What Exactly Are We Reaching For?
This is my first newsletter in a long time, since February in fact, so I wanted to take this time not to catch up on my life but to boldly reassert the aim of this project. That’s why you’re here, right? to set your aim straight and reach for something more… So that’s what we’ll do.
In this letter, you will expect to learn:
What “Reaching for More” is
How to fortify your process of “reaching”
What’s in store for the future…
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Stick around until the end, I reorganized things a little and I would like to know what you think!
Reach for Something Else
Like many, I have a deep love of music. I’ve come to believe that existence would be an utter and total joke if it weren't for music. Not just any music either, although I have wide-ranging taste, I’m careful with what I let into my ears. Naturally, Classical music is what I reach for when I need to focus, feel, or just flounder within my mind a little.
I thought I’d point you to a favorite of mine, one that I was only recently reminded of while watching the incredible film, Master and Commander: Far Side of the World. That would be La Musica Notturna Delle Strade Di Madrid: Op. 30 n. 6 (1780) by Luigi Boccherini. It goes through several stages, but is light and fun; great for someone not wanting to listen to an entire symphony. My daughter and I enjoy dancing to this in the kitchen whenever it surfaces on the playlist.
What Are We Reaching For?
My background is in psychology and psychotherapy; I currently practice as a therapist, and I hope to continue exploring many of the unknowns hidden in the human psyche.
The latter sharpens my therapeutic skills, and to make sure I’m dealing earnestly and effectively within the world of ideas, I thought the best course of action was to write.
And I did that for some time. However, the more I wrote and learned, the more I realized that I ought to share what I learned for a few reasons:
We’re experiencing what seems to be the largest “meaning crisis” in history.
Meaninglessness is known to be a major risk factor for relationship difficulties, increased risk of depression, anxiety, poorer physical health, and decreased resilience in the face of traumatic stress.
What I’m learning is directly tied to developing meaning, health, and overall well-being.
Reaching for More was the name I settled on when I first decided to make my writing public; I wanted something that acted as a “Swiss-Army knife” for the naturally broad and ever-evolving scope of the problem. Not to forget my natural tendency to find a plethora of things interesting and helpful, like the musical selection above.
Above all, I wanted the name to act on its own and to give my readers a clear message every time I published something new.
That’s because a name is a tool.
It conveys an idea, a message, a purpose.
A name is inherently meaningful; although the degree to which it’s meaningful is the same degree in which it creates value.
Reaching for More.
What’s the value in that?
It’s only three words; an object, a verb, and intent.
Let’s start with our object, “more”… more what?
Everyone works towards what they perceive as “good”, but as we know, many don’t consider what they’ve accumulated in life as good. You might be among that camp, or not, but you know someone who is dissatisfied with where they’ve gone in life so far.
So, where’s the gap between what we perceive as good and the attainment of things that are truly good?
The gap is the misevaluation of what the person sees as good and what’s actually good for the person. In other words, most of the time when people are miserable, dissatisfied, and have otherwise overwhelming dissonance between their desires and outcomes, they’ve misjudged and thus wrongly valued what they both aimed at and failed to aim at (you must attend to both if you want to see the full picture).
So, if we’re to bridge that gap, we need a process that sharpens our judgement and educates us on the true value of things. Through the construction of this bridge, we’ll find that “more” is not simply the accumulation of things or a blind fidelity to an ideological creed, but a balance of opposites.
When you construct a bridge, what you want most of all is integrity… unless you want it to fall of course.
Bridges built in different areas look differently; some have roofs, others have cables while some are wholly wrought iron. A bridge balances the downward force of both gravity and the weight of objects crossing it by leveraging tension and compression (opposite forces) to keep things steady.
Technology and purpose are going to make bridges look different; heck, if you’re brave enough, almost anything could be a bridge. The only thing that matters, far more than the aesthetic, is its integrity—the ability to function under stress.
That’s because, when we think about it, a good life is the degree to which we find perfect balance between all of the opposing forces.
As we’ll discuss over the coming weeks, there’s a lot more to integrity than meets the eye, which is why this publication isn’t named “Reaching for Integrity” although that’s kind of a good name come to think about it…
Anyway.
Determining how to act with integrity is then the essence of “More”. In other words, “More” is educating ourselves on the value of acts as it relates to their soundness and goodness. Not only that, but it also becomes an education on what the good we should trend toward even is.
To give a simple resolution to what I believe the “good” is—the good is what leads to the flourishing of the individual and the collective. I’ll elaborate more in another letter.
Now that we understand our object a bit more (hopefully), and also have made it clear that our intent is to pursue integrity, goodness, and well-being, it’s time to discuss the process by which that happens.
“Reaching” is how we get to “More”.
It’s the understanding that balances those opposing forces.
We can’t necessarily grasp integrity within ourselves, but we know when it’s in motion. It’s essential to understand that building integrity is a process, one that, unlike building a bridge, is never quite through.
All we can do is reach because in our finite existence, we can never fully attain the “more” we’ve set out to acquire. That doesn’t make our mission futile but should embolden us to reach that much more toward a good end.
Reaching is the only way to act within the ever-evolving flux that we call “life”.
Not out of desperation but out of a duty to make something greater of this flux and contribute as much as we might to the greater wellness of things.
Integrity in one situation is weakness in another, while yet another situation demands a whole new arsenal never yet deployed. Reaching is the ability to flex with each situation to attain the best outcome possible and avoid making things worse.
So to wrap it all up with all up…
Reaching for More is a life-affirming philosophy that is built upon living a life of integrity in order to realize the potential built up within you and push you toward a life you love.
Coming up…
Briefly, my plan is to continue building out this idea and discussing what it means to live with integrity, examples of individuals who embodied this idea, what we need to learn in order to do this well, the cost of not living with this mindset, and so on.
Any feedback regarding this letter and our upcoming course of events would be greatly appreciated, even if it’s critical! I want to hear it all!
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Thanks for reading!
See you next week!!
xDevan