A couple weeks ago I met with a literary agent for an upcoming book deal. She asked me to describe the “Erik Van Alstine brand.”
One answer that came to mind was, truffle hog.
Yep, that’s me. A pig.
But a valuable pig. Look it up. A truffle hog is a trained pig that sniffs around the forests of France, Italy, and Germany for rare and valuable underground fungi called truffles. These pigs smell truffles as deep as three feet, and they dig them up for their owners.
I smell root-level thoughts like pigs smell truffles, and I’ve got a visceral need to dig them up. It’s why I’ve spent so much time reading hundreds of books about deep ideas and their practical implications. I keep coming back to the Thoreau quote that “For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil there’s one striking the root.” If we could solve our thinking and living problems at the root level, we wouldn’t have to hack at the leaves so much. We could really see transformation.
And it brings up some questions. What are root-level thoughts? How do root-level thoughts branch up into the way we feel and act in our everyday lives? That’s something I’ll snout the forest for in posts ahead.