Clear to the Bottom

Lucy Petroucheva
March 14, 2025

Some pieces of advice that I carry —

1. Concept: The Balance of Holding

My favorite high school teacher, Mr. Davis,¹ told us:

If you want to hold water, your fingers should be firm enough to keep it from slipping through, but not so tight that you squeeze it all out.

Picture that for a moment.

For over ten years, I’ve returned to this visual to remind myself of the balanced tension with which we must hold things in life. Often, I’m reminding myself to loosen my grip; I can’t force certainty or engineer myself/my relationships/my future into perfection, but I can hold these things with tenderness—secure, relaxed.

(I attempted to draw this once.)

2. Quote: Rainer Maria Rilke on pure action

What informs good, pure decisions?

Rilke writes:

“All feelings that concentrate you and lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of your being and thus distorts you. Everything you can think of as you face your childhood, is good. Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good, if it is in your entire blood, if it isn’t intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can see into, clear to the bottom.”

I’m compelled by the image of something “grasping just one side of your being” and twisting you—we all know the feeling of being enticed by something that appeals to only a part of us, yet conflicts with another part of us. This is contrasted with the clarity of decisions that feel transparent, informed by our whole being²—an inner state that feels “clear to the bottom,” one that even our childhood self would recognize as right.

3. Video: This is Water by David Foster Wallace

This commencement speech is about how we think. I’ve lost count of how many times it comes up on The Tim Ferriss Show—an outsized number of top performers Tim interviews say they return to it multiple times a year.

A preview:

“The really significant education in thinking . . . isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about . . . being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

4. Parable: The Second Arrow

I first learned about this idea in a Reddit AMA with the professor of Yale’s most popular class—Psychology and the Good Life. Here is Dr. Laurie Santos:³

5. Poem: by Rumi

I adore this poem. I read it and shake my head. Straw man, at the end of your straw world, there’s a fragrant field of amber. My goodness.

—

If you quit thinking for one hour,
what will happen?
If you plunge like a fish into Love’s ocean,
what will happen?

When worries keep you up at night,
picture the seven sleepers
slumbering in a cave for centuries, resting in faith.
You’ll be filled with holy light
no matter where you lay your head.

Straw man,
at the end of your straw world,
there’s a fragrant field of amber.
If you leap from your high haystack and join us,
what new heights will you reach?

Again and again, you vowed to be humble as soil.
You broke your word every time.
When you keep it, what will bloom?⁴

You are a gem covered in mud and clay.
Your beautiful face is hidden.

You came down from the heavens.
The high angel adores you and still,
you feel like a poor wretch.
If you remember who you are,
what will you become?

You seek truth but you don’t trust
a single truth teller. I know a true seer.
Listen to him. See what happens.

A fragment, a hand longing for its body,
you dream of greatness,
grandiose fantasies,
gripped by greed, gripped by pride.

Give yourself up.
Give yourself over to glory.
See what happens.

You are a mountain full of gold.
Open the mine. Let the mountain speak.
Hear what happens.

🏹🏹,

Lucy

1 Mr. Davis was everyone’s favorite. He was a once-in-a-lifetime teacher—the kind you credit with your life trajectory. He taught English and Humanities but, really, he taught us how to see and make meaning. His assignments were unconventional: writing essays to justify our existence, letters to our future children as if we might die months before their birth, and reflections on Taoist koans.

At the end of every school year, Mr. Davis wrote a long letter to his students in which he would impart life lessons. Revisiting them now, I understand them anew: “Whether it was religion, literature, philosophy, music—it didn’t matter—whatever we studied, it only became the ‘stuff’ of humanity when there was a mystery present that could not be quantified. For to quantify any object, event, experience, or person is to take the mystery out of it. . . Let us praise mystery. Let us wallow in it. Let us drink deeply from the wonder that is its confusion and awe and beauty and pain and laughter and, most importantly, let us drink deeply from ourselves—for we are mystery. . . Find the elements of your humanity that are most important to you and set them up as guideposts so that you can always find your way back to your best self. Mostly, though, take every opportunity you can to celebrate the mystery that is you and those you love.”
I’m trying, Mr. Davis. ❤️

2 Years ago, I asked a Buddhist for advice on what to do with my life, and he said “it’s not about what you do; it’s about the quality with which you do it.” It’s about the essential character from which you act — the place inside of you that motivates the decision. The rightness depends on your inner condition.

3 This concept originates from The Arrow Sutta—"When touched with a feeling of pain, one feels two pains, a bodily pain and a mental pain. The bodily pain is unavoidable, but the mental pain is optional."

4 Ugh. ❤️