[Original Newsletter Published on December 26, 2021]

Issue #006 Zen in the Art of Fighting

Welcome to the sixth edition of this newsletter from the front lines of my ambitions as a martial artist and author. I'm glad you're here and am exceptionally grateful for your support, interest, and investment in this journey.

If you’re new, welcome. If you’re not, welcome back! However we know each other or however you found this newsletter, I hope sharing some stories and thoughts on a monthly-or-more cadence will inspire you to find and follow some courageous and crazy dreams of your own.

If you'd like to catch up on the previous issues (especially if you missed the last one on account of an inbox filled with Cyber Monday sales), you can check out the full newsletter archive here. You can also view this edition of the newsletter on the web if you don't want to keep reading from your email client.

First off, some love and news for the Patreon Supporters

Thank you for backing me with your moral and monetary support, big and small. For those in the “Blue Belt” tier and higher, check your mailbox for a card sometime in the coming weeks to thank you personally. My intention had been for these to be holiday cards, but given competition, travel, and self-imposed writing deadlines, these cards will inevitably become new year’s cards.

If you'd like to join the Patreon squad, unlock exclusive content, special pieces of writing, vlogs, field notes, and perks since the trip began and into 2022, you can contribute here. Every cent counts.

Before we dive in: Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays!

You won’t find six geese-a-laying in this sixth newsletter, but if you’re someone who celebrates Christmas, I hope you had a fun and festive Christmas. If you don’t celebrate Christmas or if you just like poetry (🖐) , take a gander at one of my favorite poems by Mary Oliver, Wild Geese.

A different kind of "Wild Geese" from Mary Oliver's. Any Untitled Goose Game players in the house? (Credits to House House)

While I’m done with being a silly goose, I’m legitimately going into the theme of 6️⃣ . This newsletter is anchored around the six best things this writer read, watched, listened to, or otherwise consumed in the last six months and some of the stories associated with them. These works range across a variety of genres with differing degrees of edge—I’m talking children’s books and Broadway musicals on one end of the spectrum and True Detective and Navy SEALs on the other.

Without further ado, these are the words that deeply inspired me in the second half of 2021 and embody the energy I aim to bring into my training, my writing, and my life in 2022. I hope you enjoy them and that the words and thoughts might inspire you, too:

6️⃣ : “Safety is all well and good. I prefer freedom.” Louis from E.B. White’s The Trumpet of the Swan

Flash back to a FedEx parking lot on Friday, July 2 in South Austin, Texas. It’s Independence Day weekend, and not just for America—this is the weekend in which I leave my job. I’ve spent the previous few days documenting everything I know, completing my exit interview, and using the now-blank time on my calendar to take final, precious “coffee chats” with anyone wanting to say goodbye or willing to spend some time with me to offer their wisdom and encouragement for my road ahead.

It takes barely five minutes for me to pack my laptop into a specialty shipping box (who knew there was such a thing as a Laptop Box?) and address it per the direction of HR, back to the second floor of 125 Summer Street, Boston, two-thousand miles and a lifetime away.

My stickered-up laptop cover, before I stripped the machine "naked" and shipped it back to Boston.

My software permissions and company emails will go dark in the next few hours. ASICS will get my laptop back in a few days and reimburse me the forty-nine dollars in shipping costs. My final paycheck for the foreseeable future will hit my bank account on my birthday, the fifteenth. When I’m no longer a number on a payroll and the checking account no longer fills on the biweekly—that’s when it’s really over.

I had thought I would feel instantly liberated, like a weight would be lifted as I handed over the box to the associate behind the cash register. Instead, I felt like I was on the brink of a heart attack. I had worked so long and so hard for years, only to send that laptop back, waving a white flag in the fight to the top of the corporate ladder. Even as I knew that I needed to do this—surrender my job to surrender myself to the journey—a little, prideful voice still screeched in my ear: “Stop! What are you doing? You don’t have to do this!”

