In this episode, Mark Rowland attempts to unlock the wisdom of dogs and discusses what they know about living a good life. He takes on some of life’s biggest, weightiest questions, like, what is meaning, how should we live, and explores them through the lens of our four-legged companions. It’s about philosophy. It’s about dogs, and it’s about the age old question of how to live a good life.
Key Takeaways:
- Dogs live without the burden of reflection, which allows them to be fully present and undivided.
- Meaning in life is more important than the meaning of life—it’s found through alignment with who we are.
- Dogs are natural philosophers, offering insights through their simplicity and joy in daily life.
- Humans live two lives—lived and examined—while dogs live one, leading to greater contentment.
- Dogs embrace small pleasures with full-hearted joy, something humans often overlook.
- Love is central to a meaningful life, whether expressed through connection, passion, or presence.
Mark Rowland is professor and chair of the philosophy department at the University of Miami. He is the author of twenty-three books, including the international bestseller The Philosopher and the Wolf. He lives in Miami, Florida.
If you enjoyed this episode with Mark Rowland, check out these other episodes:
How to Find Zest in Life with Dr. John Kaag
Shamanism and Spirituality with John Mabry
How Perception Creates Reality with John Perkins
By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you!
If you enjoy our podcast and find value in our content, please consider supporting the show. By joining our Patreon Community, you’ll receive exclusive content only available on Patreon! Click here to learn more!!
Episode Transcript:
Eric Zimmer 01:10
If you know me, you know that I love dogs in many ways, it seems that the secret to a good life might be something that our dogs already know. Today, we’re talking with philosopher and author Mark Rowlands, whose book, The word of dog, does something remarkable. It takes some of life’s biggest, weightiest questions, like, what is meaning, how should we live, and explores them through the lens of our four legged companions. For me, this conversation hit right at the heart of when you feed sweet spot. It’s about philosophy. It’s about dogs, and it’s about the age old question of how to live a good life. That’s a phrase I first uttered in the show’s intro over a decade ago, and one I’ve been chasing ever since. Mark argues that reflection, the very thing that makes us human is both our greatest strength and our biggest trap. We talked about why meaning in life matters more than the meaning of life, and how dogs, those blissfully unaware Joy chasing creatures, might just be the natural philosophers we all need. By the end of this episode, you might just see your dog as more than a best friend, but as a mentor. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi Mark, welcome to the show
Mark Rowland 02:24
Thanks, Eric. I’m delighted to be here. Thanks for inviting me. I’m excited
Eric Zimmer 02:27
to talk to you when I saw the title of your latest book, which is called The Word of dog, what our canine companions can teach us about living a good life, I knew I wanted to talk to you right away, because A, we love dogs. B, the book has some philosophy, which we like. And when I recorded the intro to this show, oh God, 11 and a half years ago, at this point, I actually used that phrase in it, how to live a good life, so you sort of just hit the absolute Venn diagram for one you feed guests. And I really enjoyed the book, which we’re gonna get to in a second. But before we start, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with her grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear, and the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, Well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Mark Rowland 03:35
What’s really interesting about that parable is, and this is the philosopher me now coming out. So I apologize for that. Who is the feeder? So the feeder is the one who chooses which wolf to feed. But then the question is, well, why would he or she choose one wolf rather than the other? If they choose the Bad Wolf, then it seems they’re already in some way aligned with that wolf. If they choose the Good Wolf, then they’re already in some way aligned with with that wolf. So in that sense, the feeder collapses into the wolf because the feeder is already aligned with one of the walls, and so there is no feeder independently of the walls.
Eric Zimmer 04:12
It’s a very interesting idea. I think we can jump off and sort of talk from there. Most of us, though, will have the experience of we’re at a decision point or a choice point of some sort, and we recognize these two things, right? It could be the old classic devil and angel on your shoulder, or whatever it is, but this feeling of being divided seems very common, yeah, to being human. So talk to me about alignment, in that sense, the
Mark Rowland 04:41
feeling of being divided. I mean, I think the crucial question is, how much significance do you allot to that feeling? Does it show that your choice is a free one? You exist independently of a choice is you can choose the Good Wolf, you can choose the Bad Wolf, or are your choices already made? By who and what you are. That’s interesting.
