MIND CAFE EDITION 1 - CLARITY
ON BEING PRESENT
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Welcome MAGAZINE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: EDITOR: DESIGN: FOUNDER:
CONTRIBUTORS
Adrian Drew Chris Sowers Lee Caple Adrian Drew
Megan Holstein, John Weiss, Marta Brzosko, Julia Pugachevsky, Leah Gummery, Nir Eyal, Spencer Sekulin, Matthew Kent, Omar Itani, Adrian Drew, Barry Davrett, Brianna Wiest, Kim Duke, Jordan Gross, Sean Kernan, Danny Forest, Michael Thompson, Remy Franklin, Paul Ollinger
PHOTOGRAPHY COVER: MAGAZINE:
Callum Shaw Toa Heftiba, Kinga Chichewicz, Annie Spratt
The word ‘clarity’ can mean many different things depending upon the context in which it is used. In photography, clarity might represent the absence of visual noise, or a crisp, high-resolution image. In music, perhaps clarity could be used to denote the sound of a harmonic melody, dancing along the stanzas of a pristine vocal solo. Or when talking about the weather, clarity might refer to a blue-skied day, void of clouds, with space for the sun to envelop the world in its warm embrace. In every context, however, the term clarity depicts the same underlying theme. That is, freedom from distraction. In an environment of clarity, there are no disturbances. There is no humidity to fog the spectacles through which we perceive the space around us. Only when the landscape is clear are we able to see the world for what it truly is, whether through the medium of photography, music or the climate. Finding clarity, however, is not as much an external endeavour as the above examples might have us believe. No, rather, even on the cloudiest days or the most distracting of circumstances, clarity can only truly originate from one place. That is, within ourselves. To touch on the examples above, what use is a perfect melody if we’re too lost in thought to notice it? The birds sing the most beautiful of songs every morning, but how often do we stop to listen to them on our busy commute to the office? Or how about the last time we ate dinner in a restaurant - how present were we in noticing every flavour, aroma and texture? Instead of truly enjoying the world and all of its fruits, we so often lose ourselves to thought. Our minds have become the antithesis of clear, plagued with thousands of thoughts, worries and assumptions. Yet what might our world look like if we could unbind ourselves from thought? Not stop it altogether, since that is impossible, but to simply quieten the noise and create space for more mental clarity? Well, life would be most enjoyable indeed. It would be far less stressful and far more peaceful. Perhaps, in the absence of excessive thought, we may even discover how to be truly present in our every pursuit. But where does one begin on such an endeavour? Well, right here. This vessel through which we’re communicating aims to teach you exactly that - how to cultivate mental clarity; how to unfog the lenses and see life for what it truly is. That’s what this edition is all about.
C OV E R P H OTO G R A P H Y Callum Shaw is a lifestyle photographer, filmmaker and self-improvement enthusiast based in England, UK. You can check out more of his work at www.callumshaw.com
WELCOME
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In This Edition T H E B R E A D C R U M B S O F L I F E - P. 1 2
John Weiss explores the nature of happiness and how it is not discoverable in the lavish feasts and grand banquets, but rather, in the breadcrumbs of life. It is in the simple pleasures that we stand to find the most joy. H OW T O S E L F - C A R E U N S E L F I S H LY - P. 3 3
Despite what we’re conditioned to believe, it isn’t selfish to put yourself first every once in a while - just try not to offend anybody in the process. YO U A R E N O T YO U R T H O U G H T S - P. 4 3
As much as we tend to identify with our busied mind as if it defines us, this is not the case. Thoughts are separate from self, as Spencer Sekulin explores in this piece. T H E S T O R Y B E H I N D M I N D C A F E - P. 74
Mind Cafe was born in the midst of adversity and personal struggle, and has grown to be more than its founder, Adrian Drew, could ever have dreamed. M O V I N G W I T H C H A N G E - P. 9 4
Change is a ubiquitous part of life. Try as we may, we cannot escape the ever shifting nature of terrestrial existence - but we can become better at accepting it. T H E WAY O F L E S S - P. 1 1 3
Minimalist Danny Forest renounced all of his material possessions to live a life of simplicity and clarity. In this story, he explains why.
