u/Taoman108

Hey Dudes!

The Dude repeats several other characters’ lines in The Big Lebowski. I’d like to focus on two to illustrate the journey The Dude takes over the course of the movie. 

First, we’ve got George H. W. Bush’s line, “This aggression will not stand,” which PotUs says in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The Dude repeats this to The Big Lebowski in his office, in reference to Wu having peed (or ‘micturated’ to use the parlance of that human paraquat) on his rug. 

As the rest of the movie proves, this does not go as planned. 

The Dude’s final line, his most iconic line, is a recasting of The Big Lebowski’s “I will not abide another toe.”

The Dude transforms this bit of self-righteousness into “The Dude abides.”

“The Dude abides” – I take comfort in that. For over a decade, I’ve closed out my morning zazen sessions with a bow and a recitation of “The Dude abides.”

But it wasn’t until this morning that this thought occurred to me:

What if the first time The Dude said “The Dude abides” occurred at the end of The Big Lebowski? What if the movie is a slacker’s hero’s journey from a misguided pursuit of justice to learning to abide life’s strikes and gutters?

Perhaps it is the events of the movie, the sometimes hilarious/sometimes heartbreaking setbacks, that humble the already grounded Dude. From loss of property to loss of a dear friend, The Dude moves from seeking recompense to accepting the inevitable changes of existence, it’s instructive that The Dude is not pulverized into nihilism. Instead, he understands what he says earlier to Maude’s chauffeur, one “can’t be worried about that shit, man. Life goes on.”

I’ve noticed this in myself. As a younger man, I looked for any reason to get uptight over the world’s perceived injustices…especially those directed towards me. Now, as I’m on the other side of middle age, I’m learning that there’s more one has to abide than rail against. It’s not throwing in the towel. It’s not a nihilistic shrug. It’s a recognition of how I’m best able to laugh at the whole durn human comedy loud enough to beat the band, to attend my landlord’s dance cycles, and show up at practice for my friends. 

It ain’t much, but it might be the only way to keep me and everyone else around me sane in a world that’s gone crazy. 

I hope yer all abiding as well as you can,

Rev. Ross

Hey Dudes!

Today, it took me twice as long to drive home as it usually does. Two hours on the road got me further into my audiobook and more headroom to do something pondering. 

I thought about one of The Dude’s pastimes: driving around. Then I got to thinking about the fact that The Dude lives in Los Angeles, a city famously ensnarled by traffic. 

So what does it mean that The Dude willingly subjects himself to LA’s stop and go…for fun?

Maybe, just maybe, The Dude is practicing a kind of low-stakes Stoic exposure therapy. He knows that he might encounter traffic when he needs to get somewhere (if he ever needs to get anywhere), so he’s accustomed himself to it. 

Maybe it’s emblematic of The Dude’s greater ability to abide?

Throughout the movie, The Dude fits right in to whatever condition he finds himself in. He’s never out of place, and he gets along with folks of different temperaments. Like our neighboring cars in gridlock, The Dude’s friends and acquaintances come in all types.

All this was floating around in my noggin when I was brought back to the moment by the honk from the car behind me. As I advanced, I was reminded of a deeper lesson: to everyone else on the road, I was also the traffic. One driver’s Dude is another driver’s Walter. 

In the end, we gotta move with this dance of life, albeit haltingly at times. 

In the end, as Dudely Ram Dass would say, we’re all just accompanying each other home. 

I hope yer all abiding as well as you can,

Rev. Ross

Hey Dudes!

When I’m not penning these laid-back lectures, I spend my days as a high school English teacher. It’s a pretty great job. The students keep me hopeful, and, even when they don’t, there’s still summer break. 

Something I teach my students early on is the origin of the word school. It comes from the Greek word scholé, which meant “leisure”. 

Why? Because only Ancient Greeks with the necessary means for – the necessary means for – survival had time to pursue study. Everyone else was enslaved, married, or making olive oil.

Nowadays, we’ve got it bass-ackwards in the USA. School is largely seen as a place where one competes to go on to college then to secure a job. Unless you’re skipping math class, leisure ain‘t a part of it.  

The Dude understood the racket this is. He spent most of his college days occupying various administrative buildings and smoking Thai stick. 

