15 Things You Have To Do This Summer

Feel like summer passed you by? It’s not too late. There are still plenty of prime time summer days stretched out ahead of you. But you’re going to have to make the first move. Here are fifteen things guaranteed to jump start your summer.

1. Go barefoot

We all love our many shoes and flip flops, but once in a while leave them behind and feel the curve of the earth beneath your feet. Cool grass, white sidewalks, wet sand, smooth pebbles, that brown dirt path down to the lake – don’t let your shoes get in the way of these things.

2. Drink water from a garden hose

Some well-meaning health department wonk probably warned you not to, but “health” has many meanings. What about soul-health? We lost a little of our moxie when we put down the hose and picked up the pomegranate flavored vitamin water. Next time you’re thirsty step outside, grab that hose and crank it up. I don’t know why, but it’s liberating. And free.

3. Go swimming in the ocean, in a lake, in a river and in a swimming pool. Repeat.

Let your body slip under the water and remember, if not consciously then at least at the cellular level, the first nine months of life when you floated blissfully in embryonic fluid. Drift downstream and feel what it’s like to fly. Oceans, lakes, rivers and pools all have their different flavors, literally and figuratively. Make sure you hit them all. Do whatever it takes. Make it happen. If you only do one of the things on this list, make this the one.

4. Fall asleep in the shade under a tree

The blue sky light speckles beyond the leaves. Shapes without names. A thousand shades of green. The simple Being of a tree. Rootedness. The way it lives its whole life in one place, satisfied, purposeful, full of grace. If you let go of your incessant thinking and do this right, you will feel the earth turning beneath you in space as you slip into unconsciousness.

5. Hike the backcountry

Head for the hills and move under your own power over fields and streams, the way we moved for hundreds of thousands of years before we invented those confounded bicycles and automobiles. Feel the machinations of your routinized life dissolve and reconfigure into more natural shapes. Get reacquainted with your mother earth.

6. Make sandwiches and show up at a good friend’s workplace and kidnap them for lunch

Chance meetings and surprises are the sweet spots of life. As far as I know, there’s no rule against orchestrating these chance meetings just a little. Show up at your friend’s work with a picnic and whisk them away on an urban adventure. (Spouses, lovers and exes are also prime targets). An egg salad sandwich, potato chips and a crisp pickle on a bench overlooking the San Diego River can do wonders for a mid-week slump.

7. Wander around on foot downtown with no agenda for four hours

Get out of that glass and steel bubble called your car and see the city at eye level at three miles an hour. Stumble onto bookstores and cafes and Greek restaurants you didn’t know about. Get a little lost. Look up. Makes friends with architecture. Marvel at what busy humans have accomplished. Feel vicariously proud.

8. Rent a kayak and paddle around

Summer is the time when even novices are welcome, even expected, on the water. Take a sailing lesson, rent a row boat on a lake or paddle a kayak out through the surf at La Jolla Shores and explore the sea caves at the base of the cliffs. The sound of water lapping on a hull needs to be fresh in your mind if you know what’s good for you. You’ll kick yourself for not doing this sooner.

9. Go to a library and read poetry

Sure newspapers and websites and magazines and novels are all important, of course they are, but don’t forget where it all begins. Nothing celebrates the power of language like poetry. Language is our best attempt to get a handle on the wild and winsome energies of the universe and poetry is language distilled down to its most potent essentials. Good poets are magicians who wring the cosmos like a rain-soaked bandana and paint the page with its mercurial drops. Rapt in their shamanic spell we see with new eyes the transcendent, blessed ordinariness of our own lives. Then come the cleansing tears.

10. Pick up an instrument you don’t know how to play and try to make music with it

Caught in a rut of tedious proficiency? Tired of being so damn good at everything? Return to what Zen Buddhism calls “the beginner’s mind”. Make god-awful music on an instrument you know nothing about. Drop your ego, stop assessing everything and let your childlike fumblings wrest something new from the uncarved block, the field of pure potentiality that practiced artifice obscures.

