D. Brunner, My Role Model

D. Brunner has been one of the most important role models in my life. I often ask myself, “What would DB do right now?” He is an artist of life, a seeker of meaning, a true human.

“Once you have met a true human being, let him not disappear from the horizon of your heart.”
― Rumi

1. D. Brunner, the way I see him, aspires to wisdom and simplicity (the Sage), to the pursuit of the divine presence (the Pilgrim), to moral integrity and love (the Saint), and to self-discipline and resilience (the Athlete). A good life, for him, means to grow into all the four archetypes.

2. Accordingly, he is an essentialist to the core, one fully committed to a minimalist philosophy. As such, he makes sure that the "life-table" stays clear of that which is unimportant, trivial, or merely good. He treasures the gift of time with reverence.

3. He understands the centrality of attention and mindfulness—the sine qua non of the good life. To that end, he fiercely pushes against forces such as busyness, noise, and distractions and protects precious moments of solitude and silence essential for life-reflectivity.

4. Not surprisingly, he nurtures a sense of wonder expressed in gratitude. Not in the sense of cheap positivity thinking or minimizing the reality of pain and suffering; he is no sentimentalist. Rather, he is a “yes-sayer,” one who affirms beauty and goodness even in difficult circumstances.

5. There is a lightness about him, a deep sense of rootedness and contentment as if he has already arrived, already found his destination. There is no restlessness in him, no co-dependency. Absent too is any spirit of self-promotion.

6. He views the good life in holistic terms: spirituality (devotion and surrender to God); fitness (strength, endurance, and mobility); mental health (positivity, stress-reduction, mindfulness); nutrition (in his case, a plant-based diet); relationships and community; vocational excellence; connection to nature; and simplicity. His commitment to wholeness is the flip side of his reverence for life (Schweitzer).

7. For him, "life to the fullest" is not a matter of accident, something that happens by default. He is committed to the craft of living and willingly pays any price it might exact on him. Like St. Paul, he trains himself “unto godliness.”

8. Consequently, he understands that discipline is the path to freedom. In other words, competency, achievement, mastery, and the reaching of goals require commitment, intentionality, self-sacrifice, focus, and the saying of “no” to alternatives.

9. He speaks what he thinks, in wisdom, truth, and courage. He is a model of integrity and authenticity. He is ruthlessly honest with himself but in a spirit of self-compassion.

10. While organized, he is flexible following the "mind like water principle." After all, what matters to him are not rules or schedules, but rather a connection with that which is the most valuable at any given moment.

11. He understands that every choice matters and leverages the principle of compound interest to its utmost, particularly when it comes to the question of habit-formation. That is why he is always after tiny improvements, those 1% changes that eventually add up to transformative states.

12. He is not intimidated by valleys of doubt, emptiness, and the absence of motivation. He knows that they are illusions and mirages, siren voices of the Id. While he cannot control such emotions as they have a physiological life of their own, he observes them "from above," as it were, bemused at their claims.

13. He is resilient and is regularly recalling the journey that made him into what he is. He responds to difficult situations by saying, "Good!" Not in the sense of some amoral indifference or cheap positivity thinking, but rather from a position of courage and growth-mindset. In most circumstances, he exhibits the quality of anti-fragility (Nassim Taleb).

14. That is why he carefully watches over his words, knowing that speech creates reality. As best as he can, he refuses to speak negativity and defeat into existence.

15. He believes that mistakes are opportunities to learn from. When they happen, he analyzes them and then adjusts his approach (timing, context, strategy, attitude, etc.). That’s what craftsmanship is.

16. He constantly goes for things that he doesn't want to do. That is how he callouses his mind and confronts the laziness impulse; the proclivity for comfort, pain avoidance procrastination, and instant gratification so endemic to human nature.

17. He is not dependent on the opinion of others. He knows who he is, what his values are, where he is going as a son of God. Insults leveled against him are met either by silence or self-deprecating humor. And yet, he is all too aware of his self-ignorance and how dependent he is on the feedback and guidance of others. His indebtedness to moral and spiritual exemplars knows no bounds.