Eric Zimmer 05:02
In another of your books, it might have been the philosopher and the wolf. You talk about memory, and you say that there’s a common way of thinking of memory, as in what we actually remember. And you say that these are not really the key. There’s a deeper and more I’m just going to read what you said, a deeper and more important way of remembering, a form of memory that no one ever thought to dignify with a name. This is a memory of a past that has written itself on you in your character and in the life which you bring this character to bear. So that’s what you’re talking about here. Right To what degree in the moment we think we’re making a choice? How free is that choice? Because it is certainly influenced by and conditioned by everything that’s come before. Yeah,
Mark Rowland 05:44
that’s right. I mean memory. I mean, don’t get me started on memory. Actually, my next book is on memory. But so memory is fascinating and much, much stranger than we ever thought in the context. It is parable, though. I think the question is, to what extent are we defined by choices versus do we exist independently of our choices? So the parable suppose is that there’s a person who can choose one or the other Wolf. If that’s right, then it seems we would have to exist prior to and independently of our choices. We exist and then we make the choices. Now the alternative view is, well, we’re made up. We are constituted by our choices. There’s no real choice in that second sense, I suspect,
Eric Zimmer 06:28
is there a middle ground, though, at least it seems to me, and I don’t want to turn this into a discussion of free will, right? But a middle ground seems to me to be absolutely I am deeply influenced by my past, by my memories, by my conditioning, they actually very much constrain the choices that are available to me, actually in the physical world, based on what’s happened before, but also inside of me to a certain degree. I talk about this a lot, or think about this a lot, because I’m a recovering drug addict, and the discussion about this seems to bifurcate into a couple camps also. One is the addict has no choice. They are completely in the grips of this thing. The other is, this is all just a choice. The addict should just stop doing this right. And for me, I found that a middle ground is what allows me to function right, that I can say, well, yes, I am, you know, at the moment, many, many years away from it. So now my level of choice is completely different to what I had then. So I seem to have had less choice, but there was still some choice.
Mark Rowland 07:34
It certainly seems that way. It’s a very strange view, you know, that, in fact, choice is an illusion. There’s no such thing. I don’t know. I really don’t know. It’s a tricky question, and it depends on what we mean by choices. The underlying idea, maybe, is that there’s a difference between you know your past, fixing what you do when you passed, influencing what you do. Yes, right? That’s distinction. So that then the question is, well, how do we understand the influencing and is there a way of understanding it? Because the worry right is always well, okay, on the one hand, you’ve got your past fixes what you do. It determines what you do. Is you have no choice. The other view is, oh no, the past just influences what you do. But what does influence mean? Because what we don’t want right is fully influenced simply to mean random. Okay? Some people think, for example, that we’re free to the extent that our actions are not caused by anything. Now, I think that’s a very strange and troubling view, because, I mean, imagine what it would be like, okay, for your actions not to be caused by anything. You just simply find yourself doing something, right? So the actions have to come from you to be free in some sense, yep, yep. Then the worry is, well, if that’s right, how do we understand what it means for an action to come from you without you determining that action? Because if the actions simply emanate from you in the sense that what you are, who you are, makes those actions inevitable, then there’s no freedom there either. Yeah. So we need some kind of middle ground between what you are, who you are, making you act, determining your actions. That’s the idea. But we need to understand what influence means without appealing to randomness. That isn’t gonna work, right? It’s one of the hardest problems of philosophy.
Eric Zimmer 09:16
I think it is. I mean, this is how I think about it. And again, I’m a dabbler in philosophy, and I also recognize that my arguments, ultimately, for me, end up trying to be what’s useful in living a life, not what’s technically, theoretically true. Yeah, but I don’t think it’s random, but I also don’t think you can unwind it enough to really be clear. So for example, I could say when I’m around men of you know, my father’s age, and they look a little bit angry, I get really afraid, right? And I can make a story that says that’s because my dad was angry when I was a kid. And there’s probably some truth in that, but there’s probably a whole lot else going on in there that I just like, to your point memories that I can’t even recall. I don’t know what things shaped me in what way, because I think everything is doing a very subtle shaping. So I don’t think it’s exactly random, but I also don’t think you can solve the equation backwards and actually sort out all the variables completely.