11. Write a nine page letter to an old friend

Don’t think too much about what you’re going to write. Just start. Around page four you’ll start getting to the good stuff. You know what I mean. You might not even have to send it.

12. Visit a sacred place

I know, every place is sacred. But some places are more sacred than others. Find an ashram, a meditation garden, a labyrinth, a monastery, a church, a temple, a mosque – but go there when it’s empty. Emerson said, “I like the silent church before the service begins better than any preaching.” Sit still a while. Get out of your head. Slip into the space between thoughts, between words. Let the wooly eared theologians wrangle doctrine out in the parking lot.

13. Walk in the desert at night

Don’t fall off a cliff or stumble into a bed of cholla, but there’s nothing quite as cleansing as hot desert wind in the dark. Blood warm gusts swirl out of the sky like the breath of God, thick with the smell of stone and moonlight. Stars hang like sparks in the indigo between the mountains. Wonderful things begin happening to your skin and your muscle tissue and your troubled mind – a deep, profound stillness seeps into you like a drop of ink in water and your heart begins to beat in time with the rhythm of the earth’s deepest dream.

14. Go to a farmers market and buy some summer fruit

Buy some ugly little organic white peaches that flood your mouth with the fragrant flavor of river-fed orchards and blue summer skies and dew on the sage and poppies and lavender and bright Monarch wings and the morning star all distilled down into a fuzzy little ball that fits in the palm of your hand. Miracles come in small packages. Buy some for your neighbors and leave them on their porch. Refuse to take credit.

15. Get out of town for three days

Drive at least two hours (preferably more) in any direction and stay there a while. Hit the hotel pool. Get some sun. Read the local paper with an anthropologist’s eye. Watch the worst local TV news you can find. Make fun of the weatherman’s hair. Read maps and learn the names of new places. Make frothy drinks in the blender. Eat tacos. Watch old movies. It doesn’t take much to see that all our problems don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Catch up on your sleep. Feel your so-called real life slip back into due proportion. Feel the swelling of your self-importance recede. Let summer unwind you and leave you calm and collected, held by sensible boundaries, home at last in right-sized dreams. We do good work. We do important things. People are counting on us. But for now, let summer take you over. Live your life as if it were precious and brief and incomparably sweet. It is.

The Love of Wisdom

Philosophy is one of those words we’re supposed to know the meaning of, but don’t. Most people think it simply means one’s point of view, as in “my philosophy of life”. For others it conjures up a memory of some awful philosophy class they had years ago in college where a kindly but uninspired professor droned on and on about ontology, phenomenology and the categorical imperative. For most everyone else, philosophy is just a vague abstraction they’d just as soon forget. I’ve been teaching philosophy for seventeen years to over 7000 students, and I’m still not sure what it is.

When I tell people what I do for a living they nod politely and ask “where” and “for how long” and things like that. I see by the look in their eyes they’re intrigued, but reticent. Part of me wants to launch into an introductory lecture that neither of us could endure and part of me just wants to hug them and tell them it’s alright to not know what philosophy is. Really, it’s O.K. Philosophy, by its very nature, is difficult to get a handle on. It’s thinking about thinking. It’s using the mind to try and understand the processes of the mind. It’s like trying to see your own eyes. Try it right now. Try to see your own eyes. You’ll go mad. Now you know why philosophy graduate students look so crazy.

Philosophy means the love of wisdom. (philo: love; sophia: wisdom) It is just the name of a longing that lies deep within us, a longing for what it true and real. Despite the best efforts of academic philosophers to render philosophy utterly incomprehensible to everyone but themselves – I know, that’s not what they’re trying to do, but that is the most evident result of their endless toil – philosophy is in essence a fundamentally innate universal human experience, like breathing or dreaming. It is not the sole purview of specialists – it is the birthright of every living, breathing, dreaming human being. It’s time to rescue philosophy from the philosophers.

If philosophy is the love of wisdom, then what is wisdom? Wisdom is different from practical knowledge (how to make an omelet) or theoretical knowledge (understanding the laws of thermonuclear physics or the causes of the Civil War). Being a master omelet maker, a thermonuclear physicist or a Civil War expert does not make one wise.

