Hello and welcome to What is a Good Life? A project exploring big questions around what really matters to people. Over the last 5 years, I have interviewed over 300 people around this question.
This week, I am reflecting on my conversation with Dmytro “Dok” Dokunov. I recently watched a documentary that blew my mind: Where Everything Disappears. It was hard to hold the beauty, pain, and the loss it shared at the same time. It follows Dok, a documentary filmmaker who was living in a countryside eco-community, practicing yoga and meditation, when the war began. He joined the Ukrainian army, became a commander, and kept recording his experiences from the frontline. This is one of the most fascinating conversations I’ve had in this series.
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Take care, Mark
1. My Weekly Reflection
Last Tuesday, I felt like my head was overrun.
Too many tasks, too many apps, too many platforms, too many messages.
I sat on a seat outside my office and a particular tree caught my attention. I stared at it for quite a while. As I observed the light breeze make the golden leaves shimmy, I felt tingles in my head as it settled my brain.
I don’t think there is a coach, a therapist, or a guru alive that could have served me better in that moment.
I’ve heard a recurring idea in a handful of these podcast conversations: self-reflection and self-analysis are helpful until a point. If the attention remains solely stuck on yourself, the rumination continues.
If the attention you have cultivated from the inward gazing then also moves outwards, it can really alter your sense of connection. Your connection to people, the world around you, and to the moment.
A considerable obstacle to this outward attention is the idea that we have to fix our shopping list of dysfunctions before we get there. Perhaps believing that our life needs to be settled before we can feel settled in it.
The clues are there though that it is accessible to us right now, even when we are deeply lost in ourselves.
I recall one woman I interviewed who was stuck in a heavy conversation about her life right up until the point she viewed the Grand Canyon for the first time - her whole breath left her body and she just broke into tears. The relief of her smallness in the context of this larger existence was freeing.
The more our gaze is outward, the more subtle the moments that take our breath away can be.
As Dok points to in this interview, when he pays consistent attention to the world around him, he disappears a little, just by watching the ordinary everyday. It creates an awareness that every person you see on the streets is wandering around with a head full of thoughts, a history, a body full of sensations, and relationships to manage.
In really paying attention to the minute interactions between people, and seeing how universal much of what we could consider a drama in our lives is, it takes so much of the heat out of our situation. We are not alone. We are part of this bigger experience.
Dok suggests that being this constant observer of life, through his photography and his filming before the war, helped him navigate the surreal transition from being a civilian, to training for, and then being in a warzone.
“I notice when I make pictures of life around me, there’s a short moment. There’s no me anymore. My attention is getting out to other creatures, other people, and at this short moment your personality disappears for like short seconds. I have a theory that this is kind of meditation has made me not stuck in my personal problems or egoistical feelings, like what I want or what I don’t want. I think this is the key.”
None of what I am suggesting above is a bypass. It is being attentive to both our inner and outer worlds. Dok addresses the pain and loss of war quite frankly, yet there are these moments even within the horror that remind him of connection and beauty. Even in observing the fear he and his squad were experiencing and sharing.
In the documentary itself, Dok is at one point in a hole in the ground waiting for a jet dropping bombs to pass and he can’t help but notice that a flower has started to blossom in the wall of the hole they have dug.
To feel the effects of this outward attention in my own life is one thing. To hear a similar sense from Dok within his experience of war is quite another.
In listening back to this interview over the weekend, another quote from a past guest appeared in my head.
It was from Nora Bateson in response to a good life:
It’s beautiful, it’s moving, it’s terrible, it’s moving. Fall on your face, weep on your knees. Hold this and then let go. Do not walk past the incredible spring and not notice that it’s incredible.
There is without doubt enough horror in the world out there to keep us preoccupied, but what a tragedy if we stop seeing the connections. To stop seeing the others that may be struggling, laughing, crying and loving nonetheless.
2. This Week’s Questions
Have you noticed a tipping point when reflecting on your patterns leaves you feeling stuck?
On your next routine walk outside, ask yourself: What can I notice on this familiar path that I haven’t noticed before?
3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast
4. Full Episode - The Pacifist Who Went to War with Dmytro Dokunov - What is a Good Life? #195
Listen to or watch the full conversation with Dmytro Dokunov below.
About Me
I am a coach, writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people around this question. What is a Good Life? is a podcast and newsletter that invites us to question what we’ve been told makes for a good life, and to pay more attention to what really matters: our relationships, the moments that make us feel more human, and the experiences that connect us to one another. After hundreds of conversations, I’m increasingly convinced that the good life we are sold and how people actually experience it are very wide apart. These conversations and reflections offer another way of seeing the world, and an invitation to live a little differently.