Huck Finn Wisdom

Well, it happened again. I have procrastinated. I didn’t stop writing all together but, I succumbed to my inner voice and second-guessed my abilities. Then, I decided against being creative for fear of what others might think. But, I’m here once again and i’m ready to ramble. I just reread The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and fell back in love with Mark twain’s ability to describe exactly how we as human beings think in the most simplistic yet detailed way. He sums up my feelings lately here:

“But that’s always the way; it don’t make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person’s conscience ain’t got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn’t know no more than a person’s conscience does I would pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person’s insides, and yet ain’t no good, nohow. Tom Sayer He says the same.”

Such an honest look at the games we play in our heads. I play this constant game with my conscience that I’m sure many others deal with as well. Also, I’ve learned that many people don’t. I’ve written about this before but a few years ago I read an article about a study that details how some people don’t have that '“inner dialogue” that narrates their daily lives and helps to reason and make sense of the world. This was fascinating to me because I can’t think of life in any other way. And I wonder if these people are witheld from a certain level of fear, anxiety, happiness, and love. Or, are those feelings just different to them? That’s a thought for another time.

So, I was rereading this book, doing a 14-day Stoic journey course, attempting to grow my business, and generally feeling productive. I felt as though I had a renewed sense of hope for the future. Until, things fell apart, seemingly all at once. I received news of a friend’s illness, my business had a setback, my career aspirations seemed fruitless, the world was crumbling, and I felt rundown. In an instant I was back in that hole that I continually dig for myself. I always forget to prepare myself for adversity or at least I never see it coming.

There was an NPR podcast I listened to that quoted Zen master Shunryo Suzuki who said, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the experts there are few.” I think this quote can be interpreted as both pessimistic and optimistic. The former, in which we are naive at the beginning and feel that anything is possible only to be hurt when we realise that the world can be a cruel place that can hold you back from your full potential. I’m a realist but I prefer the latter better in that we must constantly think like a beginner at all of life’s wonders and possibilities because once we think we have mastered something, we fail to see anything more than what we think we already know. You might have to read that twice.

We should all strive to see life more often from a “beginner’s” eyes because then we will understand that there are many ways in which life can play out. It’s easy to settle for one way and it’s easy to feel sorry for yourself, but sometimes you need to go back to basics in order to see the bigger picture, outside of yourself. One of the most wonderful passages in Meditations is where Marcus Aurelius looks at his own troubles with worry and fear. “Today, I escaped my anxiety,” he writes, “or rather, I discarded it, for it is within me.” It’s a beginners way of looking at the things that distract us and it opens our minds to all of life’s possibilities.