But once I paid the bill and walked back to my car, there was no indulging that voice and no turning back. I sat in the car and cried—out of relief, out of the empty swath of time that out of mourning the final piece of my life that needed to die in order to really be “all in” on this trip. Sitting in the driver’s seat of the Subaru, trying to calm myself down, I repeated one phrase from a book I’d reread earlier in the week: The Trumpet of the Swan, a children’s book by one of my favorite writers, E.B. White: “Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.”

What I picture when I think of freedom: an Encinitas, CA beachside sunset.

When working on some material for the @zenintheartoffighting Insta-blog, I scoured quotations by E.B. White and stumbled upon this one. Wanting to see the quotation in full context, I reread the short book so I could appreciate it fully. It was beautiful. Charlotte’s Web gets most of the glory when it comes to E.B. White’s children’s books, followed by Stuart Little. In my opinion, The Trumpet of the Swan deserves more credit that Stuart Little, though Charlotte's Web is hard to top.

The Trumpet of the Swan is the story of a mute, trumpet-playing Trumpeter Swan named Louis (a wink to Louis Armstrong). Louis’ father steals a trumpet for his son so Louis has a fighting chance of finding a mate and living a full life in spite of his voicelessness. Louis learns to play the trumpet with the goal of making enough money to repay the music store for the stolen instrument. In the process of traveling and playing to reach that goal, he falls in love and wins over the object of affection, Serena. She eventually becomes his wife.

Midway through the book, Louis is given the option to live permanently and safely at the Philadelphia Zoo with Serena. The exchange between the Head Man at the Zoo and Louis reads as follows:

“…The Zoo can’t afford to lose a young, beautiful, valuable Trumpeter Swan just because you happen to be in love. Besides, I think you’re making a great mistake. If you and Serena stay here, you’ll be safe. You’ll have no enemies. You’ll have no worries about your children. No fox, no otter, no coyote will ever attack you with intent to kill. You’ll never go hungry. You’ll never get shot. You’ll never die of lead poisoning from eating the shotgun pellets that are on the bottom of all natural lakes and ponds. Your cygnets will be hatched each spring and will live a long life in perfect ease and comfort. What more can a young cob ask?”

“Freedom,” replied Louis on his slate. “Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.” With that, he picked up his trumpet and played “Button up your overcoat, when the wind blows free…"

The Head Man smiled. He knew just what Louis meant…

If there’s one thing that got me through the long process of leaving my job, it was remembering that I could always make more money but never get back my time. When I started my career, making a certain amount of money gave me freedom. By the time I said goodbye to it, the job and the money had become sources of imprisonment. Freedom for me was owning my time.

Leaving my job has had a major financial cost, but that cost isn’t greater than the value of my time. It still isn’t.

Whenever I feel self-conscious about my diminishing savings account, about the professional developments of friends and former colleagues, I think back to Independence Day weekend and to The Trumpet of the Swan. Whenever a Linkedin message tempts me to go back to the workforce sooner than I believe is right, or to a lucrative role that I don’t believe is right for me, I think, "Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom." No matter how unsteady I feel, I know know that I'm not at the point where I'm willing to trade the freedom for another run on the hamster wheel. At least I'm not yet.

5️⃣: “Hell Week is a mental gauntlet as well as a physical one. Those who have a clear goal of where they are going, and know why they’re going there, are less likely to surrender mentally to the physical pain.” Dick Couch, The Warrior Elite: The Forging of SEAL Class 228

The BJJ community is one with some legitimate badasses who have gone through some version of personal hell to get to their level of technical, competitive, and/or business excellence. But if you look on Instagram, which might as well be the Linkedin of BJJ, there’s a ton of posturing. Too many people are quick to try making themselves look and seem like warriors, using the language of battle to elevate both the seeming-hardness of their training and the extent of their accomplishments.

Even as someone training full-time, I’ll be among the first to say that sport jiu-jitsu is essentially artful pajama wrestling under a rule set that gets increasingly gamed for the sake of a win. Modern gi jiu-jitsu sometimes looks less like a physical—albeit chess-like—brawl than an aerial silks class conducted on a 10 x 10 meter mat.