Mark Rowland 10:19
Yeah, well, I mean with memory. I mean, since I wrote that passage that you quoted, I discovered that I’d been anticipated by the German speaking poet Rilke Rainer, Maria Rilke, who had this fantastic passage in a book called the notebooks of Malda Lawrence Brig. It was his only excursion into the art form of a novel. He was a poet by Drake, and he talks about the most important memories are the ones you have to have the patience to forget them. Once you have the patience to forget them, then eventually they’ll return, but they’ll return in a different form. They won’t return as memories. They’ll return as something else. So he talked about memories being glance and gesture of blood, not to be distinguished from who we are. I think there’s something deeply right about that memories of the standard sort so called episodic memories, don’t we? So I remember this. I remember doing this. I remember doing that. They’re just the sort of tip of an iceberg, and a far more significant way we’re linked to our past is by way of things that used to be memories, but have now come back in the different in a different form. So moods, for example, emotions, you’re not quite sure where they’re coming from. They’re coming from somewhere. They’re coming from memories that you once had, but they become something else. Yeah, I call them real in memories, but it’s not clear that they’re really memories. We could think of them as post memories, if you like. That’s, I think, is the most significant link to the past. Now, where that leaves us with the question of free will is, again, just another very tricky question, I don’t know.
Eric Zimmer 11:51
Yeah, I’m gonna pivot us towards your book, and we’ve been doing some philosophizing here to start this episode off. And one of the core ideas in the book is that dogs are natural philosophers. Talk to me about what you mean by that.
Mark Rowland 12:07
Well the claim that dogs are natural philosophers, it was originally made by Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher, but he was joking. He didn’t take it seriously. Basically, it was a bad pun on his part, bad dogs liking what they know and not liking what they don’t know he wasn’t really being serious. But I think there’s actually something to it. It’s not entirely clear why that is, but I expect that the philosophical worries and anxieties are sometimes a bit like diseases, diseases that we suffer from. And dogs being dogs, not human, they don’t suffer from the same diseases as us, the disease model of philosophy is associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein. So, you know, dogs get Pavo. We don’t. We have philosophical worries. Dogs don’t. And so that was one of the kind of intuitions that drove the writing of the book. I suppose I was struck by this initially, when everyday Shadow was a German Shepherd of Shadow and I go for a walk on the canal that runs behind a house, and in the mornings, lined up along the back of the canal will be scores of iguanas lined up at fairly regular intervals, and only Shadow he takes off hundreds of yards north of the iguanas just peel off into the water, swim to The Other Side and climb up the other back and stay there for the rest of the day. So the very next morning, right? They’re back again. A Shadow stop begins this process of exiling the iguanas all over again. And it struck me eventually. I mean, took me a long time, but, you know, wheels turn slowly sometimes. And it struck me eventually, this was a bit like the myth of Sisyphus, where Sisyphus was a mortal who offended the gods. The gods punished him by making him roll a large rock up a hill for all eternity. When he gets to the top, the rock slips from his grasp, rolls back down to the bottom, and he has to start all over again. So the idea is, if you replace the rock with the iguanas, then you’ve got pretty much the same sort of situation here. Now Sisyphus, when, when philosophers talk about this myth, he figures in two ways. The first is as the epitome of a meaningless existence. So all we’ve got is just repetitive activity. It aims only at its own repetition. There’s nothing that we’re kind of success or failure, so a meaningless existence. But secondly, Sisyphus is also taken as an allegory for human life. We fight our way to work in the morning, maybe. And then we spend eight hours or so in this place where we do various things with mixed results, probably quite modest results, and results that will soon be wiped away by time’s passage. Then we fight our way home again in the evening, perhaps at home, waiting for us to children, perhaps not, you know, but if there are, then in a few years time, they will have grown up and will probably do the same kinds of things that we did. And so every day in our life seems like one of Sisyphus steps up the hill. We leave it eventually to our children, but it’s the same overall idea.
