Being Right and Being Happy

You are both a thinking and a breathing thing.

I feel my writing to be most meaningful to produce, and best received by others, when it's being written to try and help myself cohere my thoughts on something into an articulable form. I've known what I want my next piece to be about for a while, but I haven't known how to put it into words. This is my attempt. I promise we'll touch on how it relates to high level Magic, but I hope the rest of it resonates with folks too.

I remember the first time I felt truly intellectually challenged.

The best teachers can give us a feeling of not knowing.

The feeling that everything you understand might be wrong, that there might be other ways to think, other ways to be.

Senior year of high school, we had the option to take AP English Literature, or a class called "Philosophy as Literature". As with most of the decisions that have shaped my life for the better, I didn't think much about it at the time -- I just hated English class and wanted something different, so I signed up for the "weird" class.

We started out reading the classic Western philosophers - Kant, Hume, etc. They wrote with a logic that, while complex and challenging to analyze, felt comfortable and evident once I understood what they were saying. Causes followed effects, things were true or they were false. "I think, therefore I am". 1+1 = 2.

But then we moved on to eastern philosophy, and things got even more challenging. Not challenging in the way I was used to, needing to learn the rules of the game and analyze the patterns in the authors' reasoning to extract their conclusions. Rather than writing towards explainable truths, these authors seemed to be writing "around" the truth - encircling it, pointing at it, but never touching it directly. Instead of wanting you to leave satisfied with having unlocked the puzzle of their reasoning, it seemed like these texts were inviting us to give up on the puzzle, sit back, and admire its beauty.

Now's probably a good time for the disclaimer that any cultural differences I talk about in this piece are purely from my own amateur and personal perspective -- I don't mean to reify, mysticize, or exoticize eastern philosophy and culture as somehow more natural, mystical, or less prone to the follies of human nature than western cultural, religious, and spiritual practices. I am speaking to the personal perspective of encountering cultural and intellectual worlds different from the ones you grew up with, and how those experiences tend to break down walls in your brain that you didn't even know were there.

Our teacher, Mr. Fieleke (shoutout!) was open with us about being a practicing Buddhist at the beginning of the class, and would often go back and forth with us in a playful way during our discussions. Poking, prodding, deconstructing, but never with a discernible agenda beyond getting us to question the things we felt we were sure of. I remember very clearly the first time I felt myself starting to question.

We were talking about Descartes' "I think, therefore I am", and the fact that much of the Eastern philosophy we were reading seemed to disagree with what should have been as obvious of a conclusion as 1+1=2. The concept of a "self" was unambiguously missing from the truths they were dancing around.

I was explaining why Descartes' conclusion felt so obvious to me -- that for observation to be happening, there has to be an observer. Experiences happen to someone or something, they don't just happen on their own -- so the pure fact that experiences do seem to be happening implies a "being" who is doing the experiencing, a "me" that things are happening to. The "movie" made up of our senses and thoughts has to be playing for someone.

Mr. Fieleke waited patiently for me to finish explaining, and thought for a second before asking:

"Why can't there just be experiences? What if there's no one in the movie theater? Isn't it possible that there just... is a movie playing?"

And I thought for a second, and I realized there was nothing I could say back. I wasn't right, or wrong -- I just simply didn't know, and neither did he.

That was a different kind of experience, the not knowing. And there was nothing to be done but to sit with it.

Years later, in my senior year of college, my dad recommended an app he'd heard of called Headspace. For those who aren't familiar, it's an app that has guided meditations and a small amount of gamification (tracking streaks, total minutes "meditated", etc), He had heard of some research that mediation can help with ADHD and the ability to focus, and knowing how much of a struggle those things were for me growing up, he offered to buy me a years' subscription of it if I would give it an honest try.

I expect anyone who hasn't tried meditation before thinks of it roughly the same way I thought of it at the time -- a kind of zoned-out state where you're in a completely different mode of consciousness, your mind blank, peaceful and at rest.