That’s not to say that people don’t train hard or to discount the efforts that people put into their scraps in the training room or in a tournament. That also isn’t to say that modern jiu-jitsu isn’t effective at neutralizing an opponent and can’t be useful for attacking them (I say this as someone who loves using the lapel and spent the last two months being tied up in knots by teenagers who’ve mastered this piece of the game). It is to say that jiu-jitsu isn’t war. It is also to say that unless they’ve actually served in combat, jiu-jitsu people are not warriors.

Similarly, this coffee might be crafted for warriors--and it's pretty great--but most people who drink it are probably not warriors. Myself included. Credit: Achilles Coffee Roasters.

Bug isn’t much of a reader of paperback books, except in rare cases. The Warrior Elite is among those rare cases. It’s a detailed, gritty, and sometimes-reflective account of BUD/S Class 228, from a retired SEAL who was a member of BUD/S Class 45. It was an especially appropriate book to read while in San Diego, living in an apartment that’s a mere ten-minute drive away from Coronado, CA where all the BUD/S training happens. For more information on BUD/S and SEAL selection and training process, check out this Wikipedia article.

Bug challenged me to read the book and tell him how it affects my perception of people training jiu-jitsu, who are quick on social media to call themselves things like “hungry lions,” “samurais,” “warriors ready for battle” and so on.

After reading The Warrior Elite, I can confirm that no training I’ve ever done at Atos, no amount of soreness I’ve ever felt after a competition compares to what the SEAL trainees go through in even the most basic of training. Reading about the sleepless, physically-grueling, and mentally-frying trials of Hell Week (and everything that follows it) put a lot of jiu-jitsu training and culture in perspective for me. The whole community could probably benefit from seeing what a genuine warrior culture, one in which the stakes are truly life-and-death, looks like.

Even though most BJJ practitioners should not be comparing themselves to warriors, there are plenty of potential parallels between the forging of a SEAL and the forging of a black belt in BJJ. Some of these include:

How you treat and support your teammates is crucial for your long-term success and personal reputation, whether on a platoon or in an academy. The world of SEALs and the world of BJJ is small enough for someone to know someone who knows you and can speak to your reputation.
It’s hard to predict, both among BUD/S Trainees and white belts, who will get a Trident Pin or Black Belt one day, let alone make it through the first two weeks of training.
Being physically-gifted or well-credentialed means very little as a predictor of who will stick around. Most people think they want to reach the highest level and have what it takes to do so, but, when the work begins, it turns out they don’t have the mettle to see it through.
The training never really ends. Getting your Trident is like getting your Black Belt in that it’s a milestone within a lifelong commitment, not an end goal.

Taken on one of the beaches of Coronado, CA, where BUD/S training takes place. These pooches may already be wet and sandy, but there's a lot of work to be done if these seal-like dogs want to become real SEALs.

Beyond the parallels between SEAL Training and BJJ, I found the quotation headlining this section relevant to my writing and to the whole trip, as well: “Those who have a clear goal of where they are going, and know why they’re going there, are less likely to surrender mentally to the physical pain.”

The goal feels more attainable on some days more than others. I still struggle to put the “why” into words. I couldn’t tell you how it’ll precisely how I will get to the goal, but I know I’m walking in the right direction, even if step by step.

4️⃣: “There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise. The real me was beneath that, pulsing under all the things I used to think I knew.” Cheryl Strayed, Wild.

Substitute “mom” for “dad,” and you’ve got some version of the punchline of the beginnings of my cross-country, job-quitting, jiu-jitsu-doing road trip story.

One morning a few weeks ago, I drove to Little Italy to check out a specific coffee shop I’d wanted to visit. I barely dodged a parking ticket while picking up order, and the coffee wasn’t anything to rave about, but it became a positively memorable visit for the “Little Library” box alongside the shop, the kind with free “take one-leave one” books. If you’ve ever opened one, you know that these little boxes are as likely to be filled with your next, treasured book as they are to be filled with the Twilight series or finance guides from the 1970s. (No shame if either of the latter is your thing, for the record).