18. And above all, he sees love—the love of God, others, and self—as the animating force and moral center of the universe. Kindness and compassion are the defining virtues of his character.

19. Thus when you talk to him, you are surprised by how fully present and attentive he is. He exudes an emphatic concern that is hospitable and healing.

20. But above all, he basks in God's fondness for him. He sees himself swimming in the ocean of infinite love. What can touch such a man?

Deliberate Practice and the Art of Living

Note: This is another blog post that has been adapted from a post in the “Students” section of the site. Given that the theme fits the theme of my blog, I am sharing it here with some modifications.

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As a high school student, I was totally into water polo, a sport of significant standing in my home country Croatia. In fact, Serbia and Croatia—both ex-Yugoslavia countries—have a stronghold on the sport's world championship and Olympic gold medals for some time now.

I still remember the brutal training sessions we had to endure. As is the case in all sports, we spent most of the time not playing the game or even shooting the ball. We swam, had leg drills, submersion drills, then swam some more, and so on. It was all about fine-tuning our bodies, fine-tuning the underlying skills needed to thrive, or even just survive, in a competitive setting. (The sport is notoriously demanding.)

One day we were slacking during a training session and so the coach punished us the next time around to have our practice session in t-shirts on. Not to be too graphic, but swimming a couple of miles with a soaked cloth dragging along will punish your body in all kinds of interesting ways. Let me just say that the guys who had the foresight to put badges over their nipples saved themselves a lot of misery.

That sadistic episode aside, the idea of repetitive practice will be nothing unusual to anyone who has been around sports (or music and arts for that matter). The basketball player who drills his free-throws, the soccer player who works on her tactics, the golf player who fine-tunes his swing—these and countless examples can be marshaled to illustrate the importance of deliberate practice (pace Anders Ericsson) for the mastery of any skill.

And so it is with life as well. There too the method of indirection implied in deliberate practice is essential for a purposeful existence. Sufficient sleep, proper nutrition, times for mindfulness and meditative stillness, regular morning journaling, empowering dialogues, and the sacrifice of service are but just some of the indirect means by which we grow in the art living. And bandages might not even be necessary!

Erich Fromm on Self-Discipline

I don’t know precisely when I encountered the writings of the psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm (1900-1980). It must have been in my late teens or early twenties when they acquired a status of devotional literature of sorts for me. Two books, in particular, have left a mark on my thinking: To Have or To Be and The Art of Loving. One of the ideas I took from him is the importance of self-discipline for human self-realization. A self-evident thought, really, but one of immense significance for the practice of life. As he reminds us, we

shall never be good at anything if I do not do it in a disciplined way; anything I do only if “I am in the mood” may be a nice or amusing hobby, but I shall never become a master in that art. But the problem is not only that of discipline in the practice of the particular art (say practicing every day a certain amount of hours) but it is that of discipline in one’s whole life. One might think that nothing is easier to learn for modern man than discipline. Does he not spend eight hours a day in a most disciplined way at a job which is strictly routinized? The fact, however, is that modern man has exceedingly little self-discipline outside of the sphere of work. When he does not work, he wants to be lazy, to slouch or, to use a nicer word, to “relax.” This very wish for laziness is largely a reaction against the routinization of life. Just because man is forced for eight hours a day to spend his energy for purposes not his own, in ways not his own, but prescribed for him by the rhythm of the work, he rebels and his rebelliousness takes the form of an infantile self-indulgence. In addition, in the battle against authoritarianism he has become distrustful of all discipline, of that enforced by irrational authority, as well as of rational discipline imposed by himself. Without such discipline, however, life becomes shattered, chaotic, and lacks in concentration.

These words, written fifty-four years ago, have stood the test of time, and then some. In an age when focused attention and concentrated pursuits are hard to come by, when deliberate practice is often reserved for specialized endeavors such as sport or artistic competence, Fromm’s appeal takes on a prophetic tinge. For my life, anyway, littered as it is with its fair share of routine self-indulgences.