But I’d say he downplayed his accomplishments. 

A cursory glance around The Dude’s abode shows various novels, a book on Japanese cooking, and Sartre’s dense, Existentialist masterpiece Being and Nothingness. 

This tells me several things about The Dude. He reads broadly and deeply. He’s not constrained to the limits of an academic discipline. He kept up his learning, even after school ended. And he wears his learning lightly. Aside from one misplaced quote from Cicero, he rarely flaunts his academic acumen. 

Additionally, he still has plenty of time to bowl, hang out with friends, and attend Marty’s dance cycle. His learning isn’t bound between the bindings of books alone. 

In our world, where more and more of our time will be taken up by automation and AI, learning is still one of the few things we can do manually. A big, existential question that’s gonna arise is “What will we do with our leisure time?” 

Or, as Kurt Vonnegut pondered in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, “What are human beings for?”

I’d say leisurely learning ain’t a bad way to spend part of one’s life. The curriculum’s open, and no one’s grading us. It’s far out. 

I’d recommend taking a page out of another Dude’s book, Michel De Montaigne, who was a legendary loafer. He read not for edification or instruction. He read for the joy of it. Whatever struck his fancy. And if a book no longer interested him, he didn’t feel like he had to finish it like some dull assignment; he put it down and picked up something else. 

Life’s too short to read boring books. 

Anyways, I hope yer all abiding as well as you can, and are finding leisurely ways to take it easy,

Rev. Ross

Hey Dudes!

The Dude’s waking hours are an optimizer’s nightmare. He lies on his rug, listens to whale songs in the bath while smoking a J, drives around with no destination in mind. 

Conversely, we live in an era of smartwatches that measure the quality of our sleep, apps that track our minutes of mindfulness, and shoes that measure our miles of movement. 

We’ve never been so wealthy in information yet so poor in wisdom. 

Which is why I appreciate The Dude’s aimlessness. His lack of doing creates a bounty of being. 

I catch myself at this. I spend a lot of my free time reading, listening to audiobooks, and filling my ears and noggin with other people’s ideas. But do I give myself enough space to let my own ideas breathe?

Meditators talk about the mind like a glass of muddy water that settles when it becomes still. Clarity is key. As a Dudeist, I call it “Dropping in to see what condition my condition is in.” I could go on about how I think deliberate boredom and doing nothing improves me, but that’s missing the point. Being bored, staring into the middle distance in meditation or stoned amusement, isn’t a means to an end. It’s an end to itself.

Blaise Pascal, a wiser fella than me, once wrote that “All of man's misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room”. 

The Dude gets this. I’d wager that. 

And with that, I hope you all, on this Saturday, take the time to do nothing. 

I hope yer all abiding as well as you can,

Rev. Ross

Hey Dudes!

The last time I watched The Big Lebowski, I sat down with my dad. He hadn’t seen it in a few years, and he’s pretty amused by and supportive of my interest in Dudeism. 

So did I play Virgil to his Dante as we wended our way through The Dude’s peregrinations around The City of Angels?

Nope. We just watched it and laughed hard enough to beat the band. 

This is one of the real joys of Dudeism: even for a Dudeist like me, who derives great pleasure from parsing every line and scene like some Kahlúa Kabbalist, the movie’s fun on its own. 

It’s like visiting the ocean. Are there treasures and sights to be discovered if one dives into its depths? Sure. 

But it’s also a blast waterskiing. In other words, don’t be in such a hurry to go deep at the expense of enjoying the surface. 

Or, like the old Zen saying sort of goes: Before abiding, The Dude was just a dude, bowling was just bowling. Upon discovering abiding, The Dude was more than a dude, bowling was more than bowling. After abiding, The dude is just a dude, bowling is just bowling. 

That said, I’m gonna go watch it again. 

I hope yer all abiding as well as you can,

Rev. Ross

[edit: typo]

Hey Dudes!

I don’t know the first thing about enlightenment. Like Donny, I’m out of my element. 

I suspect The Dude, too, is fuzzy on the particulars of waking up from delusion. Though he’s certainly enlightening. 

Enlightening. Now there’s a word I’d apply to The Dude. Let me break it apart to make my point. 

