Mountains of Humility

With our course at 12K ft on the Continental Divide, getting ready to ho down to Mile Long Lake

I just returned last week from my annual sojourn into the Wind River Mountains to spend 23 days with Naval Academy Midshipmen on a National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) backpacking expedition.  NOLS  and the Naval Academy collaborate to make an expedition into the wilderness and mountains a leadership lab for aspiring Naval Officers.  This is the fourth summer I’ve joined them as an instructor, primarily to provide perspectives on how leadership in the outdoors relates to leadership in the military.

People often ask me how ‘backpacking in the mountains’ teaches leadership in the military.  Or leadership in any environment, for that matter. That’s a fair question. 

When I explain that when you have to spend every waking hour, every day, for several weeks with the same people,  working together to confront and deal with new challenges in a new environment, with nowhere to hide from your mistakes, from words spoken in anger or frustration (by others or yourself ), the leadership piece becomes more apparent.  Leadership is very much about people working together to achieve common goals.  The tougher and more unfamiliar the context, the tougher the challenge.   On this expedition, all of us – students and instructors - learned a lot about working together to succeed, thrive, and have fun, in some of the most spectacular and also challenging wilderness and mountains in North America.

While on the course, the midshipmen kept a daily journal.   It is a description of much of what they experienced and is full of witty, borderline, and some probably-over-the-line humor; it is fun to read and is a reflection of their energy, exuberance and even irreverence. 

At the end of the course, I too contributed to the journal.    I put down some thoughts about what I hoped they had gotten out of their expedition.  In retrospect, these thoughts reflected what I had gotten out of being with them on this expedition, away from civilization in the mountains and wilderness for 3 ½ weeks:

                Humility – the mountains and the wilderness are awe inspiring. They were here well before I was born, and will be here long after I’m dead.   My small place in the time/space continuum becomes readily apparent.  Anyone who comes out of that environment and is not humbled by it, was not paying attention.  Also, it is humbling at this point in my life to work with smart, strong, healthy, and exuberant young people.   It is a cure for the smugness that can come with age and experience.

                We need each other – Living well in the back-country, just like living well in the ‘front-country’ requires that we work and get along well with others.  One cannot live well in either environment alone.  We do truly need each other to survive and to thrive….

                We need to protect the Wilderness -  it is fragile.  In our course, we taught and practiced what is called ‘Leave No Trace’ camping, and we were scrupulous about not leaving bits of food or trash, and carrying out everything we brought in;  other campers however aren’t so scrupulous. We regularly came across trash and other debris left by other campers -even in the most remote areas.

                You can live well with very little.   If you have the ability to observe and appreciate the world around you, and you have the love and support of friends and family, everything else you really need fits into a back pack.  A good book and a harmonica help.

                Every one of us is precious.  Two students who started with us did not finish the course with us.  One was evacuated nearly halfway through with painful tendonitis in his ankles; another was seriously injured in a fall and had to be evacuated by helicopter (she will fully recover after a few months of rehabilitation and physical therapy.)   The loss of each of these truly great people from our course hurt them and us.  We were not the same – we were clearly less – without them.

 Our group of 14 included 3 instructors (of whom I was the junior) and 11 midshipmen.  We ‘improvised, adapted, and overcame’ steep, spectacular terrain, gale force winds,  lightening/thunderstorms, mosquitoes, snow covered passes, long hikes with heavy rucksacks.   We bathed in ice-cold lakes, we cooked ‘creative’ meals on our camp stoves, caught and ate fresh trout, slept on the hard ground, three and four in a tent whipped by 40+ knot winds.  We also learned to live well together, which was not always easy.  For all of us, spending 3 ½ weeks away from civilization, was therapy for our ‘nature deficit disorder’ that can come from our sometimes over-civilized life-styles.   We brought many lessons back to our noisy, busy, and very full lives in the front country – what Admiral Stockdale referred to as ‘the big easy world of yakety-yak.’ 

But the mountains are still there for us, in their no-excuses-and-no-apologies Stoic silence.  When things get too crazy, or too busy, or too noisy, or too frustrating, or too whatever – in our minds, we can return to the campsites we left ‘without a trace’ in the Wind River Mountains, places where change is very slow, and the wind in the trees, and the occasional rock breaking loose and falling from the cliffs, are the only sounds we hear….

For another NOLS instructor’s perspective,  I commend to you Morgan Hite’s very short essay, Briefing for entry into a harsher environment   
http://www.lesstraveled.com/TripLog/RoadTrip99/NOLS99/briefing.htm

Stoicism – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I am a Stoic – not in the pure sense, nor in the popular sense of the word, but I suppose, in my own sense. I find much about Stoicism appealing and useful to me, and have enjoyed studying it and teaching it semi-seriously for a number of years. Within the Stoic tradition, there are a number of different versions and approaches, and it is not a branch of philosophy or ethics that is currently taken very seriously by most academic philosophers. That said, in its general, garden variety form, it is a philosophy that I find more useful than most in helping me personally to live the life I want to live and to become the person I want to become, in a world in which so much seems to be random or at least beyond my control. But while Stoicism offers much that I find appealing, it also has its drawbacks and critics. So I thought it might be interesting to briefly look at it in this blog.

