To Sleep Well

This is an essay of self-definition. Why do I live? What will I call meaningful? How do I want to live, and how will I actually live? I want to decide my own answers to those questions.

I am not well versed in philosophy. In fact, I know very little. I do not claim that the thoughts written here are philosophically correct or fit together with perfect logic. I am only explaining, in my own language, what I have read, experienced, understood, and digested. This essay may be wrong, and it may change in the future. But to know where I stand today, I think I must first write down the answers I have today.

To me, a good life is a life in which I sleep well.

I do not mean that sleep is the ultimate purpose of life. Sleeping well is closer to a state in which body and mind accept that I have done enough of what I needed to do that day, set aside for a while what I could not finish, know what must be done tomorrow, and trust that my life is not heading too far in the wrong direction.

I sleep well and wake refreshed. I begin the day and do meaningful work. I meet people, learn, make things, and move. After spending the day that way, I return to bed feeling fulfilled. Sleeping well is both the beginning of a good day and the result of having lived one. Every virtuous cycle in life begins here.

The life I want, then, is one in which I understand and remove, one by one, the things that keep me from sleep.

The first cause of poor sleep is, naturally, physical deprivation. We need balanced meals, adequate exercise, sunlight, healthy relationships, and sufficient rest. There is probably no need to say much more about that.

But another cause we often overlook lies in the mind: depression and anxiety.

Depression and anxiety slowly eat away at the mind. When the mind breaks down, the body follows, and the broken body in turn obstructs a life of good sleep. Damaged sleep then breaks the mind down again.

By depression and anxiety, I do not mean only clinical depression or anxiety disorders. I also mean regret and lingering attachment to the past; worry and speculation about the future; the mind that relives what has already happened; and the mind that lives through what has not happened yet.

Clinical conditions may require professional help and medication. I have no intention of denying that. Even then, however, restoring order to the body matters. We must recover sleep, get sunlight, eat well, exercise, and stay connected to people. And I believe that thought itself can also be part of treatment and recovery.

Again, I do not mean that thought alone can cure every illness. But by practicing how to observe our thoughts, notice when they take a harmful course, and offer them another direction, I believe we can gradually overcome depression and anxiety. At the very least, we do not have to let them take every night from us.

Why, then, do depression and anxiety arise?

One day, Buddhism gave me an answer. Three of its ideas spoke to me with particular directness.

Dependent origination means that nothing arises alone; everything comes into being through countless causes and conditions. Life is entangled in infinitely many relationships and circumstances. No outcome can be explained by a single cause.

Impermanence means that all those conditions and relationships are always changing, and that no state lasts forever. Good things, bad things, and I myself continue to change.

Non-self means that what I call “I” is likewise not a fixed, independent substance. I am a being continuously made and remade as my body, memories, relationships, environment, choices, and experiences meet and change.

The Korean proverb saeongjima (塞翁之馬)—the old man’s horse—points to a similar limit. We cannot know what a particular event will cause or what outcome it will produce. We do not know what today’s misfortune may lead to, or what a stroke of good fortune may later cause us to lose.

Most people know this. We understand it intellectually. Yet we live as though we have almost always forgotten it.

Even so, we often believe that a particular outcome had to occur. We imagine that if we had made a different choice in the past, the result would certainly have been better. We judge our former selves with what we know now and demand that they should have known even the consequences that could not have been known at the time.

We do the same with the future. We believe that if we think and prepare enough, we will be able to control it. When events do not follow the plan, we assume that we failed to prepare or that we did something wrong.

But the ability to influence something is not the ability to control it.

We cannot change the past. Nor can we know what would have happened had we chosen differently. We can influence the future, but we cannot own the outcome. Planning, training, and acting are our responsibility; the conditions that determine the result are far larger and more complex than we are.

Still, human beings become attached. We live with attachments of different kinds and sizes, and they change or erode only very slowly.

Buddhism teaches that attachment creates suffering and that we should seek a path out of it. But I do not make complete liberation the goal of my life. I do not think it is possible for me, nor do I want to live that way.

To me, attachment is not merely a defect. It torments me, but it also moves me. It makes me accomplish things, understand them to the end, and stand up again.

