walls are uniformly grey in color, you see that different areas of stone have different colors. Some have tiny mineral deposits. Others appear to have stripes like layers that had been eroded away over time. Subsequent trips reveal there are complex, vibrant ecosystems living on the cave walls. Under this light you see the stone wall is teaming with tiny, busy bugs. There are little insect fossils embedded in some rocks. You discover patches of cave fauna and irregular splotches of slime made of god knows what. You go back to the bright place regularly. Every time you visit, you discover new things. But what good are these discoveries if you can’t put them to use? So you begin thinking of how you could use your time in the bright place to help others. You begin offering to do things for the cave community that can be done more easily in the light. Eventually, you become the community’s most skilled threader of sewing needles and darner of socks. By now the community has come to regard you as an eclectic a half-nut who spouts fanciful proclamations about an undiscovered world. They grant you your eccentricities because you darn a good sock and you’re useful at repairing small objects. The bright place has become an important influence in your life. You explore it as often as you can. Intuitively, you have the sense that you are just scratching the surface. There are so many unexplained details in what you’re discovering, and they raise all manner of curious implications. Sometimes the bright place is brilliantly bright, and other times it is only a little brighter than the dim light deep inside the cave. Through repeated visits, you discover the bright-dark-bright-dark cycle … Read more

How do you consciously link the person you are now to the person you will become in the future? The first step is to recognize that you are a complex creature made up of many parts. Although you go by your own name and you have one birth date and one set of fingerprints, you are comprised of several internal personalities that together make you the person that you are. You embody various personalities including, for example, the results-minded career person, the whimsical rebel, the caring provider, the gregarious socialite, the reclusive hermit, and many others. You are not a single entity but rather an ecosystem of many entities. Each one of your internal entities has its own life to live, its own needs, its own desires and fears and quirks. Each one wants to be part of your daily activities. Some of the personalities are compatible with some of your other personalities, and some of them clash. For instance, if you are comprised of both the responsible breadwinner and the devil-may-care rebel, you will feel each of them pulling you in different directions. That tension will persist unless you can negotiate ways for them to agreeably co-exist inside you. You need to establish a sort of internal peace, a Pax Individualis, a version of your own e pluribus unum, your singular identity that emerges out of many. Have you ever found yourself saying, “I feel like a slug. I really need to go to the gym,” and then for whatever reason you don’t go to the gym? That is a conversation involving your internal Athlete and your internal Sloth. Each of these entities wants different things. The Athlete wants to feel healthy and to look good in that new outfit you got. But the Sloth wants to just chill and watch videos of kittens doing agonizingly adorable things that only kittens do, usually involving yarn, never at the gym. When you decide to not go to the gym, the Sloth says, “Shut up, Athlete. We’re watching kitten videos now, and later we may move on to a podcast or maybe a TED Talk or whatever we may want to watch and, besides, it’s none of your damn business anyway. Being athletic is overrated. Get over yourself!” In fact, not only do the Athlete and Sloth inside you want different things, they also pose a threat to each other’s existence. The more you devote your attention to one, the more you deprive the needs of the other. When you see someone who is gripped by an obsesssion, you see someone whose life is overwhelmingly controlled by just one of their many internal personalities whose dominance is crowding out their other personalities. This is no more obvious than in the eyes of an addict. The addict knows on some level that she is out of balance. Her intuition tells her that she should not be so single-mindedly preoccupied with the object of her addiction. And yet she shuts out that intuition. She is a slave to her fixation, driven by its clarion call, spellbound and somnambulating towards its glow, remaining ever wanting, never quite satisfied. Her eyes show the desperation for the next fix. It is the desperation of her insatiability, and also the desperation crying out from the other aspects of her life that are being pushed down, crushed down, neglected and asphyxiated. We all face choices. We all struggle with the questions about what to do with the time we have. We all have 24 hours in a day, 168 hours in a week. And yet some people seem to have a lot more clarity of purpose than others. Why is that? Well, part of it is related to how they broker the territory occupied by each of their internal personalities. Brokering a Pax Individualis is about balancing the power that is inside you. Hang on a minute. I want to be very careful about the meaning of the phrase, “balancing the power that is inside you” in this context. Phrases like this are overused. They have been co-opted by diverse characters, from self-help pedagogues to spiritual gurus to manufacturers of internet memes and bumper stickers and, over time, phrases like “balancing the power that is inside you” tend to devolved into platitudes. In the current context, the phrase means how you distribute the focus of your attention. So, working with the various personalities that make you who you are is about consciously choosing how you distribute the focus of your attention. If you were to take a magnifying glass out into the sunlight, you could create a singular link by using the glass to focus the sunlight with such concentration that you scald an object and potentially even set it on fire. When I was a child I could spend hours delightfully burning leaves and twigs and the occasional unfortunate insect that had the misfortune of scurrying my way when I was outside looking for objects to scorch. Your mind is no different. You can allow your mind to jump around from topic to topic while maintaining a diffuse collection of thoughts just as the sun broadly illuminates all objects in the vicinity. Alternatively, you can focus the attention of your mind on a singular thought while holding away all other thoughts. The power of this single-minded attention can be formidable. It can allow you to burn away all distracting elements of that topic and create pure mental clarity. Sometimes you may make a breakthrough discovery, or see the topic in a new way, or suddenly see it in a broader context, or realize that you have been focusing on the wrong topic altogether. To be clear, what we’re discussing is a metal activity, an activity that unfolds in the landscape of your mind. The focus of your attention may involve real objects or places or people in the world around you, but the activity is within you. When you concentrate your focus on what you will … Read more