The first book I saw in the Little Library was Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which I picked up and considered. Then I saw Wild behind it and knew that I’d have to come back for Tess another day, if at all. Wild was what the forces of the universe wanted me to see and take away with the coffee and pastry. I tipped especially well.

If you’ve never read Wild or seen the movie (in which the author, Cheryl Strayed, is portrayed by Reese Witherspoon), it’s Strayed’s memoir of a snap decision: when her mother dies and her family and marriage fall apart in her 20s, she decides, in the wake of the destruction, to hike a thousand-mile stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT). She does this as a solo female hiker with no significant, preexisting hiking experience.

The extent of my own female solo hiking experience this year, pictured: Austin's Mt. Bonnell on my birthday in mid-July.

I used to be an enormous fan of Cheryl Strayed—I devoured her short letter collection, Tiny Beautiful Things while in graduate school and was an avid listener of the Dear Sugar podcast when it was still on air. I had read Wild many years ago, but it didn’t stick with me as strongly as her other work—maybe because graduate school reduced my capacity to read anything longer than three pages or retain anything longer than three bullet points in a given sitting.

I forgot about Wild until I started learning about the pieces of book proposals—Wild seemed like a good candidate to include in the comp title section. Much like Wild is a hiking book that isn’t really about hiking (that had blockbuster mainstream appeal), mine will be a jiu-jitsu book that isn’t really about jiu-jitsu (which will hopefully have mainstream appeal). But I had no intention of rereading Wild until it was smack in front of me at that coffee shop in Little Italy. The book found me during a week when I was hurting for progress on sample chapters, the piece of my book proposal on which I’d been procrastinating the most.

I decided I would use Wild to “trick myself” into writing my sample chapters–I’d look at what Cheryl Strayed did in her first three chapters, take notes on her narrative structure and what I liked most about it, and then go off to write my own, inspired by her approach. If I got something good out of it, great. If I didn’t, I would at least have more words than I did at the start of this “trick.”

So, as part of this exercise, I sat down to read Wild for the second time. This time, it stuck to my bones while getting me un-stuck in my own work. As someone personally trying to do a fraction of what Strayed does, I’m all the more impressed by what she accomplishes in her memoir—and specifically this: most people, even those who like hiking, will never hike the PCT, and it’s likely that many of those who read Wild don’t hike at all. Even so, Strayed manages to make the literal hiking journey into a more relatable, figurative one: one of confronting past demons, overcoming present challenges, and finding herself on the long stretch of the open trail. That’s exactly what I’m going for in my own work, switching out a hiking trail for a tatami.

The closest thing I've experienced to Wild life in San Diego so far: the seals of La Jolla. Trips to the legendary Zoo and to Joshua Tree are pending.

When it comes to describing my own feelings about growth and transition while on this trip—in a book or even in plain conversation—I don’t know if I could come anywhere close to Strayed’s line about her old life sitting on her real self like a bruise. It’s beyond brilliant. I wish I’d have thought of it first, but also I don’t. It gives me a standard worth chasing, and I’ll be damned if I don’t try to write something just as good.

3️⃣: “If I didn’t do it now,” he says, “I realized I was always going to be the guy who only talked about doing it.” Musical Artist Mike Posner, on his coast-to-coast walk across America

Mike Posner is easily among my top ten favorite musical artists. If you’ve only ever listened to “Cooler Than Me,” “Please Don’t Go,” and “I Took a Pill in Ibiza,” you’re missing out on a whole opus. Nothing quite gets me in a state of nostalgia and contemplation like listening to At Night, Alone from start to finish (and doing so at night and alone, as directed by the album’s opening track).

While Spotify’s “[My] Artists, Revealed”was mostly filled with misses, there was one hit on it with regard to the content: an interview in which Mike Posner talks about two of his most extreme physical and mental endeavors: spending six months walking across the America in 2019 and his experience training for and climbing Everest in 2021. Neither of these had to do with his career as a musician, though they were, in part, spurred by it and the fame that came along with it.