My goal, therefore, is not to eliminate attachment. It is to understand, care for, train, and live alongside it.

Attachment is like a small child within me. When it does not get what it wants, it cries. When it is afraid, it hides. When it is angry, it tries to destroy everything. I cannot kill that child or cast it out. But neither can I hand my life over to it. I have to raise it.

As a metaphor, it is like the mammalian brain caring for the reptilian brain. This is not meant as a precise neuroscientific distinction, but as an image I use to understand myself. There is a part of me that instantly fears, rages, wants to possess something, or wants to run away. There is also a part that can observe it, soothe it, ask it to wait, and guide it in a better direction.

Giving attachment everything it wants is not love. Denying and repressing attachment is not love either. I must understand what it wants, while letting the larger self decide how that desire should be met.

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus pushes a rock up a mountain without end. The rock rolls back down, and he descends to push it up again. For me, that rock is attachment.

I will probably have to roll it for the rest of my life. The day when it disappears completely may never come. But I can learn how to roll it. I can learn which path will hurt less, when to rest, where to apply my strength, and when not to push alone.

Rather than dream of a life without the rock, I want to live a life in which I roll it skillfully and sleep well at night.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl wrote that we should not ask only what we expect from life, but what life expects from us.

Yet I do not think it is right to obey life’s demands unconditionally. The world does not always ask only what is just. It sometimes demands unfair sacrifice or tells us to conform to a broken order. So I must first understand what I want.

The more clearly I know what I truly want, the clearer it becomes which demands of the world I should accept and which I should refuse. When the desire is clear, so is the price I must pay for it. I must keep my eyes on the direction I want while accepting the conditions the world actually presents.

In other words, I should live as though I were playing Tetris.

In Tetris, I do not decide which shape will fall next. The piece I need may arrive immediately, or the hardest piece to handle may fall at the moment I want it least.

A piece already placed cannot be taken back. Past mistakes remain on the board. Nor can I wait only for the perfect piece. If I do not place the piece falling now, the game cannot continue.

But not everything is decided by luck. I can understand the rules. I can observe the state of the board. I can look at the next piece and plan. I can compare possibilities. I can learn from mistakes. Through repeated practice, I can make a better judgment when I encounter the same situation again.

Skill does not eliminate randomness. It helps me survive longer within randomness, create more space, and make better choices. Life is the same.

Life presents a piece, and I am responsible for where I place it. The piece that falls is neither my fault nor my achievement. But how I see it, where I place it, and what space I leave for the next piece are up to me.

There is no final completion in Tetris. Clear a line and new pieces keep falling. Emptying the board does not end the game. In life, too, there will probably be no final moment when every problem is solved.

The goal is not to build a perfect board. It is to keep making room for the next piece.

That is why life requires a plan. But a plan is not a means of controlling the future. It is a hypothesis formed so that I can see the present board more accurately and respond to the next few pieces. When the situation changes, the plan must change as well.

Training is necessary too. Training is not a ritual for ensuring that good pieces always arrive. It is preparation that helps me panic less when a bad one comes.

To live like Tetris is not to eliminate attachment. It is to understand the direction attachment wants to go, accept the board as it is, plan, act, observe the result, and train again.

Understanding attachment and thinking about it without end is difficult.

Attack on Titan expresses an attitude that I have taken to heart:

Never give up on trying to understand.

I think this is a profound stance toward life. Every change begins with observation and understanding. I must see what makes me angry, what frightens me, what I want to gain, and why I feel that I must have it.

The eight steps of The Great Learning also begin with investigating things and extending knowledge (格物致知): reaching into things and completing one’s understanding. We must first look, observe, distinguish, and understand before the next action becomes possible. So we must never give up looking, observing, and trying to understand.

Of course, we can be wrong. What we understand today may later prove mistaken. People change, and circumstances change. But the possibility that our understanding is wrong is not a reason to stop trying to understand. It is a reason to keep revising.

There is another important point: understanding has an order.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche describes three metamorphoses of the spirit: the camel, the lion, and the child.

