The Hammock Papers: Natural.

31 May 2023

Natural.

Ari Weinzweig on leadership, life, and an acceptance of aloneness ...

If we’re ultimately alone in the world, but we’re not trained in how to manage that aloneness, then we are inevitably headed for trouble. Is it worth investing so much in so many people? I stand with May Sarton when she writes, “We have to believe that every person counts, counts as a creative force that can move mountains.”

In all of this, I’m realizing that accepting and managing our aloneness is very much akin to comparable work we’re all confronted with around anxiety. Unmanaged or misunderstood, anxiety leads to inappropriate expressions of anger, apathy, addiction, and acting out. (Or, for all I know, an excessive affinity for alliteration.) It's only when we can make peace with the fact that anxiety is normal—an element of existence—that we can learn to lead effectively. As Peter Block’s friend, teacher, and co-author, Peter Koestenbaum says,
When anxiety is denied, our nature is denied. … As a result, the price we pay for the denial of existential anxiety is severe. The dominant consequence is to restrict our life.
…
Existential anxiety is healthy and is the natural condition of the person when in a state of self-disclosure.
The same is true with aloneness. Accepting it as painful at times, but still a normal part of who we are, makes it far less problematic. Instead of acting out, we can learn to live and lead more effectively.

Ari on the power of solitude ...

Solitude, once we settle into it, is a wonderful thing. It creates spiritual sustenance. It gives us much needed time to reflect. It’s our opportunity for long ignored thoughts and feelings to emerge. It’s a chance to quietly acknowledge fears that linger below the surface, unacknowledged, that weaken our emotional foundations. Reflective, thoughtful time on our own can surface hopes and dreams of a better future, support intuition, and encourage us to expand our emotional horizons.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL