Going Deeper

The Human Fire 3.2 - December 8, 2024

Rooting ourselves in the depths of what matters most.

When the trees are bare, and the first snow covers the brown grass, I feel the need to get quiet and go within. To be like a tree, conserve my energy, and put my efforts into delving below the surface, gathering sustenance and strength for the months ahead.

Two years ago, I wrote a piece titled "What Is a Deep Soul?" in advance of a running a course I created called Deep Souls: Connecting a Rich Inner Life with an Outer Life of Impact. Since then, the piece is consistently my most-read article, with people from more than 50 different countries finding their way to it through a simple Google search. It tells me that people across the globe are wanting to go deeper. If you're one of those, I'll be running the course again in 2025; click here to join the waitlist.

Today, I offer some reflections on what "going deeper" has meant for me and as I've observed it in others around me and in our world. I believe the times are asking us all to go deeper. They are shaking us out of complacency to comfort and a desire for false easiness. The antidote, the cure, is a deep rootedness in our experience, a conservation of energy not expended on wasteful things, and a mining of our hearts for resources that are, in fact, abundant.

Oxygen

Few singer-songwriters mine their own lived experience better, in my opinion, than Marc Cohn. The Grammy winner - of "Walking in Memphis" fame - isn't a super star, but he has consistently put out songs that touch my own experience better than most. There's a deep cut from his first album that expresses how the journey we take "below the surface" doesn't require us to go far:

I don't wanna go up to the mountain,
I don't need to go down to the sea
I'm gonna sit right here
till we unravel this mystery

And the time is now - not tomorrow, not yesterday, but now, "while everyone is just walking around in their sleep." Let's dig down deep.

I'm not much of a gardener, but I have enough experience with weeds to know they are more easily pulled before they have a chance to bury their roots deep in the soil.

Every day we don't pull the weeds out of our hearts gives them a chance to take deeper root. Then they choke out the other things we attempt to plant: hopes, dreams, relationships.

If I have a regret, it's the length of time I pretended those weeds weren't there in me. It's harder than it needed to be to uproot those weeds as a result. I'm having to do more work restoring my own soil. So don't wait: make time to weed your own garden daily.

Fuel

When I think of plants, I typically think of what you see on the surface: buds, blooms, branches, and leaves. So it was illuminating to discover that half of all plant biomass is mostly unseen - in the roots.

As conditions in the soil change, what goes on below the surface becomes even more important, according to biologist Jonathan Lynch. As he observed to Smithsonian Magazine, “I didn’t go into science thinking I’d be a root biologist. I went into science thinking I was going to do something about world hunger...But my work showed me clearly that the real thing going on here is with the roots.”

When the soil is nutrient-poor, as in many drought-stricken areas of the globe, Lynch says “the difference between a good plant and a bad plant is the roots.” Resilient roots go deeper down and use even a challenging environment to their advantage.

It puts a twist on the old saying, "you shall know them by their fruits." Perhaps it is equally true that we shall know them by their roots.

One of the joys of fatherhood, for me, is discovering what delights my son, and then, occasionally, having his delights become my own.

I know a lot of dads who dream to share things from their own experience with their children. I get that. I'm still hoping my boy shows some interest in Star Wars. But he has his own interests, like his deep and abiding love for the creatures of the earth, past and present. I respect and cherish those.

Another of those interests is Minecraft, which for the uninitiated is best described as Legos-meets-Sim-City: a kind of blocked, world-building computer game.

I would've lost hours to this game had it been around in the eighties when I was a kid. We play it together sometimes and have our own world we're building. In it, you have to dig - hence the minecraft part - to gather resources you need to craft building materials. If you dig down deep enough, you eventually hit bedrock and can go no further.

That is a satisfying feeling, to finally know when you've gotten to the bottom of things. It's all up from there.

Heat

Psychologist James Hollis, author of The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife, advises, "We must turn away from the cacaphony of the outerworld to hear the inner voice. When we can dare to live its promptings, then we achieve personhood. We may become strangers to those who thought they knew us, but at least we are no longer strangers to ourselves.”

Whose voice are you listening to right now, and is it your own? How deep do you need to go to recover your own inner voice?

If I have a philosophical quarrel with our age, it is with our tacit acquiescence to the idea that there is nothing but the superficial. That underneath it all, behind every appearance, is really nothing. On The Good Place, they memorably called this phenomenon "Peep Chili."

That kind of nihilism - which, at my lowest, even I have unwittingly adopted - requires pushback from a place of depth, from rootedness, from the bedrock of what it means to be human. How have you resisted this superficiality in your own life? Or if you haven't, where have you succumbed to it? How will you root and grow a life of depth and meaning?

May this winter season be a time for you to root yourself in all that matters.

Until next week, I'll see you down the path.

Chad

HumanWealth Partners

P.O. Box 1486, Newburyport MA 01950
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