Humainologie dialogue Endurance and Pursuit with book synopsis and Zoom link for our dialogue Wednes

Here is the Zoom link provided by Greg for our dialogue next Wednesday August 26, starting at 6:30 PM:

Join us by clicking on this Zoom link:

Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81069789438?pwd=VnNFSDczYU8ydnArUGpDOFFNN3pDdz09 Meeting ID: 810 6978 9438 Passcode: 282684

Endurance and Pursuit are my contribution for two related topics as a framework for our dialogue on Wednesday. A book synopsis related to Pursuit is appended below, and my question for you is this: If you decided to go on a quest starting soon, what would that quest be? How would you define it?

Amor fati,

Arthur

Book: The Happiness of Pursuit: Finding the Quest that will Bring Purpose to Your Life (Chris Guillebeau, 2014)

As the book opens, the author is at the international airport in Dakar, Senegal, on his quest to visit every country in the world. As he pursued his goal, he learned of many others who had also taken on some sort of quest and noticed that high spirits were associated with their pursuit. He began to seek stories of such quests, and as the stories came in, he developed criteria to define a “quest.” A quest has a clear goal and a specific end point; it presents a clear challenge; it requires a series of small steps and incremental progress. It is often driven by a calling or sense of mission. It requires a sacrifice of some kind, though the sacrifice may be apparent only later, after the quest is well underway.

“Most of the people I talked to,” he writes, “had been dissatisfied with their normal lives.” They thought about it and came up with an idea. They made a plan. Then they took the first step. Then another. And they kept going.

John Francis was an environmentalist who wondered how he could respond to a massive oil spill in 1971 after two tankers collided in San Francisco Bay. Talking about it with a friend, he came up with the idea to stop driving a car and to stop riding in cars. It seemed unrealistic. But a few weeks later he decided to walk the twenty miles to a party instead of driving his car. With a daypack on his back, turning down offers for rides, he arrived just as the band was playing their final number. Success. After he had walked back home, his friends arranged a celebration of what he’d done and asked him to tell them more about his crazy idea. “It was a taste of freedom,” he said. “For a while I hoped I didn’t have to come back.” And he kept going.

The quest you choose should usually come from your own calling. An artist might choose to do one painting every day for a year, an avid reader might read one book every day for a year, a runner might set out to run as many marathons as possible in one year. Chris Guillebeau mentions that Martin Parnell ran 250 marathons in one year. (Another source sets the record at 239 with Larry Macon. Either way, that’s a lot of marathons in one year.) But then the “call” might come “out of the blue,” from something inside you long hidden.

In one of the tables at the end of the book, Guillebeau lists a series of “Big Quests,” the name of the person who did it, and then an alternative, a far easier quest that you could try if that particular kind of quest is your cup of tea. A.J. Jacobs had read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in one year. If you’re an avid reader you might try reading a different Wikipedia article every day for a year. Laura Dekker became the youngest person to sail alone around the world when she was a teenager. You probably couldn’t do that. Okay, check out an alternative: “a solo voyage of your own (small sailboat optional).” Sasha Martin cooked meals based on the cuisine of every country in the world. The author’s alternative: “Broaden your culinary horizons – prepare a meal from a cuisine you haven’t tried or visit an ethnic restaurant you’ve never heard of.”

I was inspired by Stephanie Zito’s quest to donate $10 to each of 365 charities in one year, a goal she had chosen based on her own experience working in the not-for-profit world. Jason Comely devised a game to build his resilience to rejection. He called it Rejection Therapy, and the goal of the game is exactly to ask for things and be rejected, to expand your comfort zone. The author quotes Jason: “Your comfort zone may be more like a cage you can’t escape from than a safe place you can retreat to.” Break out of your cage! One practitioner, Jia Jiang, launched a “100 days of public rejection” project. He made requests that were unusual but not necessarily difficult to respond positively to, recorded them by camera and uploaded them to YouTube. He learned something with each experience – including some remarkable positive responses.

Self-reliance is important. The author asked “What does self-reliance mean to you?” and received answers such as “That I can get myself out of most any situation and live life on my own terms,” and “the ability to love yourself and to know, no matter what, you’ll be OK.” One person who embarked on a self-reliance project told the author, “If I didn’t do it, I would always wonder about what could have been,” and he heard this from many different people, expressed in many different ways. With each of the author’s chapters comes an explicit lesson as the subtitle, and for Chapter 6, “Everyday Adventure,” the lesson is “You can have the life you want no matter who you are.” He quotes Eleanor Roosevelt, “Do one thing every day that scares you.” In addition to your goal, you’ll need that timeline and you’ll need a way to measure your progress.

Even though planning your quest, including financial planning, is important, don’t get bogged down in planning or you’ll never start. If it comes to that, just jump into it. Some quests carried no financial costs at all, and others often cost less than $5,000 to complete, including those that lasted a year or more. Stephanie Zito’s one-year donation project cost her $4,260 because of some “extras” she built into it, and she found it easily affordable, even when working for a not-for-profit organization.

The author refers to several questers who have authored books on their quests. Julie Powell prepared every recipe in Julia Child’s cookbook and authored Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously. A lawyer going through a very dark time in his life (divorce, a failing career) decided to practice gratitude by writing 365 detailed thank-you notes to various people, and authored the book A Simple Act of Gratitude: How Learning to Say Thank You Changed My Life. Judith Levine and her partner went for one year without making any purchases except what was essential for living and published the experience in Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping.

For some it was the goal that was the key to their “happiness of pursuit,” and for others it was the process. Nate Damm, who walked from Maine to San Francisco, said it was the process, the journey itself, and that he was upset when he arrived at his destination. As he had walked across America, good things seemed to happen. He was also experiencing a growth in confidence and independence. Along the way, many had found that their original vision expanded. Tom Allen cycled to Iran (from England) but on the way, in Armenia, he met the love of his life and soon married her. Sasha Martin, who had a focus on diet when she began to prepare meals from around the world, found her vision expanding to share a message of peace.

And what about that homecoming? If the quest has transformed your life in a positive way and the homecoming seems boring compared to the journey, find the next quest! Must all good things come to an end? The author leaves that question for another book, while acknowledging that we are all mortal. The quest can change your life, but it cannot make you immortal.

A “bucket list” is a quest at life’s end, a list of things the person wants to accomplish before they kick the bucket. Yet any successful quest has a finality, perhaps a glory, to it through which the life of that person can be given meaning. One young woman who had completed her quest said at the end of it, “This is my story. No one can take it from me. And that is what has made everything entirely worth it.”

This was exactly the book I needed at this time of my life. The sheer range of possible goals and strategies can ignite your imagination if you begin to think about it. If you are out of work and looking for a job, you might design your quest in a way that it increases your chances of getting your dream job. That would be win-win. You either complete your quest or you get your dream job sooner than you expected – or maybe both. If you are retired, your timeline possibilities are many. For example, you might do a series of very different one-month quests – with a break between them – in the first year, then pick one of them to dedicate more time to the second year. Just imagine!

You’ve heard of Homer’s epic The Odyssey. Guillebeau describes that journey of Odysseus as being often boring and messy, with the tough spots coming up unpredictably along the way. Your own quest might match the experience of Odysseus in that general sense. “Experience produces confidence, and confidence produces success,” Guillebeau writes. Set out on your odyssey! You may want to keep a journal so that if someone decides to write an epic poem about your odyssey, they’ll have good source material. You could even do videos or photos. Odysseus never did that!