I really like the concept of individuation, which speaks to a process of becoming individualized, distinct, unique, recognizable. Individuation is the opposite of assimilation, homogenization, blending in. Individuation is the moth that emerges among caterpillars. It’s the flower growing from a crack in the pavement and the volcanic island rising up from the ocean. It is the development of the individual from its surroundings. Individuation can describe the evolution of your work, such as your writing, research, etc. When you hear a song and recognize the performers by their sound, that is an example of their individuation. It is the same if someone is described as having their own voice or their own vision. Individuation can also describe the evolution of your self as a distinct person. It speaks to the development of features, characteristics and traits that distinguish you from everybody else. The psychologist Carl Jung described individuation as the process of forming the self by integrating the conscious and unconscious mind. Cartoonist Gary Larson poked fun at the concept when he depicted an endless colony of identical penguins and one anonymous penguin singing, “I gotta be me! Oh I just gotta be me!” As your individualism develops, you become recognizably different from other people and from the way you were in the past. It’s fundamentally a process of self-transformation. Paradoxically, the new you is simultaneously the same as the old you, and it is also different. Consider Schrodinger’s cat. Physicist Erwin Shrodinger hypothesized that his cat in his box had a 50 percent chance of being alive and 50 percent chance of being dead. Unless someone verified its actual state by opening the box to peer inside, the cat existed in a paradoxical state of being both categorically alive and categorically dead. How could it be both alive and dead? It couldn’t. And yet, without verification, it was. That’s the paradox. So it is with people. As you change, you hang onto some of your personal elements while letting go of other elements. You may think back to how you were in a certain chapter of your past and say, “If I knew then what I know now, I would have done things differently. I was a completely different person back then. I am no longer that person today.” Sure, you’re speaking rhetorically, but your description does contain some literal truth. Anatomically, all your cells replace themselves every seven years, on average. Some regenerate faster, others slower, but all cells eventually die and are replaced. Are you the same person at the beginning and the end of your life? Are you the same person at age 100 as you were at birth? None of your cells remain from the original constellation that made up the original version of your physical self. If you change all the original components of something, can you say it is still the same thing? The ancient Ship of Theseus, named after the mythical Greek king of Athens, endured centuries of service at sea, all the while having various components replaced as they wore out. If you were to replace every plank, nail, rope and sail until there remained not one single part of the original ship, would it still the Ship of Theseus? You may decide it is the same ship even after all the repairs. But could it really be the same ship if literally every part is different? Alternatively, you may decide it is no longer the same ship. If that’s the case, could you pinpoint the specific moment when it became different? Did it cease to be the Ship of Theseus when you replaced its mainmast or its rudder or its anchor…? It is and it isn’t the same Ship of Theseus. It is a paradox. The same question applies to anything that undergoes comprehensive change over time. If you step into the same river on two different years, is it really the same river? Every drop of water is different. Are the Chicago Cubs who won the World Series in 2016 the same team as they were when they won it in 1908? What makes a team the same? Is it the players? None of the 1908 Cubs were even still alive in 2016. You may argue that so long as these things maintain a continuity of identity, they remain the same even as their components change. That’s a valid argument. By this logic, the Ship of Theseus is the same throughout time, as are the river and the Chicago Cubs. Even though you change over the years, others see you as the same person. You retain your own name, your same birth date, the same color of your eyes. Your fingerprints and palm prints are the same today as they were when you were an infant. After your adult teeth develop, your dental records preserve your identity. The government considers you to be the same person at every age as indicated by your social security number. Your DNA remains the same all throughout your life. Your conscious sense of selfhood is also preserved throughout your life. Sure your body has changed since the time you were a child, but you still remember what it felt like, for instance, when you played with your childhood friend in your childhood home that day when you were wearing those blue shoes and the sunlight streamed through the curtains and highlighted the texture of the fabric on the couch. You still have that memory, that experience. You still have these things, as well as all the accumulated experiences that make you the person you are today. They serve as a testament to the continuity of your identity. Whatever your age, there is a movie that has the exact same length as your life, and that is the movie of all your experiences recorded in real time and captured in the surveillance camera of your consciousness. You may regard yourself as different from the person you were when you were a child, … Read more