Eric Zimmer 14:59
Cheery stuff, cheery stuff, yeah,
Mark Rowland 15:03
and this is the challenge of sis. Was that sis was his life is meaningless and our lives are recognizably Sisyphean. But it struck me that actually, this, again, was having probably the most significant intuition which guided me writing this book at all, was that Shadow was immune to this problem. This was probably the most meaningful part of his day. And so I said, Well, I suppose that’s right, because this was just an intuition on my part. This is the most part of his day. How would things have to be in order for that to be true? And this basically started the various themes I talk about in the book,
Eric Zimmer 15:35
yeah, it’s a fascinating way of looking at things. And I do think this is a deep philosophical question for all of us, or a spiritual question. Some people would frame it as but it is in the face of the fact that pretty much everything we do will be erased by the sands of time. And you know, how does anything actually matter within that? And you talk about Socrates in a second way, and you say, you know, Socrates supposedly said The unexamined life is not worth living. Yeah. And then you sort of challenge that idea by saying, well, is a dog’s life not worth living? And you come to a very different conclusion,
Mark Rowland 16:13
yeah, yeah. So I suspect that there are certain aspects of a dog’s life that make it just as meaningful and perhaps more meaningful than than our lives. But by meaning, I mean, there’s two ways. I think what we’re going to get clear is what this talk of meaning. So, I mean, when people talk to meaning laughs, they used to think of some kind of external purpose, yeah, let’s suppose it was supplied by God. God says, right? You know, this is why I’m creating you humans. This is what you’re here for. That’s your purpose. It’s not meaning in that sense, right? That the book is talking about. It’s what some people call meaning in life, rather than meaning of life. So the idea is what’s required for you to experience your life as meaningful. And this is the problem with Sisyphus. When you look at our lives from a suitable vantage point, then it seems our lives are going to be meaningless. Why would we think this repetitive activity, that in the end, achieves very little or nothing, is going to be the basis of a meaningful life? That, then is the basic question, what’s required for there to be meaning in life? And dogs differ from us in certain ways. I think the fundamental difference is that dogs have one life and we have two. This results from our developing a capacity or ability that is present in dogs, I think, only minimally or not at all. This ability is reflection, understood as the ability to think about yourself, about what you’re doing, about why you’re doing it, and your life as sort of a whole. And once you have this ability, and it’s, I think it’s a characteristically human ability, it’s not present in other animals, but kind of this way, it’s much more present in us than other animals. We’re the world heavyweight champions of reflect, once you have this ability, then your life kind of splits into two, right? There’s the life that you live in the standard way, and there is the life that you think about, that you scrutinize, that you evaluate, that you judge, that you agonize over, and so on the road less traveled, for example, is a standard human anxiety. Or I I made this choice, but should I have made this other one? I don’t think dogs do that. You know, I picked up this stick on the walk. Should I have picked up that other I don’t think they do that kind of thing. So we have two lives because of this ability to reflect, and the dog just has one. I think it’s probably more or less inevitable the dog’s gonna love its one life more than we love our two lives.
Eric Zimmer 19:00
So I want to spend a minute on reflection here, and then I think we should go back to meaning this ability for reflection. We have Socrates, saying, supposedly, saying, or coming out of that school of thought that the examined life is the only life that’s worth living. But we have another pillar of Western thought that actually argues kind of the opposite, which is the biblical story of Adam and Eve and the fall. And you say in the book that you find yourself, strangely enough, siding more with the Adam and Eve view of our ability to have reflection versus the Socrates view.