The camel bears a burden. First, it learns existing knowledge and values, rules and traditions. It endures and accepts what it did not choose.

The lion says “No.” It doubts what it has learned, rebels against the values that commanded it, and wins the freedom to choose for itself.

The child begins anew. It does not stop at accepting or rejecting existing values; it creates its own rules and meaning.

I like this metaphor.

It is not a simple story in which creation is nobler than obedience. What matters is that there is an order. If we have never obeyed deeply enough, we cannot know what must be rejected. If we have never rejected something for ourselves, we cannot create our own values.

This applies to study and work, but also to understanding myself. First, I must acknowledge the attachments I carry. I must try obeying the rules those attachments create. I must see how far those rules take me and where they break me. Then I must rebel against the wrong commands and, at last, create my own way of living with attachment.

If I had to name my greatest attachment, I would say it is winning. It is my competitive drive.

I want to win and see things through to the end. I want to prove that I can do it. When I feel that I have lost at something or have not been recognized enough, that feeling does not fade easily.

For a while, I thought this impulse was wrong. I thought I should be more detached, stop comparing myself with others, and free myself from winning and losing. Now, however, I accept that this attachment will remain with me for life.

I will not live in order to destroy it. But I will not entrust everything to it either. Instead, I will live by understanding, protecting, raising, and training it.

I will let my frustration with losing give me direction, but I will not let a single victory or defeat determine my worth. I will use it as strength to move forward, but I will not let that strength create a life in which I cannot sleep.

Understanding attachment alone, however, is not enough. I must also understand the world. Here, let us look briefly at Christianity.

I do not believe in a personal God. But neither do I discard the idea of God entirely.

To me, God is like the system that sends random tetrominoes down in Tetris. God is the whole that presents conditions I did not choose. It is society, other people, humanity, and nature. It is chance and history, genetics and environment, and the accumulation of countless choices made before now.

I, too, am not entirely separate from that whole.

This does not mean that God always sends pieces that are good or fair. The world is sometimes cruel and unjust. Difficult pieces may fall one after another, and another problem may land on a board already in ruins. As many people say, God puts us to the test.

But I must accept the fact that a certain piece has fallen. Acceptance does not mean admitting that it is right or saying that I like it. It means not denying that this piece has arrived and that I must choose on this board, now.

I do not believe in God, but I agree with many Christian teachings.

Jesus taught us to embrace and love the world. I am not yet confident enough to say that I can love the entire world. But I think I can at least look at it as it is.

I will not see only what I like or pretend that what I dislike does not exist. I will look at the world through my attachments while observing what the world actually presents.

In Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, the protagonist follows his path by watching for omens. I, too, want to pay close attention to the choices the world shows me. I do not believe that every coincidence carries a mystical meaning. But when the world presents a piece different from the one in my plan, I want to leave room to interpret it not merely as an obstacle, but as a new possibility.

As nearly every reader will have sensed, none of this is easy.

It takes time to observe attachment. Admitting what we want can be painful. Accepting reality is harder than resignation. Nor is it easy to make a plan, act, fail, and then train again.

The moment of completion will never come.

The rock of Sisyphus will roll down again, and the pieces of Tetris will keep falling. I will become attached again. I will regret and worry again. On some nights, I may not be able to sleep.

But I can roll the rock a little more skillfully and place the pieces a little more calmly.

And if the nights when I sleep peacefully become more frequent than before, I will believe that I am gradually learning to live well.

I have laid out many thoughts and metaphors, but in the midst of actual life I cannot recall them all. At every moment of judgment, I cannot take out Buddhism, Frankl, Camus, and Nietzsche one by one.

So in the end, I leave only one sentence.

Festina lente.

It is a phrase the Roman emperor Augustus is said to have used often.

Make haste slowly.

Do not place the piece in a rush. But do not stop and wait for the perfect piece either.

Look at the board.
Understand your attachment.
Accept the piece that has fallen.
Plan the possible moves.
Decide and act.
Observe the result, then train again.

Step forward while watching where you are going. Hurry without being shaken; be deliberate without standing still.

And if you have placed the piece that needed to be placed today, leave the rest for tomorrow and go to sleep.