Regarding the past, I can definitely get down with letting go of being hounded by regrets and anger and stuff like that. Regarding the future, I can understand completely how fruitless it is to think any version of “I’ll be happy when . . . .” I can roll with happiness-as-gratitude-and-a-sense-of-ongoing-marvel and that feeling thankful for all that I have is very important. Etc. Also that thing that nun said about how it doesn’t really help peace on Earth to scream at other people to change their ways really made a lot of sense to me. AND on top of this I really get a lot out of sitting quietly and focusing on my breathing and hoping for peace on Earth, it’s pretty awesome. But really, why am I supposed to live in the moment again? What moment? This one? Hum of the fridge, sound of a dried leaf scratching a window, fall of shadows from the retractable overhead light. Yeah yeah, I am certainly capable of contemplative appreciation for the simple things etc. And I know I could die any second now for any one of a zillion random reasons, but if life is going to make any sense, I need my personal concept of a future to exist. In order to shower, to better myself, care about others in a real-life, secular humanist empathetic way, I need to keep tomorrow, and next week, and ten years from now in mind. Am I just taking this moment-living thing too literally? It's just that I hear this idea batted around an awful lot and if I’m supposed to define it for myself or something, well then, living in the moment includes a touch of future, because it has to in order to have any meaning. Betty Friedan wrote that “It is precisely this unique human capacity to transcend the present, to live one’s life by purposes stretching into the future---to live not at the mercy of the world, but as a builder and designer of that world---that is the distinction between animal and human behavior, or between the human being and the machine.” I see her point.
Where is the human progress in contentment and happiness? Friedan’s book (The Feminine Mystique, of course) is about how at a certain point in our culture, women were epidemically suppressing their potential and sense of self in order to “adjust” to society. This is why housewives ran screaming down the street in the middle of the night. Not because housewifing is dumb in and of itself, but because culturally we’re outgrowing the apron role as our only possibility – to have only one true option is a limitation and can’t be forced back in to those old clothes. Friedan wrote about this fifty years ago, and I feel like this is what I see not just in me but in everyone, all the time now – misery and confusion from trying to adjust to cultural circumstances that do not have the same shape as the true self: offices, huge grocery stores, cars, air conditioning, offices, offices, offices. Thoreau in “Economy” (in Walden) says that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation,” and that “resignation is desperation confirmed.” He said this in reference to the relentless slaving and over-hoarding of his working contemporaries. Friedan then says 100 years later, about the oppression of women, “The adjusted, or cured ones who live without conflict or anxiety in the confined world of home have forfeited their own being; the others, the miserable, frustrated ones, still have some hope.” I do truly dig what you're saying about living in the moment, Buddha man, but can personal evolution really be a by-product of contentment? Should I not want personal evolution?
Okay here’s the other thing that is bothering me about Buddha stuff. I already am kind of bummed about the priestly hierarchy stuff – my friend said he abstains from a lot of this stuff since he really doesn’t want “bigger parents.” I agree. Also, why should a be-robed “master” seem to be important to me? He and/or his lifestyle certainly don’t represent the goal of practicing dharma to me (sort of in that way that a psychiatrist somehow represents the successful end of psychotherapy, at least from the point of view of the patient – but you’d never want to model your life after a shrink, they ALWAYS have the most f***ed up kids, have you noticed?). What the be-robed Buddha man represents to me is retreat from life into total abstraction and a career choice that just won't work for me. I know they mop floors and eat cookies or whatever and are supposed to be grounded, but they sure as hell aren’t trying to live among society in a way that I can understand – and isn’t this what they’re supposed to be helping? Regular folk? I really love that Iyengar rejected monk-hood, explicitly with the idea that yoga and enlightenment are paths meant to be compatible with checking the mail and walking the dog and going to work and paying the mechanic . . . oh that reminds me, one of the monks had a dog. I’m exaggerating the priestly thing a bit, probably.
But upon whom, please, should I be modeling my concept of myself?
Hmm. Well, this is the very guidance that all paths lack, isn’t it? I mean we already all know that we cannot take our identities from the generation before us – would anyone like to be his or her parents? I didn’t think so. For a long period of life the whole point of parents is to have someone’s image to reject in order to form your own identity. But where is the example being set that I want to follow? I don’t think it exists, and that’s what’s so unnerving. There is no shape in the world exactly my size that I can fit myself into; we have all outgrown everything that can be known because it is already over; there is only the unknown – the future. Who and how we are is constantly evolving because we cannot be content to repeat what we have outgrown – I mean, maybe there is no “now.” We need the future and discontent to have identities, and identity is what gives us our future and sense of discontent – and I know ego and identity are all supposed to be bullsh*t and the very cause of my suffering but I’m not convinced.
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