What I Don't Know About Today Yet
Musings at sunrise in Ocean Park, Maine
To hear the 5-minute audio file that I uploaded today as my Morning Journal flash briefing for Alexa devices, click on the play button:
Lightly edited transcript, via Otter:
Good morning. Today is Tuesday, July 2nd.
I'm out on the beach. The sun just popped up over Prout’s Neck. With my tripod, I took a photo of myself with the sunrise in the background.
I love being out on the beach at this time of the day, because there are other people doing the same thing. They woke up and maybe asked Alexa what time the sun would rise. It was at 5:05 this morning here on the coast of southern Maine.
I feel a sense of freshness and new opportunities whenever I'm out here at sunrise. I used to take a sunrise photo every day to post on Instagram with a caption that said “Good morning.”
I had a tough day yesterday, which often happens when I’ve stumbled on a Big New Idea. In this case, it was the idea of constructed emotion than the came out of a Tiago Forte blog post that I read, based on a book by Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made.
When I get an idea that helps me to frame my life, it comes with a couple of emotions. One is the joy of discovery. I've always loved school. I remember when my favorite teacher, Sumner Scherer, taught us the decimal system in fifth grade. Mr. Scherer had a way of doing it that was so full of the joy of discovery, and he transmitted it to us. There was that moment of saying, “Oh, wow, that's how that works!”
But with the joy of learning often comes another emotion, which sets me up for a fall. It's like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown as he's about to kick it every year. I think, This is the idea that's going to make the rest of my life easy.
Maybe I now sort of understand how emotions are made—they're constructs, so perhaps I can mess with the really old ones that hurt so much. When they show up, I can say, “Hi, I recognize you. You are a created emotion that I've been using to torture myself for the last 70 years.” So there's a sense that this time I finally have life figured out.
Then the day unfolds, proving otherwise.
I had a disappointing game of pickleball yesterday afternoon. It wasn't just my elbow that hurt, it was my feet, everything. I returned to the cottage feeling ancient.
I can imagine how poor Joe Biden felt after his awful debate. He remembered when he could debate the pants off someone else, especially somebody like Trump, and thought, “I just don't have it anymore.” I felt empathy for Joe Biden after my pickleball afternoon.
In the evening, I read a post by Mirabai Starr, part of the “Embodied Writing” course I’m taking from her online. Her writing prompt for the day was “All that is unsolved in my heart.” She seeded the exercise with this quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet:
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
So yes, it's great to learn things. It's helpful to understand how emotions work, but living that answer is no easy matter. I survived my disappointment, got a good night’s sleep, and then: the dawn of a new day.
I don't know anything about this day yet.
I am curious to find out what it will teach me.
Thanks for listening.