In the absence of this bold effort, our lives are shaped, directed and constantly unsettled by anxiety, rivalry, antagonism and other natural and cultural forces. In fact, in the absence of this bold effort, we don’t really have access to intellectual integrity and to choice. If we can’t summon transcendence, we act in accord with the dictates of immediacy instead of in accord with the way we know we want to be.

Of course, the hope for humanity and its promise spring from this bold spirit. Sometimes the struggle to be bold (and heartful) is referred to as a spiritual one. However, when I talk about spirit and transcendence, it’s about an earth-bound creative, narrative and active process built of discipline. How have you used your energy, and how have you used the power of your choice and will, to see a bigger picture, be a bigger person, make a bigger contribution and have a bigger life?

Reminder: Everyone’s situation is challenging and complex because the brain is complex. Everyone is home to a multitude of perceptions and impulses, many of which are not in sync. Each of us must wrestle with evolutionary and conditioned conflict or disharmony as incompatible ideas and mutually exclusive impulses compete.

Language, a relatively recent evolutionary possibility, permits us a sense of unified consciousness, information processing and purpose. To some extent, it enables us to distance or detach ourselves from the marching orders of our evolutionary past. Yet, primitive instincts and needs unsettle us, night and day. These influences are neither rational nor consensual. They are messy. They can be cold-blooded, passionate, ruthless and poised to fight or flee. They can be sated, irritated and exhausted, and they can contradict or challenge your ability to bring order to them.

Of course, even with this information about the impulses that arise from successive stages of biological evolution, not to mention the contradictions that arise between nature and culture, you are asked to meet the civilized call to take command of yourself. This means that you are expected to develop a strong measure of self-initiative, self-determination and self-control.

However, you are learning that there is even more to your commitment to be autonomous, to overcome or transcend what just happens to you and to make life how it ought to be. You had to learn about and sometimes discover—in addition to your motor-running body—what makes you tick, what inspires your intelligence and your potential.

Yes, of course, you learned that you want to provide material comforts for those near and dear and for those whom your commitment to generosity can reach. But you also learned that you want to acquire even more transcendent character—its depth and substance, its fineness, nuance and grace. You learned that you find inspiration, fulfillment and meaning in creating and living values independent of primitive impulse, and learned that you suffer when these values are neglected.

If autonomy is to be your destiny, if you are not to be subjugated by biology or to the grim rivalry sanctioned by the Scoreboard, you have recognized that now is the time to strike, to take yourself on, to make it happen, to give artful expression to the struggle to matter, to make order and to care.

Those in the latter group have faced quite a challenge. You have realized that how you were defined by your condition and circumstances may now be reconsidered and its limitations breached.

Yes, you recognize that you are already in the world, up and running, but that you are also in the world experimentally. You recognize that you are subjected to the experiments of the world-already-in-full-swing, to its general rules, rewards and safeguards. But you are also an author and an authority. You create and experiment with other possibilities that suit your unique intellectual and conscionable commitments and your one-of-a-kind experience.

Your success rate at these various experiments in autonomous individuation, in what it means to be fully and uniquely human, depends on two factors. The first is the authenticity of the truth and discipline with which you conceive, administer and monitor the experiments. The second is the honesty with which you match your thoughts and conduct to what you discover.

Like the practice of good science, you want to be true to the data collected in your experiment, but you find that straight shooting is not easy. This is because it is impossible to still or stop the momentum of the world. This already/always insistent momentum is intimidating, wily and (generally) tempting, and it relentlessly buffets even the best aim, even the best data. (Doesn’t the Scoreboard tell you, and everyone else, how life is and rebuke any failure to conform to its marching orders?)

Let’s acknowledge how challenging it is to be your “own man” or “own woman” when the prevailing momentum is exerting its force and judgment. Let’s acknowledge how challenging it is to straight talk—to say what you mean and mean what you say—in an environment bent by Machiavellian mendacity, exploitation and expedience.