I didn't know if I was doing it right - mostly I was just sitting still and thinking about all the things I was already thinking about. But I started to like it as part of my routine, and the gamification of the app worked - I wanted to keep the streak up. I set a goal to do it every day for 100 days, and I did.

It still mostly just felt like sitting there and doing nothing, but I still just kind of enjoyed having a part of my day set aside for doing that. So I kept using Headspace, and told people I was "meditating", even though it didn't really feel like it.

Years later, when my chronic pain was at its worst, I found a 30-day course on Headspace called "pain management". I was curious, and honestly, desperate for anything that would help. I didn't want to be told that the pain was all in my head, that I could fix it simply by thinking my way through it...

But I also knew that I'd been surprised before by meditation. I still did it most days, and while I'd stopped chasing the streaks in the app, I had come to appreciate my "time out" from the day, and slowly started to realize that all meditation really was was just sitting there and doing nothing. That was actually the point.

"So it's really important to say right at the beginning, we're not looking to get rid of the pain, and there's certainly no guarantee here that the pain will disappear. Equally, we can't discount the possibility that that might happen, but we're talking about how we can change the relationship. So this is more about understanding our habits, our tendencies, the way we relate to pain right now, and understanding how we might, at times, even exacerbate, how we might increase the intensity, and through learning this technique, see how we can maybe step back from that, begin to unwind that feeling of pain."

Again with the dancing around things. "We're not looking to get rid of the pain, and there's certainly no guarantee here that the pain will disappear..." -- and yet, towards the end, at the same time talking about "unwinding that feeling of pain". Never touching down, never directly saying what will or won't happen.

But this, after dozens of specialists had promised they knew how to fix my problem and cure the pain, felt like someone who was actually taking things seriously. "We don't know, but maybe this will help" was interesting. I kept going because I was curious.

Instead of teaching me to try and wash away the pain with positive thinking and distraction, much of the course was instead about simply learning to sit and experience the pain without outside distractions, to observe it without reacting to it. Partially, this was difficult just because it wasn't fun -- sitting there and feeling pain doesn't sound like the most enjoyable activity, does it? But since I was in pain all the time, it wasn't very different from anything else I was doing, so I kept going for the full 30 days.

Like they said, the pain certainly didn't go away. Much like when I'd first started meditating, it didn't really feel like anything was happening -- I was just sitting there, feeling what I was feeling, thinking what I was thinking (mostly, lots of frustration, wondering dejectedly about what was going on in my body, and literal pain). The point was, specifically, not to do anything. To simply have the experience.

A year after that, I left my job. At first I'd decided to leave just to leave, but then I qualified for the Arena Championship, and pivoted to spending my first few months preparing for that. The only problem was that right as I left, my pain had a bad flare-up and I was almost completely stuck in bed for multiple weeks, despite being incredibly excited to start preparing for my first high level Magic tournament.

I thankfully realized very early on that if I was going to spend my time accomplishing anything after leaving my job, it had better be to figure out my pain. Even though I'd gotten used to it as a "normal" part of my life, if I stepped back and looked at it objectively, my pain was incredibly disabling - to the point where I couldn't even do the thing I loved the most, even though I had all the time in the world to do it.

Before the flare-up, I'd been feeling better for the past year after going off the two medications I'd been on, starting some strength-building exercises at home, and giving up on any kind of medical interventions to come and save me. But the return to being bed-bound told me that there was still a big problem here that I hadn't yet solved - one that would prevent me from working and achieving my goals in the future if I didn't figure it out.

I didn't want more physical therapy, and I didn't want more medications (or more specifically, I wanted them if they worked, but I didn't believe they would), so I decided to try something I'd been avoiding up until then: psychotherapy, specifically a type of somatic therapy called "Pain Reprocessing Therapy". This therapy technique, though new, seemed relatively evidence-based and more integrative of mindfulness techniques like the ones I'd used in the Headspace course.

I talked about the effects of this therapy for me in The Journey to Worlds, but I'll quote the relevant part here, the first time I think my therapist really "got through" to me:

“Ryan, all this trying to take care of yourself still sounds like a lot of mental effort. Have you tried taking a break from that too?”