As I said in the previous post, when I was a teenager, the two most important adult role models who were not my parents were a former WWII soldier in the German army named Kurt and a concentration camp survivor named Saul. Despite their different backgrounds and cultures, Kurt and Saul had a lot in common. Both men had a certain sadness inside them. Kurt concealed his sadness with boozy, clownish antics, and Saul concealed his with a ceaseless drive to work and earn enough to maintain a middle-class lifestyle for his family. Both married women who were lively, talkative, big-hearted and at least a decade their juniors. Both spoke multiple languages, as did their wives and children. Both told me stories about getting frostbite during the war, and this really hit home because I too had suffered frostbite when I was eight or nine years old. Both understood that time is precious. They never articulated this in so many words, but they demonstrated it in their attentiveness to the people and the details around them. Getting to know Saul and Kurt at a young age made a strong impact on my development. For one, it made me mistrustful of stereotypes. Neither of these men remotely resembled the stereotypes about their cultures. Their friendships taught me the lesson that a person is not the group and a group is not the person. Individuals are more complex than groups and have more nuances. Each person has his own unique traits and ambitions and fears, pet peeves, pecadilloes and bugaboos, even without considering any physical uniqueness. From one individual to another, there are lots of variabilities. But these variabilities get smoothed over and blended away when you gather together many people and start referring to them collectively as a group. People have fingerprints; groups do not. When you stereotype, you obscure the humanness of the individuals in the group. That is certainly what the Nazis did during WWII and what all totalitarian regimes do when they oppress certain segments of society. They focus on the stereotypical traits of the segment, and this conveniently allows them to sidestep the inherent variability of its individual members. As Joseph Stalin alledgedly said, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” The field of statistics enumerates this phenomenon. If you were to choose a person randomly from the population and measure that person’s height, you might have chosen a tiny 18-inch infant or a hulking 7-foot giant. But if you repeat this random process many times over and over, the average height of all your samples will converge towards the population average. In the United States, the average height of adults is currently 5 feet, 6 inches, according to some group of actuaries. If you were to measure the height of all actuaries, you would find some tall ones and some short ones and you shouldn’t be surprised if, on average, their height is around 5 feet, 6 inches too. Problems arise if you tag the individuals with the perceived traits of the group. If you went through life thinking all actuaries are 5 feet, 6 inches, you would not only be wrong but you would also think the tall woman at the cocktail party was lying to you when she said she was an actuary. Very awkward. So it is with stereotyping. To this day when I think of the German military regime during WWII, I think of a determined force that conquered and colonized diverse regions where it brutally imposed a narrow, fanatical ideology. This was true for the regime, but obviously not true for all the people wearing the uniforms of the regime. My friend Kurt was a caring man, cultured and virtuous. He carried the situational awareness of a professional comic and a vaudevillian’s knack for improv. He loved to laugh and tell raucous stories, ironic, peppered with quirky details, and often showcasing his own blunders. But I also knew he had served as a soldier in a brutal regime where he fought against others in a kill-or-be-killed environment. He was an inherent contradiction, not a stereotype. Getting to know him over the years, I believe that he acted dutifully during the war, but not dishonorably. The Kurt I knew was a conscientious man, not a man bedeviled by a guilty conscience. Saul had been imprisoned in a concentration camp, stripped of all possessions, tattooed, enslaved, beaten, humiliated, forced to endure hard labor and watch helplessly as friends and loved ones were deleted. Did he hold a grudge? Not that I ever saw. Saul was one of the most tolerant, forgiving people I ever knew. Also, not a stereotype. Before the war, Kurt had been living in Paris where he worked in a hotel with his French girlfriend who was named Marie. Or maybe I just misremembered her name to be Marie which is, after all, a stereotypical name for a wartime French girlfriend. In any case, they were heartbroken when the war broke out and he was drafted back to Deutscheland and assigned to the army. When he left her, he vowed they would be together again. When Kurt marched back into Paris with the occupying troops, he went back to the hotel where he had worked with Marie which the Germans by then had converted to one of their military residences. He knew the hotel better than any of the men stationed there, and he knew how to sneack through some little-used corridors to make his way to the kitchen where he hoped he would find his girlfriend. In fact, when he arrived, Marie was in the kitchen. But she did not recognize him in his military uniform and for a moment she feared for her safety. He called her by name, and took off his helmet so as to be recognized. They embraced, they kissed. They were able to maintain a clandestine relationship for the short time he remained in Paris. … Read more

When I was a teenager, the two most important adult role models who were not my parents were a former WWII soldier in the German army named Kurt and a concentration camp survivor named Saul. I met Kurt when I was a child, and he was older than my parents, closer to my grandparents’ age. Most of what I knew about WWII I got from action movies and comic books. In these stories, the chisel-faced German soldiers were always yelling, “Achtung!” and “Schnell!” and ended up defeated by the Allied soldiers who, despite their inferior numbers and firepower, always managed to hatch a clever, last-moment maneuver to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The comic-book Germans were the bad guys because they wore different uniforms than the good guys. I knew nothing about wartime atrocities. Kurt was smart, cultured, clownish, and loved to laugh. He also loved to drink, which was probably one of the reasons my parents got along so well with him and his wife. One of the reasons I liked Kurt when I was a child was because he never treated me like a child. He greeted me with hearty handshakes, he asked me for my opinions, and genuinely seemed to be interested in what I had to say. He didn’t dismiss me in the way that so many other adults dismissed children. I would sit playing near the adults, listening to their banter. Kurt would occasionally turn to me and translate one of the comments to explain it in terms that a child could understand. “Two sheets to the wind – well, that just means she had too much to drink,” he would explain. Or, “I need that like I need a poke in the eye with a sharp stick – that just means it is something to avoid.” I was grateful that he thought enough to include me in the conversations. Kurt had spent the years after the war in the hospitality industry in the United States. By time he retired, he had risen to become the food and beverages manager at one of New York City’s most famous hotels. He often kept my parents and me transfixed with extravagant stories about celebrities, athletes, and politicians, always glamorous and funny and boozy. He was like some long lost foreign cousin of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack. Kurt was a colorful character, and he seemed to really enjoy the colorful characteristics of others. His catch phrase for punctuating a punchline was, “Oh for goodness sake!” He would blurt it out with his slight accent, after a comedian’s strategic pause, smiling, eyes wide, as if to implore, Can you believe it!? That catch phrase always drew out some extra laughs, and he knew just how to use it. That was Kurt. Then there was Saul, the concentration camp survivor. I met Saul when I was a teenager. He a Polish Jew who emigrated to Canada after the war. He owned and ran a small deli in the neighborhood where I grew up. When I was 17, a friend put in a good word for me, and Saul hired me to work with him. Stocking shelves, grinding coffee, slicing bread and cold cuts, making sandwiches, mopping floors, collapsing cardboard boxes for trash day, my job consisted of whatever Saul needed me to do. He was in his 60s by then. Although I never heard him complain, I knew his joints were arthritic and I suspected they gave him a lot of agony. He maintained a stoic attitude. But now and again I’d notice a brief grimace from the pain in his knees as he climbed the stairs, or I would spy him in the back room rubbing his knuckles and wrists as he ran hot water over them. His most frequent maxim was, “Every thing has a place and every place has a thing.” Each time he said this, he made it sound wise and important. He knew he told this to me on many occasions, but each time he said it as if it were the first time, and I just hadn’t yet realized how important it was. Saul was all about economy of effort. Why do something elaborately when it could be done simply? He liked to drink tea several times a day. He would drop a tea bag in a cup, pour in some milk and sugar, and then fill the cup with boiling water from the electric kettle. The bag would remain in the cup until he finished drinking the tea. Then he would dump it in the garbage, rinse the cup, and turn it upside down to dry on the counter. No spoon, no saucer, no tea pot, just the bare essentials. A couple of hours later he would repeat the whole process. Economy of action. Saul had a faded blue row of numbers tattooed to his arm that I knew was his prison ID from the war. I don’t recall how many digits there were, but I remember thinking, that’s a very long number. I wondered, if the numbers were sequential, many people must have been tattooed that way. Tens of thousands. Maybe hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions. And those were the ones who were important enough to be tattooed. How many others didn’t even make it that far in the process? Sometimes business was slow, especially when the storefront was thick with snow and ice. After Saul and I finished all the cleaning and mopping and cardboard-box origami, and it then was still too early to close up for the night, we would sit and drink tea and talk. That’s when I was able to draw out a few stories about the war. Not many, but a few. I sensed he didn’t like to talk about it. For him, the war had ended a long time ago and it had been a dark, painful time in the early 1940s. He preferred to focus on the brighter present and the still … Read more

When I was a teenager, I had a pet mouse. I enjoyed holding it in my hand and walking around the house with it. Pretty soon I was leaving the house with the mouse. Eventually I started carrying it with me around the neighborhood, even on the public bus. Believe me, you can learn a lot about people when you pull a mouse out of your pocket on a bus. A few years later my girlfriend and I were going through a bad breakup (it had nothing to do with the mouse). It was a Saturday night and I showed up for work at the Old Dublin pub. Murray the veteran bartender saw that I was out of sorts and my frazzled frame of mind could make me distracted and ineffective during what was going to be a busy night. He needed me to be focused and sharp. He took me aside, out the door to the back alley behind the pub. There Murray the bartender handed me an empty pint glass. He motioned his head toward the brick wall at the end of the alley.  “What is this for?” I asked.  “Get all your emotion out. Smash this glass against the wall.”  I shrugged, ok, and smashed the glass against the wall. Murray the bartender handed me another. “Come on,” he croaked. “Put your emotion into it.” This time I understood. I looked at the glass, thought about the frustration I was feeling, and hurled that glass against the wall. I heard a grunt come out of me. Murray the bartender nodded with approval. He handed me another glass and motioned towards the wall. This time I let out a loud bark as I smashed the glass. Murray the bartender smiled. I smiled. He looked at me as if to ask, “OK, you good?”  I thought for a moment.  Then I grabbed another glass, turned to the wall, lunged forward and yowled a throaty yowl as I rocketed that glass into that wall. I had never heard that specific sound come out of me before. It was a guttural sound. An animal sound. The sound of exorcising a demon. When I walked back in to work, I felt calm. Focused. Mentally light. What do the mouse story and the glass story have in common? They are both about catalysts. According to the people at Merriam-Webster, a catalyst is “an agent that provokes or speeds significant change or action.” The smashed glass catalyzed release of the relationship baggage. The mouse catalyzed a broad spectrum of reactions from strangers; some slight meh reactions, some more animated, and even the occasional full-on leaping-up-and-down freakout fit. Now, years later, I can’t remember what it was about that breakup that had me so bent out of shape. Whatever it was, smashing glasses catalyzed me to forget it.

You can see the past. It is etched in your memory. Events that happened, happened. You experienced those events. You know what happened. You were there. You lived them. But the future, that is something different. The future is unknown. You haven’t seen it yet. The future is pregnant with potential. It is yet unrealized. You don’t know exactly how it will be, but you can visualize how it may look, and how you may look in it. You can form mental pictures of the indivual you may become. You can identify what it would take to transform you from the individual you are today to the individual you may be in the future. What is it, exactly, that your future self has that your present self is lacking? What is that certain something that may seed your evolution to become that person you you may become? Try to identify it. And then, if you wish, try to focus your energy to develop it so that you can become the future iteration of your self that you see. That is your Singular Link. Before the actor Jim Carrey became famous, he wrote himself a check for $10 million and post-dated it five years in the future. Shortly before that date arrived, he landed his first big role in the movie Dumb and Dumber which paid him a sum close to… You guessed it, $10 million. Oprah Winfrey, Arnold Schwarzenegger and others are reported to have used similar techniques to help them visualize the future versions of themselves. Even though you