However, autonomous, knowledgeable and conscionable, you recognize that you don’t need a Scoreboard to motivate you individually or collectively to find a shared humanity. You have learned how to thrive in the flow of life, how to recognize well and true who you are, and how to heed the call to who you might yet be—strong in solitude, strong in communion.

Something profound happens when your most precious possession is your transcendent authority. From this perspective, you know who others are—that their struggle is the human struggle, too. It enables you to pursue and realize your aims with a more measured and humane assessment of what constitutes a successful life, and to exceed the seductive promises of the Scoreboard.

So, in fact, it has made and is making sense to match your way of being in the world with your evolving understanding of the human condition and circumstance and, consequently, with the way you author, govern and perfect yourself. The more you understand these possibilities for autonomous individuation and become disciplined in their expression, the more stable your life is. Not rigid, narrow-minded and inflexible, but receptive, resourceful, courageous.

What was at first awkwardly novel, complicated and a big stretch, has become over time your new—refreshingly new and gratifying, even joyful—spontaneity. The backbone, versatility and spirit that characterize a bigger life sit well on you.

It was never going to be any other way, was it? When you really need to be creative, when you really need to lead is when life is right up in your face. To fight the good fight you must shoulder the burden of your condition, circumstance and circumscription and wrest creative control over your way of being in the world. No matter when and no matter what.

To say you possess enough subjectivity or selfhood is to say that you have the vocabulary to give voice and substance to transcendent possibility, to get beyond yourself over and over again as life makes its demands. It is to say you have the vocabulary to think and to speak the right thing at the right time; to counsel a child devastated by disappointment; to console a relative unnerved by illness; to grant dignity to a friend who has lost her job to downsizing.

It is to say you have the vocabulary to coach an employee too full of herself; to set straight a buddy taking advantage of you; or to hold the line when others are trying to peck you into order with their willfulness. It is to say you have the vocabulary to connect with someone grown distant and discouraged in these harsh and dissonant times or to inspire and sustain your own faith in the ultimate value of living life from and with a generosity of spirit.

You know what the other substantive capacity is, too. Actually, it’s twofold. First, you know not to let antagonism, small-mindedness or cynicism creep into your words, your mood, your attitude, your point of view. (You never give up. It’s a way of life for you.) Second, though the voice of transcendence may be hard to hear and to speak sometimes, you know not to allow timidity or intimidation to keep you from saying what needs to be said now. And later. And tomorrow.

And like everything else you do effectively and skillfully, having the right vocabulary, knowing what and when to say it (or not) has taken and will take work. Real substance—real depth—is hard-won and incrementally and diligently earned.

It takes so much hard work because your subjectivity, intellectual integrity and transcendent resource must struggle against inborn resistances in an environment itself compromised by false fronts and corruptions of meaning and purpose. I call this endless in-your-face confrontation the substantive conflict. You know you must translate the mean-spiritedness and wall of anxiety called up by the circumstance, as well as the rough and ready instincts to which you are born, into tempered expressions of restraint, cooperation, mature competition and joy.

Your stand-up way of being constitutes and reveals your solidarity with the generous spirit—the historical enterprise for improving human life that began at the dawn of history. By representing this spirit, you disclose that you value being generous, that you understand that grace and integrity, courage and fair play, kindness and compassion are products of human workmanship, and that they are made real and viable by deed. And, once earned, once in command of this greater subjectivity, it is your selfhood to keep—you own this most treasured and irreplaceable possession.

So a beacon you are. In its light, we think, we wonder, we posit. Who might we be? How might we love and laugh, care and share? What contribution might we make? What gratitude and generosity might we express? What contentiousness and misrepresentation might we reject? What emotional and intellectual energy might we summon? How high might we soar?

Of course, your strength of character was not innate. Not something that life just naturally provided. You won it. The hard way. To be taken seriously, to be in control of your heart, your mind, your words and deeds, you’ve put some work into it. A lot of work. You’ve learned to “get over” yourself, over the petty and stingy and over immature emotional dependencies and failures of nerve.