Rather than look at enlightenment as a state in which one exists, or which one already possesses and has to realize, I’d like to consider the word “enlightening” instead. Especially with regard to how The Dude moves through the world. 

The Dude is an enlightening person. He “en-lightens” his compeers and situations. He makes them feel lighter. 

Maude drops her robe and inhibitions around him. Brandt unclenches some. Even the occasional chauffeur feels comfortable enough to shoot the shit with The Dude. 

Why? Well, in addition to taking it easy, The Dude puts people at ease. 

Careful, there’s a lesson here, man. 

Again, I don’t know the first thing about enlightenment. But I think a Dude could do a lot worse than aiming to make their scene a little lighter. To ease the burdens of those around them. 

It’s like the comedian Tim Minchin said in his viral commencement speech, “Happiness is like an orgasm. If you think about it too much it goes away. Keep busy and aim to make someone else happy, and you might find you get some as a side effect.”

It needn’t be an heroic mission. After all, what’s a hee-ro? And it needn’t be selfless either. The Dude enlightens those around him while engaging in the things he loves. Who says making one’s world a little better can’t be an enjoyable task?

That’s what I aim to do with these ponderings. If they’re of benefit, I’m grateful.  I hope, too, it’s obvious I enjoy penning them as well. 

Thanks for reading.

I hope yer all abiding as well as you can,

Rev. Ross

Hey Dudes!

A quick one today to remind us all that takin’ it easy also and always means takin’ it easy on ourselves.

Life throws a lot at us, strikes and gutters each in their turn, and we won’t always be able to abide. We won’t always be able to lean back into that chair, pop the leg rest, and take it easy.

Heck some folks might say we’re being very unDude, and they might be right.

But we can always take a breath, mix a Caucasian, and settle back into our fundamental Dudeness.

It’s always there somewhere, even if we’ve lost sight of it.

Let‘a take another look.

I hope yer abiding as well as you can,

Rev. Ross

Hey Dudes!

There’s an apocryphal story about Alexander the Great meeting a Hindu ascetic during his campaign into India. It’s similar to his interactions with Diogenes the Cynic. 

Alexander introduces himself to the ascetic, who’s unimpressed. Frustrated by his non-reaction, Alexander says, “I have conquered the known world. What have you done?”

The Hindu ascetic replies, “I’ve conquered the need to conquer.”

Far out, Dudes.

I could see a similar exchange happening between The Big Lebowski and The Dude. The former standing in for Alexander. The Dude, the Hindu wise man.

“I have achieved much, my good man. What have you done?”

“Well, uh, sir, I have achieved control over my need to achieve. What day is it?”

Maybe The Dude never felt the need to achieve. It’s possible. He is the laziest man in Los Angeles, which is saying something. But I’d argue that existing in a culture of achievement and striving, and managing to remain laid back is no mean feat. Further, I’d argue that in not striving to achieve, The Dude does more good for the world than many well-meaning achievers.

Like Lao Tzu says, “Governing a country is like frying a small fish.” Flip it over too many times, and the whole thing falls apart. Is this not the case with the many do-rights of the world? Whenever I’ve tried to actively make things better, I’ve often missed the mark, meddled too much, and inserted too much of myself into the situation. As a result, despite my good intentions and my Swiss watches of plans, I’ve fucked things up.

Conversely, in leaving well enough alone, staying centered in a state of abidance, I’ve created space for things to unfold in a leisurely way, tending to what needed tending to without too much of a fuss.

No wonder The Stranger takes comfort in The Dude, “Taking it easy for all us sinners.” 

Sometimes the greatest achievement is in not achieving at all.

I hope yer all abiding as well as you can,

Rev. Ross  

Hey Dudes!

I’ve recently been experiencing a number of upheavals at work. Nothing earth-shattering, just inconvenient and uncertain. As a result, a thought occurred to me:

“Sometimes you’re the ball. Sometimes you’re the pins.”

It captured the moment well. Maybe this time, I’m to huddle closer to my compeers and take the blow as best I can. It’s just that time. 

But then I got to thinking deeper on the image, and new shit came to light. 

Yes, the bowling ball does the striking, and it enjoys the easy glide of the lane, but there’s heaviness there too. 