Mark Rowland 19:38
Yes, it did strike me as ironic. You know, someone who spent his life doing philosophy, and here I am saying, wait a minute. I mean one thing we can take away from the story the fall, you know, and I start the book with Milton’s, Milton’s account of Adam and Eve. They become self aware, and consequently, very quickly, become ashamed, right? If they were a God, then it’s pretty clear. What his view of reflection would be, right? I mean, this is the whole banishment from the Garden of Eden, the angel with a flaming sword to make sure you don’t get back in that, that kind of thing. So it’s clear what his view of reflection would be. I tend to think of stories like this as attempts to say something, not describe something that’s literally true, but to say something that’s nevertheless important, yes, and I think what’s what’s important is that existence is always a game of swings and roundabouts. What you gain from some things you also inevitably lose. Yeah. So reflection has been great for us. You know, it’s allowed us to do all the things we’ve done, you know, dominate the planet, all these sorts of things, in large part because we are reflective creatures. But there are also drawbacks, and there are certain things that we’ve lost because of this ability to reflect. And that’s what the book is about, I suppose. I mean, you could see this just from looking at any dog having a remotely good day. Is they take a sort of joy, a delight in the marginally positive that seems to be beyond us. So for example, I mean every day, a certain point in the afternoon, I will go and pick up my younger son from school, and I’ll say the Shadow, he’s not around, so I can say it now without any repercussions. Do you want to come with? Right? And then he will explode into a sort of paroxysm of delight, running, jumping on sofas, grabbing his leash and trying to insert his head through the slipknot. And he knows he’s a smart dog. Been doing this for years and years. He knows nothing much is gonna happen. We’re gonna get in the car, we’re gonna drive to the school. We’re gonna pick up my son, drive back, come back in the house. There’s no dog parks. There’s no chasing iguanas or any kind of at best, it’s marginally positive. Getting out of the house and seeing things as he drives past this is slightly better, marginally better, than being in the ass. But he takes such a sort of delight in the marginally positive. This is something that we humans just can’t do, no,
Eric Zimmer 22:00
Not very well. Yeah, as I read your book, I was thinking a lot about, I’ve done a lot of training in Zen Buddhism, and if I were to summarize what Zen is trying to get at, I think, and certainly, what my teacher emphasized was a line that you said, which is basically not being divided like that. Your whole being is pointed in a direction and more so that that emerges somewhat naturally. And the Zen idea is, if you achieve enough, I don’t know what word we want to use, insight, wisdom, that you’re now not in this constant self doubt game, the constant reflecting, weighing everything, right? Yeah. And your actions emerge out of a place of wholeness, and you engage in them in a whole hearted way, right, which ideally points you closer to where a dog is than where maybe the average anxiety ridden human is, right?
Mark Rowland 23:00
No, that’s very interesting. I wish I knew more about Zen Buddhism. It does sound like the kind of thing I wanted to argue in the book. Yeah, yep,
Eric Zimmer 23:07
I said we would hop back to meaning. And here’s where I kind of want to hop back, because this is the phrase that you used in the book, and it was one of the ones that you know, rang my internal Zen alarm, which is that meaning in life arises when what you are and what you do coincide, which is a slightly different way of saying what I just said. Do you see dogs pointing a direction for us in how we actually begin to have who we are and what we do become more together, or for us to be less divided. Yes,
Mark Rowland 23:42
there’s the optimistic me and the pessimistic me, and usually the pessimistic me wins. So the pessimistic me says, No, we can’t be dogs, right? There’s nothing, right? There’s no possibility we’re irredeemably banished from the Garden right because of our capacity to reflect. And so the very best we can do, right is just what’s important to you is dependent on what’s necessary, and this is kind of dependent on our index to certain things happening in your life, depending on where you are in your life, you know. But there are certain sorts of moments where you can just incorporate a little bit of dog into your life. Here’s one example. Again. It’s part of the marginal positivity theme, but it’s it’s slightly more grim than the other one. So back in April last year, Shadow and I were out for a run. We’re a few miles from home, and he gave out a loud shriek and dropped to the ground. His back legs were completely paralyzed. The vet thinks it was a spinal embolism, a stroke, that where a bit of cartilage from his spine has somehow worked his way into his blood supply. So the blood supply was cut off to the spine, and as a result, he was completely paralyzed in his back legs. And this lasted five to 10 minutes. I’m not sure of the exact time, because I was, you know, panicking, but. Yes, there’s one thing he did when he was in that state, which I suspect it’ll always stick with me precisely, because it’s the sort of thing I need now. And it’s when he fell. He was lying in the sun, right? And for a dog in Miami, yeah, you don’t want to be lying, really. So, so what he did, he wouldn’t let me help at all, because he was, he was very frightened, I think, you know, but he used his front legs to drag himself into the shade, about 20 feet into the shade. He did that. I thought this is a fantastic lesson, right? Because what’s the operating idea? Well, the idea is, this is awful, right? This is absolutely awful. What’s happened, but at least now in this moment, I’m slightly better off than I was in the moment before, sort of, I was talking about, you know, what people need at different parts of their life. When you go to a certain age and I’m there, pretty much, you kind of understand your strengths and weaknesses. And so the overall possible end games start to appear, right? Oh, perhaps this will get me, you know, this is more likely to get me than that. Probably something else might get me, you know, but, but it’s something, you know, you start to see the general outline of the end. And that can be overwhelming. It’s a difficult realization, but one kind of antidote to it is this, well, okay, let’s try and make each moment just a little bit better than the one before, and then let the end, sort of, you know, take care of itself eventually.
