Be more animal.

Twenty-five years of circling. One question over coffee.

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” ~ T.S. Eliot

I was having coffee with a friend when the conversation turned to something I wrote years ago, in a book called I Am Keats: Escape Your Mind and Free Your Self.

The distinction was simple. You can spend your life staying alive, or you can spend it being alive. Staying alive runs on certainty, comparison, and comfort. Being alive runs on curiosity, compassion, and creativity.

He said that landed, and that he wanted the second one. And then he asked the question I’ve never had a good answer to.

“How?”

Three words came out of my mouth before I could stop them.

“Be more animal.”

I’ve spent twenty-five years trying to say that. Four books, a screenplay, a novel, and a nine-hour video program. It turns out I could have said it at the table in about a second and a half.

Here’s what I mean, and here’s how long it took me to get there.

Sandbox Wisdom opened on a little girl with long braids and two missing front teeth. Unguarded. A child who hasn’t yet been told how any of this goes. Who plays without a picture of how the playing should look, and who isn’t measuring herself against anything or anyone. I was pointing at something I couldn’t name.

Your Brain on Story was about what happens when you make yourself the hero of your own self story. The problem was never stories. It was that a story needs someone watching it. Cast yourself as the hero and you’ve created an audience—and the audience is you, sitting off to the side, deciding how it should go and how you’re doing. I had it in my hands and I called it narrative identity.

Unwinding Want was about conditioned desire and the three delusions underneath it. This and That—the belief that life comes à la carte, that you can keep the good parts and decline the rest. Right and Wrong—the belief that there’s a correct way to be doing this. And Now and Then—not now, then. Do more, have more, be more. An endless journey toward a future point where it finally feels finished. I wrote a whole book about the engine before I understood what it was powering.

And I Am Keats!—which I wrote before some of these—used two Romantic poets as stand-ins for two ways of being in the world. Keats had a name for one of them: negative capability. The capacity to sit in uncertainty and mystery without reaching irritably after fact and reason. That one wasn’t a diagnosis at all. Keats was already describing the animal. I spent a book on it and still didn’t have the word.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I also wrote a screenplay and a novel, and created a nine-hour video program called How to Be Alive! All of it circling the same question my friend asked me over coffee.

I don’t think any of it was wrong. It just didn’t contain the sentence, because the sentence couldn’t be assembled. It had to be said out loud, to someone who’d asked.

Now, the part I’d rather leave out.

People had objections to every one of those books, and the objections were never the same. The child was too simple. The poets were too strange. The self story was too abstract. The want was too complicated. For years I read that as evidence I hadn’t found the right frame, and I kept building new ones, which is how you end up with five books, a screenplay, nine hours of video, and no phrase.

I think I had it backwards. The complaints changed every time. What didn’t change was the flinch underneath them. Each one asked a reader to put something down—the plan, the certainty, the flattering story, the promised arrival—and there is no comfortable way to be asked that. So the objection arrives wearing whatever costume is nearest. Too simple. Too strange. Too much.

That’s not a failure of framing. That’s what it feels like to be asked to give something up.

So here it is with nothing on top of it.

You were born an animal. Then, gently, and by people who loved you and were handed the same thing themselves, you were given an assumption. Nobody said it out loud. You worked it out from faces, from tone, from what got a warm response and what got a cool one.

Do it this way and you’ll be okay.

That’s the engine. Everything else is what the engine runs.

You need to know how, so you take a script—someone else’s answer to how you should live, handed to you before you knew there was a question. You need to know you’re following it, so you install a mirror—not vanity, just a way to catch the mistake before someone else does. And you need proof you’re gaining ground, so you keep a scoreboard.

Three instruments, one promise. And the promise is a lie, though nobody meant it as one.

Look at what you were actually promised. Not a house, not a title. You’ll be okay. Accepted, safe, comfortable, someone. The permanent condition of being finally, unimpeachably fine.

But you were already that before any of it. Nothing had to be earned because nothing had been withdrawn. You spend your life trying to earn back a permission that was never revoked. Nobody took it away. Someone just implied it could be.

So what does it mean, be more animal?

Not be feral. Not follow your appetites. I’m not talking about animal morality. Keep every human value you’ve got. I’m talking about animal mode. How the thing runs, not what it does with the running.

And here’s what I got wrong for years. It doesn’t mean becoming one. You’re not being asked to strive towards anything. You already are one and always have been—breathing without asking, crying before you knew you were sad, reaching for someone falling before any part of you had time to think.

Being more animal means being less. Not less alive. Less equipment. One less script. One less mirror. One less scoreboard. One less reason you’re not allowed to be here yet.

My friend asked me how. I’d spent twenty-five years answering that question, which is the one thing I now think shouldn’t be answered for anyone.

Twenty-five years, five books, a screenplay, and nine hours of video to arrive at a sentence I could have said at a coffee table. Which is either embarrassing or exactly right, depending on whether you think the twenty-five years were the detour or the road.

I’ve stopped keeping score on that one.

And speaking of how. Dolly Parton died yesterday. She wore the biggest costume in America and was never once inside it. She knew exactly what the wig was, told everyone, and let people underestimate her for sixty years without ever correcting them.

No mirror. No scoreboard. In a business made of both.

Dolly had a how. She wrote it herself, and it fit nobody else.

She got it without any of this.

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