haven’t seen your future, you can look at the things that brought you to where you are presently and you can infer the direction they will take you. In other words, you can predict where you will end up if you stay on course. A simple example is to imagine how you will look in the future. Maybe you have always stood with a slouch. If so, your future self will probably be slouchier. Maybe your face shows creases when you smile. If so, your future face will probably be creasier. But you can also change your trajectory. Your slouchy self can start standing up straight and your creased-face self can slow time’s etching properties with – well, I don’t know, maybe some lotions or potions or something. I confess ignorance on this topic, but you get the point. Your visualization can also go beyond your physical features. Maybe you fear you’re stuck in a dead-end job and you’ll be trapped in the same drudgery for years to come. This view of your older self doing the same job can be a powerful motivator for you to work on that résumé. Using your current trajectory to predict where you’ll end up is a powerful tool. You can use it to either maintain your current course or change course. Maybe you have recently experienced a growing estrangement from your partner and the current trajectory will probably cause you to part ways. What you should do with this foresight? It’s a question born from the knowledge that you possess the capacity to influence the outcome. You are not just a passive observer of your life as it unfolds on a stage, but rather an observer and an actor in the play itself. In fact, you have the leading role. Identifying your current trajectory involves connecting the events of your past. It’s like walking backward into a future that you cannot see, and as you look at the landmarks that you pass, you use them to decide if you are moving in the right direction. Imagine yourself walking backward towards the setting sun. To help navigate you could use the direction of shadows. You could keep an eye on your own shadow at your feet and walk backward in whatever direction keeps your shadow directly in front of you, tacking left or right as may be needed to maintain your course. Walking backward is precarious because you don’t know what the next step will bring. It’s the same with the uncertainty of decision making. You may be nervous about making the wrong choice. When faced with a high-stakes decision, you may become frozen with apprehension. Your mind may flood itself with what-ifs that cause you to stop in your tracks. This fear stems from the knowledge that when you make a choice, there is a permanency to that action. Once you have chosen one direction, you shut off access to other possibilities that would have otherwise presented themselves if you had chosen a different direction. You may be confronted with the finality of the decisions you make, and therefore it’s natural to feel some apprehension. Austrian psychologist Victor Frankl advises at moment like this, “Live as if you are already living for the second time, and as if you acted the first time as you are about to act now.” This paradigm asks you to imagine that the present is already past, and that the past may be changed. It implies that you already went through this process previously, you already saw the repercussions of your decision, and you now can use that knowledge to make the decision a second time. It’s like having a time machine. Like having a mulligan, if you need it. This mental exercise may liberate you to choose more freely. There is a game in which you drop a ball and it falls on a peg and bounces either to the right or the left, and then falls again onto another peg, bouncing again to the right or left, and again and again until it arrives at the bottom. You are like the ball, and the choices you make are like the pegs. Once you make a choice and go right or go left, certain new possible outcomes emerge while others disappear. When you face a choice, you face a field of potentialities that have not yet been realized. Frankl likens the decision making process to the … Read more

Imagine that time is a road. If you look in one direction you see the past, and the other direction shows the future. The place on that road where you currently stand is the present. Take a moment and visualize this in your mind. OK. The catch is, since the present is always moving, you are not actually standing on the road, but rather traveling on the road. And if time is a road, with the past in one direction that you have already seen, and the future in the other direction that you haven’t yet seen, it’s as if you are traveling the backward down the road, facing the past.  The events you experience become fixed in your mind when they happen. They become known. They are recorded in your recent memory. As time progresses, you watch the events as they recede farther and farther down the road into the horizon of the past. By contrast, the future is unknown. You haven’t see it yet. Unlike events of the past, which you mentally recorded and your continue to see in your memories, you are blind to the future. The past is in front of you, and the future is behind you. As you travel, you travel backward into the future. How did you get here to this moment in your life? The events of the past converged to create the present, of course, and they converge with new present events to create the future. Your future is built on events of your past. Your future will be built on your previous actions and your current actions. You are currently reading these words. How may these words help you to shape your future? You don’t know yet. The future is unknowable until it becomes the present, and at that point it is not only knowable, but actually known. The future reveals itself to you moment by moment. Each future moment becomes a present moment, and then, just as quickly, it becomes a past moment. Tick, tick, tick, the future approaches you, reaches reaches you, and passes you without so much as a tip of the hat or a wave of the hand. The future is happening now.  Here it is.  