THE GOOD: What I like about Stoicism is that it is a philosophy of empowerment, freedom and responsibility. It emphasizes individual autonomy and choice – to choose our reactions to the world as it is. The Stoic says that, “It is not important what happens to you. What is important is how you react to what happens to you.” In an almost literal sense, Stoicism is a philosophy in which ‘attitude is everything.’ Happiness is a choice. Success is a choice. As are unhappiness, failure, sadness. Stoicism knows no victims and accepts no excuses. There is no good or bad luck – bad luck is merely our unwillingness to accept what life has given us. So even ‘luck’ is merely a function of attitude. It is entirely up to us to train our minds and our wills to accept our freedom and responsibility, or alternatively, to choose to be a victim. A person in prison can have as much freedom, and thereby capacity for happiness as the billionaire living in his mansion in a gated community. For the Stoic, freedom is a state of mind, not a political or economic or other external condition, and happiness is a personal choice, a decision that we make, consciously or unconsciously regarding how we react to external circumstances that we can only pretend to control. The Stoic believes in an ‘unseen order of things’ that we must accept and adapt to. Tragedy, catastrophe, death, disease, unexpected disruptions of our lives and our plans – these are part of the natural order of things and are part of every person’s life. Our efforts to manage and avoid these disappointments are ultimately doomed to failure; happiness and serenity therefore can only be attained and sustained to the degree that we can accept, and even embrace, the tribulations that come our way. Stoicism emphasizes Duty and Honor as values above worldly praise and pleasure, disappointments and loss. You and only you, are responsible for your life and your happiness, because you and only you, are in control of the only things that matter – your attitude and your honor.

THE BAD: Throughout history Stoic detachment has been caricatured in the form of the Stoic sage smiling serenely, as the world crumbles around him. Valuing one’s personal serenity at all costs can be a call to inaction and may endorse emotional detachment from one’s own suffering, as well as the suffering of others. With some legitimacy, Stoicism has been criticized as an emotional ‘cut your losses’ philosophy – don’t become too attached to anyone or anything, since everything will eventually be taken from us anyway. A person may be drawn to Stoicism to avoid emotional commitment and thereby the almost inevitable disappointment or let-down that follows. Existentialist critics of Stoicism argue that passion is what makes life worth living, and the Stoic who is infatuated with serenity, and will not risk passionate disappointment also misses the joys and exhilarations of passionate commitment. They argue that Stoic rationalism and emotional control cut the heart out of the human being. Additionally, Stoic fatalistic acceptance of the natural order of things, when taken to an extreme, can deny the value of human action. Such resignation to Fate is found in parts of the Arab world, where God is given all responsibility for this world, absolving man of responsibility for his own actions or life circumstances. Inshallah, I will live a good life. Inshallah, I won’t.

THE UGLY: Compassion can be difficult for the Stoic who takes his Stoicism literally or to an extreme. It is a ‘suck-it-up’ philosophy for oneself as well as others. There is little room for compassion if the Stoic assigns full responsibility and accountability, and denial of any victim status, to others. “This is YOUR fate, I have mine. Suck it up. Adjust your attitude. Your suffering is a gift – embrace it.” While such ‘tough love’ is certainly appropriate in many circumstances, most of us would agree that it is not in others. Those with mental illness, or who have been severely abused for the pleasure of others may not have the psychological tools to train their will to overcome adversity. Stoicism may be a philosophy for the already-strong to become stronger, and the psychological equivalent of going to the gym – it can make the healthy person healthier, but for someone who is not healthy, it can make their condition worse, or even kill them.

CONCLUSION: There are responses to the ‘bad’ and the ‘ugly’ of Stoicism that allow me to continue to endorse it as a useful and empowering approach to life. Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer offers valuable guidance in calling for ‘the wisdom to know the difference’ between those things we can change and those which we must accept. We can be passionate and emotionally committed to people, our projects, and the world, but retain in reserve our ability to let go of things we can no longer change, and choose to live honorably and well, in spite of disappointment or tragedy. We can choose compassion without coddling. We can take and give responsibility, while recognizing that there may be some who are unable to accept it – yet, or ever. We can admire the self-sacrifice and service implicit in the very Stoic mottos of the US Army – “Duty, Honor, Country” – and the Navy/Marine Corps “ Honor, Courage, Commitment.” The inclusive Stoic finds room for passion, but always holds duty and honor in reserve; for compassion, while still recognizing the value of tough-love; for fatalism, while still taking responsibility and action. Perhaps there are some legitimate excuses, but it takes a hero to not accept and rise above them. Perhaps there are some legitimate victims, which allow the rest of us to become heroes to come to their defense. The Stoic response to Inshallah is: God helps those who help themselves – that is, those who embrace their freedom, who struggle to embrace whatever life sends their way, and take full responsibility for their responses – good, bad, or ugly.