Eric Zimmer 26:22
Yeah, I’ve often said, if there was a God and I got a moment with God after I got through some of the biggest questions, or if I had a wish, I would say, can I just be a dog for like, an hour? I just want to know what is it like to be a dog? Because they do operate. It seems in such a very different place than we do, and yet they completely co exist with us. Every once in a while, I’m struck by the strangeness of it. I’m like, this is this is a completely different species. Who is my best companion? Yeah, it’s an unusual thing.
Mark Rowland 26:59
Yeah, it certainly is, and I don’t know how we manage it, and I don’t know how they manage it. Really, it all depends on similarity and difference, and what’s driving everything. Is it because they’re so similar to us that we can be best friends with them? Or is it, is it precisely because they’re different from us that they supply something that’s missing that we could be best friends. Maybe it’s a bit of both. I don’t know. Yeah,
Eric Zimmer 27:23
I think it probably is a bit of both. But I do think, you know, pointing to their being natural philosophers and not being reflective, it’s one thing I can say is that my relationships with my dogs feel very straightforward. Yeah, you know, I lost my baby about year and a half, two years, I don’t know. I think it’s actually been just about two years a little over, and it’s interesting. Like, grieving a dog for me has been a different experience, because it’s very straightforward, it’s very sad. There’s a lot of grief, but there’s not a lot of complicated feelings around like, did we say the right things to each other? Should we have done more of this? You know, it’s just simple, but our human relationships are not that way. Even really good ones are not simple in that way. And so I think that’s one of the things about dogs that I love, is that the relationship with them seems very simple, but you say something in the book early on, and then you come back to it much later. And I think it’s sort of the core argument ultimately. And you say, the more love there is in a life, whether through relationships, passions or experiences, the more meaning that life contains. And that that’s the language dogs are speaking. Say more about that? Yes.
Mark Rowland 28:40
So the book was on one level, at least, it was a sort of extended exploration of the idea of meaning in life. And the conclusion I arrived at, you know, spoiler alert, was the war what meaning is, is when happiness erupts, or is a direct expression of what you are. I imagine a case of Sisyphus, who was happy because the gods decided to be a little bit more merciful, right? So the rock the hill, all non negotiable. They kept that. But what they did, they messed with his head to make him like doing this. So he loved nothing more than rolling rocks up hills. I don’t think that’s a good way of thinking about meaning, and if that’s right, it shows the meaning is not simply the same thing as happiness. So happy Sisyphus is also a deluded dupe or stooge of the gods. And the reason this is not meaningful is that his happiness is not an expression of who he is. The gods have messed around with him, and that’s where the happiness is coming from. It’s not an expression of who he is. I argue in the book that meaning in life exists wherever happiness is an expression of an individual. So when Shadow is chasing the iguanas along the canal, this is an expression of what he is. I mean, because, because of his nature and. Generations, the history that have gone into making him this happiness he seems to exude when he’s doing this is an expression of who he is, where who he is has been determined or shaped or influenced by his history. Whenever you have this eruption of happiness that stems from your nature, I think that’s what meaning in life is.