Right now. Oops! It just happened. Now it’s the past. Surfers know this well. Precariously balanced on the surfboard, no two moments are exactly identical. Each wave is different, propelling the surfer with a singular combination of intensity, direction, intersecting cross-currents, and adornments of wind and light and temperature, creating unfolding opportunities for balance and emerging threats of imbalance. Each moment reveals itself in a combination of predictability and surprise. And when the wave finally crashes on the shore, it becomes part of the surfer’s lived experience, only to be followed by the next wave that is just beginning to be formed far out in the deep ocean. In certain situations, time is the elements that transports something from its current state of being to some new state of being. In certain situations, all the conditions for this development are in place, but the development itself needs to progress and emerge in due course. The oak tree has rings in its trunk that show it has lived 100 years. An acorn falls from this tree down to the forest floor where it mingles with the leaves and is driven by the wind until it comes to rest for the winter. When it sprouts in the springtime and takes root, the conditions are in place and all that’s needed is the passing of the seasons for it to become a tree. “Mighty oaks from little acorns grow.” The singular link is nothing more than the passage of time. Time causes water to solidify if the surrounding temperature is cold enough or causes it to vanish if the temperature is hot enough. Time allows some tiny things to grow into giant things. Think of a time-lapse film that shows the evolution of a tiny green sprout budding from soil, reaching up towards the sun with leaves unfurling and blossoming into a majestic flower. Think of another film of a flat city block where excavators dig a deep crater and trucks pour concrete, cranes and scaffolding spring from the pavement and crews build a skyscraper that casts shadows over the neighborhood. Time also reduces some ominously large things to dust. Think of the time-lapse photo of a carcass that decays, slowly at first, and then erupts into a frenzy of accelerated deconstruction. Time is the element that converts a beautiful mansion on a hill to smoldering embers.  Time turns night to day and day to night and spring to summer to autumn to winter. Time makes leap years periodically appear. With conditions just right, time made the Grand Canyon and the Great Lakes and the world’s deserts. With conditions just right, time turns coal into diamonds. Einstein said, “Compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it. He who doesn’t, pays it.” Compounding derives its power from the calendar. A single day provides just a minuscule puff of power, hardly perceptible, like the movement of the minute hand of the clock. The buildup of many single days, however, increases the power of compounding. Eventually as weeks turn to months and months turn to years, compounding increasingly compounds itself and the growth trajectory becomes ever steeper with every new page of the calendar. Farmers know this. You plant seeds in springtime, and by fall, if you are lucky, you have crops to harvest. In the first growing season, one kernel of corn could produce a corn stalk bearing one ear of corn with 600 kernels. In the second growing season, if those kernels were planted, they could produce 600 ears with 600 kernels each, for a total of 360,000 kernels. In the third growing season, those kernels produce 216 million kernels, and in the fourth season, you would have 130 billion kernels. All from a single kernel … Read more

According to a statistical model, I will die on August 17, 2035. My dad died young. My mom was closer to average age when she died. If my lifespan is exactly equal to the average of lifespans, August 17, 2035 will be my last day of life. OK, I admit, this is a pretty crude statistical model. It doesn’t account for any of the lifestyle choices that tend to correlate with lifespan. For instance, it doesn’t consider any of the things that probably contributed to my dad’s short life such as the amounts of coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, and bacon he consumed (lots) or the amount he exercised (little). Sure, it’s a crude model, but when it comes to predicting how long we will live, reliable models are pretty scarce. The best model of a cat is a cat. All models are simplifications, but some models are useful. Imagine if each and every person knew how much longer they had left to live. I’m talking about knowing with certainty, like crystal-ball-type certainty. Stop for a minute and consider what that would be like… In one variation of this thought experiment, everyone dies at the same time and everyone knows it’s coming. This doomed-humanity theme is the premise for movies like “Melancholia” and “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.” Stories like this get their dramatic charge by asking the question, “If you knew the world was ending, what would you do?” Some would shelter in place with loved ones. Some would abandon their marriages or other stifling relationships. Some would pursue their bucket-list dreams. Some would throw caution to the wind and leap head-first into the wild activities they always wanted to try. Some would get drunk and stay drunk. Some would try to get closure on an unfinished mission. Some would find the courage to finally profess their love for that special someone. The juicy part of this premise is to see what’s really important when you remove all the trappings of people’s quotidian life. An interesting sub-plot is, if everyone suddenly became self-directed, they would stop going to work; all industries would grind to a halt and society’s taken-for-granted services would collapse. Good luck catching that flight to Fiji for your bucket list when there are no pilots to fly the plane! In a different iteration of this thought experiment, all humanity faces extinction, but it’s not going to happen until some time in the distant future. For instance, scientists identify a planetary body that is on course to collide with the earth in a half century. In this doomed-later scenario, humanity would react differently than they would in doomed-soon scenario. Some people would devote their lives to thwarting the crisis. They might seek to develop rockets to launch, detonate and destroy or deflect the approaching space rock. This could become the existential mission of humanity, the unifying effort, the thing we must all assist or else become extinct. This project may be so large and complex and require such massive coordination that some pan-governmental body would have to be formed to mobilize the whole world’s resources. I imagine many people would recognize the urgency of the effort, realize their efforts could actually make a difference one way or other, and proudly conscript themselves into service for humanity. They would see it as their duty to help. Others, however, may resist these directives from the pan-governmental organization, and refuse to participate. They may view the whole thing as a hoax, just as some believe the earth is flat, the lunar landings were faked, or photos of the planet earth as seen from space were products of trick photography. They may claim the planetary-body conspiracy is just a ploy to control the masses, and be damned if they follow the herd. They would consider themselves lions among sheep. Some would view the planetary body as part of god’s divine plan and refuse to intervene as conscientious objectors. They might even launch efforts to prevent others from intervening. Then what would happen? Answer: society would splinter. Each group would hurl insults at the other, claiming they are brainwashed, deriding them for their stupidity. The pan-governmental entity may need to pass new international laws and enforce them, drafting people into coordinated service, and locking up protestors like draft-dodgers. “If they don’t want to help, we’ll have to get them out of the way!”  