He had been shaken up both by the death of his father and the death of peers and friends in the music industry and was dreading promoting his third album, A Real Good Kid. Instead of heading out on tour for that album, he goes on a different kind of trip: a walk across the country from Asbury Park, New Jersey to Venice, California. “If I didn’t do it now,” he says, “I realized I was always going to be the guy who only talked about doing it.”

In homage to Posner, a throwback to 2012 on my last documented walk in Asbury Park, NJ.

Despite the allure of continued fame and fortune, he manages to step off “the hamster wheel of stardom,” take a seven-month sabbatical from his music career, and rebalance his life on the road. Midway through the walk, he suffers a near-fatal snake bite. He recovers from the bite, and once he goes through enough rehab to regain his ability to walk, he finishes his journey across America, beginning the walk again from the spot in Colorado where he got bitten and was forced to stop.

Since the trip, Posner has continued to create music—not the kind that initially made him famous, but that fulfills him—and taken on increasingly more challenging physical and mental pursuits. After finishing his walk across America, he started training to climb Mount Everest. He summitted Everest in June, raising over $250,000 for the Detroit Justice Center in memory of his father, a defense attorney from Michigan.

One line I read and loved in an NPR article about Posner was this one: “These days, Posner is mostly in competition with himself — to become a real good adult, as he might put it, someone he finds more meaningful than some nouveau riche pop star whose vapid hits have become shopping-mall wallpaper.” I related to that tremendously in reflecting about my year–trying to be in competition with myself instead of others and to be a real good person, someone greater and more meaningful than a resume of academic and corporate experiences or a collection of amateur-level accomplishments in a sport that most people don’t care about, let alone ever heard of.

If I switch around a few details and significantly reduce the level of fame and fortune, Posner’s story reads like a version of my own: an ambitious kid from the Michigan suburbs crushes it at Duke, kills it in the music business, and, feeling adrift after the death of a parent and the hollowness of his professional success, seeks to ground himself on a walkabout.

I'm not sure what looks dorkier: Posner in his walking getup or me in a gi. I'll let you decide. Credit: The Detroit News

If you’ve got a few minutes to spare and want to see what that walk across America looked like, some footage from the walk serves the backdrop for the music video for his song “Live Before I Die.” Personally, my favorite piece of that video is the final sentence that appears on screen: “The walk is over, but beginnings always hide themselves in ends.”

2️⃣: “Life is barely long enough to get good at one thing…so be careful what you get good at.” Detective Rust Cohle played by Matthew McConaughey in True Detective Season 1

I was late to the game of watching True Detective, but became really invested in Matthew McConaughey after listening to him talk about his life story on various podcasts when promoting his memoir x advice book (and now journal), Greenlights. I found it especially inspiring to listen to how McConaughey deliberately took himself off of the rom-com role “gravy train,”and went through a serious dry spell of work in efforts to get hired for the more serious and dramatic kinds of scripts and pieces he wanted to work on (Dallas Buyers’ Club, anyone?).

Link to the full scene here. Harrelsson and McConaughey are all 🔥

That backstory made me appreciate McConaughey’s role as the gritty, brilliant, and obsessive Rustin Cohle all the more in True Detective, something that wouldn’t have been possible had he taken yet another role as the leading dude with the dashing smile. Don’t get me wrong. McConaughey still has the good looks and southern drawl of Benjamin Barry in ‘How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days’ in much of the show, but Rustin Cohle has none of the rest: he’s all seething below the surface, mystery, calculation and edge. If you haven’t watched it and have contemplated whether a month of subscribing to HBO is worth it, do it. Season 1 of True Detective is dark, compelling, and so well-acted that you wonder whether you’re watching a movie.

The quotation above comes from the penultimate episode of the season, in which Rust and Marty, the two detectives, are working together again after spending five years apart. In their reunion conversation, they recap their work, their romances, and their respective life decisions over the past few years. Rust comes out swinging with this line, which hits home in the context of the show and felt very fitting for me when thinking about my life right now, sitting in the wake of major personal and professional decisions and deciding what I want to be truly good at and whether those things can keep a roof over my head.

