Letter #30: Lose Yourself

Turns out if you want it, you actually do have to let it go.

To the Real Andrew Klavan,

The poet and philosopher Marshall Mathers III—pen name “Eminem”—said that “you better lose yourself in the music, the moment.” The celebrated rap artist Jesus Christ is said to have responded, “Word.” Although perhaps he was just introducing himself, because he went on: “whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

And I think that’s what we’ve been talking about this week. On Monday you asked, “what is this agape? And how do I get me some?” What does it look like to act out the love that makes us human? On Tuesday I responded that “If you make other people the point of everything you do, then you’ll be making God the point of everything you are.” Then yesterday you noted that this attractive idea feels, in practice, a bit like pitching yourself off a cliff. “We have set ourselves on a trajectory toward the edge of a cliff in the belief we will sail off it into eternity.”

And it does feel like that: reckless and a little giddy, a sensation of free-fall. To “lose yourself” is to lose your grip on all the fixations that naturally occupy the mind. Most days, most of the time, I’m thinking about how to maximize my own worth: how to come across as smart or as skilled as possible, how to dazzle everyone with my charm. Which, let’s face it, is breathtaking. But you’re kidding yourself if you don’t admit that most of your thoughts, even your true and noble ones, have a whisper of self-service in them. 

And self-service is normal! The most normal thing in the world. It roots you in what are typically called “sensible,” “practical” concerns: how to make a buck, how to get ahead. To lay those concerns aside—to devote yourself entirely to excellence for its own sake, and to people for theirs—is frankly bananas. 

But I can’t deny that when I achieve it (sometimes for whole seconds at a time), it is the highest state of bliss I know. When someone or something has our attention utterly, we say we are “absorbed.” That’s what it is: disappearing into love so completely that you fall headlong out of thinking about yourself. And what’s left is not nothing, as Buddhists might claim: what’s left is the best of you, the most of you there is or can be. The rest, it turns out for that flickering instant, was noise.

It really is ludicrous, as you say, to insist that those evanescent moments are in some sense more real than all the dire heartache and terrors that confront us so vividly. I would be the last to gainsay that heartache or minimize those terrors. On the contrary: the truths of this world are obvious and indisputable. The truths of the next, we can only guess at. But the bliss must be a clue. 

Love,
Spencer