Regardless of whether we’re talking about a doomed-soon event or a doomed-later event, any event that threatened to wipe out all humanity at a specific time would galvanize the behavior of the world’s population, with variability among individual responses. Looking at the population as a whole, most people would behave in ways that were categorical. If you ever studied statistics, recall that the behavior of individuals is unpredictable, but the behavior of the population is actually quite predictable. In contrast to the doomed-soon and doomed-later scenarios, in yet a different iteration of this thought experiment, every person would have advanced knowledge of when they themselves will die, but otherwise the world is no different. So, in this thought experiment, I would know my last day alive would be August 17, 2035, and you would know your last day would be July 29, 2080 (congratulations on your long lifespan), and that other guy would be aware he was going to die next week. How would all this play out? Well, unlike the other two scenarios, there would be more variability among individual reactions and less uniformity across the whole population. Again, people’s reactions would be largely time-horizon dependent. Those unfortunate individuals who found out their death is imminent would likely embark on the same activities as the doomed-soon population, sheltering in place with loved ones, leaping into their bucket-list activities, etc. Only this time, most of the world’s taken-for-granted services would still be available, such as the flight to Fiji for that one last week on the beach. People who knew they still had many years to … Read more

When I was 19, I was alone in a hospital room with my grandmother when she passed away. The term “passed away” seems spot-on from my perspective then, as it does now, because what I witnessed was a kind of movement. One instant Grandma was laying there alive, breathing, transmitting signals to the hospital vital monitors which responded by occasionally blinking or bleeping, and then she was… not there. One moment there was Grandma, a person, and then there was something less. Admittedly, her passing didn’t happen in a decisive, Hollywood-style instance. She didn’t utter some profound observation to me from the frontier of her long life. She didn’t gasp one last dramatic breath, and then exhale conclusively. No, the exact moment of her passing was ambiguous. I remember thinking, “Oh my god, here I am witnessing Grandma’s death… oh wow, Grandma just died… wait, maybe she didn’t die… maybe she is still alive…. is Grandma still alive? I’m not sure… it’s hard to tell. How do I know?” I looked for signs. Her face was tranquil, unaffected, and her eyelids were still open just a crack. Her hand was still warm in my hand. However, if she was still breathing, I could not see evidence. Her chest was still. Her nostrils were unmoving. The hospital vital monitor didn’t seem to be beeping. I sat beside her and I wept. Eventually a nurse came in. Seeing the situation, she gave me some condolences, told me Grandma was happy that I had been with her, and then turned off the machines. I too had the sense that Grandma had felt comforted by my presence at that time. It wasn’t until later that my mother told me she believed my grandmother had waited for me to arrive before she passed away. I had been on the other side of the continent when I got news of her illness. When I arrived at the hospital, she looked at me, nodded her acknowledgement of my arrival, and then passed away a few minutes later. As I sat with her, I was flooded by a rush of thoughts and emotions. I remembered as a child holding her hand while crossing the street, and I realized this would be the last time I would hold it. I remembered stories I had heard about her exodus from Europe during the Great Depression, searching for a chance to build a better life, settling in Canada with her young family, desperately laboring as an immigrant for decades to make ends meet, saving her pennies, sleeping insufficiently, and eventually succumbing to mental illness.  “I am proud of you,” I remember thinking as I looked at her in the hospital. “I know you labored and sacrificed for the family and for me.” I remember feeling a tremendous gratitude. I remember feeling an aching desire to demonstrate my gratitude to her. How could I show my gratitude? “By doing something worthwhile,” I realized. By spending my time well. By living my life in a way that inspired others, just as her life inspired me. This experience catalyzed in me a deep reflection about life, death, and the transition from one to the other. What was it exactly that I had witnessed that afternoon in the hospital?  It was clear that a transformation had taken place while I was there watching. Despite the fact that Grandma looked very much the same after she passed as she did just before, obviously her transformation was compete, total, comprehensive, irrevocable. It may sound mundane, but I was struck by what felt like a profound realization that Total transformation happens. It wasn’t just that the change was comprehensive, but also that the change was instantaneous. We are used to seeing transformations unfold by degree over time.  The hospital episode revealed in no uncertain ways that instantaneous, comprehensive change is part of life. It happens to all of us. It happens all around us. It is happening somewhere all the time. Yes, it’s true that we often witness changes that happen in small, gradual ways; but it’s also true that some changes happen as sudden, quantum leaps. It reminds me of that Ernest Hemingway line: How did you go bankrupt? Two ways — gradually, and then suddenly. The hospital episode also sparked an inkling that what I had witnessed was just part of a larger process. After she passed away, she ceased to be a person. At that moment, the only remaining evidence of Grandma was a biological collection of cells in various stages of disintegration. But there had also been a time before she was a person, more than 84 years earlier, before she came alive as a tiny baby in Europe. Total transformation goes both ways, it seems, from life to death as well as from death to life. Ashes to ashes. We talk about “the miracle of life,” but it is also a miracle of death. Both total transformations are miraculous in their own ways. Both are awesome processes, bewildering and mysterious. In some sense, I became obsessed with this concept of total transformation. A Singular Link — that is, a total transformation created by combining unrelated elements — is a metaphorical manifestation of this process.  When I started actively looking to spot Singular Links, they began to appear all around me. I now see examples of them literally every day. Perhaps by gathering them, and sharing them, and interpreting them in ways that allow others to recognize their significance too, in some roundabout way I am acting out the aching desire to demonstrate my gratitude.

