I just finished The Overstory, an incredible book. It resonated with me deeply. And the writing was so beautiful that it made me proud to be a human being.
Here are few of my take-aways (spoiler alert):
Humans need a sense of purpose greater than themselves for energy, meaning, courage and direction.
The character Olivia is initially purposeless. She is barely passing her actuarial studies major, and her life is one of instant gratification: sex, drugs and rock and roll. A near-death experience reveals to her "beings of light" who inform her of her purpose. She goes from aimlessness to being:
...someone who's sure that life has a need for her.
She looks at her college roommates, aimless just as she was, with new eyes:
Incredibly, they still believe in safety. They live as if shim and duct tape might hold them together. They become vulnerable in her eyes, and infinitely dear.
Purpose can be a healthy immortality project: even though you know you will die, there is solace in knowing your life has value in being part of a something bigger. For example, the character Dorothy wants children. For some time, this is her purpose. But when she is unable to conceive, she loses her purpose, and fills her time with distractions: first hobbies, then affairs.
Towards the end of the book, her husband suffers a severe stroke. As she takes care of him, they both develop a love of nature, a sense of purpose that is ever-accessible, and this brings her joy:
She flushes with excitement. More than excitement: purpose...She was just lost for a little while. All she needs to do is find herself. Find a cause. Something bigger than she is.
Another character, Neelay, creates a super-addictive online videogame. He becomes disillusioned with the game after a while, and decides to start building another game: Game B, if you will:
Imagine: a game with the goal of growing the world, instead of yourself.
Neelay tells his team. This notion of "growing the world instead of yourself" is the best definition of purpose that I've ever encountered.
Pain for the right reasons is better than pleasure for the wrong ones.
This quote, originally from Mark Manson, is embodied in the character Adam, who voluntarily goes to prison for life rather than ratting out his friends. Mark Manson talked about maturity happening when your value hierarchy becomes more focused on pursuing virtues, rather than chasing pleasure and avoiding pain.
When he is arrested by the FBI in his middle age for crimes he committed decades ago, Adam chooses loyalty, honor, and truth over his own self-interest. His perspective transcends his own ego:
The court sentences Adam Appich to two consecutive terms of seventy years each. The lenience shocks him. He thinks: seventy plus seventy is nothing. A black willow plus a wild cherry. He was thinking oak. He was thinking Douglas-fir or yew.
The whole tree of life is valuable, not just the human branch.
The default wiring in human brains is to prioritize our own survival, reproduction and social dynamics above all else. Michael Pollan says that The Overstory "decenters the human as the source of all meaning and value." It’s sort of a narrative antidote to our default wiring.
Take this quote, from the perspective of Adam:
Since his arrest -- since beginning to think objectively again...he has begun to see that the dead woman was right: the world is full of welfares that must come even before your own kind.
Though initially you could think of the characters in the Overstory as environmentalists, the environmentalist/humanist dichotomy breaks down when you realize that humans are deeply dependent on all the other branches on the tree of life.
The problem begins with that word "world." It means two such opposite things. The real one we cannot see. The invented one we can't escape.
It's easier to think and feel for yourself when by yourself.
As Don Miguel Ruiz puts it in The Four Agreements, humans "cast spells on each other." We all dream, at one point or another, of being free from these spells of shame and approval. There are entire books that try to help us in this, with titles like "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck" and "What do YOU care what other people think?"
Adam makes his career as an academic psychologist out of studying the ways that other people keep us from seeing the truth. "Beliefs should not be considered delusional if they keep within societal norms," is a sentence he reads, which inspires him to study a group of environmentalists who he initially thinks are delusional. Ironically, when he removes himself from mainstream society to live atop a redwood tree with Olivia and her lover, he adopts their worldview: that all of life has value, not just human life.
Another character, Patricia, seems to have a natural ability to "not care what people think." As she walks in the forest alone, she takes a break from marveling at the trees and thinks:
...Her frantic fellow mammals do make her smile: miracles on all sides, and still they need compliments to keep them happy.
Yet, when the scientific community rejects her theories about tree communication, and publicly shames her, she nearly commits suicide by toxic mushroom ingestion. No matter how independent-minded we are, we are also fundamentally impressionable.
True wealth, spiritual richness, comes from presence, the ability to appreciate life’s simple things in “the holy moment.”
A meditation teacher of mine recently shared his view that presence should be cherished above all else in life: presence isn't just some "nice" state, it is the major thing to value in life, more important than any excitement, task or project.
Richard Powers agrees:
You have a right to be present. A right to attend. A right to be astonished.
...Real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in the breeze. As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.
Stories, not reason, are what can change people's beliefs.
Richard Powers is conscious of the fact that most everything we do these days, whether it's travelling by plane to attend climate change conferences, or printing novels about trees on paper, has an environmental cost. However, he realizes that sometimes you have to break some eggs to make an omelet, as the saying goes.
What omelet is he making? The omelet of a more ecologically-attuned humanity. And how can this omelet be made? Through the telling of better stories:
The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.
What do all good stories do? They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren't.
Thank you, Richard Powers, for killing my human-centered-ness a little. You are making the trees proud.