Wisdom is the ability to live a good life – a life of depth, of value, of purpose, of dignity, of kindness, of creativity, of beauty, of mastery, of humility, of joy. To be wise is to thrive in a state of well-being where one’s potentials are fully realized. This requires great risk taking – embodying the courage to grow beyond one’s fear-based and self-imposed limitations. Life is both staggeringly difficult and unspeakably beautiful. How are we to negotiate these treacherous twists and turns, not hurt our selves or others, and still enjoy the beauties of the way? That’s going to take some wisdom.

If philosophy is a yearning, then when do we feel that yearning most keenly? One has only to look at one’s own experience. Standing in a cemetery and watching a casket lowering into the ground. Feeling the grip of the tiny hand of a newborn child. Lying on the asphalt along the interstate with paramedics hovering over you, smoldering wreckage scattered for a quarter mile. Standing by a campfire on the bank of river and watching glowing embers soar up into the darkness of a desert sky, turning into stars. Sitting in a tiny doctor’s office and hearing the word “cancer”. It is in these moments that the trivia of life drops away leaving a startling clarity – a clarity that seems to transcend thought. We are now in the field of pure awareness, liberated from our incessant thought-stream. And from this perspective, usually quite fleeting, we see with new eyes the challenges and beauties of our lives. We shift back into our deeper awareness – a silent, still witness that is usually hidden behind the thicket of our incessant thoughts and we catch a glimpse of something grander, something wider than our work-a-day world with its ill-timed troubles and endless pursuits.

These moments of awakening are the bricks and mortar of philosophy for it is from these insights that we begin to build a path to truth. “The unexamined life is not worth living” said Socrates, and in these moments of nameless clarity we know just what he means. Life, as it is normally lived, is like a dream. Part of us is completely caught up in the dream, attached to the imagery and invested in the delusion. But our deeper nature knows there is something more, something lasting and precious beneath the shimmering surface of the perceptual field. Seeing through the illusory nature of surface consciousness and drawing sustenance from the eternal presence it conceals – this is the central lesson of the world’s wisdom traditions. But we haven’t been very good students.

Throughout history remarkable individuals have experienced wisdom and tried to teach it to others, with varying degrees of success. Most of them are lost and long forgotten. A few of them live on in the words and teachings they left behind and in the traditions that arose around those teachings. Each of these teachers used the imagery and context of their own cultures to illustrate the path to the timeless presence beneath the surface of our unexamined minds. Some personified it and called it God. Others split the infinite energy of the universe into pantheons of countless gods, in conflict with each other. Still others preferred to leave the source nameless, fearing that if we name it we will become attached to the name and forget the reality to which the name refers. And in the deeper, mystical currents within each of these wisdom traditions lies the same essential claim – that we are one with the source, that we are identical with the ground of Being. Only we don’t know it. We are caught, for now, in a dream of separateness, enslaved to our lower nature, gripped by fear and lost in illusory loneliness.

Wisdom then is the ability to navigate the boat of our lives through these waves and into the far harbor of our ancient home. There are many maps and charts. But each of us has an internal compass as well, and must chart a course of our own. “Truth is a pathless land”, said Krishnamurti, and indeed, we cannot simply mindlessly follow the path of another. Wisdom defies formulization. Doctrines and dogmas can point the way, but they must ultimately be left behind.

To study the history of philosophy then is to study the history of love. We humans are philosophical animals – we tirelessly seek the object of our love, namely, wisdom. Our mythologies, religions and philosophies are, at their best, attempts to close the gap between us and the ground of Being from which we and all things come. Religion comes from the word religio meaning “to bind together” or “to connect”. We are tired of feeling alienated, alone, cut off. We want to awaken to the eternal energy of life coursing through us and all things. We want to feel at home in our own skins. We want to transcend and leave behind our divisive ideologies and awaken from this dream of separateness. We want to overcome ignorance and illusion. We want fall at last into the arms of our beloved. That is why we study philosophy.