And yes, the pins get struck, but they have companionship. For a brief moment when they’re flying through the air, they enjoy a moment of weightlessness. 

Further, no matter the outcome, the ball is returned to the bowler and the pins are set aright. There’s a larger mechanism at play that keeps this whole thing going. 

In a Daoist sense, it’s within this thing, within the interaction between ball and pin, that the game of bowling occurs. We can’t have one without the other. I don’t think it’s a coincidence bowling balls are traditionally rendered black and pins white. It’s the Yin Yang present in every suburban strip mall. 

Obviously, I’m not a golfer. 

I think wiser Dudes like Alan Watts would wryly chuckle at the comparison. But I’ll leave it to The Stranger to have the last word:

“Sometimes you eat the bear. And well sometimes the bear eats you.”

I hope you all are abiding as well as you can,

Rev. Ross

Hi Dudes!

By many measures, The Big Lebowski is an unconventional film. To quote Maude, “the story’s ludicrous,” our characters are rarely heroic, and we encounter a mysterious narrator in The Stranger who seems to be both in the narrative and weaving the narrative all at once. 

Usually, stories have rules. This isn’t ‘Nam.

And yet, The Dude reminds me of another fella. A fella by the name of Albert Camus.

French-Algerian writer Albert Camus was a fellow traveler with Existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. One of the youngest recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Camus wrote novels, plays, and philosophical essays before his life was tragically cut short by a car accident. Hardly a lightweight. 

It’s Camus’s notion of the Absurd that I’d like to connect with The Dude. Indeed, The Dude is portrayed as an Absurdist hee-ro, one from whom we can learn a thing or two.

Put simply, Absurdism posits that existence is meaningless, and people experience an existential unsettling when they attempt to find meaning in a universe that has none to offer. In his book The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus cheerily suggests that, given this, there’s really only one major philosophical question: why don’t we all kill ourselves?

I’ll not spoil Camus’s legacy by poorly parsing it all out. For the purposes of this post, it’s enough to bring up that Camus references the Greek myth of Sisyphus to point us toward an answer. In the myth, Sisyphus is condemned to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it tumble down over and over again. Forever. Further, Sisyphus knows it’ll never stay up there. If he had hope that it would, there’d be less of a sting to his punishment.

Camus writes that this is our existence. We push our boulders up our hills. We start projects that will fall apart. We struggle and sweat, and, well, for what? 

Now, Camus is no nihilist. Instead of looking upon the condition our condition is in and despairing, he looks on it as some kind of cosmic challenge or joke. He throws the burden back on all of us, asking, “Well friend, all of your systems and beliefs, all your supposed knowledge and wisdom, are for naught. What’s keeping you going?” 

There’s no right answer. It’s anything that can get a Dude out of bed in the morning. Anything that, after one clearly admits the absurdity of one’s situation, allows them to carry on.

The Dude gets this.

By the end of The Big Lebowski, all the boulders rolled up all the hills have tumbled down. The Dude is still down a rug, no one’s any richer, and the semis continue. The Dude is down a friend, but the world is up a child, so the human ledger is balanced.

Hell, The Dude bowls, an activity that is Sisyphean in nature. Balls roll, pins fall, balls are returned, and pins are restacked. But damn does he enjoy the game in spite of its futility.

So, what are some absurdist lessons we can draw from The Dude:

Drop the story, Dudes: There is no story to speak of in The Big Lebowski. All of the scenarios each character concocts for Bunny’s disappearance are half-right at best. Life, too, is just one damn thing after another. But that’s no reason to despair.

Admit your situation: The Dude knows he’s a loser who the square community doesn’t give a shit about. He knows he’s never going to be one of The Big Lebowski’s achievers. But that doesn’t matter. It’s all smoke and mirrors anyway. One can still grab some burgers, a few beers, and a couple of laughs, and abide the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with a smile on one’s face.

Nihilism is exhausting: Unlike the nihilists, The Dude doesn’t believe in nussing. If anything, he believes in something, even if it’s just bowling and friendship. As many learned folks have written, it’s not about not giving a fuck, it’s about being judicious on what to give a fuck about.  