Mind Cafe Media Ltd. 2020
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IN THIS EDITION
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On Being Present A S TO RY BY M E G A N H O L S T E I N
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n the spring of 2017, at the height of the #vanlife craze, I bought a van. It was a 1997 GMC Savana, complete with a high-top roof, sun-bleached paint, and a transmission that was on death’s doorstep. I bought it in Kentucky from a man whose son had the same kind of adventure I wanted to have, only to leave the van in his father’s hands when he ran away to Alaska. It cost $2000. Once I bought the van, my father and I drove it from the seller’s house in Kentucky to northern Ohio, where it spent the next month and a half in my grandfather’s favorite workshop. It needed a rebuilt transmission, suspension, and braking system. These repairs cost $4,000. Everyone in my life, from my father to my friends, was eager to tell me how stupid this was. I was about to graduate college. If I wanted to travel, I should get a job, not immediately run away in a van that could barely drive. Maybe I could travel in a year or two, they said, after I saved up some money and bought a nice RV. It was good advice. I ignored it anyway. If my goal was to travel the country in safety, luxury, and have the maximum amount of fun I could, I would have followed their recommendations. If that were the case, an itinerary and a five-digit savings account would have been useful things to have. But traveling the world in safety and luxury wasn’t my goal. My goal was to learn how to be present.
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ON BEING PRESENT
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“Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child - our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” A Q U O T E F R O M T H I C H N H AT H A N H
Prior to buying the van, my life had been, in many ways, the American dream. My father raised me to be a competent entrepreneur, self-starter, and autodidact. In middle school, I was a competitive golfer. And I was good. I walked on to my high school’s varsity golf team as a freshman. This was no small-town high school, either. My high school was in Dublin, OH, a city internationally recognized for hosting the Memorial Tournament. And then, at age 15, I started my first business. I called it Pufferfish Software, and we made apps for autistic children. It took off like a rocket. First, I started to receive national attention for being a teen CEO. And then awards. Investors started competing for my attention, inviting me to pitch their accelerators and venture funds. At 16, an age where most teenagers are negotiating with their parents for a later curfew, I was spending my evenings networking at professional events. And when I finally did turn 18, large corporations began trying to lure me away from the startup life to work as a consultant on teams with people twice my age, people who had been in the business longer than I’d been alive. And I hated it. I was one of the lucky few... but I didn’t feel lucky. I felt trapped. My time didn’t belong to me anymore. My time belonged to my projects, to my professional contacts, to my contractors, and to my customers, but not to me. In my early twenties, most of the people I grew up with were out being young, having their first ill-advised romantic experiences, and generally just wasting their time. Meanwhile, I was bent over a desk, making yet another Gantt chart for a project I feared would go nowhere. People call it the rat race, and it certainly felt like one; all of us just rats in a maze, racing to be the first to get the prize. And what was the prize? “Making it.” Being on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Getting a seven-digit investment from a VC. Hiring a bunch of people and renting offices. These prizes were stupid, and deep down, I knew it. As I moved into my twenties, a time when I was supposed to be leveraging my early success into a chart-topping career in Silicon Valley, I just started to plateau. I didn’t care about the prizes anymore. Going to work began to feel pointless. What difference was any of this making in the actual world? Whose lives were we making better? I didn’t know. ON BEING PRESENT
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So I quit. I spent all my money on a van that couldn’t make it 100 miles without breaking down, and I drove away. When people hear I’ve spent time traveling long-term in a van, they assume my life was a constant fun-filled adventure. Maybe it would have been for someone else, but not for me. I wasn’t concerned with going places and doing things so much as I was with just seeing the world for what it was. And the world - or at least, America’s interstate highway system - is empty. There’s nothing out there. The only living things for hundreds of miles were me and a couple of long-distance truckers. There were mountains in the distance, some abandoned shacks in between, and hours and hours and hours of nothing. All I did was drive. There were days I did nothing but drive for ten hours. I only stopped to get gas, eat a cup of instant soup, and sleep. Then I woke up, climbed back into the driver’s seat, and kept driving. I wasn’t even headed anywhere. Every time I was near an interesting tourist attraction, I skipped it. I drove from Columbus, Ohio to Portland, Oregon and missed every single national park on the way. And I don’t regret skipping the national parks. I was looking for something more important. And in the empty highways of America, I found it. I went on this road trip to learn how to be present. I chose to do this by traveling because travel forces you to be present. The newness of the experience strips you of all your preconceived notions. You’re left with no option but to take the world as it is. Traveling in a broken down van, not knowing where you’re going to sleep next or even if the van is going to make it through the journey, only makes this more true. In those conditions, you can’t even know what the next hour holds, let alone the next week or the next month. I was forced to be present because it was the only option I had. I told you I learned how to be present. Well, here’s how you do it: you don’t worry about the fact that the check engine light is on again, even though you don’t have any cell service and the nearest gas station is one hundred and twenty seven miles in the direction you just came from. You conclude you are either going to make it to your destination, or you are not, and worrying about it isn’t going to change anything. Instead, you look at the horizon and see mountains hundreds of miles away and abandoned shacks in between. And out there in the middle of nowhere, you finally see the truth: that the world is beautiful just the way it is. 10
PHOTOGRAPHY
Toa Heftiba
L O C AT I O N
United States
“Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time - past and future - the more you miss the now.” A Q U OT E F RO M E C K H A RT TO L L E
ON BEING PRESENT
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