Of course, I had tried to do this. But something about being challenged on a description of my pain, how it was only able to be managed in the short term, how slowing down and listening to it instead of trying to actively manage my schedule around taking care of a body that constantly felt like it was failing felt like work in and of itself, like I couldn’t escape because I was always working, made me realize that I might not actually be letting myself LET GO as much as I thought I was.

That I was still pushing through discomfort to try and earn comfort.

That I didn’t know how to shut it off anymore — The churning, the worrying, the analysis, the optimization, the healthy attitude, the carefully planned schedule, the desire to be Doing the Right Thing, to be Accomplishing Goals, to be Earning my Rest.

Maybe rest was just something I desperately needed right then, not something I had to accomplish for myself through careful planning and execution and problem solving.

Maybe I couldn’t be thinking so much all the time, because my brain couldn’t handle it.

Maybe learning to ignore my thinking brain's pleas to stop and shut off and recharge had forced it into the only communication I would at least hear, even if I didn’t listen to it: causing me intense physical discomfort until I actually let the whirring, grinding, churning analysis machine rest.

I could feel my feet on the grass? I could see the other people in Brooklyn Bridge Park and watch them having fun, without needing to check my phone? It felt like time was slowing down, instead of speeding up? That’s weird.

That is what I wanted to write about today -- that feeling I was having right then. The feeling I hope you can access right now.

This.

Right now.

You are reading, but I'm going to ask you to stop for a second. Where are you? What's going on around you? Can you feel your feet? I don't know the answers to these questions, but you might. Take a second and investigate -- what is "this", right now, for you?

Thanks for coming back. You can see how it's weird to talk about 'this' in writing, because in some ways, writing seeks to do the opposite - to transport you to a world removed from the one you're currently in, a world that doesn't exist in your senses, but instead in your thoughts.

Playing and thinking about Magic has this property in common with writing. When I'm "doing" Magic, whether playing or just thinking about the game, I get beautifully lost in a world of ideas and concepts. There is a deep engagement and fascination with these abstract structures, and trying to find the patterns in them can be mesmerizing, and immensely rewarding.

Getting better at Magic requires an enormous level of introspection and self-critique. You need to be analyzing not just the patterns themselves, but mapping between your own understanding of them and the discrepancies you find between the patterns in your brain and the results of trying to apply those to the "reality" of the game (itself an abstract world, but one with tangible outcomes). It's endlessly analytical and self-critical. It's beautiful, and difficult, and exhausting. It's meaningful, and meaningfully, work.

Everyone more or less knows what good process looks like in Magic. The challenge is getting yourself to actually do the work. To play consciously, rather than instinctively. To think about what you're doing before you do it. To question and learn and patiently trudge through the experience of ignorance, rather than seeking confirmation of your pre-existing ideas. To give up on any preconceived notions of how good you are as a player and instead realize how short you are constantly falling of baseline competency. To Stop Trying to Win and instead try to find places where you're losing because you're wrong.

This mindset and set of practices is what it means to compete at being right - to seek to understand complex systems at a deeper level than others who are trying just as hard as you are to find patterns in them. Reflexive introspection, ideas upon ideas upon ideas and an endless spiral of thinking, to model not just an abstract world but your own flawed interactions with it, acting and succeeding and failing: an always-improvable algorithm that can edit its' own code (and must, if it wants to beat the competition).

But you also have to breathe while you do this, and feed yourself, and rest. You have to be able to rest, or you won't be able to keep going. Because annoyingly for those of us who want to be the best at playing Magic, we are not only made up of ideas, minds floating in between MTGO queues and discord servers - we are also people made of bodies and experiences and relationships to others.

I've had two major goals in my life over the past few years, and I've been extremely lucky to have enough of the major resources (time, money, and social support mainly) to pour into them. They are:

Striving to be the best Magic player I can be

Striving to heal my pain

In many ways, these two goals have felt like they require exactly opposite things from me. The first one is about learning how to be right, how to push yourself to learn and change and grow. To think, slowly and with great effort. The other is about learning to let myself be happy - something that requires letting go of the desire to be right, the drive to learn and change and constantly work and improve. To exist in the moment, breathing, experiencing.