Finish your coffee: There’s a quotation misattributed to Camus that I think still captures his spirit. “Should I commit suicide or drink a cup of coffee?” Even though Camus didn’t write this, he could’ve been speaking about Walter at the counter. We might not be heroes in epic tales. But we can abide by continuing to engage in the small acts that give our lives meaning to ourselves and to others.

If there’s no Stranger out there unfolding our story, it’s up to us. 

Your roll, Dudes

Rev. Ross

Hello Folks!

This morning in meditation, I had an experience I can trace back to Ram Dass’s teachings. 

Before I go on, I want to make clear this was an experience, and I’m not pretending to be hip to any secret knowledge. After I got up from my cushion, I still had to do the dishes and answer emails. I’m no saint or realized person by even a half. I just thought this was something special and worth sharing with the rest of this satsang to compare notes

It started with a sense of my awareness shifting to Awareness. It was paradoxical, both focused and broad. The way the sun breaks over a clear horizon – a brilliant single point of light and rays of light that act as film over the horizon, illuminating its expanse. This was Awareness – able to rest on a particular point and able to light up the whole plane of being. 

This landscape turned into an ocean with waves cresting and breaking peacefully. The “I” that was perceiving this felt itself rise then disperse into the sea with neither pain nor fear. Again, there was Awareness of all this, but no locus of that awareness. 

Then friends and family rose out of this sea. I saw my wife, my parents, my in-laws, my daughters, and friends come together like waves, then return to the source of the sea without fear or suffering. 

It’s hard to put into words, but whatever was perceiving this knew they weren’t going anywhere because they’d never left. Like this Awareness, they’d always already been here. 

I’ve been sitting with this all morning. It’s been beautiful. 

Ram Ram,

RC

Hey Dudes!

Lots of shit goes sideways for The Dude. His rug’s pissed on, he gets socked in the jaw, his car is stolen then ultimately set aflame. I could go on, but you get the point.

And yet, at no time in The Big Lebowski does The Dude ever say, “Why me?” or something along those lines.

That’s worth lingering on, Dudes. I know I’ve gone through things that, relative to The Dude’s travails, were minor inconveniences and I’ve definitely railed against my fortune.

Again, intuitively, The Dude proves himself to be a model philosopher. Specifically, he practices something first coined by Friedrich Nietzsche in his book Ecce Homo, a love of one’s fate, or, to use the parlance before our times, amor fati.

Here’s Nietzsche’s quote:

>“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it… but love it.” 

That’s a tall order, Dudes. There are lots of strikes and gutters in a person’s life, and some gutters can really send us to the dumps. But I’d say the genius of Nietzsche’s quote is that regardless of what one wants, one can’t change anything that happens to us. Sure, we have some agency over what happens next, but the past has passed. 

What’s left to us, as Jean Paul-Sartre wrote, is to take responsibility for it. Not to blame ourselves for what’s happened to us, but to determine what to do with it. To reframe it.

The Dude constantly does this. He allows for some venting, but then he muses he “can’t be worried about that shit. Life goes on, man,” or “Yeah, well, The Dude abides,” or even simply “Fuck it.”

The Dude’s not bypassing or disassociating. He’s acknowledging the immutability of the past and finding a way to embrace it in his present.

Ironically, the only character who says “It’s not fair” is one of the Nihilists, who adheres to a philosophy that counts Nietzsche as one of their forefathers. It’s so out of character, Walter calls them out sneering, “Fair?! Who's the fucking nihilist here?!”

No wonder believing in nussing can be so exhausting.

Ups and downs, strikes and gutters, I hope yer all abiding what’s thrown your way Dudes,  

Rev. Ross

Hey Dudes!

Kevin Smith’s 1999 movie Dogma was a formative film for me. Like Branded for Walter and The Dude, it came at the right time and hit me when I was in the midst of the stress of preparing for my Bar Mitzvah, dealing with the death of my grandfather (which was the first major death I’d experienced), and the general upheaval that comes from being a thirteen year old boy.

There are a lot of ins and outs to the movie, and I don’t want to give away too much of the plot. So let me isolate one exchange that has stuck with me and has influenced my approach to Dudeism as well. 