Eric Zimmer 30:47
You’re positing that meaning comes together when both happiness and that happiness emerging naturally from your nature, yeah, is together to tweeze this apart, you gave the example of happiness that you think is meaningless, which is the equivalent of somebody messes with your brain to make you happy. You know, someone comes into my brain, puts an electrode in that just keeps hitting the happiness button. And that’s not particularly meaningful. I will be happy, and whether I would choose to do that or not, I might, yeah, I’m not sure on this question, depending on the day, but it’s not meaningful, but we also see people who appear to be acting out of their nature, like when I was an addict, I was, on some level, acting out of what my nature was at that moment. Right? Yeah, now again, this would get into the question of, what’s my true nature? What’s my condition nature, what’s my wounded nature? But I wouldn’t argue in any way, shape or form, that that was a meaningful life. I really think your definition is really interesting. I often think about meaning in this way. It is a non intellectual way of doing it, which is that if you and I were to engage in a debate right now about whether one dog getting run over by a car is an important thing, I mean, some part may be like, Well, yeah, but then you’d go, but look, there’s billions of dogs on the planet. There’s always been billions of dogs. We’ve got more dogs than we need. Like, this is trivial. This is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, intellectually, and I can’t best that argument. Ultimately, I kind of have to be like, Well, yeah, I guess really it doesn’t. But if I walked outside right now and I saw a dog that had been hit by a car laying in front of me, you couldn’t talk me out of believing that me taking care of that dog was the most important thing. And so I think that’s pointing at what you’re talking about, where, where the meaning is emerging from who I am, not from my intellect.
Mark Rowland 32:49
Right, I think the problem for we humans, right, is that there is such a thing as who I am, as who you are, but it’s a lot more slippery. It’s a lot more attenuated than it is in the case of animals, because we’re always these two different things, I think you you articulated what these are very, very nicely. Actually, on the one hand, we’re creatures who can take the big picture, right, you know. And from this perspective, the medieval philosophers used to call it perspective of eternity, subspec, yeah. Eternity. From this perspective, you know, you and I were just insignificant extras in this whole cosmic play. You and I were both sort of unremarkable people living unremarkable lives, just like everybody else. And so when we die, well, that’s just one death amongst sort of billions, you know, what does it matter? So that’s the view from the outside, if you like, but the view from the inside was no you know, life matters. We we’re hubs of meaningfulness, significance, all these sorts of things. And the case of the dog that you described is the difference between taking an outside view of this is just one more dog. You can take exactly the same sort of view of human beings, just one more Totally, yeah, but there’s a view from the inside, and then from the inside, things matter in a way they can’t matter from the outside. So the reason we’re so confused, I think, is because this was a point made by the philosopher Thomas mayor, a long time ago, 50 years ago, we know both of these views can’t be true, right? Either we’re significant or we’re not, we can’t be both. So these views can’t both be true, but it seems to us strongly that both of them are true, and therefore we can’t find a way, respectable way of abandoning either one.
Eric Zimmer 34:30
This is another area where Zen is interesting, because Zen talks a lot about this idea of the relative and the absolute. The absolute would be sort of that, that big view of everything, right? It’s just all dust in the wind, to quote another thing, right? Yeah, right. But Zen would posit there’s actually a beauty and a freedom to be found in that it also talks about the relative, which is our day to day lives as we experience them and live them. And Zen makes the point of they actually believe they are both true, and they are both actually different sides of the same coin. And that to be able to move back and forth between them fluidly is an attribute, yeah, to be able to take both those perspectives, the big perspective, which is like, well, you know, we’re all gonna die, and the Earth’s gonna get engulfed by the sun at some point. So literally, how this interview with Mark is going is completely unimportant. And at the exact same moment, it’s important to me, it’s important to you, hopefully somebody listening, it’s important to and it feels that way. So it seems like maybe philosophers don’t like that kind of answer because it feels like a cheat.
Mark Rowland 35:44
I think they would like that kind of answer is finding a way to live. The answer is, it’s always difficult to sway two sides of the same coin. But what exactly does that mean? Yeah, yeah. Totally, totally. So I can see the value of the attempt. Yeah, this is what the human condition is, because we’re reflective creatures, because we’re such creatures, we have these two different views. They’re very difficult to reconcile, but the key to living is to try and find a way of reconciling them. Right? Dogs don’t have that problem because they just have one view.