The Unseen Order of Things, or Unscrewing the Inscrutable

I recently had a couple of interesting experiences that provided glimpses into that ‘big’ question that sits silently in the background as we live our daily lives. I am certain that most people have had these types of experiences and glimpses, and then usually dismiss them as ‘weird’ or strange, and then slide back into our more comfortable ‘consensual’ reality without really considering the implications.

I was recently sitting in a meeting when for apparently no reason, an old friends name came to mind, and I realized we hadn’t communicated in over a year. It also occurred to me that he had probably visited San Diego in the years since we’d last seen each other. On an impulse, I sent him an email, with “What the heck?” in the subject line, accusing him of coming to San Diego and not getting in touch. He responded shortly with an email whose subject was: ‘Busted!’ He was in San Diego at the time at a conference, and was scheduled to leave that night. Coincidence, right?

I try once or twice a week to get out for a road-bike workout in the morning, but I hadn’t ridden in a couple of months. A few weeks ago, I prepared my bike the night before, got everything ready so that I could quickly leave the next morning on a short ride before work. That night I had a vivid dream of being on the side of the road with a flat tire on my bike. I got up that morning, put on my bike regalia and went into the garage to find my bike with a flat. Rarely has that happened before. Another coincidence, right?

Almost everyone has similar stories they can tell. There are however people who have regular and much more dramatic experiences of something that could indicate that there may be a connection between people, and events and places which goes beyond our normal, consensual experience of everyday life. And while some people consider these unexplained and seemingly random experiences as merely strange coincidences, a considerable amount of effort has taken place within the scientific community to reliably and consistently replicate and explain these phenomena. So far, such para-normal phenomena and experiences have not been able to be repeated with consistent or mathematical reliability in a controlled environment.

Those people who regularly and routinely have such experiences, usually can’t explain them, nor can they reliably call them up at will. Joe McMoneagle was studied by the Army and the CIA for years because he had an amazing ability to do what is called ‘remote viewing’ – describe a place with amazing accuracy where he’d never physically been. Edgar Cayce, when put into a hypnotic trance, could seemingly take his mind to anywhere in the world and describe what was there, as well as accurately describe the lives of people he’d never met – even when not in their presence. Other people have had dreams or visions that have accurately portrayed events that subsequently happened exactly as their dream or vision predicted – way beyond statistical probability.

I recently read a book entitled The Third Man Factor by John Geiger that seeks to explain the phenomenon recorded so many times of people in a life threatening situation sensing a ‘presence,’ which guides and comforts them, enabling their survival. (Those of you familiar with Ernest Shackleton’s trek over South Georgia Island know what I’m talking about.) One of my favorite philosophers, Colin Wilson, has recently written a book entitled Super Consciousness in which he explores what Abraham Mazlow described as ‘Peak Experiences’ and how people can intentionally induce these experiences. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink seeks to explain how our minds frequently make their best decisions without ‘thinking’ – and Gladwell makes no claims on any ‘unseen reality.’ String theory and Quantum physics (neither of which do I begin to understand) challenge our consensual reality and whether ‘reality’ is truly limited to the 4 dimensions of space and time.

There is a huge body of literature of scientists, charlatans, religious mystics, skeptics, new age philosophers trying to explain these phenomena that don’t seem to fit into the ‘consensual reality’ in which we live our daily lives. I read somewhere that much of philosophy and religion is an attempt to address whether there is only one objective reality, or whether there are multiple dimensions, and whether human beings have the means of bridging these different dimensions of reality and existence. Is there an ‘unseen order of things’? Are these strange experiences ‘leaks’ between one dimension of reality and another? Plato believed yes. Aristotle didn’t agree.

So what are ‘the implications’ of an amazingly predictive dream, or a ‘flash’ connection with someone that seems to have meaning – are they little glimpses of ‘the big question’? Is there an ‘unseen order of things’? Are we all connected by what Carl Jung called a ‘collective unconscious’? Is there another dimension that connects people, events, places and things beyond space and time? Or can indeed all of this be explained by a more thorough and complete understanding of biology, psychology, and physics within the day-to-day reality in which we ALL agree that we live? Struggling with these unanswerable questions can be profoundly personal, and can force one to confront one’s most deeply held values, who one is and how one lives one’s life – which can be awkward, and even scary.

When I worked in the Pentagon, we regularly were confronted with decisions and events within our ‘consensual reality’ that were perplexing and just didn’t make sense. To help us deal with these, my boss at the time used to quote the Hall of Fame football player Dick Butkus: “There’s a whole lot of S@%# going on that we just don’t understand.”