It’s between Bethany, our main character played by Linda Fiorentino, and Rufus, played by Chris Rock. Bethany is a Catholic undergoing an existential crisis that sets her on a quest equal parts epic and comic. Rufus is the 13th apostle, excluded from the Christian Gospels "for being Black”. During a quiet moment, Bethany asks Rufus what Jesus is like. He responds:

>Rufus: He still digs humanity, but it bothers Him to see the shit that gets carried out in His name – wars, bigotry, televangelism. But especially the factioning of all the religions. He said humanity took a good idea and, like always, built a belief structure on it.
Bethany: Having beliefs isn’t good?
Rufus: I think it’s better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier.

This distinction, between the rigidity of a belief and the malleability of an idea, is what draws me to The Dude and Dudeism. Whatever The Dude holds on to, he holds lightly. His possessions, assumptions, opinions about others. They’re his, but they’re subject to change when new shit comes to light. And The Dude is quick to admit when his own thinking gets uptight.

Where goes The Dude, so goes Dudeism. Dudeism, for me, has never been about creeds or adhering to strictures. It’s an attitude or an orientation toward this whole durn human comedy. It’s a kind of seeking that one can do driving the roads or in one’s bathtub. It’s less a pursuit of truth as the weaving together of many, complimentary truths. Of following Rufus’ line of thinking and entertaining good ideas that are melioristic, yet always subject to change.

Or, to quote from sources from farther East, to remain green and supple. That which is rigid and unyielding, be it a tree or an idea-turned-belief, is already dead.

I hope yer all abiding as well as you can,

Rev. Ross 

[Edit: Formatting issues]

Hey Dudes,

Even if the whole world’s gone crazy. 

Even if nihilists broke into your private residence. 

Even if Woo peed on your rug. 

Even if you spent yesterday being very undude. 

Even if it’s already the tenth. 

Nothing is fucked, man. 

Strike or gutter, the pins reset and the ball returns. 

The Stranger checks in with you at the bar. 

Friends will show up at practice. 

The whole durn human comedy keeps perpetuating itself. 

And The Dude within you abides. 

Hey Dudes!

Recently, I rewatched Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and was struck by Brad Pitt’s character, Cliff Booth. 

Booth embodies the kind of preternatural calmness one might expect of a Stoic or a samurai. And while I’m passing over the questionable actions he may or may not have done in the past (wife, harpoon gun), I think there are Dudely lessons one can learn from observing his character. 

Cliff and The Dude share some similarities: they live simply, they seem to feel at home in whatever scene they find themselves in, and they value friendship above all else. 

Indeed, I’d say Cliff Booth’s friendship with Rick Dalton is one of the healthiest on-screen depictions of male friendship we’ve seen in the last decade. 

Further, both Cliff and The Dude are comfortable with who they are. This comfort engenders confidence. In The Dude’s case, his casualness runs deep. In Cliff’s case, he walks into every situation as though he’s been there before. 

Cliff and The Dude are gyroscopes. Whereas pinwheels need an external source of power to spin, gyroscopes spin with their own internal power. 

Contra Cliff, Rick needs the approval of directors, neighbors, agents, and other actors to feel a sense of self worth. Cliff needs…well, Cliff. Though, to be fair, it also helps to be Brad Pitt. 

Contra The Dude, the other Lebowski needs a wall full of achievements and a young trophy wife to obscure the goldbricking truth. The Dude is content to bowl, roll, and throw back some oat sodas. He’s a deadbeat, and he’s okay with it. 

Where Cliff and The Dude diverge is in how they respond to violence. And here’s where I’d argue that Cliff synthesizes the best parts of The Dude (see above) and Walter. 

Like Walter, Cliff draws lines in the sand. If someone crosses that line, he’ll do more than mark it zero. Truly, he can go to some dark places. But it’s important to note how in the movie, Cliff never starts violence, he ends it. 

And unlike Walter, who makes talking about violence a big part of his personality, Cliff does what he needs to do when the moment arises, then goes about his day. It’s not worth remarking upon or retelling for self-aggrandizement. (Heck, that’s part of what ticked Cliff off about Bruce Lee.) Which is somewhere between sociopathic and Dudely…I can’t quite tell. 

To tie all this together, some takeaways:

• Let your self-worth come from within. 
• Let your value create comfort, confidence, and companionship. 
• If it comes time to act, let your actions do the talking, without hesitation. 
• And look good while fixing the cable.