Through much experience and practice, you’ve acquired a never-quit, decisive, stand-up responsibility for your condition and circumstance. You recognize and respond creatively and effectively to the private and public demands on your autonomy. Although this substance lives metaphorically in your heart, your spine or your guts, it feels like an uncommon confidence—a core bedrock of personal inner strength. Can you be knocked down? Yes. Do you stay down? Never. You know there’s life after everything.

We live in a rivalrous world. The demand to produce results never ends, and the competition for life and lifestyle goes on forever. Yet, even as we’re becoming more competent in the marketplace, for example, or in the business of running a home (or a life), we recognize another demand. The humane call on contribution and conscience, on integrity and fair play, on hope, good faith and love. We hear these calls as transcendent obligations, which they are. They are also the means to a profound presence of mind, to intellectual happiness and to the emotional expansiveness that leads to genuine care, concern and generosity.

But think of the territory you have had to traverse to get here—to this mindfulness, willpower and transcendence.

Beasts without language, including the pre-linguistic animals we were eons ago, have no subjective referential capacity to get over their primal instincts. Virtually everything about an animal’s behavior is determined by do-or-die immediacy, impulse, appetite and habit. Over this ruled-by-nature system of stored responses awaiting stimulus, they have no narrative or descriptive control.

We modern human beings are also host to this ancient simple-reflex wiring but, of course, it’s not a natural fit for the transcendent character required today. However, our subjective capacity makes it possible for us to transcend or rise above this visceral immediacy in favor of practices that we regard as rational, decent, meaningful or civilized.

Leaders are not persons of metaphysical qualities or semi-divine origins. You change the world, you lead, you fight the good fight when you emerge from the reflexive, rivalrous condition and circumstance, when you stand for projections and hopes that exceed what has often become corrupted in business, politics and everyday life.

It’s true, isn’t it, that the difficult part of fighting the good fight is to persist when all the “fight” has been sapped by anxiety or misdirected by the show-off rewards of a ruthless, heartless rivalry. But the realization of your unique hope for yourself and for humankind lies in your ability to confront these situations that test the character of your substance. Now. And tomorrow.

Success in the new year is also going to take a willingness to return to the drawing board as we face inertia, criticism, cheap shots, complexity, disappointment, rivals and breakdowns. Because what happens when we have hopes, goals and dreams? Life. Messy, complex, contingent, imperfect life. Each and every one of us must deal with the sometimes absurd, sometimes agonizing stuff of life that foils the best-laid plans.

Think about it. Obviously right or ambivalence-free decisions and choices are rare and easily upset by adversity or everyday bad news. And then later, self-doubt and second thoughts may sideline them anyway. The signposts are few and vague. In fact, a complicated, emotionally complex, entangled mix of the immediate, the conventionally allowable and the attainable influences much of the action we take. Even some of the well-informed choices we make in good conscience subject us to pangs of regret and to consequences such as loss, failure and disappointment.

There’s more. There are limits to what relationships can provide—whether we choose to marry, commit, parent. If we don’t choose to practice religion, we’ll experience moments of meaninglessness. If we do practice religion, we’ll still have to face down existential anxiety. If we choose to indulge our passions, we might hurt those who would have us choose otherwise. But if we forego these passions, we might grow old feeling we have lived terrible and little lives.

And then there are the “rules.” What do they demand? For example, is the amount of time we spend with children, aging parents, partner, or on community projects, a matter of inclination, or of choice, or of obligation? And what about the crucial stuff of personhood, whose spine (and heart) is a strong transcendent identity?

Yet, the heart of our transcendent identity, of our private and personal life, is neither easily come by nor maintained. Granted, we want very much to get it right. We want to be true to the truth. But in pursuing truth, what are we being true to? What authority are we deferring to, or simply making?

A transcendent identity is constructed piece by piece. It involves a combination of personal discipline, inquiry and reflection. A meaningful transcendent identity also requires an extensive remodeling of the conflicting, perhaps waffling, beliefs, vanities, assumptions and prejudices we have (by gene) or were given (by convention) before we are actually able to design a life for ourselves.