1️⃣: “You start writing the next one. And after you finish that one, you start on the next. And on and on, and that’s what it is to be a writer, honey. You keep throwing them against the wall and hoping against hope that eventually, something sticks.” Rosa from the Netflix version of Jonathan Larson's Tick, Tick…Boom!

Sometime mid-November, I succumbed to the “Top 10 Movies” list on Netflix and played the Netflix trailer for Tick, Tick…Boom! It was after a hard training session, so maybe I was feeling especially vulnerable, but all the same, my eyes welled up just from watching the trailer. By the time I finished the show’s first number, “30/90,” I was in full-blown tears.

Different piece of media entirely, but representative of how I felt barely 10 minutes into Tick, Tick...Boom! Credits to the creators of Sailor Moon

Even if you don’t like showtunes, the lyrics are loaded, clever, and worth a read and the song worth a listen (both the original cast recording or the Netflix cast recording). Few songs so playfully and wrenchingly capture the despair of reaching a certain age and feeling a combination of panic, frenzy, and disbelief that comes from thinking or expecting yourself to be farther along or better off by your age than where you are. I’ve definitely felt everything that Jon, the main character, covers, both in “30/90” and throughout the entire show: like your prime is passing, like your artistic dream is a pure fantasy, and like you’re helplessly and hopelessly burning your time until—tick, tick…boom!—you’ve got no time left.

The hardest line in the movie for me to hear was the exchange between Jon and one of his colleagues at the diner where he works: “You get to a certain age, and you stop being a writer who waits tables, and you become a waiter with a hobby.” At what point do you decide to stop identifying as an artist for a living and supporting your art with something that pays the bills, before your art becomes the hobby and the living is your identity?

The plot of the show is semi-autobiographical and based on the life on Jonathan Larson, the creator of Rent. The title character, Jon, is a musical theater composer, who has been working on his musical for nearly ten years with no luck getting it finished and onstage. By the end of the movie version of Tick, Tick…Boom!, Jon gets the chance to workshop his musical and even gets some positive feedback on it, but not the longed-for offer to have it produced on Broadway.

The quotation above is the conversation between Jon and his agent, Rosa, who has just given him the feedback that “Everyone is telling [her] the same thing. That Jonathan Larson. I can’t wait to see what he does next.” Jon is crestfallen, and, upon asking what to do next, is given the basic but brutal advice: to write the next one, and the next one after that, in hopes that the next one will bring the joy, success, and renown he wished he’d had for this one.

How I feel re: hearing back on pitches, getting "discovered" by an agent, and "making it" as a a creative. Credits to Netflix for Tick, Tick...Boom!

In the case of the real Jonathan Larson, “the next one” after Tick, Tick…Boom! was Rent. He passed away the day before its opening night and never got to see it become one of the top Broadway shows of all time. It begs the question: which is more tragic: the artist dying before he gets to see his work succeed? Or the artist failing to pursue that work and the world never getting to see it at all?

These are the questions that give me a sense of urgency in my writing and a sense of obligation in writing—to myself and to whoever might want or need to read what I have to say. I don’t want to die without having gotten a chance to put “the first one”—and, if I’m lucky, “the next one”—down on paper.

Closing Out

It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new [year] for us. And I hope you’re feeling good, whether you prefer the musical stylings of Nina Simone, Muse, or Michael Bublé.

Thank you for riding along in the metaphorical passenger seat of this post-employment, itinerant athletic and author-ly journey. If you’re at leisure to write back, I’d love to know:

What inspired you this year or this holiday season.

What resolutions or intentions you have for the coming year.

Anything else you’d like to share (about what’s going on in your life, how I can make this newsletter better, the best Christmas decorations you saw or food you ate, etc.)

Until next time, thank you for reading and happy new year,

EZ

PS: I welcome any suggestions on favorite covers of “Feeling Good” and things I should be reading, watching, or listening to in 2022. Reply back and hit me with your best tracks and tips.

PPS: For those who care, this is likely Snickers’ favorite playlist.

Issue #006: Zen in the Art of Fighting