 

I hope yer all abiding as well as you can,

Rev. Ross

Hey Dudes,

This year, my dad’s gotten pretty sick. I can’t say with certainty how things are going to shake out in the short term, though we all know how things will shake out in the long term. 

All this to say, I’ve spent more time this year than other years by sickbeds and helping out my mom, who’s his prime advocate. My Special Lady Friend and I are even handling the logistics to move them in with us by year’s end. 

It’s required checking in with our conditions but also expressing sympathy for my mom and dad, who are nearer to the center of all this than we are. 

And that got me thinking about Walter’s exchange with The Dude after The Nihilists messed up his bath time. 

Walter, as is his wont, comes in hot talking about unsecured marmots within city limits, castration, and what have you. 

The Dude’s having none of it, and Walter picks up on The Dude’s vibes. 

“We are sympathizing here, Dude.”

The Dude brushes this aside, leaving Walter put out. He departs with this parting shot:

“Okay Dude. I can see you don’t want to be cheered up.”

So this is the crux of what I want to get into, and what I want to tie back to being a Dudeist among those who are grieving and anxious. 

There’s a tension between Walter’s statements. On the one hand, he wants to cheer up The Dude. On the other hand, he claims to be sympathizing with The Dude. 

What if the sympathetic move would’ve been to not try to cheer up The Dude? What if The Dude needed someone to just sit in the shit with him and toss back an oat soda. 

Ironically, one can find guidance from Walter’s adopted faith, in the Jewish tradition of sitting shiva. 

In shiva, the period of mourning, the bereaved welcome guests. When the guests arrive, it falls upon the bereaved to speak first. This accomplishes at least two kindnesses. First, the bereaved don’t have to sit through platitudes they don’t want to hear. They get to set the tone. Second, it absolves the guests from groping for the right words to say. 

For some people hearing “Everything happens for a reason” is exactly what they need to hear. For others, those same words would want to make them punch someone in the face. 

Better than trying to guess what someone needs for sympathy is to follow a Dudely maxim. The one The Dude says to Marty: “I’ll be there man.”

I’ve been at the deathbed of my grandfather, and the sickbeds of others. In those moments, the Dudeliest thing I could do is to just be there. Fully, without some kind of script to try and make everyone feel better. And when they wanted to speak, I followed their lead. Some wanted to talk about death. Others, life. Others, music and their favorite deli sandwiches. 

The real act of sympathy is abiding presence, pure and simple. 

I’ll try to keep that in mind as I navigate the shoals ahead of me now. 

I hope yer all abiding as well as you can,

Rev. Ross

Hey Dudes!

I’m rereading The Great Guide, Julian Baggini’s accessible book on the life and ideas of Scotland’s David Hume. Aside from his far out writings on causation, skepticism, and the self, Hume is praised by Baggini (with some qualifications) for how he lived his life.

Baggini states that the reason why Hume isn’t as well known as other philosophers isn’t merely because of the difficult nature of his work, but also because he didn’t fit the mold of a heroic philosopher/public intellectual. He wasn’t extreme in his views; he didn’t live an outsized, tragic life; he wasn’t swept up in enthusiasms. Hume was, by many accounts…well…nice, calm, sociable. He liked to chat with friends over beer. He went on leisurely walks. He was rather Dudely.

It’s this quality that Hume’s biographer argues we need more of in the world. Folks who can think deeply, and who, in the parlance of our community, can abide.

And it’s a quality that even a dummy like me, who lacks Hume’s powers of perception, can aspire towards.

It reminds me of an example from 13th Century Zen monk Dogen’s writing, Shoaku Makusa, which contemporary Zen author Brad Warner translated as Don’t Be a Jerk. In that, he states:

>“Even if the whole universe is nothing but a bunch of jerks doing all kinds of jerk-type things, there is still liberation in simply not being a jerk.”

I think this is true of us Dudes too. Sometimes looking to change the world can seem like a daunting, impossible task. We might not know where to start. Our Inner Walter might think they’re the only one who gives a shit about the rules.

And yet, we can repurpose Dogen’s advice:

>“In a world in which everyone is acting very UnDude, there is great freedom in being a Dude.”