So, like I said upfront, no one said it would be easy, and it won’t. Happily, the civilized and civilizing spirit is powerful—a shock of recognition about who we are, about who we might yet be and about what we can give back to the world. In this spirit, there’s work to do. Lots of it. In the struggle for the soul of humanity, we should expect to do no less. But this heralding of possibility gives outward presence to inner grace, inspires wonder, hope and energy, and sweetens our own lives as well as the lives of those near and dear.

Yes, there is sadness in the world. And discouragement. So much remains unconsidered, unjust and undone. Yet, with immense gratitude for the possibilities, gifts and blessings to which we are heir, we celebrate transcendence and give our word to live life with hope, love and concern.

During this holiday season, when its majestic vision is so triumphantly proclaimed, we renew our pledge to make the civilized spirit the generous authority upon which we stand and to rejoice in the affinity, compassion and reciprocity that are ours to create and share.

For who we might yet be and our potential are heralded by this spirit, yet its promise is not a given. Its values, and its glory, must be daily and courageously told. It is alive, forthright and expansive when we reflect, when we lead, when we inspire, when we safe-keep kindness, love and connection.

You are the promise of the new year when you not only honor the eternal quest for transcendence, but take its lead. Best wishes to you and yours for a joyful holiday and a happy and healthy new year.

Setting out in a new direction requires thoughtfulness, organization and discipline. Given, you know your objective. But have you considered all the means to it? Do you have the time, money, resources and, if necessary, the backup to enact all the steps to its achievement? Are you realistic about the obstacles? As it happens, creative endeavor is resisted—if not by the nature of what you are working with, then by the force of your own nature.

Deep and incremental practice as well as the ability to bounce back after disappointments or challenges to your authority are intrinsic to accomplishment. (If a resistant world isn’t a factor, then you can count on resistance from within.) However, as you well know, there is great reward, including peace of mind and an uncommon confidence, in deep and consistent practice. Practice makes perfect. So, let’s look at three projects designed to produce mastery in practice.

The first requires an analogy with baseball. Everyone who wants to succeed needs batting practice. Some people know from experience that hits in a pressure-filled, game-on situation are preceded by much practice. The rest of us, however, may underestimate the amount of practice that grounds performance, consistency, willpower and resolution.

So, keep an accurate account of your practice time relevant to each factor involved in achieving your goal. Does your objective involve getting up an hour earlier five days a week? Did you get into the batter’s box to practice on Monday? How did you fare on Tuesday? On Wednesday? What was your batting average at batting practice after two weeks?

Okay, you have a more realistic take on your batting average at practice. Let’s move on to the second project with the same objective or, if you wish, a new one. To acquire a resource you don’t have or to change a counterproductive habit, design a developmental model or structure for fulfillment into which you can insert yourself. Customize this model until it works. If you’re not improving your batting average at practice, don’t ask, “What’s wrong with me?” Look to see what’s wrong with your structure for fulfillment.

For example, your friend who works out daily may say she counts on her willpower to get her to the gym. More likely, she has been trained to such a regimen or else the incentive is irresistible. Perhaps lifting weights resonates comfortably with her temperament.

However, if exercising is the last thing you feel like doing but your health depends on it, you must design a structure tailor-made to you. If getting to the gym requires revising your schedule, if the workout itself requires a reliable personal trainer, then design them into your structure. Still not improving your batting average? Make a design change or, if need be, introduce a penalty feature into your developmental model.

The third project, if you are still game, is to immerse yourself on a regular (and incrementally more challenging) basis in an aesthetic or spiritual objective that will keep all of your daily effort in perspective. Don’t think of a project like this as peripheral to other individual goals and objectives. The practice is crucial because the vision you have for your life was born of something transcendent. Moreover, you may wish to use this objective for all three projects. Think about it. Doesn’t achieving an aesthetic or spiritual goal require the batting practice described in project one and a structure for fulfillment described in project two?