Despite demanding opposing things from me, these goals have also felt complimentary to each other at times. In fact, their distinctive qualities end up pointing towards each other in what they leave out. One asks me to hold tight to my thoughts, my identity, my agency in the world, and through effort continue to shape and keep a tight grip on those things, while the other asks me to stop the effort, sit back, and watch change happening, maddeningly, anyway, without a "self" at the controls to guide it.

I've described how the process of improving at Magic feels, to me, like the ultimate test of the first mode, thinking and learning and improving. Many folks who are reading this should have some familiarity with the experience of that mode. But what about the breathing? I think many Magic players tend to struggle with this part of the human experience. Despite the amusing paradoxes that doing this always brings, I think it is worth it for me to try and point at it through language here.

I think a big part of this, for many people, is Faith -- a belief in something larger than you can ever hope to comprehend -- something more than yourself, beyond you, more meaningful and powerful than you. This can take many forms, and the form that others find most useful won't necessarily be the one that's most useful for you. Some forms I've seen this take are an individual creator deity so large and powerful that he transcends our ability to understand her (God, Allah), a notion of utopian destiny and human transcendence through technology (humans or humanity being destined in the arc of history to become creators of new life and new worlds), a concept of complete interconnectedness, where nature and all living beings make up a thinking, breathing whole being that we can be understood to be a part of, or even the idea of nothingness, that there is no objective truth or reality, and all that exists are our fragile and small perceptions, which don't need to be taken seriously all the time (the notable absence of one big thing becoming that big thing to believe in, basically).

I am not a person that Faith comes naturally to. It's in my nature to prefer beliefs that I can explain and reason with, and I've had very little interest in filling the gaps outside of that for most of my life. I've had to find a kind of Faith that works for me to experience breathing, and my version of it tends to be some kind of acceptance that all these frameworks are different ways of accessing or "encircling" the same big, inaccessible truth. In my own words, the best way to describe this truth is:

There is no dividing line between "self" and "other", and the extent to which we need to work with this concept is a necessary tool brought about by "our" inherent limitations

Consciousness, thinking, the processing of information and the way this processing leads to changes in the world, if it exists, cannot be said to be a phenomenon that is unique to individual human minds. Instead, it is a result of how information becomes organized into patterns in the world that are able to change themselves in unpredictable and adaptive (selecting for the ability to self-perpetuate) ways as they are changed by their interactions with the larger world

This can be said to be true of human minds, but it can also be said to be true of ant colonies, of ecosystems, of communities, and cultures, of what we call "algorithms" (social and cultural phenomena driven by the way digital systems are organized), and potentially, one day (though not, in my view, any time soon), machines. It could even be that all of existence has this thinking, conscious, living nature.

In fact, there certainly will always be more to "me" than I can ever hope to be able to comprehend consciously, and striving to fully encapsulate and understand myself within my own thinking is a nonsensical and dangerous goal. Instead, sometimes, I can simply sit and watch and experience, letting this thing that I put a box around and label as "me" surprise me and pilot the ship on its own - even if letting it do that is scary.

The concepts we have of time, space, the universe, and our place in it are certainly flawed & incomplete, and likely disastrously wrong, and the stories we tell ourselves about being individual ensouled beings existing inside the linear chronology of a world made up of mostly inert matter and energy, having agency over our surroundings and place in something called "history" and "the universe" are probably things inherent to our own nature and limitations more than some kind of direct, unbiased experience of something concrete called "reality"

In all likelihood, yes, we are tiny and incomplete, innately blind and ignorant, merely a small part of some larger whole that we will never have access to

But something interesting is happening, seems to be happening, or existing, or changing. And it can be observed and experienced, and it's beautiful and terrible and personal and permeating and magical and boring and obvious and impossible to understand.

These ideas are a form of spiritual belief. They are not exactly verifiable or falsifiable, so they cannot be fairly described as claims of truth. They are a Faith in something outside of whatever I usually call "myself", something that is larger and I am necessarily just a small part of. They are an acknowledgement of not-knowing, of just being.

