Today is July 1 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is "Are you creating distance to find perspective?"
In his novel Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are, author John Kaag discusses his exploration of what Romantic thinker Friedrich Nietzsche called “the pathos of distance.” Kaag wrote his book as tale of two journeys: one when he was an introspective young man of nineteen, the other seventeen years later as a husband and father.
As he hiked towards the Swiss peaks Kaag discussed the sense of being higher, of looking down and how that gave rise to the “craving for ever new widening of distances within the soul itself … the development of ever higher, rarer, more remote, further stretching, more comprehensive states.” Kaag noted the impulse to strive was at the core of Nietzsche’s perfectionism. The backcountry is an ideal place for Nietzsche’s hard questions:
What am I trying to escape by making this dangerous trek?
What is the point of this risk?
Am I really, precisely, this alone?
Am I going to die?
I’ve found that the disruptions of going “off-road” brings them into sharper focus. What I discovered in the mountains, however, is that becoming who you are usually involves getting over who you think you are. In fact the “who”— the idea of oneself — is probably an impediment to growth and honesty.
Nietzsche wants us to be wanderers, “though not as a traveler to a final destination: for this destination does not exist.” This is not to say that we can’t set goals — quite the opposite. “Set for yourself goals, high and noble goals,” a young Nietzsche instructs, “and perish in pursuit of them.”
If you arrive at a final destination, it’s a sign that you’ve set your sights too low, that your goal isn’t high or noble enough. And what if you die in the pursuit of your goal?
Recall the words of Stoic Epictetus: “I have to die. If it is now, well, then, I die now; if later, then now I will take my lunch, since the hour for lunch has arrived — and dying I will tend to later.”