As I said in my previous post, we want life to be rewarding in all the obvious ways. But there is more. We want it to matter. We want to reach beyond the quotidian and beyond what’s practically or immediately necessary—even beyond making a difference. We are drawn to forms, projections and possibilities for becoming fully human that have been dreamed and attempted by individuals throughout history. We are inspired by the shared hopes and deep and generous practices that enable our unique experience and illuminate our common stake in the evolving discourse of civilization.

So, I recommend a serious and practiced commitment to projects that enable us to see through the quotidian to another dimension. A too utilitarian and impatient perspective often compromises the big picture of what constitutes a meaningful and fulfilling life. However, something grand happens when our attention and sensitivity transcend the everyday and match themselves deeply to subjects (such as painting, music and literature) that illuminate life’s complex and irreconcilable realities. We can suddenly get a sense of the larger world, appreciate and respect its multiplicity and feel an exquisite sense of pleasure and awe in its light.

How this works (the confluence of nature and art) is a mystery. Yet our ability to create and experience the transcendent is a key part of what it takes to feel comfortable in the world, comfortable in our skin, consonant with the complex and competing emotions to which humans are heir, in harmony with the deeper rhythms of life.

We are drawn to forms, projections and possibilities for becoming fully human that have been dreamed and attempted by individuals throughout history. We are inspired by the shared hopes and deep and generous practices that enable our unique experience and illuminate our common stake in the evolving discourse of civilization.

Moreover, for such opportunity and privilege, we are honestly and wisely thankful. This enlightened and thoughtful way of being is not ordained. Countless individuals, locked into a merciless existence and struggling to survive, may never have an opportunity to choose cultural forms and projections expressive of a transcendent humanity.

Indeed, absent the proper vocabulary to interpret and address the world, what is alive and possible in our most honorable traditions and projections is obscured by the press of every day. We’re busy, preoccupied; yes, open to wonder and appreciation and intelligence, but also misdirected by rivalry, anxiety and fatigue.

Now, let me take the opportunity of the holiday to tell you that the consciously thankful attitude with which you engage life’s hours and give back upon the world your best and finest contribution is a remarkable personal achievement. So, to you, too, we give thanks.

Honestly, though, it’s hard to know where to begin and where to end when making a point because how we learn isn’t usually linear, despite our computational brains. We know that experience, thinking and practice can change the brain. New neural pathways that affect how (and even what) we see, hear, feel and understand are created. As such, experience, thinking and practice affect our judgment, decision-making, choices and options.

But this amount of experience + this amount of thinking + this amount of practice doesn’t compute in a formulaic way. Rules carved deep in our genes and rules gouged deep by culture still influence how we live out our lives. Atavistic fears and desires punctuate our subjectivity at least hourly and society’s imprint weighs heavily all day long.

Nonetheless, we don’t have to surrender to the way that we have always been or to the first wave of habituated response. Each of us has the ability to be an original, to stamp our own will on our condition and circumstance. So let’s talk about will—because how it is bound and determined is crucial.

The first kind of will to which each is born is determined. I refer to this type of will as willfulness. Here, determined means that creatures are causally subjected to and bound and activated by systems already in place. This is an immediate primitive resource, a reflexive intelligence that shapes the behavior of animals living, for instance, in the jungle or on grassy plains. Driven by the programmed instinct to survive, they just do what the living system “tells” them to do, sometimes aggressively, sometimes submissively, but the willfulness is always prior to choice, a reflection of immediacy.

Initially, we, too, are bound and determined, and our responses to life are reflexive and automatic. Humans, though, have extra brainpower that makes room for another kind of will, one I refer to as willpower. A developed willpower enables us to instigate responses not already programmed.

Recognizing that the kind of person we make of ourselves matters, we can be bound and determined in a different way. That is, we can commit to becoming a free individual, out from the confines of the creature’s subjection. And we can dedicate ourselves to achieving a way of being that reflects thoughtful, deliberate, creative choices.

However, because this creative possibility can be counter-intuitive to the animal’s stark, bound and determined instincts, becoming something other than we were is challenging. In fact, much of how we are trained to separate ourselves from the reflexive instincts of the animal is often more decorative than substantive.