The previous post talked about what motivates us to do what we do. It addressed the concepts of collaborative motivation (primarily seeking to benefit others) and individual motivation (primarily seeking to benefit the self). There is, however, another source of motivation. It is the motivation born from the belief that each individual has a unique path to follow and, if receptive, the individual can allow that path to be revealed. Let’s call it, metaphysical motivation. Mythology is filled with characters who find themselves in the unique position to act in response to their own singular callings. Their lives and lessons reveal wisdom that can guide and inspire you. These icons serve as messengers shuttling back and forth between ordinary quotidian life and the world of ancient wisdom, of fables and oracles and Norns and Sibyls, the world of Truths, with a capital T. There’s the story of Moses who was visited by Yahweh through a burning bush and was given guidance to lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. On Mount Sinai he received the Ten Commandments and other laws, establishing the basis for Israelite law and ethics. There is the story of Siddhartha Gautama. Born to a noble family, he ventured out of his family palace four times where he encountered an old man, a sick person, a corpse, and a wandering ascetic. These encounters prompted him to reflect on suffering, old age, sickness, and death, and he set out to seek spiritual truth that led him to enlightenment, Nirvana, becoming the “awake one.” His teachings became the foundations of Buddhism.   There’s the story of Muhammad, the prophet from Mecca, in present-day Saudi Arabia. While meditating in a cave, he began receiving revelations from the angel Gabriel that continued over the next 23 years. These revelations informed on matters of faith, morality, law, and social issues, and they formed the basis of the Islamic holy book, the Quran. The angel Gabriel is also said to have visited Mary, a young Jewish woman in Nazareth. Gabriel told her that she would conceive of a child and give birth, despite being a virgin. The same story appears in the texts of both Christianity and Islam. The Virgin Mary’s gift to the world was her son Jesus of Nazareth. Although not much is recorded about the first three decades of his life after birth, by the time he was 30, he had become an outspoken preacher for God, forgiveness, love, and compassion. His life, messages, death, and resurrection became the foundation for the New Testament of The Bible. History brims and bubbles with individuals who followed their unique mythical journeys, leading inspiring lives, from St Francis of Assisi to Jalal al-Din Rumi to Swami Vivekananda to Mohandas Gandhi to Mother Teresa to the Dalai Lama. Mythological tales across epochs and cultures serve as sources of mystical reflection and introspection and act as motivators for those who encounter them. The Epic of Gilgamesh from ancient Mesopotamia depicts the hero’s quest for immortality, the inevitability of death, and the acceptance thereof. The accounts of Perseus in Greek mythology teach about the virtues of following a righteous path, despite the oppression and wickedness of others, to overcome great odds. Arthurian Tales describe the quest for the Holy Grail, teaching about faith, character, humility, and honor. Dante’s Divine Comedy plots a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, providing meditations on sin and redemption.   What all these mythical beings have in common is a certain otherness that separates them from the lives of ordinary people, from me and you. Their role is to commune between the people and the gods, between the heavens and the earth. Their role in human consciousness is to provide a glimpse of the divine. They reveal, they elevate, they inspire. The engender hope. They invigorate and stimulate the imagination. They alert us to something bigger than our lives, our ordinary, finite, prosaic lives. These icons present us with a stirring sense that our existence, temporary as it is, is linked to something much bigger. A plutonium atom is linked to a bomb. It is all but invisible, patiently waiting to ignite its atomic fury. A drop of sea water contains the taste of the whole ocean. A microscopic plant spore reveals the fractal complexities of the universe. You and I and all of us are atoms, drops of water, spores; each is individual, and yet connected to the larger collective. Mythology connects the finiteness of our lives to the infinite, igniting a metaphysical understanding of ourselves in the world. Its lessons can be motivational and powerful.

There are generally two types of motivation for finding singular links: collaborative motivation and individual motivation. Collaborative motivation primarily seeks to benefit others; individual motivation primarily seeks to benefit the self. Collaborative is outward-facing; individual is inward-facing. Let’s unpack them both. Collaboration Collaborative motivation is a sharing process. In the same way that a teacher inspires understanding in a student, a mentor provides guidance, support, and expertise to a protégé. Mentors are those who nudge their young apprentices onto their journey. In mythology, literature, film and folklore, they provide an amulet or talisman to aid them. Obi Wan Kenobi gives Luke Skywalker the light saber. The Good Which Glinda gives Dorothy the ruby slippers. Gandalf gives Bilbo the ring. In The Matrix, Morpheus gives Neo the red pill. The mentor provides a spark that helps to ignite the transformation from an ordinary life to something extraordinary. The young seeker sets out on what turns out to be an epic journey, encounters resistance, overcomes adversaries, confronts fears, and escapes the threat of death; she learns valuable lessons, grows in wisdom, matures, and graduates to a higher level of mastery; she eventually returns home, transformed to the role of mentor herself, providing the sparks to ignite the next generation of seekers. Sometimes the hero is scarred by the trials of the journey. Luke Skywalker loses an arm. Frodo Bagggins loses a finger. These scars symbolize the price paid for attaining wisdom. In Norse mythology, Odin literally sacrifices one of his eyes as a price to drink from the well of wisdom. He becomes transformed to the “All-Father,” the one-eyed chief god in the Norse pantheon. His eye patch is emblematic of his sacrifice in the pursuit of knowledge. It all begins with a spark, a voice, or a revelation, a certain something that alerts the novice to the existence of larger, mysterious forces. Sometimes the novice will attempt to avoid the calling, preferring to stay in the safety and security of her ordinary world. But then the mentor appears and nudges her down a road to some great unknown. In these iterations of the mentor-mentee relationship, wisdom is attained for the benefit of the culture. The neophyte completes the circle by bestowing something upon others. The mentor’s journey is analogous to the cycle of life: birth begets death begets birth begets death. Although these tales glorify the individual hero, the larger message is that the hero is a reflection of the greatness in all of us, the greatness in society, a universal greatness. Individuation In contrast to collaborative motivation, sometimes there are individual motivations for finding singular links. In folklore, characters who act in their self-interest often provide lessons of caution. These characters are motivated by individual achievement, pride, or hubris. Icarus of Ancient Greece becomes infatuated with flying, ignores warnings, and flies too close to the sun where his wings melt and he falls to his death. Doctor Frankenstein, obsessed with the idea of creating life, reanimates a monster who then turns against him. European folklore has variations of men who are seduced by the beautiful “femme fatale.” She lures them into the forest where they become lost and confused, eventually dying. The sirens in Greek mythology lure sailors into the sea to drown. These anecdotes warn against the perils of temptation and the allure of external beauty. The characters who act with self-serving motivation usually act without mentors. In contemporary culture they are often cast as lone-wolves who overcome improbable odds to correct some sort of injustice. Think of John Wick or Rambo or Bruce Lee or Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickel or the pantheon of aggrieved Quentin Tarantino anti-heroes (“Quentin Tarant-heroes”…?). Their journeys showcase the power of individual will and determination. Their lesson is, “If you truly believe, you can persevere.” By contrast, the lesson of those guided by their mentors is, “If you answer the call, you can be part of something bigger than your own life.” In future posts, we’ll unpack these two types of motivation in the context of finding singular links.