When I allow myself to accept not knowing, I can start to pay less attention to the parts of my brain that try to know, that are constantly looking to capture everything around me in thinking. I can exist within my surroundings instead of apart from them. Taking them in, but also letting them go, breathing them out. A little different every time. Change happening, without "me" being in control of it.

This.

So that is what breathing feels like. It's in many ways an entirely different way of being from what is required to improve at Magic. It's something that I'm still trying to access more, because it's not the thing my brain naturally gravitates towards. It's the one way that I've found to truly improve my relationship with my pain, and over the long run, possibly even reduce the pain itself. I enjoy Magic because I like thinking, because I like being right. I like understanding complex things and I like the challenge of understanding myself better. I, I, I. Me, me, me, thinking, improving, better, understanding, being right. It's fun and rewarding to get lost in a world where you get to compete in this never-ending process.

But as I've been pushing further and further into this world, I've also been able to successfully trick myself into seeing the importance accessing this other mode of being, the opposite mode, as a way to rest from the exhaustion that can come from constant thinking and analyzing and reflection. I'm game to work on anything that will help me spend more time and energy getting better at Magic - including "improving" at resting, at recharging my thinking battery, because it turns out that we humans do, annoyingly, have limits and need balance.

Part of this balance has come from realizing how much thinking (as opposed to breathing) I was putting into so many aspects of my life without realizing it. You might call this anxiety, or overprocessing, or masking, but I don't always see or experience it that way. I like being "thought"-"full", especially in my interactions with other people, but in doing so, I've often forgotten to be...

The most commonly used word for what I want to describe is mindful, but in the dichotomy I've been using in this piece, "mind" feels too close to a notion of thinking, so I'm going to use the term "breathful". When I say "breathful", I mean the same thing that "mindfulness" mediation seeks to give us the skills for - to be able to experience the moment for what it is, observing without judging, experiencing without chasing or controlling.

When I'm able to be more breathful while I'm around other people, I'm not only more able to save the thoughtfulness for things like practicing Magic or writing, I've also been pleasantly surprised at how much more positively these experiences tend to go both for myself and for the people I'm around. It turns out that when you need to spend a ton of energy thinking while you're around others, always analyzing the social situation and how to best act within it, being around other people starts to be very draining and you start to avoid it when you can, and resent it when you can't. But the inverse of this is that when you can start being more relaxed and authentic with people, they normally don't shun you for being less than perfect. Instead they start to feel more permission to be the same way with you, and genuinely nourishing connection and exchange can take place.

I'm still nowhere close to being able to do this all the time. Being around people is still exhausting for me, and I still find myself masking, overanalyzing, and struggling to be let go and be authentic. Partly, it's hard because some amount of thoughtfulness is still necessary -- it's not good to completely give up on trying to act well towards others or let yourself go totally without a filter, especially if you're not practiced at operating on social autopilot. I've definitely had moments over the past year where I've realized I let myself ignore social rules a little too much, and a more lowkey awareness of them, without overdoing it, would have been useful.

What is needed is balance. We are at our best when we can both think and breathe. Sometimes more of one is needed, sometimes the other. Sometimes an even balance does the trick, and sometimes you need to let go of one mode completely for a while until it makes sense to return to it.

Being happy and present matters very little when you're unable to move through the world effectively and do the hard work of learning how to reach into the systems we live within and act within them to help yourself and those around you.

Being right matters very little if you get lost in creating your own maps of the world, and forget that you are actually in a place, right now, having an experience that you'll never have again.

You are both a thinking and a breathing thing.

Sometimes you'll be right. Sometimes you'll just be.

I hope you'll choose to experience both as much as you can.

2-for 1 alert!!!! There were two songs I wanted to include for this piece, but I can only link one at the top (both are some of my all-time favorite songs). Here's the other one:

https://open.spotify.com/track/6PmsHVre2N9yOjDge00r9c?si=753d2fca38ba4db7