We might not have books written about us. We might not have our likeness printed on the cover of Time magazine. But we can’t worry about that shit, man. All that's not up to us.

We can, however, choose to be Dudes. Or, if nothing else, a little more Dudely than we were a moment before.

It might be the only real freedom we have.

I hope yer all abiding as well as you can,

Rev. Ross

Hey Dudes!

For years I’ve kept a journal. I was inspired by Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and others, though my ponderings are comparatively shallow, pond-deep at most. 

But recently, I asked myself how I might merge this practice with Dudeism. Here’s my idea. 

Imagine each evening, you’re assembling your bowling team. So, call up your inner Donny and Walter. 

Start by recalling an event from the day. It might have stood out because it was far out, like meeting up with a Special Lady Friend or bowling a perfect frame. Or, it might have made you feel really undude. Perhaps someone peed on your rug or you endured a coffee mug to the forehead. Fucking reactionaries. 

Write it out with as little editorializing as possible. Just the facts. It could help to write in the second person to gain some distance. 

Then unleash your inner Walter on the page. Allow yourself to get as self-righteous and indignant as you can. Better on the page than in life. You’re not wrong you’re just an asshole. And that’s cool…that’s cool, because you’re standing up for yourself. 

All done? Far out. 

Now let your inner Donny have his say. Donny doesn’t make many statements; instead, he asks questions. And there isn’t a question dumb enough for Donny to keep to himself. He’s all innocence. Really interrogate that event. 

Okay, now what?

Well Dudes, I’d say we’ve got ourselves a thesis, antithesis, synthesis situation here. We set the event down on paper, we let Walter fulminate and draw his lines in the sand, we get Donny in his inimitable way to soften some of our certainties. 

Then from this pendulum swing…our Dudeliness arises. Abiding, I argue, lives between certainty and curiosity. 

Maybe journaling isn’t your thing. Still, I bet calling upon your inner bowling team, and working through these positions internally instead of upon the Nihilists and Smokeys in our lives, might help us abide the strikes and gutters that roll our way. 

I hope yer all abiding as well as you can,

Rev. Ross

Hey Dudes!

No matter where he is, The Dude seems to be pretty content. Sure, he’s bothered when his rug is micturated upon, or when his buddy pulls a piece out on the lanes, but by and large The Dude abides. He’s comfortable in spacious mansions, Venice Beach bungalows, swanky swingers’ pads, and (to an extent) funeral homes.

I got to thinking about The Dude’s sangfroid while reading The Discourses of Epictetus a few days ago because I happened upon this quote that I’ve been keeping at hand. It’s about how to better perceive our situation. Here it is:

>When you are alone, you should call this tranquility and freedom and when you are with many you shouldn’t call this a crowd, or trouble or uneasiness but festival and company and contentedly accept it.

In other words: if you’re alone, act as though you’re totally free; if you’re among others, act as though you’re at a festival.

Far out.

I dig this quote because it’s all about reframing our circumstances to appreciate the benefits. There’s an old joke that the definition of a dog is “a creature always on the wrong side of a door”. When it’s out, a dog wants to come in. When it’s in, a dog wants to go out.

People are like that too. How often have I been by myself and thought “Gosh it’s lonely here. I wish I was hanging out with people” only to go out and yearn for the comfort of my own company.

The Dude, however, gets Epictetus’ sentiment intuitively. He doesn’t seem to want for anything when he’s skipping home from Ralph’s to spend an evening alone, and he doesn’t ever seem to be searching for the exits when he’s consorting with known pornographers and their ilk.

Further, the reframing of a crowd as a festival is particularly helpful in abiding. When we’re at a party, we’re more likely to cut people slack. Folks speak a little louder, stand a little closer, and jostle each other. Even if there’s a beverage here, man.

And what do we do? We’re cool with it. We don't become doormats, but we understand that it’s part of the cost of socializing and we can lighten up about it. No one wants to be the guy with the cleft asshole who takes every careless act at a party personally. It’s not about us, Dude. And that’s cool, that's cool.

So I’ll be applying this Dudely, Stoic framework to my days and see where it leads me.

See you at the festival, Dudes!

I hope yer all abiding as best as you can,

Rev. Ross