Eric Zimmer 36:16
Do you think that reflection has become more ingrained in us as time has gone on, because certainly we can look back to you were referencing the medieval period, and we could say that from what we know, most people believed a certain set of things and didn’t spend a whole lot of time debating whether those things were true. They went about trying to live them. But today, we live in a very different world where I would say that the average person, I’m not gonna say average person, there are a whole lot of people who don’t know what to believe or what they believe, which opens up an existential crisis of meaning, because I can’t say that life means this, because God said it means this, right? And so have we become more reflective? Have we just had more ideas dropped into our space? Like, how do you think about that?
Mark Rowland 37:07
I’m one of those people that I don’t really know what I’m thinking until I write it down. That’s why I became a writer. Basically, I wanted to know what it is I was thinking. I think the ability to put things in a stable, external form. Writing is a sort of obvious example. Expands our capacities to reflect on ourselves, because most obviously, we can remember what we were thinking about ourselves yesterday, and then we can add things to it, and so on and so on. So I think probably external systems of information storage, where the information can be about ourselves, as well as other things, enhances our ability to reflect. So that would be a difference between us and the Middle Ages, where people’s grasp of writing was a lot less,
Eric Zimmer 37:53
yep. So ultimately, I think that you arrived in a place where you felt that the meaning of life that dogs arrive at is that love is really the thing. So share with me a little bit more about coming to that and and how you think about and how you try and bring that into your own life.
Mark Rowland 38:13
When I see Shadow chasing the iguanas up and down the canal, he loves what he’s doing in a way that’s very, very difficult for me to replicate, generate that level of delight. It’s something he does every day, routinely. That’s love. It’s a love of what you do, and thereby the love of life. So whenever this kind of love erupts from you, is an expression of what you are. That, I think, is where we find meaning in life, and that’s ultimately the connection between meaning and and love. It doesn’t necessarily mean love of others, that’s, that’s, that’s certainly part of it, but it’s the love of life, where life is a series of things you do.
Eric Zimmer 38:53
Having that realization and seeing that in Shadow. How have you found ways to bring that into your life? I mean, again, knowing you’re not going to be Shadow right, what sort of one thing you do that helps you get closer to that,
Mark Rowland 39:07
I try to find periods of time in any any week, say where I will find things that I love doing and do just because I love doing them. Because the guiding thought is that if you think of work right as an activity that you do for something else, you work because you get, you want to get paid, right? So that’s an activity that has an external reward, yeah. And what dogs are really, really good at is picking up on the things that have internal rewards, where the reward is the activity itself. Yeah. And the way we live. Many of us, our lives are kind of outposts of our work. Our lives are dominated by activity, where we’re doing something in order to get something else. So I think probably one of the keys to our happy life, and this is something I’ve learned from dogs over the years, is to try and find ways what we’re talking about is playing. Yeah, this way, right where play is is activity. And. Whose reward is internal to the activity itself. Yep, the more you can bring little bits of this into your life, the less your life becomes dominated by work, I think probably the happier and more meaningful your life, or
Eric Zimmer 40:14
to the extent that you can internalize what you’re doing for work and do it out of a different place. That’s kind of the ultimate, right? And again, a lot of people don’t have that luxury. I think it is a luxury, but I think there are always ways to imbue what we do with a slightly different spirit, back to Zen, right? One of the things we do in Zen is called Work Practice, where you do something like washing the dishes or sweeping the floor, but you try and do it with single, pointed attention. And those things actually can go from being rote and tedious to kind of enjoyable when you orient that way.
Mark Rowland 40:51
Yeah, put it in the terms I sort of defined then, that what you’re doing is converting what ordinarily would be work into play. Yes, that’s, I think what we should try and do
Eric Zimmer 41:01
Mark That’s a beautiful place to wrap up. I really enjoyed your book, and we’ll have links in the show notes to where listeners can get it. And thank you for joining us.
Mark Rowland 41:12
Thank you, it was great pleasure. Thank you very much for inviting me.
Eric Zimmer 41:15
Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring or thought provoking. I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together, we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one you feed community.
Leave a Reply