Even in the first decade of life, we’ve absorbed—from the cultural examples around us—a strong sense of the image we should project. We can see and want to acquire the detail, the way of being and the stuff that will seemingly distinguish and, perhaps, elevate our position in the pack. While these efforts over time may show well and purport of superiority, you know and I know that they do not reflect the quality of character upon which a decent, humane and peaceful life depend. Indeed, a certain vulgarity, grubbiness of temperament or desperation may foul what on the surface looks like a well-lived life.

Yes, creature comforts are terrific; we’re thankful for warmth and sustenance, safety and art but none is character. And, in fact, without inner mastery we remain at the mercy of the same pervasive, destabilizing anxiety and fear that keeps an animal forever on edge.

So, as I said, there is nothing passive about peace of mind. To achieve it in our modern world, where the brute is glossed by the Scoreboard and truth concealed by the ego-protection program, we’ve much to do: Cognitive and pragmatic tools to acquire, principles to stand for, nerve and heart to put to the test, sympathetic consideration to extend and love and kindness to bestow.

These are the fundamentals of good conscience, of peace of mind, and of an open-hearted, clear-eyed take on the myriad problems that day in and day out present themselves for resolution.

What makes possible such a creative and rewarding life is transcendence. But not an otherworldly transcendence. We’re not referring to a non-physical or spiritual realm that exists outside of the material universe where we humans, made of mundane chemical compounds, fluids and cells, live.

The transcendence that I speak of is here, now. It’s learnable, doable and intellectually and emotionally fulfilling. More exactingly, it is the cognitively and pragmatically unified discipline from which willpower, self-command, resource and fulfillment are enacted.

But let’s address immediacy and willfulness first. In the main, what I mean by immediacy is that which has not been reflected on. Immediacy comes from a largely programmed or foreordained piece of the brain. It generates the type of fight/flee and biorhythmic maintenance (eat, sleep, reproduce) responses that promote the survival of the animal. The human brain, home to the same immediacy of other animals but capable of history and language, too, is not all hard-wired. It can, to an appreciable extent, be taught, and recursively teach itself, to mediate or temper the immediacy.

However, this extra intellectual capacity also makes possible a human-made, protocol-filled social world that can be as confrontational and rivalrous as the natural environment in which other animals find themselves. Faced with conflicting—sometimes aggressive—claims for what’s right, valuable, decent and sustainable, we don’t always know when to fight. Or flee. Or submit. Or try to escape to a rock garden.

In animals, human and otherwise, immediacy’s initial feel is a prodding anxiety. In humans, a common, reflexive response to the feeling is an antagonistic willfulness. Although this might seem to be the natural response to feeling subjected, intimidated or outraged by all the assaults on our personal authority and peace of mind, it’s often ineffective and ultimately unsettling. After all, we take our measure from, and our experience of life is elevated by, our track record with integrity and fair play, generosity and toleration and a resilient and courageous spirit or mettle.

Which is where transcendence comes in. Transcendence does not offer an escape from the peopled world. By exceeding the programmed limitations of immediacy, transcendence creates an in-the-world opening for reflection, decision and choice and inspires the development of the strength, backbone and heart that give dimension and heft to willpower, personal authority, authenticity and leadership.

I titled this post, Take yourself on, for a particular reason. Neither you nor I are fated to endure mean and little lives because of the oppressive circumstances that millions of those less fortunate are stuck with. So our biggest obstacle to an enriching and fulfilling life is our own deeply instilled and inveterate willfulness. We frequently, stubbornly and counterproductively refuse to transcend the immediacy that limits the way we respond to life. For myriad reasons, some of them punitive and vengeful, some of them naïve, indulgent and, perhaps, self-pitying, and some of them fearful or rivalry-in-the-raw angry and defensive, we mistake a chronic, obstinate willfulness for self-command, self-control and self-discipline.

Well, when we do, we’ve got it wired up wrong. Locating our heart and mindfulness in such a primitive and indiscriminate intelligence, we barely scratch the surface of human possibility. And we know it. So, take yourself on.